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Interesting that the shadows here are quite literal :D
Neat mechanic with the bedroom doors! Overall, moving through the tower feels somewhat magical and disorienting, like a wizard’s tower should be. I do think it ends up a bit too linear, and maybe a couple of other options on how to traverse the space could enhance the experience and bring a bit more disorientation. I guess the only nonlinear way of traversal would be if players decide to climb a window and end up skipping the first few floors directly to 3X, but not sure if this is intended or an oversight.
Thank you!
I think if I were running this and the players attempted to climb the tower, I would let them. If it were after dark, I would roll to see if the the shadows notice them, and if so, they'd attempt to bring them into the tower (likely into room 4 to be tied up by the void spider).
Solid, very playable adventure!
Thank you very much!
Solid premise with a couple of neat ideas that could really shine with a bit more interactive detail. Understandably towers are tricky to do because they tend to be very linear.
I felt the first room was an unused opportunity as it’s completely barren besides the secret door, which is so strongly telegraphed by the lone chair, it’s not really a secret at all IMO. This would have been a great spot for an interactive element, like possibly a basic puzzle to locate the door (choose/sit on the right chair, with the incorrect choice having consequence); provide an additional clue like a faint hand print or bloodstain, etc. Something that would make the PCs interact and investigate rather than take the initial scene entirely at face value. Even adding a simple detail like a tapestry or mural about the archmage help make an empty room much more interesting. :)
Thank you. I appreciate the feedback.
I wanted the first room to be somewhat easy, but I think in making it easy, I left it boring.
After traveling across the gulch, he characters have just had at up to 6 encounters, some potentially deadly, and if they're running late, up to 4 shadows are heading right for them. I wanted to make a space where they could catch their breath, but I also wanted it to be completely mundane as a contrast to what they see in the rest of the tower.
If I ever revisit this, I'll definitely add some more to the first room.
Understandable though I feel I must point out that technically by the wording they may encounter up to 7 or 8 encounters! (Even though the tower is 6 miles away “if mounted, the party should arrive within seven hours. If walking, it should take eight hours.” and that you should roll on the desert encounter table every hour of travel.
a) I think that’s far too many encounters; even upwards of 6 is too many in a row, even if they’re not all combat, but since they’re all random you have no control over if they are. My suggestion: Roll for an encounter check on a d6 each hour. If that was the intention no worries.
b) I also think the discrepancy between walking and mounted should be greater than an hour. Mounts usually cut the walking travel time in half, otherwise the cost of them wouldn’t be worth the modicum of savings in travel time.
Sorry, I’m not trying to nitpick, I just want to provide constructive feedback. There’s good stuff here, let’s just polish up the rest. :)
You're right about the encounters; I was misremembering what I'd written vs. what the rulebook suggests. Six is the minimum. I don't know your experience level with Shadowdark, but none of the encounters on the random table require combat, though they can often lead that way. I'll confess that I was running out of time (and thought I was running out of space) when I tossed my mostly complete list of bespoke encounters, descriptions, and rules for the gulch section and compressed it down to use the table included in the rule book. As I type that now, it's obvious that by "glossing over" the gulch, I zeroed-in on the destination when travel through the gulch in my assigned title might have worked better as the main focus.
Walking will take more than one hour extra, however, the seventh hour encounter is prescribed (and not a random roll) as it matches up with the timing of sunset and the emergence of the shadows; I should have made it a little more clear that you'd still be walking after the seventh hour. Going by the rulebook, one Arduous six-mile hex should take eight hours on foot; with no encounters, horses (or other mounts) probably would make it in four. My original custom encounters included a fair number that would attack the horses directly (e.g., gopher holes and worse, leading to a party traveling only as fast as its slowest member) and rules for adding time to the clock if you spent too long dealing with an encounter. Lose one horse, and you're definitely not making it before nightfall. Tarry too long with an encounter, and you'd lose an hour. As I said before, I tossed it all because I was out of time and I didn't like how punitive and convoluted the whole gulch travel system was getting.
Please don't take these explanations as me being defensive; I genuinely appreciate you taking your time to give me feedback. Typing all of my thoughts out is helping me see even more rough edges that should have been sanded off. Thanks for being a sounding-board.
Scratch that, the minimum would be however many hours you'd traveled. If you were mounted and ignoring / running from any of the encounters you saw, mounts might make it as few as four hours (and four encounters).
Yes, whether the encounter leads to combat can vary and but in my mind if its randomly generated with the whims of the PCs and the Reaction Die I still treat it as potential combat; plus I wasn’t opposed to them on the ground of too many combat encounters, just too many encounters in general occurring each exact hour.
Yeah the Gulch does lack description on what makes it arduous terrain, particularly since it as you pointed out is titular! It would’ve been great to see what you wrote for it, perhaps an expansion later?
When I was looking at the Shadowdark corebook and considering overland travel I was considering the gulch as difficult terrain (which multiplies the time by 2) chiefly because arduous would make it a flat 8 hours regardless of walking or mounted, which I take as reserved specifically for travelling through mountainous terrain.
