Tower of the Vacant King

This is a Late Pledge! The game will be released in summer 2025!

This game has been successfully crowdfunded!

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It calls for the emptied and drowning. The tower is ambition. A monument to the living made by the synthetic.

Aspirers will find their ascent towards the last knowledge of the old world treacherous as swarms of killer bots, known as the Vacant Lot, chase them towards the top.

What is this tower?

Whether you arrived to it from a distant world with no technologies or come upon it in post-apocalyptic times, the Tower is a beacon of a lost world with its functioning lights and ominous, glowing presence in a sea of ruined debris.

Some say, at the top of it, lies the answer to The Last Question. A means to escape this decaying world.

Who is the Vacant King?

A monster, a person, software, an idea. You will only know when you get to the penthouse, but as you fight your way through the rooms of the tower, hints and clues will prepare you for the final encounter.

Generate your own endgame encounter with player interactions during the adventure.

Who is this game for?

Tower of the Vacant King is a mega-dungeon generator that is inspired by and compatible with Corp Borg and made to play with other Borgs. Create an adventure or full campaign setting as the tower can have as many floors as the GM wants.

The core mechanic is that of the 'floor planner', a system-agnostic room by room, on-the-fly roll on random tables for high variability and sustained, ecclectic action.

What's in the book?

It wll be around 80 to 110 pages depending on the stretch goals and will be A4 sized.

Mini-game system - Learn how to navigate the tower as swarms chase you endlessly. On special floor plan sheets, track and create variables on the fly. Players who somehow block the swarms' path or defeat them will have some time to investigate the many forgotten wonders of this corporate world filled with memories of the past.

Floor Plan Generator - Create everything on a floor from rooms, to the contents of drawers and filing cabinets and encounters.

Wandering Enemies and Unique Encounters - Many things roam this place. Some dangerous, some curious, some thirsty for things that want.

Strange Loot, side quests and effects - As the players explore the many offices, they may want to connect to The System or The Net, two opposing networks that fight for dominance of the towers' electronics and sentients. The players may catch a case of the glitches when they do, though.

Story Mode - You could play the tower randomly, but the GM may also insert special rooms or floors where a system of breadcrumbs to follow will lead the players through the history of the tower and other unique encounters to ultimately face off against The Vacant King, whatever that is.

The Vacant Lot, in the countless years they have been roaming the tower, started collecting photographs left behind by the office workers all those years ago to make collages. You may find these in your adventures and they will share insight on their way of life and may lead you to sidequests, items or more.d of bloated stretch goals, so instead, we prefer using this space for things we want to experiment with and re-implement, a kind of design laboratory.

Art & Design

This is a game about sentience coming about synthetically and how we affect its view on the world, how dangerous and beautiful it can be and how it reflects on us as creators. Even though it is dedicated to a specific potential of AI, this book in no way supports the use of AI and has none of it.

All visual works made for Tower of the Vacant King are digital mixed media collages. All photography is either taken by me (I'm a photographer, check my work here) or sourced from unsplash as copyright free images. Then photobashing occurs in Photoshop along with digital drawing and painting. Absolutely no A.I. is used in our out of photoshop (including content-aware fills). 

All words, designs, ideas and concepts are thought out by humans. No A.I. or chatbot is used in any way to help with gamedesign, synthax or filler text.

Here's the second free one-page rpg that immerses you in the world of the book. The Vacant Lot is a solo rpg about synthetics slowly becoming sentient and realizing who they are through violence. It is also an unique creature / npc generator for Corp-Borg, Cy-Borgs and other borgs! An expanded version of this will be available in the book!
It's free over here : https://invisiblecuts.itch.io/the-vacant-lot