The Tower in the Lake
Author: Matthew Lake
System: BX
Party Size: 4-7
Level Range: 3-5
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…
A water-obsessed wizard has built an elaborate tower in the middle of the lake that goes all the way to the bottom. There, he conducted arcane experiments to transform himself into a merfolk like his beloved—a "freshwater" mermaid named Adeline. Then he disappeared mysteriously. Now, twenty years later, only the top floor of his tower stands above the surface, while the submerged levels remain mostly air-filled. The place is leaking badly, however, and the lower level is flooded.
Some guidelines are provided for placing the site in a particular setting: A lake or wide river, or even off the coast "with minor adjustments to monsters needed." (The adventure site is in conflict with itself regarding appropriate setting, which I'll discuss as part of the Theme below.) A few hooks are also given, regarding the wizard's legendary caches of magic and treasure, and another about three local boys gone missing after visiting the tower on a dare.
There is a list of six rumors, three of which are true, two partially true, and one false. The three true rumors are specific and actually provide information about the site's background. That's good. The two partially-true rumors are more generic but do suggest some of the site's subtext. One of them is that the wizard's "victims haunt the tower." When taken with the three true rumors that depict the wizard as "envious" and trafficking in monsters and reprobates, a clearer picture emerges of the wizard as a villainous character. That's also good.
The second partially-true rumor reveals that the wizard "left to settle down with a nice girl," who the party can intuit later is the mermaid referenced throughout various dungeon details. This information can actually help the party overcome a certain dungeon trap. That's also good. I dig these rumors. The sixth rumor is false. While I'm not a fan of false rumors without proper attribution; that is, DM-provided background information which the party would have no logical reason to believe may not be true—in this case, the rumor is innocuous and probably won't come up during gameplay, so it's easy to ignore.
The author provides some useful guidelines for dealing with the flooded lower chambers, including swimming and fighting underwater, as BX contains no such rules. Then there are some specifics about the tower/dungeon environment, including that 100' of it is underwater and each floor has 20' (!) high ceilings. Then we get into the dungeon key, starting with the ruined top level that rises above the lake's surface.
Crossing the lake, the party arrives at a rickety pier; stairs climb to the top level of the tower, the "crumbling ruin." There are no set encounters here, though the party can variously encounter some wandering creatures (giant centipedes, giant toads, or an invisible stalker cleaning up the place). There is a staircase down, but also a deep shaft where another, now-collapsed stair once spiraled down to the lower levels. The shaft floor is "packed with the submerged wreckage of the rotted wooden stairs" (nice description), and rappelling down provides access to the tower's lower levels.
The intact stairs descend to the wizard's former living quarters, first opening into a "courtyard" with a fountain. (Courtyards, by definition, are open to the sky, so this is really just a chamber.) There's an aquarium stocked with "miniature sea life" and a model of a shipwreck. A treasure chest holds a key, but tiny sharks bite anyone trying to reach in for it. A pair of plate-armored suits guard the stairs down and animate as living iron statues if approached.
There is a room titled "False Library" that contains some comfy furniture and "[b]ookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes." The books are real, so I'm not sure why it is called "false." It's definitely a library. A series of guest rooms contain some valuables and giant centipedes, while the master bedroom holds a marble-statue of a mermaid engraved with the name, "Adeline." The back wall of his wardrobe is illusionary and conceals a secret ladder down to a second library.
The wizard's diary is also here, but written in a code that requires a Read Languages spell or days of careful study to reveal much of the caster's back story, including his romance with the mermaid and his final entry of "It's now or never..." I don't much care for gatekeeping frivolous information like this; just let the players spend time to read the book and gain important contextual details to the setting.
The invisible stalker from above is normally on this level, cleaning a nondescript hallway. He offers a few hints about navigating the dungeon, in the hopes that the party will inadvertently release him from his endless servitude. This could make for an interesting, ongoing interaction, but as we learn from earlier in the key, the stalker "will attack the party if it tries to leave with treasure," with no indication that he might try to parlay or warn them first (even if only to leverage their help in gaining release from its service).
