Greetings!

In my campaigns, I often include many mystical Wizard Towers. I have tables that determine a variety of strange and unusual features, as well as mystical properties and powers of the Wizard's Tower. Of course, besides the challenge of exploring and overtaking an enemy Wizard's Tower, there are a number of distinctive advantages and special treasures and rewards gained by a Wizard that can successfully seize control of such a Wizard's Tower. There are also often magical summoning chambers, weird laboratories, and cherished libraries that can be explored, mastered, and utilized. Such Wizard Towers definitely get Wizard player characters excited in my campaigns!

Do you create special details, properties, and rewards within such Wizard Towers in your campaigns?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK;1129240Greetings!

In my campaigns, I often include many mystical Wizard Towers. I have tables that determine a variety of strange and unusual features, as well as mystical properties and powers of the Wizard's Tower. Of course, besides the challenge of exploring and overtaking an enemy Wizard's Tower, there are a number of distinctive advantages and special treasures and rewards gained by a Wizard that can successfully seize control of such a Wizard's Tower. There are also often magical summoning chambers, weird laboratories, and cherished libraries that can be explored, mastered, and utilized. Such Wizard Towers definitely get Wizard player characters excited in my campaigns!

Do you create special details, properties, and rewards within such Wizard Towers in your campaigns?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Yeah, SHARK my childhood was filled with the stories of the Magic Wizard Towers of Dragonlance and there was the Dragon magazine with the steps for creating your own Wizard school.

Although to be completely honest, fitting everything into round Towers was always the most annoying part.

Quote from: Shasarak;1129242Yeah, SHARK my childhood was filled with the stories of the Magic Wizard Towers of Dragonlance and there was the Dragon magazine with the steps for creating your own Wizard school.

Although to be completely honest, fitting everything into round Towers was always the most annoying part.

Greetings!

Very interesting, Shasarak! Remember though, too, that the term "Tower" can be generalized. Actual "towers" can be square, or triangular, or pyramidal, *H* shaped, and more, besides, not just circular!

I also tend to think of a Wizard's Tower as embracing a number of connected smaller towers or buildings, as opposed to a singular structure. Of course, more than one, being a few or several, is one thing. If you were to keep adding additional towers and structures, it ceases being a "tower" and becomes a proper fortress. *Laughing* I think there is room there, though, for something between the two, being several towers or structures, nestled closely amidst the primary Wizard's Tower. Just some of my ideas, my friend!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Shasarak;1129242Yeah, SHARK my childhood was filled with the stories of the Magic Wizard Towers of Dragonlance and there was the Dragon magazine with the steps for creating your own Wizard school.

Although to be completely honest, fitting everything into round Towers was always the most annoying part.

Just make it bigger on the inside. They're wizards. They can do it.

Seriously though my most effective wizard tower dungeon was a cabin in the woods concealing a tesseract-shaped dungeon infested with killer statues, the late wizard's recalcitrant bat-monkey servitors, a fully stocked but poorly labelled alchemy lab, etc.

Quote from: Dan Vincze;1129256Just make it bigger on the inside. They're wizards. They can do it.

Seriously though my most effective wizard tower dungeon was a cabin in the woods concealing a tesseract-shaped dungeon infested with killer statues, the late wizard's recalcitrant bat-monkey servitors, a fully stocked but poorly labelled alchemy lab, etc.

This.  A tower is a built in reason to have:

1. More vertical elements to your "dungeon".
2. Weird stuff going on in said tower and dungeon underneath it.

It's especially fun when the tower doors lock behind the party and they need to find a way out.  Even more when the dungeon has a room where they let something out, that chases them around the tower until they do.  One of the few times in my games where I've seen "Hold Portal" used to maximum effect--prevented an almost sure TPK after a series of bad choices.  The survivors managed to find an upper window they could squeeze through, lowered a rope, fled into the woods, and never went back to that tower.

Don't forget that wizards being wizards, said tower does not necessarily need to conform to normal construction guidelines. Or for that matter, even normal geometry.

