Adventure Site Contest 2: Tower of the Necromancer

​Written by Riley
S&W, levels 1-2
It’s a wizard tower, duh.
  Hidden amongst a copse of trees atop a small cliff lies the tower of Santha of Nikoza, the Conjurer. Recently villagers have reported seeing undead and hearing strange moaning sounds.
  I don’t know if you’re like this, but from multiple conversations with other sandbox DMs, I know a lot are like this. We become map magpies, grabbing random little maps from everywhere, squirreling them away on phones or laptops to grab in emergencies, when lairs are sought or hideouts are discovered. In my maps folder, I have a subfolder labeled “spires” that’s just loaded with tower maps, they’re endlessly useful. Towers as fortifications, rocky spires as dragon lairs, towers as prisons…plenty of other uses, but far and above the most common tower is Ye Olde Wizard Tower. Thank you Riley, we need the classics.
  The story is…uh oh, we have us a Subversive Twist Tower. Evil necromancer? Actually neutral alchemist. Skeletons wandering around? Human mercenaries with their flesh turned invisible. Those moans? Captured blink dogs. Also because it’s a dude experimenting with blink dogs, there’s an ogre who’s a teleporting Quantum Ogre. Let he who hasn’t made that joke himself throw the first stone. The wizard is happy work with adventurers who are friendly, but everything being set up to look like an evil lair means you won’t normally start out with the talking, more likely it’ll be all murder after a series of unfortunate misunderstandings.
  I have mixed emotions about subversive “aha, tricked you” twists in adventures like this. On the one hand, there are already plenty of low-level necromancer towers in the world, so it makes sense to sake it up a bit. On the other hand, players often regard these as dirty tricks, getting annoyed with the subverter. On the gripping hand, this is OD&D level 1/2, so this is written to be, if not the first adventure, then at least one of the first few, so this sets the tone for an entire campaign. That’s…well, it’s going to be very group-and-DM-dependent, let me leave it at that.

​  The map is fairly simple, but lovely. Let me once again note that this isn’t an art competition, but I do want to highlight skilled map illustration where I see it. Something like this, clean, simple, and direct, is wonderful for the scale of “adventure site”, and the tower illustration is great for showing players “this is what you see”. Towers are interesting locations to set up, because by default they tend to be fairly linear going inside…which is why window locations should be carefully depicted to show enterprising PCs alternate ways inside. No player will ever enter via front door if they can help it. The caves beneath give alternate means of ingress, which is good, although missed opportunity to have a secret passage between 10 and 6B there. Still, loops are overrated and the size is perfect. 

  Non-beatstick threats are limited to an exploding glyph and awkward/dangerous traversals (climbing tower, squeezing into spider cave), but there’s a reasonable amount of danger for level 1. The random encounter down below in the caves is the aforementioned quantum ogre, while up in the tower the wizard and his “skeleton” mercenaries are the random encounter. Beyond the subversion trick, the mercs are skeleton-looking to possibly bait out a clerical turn attempt or two. Beyond that, it’s the low-level basics of a level 4 wizard, spiders, centipedes, and blink puppies, because why not force the players to feel like puppy-killing monsters, right? Got to make the newbies feel a little sweat for their payday.
  Said payday is a little sparse, even for a small level 1 site…2,847.3 golden pieces doesn’t go very far even then, although its nicely mixed up with some hidden, some flavorful, some scattered, that’s decent placement. Magic items are a mirror of mental scrying, a magic net, potions of skeletonization (makes you look like a skelly), and a +1 greatsword. Biggest miss is no hidden spellbook, c’mon, we’re robbing a wizard here and your Basic MU needs those spells. I’d boost the amounts a bit but I’m like the contents themselves.
  Placement in your campaign should be a breeze, really just depends on how trope-tolerant your players are. It’s a simple, charming little mage tower, sometimes that’s all we’re asking out of life.