The ancient city was originally founded as a place of study; a great library was its first building, and it remained ever its heart. However, the city grew to form the core of an unspeakable ritual, powered by harnessing a long forgotten god. Eventually, its distant neighbors could not tolerate the ideas it was spreading, and they attacked. That was when the walls fell, leaving a ruined city with a defaced statue at its heart… and broken roads, spreading corruption, and fanatics of that forgotten god bleeding out of it into the countryside…

Rolling on random tables can be a useful tool for a gamemaster when it comes to generating material or making decisions, but it can be so… rote, can’t it? When The Walls Fall by Molomoot is all about generating the history and current status of a fallen city, and it seeks to gamify the experience by combining table-based generation with that most ancient and venerable of rituals: building dice towers.

You are in fact rolling on random tables, quite a few of them, so you’ll need an entire set of ‘standard’ dice: d20, d12, 2d10, d8, d6, and d4. Rolling the d20 will determine the Founding Ideals of the city. Once rolled, you place the d20 in the center of a hex grid. You then proceed to roll each other die, descending in size, but after rolling and recording the value you have to place it upon the previously placed die. So long as the tower stands, you can keep rolling, all the way until you’ve placed the d4. The d12 determines a Dark Secret, the d10s rolled together determine a Source of Prosperity, the d8 describes a Special Feature, and the d6 and d4 rolled together tell you what kind of leader the city had and establishes something about their reputation.

In the opening example I got an 11 on the d20, a 2 on the d12, and a 3 and 1 on the d10s, before the tower fell when I tried to place the second d10. So, the taller you can build your dice tower, the more detailed the city will become.

Whenever your tower falls, either as you’re making your way through the dice or after you complete the tower and give it a bit of a wobble deliberately, you add up the value of all the dice after they finish rolling (my result for the opener was 39). This total then tells you the Cause of the Collapse, the reason the walls fell as it were, on a 1-70 table. Yes, there is a result for if you only placed the d20 and it landed on a 1; appropriately, both result #1 and result #70 are ‘an act of god.’ Presumably on a 1 the table got flipped.

The final piece of the puzzle is where the dice landed when the walls fell; I mentioned that the dice tower is being built in the center of a hex map. All of the other hexes on that map have a result in them, and where dice land dictate something of the city that still persists. So, you don’t just get more details of the city’s history the taller you build your dice tower, you get more active aspects of it in the present.

For another example, on a following attempt I managed to roll all of the dice, although the tower fell while placing the d6. My result? A city founded for freedom, with a people’s forum (14). Something was stealing the dreams of the city’s denizens (12), which might very well be related to the fact that the city tricked an alien intelligence (6 and 9). In fact, the city also had impossible ruins made of an alien material (1), which leans me towards thinking the upcoming fall is going to be the second time this city falls, the first having happened before the freedom-lovers moved in. Perhaps all this alien stuff is why the leader is known to be Cursed with a withered body (6 and 2). Eventually, the source of the city’s prosperity was stolen (44), cutting them off from the looted alien intelligence, and the city collapsed. In its wake are desecrated crypts, an irate wizard, a wicked villain, and a prophecy…

When The Walls Fall is a charmingly neat little tool/minigame. You can break it out whenever you need to do a bit of worldbuilding, come up with some adventure hooks, or just want to goof around with dice but make it a bit more engaging that just building an altar to Polyhedros, Lord of Dice. If you have an unsteady hand or dice then getting all of the possible results might be quite frustrating. If you really wanted to maximize your details my ‘hack’ would be to roll all the dice, record the results, and then start building the tower so you can use its fall to determine the Cause of the Collapse and what remains.

About the only complaint I have about When The Walls Fall is that now I have to name the darn places I’ve created, but I suppose outsourcing all of the work would be a touch greedy.

You can get a digital, print-and-play version of When The Walls Fall on itch, where it’s usually just $2.00. I got my physical version at the RPG Designer Meet and Greet at PAX Unplugged, and I’m given to understand that they can be found either in similar scenarios or via SoulMuppet Publishing if you happen to be sharing a con with them.

So… why was your city founded, what was it like, how did it come to ruin, and what of it still lingers? Start building some towers to find out!