One of the best examples of a wizard's tower, despite it not being a tower in any traditional sense, is Roger Moore's version of Baba Yaga's Little Hut, in Dragon #83. It's set in an other-dimensional space, but can be construed as roughly mimicking a tower, with rooms or suites of rooms which are equivalent to small levels, except linked as the faces of a 4th dimensional tesseract instead of vertically. The rooms are fantastic -- a summoning room, a pit to the Abyss, a library, a giant throne room, a room for maids (diakks), a lake, and even a treasure room with a WW2-era tank (she's a world-hopping collector). Baba Yaga herself also makes a great recurring NPC -- evil, yes, but possibly amicable, respectful of purity, somewhat grandmotherly, and given to fair exchanges. The hut can be a place the PCs accidentally stumble across, a place to visit for important information (but at what cost?), a place to explore (she's not going to be that annoyed), and could potentially be a campaign-ending dungeon crawl (though that's kind of a waste).

In my settings wizard towers are a stereotype, but really there is only one reason that they build towers that doesn't apply to anyone else.

Nexus access.  Sometimes there is a point of energy that a wizard wants to get at to fuel enchantments or other magical workings and sometimes the damn things are up in the air.  Inconvenient as hell, that is.  Few academics actually want a building with a lot of stairs after all.

So they build a tower to wrap a chamber around it to harness all that energy.  Sometimes these energy points come in clusters and so they will build one tower to get at the main nexus and use that energy to build extensions to the others.

That gives me a good reason to both have those funky towers with implausible polyps branching off the sides and to have load bearing villains so the tower can blow up when the wizard dies and all the restraining enchantments unravel.

Another possibility, explored in A Game For Which I Am An Overly-Enthusiastic Fanboy *coughACKScough*, is that wizards' towers sit atop dungeons. Why dungeons? To attract monsters from which components can be harvested for use in magic research and magic item creation.

Quote from: SHARK;1129240Do you create special details, properties, and rewards within such Wizard Towers in your campaigns?

Yes, I usually do, much like the ones that you described. There are often things in the basements as well.

In my games, Wizards have Towers and Witches have Caves, for reasons ...

Quote from: RandyB;1129322Another possibility, explored in A Game For Which I Am An Overly-Enthusiastic Fanboy *coughACKScough*, is that wizards' towers sit atop dungeons. Why dungeons? To attract monsters from which components can be harvested for use in magic research and magic item creation.

"Carl, why did you build your base there."

"So I can get reagents easily!"

"... And you aren't worried about monsters eating your face while you sleep why?"

"BECAUSE I'M CARL THE MAGNIFICENT, YOU PEASANT!  NOTHING WOULD DARE!"

Quote from: Manic Modron;1129324"Carl, why did you build your base there."

"So I can get reagents easily!"

"... And you aren't worried about monsters eating your face while you sleep why?"

"BECAUSE I'M CARL THE MAGNIFICENT, YOU PEASANT!  NOTHING WOULD DARE!"

LOL!

Controlled entrances and exits? A wizard who can't keep his monsters in check gets what he deserves. As does one who can.

I thought that Wizards build their Towers on top of Dungeons because it was easier to get the fresh monster components?

Quote from: SHARK;1129240Do you create special details, properties, and rewards within such Wizard Towers in your campaigns?

Here is the throne of the Tower of Abjuration:

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It is a render of a 3d model series I had done and license out. I am working on a campaign right now that utilizes a special tower system.

While not exactly towers I do like Wizard lairs. One of my favorite 'Wizards' in animated fiction is Nox from Wakfu and what every wizard should strive for in my opinion.

A Portable (And teleportable) base of power? Check.
A Artifact of power? Check.
A personal army? Check.
Minions of many flavors (but all of his creation)? Check.
A army of mobile spies? Check.
A kickass visual style? Check.

So I like this sort of thing myself.

Currently I have a wizard tower deep underground inside of a massive lava cavern.