Let Us Build a Tower: A Readthrough Review

The following is a review of the game Let Us Build a Tower by Caleb Wimble. I was provided a copy of the game to review but received no other compensation.

Let Us Build a Tower (LUBAT) by Caleb Wimble is a game that strikes me as an excellent encapsulation of the current state of OSR playstyle. Whether this is a positive or a negative for you will depend largely on your existing feelings about said movement and the many-headed hydra it has become. While reading through this book, I personally found the answers to questions I have had about OSR-style games for years, and for that I will remain eternally grateful.

To start, let's get back to the basics. Let Us Build a Tower: A Mythic Bronze Age Adventure in Babel crowdfunded on Kickstarter in November/December 2023, raising $20,699 from 414 backers on the promise of "an epic megadungeon-building ascent to Heaven full of wonders and hellish dangers through ever-stranger floors." The game as it stands now, ~1.5 years after the campaign's end, is 140 pages that contain all the rules you need to run four different classes of Throne-Seekers through 1,296 possible combinations of rooms and events, an extensive bestiary, and a smattering of details about other cities in the desert sands around Babel. The campaign also funded the Tower Builder App, a product now freely available that generates floors of the ruined Tower of Babel complete with rooms and events.

 So what does this all amount to? Well as I read through this book about endless adventure in a crumbling cursed structure of Biblical proportions, I was reminded of nothing so much as one of my all-time favorite games The Binding of Isaac. For though LUBAT's primary game influence is credited to The Gardens of Ynn (which makes sense, the former draws extensively on the depthcrawl mechanics introduced by the latter), this newer iteration has much more in common with the roguelike genre of videogames given the way that the Tower of Babel resets itself every time your Throne-Seekers leave its walls and the overall easy manner with which player characters might meet their end. This combined with extensive religious subject matter and randomly generated twisting maps full of strange rooms made for an obvious connection to a game that I have spent over 41 days of my life playing.

And it was this connection to Binding of Isaac that sparked a sort of divine revelation to me about the nature of this game. For you see, as I was reading through the rooms and events and monsters you might encounter while playing, I couldn't help but ask myself..."So?" They all seemed very gameable and fun to encounter, but they weren't quite adding up to something that felt like a very compelling roleplaying game. All you're doing is going from one room to the next, dealing with or fighting creatures you find there, and collecting treasure.

Much like you do in Binding of Isaac.

The game I've played 41 consecutive days in total.

Send help

So clearly I'm not opposed to spending significant amounts of time running through procedurally generated levels. But what has compelled me to play so much of one game but balk at the same in another? Well in BOI, I'm pushed forward by a sense of mastery and mystery. M(a/y)stery if you will (and I will not). Different characters have different powers, there are literally thousands of active and passive items to encounter that can be used in different ways, and there remain several hundred achievements I have yet to unlock. The impulse for mastery is satisfied whenever I manage to complete a run or unlock a difficult achievement, and the impulse for mystery is sated each time I enter a new room and find out what awaits me on the other side (usually an adorably disgusting monster to kill). LUBAT surely has the mystery with the depthcrawl mechanics slowly ratcheting up the strangeness of the rooms and encounters, but the book itself seemed to be missing the mastery. Yes, you can level up your Throne-Seeker with a nicely modular system that gives a surprising amount of customization to the small roster of classes, but that just doesn't hit the spot in the same way that navigating the bullet hell of BOI does.

Now you might notice that I specifically said "the book itself" is missing the mastery, and that is the nature of my personal aha moment (which has been extensively documented in OSR blogs, so this is not an original idea by any means): mastery in LUBAT comes from internal motivation rather than player skill. Why is your Throne-Seeker, specifically, exploring the ruined Tower of Babel? Well there's the obvious: it's there, it's full of treasure, and there's supposed to be a literal stairway to heaven somewhere inside. But what might you want any of that for? What does the treasure do for you? What would you do with the power of a god if you managed to actually enter heaven? The answers to those questions are where *gasp* roleplaying enters the picture, and truly what separates LUBAT from BOI. Throne-Seekers must deeply and sincerely want something to be willing to risk death and divine transformation to get it.

