A tower-climbing story is web fiction in which the protagonist ascends a vast, tiered tower one floor at a time, where each level is a discrete trial that must be cleared to reach the next, and clearing floors raises the character's rank, power, and standing together. It sits inside progression fantasy and usually wears LitRPG machinery, and its defining engine is the ascent: the tower is a legible vertical ladder that turns each floor into a self-contained escalation. SIU's Korean webtoon Tower of God, serialized on Naver Webtoon since 2010, is the work most readers point to as the modern anchor of the genre.
What is a tower-climbing story, exactly?
A tower-climbing story is a story whose central structure is the ascent, where a protagonist enters an immense tiered tower and works their way up it floor by floor, each level a harder and more consequential trial than the one below, until the height they have reached and the strength they have gained have climbed together. The tower is not a backdrop in these books, it is the plot's spine, a stack of discrete tests arranged from survivable to nearly impossible that hands the author a ready-made escalation curve and hands the reader a map they can hold in their head, a floor number that means something the moment it is spoken. This is one of the load-bearing subgenres in the family laid out in our web fiction genres explainer, and it almost always wears the LitRPG apparatus, so you see the ranks earned, the new skills, and the floor cleared printed right there on the page. My feeling about tower climbers, having read a fair number of them, is that they endure for the same reason the best progression fantasy does, that they make advancement visible and directional, and the tower adds a thing the dungeon cannot: a sense that every floor is also a rung on a social ladder, that climbing is not only getting stronger but getting higher in a world that is watching.
That last part is what separates the tower from a plain vertical dungeon. In most tower-climbing stories the tower is an institution, a whole civilization of climbers and rankers and administrators arranged by how high they have gone, so the ascent is political and social as much as it is combat. Where you stand is literally how high you have climbed, and the floors are gatekept by tests that the tower itself, or the powers that run it, have designed to sort the worthy from the dead. The climb becomes a way of dramatizing status and ambition in the most concrete terms fiction allows, and I think that is a large part of why the form travels so well: everyone understands the pull of a tall structure with a prize at the top and a rule that you cannot skip a floor.
Where did the tower-climbing genre come from?
The modern web fiction tower climber crystallized around Tower of God, the Korean webtoon SIU began serializing on Naver Webtoon in 2010, which gave the category its runaway flagship. Its premise is the genre in miniature: a boy called Bam follows a girl named Rachel into a mysterious tower, learns that the tower administers a ranked test on every floor, and starts climbing, because those who reach the top are said to be granted whatever they most desire. The tower in that story is an entire cosmology, a society stratified by altitude and policed by a hierarchy of rankers, and the ascent doubles as a slow reveal of how the whole structure works and who really runs it. Tower of God became one of the most-read webtoons in the world and picked up an anime adaptation in 2020, and almost every English-language tower climber written since is in conversation with the shape it made legible.
But the tower as a narrative engine is far older than any webtoon, and the roots run out in every direction. The myth of the Tower of Babel is the archetype, a structure built to reach the heavens and the hubris that comes with it, and video games gave the trope its floor-by-floor grammar long before web fiction picked it up, from the endless procedural towers of roguelikes to named examples like Tartarus, the ever-shifting tower players climb at night in Persona 3 from 2006. Web fiction inherited both the mythic weight and the game structure, and the two fuse cleanly, because a tower is at once a symbol of ascent and a very practical way to arrange a hundred escalating encounters in a line. The Korean and Chinese web novel waves ran with it hardest, and the vertical-trial tower now sits alongside hunter-and-gate stories as one of the signature structures that scene exported to the rest of the world.
I should be honest that the label is loose at its edges, and readers file a lot of adjacent work under it. Solo Leveling by Chugong, serialized in the late 2010s, is usually called a hunter-and-gate story rather than a pure tower climb, since its dungeons open onto the modern world instead of stacking into a single spire, but its ranked ascent from the weakest hunter alive to the strongest sits so close to the tower feeling that many readers group them together anyway. My advice, if you are trying to decide whether a given book is a tower climber, is to ask whether the central structure is one vertical tiered thing that the protagonist rises through by clearing gated floors. If it is, you are looking at a tower climb, whatever else it also happens to be.
What makes a tower-climbing story work?
A tower-climbing story works when each floor is genuinely its own trial and the ascent genuinely costs something, because the failure mode of the genre is a staircase of identical fights with a bigger number painted on each landing. The strong examples treat every floor as a fresh design problem, so one level is a straight test of arms, the next is a social trap where you have to outmaneuver the other climbers instead of out-hit them, the one above that changes the rules of the tower itself and forces the protagonist to relearn what they thought they knew. Escalation is not repetition, and the difference is almost always variety of kind rather than degree, a new question on every floor rather than the same question at a higher volume. Tower of God is disciplined about this, giving whole floors their own tests, factions, and administrators, and that refusal to reuse the same trial is a large part of why the climb stays gripping thousands of panels in.
The other thing that separates a good climb from a grind is that the tower has to mean something beyond fighting, and the best tower stories load the ascent with a reason. Bam climbs to chase a person, and that human motive keeps the reader anchored through every mechanical test, because the floors are only interesting insofar as they stand between the protagonist and something they want badly. A tower with a prize nobody cares about is just a very tall to-do list. So the climbing structure wants a summit that matters, a wish or a truth or a person at the top, and it wants the floors to extract a real price on the way, injuries and losses and hard choices about which allies to carry up and which to leave behind. I think the genre's quiet strength is that the vertical structure makes sacrifice legible too: you can always see exactly how far the character has come and exactly how far is left, so every loss is measured against a visible remaining climb.
