The city
One city for everyone, in the tower's shadow. The crown, the guilds and the church of the Ascent all drive the climb. They quarrel, scheme and sometimes agree, as real powers do.
The lore
The Sealing
What the valley tells of itself. It is all the valley knows.
Chapter I
The prison
Generations ago, people of every nation came into the valley, fleeing something none of them remember. The mountains closed behind them, and the memory of the road was gone with it.
The valley knows only what it believes: that a god locked them in and took their homelands, the whole world beyond the peaks. Nobody in the valley knows more than that.
At night a red glow burns beyond the mountains. Nobody in the valley knows what lights it.
Chapter II
The tower
So they build. The tower is the valley's own answer to its prison: stone on stone, a way to climb out and drag the god down to answer for it. Those who climb it are the Ascendants.
The whole valley raises one tower together. A new tier rises the moment the first Ascendant wins through the floors beneath it, and a plaque keeps the names of those who were first.
Hell's hosts hold the lower floors. Above them wait the deadly sins: first those that want too much of the world, then the one that wants nothing, then those of a heart turned against others. Pride, they say, waits highest.
The higher anyone climbs, the more dangerous the valley grows, and creatures slip in through the mountain passes. The valley calls it the god's anger.
You will be like gods.
Carved over the tower's gate. Chapter III
The shattering
Every season ends in a Sealing, and the whole valley sees it at the same moment. An eye opens, light sweeps the valley, and the tower shatters.
Then everyone forgets the climb, Ascendants and heroes alike. Memory does not outlast a Sealing, but what is written or carved does: the names in the Hall of Fame, cut into stone, and the guild's ledger of the heroes it has sworn. Gear made during the climb crumbles.
Then the valley begins again, and the tower rises once more.
The valley has climbed and forgotten more times than anyone can remember.
The world
The valley
Ringed by mountains nobody crosses, the valley is all the world its people have: one city in the tower's shadow, and wild lands around it.
The square
A prophet stands in the square and begs the valley to stop building. He cannot say why, only that the tower is wrong, and the crowd jeers him for it.
The hunting grounds
Beyond the city lie wild lands, each more dangerous than the last. The deepest of them open only to those who have climbed the highest.
The dungeons
Castles built into the land, a portal at every gate. Packs of monsters hold the halls, and a lord waits at the end of each.
The night
When the sun goes down, creatures of the void come out. Nobody in the valley knows what the void is.
The game
How it plays
Ascendants is an auto-battler. You never swing a sword yourself: you choose the heroes, set them in their places and decide how they fight. Then the battle is theirs.
Your team
Choose your heroes and make them a team. Tanks hold the front, healers keep them standing, and marksmen, casters and assassins end the fight.
Every choice before the fight
Set each hero at the front or at the back. Decide which ability opens the fight and whom each hero hunts first. That is where battles are won.
The fight plays itself
No luck and no reflexes. The same choices against the same enemy make the same fight, so every loss is a lesson and the next team is better for it.
Where the team fights
The Tower
The valley's tower is climbed one battle at a time. The floors won open wilder hunting grounds in the valley, and at the very top waits a choice.
The Ladder
Climb high enough and you join your country's ladder. Challenge the ranks just above you, and a win takes their place. While you are away, your team stands as your defense.
Dungeon runs
A chain of battles through a castle's halls. Every pack must fall before the lord's gate opens, and the heroes carry their wounds from one fight to the next: a hero who falls stays down.
The guild's ledger
The heroes
The guild swears heroes to the climb and writes each of them into its ledger, a record the Sealing cannot wipe away. These are the names it holds.
Hagan the Radiant
A wall of sunlight at the front.
Hagan carries the sun in his chest and the weight of every line he has held. He plants himself at the front, pouring radiance into allies who step close — a slow-burning furnace that becomes an inferno the moment his Sun Flare ignites.
Stand close, and you will not fall.
Morrow the Unmade
Erased once. Put back wrong.
Morrow was struck from existence — not killed, unmade — and something dragged him back with pieces missing. Damage that should end him pours into the hollows where his body used to be, and for a while it stays there. He holds the line because holding is the only part of him that still works.
They already killed me once. It didn't take.
Anzar
The axe drinks first.
Anzar fights with a two-handed axe that is hollow on purpose. Every blow he lands runs down the channels in the blade and fills them, and the fuller it gets the faster and hungrier he swings. Left alone in a fight long enough, he stops being a man with an axe and becomes the axe's way of feeding itself.
It is not full yet.
Aurora the Dawnbringer
Holy light mends allies and banishes darkness.
Clad in the light of the dawn, Aurora walks where shadows recede. She mends the wounded, shields the faithful, and calls forth the brilliance that turns the tide.
From the first light, we are renewed.
Gwennen the Menace
Every shot tightens the draw.
Raised by smugglers and trained by wolves, Gwennen turned the longbow into a kind of bookkeeping — every arrow a debt called in, every wound a receipt. She owes the forest, and she always pays.
I never miss what I've already chosen.
Lucenne the Fallen
What she binds, the void takes.
Once she carried the dawn beside Aurora. She fell, and the light she carried became chains. Now she binds what the void has marked, and the void takes it.
Every chain was once a ray of light.
Viper
Death drips from every blade.
A whisper of poison ends the loudest scream. Viper haunts the seams of every kingdom, paid in coin or in grudges, leaving only the slow proof of his work.
I am the cup. You decided to drink.
The tower rises again
Coming soon.