To the game's credit, the "Mythic Shinar" section offers information about a wide variety of cities near Babel and the petty warlords/ambitious sorcerers that fill them, but this section is also the most confusing addition to the game. (It was, appropriately, a stretch goal for the Kickstarter and not presumably part of the original vision.) It expands the focus of the adventure beyond Babel, but most of the game's text is about Babel: its rooms, events, monsters, treasure. Expanding the world beyond it provides some helpful context to imagine the reasons a Throne-Seeker would enter the cursed tower, but it also dilutes the focus of the adventure. The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library, the primary predecessors for LUBAT, don't really bother with explanations for why you might enter them; they're either just there for the exploring, or else they're making it difficult for you to escape them. I don't really prefer this style of adventure, but I must admit that it gives them a certain purity of purpose. You either engage with their puzzle boxes as they are, or you don't.

Here at the end of the review, it might seem silly to say that the main thing I took away from LUBAT is "characters need a motivation," but it was a genuinely important revelation for me. In games like D&D, my impulse to play comes from the story, sure, but also from the mechanical progression. There are spells to pick, cool abilities to play with, and ever stronger monsters to test my character against. Storygames tend to provide upfront story beats and motivations to pursue, and while perhaps a little lighter on the "mastery" side of things, the broad roadmap given means that I have guidelines within which I can explore while still being confident that I'll end up somewhere meaningful. OSR games (for me) fall into something of an uncanny valley between these two: not enough mechanical levers to look forward to pulling and little to no story roadmaps to follow. I still don't think that OSR games will ever be my favorite to play, but I now realize that I was approaching them too passively. I was used to games that bring more to the table and can carry me along with them a bit more, but in LUBAT you'd better be ready to help build that Tower of Babel yourself or it might just crumble out beneath you.

Some final itinerant thoughts about LUBAT that don't really fit anywhere else in this review:

• The bestiary is truly fantastic. The Fallen Ones, Great Serpents, and Legendary Revenants in particular are really dynamic antagonists/patrons/monsters to encounter. Provide information about these early and often to your players, it will help motivate them to keep climbing the tower (I know that it would motivate me!).

Who wouldn't want to meet LILÎTU in the Tower of Babel?

• I deeply respect the amount of research that clearly went into this game, and I find the combination of Old Testament and Sumerian mythology really compelling. It's just familiar enough to have something to grab onto, just strange enough to be surprised.
• Love love LOVE the spellcasting system: carry around a bunch of Babel Stones that each have one word on them, and combine those words into brief descriptors that govern what a spell can do. It's a system that will likely require some practice to get the hang of, what with negotiation around the power level desired by a spellcaster, but one that can make for highly creative results.

On Con Games and the Apocalypse (World)

 This past weekend I did a very silly thing that has become part of a pattern for me: running games for the first time at a convention for strangers.

On the three occasions I have attended a con thus far in my life, I have always run games, and of those games there is always at least one that I have not played previously. I consider myself a pretty good GM and thus see cons as an opportunity for me to try out some new stuff in a one-shot environment. This time around I was bringing Apocalypse World and The Warren to the table, games that I had been very excited by upon reading them for the first time within the past few years but had yet to actually play. Surely, I figured, being familiar with PBTA games in general would allow me to make one-shots for them without too much trouble.

I was wrong.

Okay that's overdramatic; the games were fine and the players said they had a good time, but I definitely struggled a bit more than I expected to with Apocalypse World in particular. There would be times when I'd grasp in vain for an appropriate move to resolve what a player had just described or struggle to figure out how moves might cascade into each other appropriately and thereby keep the action churning along. Nothing went off the rails, but sometimes it felt like the wheels were spinning without catching much traction.

At the time I was confused: I had familiarized myself with the moves, created some pre-gen characters so that we could get started playing right away (and so that I would be familiar with the moves present at the table), and created a setting with conflicts ready to boil over the moment action started. So what went wrong?

