LEXICUTIONERS

The Order of Lexicutioners are a player faction we put into Strata, our first full-length Spire sourcebook. (They were commissioned as part of a Kickstarter reward by Tim Rudloff, who deserves full credit for the name.) The Lexicutioners are a cult of linguist-assassins who hunt down and kill dangerous languages as well as having access to some weird wizard shit too.

Their High Advance was a lot of fun: they were allowed to redact one word from the GM's copy of Spire, and reality would have to accommodate the change. With this one-page game I wanted to explore the idea of players messing with the rules text a bit more, because it seems a shame to do it only once or twice a campaign.

So: LEXICUTIONERS starts off as a functional micro-RPG - a cut-down version of Spire that readers of Sepulchre, my previous Spire hack, will probably recognise. But every character can modify the rules text itself by spending resource earned during regular play to delete words, and some bits cost more than others to kill. 

Which means that the game might be over very quickly, either from becoming unplayable or the players skewing the mechanics to push things in their favour. But that's part of the fun - and I'm really interested to see what you lot can come up with when the word-killing is combined with the unique character abilities, like replacing words with copies taken from elsewhere in the text or removing individual letters rather than whole words. 

Next month I'll hopefully make some progress on SPACE DOCTORS: Doctors in Space, a half-finished game about melodramatic interplanetary medicine and ravenous sexual tension. (Or something else.) Once next month's game is released, I'll write up the back pages and send December, January and February's games off to the printers, so those of you at the $15 tier should receive your bundle of physical copies around April.

(Oh, also! We've finished the Hollows Quickstart document and you can download it here. If you enjoyed the Hollows updates I wrote over the summer, or just want some context on what the fuck I was going on about, you should take a look. It's great!)

Love and chaos,

- Gx