After our travels, an ending of sorts was found.

So, here we are folks, the final pieces for the Tower dungeon. I have neglected to include a few pieces to save some secrets. We aren't sure if we will be giving this whole deal away for free, or sell for a cheap price. Discussions need to be had with owners of systems. If we do end up selling this, we may just sell it with one or two systems attached, and give the others away for free.

 

Whatever is in here, I wouldn't drink it.

6 – In these Colors of Questionable Hue

Steel grating comprises the floor of this cube of a room, one hundred feet on a side. A line of three twenty foot wide vats line the left and right side of the cube and its center, all of which are evenly spaced. Made of stainless steel, their finish polished to a mirror shine, their tops nearly touching the ceiling. Along the back of the room is a basin, a stainless steel basin that takes up the entire back wall, its rim nearly touching the side walls. Bright white light cast down from wide fixtures on the ceiling is strangled by the prismatic radiance cast from the vats and the basin. Rainbow light climbs every surface of the place, bands of every hue and shade mark the room. Sounds of splashing and slopping come from the basin, while the dome topped vats shift perceptively as if filled with the restless movement of swimming beasts. A tall wave rises from the basin, never cresting, only growing until it presses against the top ceiling of the room. It is the truest rainbow given liquid form, every imaginable color crawling over it in lunatic patterns only imagined before by the mad. Suspended within this wave of color is an office desk, floating nearby are a rolling chair and a half dissolved corpse dressed in business formal.

[Insert battle with big rainbow blob, a larger form of the monster from room #2. Inside the blob is the body of Edsel Q. Forsythia, head of the whole crazy project as well as papers explaining the aftermath of the accident that brought the tower to its current state. The papers end with Edsel saying that he is being hunted by something and that its coming through the hall to get him.]

Warped words in warped containers.

8 – Files of Questionable Merit

Opposite the star-lit dome and the mechanical eye is metal room draped in dim light. A bulbous and rolling room that is more akin to a well lined with file drawers. A narrow room whose floor drops away from its entrance by 30 feet or more. Drawers of every size, all metal, all painted in the unimaginative shades found in offices of bureaucrats. While four sided, their proportions are uneven, the dimensions of the draws slanting at angles far too imaginative for their original purpose. A climb down to the floor is easy, the half extended drawers and their handles providing easy footholds. Within the walls, handles and extending rails on smooth bearings providing access, are innumerable papers and items. Thorough searching might reveal papers of note or items of use. Lighting the room, dimly, is a single bulb of light, dangling by a thin wire.

[I want to make two tables, one for interesting bits of info about the black candle, and one for useful items. Perhaps have limit the number of times a person may roll? Or create a setup where the longer they take, the greater likelihood of encountering a random monster?] 

A long, perhaps endless, staircase.

 

9a – Down and In

Warm to the touch, the handle twists easily, allowing the stained glass window to be pulled open on well greased hinges. Made of descending rows of pipes, each step of the staircase is comprised of three pipes creating the normal dimensions found on most stairs. Drifting to the left and right, the descent never keeps to a completely straight path, but it also avoids any true turns. After a short time into the downward journey, items begin to appear on the steps: shoes, clothing, crumpled bits of paper, coins, and bones that might belong to a human. Time drags, legs tire, and the journey never ends.

[Require some kind of save to break out of the infinitude of the stairs. Create negatives for failed saves, such as extra time required (perhaps a day between each save) as well as some kind of exhaustion penalty?]

[After a successful save.]

A glow, first hardly beyond a possibility or notion, that soon increases in intensity until the final few steps allow sight at the stairs' destination. A space, filled with machinery that could be found in a foundry, the light of the room orange and bright from a substance within the large vats dotting the room. 

Heat and light in liquid form.

 

9b – In Hell's Own Heart

A space, easily 25 yards wide and twice that in length, its ceiling, barely visible in the room's orange glow, just as tall as the room's width. Four evenly spaced vats sit to either side of a large engine, or perhaps furnace, at the room's center, wide pipes connecting the bulbous mechanism to the base of each vat. Each tub is twenty feet tall and nearly twice as wide, their sides caked with the ash from the heat of innumerable years. Illuminating the room, and driving its temperature beyond comfort, is the slowly churning liquid within the tanks. At the room's heart, is a heart of iron and steel set upon four struts and attached to each heat churning tub with wide pipes. Heat pulses from the furnace as well, along with a similar orange light that bursts from the grates set into its sides. It rises easily fifty feet into the air, with ten or more pipes emerging from its top to move down to the eight vats with the others rising to meet the ceiling. Spilling from a long, thin square opening in the heart's side are thick worm like creatures cast from what appears to be iron or steel, their sides matte black and segmented. Eight of these mechanical things writhe through the grated spaces between the vats and heart, tending to dials and valves on the blackened tubs. Watched long enough, it appears that after some period of time or completion of some task, a worm will slide its way back to the heart, then enter back into it through a small round hole at the heart's bottom. Once a worm enters a heart, a new one separates itself from the tangle emerging from the side of the furnace, and wiggles its way back to the previous worm's station. They appear to pay no attention to those standing on the stairs and observing, but they may take umbrage to those who decide to walk in the space of their work.

There appears to be two exits from the room of vats and furnaces. To the right, of those who enter the room, is a metal door nearly a foot thick. It is ajar, letting out a band of white light into the orange dimness of the room. To the left is a wide ladder, its rungs climbing to a ledge where a light that is both black and blue, spills out in a burst of anti-radiance, a true example of Stygian color.

[So, the idea is that there are a functionally infinite number of worms, which can be both a good and a bad thing for the party. Bad, because there will always be replacements for the one's that are killed. Good, because if they are using a per-monster-killed xp system, they could grind away at them to level up. The worms will attack anything that is in the vat area, but will no follow them once they begin climbing the ladder to area 10 or through the door to area 9]

A complete set of controls, but what do they control?

9 – And, Through These Doors, Answers to Unasked Questions

Ajar and spilling a bar of bright white light, the door swings open with little need of force, its hinges traveling without complaint from dry pins or rust. Its width is the same, though the room is half the length as the one adjoined. From floor to ceiling it is covered in square white tiles the width and breadth of a man's hand, a glossy glaze upon all of them. Bright light pours from something at the room's center, set upon a tall pedestal of a mechanical, or perhaps electrical, nature. It climbs up to nearly touch the ceiling, the angle making it impossible to see the source of the radiance. Constructed of layered pipes polished to a mirror finish, the pipes festooned with lights, dials, and valves, the pedestal is as much a mechanism as a work of art. Facing each of the four cardinal directions are the upper bodies of four golden men, made in the proportions of Greek perfection, emerging from the pedestal like the figureheads of some fantastic ship. Arms outstretched, hands cupped, the figureheads hold spinning rubies larger than a mans fist, teardrop shapes with curved fins at their top to give the illusion of being formed like fire. Arrayed around the pillar of pipes, figureheads, and light are curved banks of control panels. Two rows each, the double rows are each set to face one of the figureheads emerging from the pipe work of the pillar. Each control panel is comprised of three stations, all with similar controls and dials, a wheeled swivel chair is set before each station, the wooden seat well polished from numerous occupants. At the back of the room is a tiled platform, with a set of metal stairs attached to each side. Set atop the platform is a similar control panel attached to the back wall, three chairs marking its stations. Facing the machine at the center is a wide desk, made dark and well polished wood. Scattered and stacked on its top are papers, some in folders others scattered outside of them.

[So, in the papers will be at very least a partial history and explanation of the tower as well as instructions on its operation. The instructions can be used to shut down the machine, as well as what is shedding light at its top.]

The black and burning heart of the entire tower.

