I met Sebastian Yūe at the UK Games Expo in a brief encounter at an indie tabletop games stand. Yes, such things could be found at the giant board games convention.
Here we are, some weeks later, and I’ve had time to look at The Model Minister, which is Sebastian’s grey to dark adventure for Rowan, Rook & Decard’s Spire: The City Must Fall. In Spire, you play dark elves who have had enough of oppression and are secretly engaged in rebellion. In Sebastian’s The Model Minister, that’s no easy task at all.
Welcome, Sebastian! Thanks for joining us. To start, for our readers who might not be familiar with your work, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into designing tabletop games?
I’m a freelance writer, editor, and game designer, and I’m the publishing coordinator at Canadian RPG publisher Hit Point Press. I’ve been working professionally in the tabletop industry since 2020. I didn’t set out to become a game designer; my background is in journalism.
I got started by chance while I was attending an adult support group for trans people with eating disorders. We were taking turns facilitating the group, and by that point I’d been playing D&D for a year or so, and I offered to run a one-shot adventure. When the game was over, one of the players asked what I was going to do with the adventure. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could do anything with it.
So, I went home that night and looked into how I could publish it. I didn’t know anything about adventure writing and I didn’t know how to take my bullet point notes and turn them into something I could share with others. In my quest for guidance, I found the Write Your First Adventure course run by the Storytelling Collective (formerly the RPG Writer Workshop) and used it to polish up the adventure, which became Lake of Secrets on the Dungeon Masters Guild. I enjoyed the process of crafting that adventure so much that I simply kept doing it. I sought opportunities for collaboration and I learned that I could make a career out of game design. I’d been laid off by the company I was working for around the start of the pandemic and I had infinite time, so I just kept writing.
As a freelancer, I’ve now edited for the Cosmere RPG, Daggerheart, and UNCAGED: Goddesses, and I’ve written and designed for Pathfinder Lost Omens: Divine Mysteries, Apocalypse Keys: Doomsday Delights, and Subclasses Revivified.”
We’re here to talk about your scenario ‘The Model Minister,’ which is set in the fantastic world of Spire. What was it about Spire that inspired you to create a story within its universe?
Spire is a blend of everything I personally love in an RPG. It’s fantasy-punk with magic and elves, yes, but also guns, body horror, political intrigue, and trains. You play a drow revolutionary resisting the horrors of an oppressive regime, and the mechanics do an amazing job of blending brutal violence with absurdist humour.
It’s interesting because your cause is just, but your character isn’t heroic, they’re doomed by the narrative, destined to die for a future they’ll never get to see. I also love how character-driven Spire is. I’m a very socially minded designer; setting up social encounters with strongly motivated and believably flawed NPCs is probably my favourite thing to do. I want the interactions the characters have and the relationships they build to support the story the players are telling together. The setting, mechanics, and themes all made me excited to craft a messy, complex plot for people who want to play messy, complex characters.”
Your adventure kicks off with a really compelling and morally grey premise: the players are sent to kill a compromised agent to protect a larger conspiracy. What’s the story behind coming up with such a tense setup?
In its first few pages, the game explains that you’re a member of a paramilitary cult called the Ministry, dedicated reclaiming the city of Spire from its colonial overlords. It also says that your loved ones would sell you out, as would the Ministry itself. I wanted to explore a situation in which that happened, but what if you had to be complicit in the betrayal?
The game sets up all these layers that you need to navigate; you have to work within the institutions maintained by your oppressors, but also you’re working for the Ministry, which wants you to subvert those institutions for your own cause, so that tense plot hook felt believable, very true to the kind of task the characters would be assigned.
With this premise, I wanted to offer the opportunity for players to have their characters question their values. What would or wouldn’t you do in the name of freedom, and are the Ministry’s methods in line with how you want to achieve freedom? The setup is also adaptable; I can see GMs who are running long-term campaigns replacing the agent with an important NPC from a character’s life, or even another party member. I’d love to see what happens when those attachments are even deeper and the emotional stakes are even higher.”
The central conflict in ‘The Model Minister’ isn’t just about combat; it’s a web of loyalty, betrayal, and desperate ambition. Was it a conscious design goal to create something with so many potential social and moral complications?
