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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). 

Thank you very much!

Six is the minimum.

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).

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.

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.

Thanks!  Let me know how you like the adventure once you're able to play it!

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.

Thanks, I appreciate it!

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.

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.

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!

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.

Thanks!  Yes, there certainly could have been more added left 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.