Cover art from Let Us Build A Tower, by Goran Gligovic.I prowl social media, mostly BlueSky and the site formerly known as Twitter, on the lookout for wemic stuff, about once a week. (My moniker over there is "The Weekly Wemic.") That often means art. I found a great piece of urmahlullu art, and sourced it to a relatively new TTRPG. And after a very nice exchange with the game's creator, Caleb Wimble, he sent me a PDF: "Let Us Build A Tower." I'll review the urmahlullu rules from the game in an upcoming screed; here's my review of the rules in general.
My own game, Labyrinths & Liontaurs, is set at the cusp of the late Bronze Age morphing into the start of the Iron Age. So I was excited to find that Let Us Build A Tower is also a Bronze Age setting. It draws a lot of inspiration from Ancient Assyria — including a slew of scholarly sources for those inclined to learn more. As a Wikipedian devoted to citing sources, I appreciate that!
The game mechanics hold few surprises for anyone who has played D&D, say Third Edition or Fifth Edition. There are four character classes (Warrior, Thief, Priest, and Scribe), d20 checks to resolve most outcomes, hit points, and feats. Lots of feats. But let me not dwell on these mechanics, because the game is not really about that. It seems to me that these, dare I say, generic mechanics are designed to be as backwards compatible with other games as possible. And that's OK, because it makes the game easy to slot into another campaign that uses similar mechanics without a lot of fuss and muss.
What I'm saying is that if you are playing D&D or Pathfinder or Dungeon Crawl Classics or another Old School RPG ("OSR," as the kiddies say these days), then you will find it easy to slip Let Us Build A Tower into your game setting. Imagine an island on which all iron rusts away in minutes ... your players wander around and find a Bronze Age culture and a Tower at the center. Imagine you step on a trap and are plane shifted to an alternate dimension. Or just start in this setting but use, say, the Pathfinder 1.0 rules. You're ready to go.
And in the spirit of an OSR, the game features a lovely set of tables for all sorts of purposes. There is a table for searching a dead body. Tables for item enchantments; another for item curses. Tables for quests. Tables for encounters. This is a game for dice lovers!
So in contrast with my own L&L, in which the mechanics are a huge part of the game, Let Us Build A Tower really focuses hard on setting, culture, and, of course, the Tower. I read the Epic of Gilgamesh a long long time ago, and on my site you'll find plenty of screeds that talk about Ancient Assyria; it is a pleasure to find echoes of that culture in this game, from heroes of legend (Enkidu and Humbaba) to mythic creatures (lamassu and chimeras) to historic places (Assur, Eridu, and Uruk). And there are a goodly number of adventure seeds, most steeped in culture and lore. You can travel the lands of Mesopotamia, with enough details to run an entire campaign (along with random tables for these options, too).
I feel a little funny only getting to it this late in the review, but let me say that the inner heart of Let Us Build A Tower is this: The game is a random dungeon generator! Now, kiddies, I'm an ancient grognard, and I recall with perfect clarity the good old days of First Edition D&D, or as we called it at the time, Advanced D&D. And in the original 1E Dungeon Master's Guide, there were tables and tables used to generate random dungeons! We sure did have fun with those rules, back in the day. Did they always make sense? No! Was there any real rhyme or reason to the adventures that random rolls created? Hecks to the no! This was back before computers, before Rogue and Moria and Dwarf Fortress. We were rolling dice to make our random adventures, and we liked it!
So it really tickled my funny bone to discover that Let Us Build A Tower is a delightful call-back to those days. The Tower of Babel itself is the dungeon that changes every time you enter it. There are potential events every ten minutes (an homage to AD&D's "turn" unit of time). The rooms, the inhabitants, and the possible encounters are all there at the roll of the dice. There's the "Confusion of Tongues" one would expect. Really, the chaos of the dice is the point. Here, let me give you the smallest taste:
Random dungeon ("tower") tables from Let Us Build A Tower, by Caleb Wimble.Bottom Line: If you are looking for a few ideas — say monsters, or artifacts, or adventure seeds — to spice up your game, Let Us Build A Tower has those in spades. If you are looking for a random dungeon generator, well, that's what this game does best. If you don't like the chaos, you can just pick and choose elements, without rolling, to make your dungeon to your own spec. And you can embrace the game whole-heartedly and set a full campaign here. Highly recommended.
