The Tower

The Tower is the world’s balancing topography. It is passive — not sentient, not supernatural, not anthropomorphic. It is a feature of the world, like geography or weather. Its enforcement is intentionally minimalist: it issues Tower Bounties, and it kills any Ascender whose build crosses the Threshold from Broken into Infinite. Everything else is left to the Inhabitants of the Tower to resolve.

The Tower is distinct from The System, which governs Leveling, Monster emergence, Skills, Loot, and Relics. The Tower is topography (Tiers, Biomes, Bounties). The System is substrate (growth and content). Neither is supernatural; both are matter-of-fact features of the world.

Tiered Floor topology

The Tower has explicit vertical structure: it is composed of Tiers, and each Tier is composed of Floors. A Floor is a contiguous horizontal expanse at a given height; a Tier is a stratum of one or more Floors sharing characteristic properties (Biome distribution, Bounty intensity, ambient threat). Ascent is vertical and ordered — moving upward traverses Floors within a Tier and, eventually, crosses from one Tier to the next. This vertical Tier/Floor topology is game-design canon, not merely a substrate-modeling convenience (ratified per ADR-027, docs/notes/audits/audit-tower-cluster.md:40).

Justice is hands-off

The Tower itself does not arrest, fine, or imprison. It enforces justice only by issuing Tower Bounties for Ascender and NPC enforced justice.

The punishment systems that Inhabitants experience — fines, imprisonment, restitution, exile — are not ratified Rules of the Tower. They are social constructs, enforced by Inhabitants on Inhabitants. The Tower issues the Bounty; the Inhabitants decide what to do about it. Faction Bounties and Ascender Bounties exist as social-construct counterparts to Tower Bounties — see bounties.md for the full Bounty taxonomy.

Several implications follow directly:

The Tower’s authority is distributed. A Tower Bounty is a signal that activates the Ascenders who choose to act on it. An Ascender who ignores Tower Bounties faces no Tower punishment, only whatever consequences other Inhabitants impose.

Justice norms vary by community. One settlement may run formal courts; another may have only bounty hunters; a third may quietly ignore most Bounties. None of these are wrong by the Tower’s measure, because the Tower has no measure beyond the Bounty itself.

Fines, prisons, guards, and similar institutions exist only insofar as Inhabitants build and maintain them. They are infrastructure of the people, not of the Tower. Treasuries are Faction or Party attributes — the Tower itself has no treasury.

Faction internal structure

Where Inhabitants organize into Factions, the canonical Faction hierarchy is two-tier: LEADER and MEMBER. There is no Officer rank or intermediate tier between them. A Faction’s authority surface — who speaks for the Faction, who can commit it to Bounties or contracts, who can admit or expel — collapses to the LEADER/MEMBER distinction; any further differentiation is informal social texture rather than ratified structure. This two-tier hierarchy is game-design canon (ratified per ADR-027, docs/notes/audits/audit-tower-cluster.md:262).

Inhabitants: Ascenders and NPCs

The Tower’s Inhabitants fall into two ontological categories that the world treats differently.

Ascenders are the first-class agents of the Tower. They have individual identity, individual builds, persistent state, and the capacity to accrue Bounties, hold Faction membership, and pursue Brokenness. The Tower’s enforcement attaches to Ascenders as individuals — a Tower Bounty names a specific Ascender, and the Infinite blocker kills a specific Ascender.

NPCs are not first-class agents. An NPC is a Location-bound abstraction: a population density associated with a place rather than a roster of individually-tracked persons. NPCs do not carry individual state, do not hold Faction roles as distinct identities, and do not transition into Ascenders — an Ascender that appears in a populated Location is a freshly-instantiated Ascender, not a promoted NPC. The narrator may describe NPC populations vividly (villagers, vendors, guards, crowds), but the underlying canon is that the population is a property of the Location, not a collection of agents. This NPC ontology is game-design canon (ratified per ADR-027, docs/notes/audits/audit-tower-cluster.md:358).