Yes, it was precisely my design goal to create such a socially and morally complicated scenario. I wanted a story without a clear “good” ending and for it to be a difficult decision not just for the characters, but for the players as well. Madalene, the agent the characters are supposed to kill, understands the gravity of her mistake and her loyalty to the Ministry should mean that she accepts her fate. But as the characters explore the estate where she was working undercover, they discover that her ordeal has worn her down, and ultimately, she wants to survive, to live to fight another day. It’s easy for the characters to see themselves in Madalene and understand that even one slip could take them from an asset to a liability for the Ministry.
The thing I love about complicated scenarios is that the choices are hard. Player decisions matter, they drastically alter the circumstances. All possible outcomes have practical benefits and drawbacks, but the characters will also have to contend with how they feel about their actions long after the story has ended.”
The scenario presents some incredibly vivid and dark imagery, from the ‘animal cages’ and ‘half-flayed occupants’ in the crafting studio to the drow models with grafted animal parts. How important is this body horror element to the story you wanted to tell?
The body horror element is very important to the story. Nonconsensual body alteration is fairly common for drow in Spire and it felt natural to include it in The Model Minister.
Here, it’s related to the themes of choice and sacrifice. Madalene was once so devoted to the Ministry that she gave up her bodily autonomy for it. It’s more complicated than that, though—her aelfir lord is her tormentor and she doesn’t enjoy being a live subject for his experiments, but she also knew what she was getting into. The transformations that Madalene and the other drow undergo turn their bodies into battlegrounds—microcosms for the pain and sacrifice required for societal change.”
You’ve mentioned that ‘The Model Minister’ was first published in The Hearth Magazine and later revised. What did you learn from the initial release, and what changes did you make for this standalone version?
I’m profoundly grateful to The Hearth Magazine for accepting my pitch. The Model Minister is my first attempt to write material for Spire and initial release got me to write concisely and gave me motivation, energy, and confidence to get my first draft down on paper. The Hearth Magazine has generous terms that revert the publication rights to the creator after 90 days and I knew from the beginning that I’d publish a first version with the magazine and expand the project later.
In terms of changes, I deepened the NPCs by expanding their stories and relationships, I added GM guidance for running the scenario and turning it into a campaign, I wrote a new scene, and I completely redid the art and layout. I couldn’t have achieved these changes without putting together a small team: developmental editor Pam Punzalan, cover artist Adrian Stone, interior illustrator Direquest, editor (and editor-in-chief of The Hearth Magazine) Brent Jans, and graphic design consultant Luna P.
I’m so glad to have had the chance to work with these amazing industry professionals, and each made an invaluable contribution to the polished final version of The Model Minister out there today.”
For budding designers looking to write for existing game systems like Spire, what advice would you give them based on your experience creating ‘The Model Minister’?
To design third-party publications for existing games, my advice is mostly technical. Study the source material and use it to structure your own work. Observe how they organise information and familiarise yourself with the mechanics. Understanding the mechanical syntax and following the textual conventions of the official books will make your supplement easy to navigate for people who already play the game, and that consistency will give your work a level of professional polish that will set it apart.
I’d also advise that you charge money when making your project publicly available. Even if you’re not doing it to make money, and game design isn’t your main source of income, even putting a suggested price helps support an ecosystem that values the work of all game designers. I don’t think I need to give advice on ideas—those are the easy part—but I do think it’s important to write something that you yourself would want to play.
And the big question everyone wants to know! Now that ‘The Model Minister’ is out in the world, what are you working on next? Are there any upcoming projects from you that our readers should be getting excited about?
I’m a contributor for WIZARDPUNK 2 (sequel to WIZARDPUNK) published by Sandy Pug Games. I’m hyped about this one because I loved the original zine and it’ll be my first time contributing art to a project. I’m excited to draw traditionally and lean into an eclectic aesthetic. In terms of personal projects, I’m working on an indie project called Doppelbanger, which is about encountering your doppelganger in an alternate universe. To stop the space-time continuum from collapsing, you have to kill them before they can kill you, but what if you could prevent total destruction by romancing them instead? You can keep up with my work on my website, sebastianyue.ca, or follow me on Bluesky Social.
Thanks, Sebastian!
Quick Links
- Buy: The Model Minister
