The world that was
Aldervale was whole once — and it was never primitive.
Human river-ports under blinking signal towers. Elven woods lit from within. Dwarven forges splitting atoms beneath the mountains.
Magic and machine were one craft there. They called it aether.
The theft
Then Vharuk, the Demon King, rose from below.
He did not burn the world. He stole it — realm by realm, torn out of the ground with everyone still on it.
The Ascent
He welded what he took into a tower of a hundred floors — black iron, grav-engines, chains of aether.
Every floor is a captured realm. The people below gave it the only name that fits: the Ascent.
The Wardens
On every floor, a Warden holds the lift to the next — half beast, half war-machine.
And on the hundredth floor, in a citadel half throne room, half reactor core, the Demon King sits with the whole world stacked beneath him.
You
You were on one of those floors.
Your home is up there now — locked behind a hundred Wardens. You walked out of the wreckage with a rusted shiv and fifty coins.
That makes you what everyone here is: a refugee. And a climber.
Roothollow
At the tower's foot stands the last free settlement: Roothollow.
Tarps over titanium. A plasma forge next to a horse trough. Refugees of every stolen realm, all of them climbers now.
Every climb starts here — and every dead climber wakes here. The tower does not get to keep you.
No one climbs alone
When a Warden falls, the lift opens for everyone — every climber, everywhere.
And the names of those who did it are cut into the Stone of the Climb, lit from within by aether.
The shardmind
At the gate, a shard of old Aldervale will choose you — a machine spirit that remembers the world as it was.
It will scout ahead of you, carry what you cannot lose, and drag you back from death.
It is speaking to you right now.
The muster
The great Wardens do not fall to one blade.
Climbers pledge at the keep, and when enough have gathered, they break it — together. Floor by floor. Warden by Warden. All the way to the throne.
The tower does not care whose name is on the blade.
The Stone does.
Every blade cuts the same body
There is no server list. There are no shards, no instances, no parallel copies of the tower. The Warden holding the frontier has one pool of blood, and every climber alive is cutting it.
Strike it and flee — your damage stays. Sleep, and someone across the world deepens your wound. When it falls, the lift opens for everyone, and every blade that cut gets its share of the kill, by name, on the card.
— the frontier, right now —
THE FRONTIER WARDEN
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ ··%
scripts off — but the wound is real, and it is open now
When it falls, it falls for everyone.
A whole MMO in a chat window
No client. No install. Linear Ascent plays as scene cards — every turn is a card like the ones on this page: art, a headline, the world's news, and your options. It plays right here in your browser — nothing to install — and in chat via Luna. Same world either way.
walks in swinging. Pays for it. Keeps walking.
opens at range and means to stay there.
spends sleep, fire and memory of the old world.
A grey wolf circles
YOU ████████░░ 24/30 · WOLF ██████████ 14/14
— a real fight, playing itself —
A hundred floors. Every one a stolen realm.
Greenreach first — the stolen meadowlands. Ten floors are filmed; the frontier decides how fast the rest matter. Past the meadows: the mine-realms, the silk floors, the cinder belt. The tower is longer than anyone has lived.
Lamplit Steading · Warden Brackjaw
Weirsend · Warden Sedgeback
Cider Cross · Warden Applewrath
Pylon Rest · Warden Glarefang
Woolgate · Warden Ramsteel
Hedgeharbor · Warden Thornhide
The tower is full of people. Not all of them are nice.
Found a banner, fly it, tax your members, enter the weekly world challenge. Admin is a job; dues are real.
Letters carried floor to floor by relay. Gold rides with them — minus the carrier's cut. Write to allies. Or victims.
Sleep unlodged above the mercy floors and yes — you can be robbed in your sleep. The Crier prints who did it.
The world's newspaper, at your door at dawn: who fell, who struck, whose banner rose. Your name can be in it.
Your deeds outlive the world
No matter what happens on the hundredth floor — we remember. When it breaks and Vharuk is cast down, the era ends and the world resets to the first gate. But the era's whole ledger is frozen into the Stone, readable in every era to come. Forever.
═══ THE STONE ═══
scripts off — the Stone still stands;
its freshest lines show here when they can be read
This page will outlive the current world.
So could you.
The paper prints at dawn. Scripts show you today's edition.
— real lines from today's paper. This is not a mockup; these things happened to real climbers, recently.
Enter the tower
One tap with your Google account — no password to invent, nothing to install. You play right here in the browser.
Continue with GmailPassword sign-in is only for accounts made before the Gmail door — new climbers use Gmail above.