Monday, February 11, 2019

D20x5 Wondrous Wizard Towers

Love me a good tower.




List-maker as per usual: https://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

You need to be in the post to use this one too now for some reason, blame it on the nerds.

D20 This tower is:
1 More of a tall, narrow ziggurat.
2 Built like a train standing on its caboose.
3 An enormous icicle maintained by weeping, freezing-tongues goats.
4 A tree bound bonsai-like and enchanted to grow ever-upwards.
5 A smooth and gleaming silver cylinder.
6 An obsidian obelisk that bleeds from minute cracks.
7 The spine of some hunchbacked behemoth.
8 The severed and hollowed-out hand of a giant reaching for the noontide sun.
9 A burrowing worm breaching up from the earth, petrified at its apex.
10 An arrow from a titanic war, plunged headfirst into the earth.
11 A geyser frozen at the moment of eruption.
12 A fang of the world-serpent, tunnelled through with cavities.
13 Its builder’s own walking stick, magically enlarged.
14 A tower-sized viral invader of the world from astral realms lobotomized by the wizard who called it home.
15 A bacterial stalagmite formed by silicon-based microorganisms cultivated by its builder.
16 Its builder’s mentor, transmuted into a massive sculpture-palace.
17 Only the insignificant upwards outgrowth of a vast underground complex, like a mushroom is from a hyphaeic network.
18 The cyclopean pillar of an otherwise lost and ruined construction.
19 A spiral staircase twisting up to the clouds, leading nowhere.
20 A narrow volcano fermenting a belly of acid.
D20 This tower was used:
1 Like a tuning fork for the vibrations of reality, to aid in altering the songs of the superstrings to the wizard’s liking.
2 To impale and snarl the leylines passing beneath so that the wizard could draw on them for power and send spells into the wider world through them.
3 To elevate the wizard away from worldly temptations.
4 As a spiritual successor to the Tower of Babel, and so to act as the occult foundation to yet greater hubris.
5 As an enormous wand to contain tremendous spells.
6 As a stake to pierce the barrier between this world and others.
7 As a craft to carry the wizard to the stars.
8 As a tomb that would allow the wizard to bear their full magical might into the afterlife.
9 As a combined library and analytical machine that would process all the magical writings the wizard collected and derive a way to automate the spell research process.
10 As a place to host bacchanals for the wizard and all their unearthly companions.
11 As a microcosmic model of the wizard’s ideal world, suitable for expansion into the rest of reality.
12 As a prison for the wizard’s alternate selves they captured and tortured for knowledge and amusement.
13 To provide a magically-enhanced view of the sunset.
14 As an antenna to pick up strange stellar signals.
15 As a decoy vault for its builder’s less precious treasures.
16 As a place its builder could relive the best times of their life and rewrite the bad through illusions and fantasies.
17 To avoid contact with the earth, a taboo they acquired from dealings with chthonic spirits.
18 As the central point of a wizard-fortress that was never finished.
19 To shame wizards with less impressive real estate.
20 To assuage the wizard’s phallic obsession.
D20 This tower is inhabited by:
1 The wizard who built it, fused into the foundations of the tower itself in their quest for longevity.
2 The apprentice of the wizard who built it, trapped by the mechanisms and protections they had only the scarcest grasp of.
3 The intelligent experiments of the wizard, believing themselves to be a chosen people saved from the depravity of the outside world.
4 The bestial experiments of the wizard, now using the tower as a nest while they range further and further for prey.
5 A squad of inquisitors evaluating the wizard’s writings and prepping the whole thing for demolition.
6 Backwards beings that slipped in through a magic mirror.
7 A posse of outlaws who are starting to think the many dangers of the tower aren’t worth the protection they provide from the law.
8 Dinosaur-ghouls that have been devouring the dead since the last great meteor fell.
9 Increasingly erratic golems unable to understand that their master is gone, desperate for valid new orders.
10 Several undead pieces of the wizard who built the tower, each independent and believing themself to be the only legitimate continuation of their living self.
11 A cult which venerates its builder as a demigod, and maintains the tower while waiting for their reincarnation to return.
12 The familiar of the wizard who built it, grown gargantuan and gluttonous since their disappearance.
13 The wizard who built it, though they don’t even remember that they did since their brain has been scrambled by demonic parasites.
14 The manifested dreams and nightmares of the wizard who built it, spawned from their inverted skull.
15 The mob that killed the wizard who built it, each member now possessed by a maddened fragment of the wizard’s soul.
16 An archon of the outer spheres repossessing the wizard’s stuff (and anything/anyone else it finds in the tower) to collect on a debt they owed.
17 Impossible aberrations whose very presence warps reality around them.
18 Civilized rats who’ve claimed it as their kingdom with their man-sized war puppets.
19 Octarine oozes glutting and proliferating on the enchantments.
20 An entire overgrown garden of alraunes, barometzes, and other magical plants.
D20 This tower has claimed the life/lives of:
1 Some hunters who sought shelter from a storm. Their families are going hungry without them.
2 Orphans pressed to pay for their lodgings by raiding dark places.
3 A firebrand priest who thought to preach the evil out of it.
4 A rival of the wizard who called it home, hoping to gloat their victory through longer living.
5 A historian of the occult and their entourage.
6 An elite scion and prospect for an equally elite warrior society, put up to accomplish a feat of daring.
7 A cursed peasant who sought to petition the wizard within for a boon.
8 Some tax collectors tasked with tallying the wizard’s estate.
9 A very lost pet dog.
10 An artist facing inspirational constipation who wished to use the tower as a retreat.
11 Desperate debt-ridden mercenaries willing to face morbidity and mutilation for some quick coin.
12 Sleepwalkers entranced by one of its builder’s spells.
13 Some reckless children who entered on a dare.
14 An acolyte who thought it a sanctum of their demon-god.
15 Peasant-rebels seeking a weapon to better press their demands.
16 A wealthy, overly daring tourist and their travelling harem.
17 An oracle who sought to deliver a vital portent.
18 Ignorant and unprepared looters.
19 An estranged relative of the wizard who built it seeking to rekindle their connection.
20 An infamously opportunistic treasure hunter. Many are happy to see them gone.
D20 This tower can be found:
1 Atop a hill riddled with dolmens like a teratoma is with teeth.
2 In a sea-cave gargling the tide, open wide as a whale’s mouth.
3 On the frigate-thick outstretched finger of a giant banyan.
4 Protruding nervously above the edge of a ravine.
5 On an island shrouded by mist, at the middle of a lake that’s freezing cold regardless of the season.
6 In the midst of a hamlet that seems to have been abandoned a moment ago.
7 Slopped with bog-peat, veiled by midge-swarms.
8 Walled off by stones stacked by the hands of itinerant shepherds.
9 In an overgrown garden with glass shards mixed in its humus from the shattered walls of its greenhouse.
10 At the center of a dust-dry canal network carved through gravelly scrubland.
11 At the center of a fairy-ring of shivering mushrooms. Their spores were the first line of the tower’s defense.
12 Riding a glacier down ocean currents.
13 Only while the moon shines down from its highest point in the night.
14 In the foothills (shaped like actual feet) of a mountain shaped like a man.
15 In a dusty hall within the crypt of its builder.
16 Halfway sunk into an improbable lagoon.
17 In a desiccated desert of sun-smote salt.
18 In a place that’s always twilight.
19 Veiled from common sight near a bustling hub of civilization.
20 On the cusp of a slow stone vortex.

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