Tower shopping! For the wizard who has everything...

[sckeener]

You honestly might want to check out the 3.0 Stronghold Builder's Guidebook. It might help to answer a lot of these questions. It also includes wondrous architecture and magic siege engines to help you defend your tower, too.

I'd also like to toss in Covenants. I mean if you are looking for classical wizardly stuff...Ars Magica is the resource to tap:

Covenants

As there are four seasons in a year, there are four seasons in the life of a covenant ...

This supplement, published in 1990 by Lion Rampant, was the original guide to creating covenants for Ars Magica under the game's 2nd Edition, and has been long out of print. Besides including rules for creating the covenant, "the central character in your saga," this book included four extraordinary examples of Ars Magica covenants, one for each season:

* Lariander: Located in the middle of a bizarre faerie forest, this Spring covenant is on the brink of total chaos. The grogs are slothful, the companions decadent, and the magi inexperienced.
* Bellaquin: A Summer covenant, it actually rules an entire fiefdom and deals extensively with the medieval nobility. It is the home of minstrels, sages, and all too much intrigue.
* Doissetep: This sinister covenant is infamous among magi, and only partly because it has the largest library in Christendom. An Autumn covenant, its enormous mountain fastness in the Pyrenees is nearly impenetrable.
* Val-negra: This Winter covenant is a place so strange, that it is slowly drifting away from the normal flow of time. Most magi think it was destroyed long ago; it may have been better if it was.

Authors: Mark Rein*Hagen
Stock Number: AG1010 | No ISBN | MSRP: Unknown
Format: 66 pages, 8.5" x 11", perfect bound
Release Date: 1990
OUT OF PRINT​

 

[Shayuri]

Can you obtain the Genesis spell? A scroll of it is just 33,000-odd gp.

This gives you a smallish demiplane, which slowly begins to grow. The terrain of it is chosen by you, and is gradually revealed as it grows. Anything living has to be imported, of course.

The demiplane comes with a single permanant 'gate,' that can be anchored to the Material plane.

NOW

My favorite epic mage created a nice demiplane where it was always sunny and warm, and built a comfy house there. The other end of the gate led to a little shack on the Material Plane...a dilapidated old thing that looked like an old abandoned hunter's shelter. Until you looked through Detect Magic...and beat the Magic Aura spells that dampened out its auras.

The shack -glowed- with abjurations and divinations and stuff. Alarms and wizard locks and wards aplenty. In fact, there were liberally scattered warning spells all through the area around it, so intruders could be "tracked" as they approached it.

If you know some druids, have them head on over to cast Liveoak once a month, or shell out to make it Permanant.

Even so, its primary defense was its apparent dullness. The grand tower was safely tucked away in the Deep Ethereal...accessible only by the gate, or by a Gate spell (or Planeshift, if you can somehow find the tuning fork for a baby demiplane).

 

[Andre]

I suppose if you were really smart, you'd make a big show of building the tower in a well known location, stocking it with nasties and traps and then find some place secluded to actually live.

This one gets my vote. Heck, build the tower near a small, pleasant town, then buy a local tavern and tell tall tales of the nearby "mad wizard" who consorts with demons and such. Or get yourself elected mayor. Or just sit outside the barber shop whittling. Lots of good things to do when folks don't know who you really are.

 

[Griffith Dragonlake]

Obligatory Python quote:

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

 

[Sigurd]

You sort of have the spiderman problem. With great power comes great responsibility - unless your're selfish evil.


Its fine to choose your allies but practically you probably need some. I've always been partial to stable otherworldly allies who might not actually need you too much. Sort of like Bilbo going to live with the elves.

In protected seclusion you... Teach a class. Train an apprentice or three to do the real jobs and have your evenings off. If you're really powerful people will find you unless you go to extraordinary lengths to conceal yourself. If you are truly alone that will get boring or dangerous real soon.

Best to advise someone who's strong and organized enough to keep crowds from your door. Its a working retirement but you know its probably the most secure and peaceful.