Tower Bounty mechanics

The full Bounty taxonomy lives in bounties.md. Summarizing the Tower-specific properties:

A Tower Bounty is registered against the true Ascender the moment the qualifying act occurs — Tower Crimes are attributed beneath any Mask. The Bounty is Proclaimed (made publicly actionable) only when the Target is Un-Masked by or in front of non-allies on the same Tier. Because Ascender mobility is superhuman, Proclamation is effectively a public broadcast across the Tier the moment an unmasked Target is observed by any non-ally. See masks.md for the registration-versus-Proclamation distinction and ally classification.

Tower Bounties never expire.

Fulfillment requires only the Target’s death — body destruction is not required. The Bounty is announced on the Tier as claimed by the Relevant Parties when the corpse is Un-Masked in the presence of at least one non-ally of the slain. Because the corpse’s identity is not revealed until Un-Masking, a Masked corpse left uninspected does not announce its Bounty; the kill is plausibly unknowing, and a killer may collect a Bounty they did not know existed when the announcement later fires. If the corpse is Un-Masked only in the presence of the slain’s allies, no Claim fires and the slain enters the “Wanted indefinitely” state — the Bounty persists, and the corpse can be transported to a non-ally observer at any later point within a reasonable time-frame to trigger the Claim. See bounties.md for the full claim-announcement mechanic, the Wanted-indefinitely state, and the Relevant-Parties definition.

How the Tower reconciles with subsequent Revival of a killed Bountied Criminal is open canon. The tentative direction is fair-game: the Bounty resolves at the moment of claim-announcement, and the economic cost of Revival is the natural counterweight. This is not yet ratified.

Tower Bounties are Kill-on-Sight by tradition. The Tower does not specify the manner of fulfillment — the kill-on-sight pattern is the historical Ascender response.

The Tower also issues counter-Bounties in response to Ascender behavior that warrants Tower-level discipline — most notably, the abuse of power by powerful Ascenders punching down on lower-leveled targets through trivial Ascender Bounties. The Tower’s response is to issue a Tower Bounty on the abuser. This keeps the enforcement model internally consistent: the Tower issues Bounties; the world’s social fabric resolves them.

The Infinite blocker

The Infinite blocker is an inherent property of the Tower. It detects when an Ascender’s build crosses from convergent recursive feedback (Broken) into divergent recursive feedback (Infinite), and kills the wielding Ascender.

This is not a rule the Tower enforces socially. It is structural, like gravity or topographic erosion — a matter-of-fact property of the world, not a supernatural intervention.

The Threshold

The Threshold separating Broken from Infinite is the convergent-to-divergent transition: per-cycle damage multiplier crossing 1.0.

Below the Threshold, recursive feedback attenuates each cycle and the geometric series converges. Above the Threshold, per-cycle damage grows and the series diverges.

The Tower judges the structure of the build, not the numerical outcome of any particular combat. The instant the build’s per-cycle multiplier crosses 1.0, the Tower’s verdict lands and the Ascender dies — regardless of whether divergent damage has yet compounded to anything significant. This is what makes the blocker structural rather than punitive: the Tower is not waiting for harm to occur, it is detecting the runaway-shaped mechanism and cutting it.

Two paths to death within the Infinite state

Even within the Infinite state, the dynamics that play out before the Tower’s verdict can differ. Both end in the Ascender’s death.

Positive feedback — per-cycle damage grows. The Tower detects the divergent mechanism immediately and kills the Ascender before the trajectory runs to numerical absurdity.

Negative feedback at fatal accrual — the per-cycle multiplier is at or near 1, the loop iterates many times, and cumulative damage accrues until either the Attacker or the Ascender would die from sheer accumulation. The Tower judges this as an Infinite Loop regardless of who would have died first; the Ascender wielding the recursive structure dies by Tower judgment.

The two paths describe what the Infinite state looks like from the outside. From the Ascender’s perspective, the outcome is identical: the Tower kills.

The Tower does not interpret intent.

