The Spider and The City

You are the Spider. This is the City.

You are a criminal mastermind. You are the spider lurking in the shadows. In a city that was held in the vice grip of Celestial Law, you have never followed a rule that you didn’t write.

You are your own master - a leader of a hard-bitten crew, holding court in the seedy underworld that thrives below your city’s paper- thin facade of order and normality. The rich don’t believe you exist. The poor know you all too well - your justice is often the only one they can access.

But now the city of Inquilad - your city - is free. As the kingdom lies in ruins, the people of Inquilad have seized power and now seek to build a utopia. You understand freedom. And you wonder how long their freedom will last...

There are rumours that the Right Men, General Piyadasi’s army, march toward the city. A little bird tells you that they might reach the city walls as soon as 2 months from now.

You thought you understood how the world works. But if your city can be reborn, what about you?

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About the Game

The Spider and the City combines high stakes resource management and prompt-based journaling. Like in videogames such as Darkest Dungeons or tabletop games like Band of Blades, you allocate resources to missions, trying to giving yourself the edge to help you succeed. Using mechanics inspired by Blades in the Dark, you build the strongest dice pool you can ... and then let the gods decide how the bones fall. Like in indie hit Thousand Year Old Vampire, you respond to the prompts that the game throws at you, telling the lonely story of a criminal mastermind in a rebel city. Your decisions might not change history but they matter - and you're in charge of how much. When the game ends, take the journal you've written and read it as a historian and write the "real" story of your tragic character.

Good luck! Let your heart not break on these tumultuous shores.

Update Oct 2nd 2020:  Digital Job Generator available. Now, you can generate jobs with just  a click of a button. Save yourselves some dice rolls by visiting this link.

Here's a thoughtful explanation and video essay about the game:

Here's a glowing review from the RPG Internationale: