The Siege of Ashenvault
From the novel by Elliot Cranmer
The game we see here
Hold a section of the last citadel's wall against the Hollowborn. Between assaults, gather the chitin they shed and the glowing fluid they leave behind, cure it, and bond it to the stone. Hollowborn cannot sense their own shell, so a well-built wall turns a charge aside. Up to four engineers share the steam valves, the ballistae and the repair work.
Why this world
Tower defense is one of the formats that win on the platforms we build for, and this book is already laid out like one. It names five enemy castes, from fast wall-climbers to building-sized matriarchs, and a list of defenses: ballistae, steam vents, oil cascades, ward arrays and chitin cladding. Its middle chapters are a crafting loop of harvesting, testing and curing, its hero reads the wall as a stress map, and the siege is manufactured, so each season the signal can rise again.
The book · Fantasy & Mythology
The wall failed at sunrise, and fourteen names burned themselves into Sable Cray's memory before the dust had settled. A siege engineer with a gift for reading stress lines through stone, she had bonded monster chitin to the eastern rampart of Ashenvault as proof that the citadel could be saved. The bonding gave way. Her colleagues did not.
Expelled through the Undercroft — a sentence that has only ever meant one thing — she descends into the ancient mining tunnels beneath the city and finds the roots of the very creatures besieging the walls above. They pulse in a frequency she recognizes. It is the frequency of Ashenvault's defensive wards, narrowed and amplified into a signal that does not repel the Hollowborn but summons them.
The siege, she understands, has been engineered. The walls have been failing on a schedule, and the schedule belongs to the men who sentenced her.
From a collapsed watchtower in sight of the citadel, Sable begins to build something the Guild would call an abomination: a counter-fortification grown from chitin, bone-mortar, and trained root structure — a defense the monsters cannot recognize as prey. Her former master watches from the battlements. Her apprentice is already searching the maintenance logs. The question is whether engineering can outpace politics before the Council triggers the Convergence they have been quietly preparing for forty years.
Games set in this world
Game adaptation is considered per title when the world-building can support it. Pitching is the first step; it is not a licence. See rights at Greenlight Publishing.