Character and Setting-building with Spire

I read Spire! Drow revolutionaries fighting against the high elves, a little too cloak-and-dagger for my tastes but a pretty decent package overall. I didn't have too many thoughts other than "yeah I'd prefer a little more system-definition for some of this but mostly this looks like it'll work pretty well," until I got to thinking about how the setting and the system interweave with each other. That is interesting to me.

Character creation in Spire, the game, keeps bringing you back to Spire, the city. You get a mini-lifepath that describes how your character spent a period of forced labor. You pick a class that's associated with different factions, locales, or elements within the city, and then your class prompts you to make NPC contacts for your character, again associated with specific aspects of the city. I think what sets this apart from other systems I've read is that these things all get expanded on elsewhere in the book, there's extensive detail for the GM to work with, and all these things point back towards each other, because it's all set in the same city. It's not just a set of prompts to help you build a setting for yourself, it's adding a few ingredients of your own to a pre-existing powder keg. The city of Spire is more or less a closed system, you can't leave without dramatically changing the assumptions of the game. By prompting you to engage directly with what's been established, you're drawing attention to rows and rows of dominoes ready to knock down: The seeds of the campaign you'll play through.

In some ways Spire reminds me of capsule games or the default campaign included in The Far Roofs, but it's more open-ended than Yazeba's and not nearly as open-ended as Froofs. I like the powder keg imagery. They wrote a setting ready to explode at any time, and character creation that lights the spark.