Pour ceux qui veulent un peu (voire beaucoup) de lecture
Something Flickers Within
Spirit Fire™ is a non-linear open-world board game system in which you explore unique fantasy realms on an introspective journey of discovery, wonder, and mystery. Your choices matter because you’re not following a story—you ARE the story.
This is a substantive, emotionally-driven experience with aspirations beyond the expected iterations on tactical combat and standard gameplay. To emphasize this vision, there is NO combat in Spirit Fire. Instead, this experience finds conflict, pressure, and suspense in the countless other types of difficult challenges life asks us to overcome, including the tensions we face deep within ourselves. It’s time to wield something more powerful than a sword: your mind, your heart, and your spirit.
A principle question in Spirit Fire is “who could you be?” Your journey to answer that question begins with the first part of the system: your character box. Contained in that box is everything you could become—infinite versions of you, waiting to be unlocked and discovered—as well as the components necessary to play the game, including the first open-world realm for you to explore.
With your character box, you’ll venture into unique realms, telling your story in a campaign of your own creation, exploring where you want, pursuing the quests and ideals of your choosing, tapping into spirit fire to do more than you ever though possible, all while carefully tending your internal spark in order to keep going.
With drop-in / drop-out multiplayer (meaning seamless transitions between solo and cooperative play), multiple open-world realms coming at launch (with many more in development for the future), and a plan for a continuous stream of new personal quest lines that can by played in any realm, Spirit Fire is a deeply customizable on-going experience. At times, you will attain resolution and closure, but through those moments you will also set the stage for more to follow. Everything in Spirit Fire can be reset and played again, but the system enables something better: the ability—if you wish—to forever build on what’s come before.
You have many questions. Good. Curiosity is a beautiful and powerful thing. Answers and high-level overviews of some of the game’s concepts can be found below. Detailed deep-dives are coming in the weeks ahead. For now, set aside any assumptions, comparisons, or preconceived notions established by your previous gaming experiences. Let your experience with Spirit Fire be its own thing. You deserve it. Give yourself the joy of seeing things with fresh eyes, and be open to discovering something new within yourself.
Above all, set this question foremost in your spirit:
What will you do, in this dark world, with the flame you carry?
In addition to your character box, the Spirit Fire system features a variety of open-world realms that you can explore at your own pace, in the order you wish. The character box comes with one realm and more will be available at launch. Each of these realms is a distinct setting with its own narratives, map, quests, opportunities, and perpetual living environments. Your drive to discover will determine which parts of these realms you uncover; and your curiosity will reveal hidden opportunities that might easily go overlooked. It’s up to you to decide what is worthy of your spark.
Over time, more and more realms will be released, and you can explore as many—or as few—of them as you’d like. If you love a realm, you can explore it in depth, revealing every secret and opportunity that place has to offer. Or you can skim the surface of a bunch of different places.
Each realm is full of realm-specific stuff to do, but is also an active environment with its own atmosphere and vibe in which you can do tasks that aren’t realm specific. Since many of your quests can be fulfilled regardless of what realm you’re in, you might spend more time in a realm simply because you like spending time there. Since YOU are the story—where you go, what you do, and how you do it is the point.
Spirit fire is a spiritual energy that exists in and around you. It’s both intimate and unknowable. It’s the thing inside that feels greater than you and yet IS you. It’s the mystery that solves other mysteries.
There are four different aspects of spirit fire: consumption, awe, illumination, and intensity. Things that you do, or that happen to you, will affect how much of these different aspects of spirit fire are burning within you. Conversely, how much spirit fire is burning in you influences what you can do and what happens to you.
Many of your abilities and connections are only available to you with the right aspect of spirit fire burning. Others can only be used by extinguishing that spirit fire. A tension exists between keeping the fire within lit, spending that fire to accomplish your goals, and being careful not to let your fire burn out of control.
Each realm is a mystery wrapped in mysteries, with a map waiting for you to poke, prod, and explore. Sometimes quests will send you in certain directions, but just as often your curiosity will be the thing driving you forward. Most maps start largely unrevealed, though not completely; there will always be interesting landmarks you can juuuust sort of make out on the horizon. Usually the only thing telling you where to go is the little voice inside. Who knows what you’ll find as you reveal more of the realm along the way?
The things you do will impact the world, sometimes in ways you intend, sometimes in ways that are unexpected. The quests you complete and how you complete them may dramatically change the environment, replacing portions of the map with different map cards. Areas and details will become re-contextualized as you learn more about the realm or develop new abilities.
Spirit Fire™ is an experience about discovering who you are, and such an experience demands incredible agency in where you go and what you do. Explore as you wish.
Speaking of agency and discovery—
One of our favorite things about this game is how frequently new content is being revealed from card packs. Many actions you take, quests you complete, and events you trigger will result in the opening of packs.
(These are thick envelope-style packs that can be easily reloaded and resealed if you want you reset your game.)
Packs will be coming at you from everywhere. Your character box comes loaded with character packs for you to earn access to that will enable you to expand and customize your character build. Realm specific packs reveal new portions of quest lines, characters to interact with, changes to the map, and many other surprises. There are “personal quest” lines that you can pursue in any realm; which of these you choose to complete—and how you choose to complete them—will result in dramatic personalization of your character and card pool.
Your discoveries will shape everything about your experience, who you become, and the world around you.
Many encounters and quests will send you to a spiral bound book of challenging activity spreads. These represent your internal processing of whatever it is you’re experiencing, determine how that experience affects you, and—in some cases—how well you succeed at the thing you’re doing.
