Need to fill an abandoned elven wizard's tower

[orangefruitbat]

Here's the background. In Cormyr, the PCs have tracked some raiding drow to a long lost elven portal. The drow have been recently displaced from the city of Maermydia (sp?), and as such, are low on resources and desparate.

The portal leads to an abandoned wizard's tower in Cormanthor. Here the PCs will find lots of dead (and undead) drow. I already know how the drow died as I'm begininng to foreshadow events in City of the Spider Queen.

My problem is filling the tower to make it interesting. I'm using the Tower of Sorcery map from WOTC's map-of-the-week archives from 2002. The party consists of 6 level 8/9 characters (there is no cleric, but one character has a mace of disruption). Currently I'm leaning towards the tower being filled with spectres, but if there are cooler elven undead, let me know.

The tower itself should have it's own defenses. The invading drow have taken out most of the glyphs and explosive runes, but there still might be other, more subtle dangers here.

Also, what sort of cool things would the 'good' elves have left behind when they abandoned this tower during the Retreat? Obviously they took their best stuff with them, but they must also have left a lot behind. In particular, I"m looking for items that provide a sense of wonder or a sense of loss.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I like to think common items or items too big of heavy to take with them. Wands would be an example of a common magical item that could have been dropped and missed, but also rings or other small objects. To perform wonder, animated items, continuous light spells on a obect that always moves to shine its light on someone - spotlight, this could also be done to make escalators.

 

[Mimdalf]

The tower could have been enspelled by an elven version of the old guards and wards spell only instead of creapy things to thwart explorers the tower would posess unexplained breeze with the scent of the forest, and stairs choked with vines instead of webs etc.

 

[Gregor]

There are those Cormanthor Elven Blades in Magic of Faerun, +1 Keen Longswords that were crafted for some of the elf nobles in the Court. Maybe have the long lost owner of the tower be an elven bladesinger who left his sword behind. Or maybe put an Elven Moonblade in there somewhere? Plenty of fine art objects such as woven carpets, tapestries, goblets etc, things which could not be taken with them in the rapid retreat.

Cheers,