This one comes from a handful of places for my newest campaign idea that you can steal, pick apart, etc. The first spot is Nerdarchy which really got me thinking about it on one of their videos where they were talking about a dungeon/tower that would get harder each time the player characters would go into it, level up, that someone had asked them to talk about how you could run a game with that.

That then got me thinking about an anime and book series. Is it Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon and Sufficiently Advanced Magic both deal with towers/dungeons that have various floors and in one case the lower floors are harder, in the other the higher floors are harder. And in the case of Sufficiently Advanced Magic there are multiple towers. The anime obviously has an anime feel to it, but so does Sufficiently Advanced Magic. I’d say that it has litJRPG feel to it.

So stealing a bit from a number of them, I really like the idea of these towers being out there, put in place by some magical being. The tower is never the same as they are magical and they are an important part of the culture.

Instead of starting at level 1, players start at level 0, which is pretty deadly, but they get to go in as a group of four and the tower provides some starting gear for them. But the PCs have to survive the first floor of the tower which is basically the proving grounds. If the PC’s survive, they hit level one and get their class. That is basically the goal of people in the society, to get into the tower and get a level and be able to have a more interesting life than those people who aren’t able to afford the entry fee or can’t find a group to put together a proving.

Once the PC’s (or their back-up PC’s have succeeded), the PC’s will be courted by a couple of different organizations, basically schools who train up adventurers so that you have skills for the real world, but only once you’ve done several years of work for them. Each school is always trying to get the best and the brightest, and each school has an area that they specialize in, so there is sabotage, corporate intrigue, spying, that goes on between the schools that the players might have to take part in.

For the players, though, the biggest thing is going to be the first ever tournament that they have to get ready for which will be a grueling slog through the largest tower to get to the highest level, which no one has ever done before, but that event is ten years out. So that is what the game is building towards, that final big climb.

Before that, there are going to be several things that the PC’s will have to do. They are going to have to do some covert operations to find out what other schools know about various towers, since schools will specialize in a single tower. Along with that, they are going to start to find out that weird things are happening, such as monsters who have only been seen in the tower are coming out of the tower and the inner workings of the towers is starting to get known.

You’ll have to decide when you want to hit the tournament and the tower, but I think that level 10 would be a great starting point. The competition will have them in the tower for weeks if not months, so players will, for once, actually have to keep track of things like food, arrows, spell components, carrying limits, etc. I wouldn’t track these things otherwise in the game, but this competition is supposed to be huge and grueling and by making them worry about what they have, it’s going to make the tower feel more epic and challenging.

This then is going to be a lot of the rest of the game as your players power through level after level of this tower that is set in a pocket dimension somewhere. Players are going to have to deal with traps, monsters, puzzles, and possibly other groups who are making their way to the top as well. All while keeping track of their gear. This part is going to be pretty intensive for the Dungeon Master because you are going to want to create something where there are short cuts, hidden routes, etc. so the players have a plethora of options and that they don’t have to get stuck somewhere.

Once your players get to the top, or even if they don’t, some other group will, that is going to unleash something bad onto the world, probably an elder god. The towers are all going to be prisons that are keeping something sealed away. That’s going to be the big boss and why the monsters are starting to break free from the towers in preparation for the the elder god being released.

Just a few other notes:

If your players are up for it, it could be really interesting to have the tower randomly select or weighted selection for what class the players are going to get. If the player does more combat, go with one of the martial classes or weight it towards that. If they are the ones who solve the puzzles, start building a pool of the more INT focused characters. You could really have a hat for each player and drop in pieces of paper to go along with one of each class to the hat and have them draw it out of their specific hat.

The other thing is that you’ll need to spend a fair amount of time building up the big bad so that it isn’t a completely surprise at the end, top of the one tower. Maybe there was a minor monster released when one of the other towers had it’s top floor reached before, but then there was a massive boon/blessing that went along with it as well, so that is why the various schools are willing to send people to climb the biggest tower to the top, because they hope the boon will be great, and there should be a great boon up there. I would even tailor them to the players so they have a boon specific to them to take on this over the top monster that is released.

Would you want to play in this game? What are your thoughts on the idea?

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