Well as I've been thinking about it since then, I've realized two important things:

1. I wasn't always making the best use of AW's arenas of conflict in my games.
2. I'm not 100% convinced that AW makes for the best convention games.

Let's break these ideas down.

Working with Arenas of Conflict

In the linked article above, Vincent Baker lays out the 8 arenas of conflict he sees in Apocalypse World: honest negotiation, commitments & obligations, negotiation in bad faith, implicit threat of violence, explicit threat of violence, outbreak of violence, nonviolent physical striving, and weirdness. These are all places where characters (PCs and NPCs alike) can come into conflict with each other over their differing goals and motives. Additionally, all of these arenas have Basic Moves associated with them, allowing for players to take a variety of approaches when trying to accomplish things and gently encouraging players with certain stats to focus primarily on particular arenas (someone with a high Hard stat is going to be most mechanically effective when in the "Explicit threat of violence" and "Outbreak of violence" arenas, for example).

Now it's worth saying that these are descriptive and not prescriptive; the arenas are not laid out in the rules nor are the associations between them and the Basic Moves. But it all makes general sense: you can't really say that you're negotiating with someone if you're trying to seize something from them by force. The mob might be able to say that, but the reality is still that they're taking something, not asking for it.

But even with that said, even with no one telling you that these are the arenas of conflict available to you or that certain moves are associated with said arenas, something is missing from the game if you don't make full use of these arenas, something both narrative and mechanical. Narratively, you're not getting a full scope of what the world you're playing in can offer, while mechanically you're missing out on some of the cool stuff that your characters can do.

In one of my games, for example, a military strike force came to claim ownership of a derelict oil platform where a community of people live. By the end of the game there had been threats of violence, outbreaks of violence, and even some negotiation, leading to a lot of going aggro and reading a person/situation, but not so much seducing/manipulating someone or opening your brain to the world's psychic maelstrom. The game just felt a little incomplete to me, the person running it and most clued into all the moving parts.

Apocalypse World Con Games? Prep Wisely

The real central lack of my two games, I now realize, was the absence of Commitments & Obligations. My players were very happy to slot themselves into my world and make up some history with each other, but without more explicit ties from my world to them it was a little too easy for them to all team up and work together.

In most games this would be a great thing! No one likes the player in the D&D party who's an edgy lone wolf and doesn't want to work with anyone else, but for Apocalypse World you really want some conflicting loyalties among the players. They don't need to actually come into direct conflict, but it really helps if they have to renege on some other agreements in the world in order to work well with the other players. That way, the decision to work with the other PCs cascades into new NPCs showing up and getting involved in the action, and the decision to work against the PCs creates more action between the people at the table.

AW is a game that expects and encourages conflict between player characters because it creates interesting, dynamic stories, and I'm honestly not sure if people in a convention setting are necessarily always ready for that. (Not the interesting dynamic stories part, the PC conflict part.) Trad play cultures (especially D&D) are full of horror stories of player conflict gone wrong, tearing apart tables and ending friendships, and people looking to try out some fun games at a convention might just be averse to getting anywhere near that kind of play.

I can say for sure that at my tables players were always trying to get along and work together, which is great! But it's not really what Apocalypse World is bringing to the table. Had I known better, I would have prompted the players to explore that kind of conflict and to make sure that we were all on the same page for what to expect. And if they weren't interested in that (which is completely fair), I would have needed some strong backup NPCs to barge into situations and start fucking everything up.

March 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

Turns out my version of an April Fool is to immediately write a monthly retrospective! Zine Month/Zine Quest are essentially done, so it's time to read the tea leaves and see what we can divine about the future. And folks? It's a mixed (tea) bag.

