The setting
For as long as anyone can remember it has stood above the clouds, and every generation has been told the same thing: reach Floor 100, defeat the King, earn your freedom, have your greatest wish granted.
That is what the Church preaches, what the Houses profit from, and what you will arrive believing.
The Tower does not have a theme, and that is deliberate. Some floors are wilderness. Some are cities. Some are the remains of civilisations that failed on the way up. Some are places somebody wished into being, and got exactly what they asked for.
So climbing is not a difficulty curve with new textures on it. Floor 2 is a cave system where the work has stopped and the people are frightened. Floor 4 is farmland above the clouds, run by a man who controls the only staircase and has read his own contract very carefully. What each floor asks of you is different every time.
People do not age in the Tower. They stop, or they slow. So the floors are full of people who came in and never left, people who have lived here their whole lives, and people born here who have never seen anywhere else. The woman at the forge has been at that forge longer than your grandparents were alive, and she has opinions about climbers.
Almost everybody profits from the climb continuing. The Houses profit from the system, the Guilds depend on it, the Church turns it into religion, and the King's government controls who is allowed to go up at all. Plenty of people benefit from climbers trying. Very few benefit from one actually finishing.
Who holds power
Houses own territory, law, armies and floor rights. Guilds own the services everyone needs. Both of them will want something from you.
Solenne writes the law. Korrin keeps the armies and the stock. Morcant trades in memory: manuscripts, archivists and secrets. Hearth owns the food and water. Midrill opened the mines and the routes, and one of theirs reached the King.
The Tower Guard is the King's army. The Workshop makes what the Tower uses. The Merchant Guild knows the shortcuts. The Black Stair is the part nobody advertises. And the Guides are the strangest of them, playing a longer game than anyone else at the table.
Climb, defeat the King, claim your wish, free humanity. It feeds people, heals the sick and shelters climbers, which is why the lower floors trust it. It is not villainous. It is also not telling you everything.
The people
A girl who turns up throughout the Tower, always seeming to know where you are going before you get there. She offers guidance and warnings and never quite explains herself.
The only permanent resident of Floor 1 and the first friendly voice after the tutorial. He points newcomers uphill and has no idea what the crystals he keeps finding are. Climbers never used to come through his forest.
Young, inexperienced, short on talent and shorter on confidence, and climbing anyway. You meet him in the mines on Floor 2, some distance out of his depth.
A travelling trader who turns up on nearly every floor with jokes, stories and stock he really should not have been able to get hold of.
It helps you through the tutorial and then goes quiet. Everybody in the Tower knows what the Watcher is. Nobody can tell you what it wants, and it has started appearing on the lower floors, which is new.
Ruler of Floor 100, and the reason the whole system exists. The Church holds him responsible for the corruption, the Houses built their authority on opposing him, and no living climber has reached his floor.
Open now
A quiet wood with one cottage in it, and one old man who has lived there alone long enough to be surprised anybody came. You arrive out of the tutorial, help him, and earn the way down into the caves. Its real job is teaching you the game, so every reward here is a lesson rather than a prize.
The cave system under the forest, and the first place the Tower stops being pleasant. The corruption has reached the mines, the work has stopped, and the people still down here are sheltering around a fire instead of digging. It is where you meet people who are afraid, and where the first boss is waiting.
A savanna that rotted. The water crystallised, the wells were sealed, the animals were replaced by something worse, and everyone who lived here left. One person stayed. This is the first floor you change rather than clear, and it ends with clean water welling up. It holds the game's only dungeon.
House Hearth's floating farmland: six islands above the clouds, worked by ranch hands, feeding the Tower. The pastoral bit lasts about ten minutes. The waypoint to Floor 5 sits on the manager's ground, which means he decides who uses it. You work, you earn passage. Debt first, freedom later.
The city where the refugees from every floor below ended up: the miners who lost their living, the families the savanna drove out. It was granted to House Midrill as a wish, and they have stopped caring. Built and populated; the story is being written now.
The spaces between the floors, and the people who live in them because nowhere else will have them.
Floors 5, 6 and 7 are one story rather than three neighbouring levels. It starts in Lowerhaven, turns on Floor 7, and finishes back where it began.
Everything above this is what the Tower says about itself. Whether any of it is true is the campaign.
