Some locations—the wizard’s tower, the sunken temple, or the haunted house—have a well-trod presence in stories and adventures. In this series, we’ll explore the potential of these archetypal wizard’s tower, playing with or defying tropes, and presenting rules and ideas to bring them to life.
Wizard towers need magic items in them or it’s going to feel like failure to deliver on the premise. If not hoarder stashes of discarded magical bric-a-brac, there should at least be a cool cursed artifact somewhere.
To go beyond loot lists, however, let’s dig into the role of magical objects as part of a wizard’s tower as an adventure setting. The following adventure seeds play with common tropes and echo stories you probably know, but each is built around an item that hinges the story on it—and only in ways that matter because they’re in a wizard’s tower.
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Adventure Hook 1: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Wizard towers are often viewed as good places to stock up on magic items that they’ve either stashed or created. But who says every creation is a success? And maybe it’s not always a good thing they leave this stuff lying around.
Hook: The PCs receive a frantic plea for help from the apprentice of the wizard who lives in a tower at the edge of town. There’s a monster on the loose in the tower, and his master is out of town.
Plot: The apprentice made an ill-advised decision to throw a party while the master was away. Faced with a daunting afterparty clean-up (and a hangover), the apprentice dug out a magic item prototype his master deemed a failure: an ambulatory broom, able to move on its own, detect small, inorganic debris, and sweep it away. Convinced he could make it work, the apprentice set the broom to clean and took a nap.
He awakened later to find out why the broom was deemed a failure: It had no discretion between mundane dust and dirt and important dust and dirt… like the ink, gemstone dust, and chalk making up wards and binding circles keeping summoned creatures in place.
His master’s current project is a research tome on Fiends and a few “guests” were stewing in the upper floors in well-protected circles. Or theyused to be, anyway. The apprentice, trying to track down the broom, saw the first circle had been breached, and fled to the ground floor to get help. The tower has many defenses on it to disorient and block Fiends from escaping into the village, but only until the ambulatory broom erases them.
The PCs are tasked with dispatching any released Fiends and, maybe more importantly, tracking down the ambulatory broom before it does more damage.
Adventure Hook 2: The Tea Party
In a case of things not being as they seem when meddling with magical affairs, sometimes you find yourself not in a wizard’s tower… until you’re seeing it from another perspective.
Hook: A local witch (pointy hat optional) agrees to resolve a dispute or impart some information the PCs seek if they come to her home and make arrangements over tea.
Plot: The tea, of course, is enchanted. Whether because she’s antagonistic or a capricious possibly ally, the witch serves the PCs tea from her eternal teapot. The teapot keeps tea brewed in it hot and fresh indefinitely, but it also bestows magical effects on the drinker based on the leaves brewed in it.
The PCs unwittingly drink a polymorphing infusion which turns them into mice. The witch tells them she’ll agree to their terms . . . if they earn her cooperation by solving their predicament. She puts the teapot back on the stove and brews a new infusion, one which will reverse the transformation once imbibed. The PCs either have to get to it—challenging, in their current form—or wait out the effects. If the witch’s familiar lets them.
The witch leaves them in her cottage with her cat, Cheshire, who is more than he appears—he’s an intelligent grimalkin (see ) who can make himself invisible, and he chases and harries the PCs as they try and get to the eternal teapot or find hiding places. In their mousey forms, the PCs find the cottage more complicated to navigate, with multiple levels to ascend to reach the teapot and all kinds of traps and obstacles that were insignificant before their new perspective as rodents. (A metaphorical discussion on how sufficiently powerful magic-users view others? That’s for you to decide.)
Adventure Hook 3: The Funhouse
Finally, what about a wizard’s tower where the wizard isn’t even trying to keep anyone out? Come one, come all… at least until they find out the “fun” awaiting them.
Hook: A mysterious wizard with a traveling tower goes town to town, opening his doors for a carnival-like experience manned by his offbeat servants. Visitors can participate in fortune telling, games of chance, and unusual entertainments, but the main attraction is the Hall of Mirrors. The wizard never shows himself, but if someone reaches the top of the spiraling staircase in the Hall of Mirrors to meet him, they receive an audience and a reward. Allegedly, no challengers have yet succeeded due to the powerful disorientation caused by the mirrors.
The PCs meet someone who followed the tower from its last stop where her friend disappeared while attempting the Hall of Mirrors.
Plot: The “reward” for meeting the wizard isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. The wizard is a powerful mage, inventor, and scientist seeking innovative ways to expand his lifespan and transcend his current limits without resorting to states like lichdom. In recent years, he struck on a breakthrough: by incorporating parts harvested from exceptional people into his own body through magic and twisted alchemy, he’s able to both extend his longevity and enhance his capabilities.
Of course, truly exceptional people are rare, and he couldn’t very well empty villages one by one to find them without drawing attention. So, instead, he conceived of a process for promising victims to select themselves. The carnival guise made a useful cover, and the distorted mirrors lining the Hall of Mirrors are his testing gauntlet to sort wheat from chaff.
The distorted mirror reflects viewers as the clumsiest, most inept versions of themselves, seeing dozens of reflections of them and their friends falling, tripping, dropping things, and so on. While often amusing at first, disorientation kicks in after watching the reflections too long; victims who fail to resist the subtle influence do get clumsier, failing at simple tasks, and often have to turn back as the staircase ascent grows too difficult.
Those who persevere prove they have the strength of mind to resist the mirrors’ influence, or the strength of body to persist regardless. Either case suits the wizard’s purposes for them.
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