Builder's Manual · Chapter 1

How This Project Works

The Tower is not a script. It is a world model that an AI Game Master reads and writes while people play. Every file is either content (a person, a floor, an item), state (what is true right now in this campaign) or instruction (how the GM should run something). Building on it well means knowing which of the three you are writing.

The one design constraint that shapes everything

Most tables run the GM on a free, slower model. Design every mechanic for a GM that is careful but not clever:

Lookups, not arithmetic. A table row the GM reads beats a formula it computes. If a number must be derived, make it a computed field or pre-print it.
Visible state, not memory. Anything that must be remembered across a session lives in a field — usually on @Missing file — never only in the chat.
The nearest instruction wins. A rule the GM read three files ago loses to the sentence right in front of it. Put the rule where the decision is made.
Exact lines for exact moments. When something must be said one way (a boss's refusal, a System notification), write the line verbatim.

Three layers of context

Layer	What it means	In this project
Pinned	In front of the GM in every message	@Missing file, The World & The Tower, The Ledger — and nothing else
Partial	The GM sees the name and description, and opens it when needed	Rules documents, the Journal, key codices
Searchable	Found by name when the fiction names it	Every person, place, item and floor

The pinned set is expensive — every word costs on every message — so it stays small and holds only what must be true always. A partial file's description is its only advertisement: if it does not say when to open the file, the GM never will.

Schema descriptions are orders

A field's description reaches the GM at the moment it writes that field. That makes it the best place for a write rule ("write the new total, print the ⟦ 💰 ⟧ line") and the worst place for a rule the GM needs while only reading. Two habits follow:

Say "omit the field", never "leave it empty" — the GM will write null and the save fails.
Layout labels outrank descriptions. A sheet label that says "verbatim" will be obeyed over a description that says "paraphrase".

Triggers

A GM-instruction file can be armed to inject itself on an event — when a type of file is updated, created or read. Use one when a rule must fire at a specific moment and cannot wait to be remembered. A triggered body over 500 characters is never injected, and nothing warns you — keep them short and point at the full document.

Manual updated Oct 23, 2026.

Homebrew (The Tower system)

The Tower

Wake up with a Power drawn from your own life, in a city at the foot of a fifty-floor Tower. Climb it floor by floor, rule its streets, or disappear into its underworld — but the world has one hundred years.

Crafted by

@Chzp

245.4K

Messages

1.5K

Plays

109

Likes

1,544

Files

Versionv168

CreatedJul 5, 2026

UpdatedOct 23, 2026

The Tower

Climb the Tower, or perish.

Twenty years ago, impossible towers erupted across the Earth, and a voice spoke into every mind at once: conquer the Tower, or your world perishes in one hundred years. Since then, ordinary people Awaken with a single Power drawn from who they truly are — a firefighter who commands flame, a surgeon who closes any wound, a liar who becomes anyone — and are pulled into a fifty-floor dimension where every floor is its own world.

You begin in the Sanctuary, the one safe floor: a city of guilds, markets, embassies and a second city in the drains below. Above it, the floors: a forest, a labyrinth that rewrites itself, a city of brass with a djinn in a jar, a storm god over a pyramid, an arena where people bleed for a crowd, a city of floating islands, a machine city that only wants to help — and much more.

How you spend your hundred years is yours. Make your Awakened in an illustrated creation wizard — your past, your Power, your Rank from D to S. Then play it like a visual novel with the freedom of a tabletop RPG: one d20 roll on a ladder of Triumph, Success, Cost and Failure, deadly fights where running is wise, a living world of guilds and rivals that remembers what you did. Climb for glory, for someone waiting outside, or to learn who built the Tower. Or never climb at all.

Glimpses

Author's note

The Tower is built one floor at a time, and every floor is its own world with its own rules — a caravan crossing, a heist, a siege, an escort through a dead city, an egg stolen from a nest. Fifty of the fifty floors are playable today, each with its own monsters, people, art and map, and new ones keep arriving.

Under the floors there is a whole city to live in: guilds you can join or found, jobs and deals the world remembers, a law that can put a collar on your Power, an underworld that has to be invited into. You can play a whole campaign without ever taking the stairs.

And there is a mystery. Nobody knows who built the Tower, or why. The answer is in here, scattered across the floors, for the players patient enough to notice. Thank you for climbing.

World Map