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The Spire

AX.GIL.01.01 - Iron Lattice

AXIOMRPG GENRE CATALOG
Biopunk/corpo-fantasy
Reference Code: AX.GIL

Lineages: 5
Organizations: 5
Professions: 25 + 4 Templates
Power Traditions: 5
Threats: 52

Compatible with AxiomRPG Core Rules (AX.C)
Required Core Sections: AX.C.01 through AX.C.16

This Catalog defines setting-specific content for the following
Points in the Core Rules:

    AX.C.01 - Setting Details - Override
    AX.C.06 - Lineages - Override
    AX.C.07 - Professions - Override
    AX.C.08 - Perks & Powers - Supplemental
    AX.C.09 - Equipment - Override
    AX.C.13 - Threats - Override
    AX.C.14 - GM Tools - Override

All other Core sections apply without modification.

The Spire

The Spire is the closest thing the Iron Lattice world has to a neutral city, which means it is a city where all five Power Pillars are present. Where all five are working to ensure the others do not gain a decisive advantage. It sits at the confluence of a major continental land corridor, a BVHI tectonic transit hub, three NTC resonance relay towers, and the oldest continuously operating Linden-Green Accord registry outside Elven arcology territory. Every org needs it. None of them own it. That has been the city's defining condition for the better part of three centuries.

From above, the city looks like its name: a cluster of towers, each one owned by a different faction, competing for vertical dominance over a dense, sprawling middle city that belongs to no one in particular. From street level, it looks like every crossroads city on the planet, loud, compressed, full of people who came here because they had to and stayed because the money was better than wherever they left. From below ground, it looks like a Dwarven engineering masterpiece that the surface city was built on without fully understanding.

The Spire is the introductory city for this setting because it contains all five orgs, all five lineages, the full range of socio-economic strata and a live territorial tension that gives every character a reason to be present. Newcomers to the setting encounter the world's core dynamic in compressed, walkable form: the powerful competing on the upper floors, the rest of the city surviving the consequences.

City Structure

The Spire is organized along a vertical axis that maps directly to wealth, power, and lineage demographics. This is not accidental, the city's physical structure was shaped by each lineage building according to their own logic, layering over and under a shared urban core.

The result is four distinct vertical strata, each containing multiple named districts, that players and GMs should understand as both geographical locations and social categories.

Elevation Strata Overview

UPPER STRATA

  • "The Canopy"
  • Elven arcology towers and LGT administrative spires

MID STRATA

  • The Lattice
  • Corporate campuses, professional districts, transit hubs

STREET STRATA

  • The Fold
  • Human crossroads, open markets, mixed-lineage wards

UNDER STRATA

  • The Bedrock
  • BVHI deep infrastructure, Halfling enclaves, the Deeps

City Governance & Faction Power Map

The Spire has a nominal city administration, a Council of five district representatives plus an appointed City Arbiter who theoretically mediates disputes above the commercial level. In practice, the Council's authority ends where org authority begins, and org authority begins at most of the points that matter.

The actual power balance in the city shifts constantly. The following represents the state of play at the time a new party of player characters arrives:

LGT holds the foundational legal authority; they own most of the city's land under the Accord Registry and can trigger title-based leverage at any point. Currently executing a slow-roll audit of all Human-occupied commercial properties in the Graft Wards to assess Covenant compliance, which has been generating friction for four months.

BVHI holds infrastructure authority, nothing in the city moves, stores, or maintains without their systems. Currently in a contract renegotiation with city administration over maintenance fee escalations that they have structured to ensure settlement terms favor deeper BVHI access to the Anchor Stone subsurface. The negotiation has been running for eight months.

NTC holds information authority, the city's digital systems run on Gnomish hardware and NTC holds the certification keys. Currently investigating a series of Legacy Anomaly reports from the Fault Corridor that their analysis indicates are not structural but are instead consistent with unauthorized Silicon Demi-Plane access from an undisclosed node. They have not identified the node. The HIA has.

HIA operates in the background, as always. Their current active operations in the Spire include three long-term sleeper personnel in non-Halfling orgs, continuous monitoring of the NTC Fault Corridor investigation, and a Hospitality Suite event scheduled for next month that seven senior figures from four orgs have confirmed attendance at. Seating assignments are not random.

