Adventure Site Contest - The Red Tower

A tower of unfulfilled promises

This entry is by illustrator Ferenc Fábián and author and map-maker Kristóf Morandini. It's a rough, mostly abandoned wizard's tower in a dead forest. Written for Swords and Wizardry characters of fifth level, though somewhat under-baked. Despite suffering from many of the usual weaknesses of Tower adventures, it is borne up by a few clever twists on the tower formula that keep it from being completely without merit. Let's dig in.

So the overview. An evil sorcerer out in the middle of the woods has killed off all the animals and trees in the area with his foul arcane experimentation. Having enough of this, an army marched from the north to drive the man out, resulting in the death of those involved and the disappearance of the sorcerer and most of his servants. The sorcerer's tower is left behind for the plundering, and the siege camps is now overrun with undead and a malfunctioning siege engine (the siege camp is not detailed beyond this). Good concept, with a high potential. But as I stated previously, this is more of a miss than a hit.

Several times in the course of this contest, I have went on record with the somewhat dubious opinion that tomb adventures are unfairly maligned. Keeping with the trend of contrarian takes, I believe that towers generally receive far more praise than they should. This entry is an example of my general problem with tower adventures, and of some ways to mitigate them. Let's look at the exterior description:

The Tower: The only entrance is a wide gate, without any door, protected only by a transparent magical field. Two big stone pillar stand in the two side of the gate, which are a little shake. If one is moved out of it’s place, the field is disappears (Open Doors role, with -1. Maximum three character may help.). From inside it’s permeable. 
The attacker’s catapult destroyed the second floor, at top of the gate. 
For one window on the second floor, a thorny, strong branch of wild rose goes. It can be climbed, but will hurt anybody with has uncovered skin (1d4 HP). 
Two hundred foot nord from the tower is a well. It is 10 foot deep, with 2 foot water at the bottom. Under the water, there is a passageway to the basement of the tower. After 10 feet, the passage ascent above the water.

Towers are boring structures. They are very defensible (on purpose) and generally only present one linear way of approaching them, both from the outside and then once a party is inside, they can only go up or down in a linear way. Now, it is clear from the exterior description that Kristóf has thought about this issue, and provided a few extra entrances for variety of approach. This is good, I particularly like the thorny roses that hurt anyone climbing them while wearing skimpy armor. The destroyed section of that second floor is good too, as it rewards a party who has a grappling hook or Fly while being just a neat piece of scenery for others. But once a party is inside, there are little surprises left in the map. The best towers provide interesting traversal despite the location, or failing that, provide a lot of interactivity in each room. That prevents the linearity of the map from becoming too much of a slog.

This module is lacking on the interactivity and unique map traversal. There are hints of interesting ideas, but many of them fail to deliver. This is where my I begin to think that the ideas were not fully baked. Two examples, the NPCs and the seige camp. First, the NPCs

:These guys are cool, and tell you everything you need to know about how they act and how to run them in a quick blurb. While unlikely to pose much of a problem for the party, there is gaming to be done here. However, "He has no information about the sorcerer's disappearance." is indicative of the entire tone. There are no hooks provided, which is fine. But any party worth their salt is going to be able to tell that this guy is not the real master of the tower and be interested in tracking him down after. Or perhaps they heard about the siege and are contracted to ensure the sorcerer's death. Either way, there is nothing here beyond some surface level role playing to be had. Speaking of the siege, what happened? Well, we don't really know. They only detail is that there is an automatic mechanical siege engine and some undead. Fine, there was not room to fully stat it, I get that. But I wish the siege engine interacted with the tower in some way. Maybe it's shooting at the tower in lieu of wandering encounters (none given, but the standard S&W tables work fine). Give the tower a time limit on standing from the barrage unless the party clear the engine. Forcing them to work fast to either loot or take out the engine. Something. This trend of surface interest with nothing to follow it up is very pervasive, the only interactable rooms are a single amphora which contains a gas trap, and an injured Dragon-newt in a basement pit. This is supposed to be the tower of an evil sorcerer powerful enough to repel an entire army and kill EVERY ANIMAL AND TREE IN A FOREST, but it reads more like the tower of my aunt with mild hoarding tendencies. It's too safe and dull.

Conclusion and minor points. Treasure is low at ~2500, but bolstered by a few magic items as befits a wizard tower. There are some minor information parsing issues, things that need to bolded, it would be nice to have both NPC schedules in their description, etc etc. But over all, I think this is an under baked idea of what could be a passable adventure. Not exactly glowing praise I know, but worse has been released. I wish luck to Kristóf and Ferenc and hope they continue honing their craft, as there are glimpses of a good idea here.

Sail On!
-ShockTohp