If you're selfish evil then you don't want to retire. Now at the height of your powers you want to experiament in a grand fashion and destroy whole villages in the process. You 'retire' to the head of a powerful cause exploiting, enslaving, and enriching. How does the suffering matter next to your immortality?

Sigurd.

 

[Serienna]

Retiring!? Who said anything about retiring? She's trying to minimize the collateral damage from all the reprisals! It may seem easy being a famed heroine but not so much when you're persona non grata in almost everywhere thats heard of you due to a reputation of harboring villages getting squished. Let alone over the course of the campaign just about every kingdom has been razed and/or changed hands. There isn't alot of real estate security here. If the king himself can't be kept safe, leaving the artifact in the safekeeping of the royal vaults isn't particularly effective. If any of you have played City of Heroes, Azuria, is all you need to know.
Kings have a bad habit of succumbing to evil artifacts anyway.
They also don't have much patience for angry great wyrms roosting on their castles to hold their cities hostage because of something the archmage's rogue companion may have pilfered...

That is not to say they want to abandon the resources of the skileld men and women who serve them, but just have them at a somewhat safe distance.

_______
Addressing Genesis:
If this were any vanilla campaign I would have gone that route immediately . Unfortunately the cosmology we have has planes but not exactly. Only the five elemental planes (for some reason wood is an element ), somewhere 'else' where the few deities might reside if they're on accessible planes at all, and something like the astral that connects all the worlds together. Our version of ethereal is something of a phantom zone between our astral and prime. Its somewhat like the concept of The Abyss from Krynn, theres prime and everywhere else. As of yet, there are no demiplanes, yet bags of holding, portable holes, and, dimensional spells still work. Don't ask why. Its magic.
The planes are *very* hostile. Even if possible to build a fortification there, it wouldn't last. A pocket demiplane in border ethereal would be a godsend but this is a very material grounded campaign.
___

A dummy residence is absolutely brilliant. However no one will fall for the shack being this mage's place of residence. There isn't enough money for the mage herself to build, and if the warrior builds a keep, that completely defies the purpose of the minimizing collateral damage premise. Alas the warriors war, the thieves thieve, the priests pray, and the wizards are stuck holding the bag protecting the world from extraplanar intervention . That plus all of the additional requirements for enchanting and particularly potionmaking. Its an expensive job but someone's got to do it

Alas, the tower (or possibly dungeon) will have to be alot more mundane than a castle in the sky or otherdimensional fortress. It is probably compared to the standard, a low magic campaign. While there certainly are a significant amount of powerful beings, they are (for the most part) grounded in terra firma. In fact, in all this time, we've only faced one floating fortress and its existence is more of a testament to the unfathomable power of our ultimate enemy than a trick from any particular magical devices available.

 

[Quartz]

Build your tower then transport it to a big city: there's nothing like having your mates nearby; not to mention the floozies. Have the tower floating 1mm off the ground. For bonus points, put a moat of lava around it to disguise the floatiness. Aerial defence is a matter of controlling the winds or having an elder air elemental around. Bonus points if the tower is covered in an invisible Blade Barrier. And don't forget the invisible Prismatic Wall over all openings. Or over the whole lot. You can have servitor Earth elementals inhabit the body of the tower both as general purpose servants and to neutralise Earthquake spells.

 

[Herobizkit]

The simplest answer is to build a Colossus that can walk around, and build your stronghold in its head. You become legendary AND a target for all kinds of adventurers.

 

[Kheti sa-Menik]

You're that powerful a wizard and you're going to spend your epic years on the <ugh> Prime Material? That simply won't do, not at all, dear boy.

 

[sukael]

Have you seen the movie Howl's Moving Castle?

The titular wizard (Howl) has what's basically a large house built into the back of a multilegged, moving fortress - it regularly roams unoccupied lands to keep from being an easy target.

Built into the door to the outside, though, is a multi-setting switch that, when changed, links the door to (otherwise empty) buildings in different cities. By changing the switch to the appropriate one, Howl can move through his storefronts in different cities... all labeled with different names, of course.