Randel
2010-03-06, 04:04 PM
This is just a kind o weird idea I came up with while thinking about Space Elevators. At first I got a weird idea of a supervillain or someone who has a corporate headquarters that is so tall that the top floor is actually the top of a Space Elevator and they have millions of floors of office workers below them doing their work (hey, if someone manages to take over the world they would need alot of work to run it... and why not have all government stuff run the same building you use as your lair?)
Then I started thinking about Rapture in Bioshock where someone sets out to do the Impossible and things just fall apart. But instead of a city under the ocean its a tower to Infinity.
Imagine the Never ending Dungeon except that it goes upwards instead of downwards, each level is fairly small but there are potentially millions of them and one of the players tasks is to bypass some of them while still leveling up enough to deal with the horrors up ahead. And you just know that once you start getting past Earths gravity well and running into the magnetosphere and the radiation and whatever crazy stuff is going to try and take over a tower like that (much less they guy who's still building that dang thing) you just know something has to be awesome about it.
The idea in a nutshell:
A group of wizards decided to build a tower to infinity... literally building the tallest tower possible and building it forever upwards until they reached the sky or the heavens or whatever else was up there. They pooled their resources and got to work... however once news got out of their project then others came to take it from them or stop them from their task. That was many years ago and the players have come to see whats happened to the Tower to Infinity.
The Tower:
The Tower to Infinity is basically a skyscraper mixed with a Space Elevator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator) that also includes magical construction using Walls of Force and other stuff to let it be made infinity tall. Most of it is made or iron, steel, stone or wood (there are permanent traps that create walls of iron that can be turned it into high quality steel). Due to its magical architecture then the tower itself can't fall (at least not entirly as far as anyone can tell) several floors have been completely destroyed but all the floors above them remain undisturbed despite not being 'supported' by anything.
Right now, the Tower has reached the minumum height that Space Elevators need in order to function... basiaclly its over 38,000 kilometers tall and with each floor being roughly 10 meters tall it has over 3 million 8 hundred thousand floors to it.
It has stairs in it but there are also a variety of shortcuts between floors (including teleporters) but these are not available at every floor and some of them are broken either due to decay, sabotage, or not even being finished. A variety of systems are built in to support its inhabitants including Create Food and Water traps, decanters of water, bottles of air (built into the ventilation system so everyone can breath) and so forth.
At the really high up levels, things get crazy. Gravity starts getting weaker, the air outside the tower becomes rarefied enough that holes in the windows result in air getting sucked out of the tower and people getting launched outside where they will almost certainly fall thousands of feet to their doom (if they don't freeze to death in midair first), gravity eventually stops in the really high levels except in certain areas of magical gravity, and the Van Allen Belt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_belts) fills many of the upper levels with radiation that is dangerous and deadly to organic life.
Fortunately, after one gets past the center of gravity then gravity turns back on... but in reverse where you can now look up and see the Earth overhead. The Tower is apparently still being constructed... but nobody knows who is doing it. Its construction has started attracting the attention of Gods, Fiends, and even Eldrich abominations from beyond time and space.
The lower levels of the tower were constructed first, showing the idealised motives of their creators... and the swift mundane attacks by hoards of orcs and invaders that followed. Higher up, there is a gap where levels 20-35 were apparently destroyed by someone which effectivly cut the upper parts of the tower off completly from the ground below. These levels are optomisitc and unraided until farther up when airborn creatures managed to find the tower and broke in to nest there and live on the outside (there may be a dragon who broke into the tower and feels himself quite safe from anyone else since he destroyed a few of the levels above his lair) farther up is where the upper atmosphere makes it impossible to live outside the tower and the occasional breaches in the outer walls results in dangerous suction threatening to drag people out.
Farther up the gravity lowers and radiation builds up, these areas are now filled with undead and constructs who are trying to maintain the towers infrastructure where living workers can't go. Angels and Demons have started appearing, finding the areas up here much easier to manifest in than on the mundane surface. Various extraplanar creatures are showing up, trying to claim the tower for themselves while the towers automated systems send out constructs, undead, or summoned creatures to deal with the invaders while keeping the place afloat.
Past that, the radiation dies down and gravity reverses... this is where the truly powerful creatures are showing up and are in their element trying to take over the Tower. Abberations and Mindflayers are appearing now and are coming into contact with the various angels and fiends.
Meanwhile, someone is still building the Tower, conjuring up the marerials for it and building the ever increasingly expensive components necessary to keep the Tower habitable and stable in any sense of the word. Their minions are now horrifyingly powerful constructs who have managed to keep the unending torrents of invaders at bay... dealing out terrible death and annihilation to any who would disturb their creators work.
The Tower is mind bogglingly tall now but it keeps growing taller... eventually it might even intersect with the path of the Moons orbit! Nobody is quite sure when that would happen or what would happen in that case...
