Wizard's Tower ideas

[MarauderX]

Hey, I'm looking for resources or ideas for a truly diabolical wizard's tower. The wizard would have access to 9th level spells, and have decades of time and nearly limitless amount of gold to spend. What kind of place would he have that would allow him to roam freely yet still be locked down tightly? What kind of layout would the tower have?

The idea is that the wizard likes to capture those who enter his domain when they aren't wanted. When he has them he twists them into doing something for him, sometimes whether they know it or not, and not with a simple Geas spell. But he has to capture them first.

Traps come easy. But how devious, malicious and underhanded can we get and still capture a party of high level PCs?

 

[Slife]

Traps are easy... good. Give him tomb-tainted soul, or make him a lich. Trap every single stone, wall, door, and ceiling in his tower with inflict light wounds. Add in undead servants.

If you decide to make him entirely undead, add in energy and ability draining traps as well. Use gate on a Djinni and have it make 20 cubic feet of black lotus extract. Fill important areas with it. For your inner sanctum, have a ring of twenty or so magic missile traps (cl 1) aimed at the door. There's a command word to disable them, so all he has to do is say it when he enters the guarded area.

Cast guards and wards when you need a lockdown.

 

[Simm]

Try to get your hand on a copy of any of the grimtooth's traps books and just go crazy. Alturnately have him use guard and traps with so sort of odd correlation, try arranging the obstacles in alphabetical order or have each one include element of all five energy types.

 

[Thunderfoot]

If you go with the undead angle (and who wouldn't) have him hint that the undead servants are those beings that failed him in previous tasks - you either serve one way or another.

Be carfeul with the traps! As a proponent of BELIEVEABLE traps, please think before you add. Simple rules of thumb, traps have only a few purposes:
Keep things out - permanently
Keep things in - permanently
Incapacitate things (usually permanently)

In otherwords, traps that have "escape mechanisms" aren't traps, they are Hollywood pulp fodder. Traps are deadly! If they aren't deadly they were designed that way to make the trapee WISH they were dead. Traps are one shot items that MAY be reusable, so be very careful about the materials you use in them - wood, stone, an sand are all easy to obtain; gold, diamonds, and magic items are not. Gold is used to decorate and pay for traps, not build them out of (trust me I've seen rookies do this.). Think about how much this thing would cost to construct - yes its a wizard's tower but even they need money occassionally.

Sorry if I sound preachy, this is just my pet peeve in games, traps that have no purpose but to delay, would take feats of modern engineering, much less a supposed medieval society and traps that would cost more gold than is stored in the reserve bank vaults in New York (used to be in Ft Knox). But I love what you've described, sound positively nasty!

 

[Slife]

Just to help with the pricing, here's the relevent trap info from the SRD

Inflict Light Wounds Trap

CR 2; magic device; touch trigger; automatic reset; spell effect (inflict light wounds, 1st-level cleric, 1d8+1, DC 11 Will save half damage); Search DC 26; Disable Device DC 26. Cost: 500 gp, 40 XP.

You'll need craft wondrous item to make the trap yourself, time to craft is 1 day/500 gp. There's a feat which halves the cost of traps, I *think* it's master trapsmith, but I'm not entirely sure. EDIT: It's Extraordinary Trapsmith, and, sad to say, it only works on non-magical traps.

Anyway, in order to keep other undead out, I'd recommend a bunch of disrupt undead traps all tied to a single Symbol of Death as the trigger. Attune your undead.

 

[FATDRAGONGAMES]

If you need tiles we just released a Wizards Tower tile set a few months ago.

 

[MarauderX]

Thanks all for the responses so far.

Of course the wizard is a lich. He wouldn't be wholly evil and past redemption without it. Good idea about those failing him being converted into undead.

And everything about the place, and my campaign in general, has to be practical. If you fell in the pit there are no goofy levers in the pit to pull to get out.

I have grimtooths, which are mostly kinda elaborate and not entirely plausible in a wizard's tower. Keep in mind that many of them are for a long abandoned tomb or similar, where anything wandering down the hall gets obliterated. The place has to be useable; a bunch of underling wizards with a curious streak may get a lesson in the afterlife, but I'd rather keep a good number of staff on hand without risking any of them, even a wandering zombie or two.

Has there been anything in Dungeon magazine to fit the bill?

 

[Shemeska]

Use terrain to your advantage. For instance I had a draegloth lich in the past month or so of my game whose tower was built from the reclaimed ruins of an elven mage school. The original elven tower was pretty tall, but the lich managed to lower the elevation, placing the tower in a rather deep depression, and then he diverted a river into the remains of the city, completely innundating much of the ruins and flooding the entire tower except the tip of its highest chamber. Add a very very poisoned, sterile lake, incorporeal undead flitting about and through the glass-steel walls of the tower, currents and antimagic zones and it's an amusing situation even for high level PCs.

Nothing mundane.