I suppose it makes sense if this text is meant to supersede the earlier piece, but then that initial encounter description shouldn't have included the attack instructions. Instead, it should have referred the DM here to read the creature's actual motivations/order of battle.
There's a pit trap here, too, but I don't exactly understand a reference in the description: "Water pools inside the pit trap’s warped trapdoor (1-in-6 chance of activating)." (?) In any case, the pit opens into a sliding chute to a lower level. The pit trap here seems a little questionable until you take into consideration that it is protecting a direct route from a surface entrance to the wizard's private chamber that only the wizard would/should be using. A pit trap here is legit, but there should be some simple way to arm/disarm it (hidden button, lever, etc.) to allow for the wizard's passage, and to provide a bit of rewarding discovery/interactivity for the party.
The main staircase down from the top level continues down from the "courtyard" to the next lower level, the wizard's workshops. Signs of the tower's deteriorating condition are further evident here as "[b]lack basalt walls ooze water." Dark, cold, and wet. Cool. There's a gray ooze roaming around down here, along with unique monsters called "cauldron crabs." These are hermit crabs who hoisted a pot of potion brew onto their backs as a shell, and are now infused with the magical fluids. It gives each one a random potion power. Neat!
There's another pit trap here that is unkeyed and is given no description or details on this level. It is mentioned in a description of the area below it, but it's easy to miss if the DM isn't paying careful attention to the map.
There's a room with an ominous pentagram on the floor, in which two of the missing local boys huddle, terrified and under the mistaken belief that the circle is protecting them from an invisible cauldron crab wandering the level. They won't leave the circle, nor will they trust the party unless someone steps into the circle. This encounter can go badly any number of ways (at least with my group of "shoot first, sort it out later" group of players). The boys are running out of food though, so it'll be decision time soon.
A locked, "rust-streaked iron door" bears a powerful warding. A Magic Mouth appears and asks for a password ("Adeline" if the party has been paying attention), warning the party away if they give the wrong answer. "[S]ubsequent failures teleports the party to the Cells (Save vs Spells to resist)." Is there a range—what if some members of the party aren't near the door? The potential for multiple failures is indicated, so how many times can it do this? These are critical details to know because the cells are flooded, pitch-black, and contain a pair of wights! This is a likely death trap for someone.
Inside is the wizard's arcane library. If recovered, the collected materials can double a magic-user's speed of magical research, saving up to two-month's time. That's a nice bit of powerful treasure that a character can use throughout their career. There's also the wizard's first-level spellbook, perhaps written for an apprentice that never was, as well as a sheaf of 14 magic spell scrolls, six of which are Water Breathing (super handy here, if a bit enabling). A secret door on one shelf opens into a ladder up to the wizard's private chamber.
In another area is the wizard's potion workshop. Here, he perfected his transformative research, culminating in a unique magic item: A Polymerph Potion, which permanently (!) transforms the imbiber into mer-form (or vice-versa). The lab is crawling with a trio of cauldron crabs, but a huge cache of potions may be found here (including four Polymerph Potions). The key to the cache is found upstairs in the "courtyard" aquarium.
Finally, the chute pit trap from the floor above dumps victims into a powerful whirlpool that drags them under and eventually drowns them if they fail a save vs. paralysis, which they can make each round. Oddly, there are two different areas from which a character in the whirlpool can egress, but no method of pulling oneself out is given. Maybe it's meant to be automatic if you make the save, but the text makes absolutely no mention of it.
The next level down, the "Ground Floor," sits on the lake bed and is accessed via five routes: The whirlpool, the stair shaft from the top level, the continuation of the "courtyard" stairs, the unkeyed pit trap on the floor above, and a massive airlock chamber into the lake's hypolimnion (the smarty-pants way of saying "bottom").
Getting sucked down by the whirlpool traps the character at the bottom, 35' below. There's a door here that can be opened to release the water and escape the drowning hazard, though the rushing water carries them right into the path of a water elemental. Opening the door isn't automatic, however, as all doors in the dungeon are treated as "stuck," requiring a successful Open Doors check. No guidance is provided as to a penalty for kicking open a door while underwater.