• 294 campaigns
• 34 Backerkit
• 6 Crowdfundr
• 254 Kickstarter
• $4,205,543.02 raised
• $1,918,365.98 on Backerkit
• $6,182.91 on Crowdfundr
• $2,280,994.13 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 15 accessories
• 1 actual play
• 65 adventures
• 4 advice
• 1 audiobook
• 18 campaign settings
• 1 fundraising
• 2 reprints
• 73 supplements
• 111 systems
• 3 zines
• 150 distinct systems used (84 original)
• 73 campaigns (24.83%) used D&D 5E and raised $815,507.09 (19.39% of all money raised in March)
• 47 campaigns used AI in some form (15.99% of total) and raised $317,417.28 (7.55% of all money raised in March)
• 21 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 28.77% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 22 different countries
• Top 3: 161 in USA, 46 in UK, 19 in and Canada
• Singleton countries: Denmark, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, Portugal, Singapore, Vietnam

Backerkit's March

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in March were:

1. The Magnus Archives RPG: Tangled in the Web by Monte Cook Games ($1,015,475 from 6,174 backers)
2. Terraforming Mars - the official TTRPG by Shadowlands Games ($376,758.63 from 1,800 backers)
3. Adventures in the Household: Journey to the Garden 5E by Two Little Mice ($131,216.21 from 985 backers)
4. Festival of the Forgotten: A Dark Carnival D&D 2024 Handbook by Storytellers Forge Studios ($85,337 from 730 backers)
5. Hexploration Decks & Tiles-- Hexcrawl/Sandbox RPG Support by Inkwell Ideas ($62,991 from 773 backers)

You'll permit me some editorializing here (as it is my blog after all): I still kind of can't believe that a Terraforming Mars TTRPG exists (or will exist). I love the game, but it's very difficult for me to imagine how exactly it connects to an adaptation in a meaningful way. That said, when I read the Quickstart I was pleasantly surprised at a lot of the ideas it contains. There's an ideal of playing through the various phases of Mars' terraforming, with player characters being related to the ones used in previous phases but changed somehow (the example given, I believe, was employees of one of the vast terraforming corps in one phase and rebels against the same now-dominant corp in the next).

That said, plenty of those ideas are also deeply confusing and contradictory in their current form. Case in point: a significant portion of the quickstart devoted to combat. Not necessarily my primary concern in a game about scientific mastery over an uninhabited alien landscape while grappling with corporate control of said landscape! (Of course I understand that violence is going to be an intrinsic part of the corporate control in question, but does that really need detailed combat maneuvers and tables full of weapons? I'd say no.)

If there was ever any doubt, official TTRPG adaptations are here to stay (as evidenced by the massive success of the first Magnus Archives TTRPG supplement). I'm just glad that they also are bringing with them some interesting ideas.

Crowdfundr's March

There were 6 campaigns on Crowdfundr in March, which were:

1. Load the Simulation: Train hard. Hold together. Drift alone. by Cezar Capacle ($1,651 from 133 backers)
2. The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire-A Draw Steel Adventure by Andie Margolskee ($1,149 from 151 backers)
3. Pirouette - A Ballet Horror TTRPG by InnocentGoblin TTRPGs by Michael Sweeney ($1,071.91 from 52 backers)
4. Anomaly Hunters, a TTRPG of monster hunting and TV by Wendigo Workshop ($866 from 34 backers)
5. Letters to a Young GM by John Wick ($790 from 54 backers)
6. This Town Is Full Of Monsters by Aleks Samoylov ($655 from 11 backers)

There remains not much to say about Crowdfundr.

Kickstarter's March

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in March were:

1. Fighting Fantasy - Solo Adventure Gamebooks - Back In Print! by Steve Jackson Games ($319,101 from 5,331 backers)
2. Gods of the Forbidden North Trilogy by Pulp Hummock Press ($168,704 from 1,660 backers)
3. The Lady Pirates Tarot & Sails of Fate 5e Supplement by Baroque Publishing ($108,949 from 1,209 backers)
4. Immortals: Hubris & Glory (5E) by Black Lantern Productions ($98,722.20 from 821 backers)
5. Mappa Mundi - An Exploration + Ecology RPG by Three Sails Studios ($97,610 from 1,849 backers)

I want to talk briefly about Gods of the Forbidden North Trilogy as the first $100,000+ campaign in a while to use AI in any way. It was used here to make the promo video (commissioned by the author using his own money, he is careful to stress) and nowhere else in the product. And I have no reason not to believe that.

