We're doing setting pitches this month, so here's mine. I've been writing a lot about the Tower Lands lately, so hopefully this'll be a helpful summary for anyone just joining in.
As Mr.Mann has already pointed out, any good setting has more than one pitch. There's the ground-level view you give to players to get them on board with an adventure, there's the big overview you give to refs, and there's the behind-the-curtain commentary that dispenses with the flowery prose and puts everything in context. I'm gonna address each of these in order, plus the ever-popular Appendix N.
The Player Pitch
The caves of Roa Village are the only world you’ve ever known. Stone above, stone below. Humanity numbers five hundred and sixteen souls since Ged and Lani had their baby last week. By glowshroom’s light, you spend your wake-shifts in search of the earth’s bounty: gold and silver, iron and tin, and above all, the Glimmer, that sparkling treasure with its soft green luminescence, every find a blessing.
Under Chief Belar’s watchful eye and the masked gazes of the acolytes, the fruits of your labor are offered up to the gods, carried into the temple and never seen again. The elders speak of a world above where the gods dwell, a place of a thousand colors and a hundred thousand lights, where there are no walls and no ceiling. When someone asks if it really exists, the elders only shrug. All know better than to speak of it in front of the chief, or else earn lashes for turning their thoughts from work.
Three sleep-shifts ago, a whisper began to circulate. One of the deep teams uncovered something unbelievable: a new tunnel, unknown on any of the maps. Walls not of rock but of metal, gleaming silver, and light, not glowshrooms or even firelight, but a strange pale radiance from some unknown source.
You scarcely dared believe it…but there it is before your eyes. A fissure in the rock, and within, those gleaming silver walls, smoother than those of any cave.
What secrets do they hold?
The Ref Pitch
The Tower Lands are part of the continent of Urd, on the world of Arai. Their name comes from the Towers of the Gods, five enormous, ancient structures said to have been built by the primordial First Ones who shaped the world ages ago. The rulers of the Tower Lands are the Deathless Lords, five immortal sorcerer-kings who each control one of these Towers. With mighty magics and wondrous relics at their command, served by power-mad sorcerers and enchanted superhuman warriors, the Deathless Lords are worshiped by the common people as gods in their own right.
The sages call the present age the Interregnum--a fallen age. Centuries of war between the Deathless Lords for control of the realm have left the Tower Lands shattered. Beyond the walls of the great cities that gather at the feet of the Towers, villages shine as points of light amid deadly wilderness, surrounded by their ruined neighbors. Armies march on campaigns spanning generations, no longer remembering who or what they fight for, burning all in their path. Desperate bandits, hungry beasts, treacherous daemons, and magical weapons now beyond the Deathless' control stalk the roads. Few dare to travel far from their homes, though things are little better in settled places. The lords who serve the Deathless feast off the labor of serfs and slaves. Bloodthirsty knights take what they want at the point of a sword. Corrupt temples bleed the people of tribute. Those unfortunate enough to lose their lands and families, to be touched by curses, or to speak out against their oppressors are cast out, left to fend for themselves.
The Tower Lands are about the size of Greece. The landscape is varied, but in broad terms, it's warm, dry, mountainous, and coastal--like the northern Mediterranean, though the plants and animals mostly aren't those of Earth. The aesthetics and culture are a mishmash of classical, medieval, and pulp sword-and-sorcery trappings. Knights wear plate armor and wield longswords and polearms, while gunpowder is unknown. Feudal sorcerer-warlords rule walled cities maintained by slave labor. People offer sacrifices to legions of gods great and small under the instruction of secretive cults.
Ruins of the First Ones and countless ages since litter the landscape. Within lie forgotten treasures, powerful relics, and lost secrets. Such wonders speak of a better past, a time when people lived in peace, prosperity, and hope. Those brave enough to seek them must contend with devious traps, ancient guardians, and baleful curses, but the rewards can be great. The Deathless Lords covet the treasures of the ancients, while intrepid relic hunters risk all to claim what they can carry.
The people of the Tower Lands call themselves the Halish, hundreds of tribes and clans united by shared language and customs. Most are human. There are also the raun, the horned folk. Many raun live within Halish communities and embrace that culture, and those who do are generally accepted as Halish in their own right. Others keep to their own enclaves in border villages and nomad bands, where they are said to keep strange, barbaric traditions and worship false gods.
Though the Towers are the most spectacular symbols of the gods' power in the world, perhaps the most truly wondrous is Dust. This substance, gathered from ancient sites or refined from rare minerals at holy shrines, is said to be the First Ones' wisdom in physical form. Using the art of tuning, sorcerers imbibe Dust to partake of that divine wisdom, engraving their will upon it with secret meditations, chants, and hand signs and unleashing its power to bend the elements and occult forces to their service. The Deathless Lords and their servants covet Dust above all other treasures; so highly is it valued that the common folk use it as currency in trade.
