A Tower Made of Sky
A downloadable bestiary
An illustrated, system-neutral bestiary of allegorical monsters.
Discover 30 impossible beings:
- an extinct city reconstructing itself from memories stored in mycelium,
- an unseen beast that never is but always was, the doom of every hunter,
- a sorrowful flower that tells histories that almost happened,
- a three-eyed spirit of narcissism in the body of a toad,
- shadow-grass from the heat death of the universe, ensnaring the present day,
- and things stranger still.
Every entry is accompanied by a lavish, full-page, full-color illustration by Waclaw Traier in his signature, darkly beautiful style as well as 10 story hooks for introducing the creature into your own campaigns or creating variant monsters.
Each monster doubles as an allegory or a thought experiment. Those who like to add emotional depth and weight to their RPG adventures will discover themes including:
- the birth of “monsters” through social alienation,
- the burdens of memory and forgetting,
- the horrors of utopian thinking,
- the ways language constrains us,
- and the value of grief and sorrow.
The entries are wildly diverse—psychological spirits, philosophical beasts, and things that stretch the definition of “creature” to its breaking point. Yet one thing unites them: each says something important about its world. Introduce any of them into your game, and you’ll push your campaign setting in a surprising new direction. Or set your next campaign in the bestiary’s own mysterious world of the Tower to play out fresh and alien adventures.
What You Get
This is the digital edition of A Tower Made of Sky, a 158-page PDF. Paperback and hardcover copies are available through Lulu.com.
Purchase
In order to download this bestiary you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $12 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Comments
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Firstly, a disclaimer: I cannot claim to be unbiased about this project. A Tower Made of Sky has long been close to my heart, and indeed, one of the monsters within is, at least in part, my own.
With that said, here is my pitch for why I believe this is a novel and worthy bestiary.
A Tower Made of Sky owes much to the academic humanities, the social sciences, and the fields of philosophy, psychology, and monstrosity studies. The creatures described are not traditional TTRPG monsters, designed to be slain and encountered bereft of context in a cold grey dungeon. Neither are they plausible animals. Rather, these monsters are fragmented reflections of psychological and philosophical concepts, anxieties both newborn and primeval, and statements which embody and transgress the boundaries of epistemology. Each of them is an uncanny being, gesturing towards the parts of ourselves and our worlds that we yearn to destroy, and to embrace, in equal measure. They are vivid, substantive pieces of ether, layered in metaphor and yet affixed so tightly to the concepts they express that reality in all its messiness seems vague and distant by comparison. They are Kafkaesque nightmares - (ir)reverently ironic existential commentaries given form, flesh, and spirit.
These are monsters someone could build a world around.
I am awestruck with what Sam has accomplished - the strength of the prose, the guiding vision, the ways he reconciles the conceptual origin of these creatures with the materiality of their existence in their own world. Thus creating a vision of a space in which monsters are both and neither flesh and ideal, and thereby something greater than either.
A Tower Made of Sky is an evocative and cerebral work. It is a challenge to the way that we, as TTRPG players, have conditioned ourselves to understand monsters. It is poetic, beautifully illustrated, and furthermore radically unpretentious. A Tower Made of Sky is not a manifesto. Like all the finest bestiaries setting manuals, this is a book of stories waiting to be told. And I believe it is a book of stories worth telling.
Thanks for the lovely and in-depth review, Maiden Wonderland (who collaborated on "The Nameless Beast," one of the monsters that appears early in the book, for anyone reading this). You highlighted several of the goals of the book here—I'm glad that it has succeeded at them for you :)
Great bestiary! Inventive in ways that you can build multiple campaigns around.
Thank you, Gamesail, glad you've enjoyed it!