HOWEVER!

The trailer still looks like ass lol.

The "Use of AI" section on Kickstarter says "the creative filmmakers at Big River Film Co. who shot the marketing video at the top of this Kickstarter page did experiment with AI elements to explore what they, as real artists, could accomplish by pushing boundaries with such technologies." Now the word 'shot' is doing a lot of work here, because when watching the 1 minute and 14 second video I don't think there was a single frame that didn't seem AI-generated.

And again - it looks like ass.

What experiment are they doing here exactly? What boundaries are they pushing? It just boggles the mind that someone with the budget to commission a video like this couldn't...commission a better one.

Pay attention, too, to the primary justification that comes at the end: "this project’s promotional video is a strong example of how AI can be a powerful tool in leveraging the playing field between small, independent creators and large corporate entities with staggering budgets." No it isn't! This video looks cheap! It consumed god only knows how much energy and water, and it shit out this 74 second turd of a video and a metric ton of carbon emissions. It's the equivalent of "I went to ______ and all I got was this crappy t-shirt" except if the t-shirt was also actively killing the person wearing it and everyone around them (or more accurately, if it were actively killing a bunch of people in the Global South who are already bearing the brunt of climate change).

I'm fucking sick of it. Creators need to do better, and the 1,660 people who backed that campaign need to care about more than their silly little roleplaying game that's probably going to sit on their shelf unplayed.

March 2024 vs. 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 21 (2024) - 34 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 232 (2024) - 254 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $939,594.09 (2024) - $1,918,365.98 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $4,897,291.24 (2024) - $2,283,379.13 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 34 (2024) - 47 (2025)
• Money: $152,318.82 (2024) - $319,802.28 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 69 (2024) - 73 (2025)
• Money: $1,918,554.37 (2024) - $815,507.09 (2025)

Something is going on with crowdfunding right now, and I have absolutely no idea what. $1,635,141.22 - that's how much more money was made in March 2024 over March 2025. Kickstarter campaigns raised over $2.5M LESS this year despite increasing the number of campaigns that successfully funded. The top is weirdly falling out (falling off?) of Kickstarter TTRPG campaigns, as evidenced by:

• Kickstarter March average: $21,109.01 (2024) - $8,989.68 (2025)
• Kickstarter March median: $2,956.05 (2024) - $2,320.09 (2025)
• Kickstarter March D&D average: $28,399.15 (2024) - $8,801.27 (2025)
• Kickstarter March D&D median: $2,556.05 (2024) - $2,206.73 (2025)

Some of this can be explained by high profile, company-backed campaigns moving to Backerkit, but even that doesn't explain it all. There were 10 campaigns in March 2024 that raised $100,000+ as opposed to 6 in March 2025, and that shortfall accounts for almost the entire discrepancy between these two years (assuming that the average high-value Kickstarter money raised across both years [~$367,000] is representative, the absence of 4 of those represents a reduction in $1.468M).

What does this all mean? Well as always, in the absence of year-over-year data and perfect macroeconomic oracular knowledge, it's impossible to say. But given what we do know: I'd say this is a sign that some people are already waiting to see what's going to happen with the US economy and an impending trade war. But it's not the relatively big publishers, because your Steve Jacksons and Monte Cooks ran big campaigns in March that are undoubtedly going to be affected by tariffs and paper costs. Instead, it's the ambitious third-party D&D people who are kind of vanishing. And this makes sense! If you're a small team preparing a big tome of a book that you anticipate a big audience of D&D enthusiasts will snap up, I'd be concerned about the potential success too. Will your small team be able to handle the chaos of a fascist hopeful-dictator as you try to deliver products? Will people balk at paying unexpectedly high costs for shipping and allow tomes to pile up in your house or a rented warehouse? Will tariffs suddenly change right before a shipment arrives internationally and completely wipe out most of the profit you made? It's stressing me out just thinking about it, and I've never had to even try to do it before.

So yeah (*chuckles weakly, as though trying to put a brave face in spite of a mortal wound*) April Fools...what a fun holiday. Can't wait to see what happens this month...