NVS is in what Syndicate culture would call an "opportunity cycle", a recent collapse of a major Human commercial venture in the Graft Wards created distressed property and displaced professional networks. Syndicate Fixers and Venture Scouts have been active in the area for six weeks and three new NVS-backed enterprises have opened in the former sites. The LGT audit has complicated their acquisition timeline.

Sensory Profile & GM Notes

By district:

  • The Canopy: Quiet, clean air, subtle harmonic hum from the NTC relay, the weight of absolute confidence. NPCs here finish your sentences by correctly predicting what you were going to say, then wait for you to catch up.
  • The Lattice: The background smell of electronics and recycled air. Conversations that break off when you enter a room. Deadlines expressed as weight rather than schedule.
  • The Fold: Loud. Cooking smells from four different culinary traditions competing in the same block. The visual texture of buildings modified six times by tenants who didn't expect to stay. Energy and exhaustion at the same time.
  • The Bedrock: The low vibration that means something is moving somewhere. Echoes with no clear source. The specific quality of air that has not been near a window in months. The feeling of being inside a system that does not care about you specifically.

Key GM principles for the Spire:

Every location should surface one org's authority and another org's interest in subverting it. The Spire functions well as a setting when the players understand that the city is a negotiation in permanent session, and they have just walked into the middle of it.

Player characters without org affiliation will be read by every NPC they encounter as a resource, something to be assessed, leveraged, or neutralized before one of the other orgs gets to them first. This is not hostility. It is the ambient condition of a city where everyone important assumes everyone else is on someone's payroll.

The Resonance Common is the GM's primary neutral ground and should be treated as such: things that happen here are witnessed, but not immediately actionable. Use it for information exchanges, unexpected alliances, and scenes where the players need to receive something without immediately being hunted for it.

Adventure Hooks (Starter Set)

The Audit

Setup: An LGT Asset Auditor approaches the party with a contract to document evidence of Covenant violations in the Graft Wards, work that LGT staff cannot do without triggering the NVS response the org wants to avoid. The money is excellent.

Truth: The violations are real, but several of the targeted properties house NVS fronts that are concealing something the LGT wants access to, not shut down. The Auditor knows this. The contract terms ensure the party does the legal exposure work; the LGT does the private leverage.

Stakes: Success delivers the evidence and burns the party's relationship with the NVS Graft Ward network. Failure, or worse, discovery of the actual intent, leaves the party holding signed LGT paper in a city where the Syndicate has fast eyes.

The Fault

Setup: A BVHI Seismic Engineer, filing independently rather than through official channels, contracts the party to run a private survey of the Fault Corridor. She suspects the Legacy Anomaly reports are being suppressed before they reach BVHI senior staff.

Truth: The harmonic irregularities in the Fault Corridor have been increasing for three months and are consistent with a nascent Entropy Collapse signature, a Kinetic Debt effect from NVS infrastructure above. Someone is suppressing the reports because the formal finding would legally obligate a shutdown of half the Graft Wards above the Corridor, costing the NVS their recent property acquisitions. That someone has a name. It's in a file the HIA keeps but hasn't sold yet.

Stakes: If the Collapse is not addressed, the structural consequences reach the Anchor Stone's subsurface and the harmonic effects become unpredictable at city scale. If it is addressed, the responsible party faces consequences that at least three orgs have reasons to prevent.

The Reclamation Ward

Setup: A Gnome named Tix Preel, Hardware Exorcist, makes contact in the Patch District. A device brought to the Reclamation Ward for diagnostic two weeks ago has not been returned to its owner. Tix is not NTC staff; she received the job from a third party and never saw the device herself. She wants to know what's in the Ward. She's willing to pay, and she's willing to go in herself if someone clears the path.

Truth: The device contains a fragmented Bound Spirit, a partial consciousness from NTC's Zero-Day Soul process that retained enough coherence to begin communicating through the hardware. The Reclamation Ward staff realized what they had and escalated. The device is currently in a containment loop. The NTC's response team is deciding whether to recycle the fragment or study it. The Spirit is aware of both options.

Stakes: Extracting the device means becoming responsible for a partially-conscious piece of legacy Bound Hardware that three NTC departments want back and the HIA wants to interview before anyone else does. Leaving it means the fragment gets recycled. The Spirit knows things about the Zero-Day Soul process it was not supposed to retain.