Spire Apps, Apps for Spire

I’m a massive fan of Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor’s Spire: The City Must Fall TTRPG. It’s one of my favourite games to run. Anyone that knows Spire knows that rules-as-written the GM is meant to track Stress and Fallout but that doesn’t always suit every group. For those GMs that do track stress there’s a handy app call Spire Companion which is very clever and cool but it lacks a couple of features that I wanted.

  1. Supporting multiple campaigns: I run games for a few groups and having to scroll around to find which character I’m inflicting misery on gets old real fast.
  2. Exporting data so it can moved to a different browser, or just saved as a record: Spire Companion has no function to export your data which means if your browser data is cleared you lose everything that you’ve saved on there. That can be a real pain.

So wat do?

Same thing I do every time I don’t have an app that does what I want. Write my own.

I’ve created a character sheet and a campaign management app for my players and myself. Both of which use your browser storage for their data but allow you to export and load all your data easily. I also went a bit beyond on the campaign app by adding searchable notes, npcs, and locations. Hell, everything is searchable via the search box at the top of each page and the search string is actually interpreted as a case insensitive regular expression for people who really want to go overboard.

Both apps should scale for most mobile devices (unless you have a really tiny screen) and be reasonably convenient. They’re also both PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) which means that you can install them to the home screen of your mobile devices by pretty much any Chrome based browser. I’d say they’re 90% done at this point but I probably won’t be changing the data models any time soon so any further updates shouldn’t break anyone’s data…

Hopefully they’ll be useful for people.

  • Nick