Folklore the Affliction — Fall of the Spire
A bound dossier arrived this morning in two parts — a five-volume October-2020 campaign journal stitched into the cover of a later despatch from April 2024. The Keeper, who has handled such double-bound files before and knows them to belong almost always to games their owners did not quite manage to leave behind, files the parcel under F and reads on.
The series chronicles Daniel (@dungeondive)'s play-through of the Fall of the Spire expansion for Folklore the Affliction — three chapters of a Jack-the-Ripper-style hunt through Eürotrusk, undertaken with a femme fatale two-hero party (a dimension-crossed Druidus and a spirit-walking Huntress) and an unusual amount of house-ruling to make the system survive at two players. The arc closes four years later with a short-form video that points not at the expansion but at the Adventure Creation Kit book.
The frame Daniel lands on is that Folklore the Affliction feels to him like a board-game version of a PlayStation-1-era Japanese RPG — an overworld, small pre-rendered adventure tiles, a split between skirmish and map combat, item-and-class economies, fetch-quest rumours, and an enormous amount of bookkeeping. It is the only game he knows that scratches that particular nostalgia, and so he forgives the bookkeeping. The 2024 coda is a love-letter coda — the same shape as the Fallen Land run: this game stuck.
The Exhibit Catalogue:
- Fall of the Spire — Part One: Choosing Characters — six new heroes, a femme-fatale party pick, and a list of house rules to survive two-player play
- Fall of the Spire — Part Two: Let the Bookkeeping Begin — party manager as a player role, plus chits with their meaning printed on the back
- Fall of the Spire — Part 3: Adventure Recap and Review — the new initiative track, a Druidus who picks up a hand cannon, and Death and Decay as a side-quest draw
- Fall of the Spire — Part 4: Continuing the Adventure Recap — charged abilities as a soft combat timer, and a one-shake roll that resolves to-hit, damage, and victim
- Fall of the Spire — Final Adventure Re-Cap and Final Thoughts — the verdict: a board-game PS1 JRPG, with diamond-pathed final chapter and a re-boxing demo
- One thing I love about…Folklore: The Affliction — the 2024 coda nominates the Adventure Creation Kit toolkit-book as the real treasure
Filed under F for Folklore, on the shelf with the love-letter codas.
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– The Keeper
Notes that any game whose owner returns to it four years later — not to play, but specifically to praise the appendix book that came with the upgrade kit — is, by any reasonable definition, still on the table.