Adventure Site Contest 2: The Tower in the Lake

Written by Matthew Lake
B/X, levels 3-5
Sunken wizard tower
  From the surface it’s just a crumbling ruin. But beneath the waves lies the arcane lair of the great wizard Thassalius. Can you unlock the wizard’s fabled library? Dare you plunder his flooded treasure vault? Will you prove yourself against his mutated creations? There’s only one way to find out...
  Wizard towers crop up often enough to feel trite, as discussed before. While I’ll defend the use of tropes to my dying day, there’s also something nice about shaking them up, varying things a bit. How about a wizard tower…underwater? Mr. Lake here embraces nominative determinism and places this tower in a lake, introducing with a lovely old painting on the cover page, sprinkled with illustrations from one of his players. As always this is not an art contest but Tommi Mason (@thefaunaartist) does an excellent job here with the marginalia. I don’t often comment about writing style but I dig the occasional wry observation sprinkled throughout in this one.
  In the end this is a love story. Wizard falls in love with a mermaid. Sinks his tower and obsessively dedicates his entire life to being able to be with her. Eventually figures out how to turn himself into a merdude, leaves it all behind, and we are hopeful that it ends happily ever after. His tower is left behind and now you get to loot it with three to six of your very best friends. Why has it been unmolested for the past three decades? No idea, but hey, its starting to flood now…
  As a note this has rules for swimming, wading, and underwater combat. I’m not a Basic expert, so I have no idea how these stack up against the 3,210,563,558 other Underwater Combat Rules made for B/X and its many degenerate clones. Seem reasonable though.
  The map is excellent. Not only do we have the “tackle this by climbing outside” solution to the Tower Problem, complicated by swimming, but there’s also a main set of stairs, a shaft, a whirlpool, and a pit trap for up/down, meaning this place has a lot of exploratory options. A dizzying amount of options, thank goodness for the side view cutaway and good clean linework to make it all clear. Not a lot is secret, but good mapping will at least hint on a few key ones. For the scale (which with 22 keys is about top for the ideal size), it’s darned near perfect. 

I want to hug him.

  All of that feeds into the environmental effects and challenge. A lower water spell, failing, keeps the tower mostly dry but of course that’s something that can be broken by enterprising players. I’m a little unclear how the airlock is supposed to work but everything else is just great. A magic gizmo can lower the water level for a few turns, or else be removed to flood the whole tower. Hazards are mostly falling and drowning, with a few very nasty curves through here and there…how do you feel about a trap that teleports half your party underwater in reach of wights?
  Great variety of monsters packed into this tower, mostly book monsters (like those nasty wights in the flooded dungeon) but with a couple tasteful new monsters (illustrated, woot) like the cauldron crabs (giant hermit crabs wearing cauldrons) and the mer-owlbear. I love the mer-owlbear and I wish to subscribe to his newsletter. He’s also the “boss” of the tower, fwiw. There are also some NPCs for interaction, a luckless rival adventurer party and an invisible stalker pressed into service as a janitor. The only criticism I have for the monsters is that it’s a little dense in here, I’d want a little more spacing between contacts personally, going to be a little bit of a slog despite all the work on good interactive bits too.
  Treasure is nicely varied and tends towards “hard to extract”. Actually, in a mean move, the one high-value (8k) easy-to-carry treasure piece is the crystal that floods the whole tower, so how’s that for a kick in the jimmies. The treasure room has bars and bars of silver with a wry comment about the wizard’s love of the silver standard. Nasty merfolk mutant corpses valuable as freak show attractions, there’s creativity here. Magic items are book standard but good, and the spellbook and scrolls here will make your party’s own wizard very happy. My own preference would have been to have a little more of the treasure “forward” in the top two levels, but that’s a mild quibble.
  My mind struggles to think of a D&D world where this wouldn’t work. Wizards’ towers are the bread and butter of your low-level delves, and lakes and seas are everywhere. It’s not so high magic as to be gonzo, just works for almost any D&D campaign.

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