Attempting to decipher an ancient language so you know which stone lever to pull may take you to a logic or mnemonics spread. Trying to bring about a peaceful resolution to a conflict between villages on the brink of war might take you to a negotiation spread. Maybe you just encountered something terrifying (or beautiful) and you’re simply determining how—and how much—that experience impacts you.
There is A LOT to talk about with this element of the game. It is deeply tied to one of Spirit Fire’s central premises: that it’s not so much the things that happen to you that determine who you are, but your response to them—how you internalize them, how present in the moment you are, what you take away from your experiences (for better or worse).
We have to cut ourselves off about this subject or we’ll go off for ten paragraphs. Look for much more on this in the weeks to come.
Many of your actions and the things you experience contribute a deeper understanding or connection to the world. The more you encounter the mist creatures in the forest, the more you grow familiar with their nature. The more you assist the temple monks, the more they will trust you.
As you have these types of experiences in each realm, you will build a collection of these key interactions, understandings, or relationships. The icons you have in this milestone track will greatly influence what happens and what you’re able to do. There are infinite examples of this relationship with the world at play: Your many interactions with the mist creatures may enable you to complete a certain quest, but the druids may no longer trust you. Unlocking a rune-covered door may not be possible until you’ve encountered the runes enough times in other contexts that you develop a better understanding of them. These are not spoilers, they are things we’re making up for examples, but you get the point.
Your actions have consequences, not just on yourself, your cards, your resources, but also on the world around you and how it responds to you.
Much of what you do in Spirit Fire is powered by your deck of cards, which is primarily made up of disciplines.
Disciplines are the things you’ve learned in your travels that become the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical tools you use to face the situations you find yourself in. With your disciplines you’ll face encounters and opportunities in the spiral bound book, navigate the environment, increase your resolve, and affect the spirit fire burning within.
The disciplines you choose to pursue and make part of yourself shape who you are. How you use them is your expression of how you face the things you experience. What you do, and how you do it, has a big impact on the types of disciplines available to you, and the way you combine them will have a dramatic affect on what you’re capable of.
There’s so much to talk about with these, and we’re excited to dig into them in more detail soon.
In this game you don’t have “equipment” in the traditional sense, what you have are connections with the world around you. Spirit fire can be found in almost anything, and by attuning further connection to it through the spirit-filled things in the world, you are able to deepen your access to aspects of spirit fire you could never achieve on your own.
The things in the world you connect to spirit fire through are called conduits. By attuning to different conduits, you effectively “equip” these connections. So, instead of equipping a shirt, hat, ring, sword, and boots, you might attune to a fistful of glowing stones, a grumpy furry friend, the moss of the forest, and the ancient winds blowing through the land.
Your relationship to spirit fire is changed through these connections, granting access to unique abilities and affects. These connections often come with quirky side effects that make each of these relationships full of personality.
Your journey is personal, but connections to the things around you are essential.
Your emotions and headspace are not the same moment-to-moment. Events affect you. Your attention changes. In Spirit Fire, how you shift and set the power of your resolve has a major impact on what you’re capable of.
The outcome of your actions is shaped by the power and state of your resolve. For example: every discipline you possess can be played to perform a series of actions (focus, ignite, or push), but the value of those actions is determined by your current resolve. Using a discipline to focus lets you draw cards, but your resolve determines whether you’re drawing 1, 2, or 3 cards.
In other instances, actions may require a certain resolve in order to perform them.
Increasing and adjusting the strength and direction of your resolve to suit your situation is a key part of your journey.
Your experiences have the potential to unlock a flicker of something new within you, a mote of understanding or wisdom that you can use toward growth. Just about anything you do in the game has the potential to result in flicker. Completing quests often brings a big surge of flicker. Certain disciplines, when used in certain ways, result in flicker. Any pack you open has the possibility of leading to flicker. Most often though, flicker is attained by how you respond to the experiences you have in the challenges in the spiral-bound book. You’ll have many experiences, but finding personal growth in them depends on your leaning in and committing yourself to learning something from that moment. Flicker is what happens when you don’t just endure the happenings of your life, but absorb everything they have to offer, whether they’re beautiful moments, tough moments, instances of conflict, or of calm. Everything you experience has the potential to bring something new to life inside you. It’s up to you to seek your own growth.
Flicker is applied as shapes drawn on a special pad of paper. When a shape matches the one on the bottom of a card, you have brought about change within. How you map your flicker to yourself determines how you grow and evolve. Do you gain a new discipline? Do you create a new conduit connection? Do you overcome a burden? It’s completely up to you.
Each of us has an internal spark, a life energy we draw from in all we do. We use this spark to achieve the things we want to achieve. If we’re not mindful though, we can see it squandered on things life does to us, things outside our control. We can forget that it’s there, being used up, every day, by us, on things we don’t really care about. One of the most important parts of our journey is understanding that it’s up to us to determine what is worthy of our spark.
Ultimately, the measure of your life is what you do with your spark while it burns. Who do you become? What do you leave behind? What do you do, with your spark, while it burns?
All of this is present in Spirit Fire’s spark mechanic—which is the measurement that determines when your story comes to an end. You start your journey full of spark, but, over time, this spark will be diminished, used up by things you encounter and actions you chose to take. But, as in life, there are things you can do to rekindle this spark. There are quests and storylines you can pursue that fill you back up, that relight the thing inside, that bring back some of what you’ve spent, enabling you do more in the long run.
There is so much to see, and do, and be in life. Finding the right balance between giving of yourself and seeking opportunities to re-stoke your flame is one of the most beautiful challenges of your journey.
Your Journey is Just Beginning
pour cette campagne, mais avec une possible localisation future.
Et limite je préfère en anglais de toutes façons. Ils écrivent tellement bien je préfère perdre un peu de temps sur un ou deux mots qu’avoir une traduction bancale.