The Conquest army I play more than any other is the Spires. Is it because it came in the original starter set and I ended up with four of them? Perhaps. Is it because once you’ve painted 100 force-grown drone models it’s difficult to justify not using them? Maybe. Is it because the experience of shuffling my card stack like a Las Vegas dealer partway through every turn gives me a sense of superiority over my opponent? I plead the fifth. For now, let’s park thoughts of models and rules and dive into the appalling, “can’t bear to watch but can’t look away” lore that has gripped Conquest fans ever since that box first appeared.
The Spires is a flexible faction that draws on elves, aliens and body horror. They’re simple on the surface and increasingly complex the deeper you dive. So let’s dive in together and discover what we can about what there is to love about this unique wargaming race.
Tale as Old as Time
When first reading up about the Spires, it’s likely most people come across two pieces of information: They’re like elves, and they’re an alien race that crashed into Eä a long time ago. These two things are both sort of true, but are worth ignoring in order to understand them properly.
They certainly did come from the skies, further back in time than the history books record. But thinking about them as an interstellar alien species does funny things to my mind given the fantasy setting of Conquest. The fact that Eä is fundamentally not their home, though, is important. They want to return, and have been working ever since to make this journey a possibility, predominantly through their scientists’ experiments.
Similarly, in some ways they are akin to elves. They’re extremely long-lived, and would appear to have slender bodies, but none of the Conquest miniatures directly represent them. Instead, the only time members of the Spires race appear on the battlefield is in the form of an avatar that they project their consciousness into. Some of those look like spindly humanoids that are more resilient and hard-hitting than their appearance would suggest. Others, having observed the cavalry of the Old Dominion, appear as centaurs, while others still embrace the world of the big cats in the feline centaurish presentation of the Leonine Avatara.
Thriving on Death
The core premise underpinning the Spires is their expertise in biomass. They take the creatures of Eä and repurpose their organs, muscles and bones for their own purposes. Delicious. The alien race that we see as the Spires is collectively known as the Exiles, and other groups within the Exiles have abandoned the Spires to their experiments on ethical grounds – more fool them.
The spires themselves, the enormous pillars of flesh that dominate the skyline of Eä, are the home of the Exiles’ descendants that live on in the faction known as the Spires. They refer to themselves as the Sovereign Lineage. When the armies of the Spires go out to war, it’s not the Spires themselves that are fighting, it’s the organic objects they’ve created, whether those are avatars in order that they can experience the battle for themselves, cloned warriors that excel in their field, or drones that serve no purpose other than to die.
These experiments on biomass are primarily carried out by the Biomancers, who serve the Sovereign Lineage as part of the Directorate. Imagine them as a Research and Development department driven towards quite literal world domination, through the most extreme forms of biohacking. One wonderful example of this would be their Abomination, which is in effect a living torture chamber. In most ways it isn’t a creature in its own right but a living cage, into which a prisoner of war is placed before it’s sent out to scuttle around among that same prisoner’s previous comrades. The other-worldly screams heard across the battlefield are actually the distorted, amplified cry of pain and misery from the person trapped within the Abomination’s torso.
An Unusual Underspire Uprising
Working for the Directorate, at least according to the Spires org charts, is the Underspire. This lowest class of the Spires are important for their overall ecosystem because the experiments of the Pheromancers provide resources for the Spires faction as a whole, so they are tolerated and generally ignored, particularly by the Sovereign Lineage.
But here is where the Spires (as a society) become particularly interesting. Aside from the nightmarish practices of the rest of them, which ought to make one giddy with glee in their extreme form, the Underspire is a little system all of its own. The Pheromancers believe their work to be more important than they’re getting credit for, so there’s an underlying tension between them and the spires’ other inhabitants. And there’s more.
Imagine the Pheromancers like the stereotypical IT department working in the basement. The rest of the office go there when they need to but, more than anything else, wish to never have to interact with them. In the meantime, the IT crowd has cleverly been coming up with newer, more efficient ways to provide support in the form of useful tools – drones. But these drones have started to act in odd ways recently, suggesting the nameless, faceless mounds of flesh created only to plod around, swing blindly at enemies, and die in the name of the Sovereign Lineage, have started to truly develop consciousness. More than that, there’s even a suggestion they may have formed their own religion, and the only thing potentially stopping it – or benefitting from it – is the Pheromancers. Intriguing, am I right?
Why I Love the Spires
All in all, it feels to me that the Spires have a bit of everything. A rich backstory. Inner turmoil. Levels of imaginatively disgusting activities that are enjoyable in the context of a dark fantasy setting, and difficult to explain to anyone outside of it.
Perhaps for you it’s the alien pursuit of a route home that catches your eye, the body horror or the way the subfactions play off against each other. Everyone’s drawn to the Spires for a different reason. For me, there’s a deep, visceral pleasure in seeing a gargantuan not-spider offending the enemy just by being present.
As always if you want to get 10% off and support Goonhammer you can make your Conquest purchase by clicking here for US/Canada or here for EU/rest of world. You’ll also need to enter code “goonhammer” at checkout.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