If an Ascender constructs the Threshold-crossing Modifier on their own, the Tower kills them. If another Ascender, an NPC, the environment, or a Cursed Relic applies a Buff that adds the Threshold-crossing Modifier, the Tower also kills them. The giver’s intent — helpful, hostile, accidental — is irrelevant. The receiver’s awareness — surprised by the new Modifier or not — is irrelevant.

The Tower checks the structure of what is on the Ascender’s sheet. If that structure crosses the Threshold, the Ascender is dead.

This opens a genuine gameplay possibility. A hostile Ascender can weaponize the Tower by applying a helpful-looking Buff to a Broken-Build Ascender that tips them across the Threshold. A friendly Ascender can accidentally do the same in good faith. A vendor selling a rare Relic, a Cursed item dropped by an NPC, an environmental aura — any of these can be the killing addition. The Tower neither punishes the giver nor warns the receiver.

Death and Relic legacy

An Ascender killed by the Infinite blocker is permanently dead. Their Relics drop in place — on the ground where they fell — and persist there.

Future Ascenders may find these Relics, identify them, and pick them up. There is no mechanical annotation on the Relics: no Cursed status, no flavor text describing the prior bearer’s fate, no marker visible in inventory. The cautionary tale lives entirely in social and observational learning. Other Inhabitants see the death, see the dropped Relics, and learn (or do not learn) from the visible aftermath.

The Relics are not Cursed by virtue of having killed their prior bearer. A future Ascender who picks them up may construct the same Broken Build and pursue the same Tempting of Faith, or may use the Relics in a wholly different configuration. They may also sell the Relics to a Skilled Artificer as crafting ingredients — see relics.md for Relic mechanics including durability, repair, and Artificing.

What survives across the deaths is the choice, the build, and the Relics — not a punishment carried in the items.

Broken Builds: the ultimate goal

Every Ascender’s goal is to achieve a Broken Build.

A Broken Build is a build that forms a recursive damage-feedback structure in its convergent form — per-cycle multiplier below 1, feedback bounded, dynamics dramatic but stable. A Broken Build is powerful, sometimes definitively so, and it is fully achievable. The Tower does not punish Ascenders for being Broken. Brokenness is the apex of build construction, and Ascenders pursue it openly.

A Broken-Build Ascender is not immortal.

They can be killed by overwhelming force. They can be killed by subterfuge. And — crucially — they can be killed by being tipped across the Threshold from Broken into Infinite.

That last path is the Tempting of Faith.

Mortality of Broken Builds

Broken Builds are not immortal. This is a design commitment, not just lore: a world in which the highest builds are unkillable would collapse into a small set of dominant Ascenders strangling the simulation’s social dynamics.

Three mortality vectors apply:

Overwhelming force — a sufficient concentration of attackers, damage, or environmental hazard can kill a Broken Build outright. Brokenness does not confer numerical invincibility; it confers favorable dynamics under typical conditions, which sufficiently atypical conditions can break.

Subterfuge — non-combat means of removing an Ascender from the field. Poison, ambush from stealth, betrayal by a party member who knows the build’s specific weakness, social manipulation that isolates the target. The Broken Build’s strength is in its feedback structure; if combat never happens on the wielder’s terms, the structure provides no advantage.

Tower tipping — the path described above: a Modifier crossing the Threshold from Broken to Infinite, however it arrives. This is the mortality vector that the Tower itself provides, and it is the one a Broken-Build Ascender can do nothing to defend against if the Modifier comes from an external source.

For overwhelming force and subterfuge to remain credible against a fully assembled Broken Build, the game world must contain abilities and mechanisms that can directly counter the build’s foundation — Relic-disable and Relic-destroy abilities. These are detailed in relics.md, with the design commitment that pacifier paths are commonplace and broadly distributed across the ability space (not gated behind a special class or faction monopoly). The mechanism design is tracked under ed-130.