I think the shadow encounter should be described as occurring at sunset instead of during a specific numbered hour, that way it accounts for PCs who set off on their journey early/late, encounter time, and/or pausing to rest along the way.
A cool thing indeed, with a lot of good ideas alla around. Maybe wording and graphic can still improve, but that's just a grognard not liking shadowdark so let me be. Will play!
Thanks! Let me know how you like the adventure once you're able to play it!
A journey up Gulch to a captive wizard's tower! Your cover strikes a chord with mine, haha.
A few favorite things:
"Room connections are worded to be slightly disorienting." This didn't really come across as particularly disorienting, but why should it, haha? Really runnable and fun adventure! Great submission!
Thank you!
I added that line about room orientations because I specifically shied away from using cardinal directions and if you were to map out the rooms / floors as a stack, they would not line up into a vertical tower. For those who map carefully while playing, that spatial weirdness could get pretty disorienting and I wanted to make sure that the GM knew it was a purposeful decision.
Ah, that would definitely come up for mappers!
A cool little adventure.
Thanks, I appreciate it!
Maybe I’m lured by the “Gulch” in the title, but I somehow see a sword&revolver setting for this, like the Dark Tower series.
Something about riding that damn Gulch towards the tower and one-shooting the first shadow before entering makes quite a nice picture.
The tower itself is brilliant in its out-of-bounds madness. I like the ups and downs in danger level (which the players wouldn’t know).
I love myself a nice wizard’s tower and this one is very nice. (It got two wizard’s!)
I'm with you on that; I had the hardest time getting myself away from a weird west setting.
I decided to forgo the weird west because none of the authors or books listed in Appendix N (at least, the original one) were westerns (weird or otherwise). Howard wrote one, but he was specifically listed for his Conan books, and I did not want to veer too far from the list. Maybe I should have taken more liberty with the theme, but I was trying to stay true to the spirit of the jam. I decided a Conan-style mad dash to save someone (or someones) would have to suffice.
I'm glad the strangeness of the tower came through. Merely playing with the sizes and (relative) positions of the floors almost seemed like a cop out, but I think in some ways the understatedness of it makes it work better than it otherwise would. Releasing a trapped wizard to help fight a necromancer is also a direct nod to Howard's work.
The cover is great, and the text is clear and has room to breathe. I appreciate the references to the rules page numbers when relevant. There's a lot of room left on the map page. I wonder if it there could be a bit more added here? Overall, nice job!
Thanks! Yes, there certainly could have been more
addedleft in. My initial writing pass was much longer, and I was afraid it wouldn't fit once I laid it out, so I edited. And edited. And edited. I chose a small font and size... and had a page and a half to spare.First praises are for the clear writing, formatting, and layout. The color palette and sparing use of collage art works very well with just a little.
The "What's in the Room?" table had me smiling as it reminds us that the apprentices inside are just living their lives!
A couple of the rooms, namely 5B have a lot going on and therefore a lot of bullets to explain, some of them not necessarily listed depending on importance. There might be some room to edit here, although at times the room text is written to be read from what I understand.
As a fellow Wizard's Tower entrant this year I applaud your efforts! I particularly enjoy the sentient sword as there are not enough of those in modern ttrpg material!
Thank you very much! Yes, my initial pass at the room descriptions tended to be "reversed"; I left the most important / actionable thing for the end, as a sort of "cinematic" flourish. The bullets are in the order that the bold words appear in the description, and thus also bury the lede.
You're also right that I intended for most of the text to be read or, in the case of the bullets, read by the GM when the players asked. I used italics to indicate what should be kept secret. I, of course, also intended to go back mention all of this at the beginning of the document, but I ran out of time.
Heya,
I'm working on organizing a collaboration between all of the Shadowdark creators from Appx. N Jam. If you're interested find me on the SD Discord or msg on bsky.
I like the table of outcomes based on what happens during the adventure. The What's in the Room table is a clever way to ensure a consistent adventure length. I appreciated the sketched maps as well. Solid effort!
I appreciate a "What happens now?" section for small 'drop-ins' like this so it can be linked into a larger campaign or gives your players a thread to pull on, if they so choose.
For the rooms table, I thought I'd try a "mini depth-crawl" to keep the adventure from getting bogged down while still giving me the descriptive room to make a wizard's tower seem bizarre and 'not-of-this-world'. I worry a little that rolling the extremes (a 1, followed by a 4) makes this floor pretty boring, though. I'll have to make some adjustments to account for those probabilities the next time I try something like that.
Thanks!
Nice wizards tower with multiple factions that feel plausible, instead of some stuff that sticks separate groups in a small space with no explanation. I think this is a really good job scoping out the right amount of stuff for the space available so there’s plenty here but isn’t under developed or full of too many ideas. Really like the cover colors too.
Thank you!
This was at least the fourth concept I had for the title I was given, and at least two of the ones I passed on were full of way too much. I even scrapped one after having fully written it out and drawn better maps than what I was able to pull together for this.