Climbing

Climbing is the organized pursuit of advancement through The Tower, where Climbers exchange danger for levels, equipment, access, and eventually passage to higher Floors. Its decisive principle is that progress is never merely a matter of defeating enemies: routes, supply lines, bridges, buses, water, tools, information, and retreat plans all determine whether a Party can survive long enough to grow stronger.

Rules of Advancement

The System makes Climbing a staged progression. After reaching level 5, experience gain in the Hunting Grounds and the 1st Floor is reduced, forcing Climbers to seek the 2nd Floor if they want to continue accumulating power. They can follow established routes, which are slow, safe, and reliable, or clear a Key Site on the 1st Floor to open an inter-floor Door, a faster but more dangerous and rewarding alternative.

The route system becomes stricter higher in The Tower. Above the 5th Floor, established routes no longer exist, so Ascending or Descending requires Climbers to secure Key Locations. The System therefore recommends early acclimation to such trials: Climbing is not simply a sequence of level thresholds, but a gradual education in the conditions that later make movement itself a contested achievement.

The discipline also begins with formal selection. After a failed attempt to generate a Class Seed from a thumb-sized piece of pemmican, the System directs the candidate to choose Primary Abilities. A later display explicitly asks the candidate to make that choice, showing how Climbing joins personal development to an interface of Classes, abilities, charges, and free points. Advancement is consequently both bodily and administrative: a Climber must survive the world while also making decisions within its rules.

Routes, Buses, and the Price of Speed

A bus offers the fastest ordinary route to the next Floor. Climbers can run in its wake and assist with clearing a Key Site; the rules are permissive enough that anyone who is present without actively sabotaging the other Climbers can receive credit. This creates a powerful shortcut for lower-level Parties, but it also turns progression into a race behind someone else’s momentum.

The apparent convenience is misleading. High-level porters kill only the monsters directly blocking their destination and do not slow down for followers. Over several hours, they can outpace slower level 10 Climbers, leaving those who fall behind to face monsters enraged by the passage of nearly twenty Climbers. The bus therefore redistributes danger rather than removing it: speed and protection belong to the leaders, while latecomers inherit the disturbed territory.

The same logic governs Will and Loth when their Acclimation timer has expired and they are nearly level 10. They recognize that it is time to attempt a Key Site and reach Floor 3, but a passing bus transforms the intended expedition into an improvised pursuit. The danger confirms Loth’s earlier caution that entering a higher Floor below the current Floor’s maximum permitted level would be foolish, even when a bus appears to offer an easy ascent.

Expedition as Logistics and Engineering

Climbing depends on reconnaissance and communication as much as on combat. During the mission to destroy the kaith supply lines, the new Climbers are divided into groups and sent into a branching cave system. Nathan, the veteran supervising the Quest, makes the objective explicit: the Party is to find and destroy the supply lines, not seek a direct fight with the kaith. The assignment places Climbing within a military-logistical framework, where disrupting food movement can matter more than winning a battle against frontline forces.

Nonhuman and material agents extend the Party’s abilities. Loth controls dozens of insect species kept in a bucket-sized barrel of soil topped with food scraps, using them as practical instruments inside the caves. He also marks every branch with arrows made from the luminescent juices of crushed glowbugs, turning the dark tunnel network into a navigable record of prior movement. A Climber’s capacity is thus partly carried by containers, creatures, light, and marks on stone.

The same practical intelligence appears when movement fails. After Will reaches a ledge and nearly falls into the emptiness below, Loth throws him a rope and directs him to hold it against the wall. The rope converts a hazardous gap into a recoverable passage, showing how Climbing rewards improvised infrastructure even when a character’s individual strength is insufficient.

Retreat is equally central. When Nathan is left as the spearhead holding a bridge, the remaining Climbers are ordered to return to the surface, bring him back the next day, and come with the other Parties rested and prepared. The decision rejects the immediate temptation of pressing forward. In Climbing, preserving the chain of command, restoring stamina, and returning with adequate forces can be more important than claiming a dangerous position at once.

Resource Management and Survival

The material limits of Climbing are stark. A Stronghold on a floating mountain appears to be a mine, defended not by a conventional wall but by the mountain’s own edge, with ballistae and soldiers watching for kaith invasion forces and flying threats. Its exposed layers reveal quartz or salt, and the salt mine matters because salt is scarce and valuable. The scene connects advancement to settlement economies: higher-floor survival depends on extraction, defense, and the movement of necessities, not only on monster-killing.

Water can force combat even for Parties that prefer avoidance. While traveling north, Will’s group avoids fighting whenever possible because they lack a safe place to retreat and every encounter might draw more aggro than the team can handle. They stop only when their water runs low and they find a relatively slow or weak monster, such as the snails. The encounter is therefore dictated by inventory rather than ambition: a monster becomes a resource barrier before it becomes a target for experience.

Engineering can turn that resource pressure into a weapon. In a plan against the Tangled, Travis is sent to lure the fire-mote swarm while the other three descend into the water tanks and rig them to explode. The tanks can preserve water for a week after their suppliers have died, and Loth proposes restricting their flow so natural heat builds up before the stored water is released as steam. Fireproof rope, wire, and springs become parts of the operation. The episode makes Climbing resemble field engineering: victory emerges from manipulating heat, water, timing, terrain, and enemy behavior.

Knowledge, Experience, and Adaptation

Experience in Climbing has value even when it does not directly produce levels. Steve explains that he has spent two decades moving through the first six Floors as a rental, learning their places and people. Because he understands that he will not gain levels until the Party passes the 7th Floor, he offers to write a dossier on the next four Floors, accompany the Party, and serve as its liaison in town. His proposal identifies information as a portable form of strength, especially for someone whose advancement has stalled.

That proposal also exposes a recurring tension in the practice. Climbing rewards measurable progression through levels, yet survival depends on forms of expertise that the level system cannot fully capture: local knowledge, social connections, route judgment, engineering skill, insect control, and the ability to recognize when not to fight. The strongest apparent shortcut can become a trap, while a rope, a map, a supply-line target, or a water-tank mechanism can create an opening that raw power cannot.

Climbing consequently functions as the book’s central model of growth. It has the visible structure of a game—Classes, Primary Abilities, levels, experience penalties, Key Sites, and inter-floor Doors—but its actual test is harsher and more physical. Each ascent demands a new balance among ambition, information, supplies, allies, monsters, and escape. The higher the Party goes, the less progression resembles climbing a ladder and the more it resembles building a survivable path through a hostile system.