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View Full Version : The Tower to Infinity (or "Where's the Space Elevator?")



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.

flabort
2010-03-06, 08:31 PM
probly going to be ninja'd. if not, first post, w00t!
Ended up wiki walking, from Space Elevators (Thanks!) to Carbon Nanobuds. still got that one open, even.

I'd think that there would be a whole team of wizards working on it to start, and maybe a whole civilization of them now. The lower, weaker, and younger wizards get stuck on repair and fend-off-from-invader duty, while the more powerfull ones are the ones summoning the stronger materials and building it. the most powerfull (50+) wizards are creating streams of molten penta-refined addamantine, which creates the main supports, atleast beyond the point were they figured out how to make that. those without any magical talent are stuck on the tasks of either studying to become wizards, or, umm, bolstering thier populations. since the tower is a virtual utopia, with infinite food via magic traps, and infinite space, it can support infinite people. if it weren't the target of hundreds of invaders...

Several lower level wizards have started to desend the tower, some curious to see if there really are people who live on the ground, others to replace missing floors, and finish the constructions of several un-finished devices. Several of the wizards creating the tower are gods in thier own rights, with the single minded determination to build the tower higher.

As it is wizards we're talking about here, several have been experimenting, and several of the walls seem to pulse, and breath. indead, the sixty second million and third floor was created completely out of living matter, able to withstand the presure of the vacuum, or rather the lack of, and survive on a measily 3 teenaged humans a day. which is no problem for the wizards' breeding stock.

Occasional flaming chunks of metal have fallen into the fields surrounding the tower. since it has been in progress for so long now, however, the fields are almost a large hill of an interesting steel-adimantine alloy, with a greater concentration of steel near the bottom, and more adimantine at the top. However, very few thieves and metalsmiths go near the place in search of metals. The grand majority of chunks tend to explode in brilliant, multicolored clouds of fire, ice, and energy if you look at them the wrong way. some of them tend to create great clouds of gasses, and others still summon creatures unlike any even from beyond the far realms.


It may be quite possible to come up with a series of tables for completly randomly generating floors. hmph, most of the ones we need probably already exist! however, to give it that real, Tower to Infinity, were it's still in construction and is falling to pieces at the bottom feel, we'd need a large list of tables. if we start with some specific parameters for the bottom floor, we could create some very complicated tables, even a whole book of tables, to cover this setting.

Edit:
Wuuuuhhhh? I'm actually first to reply?

flabort
2010-03-06, 09:18 PM
Know what? I think I'll post again. This will probably be a double post.
Atleast there is an extra-visible break.

I'm... not actually a fan of constructs doing all the defence work in this situation, to be honest. sure, I like constructs and such, but in this situation...

Sure, it makes sense that wizards would use constructs to do thier physical work, but most of them have extremely high powered telekiness for that. sure, the mechanical minds behind the physical strength would be usefull, too, because the wizard would be able to focus on more than one thing at a time. (Why isn't there some kind of multi-tasker feat that allows multiple focii?) But, If they've been working on it so long, a few dozen of the breeding stock should be able to handle the job just as well. or maybe clones, since they've also probably had time to develope those, too.

The fact that no-one on the ground knows if anyone is still up there working on it would give credit to the fact that no-one up there is really sure if the ground is livable, let alone if anyone lives there. And the fact that it's a wizard-based society would remove the fixtation with wealth within the breeding stock, as all thier needs are met in excess, and they haven't heard of money in.... millenia. Therefore, no thieves, aristocrats, no leading government other than the most powerfull wizards, who unlocked the secrets to immortality long before any of the breeding stock's great-great-grandfathers were born. The only things of value that anyone would protect would be their spell books, and the tower itself. so the tower would be riddled with valuble things, mostly for the entertainment of the breeding stock, and most of the breeding stock has gone higher with the wizzards.

As for expected difficulty of floors-to-hieght ratio? I'd estimate every 8 to 16 floors up, skipping missing floors, would challenge a character of one level higher. so, by the thirty millionth floor, if there were no missing floors, it would challenge a 2,500,00th level character. scare you much? therefore, it must be VERY thinly populated in the lower areas, allowing 160 to 300 floors per level, or a character level of 130,435th at the thirty millionth floor. STILL way too high of a character level. as in, they'll never have that much of an attention span.

Still, if it's well done enough, you could keep a small groups attention long enough, that if you gamed daily, for about 2 hours a day, you'd get there in about three years, real life time.

I like the concept. I love it even. but now, in consideration of it, I'm not sure you could pull it off.