The title doesn’t steer you wrong on this one. Black Magic (2019) introduces a booklet’s worth of unhallowed mysticism into the Spire. Within is a new class — the Blood-Witch, a weird, gory, magic using class that spreads terror and has been colonized by something Else — and a few Extra Advances, which are sort of like bonus classes a character can get if they fulfill the right requirements. They’re the Gangrou, a kind of food-centric/cursed mage; the Deep Apiarist, a mystical living beehive and the Demonologist, the rare thing in Spire that doesn’t need any explanation. There are a couple pages on demons themselves (which leads into tomorrow’s post). Finally, there is Occult fallout, which you suffer when you are the victim of occult magic. In sum, Black Magic makes Spire weirder and surprisingly ickier.

It also forms a bridge of sorts to Heart, Spire’s sequel game, which is more concerned with horror than revolution (though self-destruction remains a central theme). The Deep Apiarist shows up there as a fully fledged class and the Blood-Witch sees some taming down into just a regular old Witch, but you can definitely see where Heart will lead by flipping through the pages of Black Magic (I’ll tackle Heart another time…).