Descending the stairs from the "courtyard" brings the party to a bio-lab, where the wizard's failed experiments in creating merfolk hybrids are kept in jars. The stair shaft comes to a room just outside the whirlpool room door. A rubble-filled passage can be cleared to circumnavigate the nearby water elemental.
The pit trap dumps the victims onto a termite-riddled wooden floor, causing them to continue falling through to the completely flooded level below. Anyone walking on the rotten floor may break through as well, plunging into the water. In the airlock, a series of levers controls the valves, allowing a character to exit out into the lake without flooding the rest of the tower. Evidence of the wizard's ultimate fate may be found inside the airlock as well.
At the center of the ground floor is a circular passage surrounding an inner chamber guarded by a patrolling water elemental. The chamber in the donut hole contains a "focus crystal" (a giant ruby worth 8,000 gpv) that modulates the water level inside the tower. Electricity cascades from the gem, and there is a dial with three settings that can either turn the crystal off, make it active (its current setting), or overload it, completely draining the flooded levels but destroying 25% of the gem's value. Turning it off (or accomplishing the same thing by removing the gem) dismisses both the invisible stalker and the elemental, but completely floods the entire tower in 20 rounds and causes it to collapse 10 rounds later.
Below the ground floor is the dungeon level, where patches of kelp obscure the halls. There are some dangerous creatures wandering around, including giant leeches, deadly sea snakes, water termites, and giant piranhas. Drunken nixies raiding the wizard's old wine cellar cavort merrily down here as well.
A pair of devious wights (is there any other kind?) are chained to the wall of one chamber, though it doesn't say how long the chains are, nor what the wights are capable of doing in response to the party. If they're basically pinned to the wall, the party can kill them at will, though they beg for release in exchange for information. Of course, if the party is stupid enough to fall for this ruse, the wights turn on them immediately and the characters get what they deserve.
Finally, the wizard's treasure vault is at the heart of the dungeon level, though a long tunnel from the lake bed emerges at the vault doors, which stand wide open. Not very secure. Inside is a mer-owlbear, an owl-headed orca (in a lake) that guards a fortune in silver. The mer-owlbear is a 6HD beast that can bite victims, savage them with its foreclaws, and slap them silly with its tail. Your party will be earning those 300 bars of silver (worth 12,000 gpv).
Monetary treasure is about 40,000 gpv, or 8,000 apiece for a party of 5—enough to take most BX classes from 4th to 5th level. Not bad. There's also no value provided for the books on magical research (which should be worth a small fortune to a magic-user if the party wanted to sell them) or the 1st-level spellbook which contains 8 spells (cost = 8,000 gpv). Magic items in consumable form are plentiful, with 20 potions and 14 scrolls, but the only permanent items here are a Ring of Water Walking and Boots of Speed.
And there we have it... a relatively tidy, well-constructed site that has a lot going on but stays pretty tight. Plenty of interesting things to do but never feeling bloated or leaving a lot of unanswered questions. It's not without a few issues which I'll get into below, but this one is a contender for the top spot.
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1) THEME
(How strong/consistent is the adventure's premise, flavor, and setting?)
This is where the adventure sort of shoots itself in the foot for me. Your frustration level may vary here depending on personal tolerance for things that don't make sense. What doesn't make sense is why the author chose to put this adventure in a lake at all. That one, seemingly minor decision creates a cascade of conflict with D&D's established "ecosystem" by forcing a freshwater peg into a seawater hole.
The obvious theme here is an underwater environment, reinforced multiple times in the text through names, descriptions, monster choices, and references. I'm a language nerd so I'm probably sensitive to the use of certain words, but almost everything in this dungeon is bent toward an oceanic location.
We'll start with the wizard's name: Thassalius. This seems to be a reference to the Greek root word thalass, which means "sea" (thalassophobia, for example, is the fear of the ocean). The suffix -ius is Latin and is added to a noun to form an adjective indicating "made of" or "belonging to" that noun (the Greek cognate is "-ios"). The word thalassius means "maritime" in Greek, indicating a connection with human activity at sea.