Broken Thorns Build (worked example)

A canonical Broken Build:

100% Thorns Damage
a Passive Skill that returns 50% of all damage to self as damage to Attacker
Skill Damage is quadrupled for 4 seconds after Taking Damage
Damaging an Enemy returns 10% Damage (a Cursed Relic)

Per-cycle multiplier: (Thorns% + Passive%) × Skill_mult × Relic% = 1.5 × 4 × 0.1 = 0.6.

The series converges with total self-damage A / (1 − 0.6) = 2.5A and total retaliation 15A, where A is the initial hit. The build is recursive, the dynamics are spectacular, and the per-cycle multiplier sits safely below the Threshold.

This is the Broken state. The Ascender wielding it is powerful and mortal — vulnerable to overwhelming force, vulnerable to subterfuge, vulnerable to a Threshold-crossing Modifier.

One innocuous Modifier crosses the Threshold

Suppose the same Ascender, before that fatal first encounter, receives a Buff or picks up a Modifier:

Bloodlust — while below 50% HP, your Skill Damage is doubled.

Bloodlust looks like a defensive panic button. It is a standard low-HP-rage stat across the genre, frequently chosen for survivability — when you are in trouble, you fight harder. The tooltip would not flag it as build-breaking.

In the Thorns feedback loop, Bloodlust activates the instant the first incoming hit drops the Ascender below 50% HP (any meaningful damage does this for a glass-cannon Thorns build), and it stays active for the entire cycle. The Skill window’s 4× now compounds with Bloodlust’s 2× into an effective 8× Skill multiplier.

The per-cycle multiplier becomes:

(Thorns% + Passive%) × Skill_mult × Relic%
= 1.5 × 8 × 0.1
= 1.2

1.2 > 1 — the loop crosses the Threshold from Broken into Infinite.

Cycle-by-cycle self-damage growth, starting from initial hit A:

Cycle	Self-damage	Cumulative
0	A	A
1	1.2 A	2.2 A
5	2.49 A	9.93 A
10	6.19 A	31.15 A
20	38.34 A	223.6 A
50	~9,100 A	~54,800 A
100	~83 million A	~500 million A

The Ascender does not actually take 83 million times the initial hit. The Tower kills well before the trajectory reaches the Ascender’s HP cap, because the structural property — per-cycle multiplier at or above 1 — is what triggers the judgment, not the numerical outcome.

The narrative arc:

Ascender wields a Broken Thorns Build. They are powerful, well-known, and operating safely under the Threshold.
Ascender receives Bloodlust — from a rare drop, a vendor, a friendly Buff, a Cursed item, any source.
Next combat encounter, the first incoming hit drops them below 50% HP.
Bloodlust activates. The per-cycle multiplier crosses from 0.6 to 1.2 in the same instant the recursion would have fired.
The Tower kills the Ascender.
The Relics drop in place. Other Inhabitants see.

The Ascender did nothing visibly wrong. They received an upgrade that any reasonable build would want. The Tower neither cared about that nor warned of it. That is the Tempting of Faith.

Open canonical questions

Mechanical question affecting the Broken Thorns math: does Cursed Relic self-damage count as “Taking Damage” for the purposes of refreshing the Skill window and re-triggering Thorns and Passive? My analysis assumed yes; if no, the loop is one-shot per external hit and the multiplier analysis doesn’t apply.
For negative feedback at fatal accrual: at what cumulative-damage threshold does the Tower consider an attenuating loop to have crossed into Infinite? Or is this judgment based on iteration count rather than damage magnitude?
What specifically triggers the Tower to register a Bounty in the first place? Proclamation is on unmasked-spotting, but the underlying registration trigger is open canon.
How does the Tower determine “abuse of power” in deciding to issue a counter-Bounty on a punching-down Ascender? Power-differential threshold? Pattern detection across multiple low-stakes Ascender Bounties?
Masks: how are they obtained, how do they fail, what do they cost?
Do Future Ascenders refer to temporal successors (generations across simulation runs) or contemporaneous others in the same world?
What’s the canonical fate of Relics dropped from non-Tower deaths (combat, starvation, fall damage)? The drop-in-place rule above is stated specifically for Infinite-blocker deaths; whether it applies generally is open.