Anyway, thoughts and ideas? I've never designed a campaign or anything so feel free to steal this idea for a campaign if you want to.
Then I started thinking about Rapture in Bioshock where someone sets out to do the Impossible and things just fall apart. But instead of a city under the ocean its a tower to Infinity.
Imagine the Never ending Dungeon except that it goes upwards instead of downwards, each level is fairly small but there are potentially millions of them and one of the players tasks is to bypass some of them while still leveling up enough to deal with the horrors up ahead. And you just know that once you start getting past Earths gravity well and running into the magnetosphere and the radiation and whatever crazy stuff is going to try and take over a tower like that (much less they guy who's still building that dang thing) you just know something has to be awesome about it.
The idea in a nutshell:
A group of wizards decided to build a tower to infinity... literally building the tallest tower possible and building it forever upwards until they reached the sky or the heavens or whatever else was up there. They pooled their resources and got to work... however once news got out of their project then others came to take it from them or stop them from their task. That was many years ago and the players have come to see whats happened to the Tower to Infinity.
The Tower:
The Tower to Infinity is basically a skyscraper mixed with a Space Elevator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator) that also includes magical construction using Walls of Force and other stuff to let it be made infinity tall. Most of it is made or iron, steel, stone or wood (there are permanent traps that create walls of iron that can be turned it into high quality steel). Due to its magical architecture then the tower itself can't fall (at least not entirly as far as anyone can tell) several floors have been completely destroyed but all the floors above them remain undisturbed despite not being 'supported' by anything.
Right now, the Tower has reached the minumum height that Space Elevators need in order to function... basiaclly its over 38,000 kilometers tall and with each floor being roughly 10 meters tall it has over 3 million 8 hundred thousand floors to it.
It has stairs in it but there are also a variety of shortcuts between floors (including teleporters) but these are not available at every floor and some of them are broken either due to decay, sabotage, or not even being finished. A variety of systems are built in to support its inhabitants including Create Food and Water traps, decanters of water, bottles of air (built into the ventilation system so everyone can breath) and so forth.
At the really high up levels, things get crazy. Gravity starts getting weaker, the air outside the tower becomes rarefied enough that holes in the windows result in air getting sucked out of the tower and people getting launched outside where they will almost certainly fall thousands of feet to their doom (if they don't freeze to death in midair first), gravity eventually stops in the really high levels except in certain areas of magical gravity, and the Van Allen Belt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_belts) fills many of the upper levels with radiation that is dangerous and deadly to organic life.
Fortunately, after one gets past the center of gravity then gravity turns back on... but in reverse where you can now look up and see the Earth overhead. The Tower is apparently still being constructed... but nobody knows who is doing it. Its construction has started attracting the attention of Gods, Fiends, and even Eldrich abominations from beyond time and space.
The lower levels of the tower were constructed first, showing the idealised motives of their creators... and the swift mundane attacks by hoards of orcs and invaders that followed. Higher up, there is a gap where levels 20-35 were apparently destroyed by someone which effectivly cut the upper parts of the tower off completly from the ground below. These levels are optomisitc and unraided until farther up when airborn creatures managed to find the tower and broke in to nest there and live on the outside (there may be a dragon who broke into the tower and feels himself quite safe from anyone else since he destroyed a few of the levels above his lair) farther up is where the upper atmosphere makes it impossible to live outside the tower and the occasional breaches in the outer walls results in dangerous suction threatening to drag people out.
Farther up the gravity lowers and radiation builds up, these areas are now filled with undead and constructs who are trying to maintain the towers infrastructure where living workers can't go. Angels and Demons have started appearing, finding the areas up here much easier to manifest in than on the mundane surface. Various extraplanar creatures are showing up, trying to claim the tower for themselves while the towers automated systems send out constructs, undead, or summoned creatures to deal with the invaders while keeping the place afloat.
Past that, the radiation dies down and gravity reverses... this is where the truly powerful creatures are showing up and are in their element trying to take over the Tower. Abberations and Mindflayers are appearing now and are coming into contact with the various angels and fiends.
Meanwhile, someone is still building the Tower, conjuring up the marerials for it and building the ever increasingly expensive components necessary to keep the Tower habitable and stable in any sense of the word. Their minions are now horrifyingly powerful constructs who have managed to keep the unending torrents of invaders at bay... dealing out terrible death and annihilation to any who would disturb their creators work.
The Tower is mind bogglingly tall now but it keeps growing taller... eventually it might even intersect with the path of the Moons orbit! Nobody is quite sure when that would happen or what would happen in that case...
Anyway, thoughts and ideas? I've never designed a campaign or anything so feel free to steal this idea for a campaign if you want to.