The wizard is described as being "always fascinated by the submarine world." The word submarine means "beneath the sea" (mare being Latin for "sea"). The proper word here would be sub-limnic ("beneath a lake") or simply limnic ("of a lake").
Throughout the key, there are other references to oceanic creatures that must be twisted into freshwater versions for no good reason: Freshwater mer-folk, freshwater nixies, freshwater orcas, etc. There is a type of freshwater kelp, but it is fern-like and not what we think of as "a bed of seaweed." The aquarium is said to be "stocked with miniaturized sea life" including sharks, and contains a model shipwreck on a coral reef (the ship could be The Edmund Fitzgerald, perhaps, but freshwater coral reefs do not exist).
Hermit crabs (or cauldron crabs) do not survive in fresh water. The wizard's failed experiments feature tentacles and lionfish spines (again, oceanic creatures and not freshwater). Sea snakes live where? The BX water termites come in a salt water version so that's okay. Piranha are freshwater fish, and nixies are described as living in rivers and lakes, so they are appropriate I suppose, but they could just as easily be sharks and mermen (to bring the back story full circle). Orcas are not freshwater mammals either.
Again, I may be way too pedantic here about all this, but the conflicting pieces really bothered me while reading it, mainly because I couldn't figure out why the author insisted on making this site in a lake. It's a self-own in the worst way. That said, it's all very fixable and doesn't impact the gameplay of the adventure. I'm purely up on a soapbox here, shouting at clouds.
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2) MAP AND ART
(How complex/useful is the map and/or art? How easy is it to grok the layout?)
The maps are hand-drawn but then laid out in editing software. Though the design is fairly compact, there are plenty of routes to take and the map makes good use of verticality to add to the site's complexity. Lots of interior details like furniture and other objects are indicated, and a legend makes identification of various elements quick and easy.
A profile illustration demonstrates how the levels stack and gives a good indication of each level's flooded state. A scale of 10' squares is also provided. All in all, an excellent presentation.
SCORE (MAP/ART) = 5 / 5
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3) CLARITY
(How easy is the writeup to read/parse quickly? How well does the information flow?)
The text is in two-column format, justified, with medium-width margins and plenty of line spacing between paragraphs and sections. Section titles are centered and bolded, in a larger, all-caps fonts. Important elements are bolded, while monsters and magic items are italicized. It's all well-written and clear. Except for the fact that book monsters do not include stat blocks, this write-up is just about perfect.
SCORE (CLARITY) = 5 / 5
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4) INTERACTIVITY/INNOVATION
(How well does the adventure use the rules to create interesting play?)
There is quite a bit of normal dungeoneering required here: climbing, finding secret doors and pit traps, and picking locks. Water-swollen doors are stuck shut, requiring kicking them in. There's an illusionary wall. A random water spray can extinguish torches.
There's an intuitive password to get through the teleporting door (which is itself a whole deadly ordeal). The interaction with the invisible stalker present lots of opportunities for misdirection and manipulation. The whirlpool is a difficult challenge, the airlock could inadvertently cause the party problems if they open the exterior door while standing inside, and tampering with the power source can set a dungeon-destroying process into motion.
All good, satisfying stuff.
SCORE (INTERACTIVITY) = 5 / 5
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5) MODULARITY
(How easy would it be to drop/integrate the adventure into an existing campaign?)
Setting aside the dissonant watery setting, this could easily be dropped into any coastal or lake region very easily. It's a self-contained location with a simple, personal story that won't require any sort of adjustment or modification to the DM's campaign to accommodate it. The only limiting factor is the requirement of a watery locale.
SCORE (MODULARITY) = 4 / 5
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6) USABILITY
(How much work will the referee have to do to run this adventure at the table tonight?)
If, like me, you don't want to use freshwater versions of sea creatures, you'll need to modify just a few elements. But if you don't care, or are willing to make those minor changes, this adventure site is 100% good to go.
SCORE (USABILITY) = 5 / 5
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7) OVERALL THOUGHTS
I love almost everything about this except for the weird lake/sea conflict. As adventure sites go, however, this one nails it. I'm definitely putting it in my "to-use" pile.
FINAL SCORE = 4.5 / 5
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