Designing The Tower – Story-Driven Runs in Real Space

TLDR 

• Shattered Bounds: Tower is the next step after Battlegrounds: a one-hour, party-based adventure run that blends a physical guild hall with story-driven missions experienced through magi-tech AR. 

• The Tower is designed around a key in-world constraint: the Guild can only hold a stable portal for one hour—a narrative reason that also keeps the experience operationally clean. 

• Long-term, The Tower grows into a multi-floor guild building: a social hub on the main floor, with dedicated run floors above.  

• What follows is how we design story-driven runs that work in real space—safely, repeatably, and with enough structure that every visit feels like a real quest. 

The Cold Open: What It Feels Like 

Imagine walking into a fantasy guild hall. 

Moments later, you’re being led to the Guild’s portal. 

As you step through, the world shifts. 

You emerge into a quiet meadow. A small village sits just beyond the treeline – houses standing silent. Something is wrong. Undead have begun to plague the area, and the villagers’ request for aid has reached the Guild. 

Your quest has begun. 

This is the experience we’re building with Shattered Bounds: Tower. 

What The Tower Is (and what it is not) 

The Tower is a story-driven run you experience with a party in a real building. 
It’s designed to feel like a dungeon run—without pretending the physical world doesn’t exist. 

If Battlegrounds is the proving ground for: 

• safety systems, 

• low-latency combat, 

• spatial boundaries, 

• and smooth operations, 

…then The Tower is where those foundations pay off in a different way: 

A run with narrative structure, location variety, and a beginning–middle–end that sticks in memory. 

The Tower is not meant to be a passive attraction you watch. It’s a guided, physical adventure you do – with a clear mission, clear stakes, and a clear reason to return. 

The Core Constraint: The One-Hour Transition 

Within the world of Shattered Bounds, the Guild maintains magi-tech that lets adventurers cross dimensions. 

But the process is unstable. 

Right now, the Guild can only guarantee a stable transition for one hour. When that time expires, all adventurers are safely returned to our world – whether they’ve finished the mission or not. 

That single rule does a lot of work: 

• It gives the experience urgency without needing artificial timers. 

• It creates a natural session length for operations. 

• It makes every run feel like a “window” into a real place – somewhere you can’t stay in forever. 

Shattered Bounds: Tower is built around that hour. 

Design Pillars: Making Story Runs Work in Real Space 

1) The run must be readable in motion 

Players aren’t sitting at a desk. They’re moving, reacting, communicating, and making decisions quickly. 

So every mission needs: 

• a clear objective that can be repeated in one sentence, 

• a visible “state of progress” (what’s going well, what’s failing), 

• and encounter beats that escalate without confusion. 

If players can’t explain what’s happening mid-run, the story collapses. 

2) Real space is a feature, not a limitation 

A real building gives you something games rarely have: 

• physical presence, 

• shared atmosphere, 

• and weight to the experience. 

But it also imposes reality: 

• safety boundaries, 

• line-of-sight, 

• reset time, 

• accessibility, 

• staff intervention. 

The Tower embraces this by designing missions that expect the physical layer to exist and using it to strengthen immersion rather than fight it. 

3) Replayability comes from structure, not infinite content 

You can’t hand-build infinite rooms and stories. 

Instead, The Tower is designed around: 

• quest templates (core structures that are fun even when reskinned), 

• rotating locations (new portal destinations discovered by scouts), 

• and variable complications (different threats, modifiers, or optional objectives). 

The goal is that checking in regularly can reveal: 

• a new destination, 

• an old destination with a new problem, 

• or a rare threat that doesn’t appear often. 

4) The Guild Hall makes the whole thing feel real 

A story run hits harder when there’s a place to return to. 

The main floor being a living Guild Hall is not just flavor – it’s the glue: 

• it creates a social “before and after,” 

• gives players a place to prepare and decompress, 

• and makes the world feel continuous across visits. 

Even if the run floors evolve over time, the hall becomes familiar. 

That familiarity is what turns “an activity” into “a place.” 

The Physical Vision: Floors, Portals, and Scaling Up 

The Tower is envisioned as a six-floor guild building: 

• Main floor: a living Guild Hall – gathering, food, shop, preparation, story. 

• Five run floors: dedicated spaces for story-driven Tower missions, alongside evolved versions of Battlegrounds-style encounters. 

But this is important: 

We don’t need six floors on day one for The Tower to be real. 

The design is meant to scale: 

• prove the run format on a smaller footprint, 

• refine the operational model, 

• then expand into additional floors as demand and resources allow. 

The end state is a guild building that can host multiple adventures at once without losing the feeling that each party is stepping through their own portal. 

Why Scouts Matter: A Simple In-World Reason for New Content 

Guild scouts are constantly searching for new locations where portals can be established. 

That gives us a clean narrative engine for content updates: 

• “A new destination has been found.” 

• “A known destination has changed.” 

• “A threat has emerged that requires immediate action.” 

This is how The Tower stays alive without pretending the world is static. 

Recent reports speak of powerful enemies emerging across the Shattered Bounds world. Requests for help are mounting. 

And the Guild is calling for adventurers. 

What’s Next 

Shattered Bounds: Battlegrounds is where we prove the foundations. Shattered Bounds: Tower is where those foundations become a true adventure. 

If you want to follow the project (or eventually help build it), you can reach out at: contact@shatteredbounds.com