Twelve towers fell point-first from the heavens. The way through them is down.
You woke on the grass of Veyra with a mark on the back of your left hand and no way home. The mark opens one tower at a time, in an order you must follow.
Each tower drove itself into the earth when it fell. Its door sits at ground level and its floors hang below, five of them dealt fresh from the tower's own deck each time you step in, and a warden at the base holding a key. Die down there and the tower puts you out at the door with exactly what you walked in carrying. The tower keeps what it gave you.
Between dives there are towns. Work, rumors, shops, a bed. Everything you do up here makes the next floor down survivable.
Twelve towers. Twelve keys. One tower still standing, and it points home.
Glimpses
Author's note
The Reverse Tower runs on the Gravebind engine: every floor is dealt from authored parts, every rule the Warden follows is a file, and the numbers are flat and honest. Every image sits on black, and the only light in the world is the arcane blue of the mark.
Inside the World
553 entries · 15 types
Characters
67 total
Dungeons
17 total
Dungeon Floors
124 total
Expeditions
1 total
Game Starts
3 total
Items
102 total
Monsters
72 total
Point of Interests
60 total
Quests
24 total
Room Events
12 total
Room Templates
28 total
Towns
12 total
Worlds
1 total
GM Instructions
29 total
Memories
1 total
Player's Handbook · Chapter 1
Down the Stair
Someone broke the seal before you got here. They levered the capstone out of true and left it that way, and they did not come back up.
You go down forty-one steps. That is the whole of your preparation.
A vault of the first floor
What a run is
A run is one character, three floors, and however many rooms you survive. There is no camp, no town, no returning to sell what you found. You go down until you come out the bottom of the third floor, or the last room reaches you first.
Before any of it you are asked to name the descent, in one word. That word decides which three floors of @Missing file you are given and in what order, so no two names put the same way down in front of you.
The dungeon is square. Every room is a square chamber with a door in the middle of one wall or two, and the doors are the only thing that connects anything. There are no corridors. You step from room to room like a token moving on a board, because that is exactly what you are doing.
The loop
Four steps, in this order, every time:
Arrive. The room is described in two sentences. You are told the exits and nothing else.
Survive it. Traps fire on entry. Monsters attack before you get to look at anything.
Take what is there. Treasure and fountains only after the room is safe.
Choose a door. Then do it again.
You can always go back the way you came. Backtracking costs nothing and no one pursues you between rooms. What it will not do is refill a room you emptied — nothing in the Vaults respawns.
What you start with
You pick a delver first. There are three who go down regularly, and you may also roll your own and take whatever the dice hand you — that is its own chapter.
Whichever you take, you go down with a weapon, a piece of armour, and two rolls of @Missing file. That is not a slow start. That is the whole kit. The Vaults do not hand out much, and every floor down there has nine rooms in it.
What you are not told
Every floor was decided in full long before you took a step. Every room, every monster, every trap, the whole shape of it — surveyed, written down, and closed. Nothing is invented to punish you mid-run and nothing is softened because you are doing badly.
You will not be told what is behind a door. Not hinted at, not foreshadowed, not warned about with a change of tone. A door is a direction and nothing more until you walk through it.
This cuts both ways, and it is the point. The dungeon was fair before you arrived.
Dying
At zero hit points you are dead and the run is over. Not captured, not dragged to safety, not left at one hit point because it would be a better story. Dead.
Start another run. Name it something else and the floors will be different.