In a village deep underground, mine slaves who have never seen the sky unearth a strange new chamber. Within lie wonders beyond their imagining, and dangers that may be their end. For those who survive, a path awaits into the world beyond, to stand beneath all the lights in the sky and, perhaps, to challenge the gods themselves...
The Real Talk
The Tower Lands are secretly a sci-fi post-apocalypse. Not the gonzo rayguns-and-wizards mishmash kind, at least not overtly--more the Dying Earth sufficiently-advanced-technology vibe. The power of the ancients genuinely looks like fantasy magic even to us as a modern audience, and all the sci-fi is masked with an archaic surface aesthetic or else so weird that it's not clearly recognizable.
Arai is an alien planet; the raun are the indigenous sapients. The First Ones were humans who came from a spacefaring civilization and built a bunch of shit before that civilization collapsed or somehow fell out of contact. Dust is nanotech that tuners program with bio-hacking. The relics of the ancients include power armor ("enchanted plate") and particle beam rifles ("magic staves"). Daemons are AIs. No one alive now remembers this, not even the Deathless, who came around long, long after it happened; some raun cultures who preserve the most of their ancient history will say that they were here in the Tower Lands first and humans came from elsewhere, but that's the most they know. If you're running stuff in the Tower Lands, don't tell the players this, and don't go out of your way to drop obvious hints; let it be background for them to work out if they care.
The Tower Lands started out years ago as my attempt to build a D&D setting that broadly conformed to the basic assumptions of the game and took the premises in interesting directions. D&D has always been a game with a by-default post-apocalyptic setting, with points-of-light settlements amid howling empty wilderness, littered with ruins of past glorious ages hiding forgotten treasure. That's the place I started from.
The main twist I introduce is that the PCs the players actually play aren't the first group of "PCs" to come around in the world--that's what the Deathless Lords are. They all started out as adventurers exploring the megadungeons of the Tower Lands, the Towers themselves, and eventually did what all good adventurers do, take the motherfuckers over and establish them as their own strongholds. With all that power and treasure, they graduated to domain play, and now the PCs are living in their campaign world, at the bottom of the social ladder they've climbed and enforced through violence and conquest--again, like all good PCs.
The Deathless being PCs is also why they're all so batshit fucking crazy.
You may have noticed that the player pitch doesn't really include almost any of the information from the ref pitch. See, I sort of lied: there really is no "player pitch for the Tower Lands." One of my favorite things in fantasy is worlds that aren't what they seem at first glance--I adore the feeling of picking up a new story and thinking, "okay, I see what this is doing," and then turning the page and going, "what, WHAT?" The Tower Lands, with its whole secret sci-fi history, is meant to facilitate that experience. This informs how I present it to players: incompletely, like the Three Blind Men with the Elephant.
The starting adventure introduced by the pitch above, with the players as underground-dwelling mine slaves who have no idea the surface world exists, is meant to give them an entry point to the world knowing practically nothing about it. They can then discover the world along with their characters through play. So they don't get a pitch that explains the broad outlines of the world to them. They're thrown into the dungeon of the starting adventure, and if they survive and make it to the end, they're thrown even harder out into the wider world and literally see the sky for the first time. It's a moment that's meant to provoke two responses: "Holy shit, this world is not what we thought it was," and, "Who the fuck is responsible for keeping this from us?" That's how play starts.
One very important part of the secret history is that no one will ever know what the First Ones' civilization was actually like. There will never be a clear answer for whether they were violent colonizers who broke the world or peaceful explorers whose creations have only become weird and dangerous because of whatever collapse happened. This is intentional. The First Ones represent that lost glorious past every D&D setting is obsessed with, but as we've all become more aware of as the discourse around fantasy has evolved, that past is often not as glorious as some would like to think. The Deathless Lords themselves and the whole society they've built are obsessed with the First Ones' glorious past, worshiping them and cursing the present age for falling from the heights they achieved. The Deathless Lords are also assholes. Does that mean the First Ones were too? It's undeniable that the First Ones were powerful, but does that mean their age is something the PCs should aspire to restore, or is everyone better off moving on and letting the past die? I don't know, and I'm never going to decide for the players. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the past really was--what matters is what the people of the present, including the PCs, do with the world that past has shaped.
Appendix N
- A Princess of Mars (literature, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912)
- The Dying Earth (literature, Jack Vance, 1950)
- Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (literature, Fritz Leiber, 1970)
- Berserk (manga, Kentaro Miura, 1989)
- Dark Sun (RPG materials, TSR, 1991)
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (animation, Gainax, 2007)
- Infinity Blade (video game, Chair Entertainment, 2010)
- Kill Six Billion Demons (webcomic, Tom Parkinson-Morgan, 2013)
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (video game, Nintendo, 2017)
- NieR: Automata (video game, Platinum Games, 2017)
- Jujutsu Kaisen (manga, Gege Akutami, 2018; animation, MAPPA, 2020)
- Elden Ring (video game, FromSoftware, 2022)
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