There is a bookkeeping problem hiding under all of this, and the long climbs feel it worst. By the time a tower serial is a hundred chapters deep the author is tracking the rules of every cleared floor, a ranking system readers will hold you to, a shifting cast of rival climbers and their allegiances, and a tower whose politics get more tangled with every level, and the fastest way to break a tower climber is to let a floor's rule or a ranker's power work one way early and another way late. This is the part I watch authors wrestle with most, and it is why the tools on IlorisNovel put a wiki, an @mention system, and a timeline next to the editor, so a floor's test, a faction's standing, and a rival's exact abilities stay findable three hundred chapters later instead of buried in a scratch file. Whatever you use to keep it straight, write the tower's rules down before you lean on them, because a tower climber lives or dies on whether readers trust that the ranks are real and the floors are fair.
Tower climb, dungeon crawl, and the neighbors
A tower-climbing story is defined by its direction and by what the structure stands for, and the cleanest way to see that is to set it beside its mirror image. In a dungeon crawler the protagonist descends into a dungeon and works downward through deadlier floors, and the space is usually a wilderness of monsters and loot to survive; in a tower climber the protagonist ascends and works upward through harder trials, and the tower is usually a ranked institution, a whole society of climbers you rise through by passing tests. Same stack of floors, opposite direction, and a different meaning attached to the structure itself, one a hostile depth you brave and the other a hierarchy you climb into. The pair is worth knowing before you tag your own work, because a reader who came for a tower of ranked social trials will feel misled by a pure monster-delve, and the reverse is just as true.
The climb also overlaps heavily with several neighbors, and most tower climbers are more than one thing at once. It sits squarely inside progression fantasy, since a tiered tower is a progression track by another name, and it crosses constantly with LitRPG, because the ranks and floors almost always come with a visible system, so you can read our explainer on what LitRPG is for the wider mechanical family. It brushes up against system apocalypse whenever a tower erupts into the modern world and forces humanity to climb or die, which is the hinge that lets a tower story and a hunter-and-gate story share so much DNA. None of these labels are exclusive, and a story can be a tower climb, a system apocalypse, and a LitRPG in the same breath without any of the three canceling the others out.
Tower climbers are one of the more distinctive corners of web fiction, and I think they stay compelling because the ascent is a structure that never stops generating stakes as long as there is a floor above and a prize at the summit. If you are drawn to write one, the on-ramp is simple enough: read Tower of God to see how much social and political weight the vertical structure can carry, decide early what waits at the top and why your protagonist would climb through anything to reach it, and then design your first ten floors as ten distinct trials before you write a word of your character stepping onto the first one. The floors are the story. Everything else is how your climber survives the trip up.
Common questions about tower-climbing stories
What is a tower-climbing story?
A tower-climbing story is a work of fiction whose central structure is the ascent of a huge, tiered tower, where the protagonist clears one floor to reach the next and grows stronger and higher-ranked as they rise. Each floor is usually a self-contained trial with its own rules, guardians, and reward, and the summit holds the ultimate prize the whole climb is aimed at. The genre sits inside progression fantasy and often carries LitRPG mechanics, so the reader sees the ranks, skills, and levels gained on the page.
Is Tower of God a tower-climbing story?
Yes, Tower of God is the defining tower-climbing story for most English-speaking readers. SIU's webtoon, serialized on Naver Webtoon since 2010, follows a boy named Bam who enters a mysterious tower to chase a girl who climbed ahead of him, and its whole architecture is the ascent: each floor is a ranked test administered by the tower itself, and reaching the top is said to grant your deepest wish. It popularized the vertical-trial structure that the wider genre now borrows.
What is the difference between a tower climb and a dungeon crawl?
The difference is direction and what the structure represents. A dungeon crawler descends into a dungeon and works downward through deadlier floors, and the space is usually a wilderness of monsters to survive. A tower climber ascends a tower and works upward through harder trials, and the tower is usually a ranked institution, a whole hierarchy of society and power that you rise through by clearing tests. Both convert a stack of floors into a progression track, but one goes down into danger and the other climbs up into status.
Are gate and hunter stories like Solo Leveling tower climbs?
They are close cousins rather than the same thing. Solo Leveling and the wider hunter-and-gate genre send their protagonists into dungeons and gates that open onto the modern world, which is closer to the dungeon-crawl shape than the pure vertical tower. That said, many hunter stories include tower or ranked-floor arcs, and the categories blur freely. A single serial can be a tower climb, a system apocalypse, and a LitRPG at once without any of the labels canceling out.
Do you need LitRPG mechanics to write a tower-climbing story?
No, but most modern ones use them because the tower and the stat block reinforce each other. A tower is already a ladder of ranks, so printing the floor number, the rank, and the skills gained makes the progression legible and satisfying. Plenty of tower stories run lighter, treating the climb as a mythic or psychological ascent rather than a numbers game. The load-bearing element is the tiered vertical structure, not the interface, and you can build a strong climb with almost no visible mechanics if the floors themselves escalate cleanly.
by Jacob Tam · August 18, 2026
I run IlorisNovel, a platform for web fiction writers. If you want to see what building a tower here feels like, you can try the editor with no account.