Adventure Site Contest 2: FA1: The Copper Circle

​Written by A. M. Jackson
AD&D, levels 1-2
Levitating wizard lab
  This construct was built by the once-great wizard Thenzur for magic-users to find his spell, which can only discovered through exploration. He is known for a spell that is on p. 68 of the PHB, which creates a “circular plane of null gravity.” He was known to carry every coin out of the dungeon; this structure is what he made from all the copper: a giant cylinder 200' wide and 60' high.
  There are two main flavors of “wizard adventure site”. The first, classic, is “wizard’s tower”, which we have already examined in one of its more fairytale standard incarnations. The second, only slightly less rare, is “weirdo puzzle lair”, and that is what Mr. Jackson has delivered to us with The Copper Circle. Levels 1-2, which, hey, newbies need adventure sites too, the adventure site is only a dozen keys but every entry is pretty complex.
  Our gonzo story here is motived by the question, “how do we house the must-be-discovered-in-play spell Floating Disk in an adventure site?” In this, the LEGALLY DISTINCT AND NOT AT ALL COPYRIGHTED Thenzur’s Soaring Circle is the primary spell focused on in a giant copper cylinder piloted by psionic pygmies that vrooms around as they search for their long-dead master. Go inside, bumble around looking at puzzles and interacting with low-level threats (and a few puckeringly high-level chats), leave having captured your MU’s much-needed spell scroll along with some gonzo friends made along the way. Or a slightly ambiguous feeling from murdering some neutral guys. I do really like the detail that this thing is made by the wizard with all the copper he’d taken out of every dungeon, nice touch.
  The map is given with both DM and VTT versions, not strictly needed but a very nice touch. For a very small location it’s got some nice variety and the fact that there are three ingress points gives some reasonably different approaches here. For a hovering magical cylinder one could wish for a little bit more verticality but there’s nothing wrong with the layout here. Looks cool too.
  As this is a little puzzle dungeon, there are of course lots of tricky little traps and interactive bits. There are several statues of the wizard guy that are missing arms/spellbook/etc, putting it all together unlocks a chest under each statue that contains the floating disk spell scroll and a little treat, alternately these chests can be opened by magic words, which are written in turn on a piece of paper that got ripped into scraps, so it’s recoverable. Other trap/tricks involve invisible floating disks, natch. None of the puzzles are single-solution, which is good, and some of the traps will absolutely murder careless PCs but all of them are well telegraphed. It’s fun. Moving the magical cylinder requires some complicated fixing and then 150lbs of organic matter, nice.

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​  Monsters are suitably gonzo for a hovering copper cylinder belonging to a high-level wizard. Psionic pygmies are weird and happy to talk, demonic manes are running amok in one of the rooms, a bronze dragon(!) hangs out in another room, cheerfully willing to commission the adventurers on a side quest. A bit more standard grey ooze and NPC thief fill out the roster, there’s potential for death here but nothing obscene. Just about right for a first level site.
  So the point of this adventure site is to give out a spell, but there’s enough cash on hand here to squelch any resentment out of the rest of the party. The big hoard that is the young bronze dragon’s travel purse probably won’t be taken. Intangible reward of the pygmies offering to give the PCs a lift to somewhere is a good idea. The module acknowledges that there’s a sticky question of what happens if the players take over the cylinder itself…a floating copper base that can travel 80mph is a very gamebreaking thing to hand out at level 1, but with a shrug and a head scratch the DM is told to just handle it.
  Insertion into a campaign world is a gonzo tolerance question. If there’s a high-magic AD&D “standard”, then I see zero reason not to put it in directly. Otherwise, it might want to be contained a little more carefully, as a portion of a bigger dungeon. Still nice to have a gonzo wizard lair handy and it’s a high-quality one. 

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