10 – Heart of the Abyss

Each rung of the ladder seems to stretch up farther than the next, each reach for the proceeding rung appears to stretch further without discomfort, the distance between rungs never changes. Time, measured through the journey, lengthens and compresses, but the body never weakens from the exertions during the varying period of work. Light becomes dark, yet just as accommodating to sight, tinging the environment blue as the end of the ladder draws closer. The top of the ledge spans miles in every direction. The top of the ledge is but a few yards across and deep. Black grass waves in a gentle heated wind, stars, colored the same dark-light as the illumination of the ledge, dot the black sky. Black tiles cover the floor, walls, and ceiling of the alcove atop the ledge, a light-bulb hangs by a wire from the low ceiling, the illumination it casts the same as that which pervades the space. At the center of the Stygian plain a black pyramid rises miles away from the ladder's top. At the center of the tiled ledge is a black pyramid, a quarter of the height of a man. Floating above the pyramid, an eye the its color a marriage of purple and moonless night, both a width of a hand and hundreds of yards wide, their irises a single black candle. In the center of the pyramid a handle is set, sized for the hand of a titan, sized for the hand of a child. Aligned vertically, the direction of the handle points up towards the word ON, placed perpendicular to the handles direction, the word OFF. Vision, and perhaps the body, is pushed towards the plain, to a miles long journey and to a handle impossible to grasp. Concentration and will keeps the journey but a few agonizing paces. Concentration and will keeps the handle small enough to grasp, and loose enough to turn.

[So, a number of will saves or stat checks are needed to approach the pyramid, and keep the traveler in the world where the pyramid is small enough to work with. Another set of checks is finally needed to turn the handle and grasp the candle. The effects of this and other situations will be described fully in the final product.]

Further we went, and deeper we dived...

Red stairs...

 

5 – A Party to Questionable Events

Cement steps climb through a stairwell filled with echoes of raucous laughter and dissonant music. Sounds float from the space beneath the door along with the flickering lights from shadows of movement. Tinged red, the light beneath the door is dim, it casts the unpainted stairwell maroon. Unlocked, the simple and unpainted wood door swings easily open on well oiled hinges. Moving, dancing, talking, eating, and drinking, anthropomorphic moths clothed in sheer dresses party with humanoid lizards in shiny suits and slick wigs. If they become aware of being watched, the music will stop with the hard rip of needle on vinyl. If they are unaware of interlopers in their midst, they will continue their party of dark drinks and mating rituals.

Never party with lizards

[I want to include an encounter that is can be resolved through talking or violence. Perhaps link it to Chad's idea of the Moon Maiden. Maybe one of the rewards she gives for the optional quest she gives is an object that will smooth over relations between the players and party-goers.]

A rusted hatch to deep places.

5a – A Hatch to Deep Places

Degraded with the passage of short ages, the hatch's black paint is blistered and broken by eruptions of rust. Its latch is fused by rust, requiring brute strength or ingenuity to open. [Require some kind of strength test or other means of popping it open] A choir of screaming hinges herald the opening of the hatch, the timbre to close to that to the cry of a child. Bright light spills from the opening, revealing the nature of the stairwell to be the one mundane site an insane maze. Two passages split away from each other, the first stacked upon the second. Once again, the down of the current position is in another direction than the down of the way forward. 

Watch your step.

 

6a – You Take the Low Road

Bucking and rolling like the sea, the lower passage undulates as if it were alive. Walls covered in wet paint the color of old linen, the scent of perfume wafting from the fresh coat. A freshly waxed floor of checkered black and white tiles give slightly with each wavering step. Bright light pulses brighter in a steady rhythm, the timing of a visual heartbeat. Each step risks unbalance and a fall, requiring a skilled grace to avoid a tumble. [Insert some kind of Dex check or other skill check to avoid falling]

[If they fail whatever check, this is what happens]

With a speed that exceeds normal thought and reflex, an arm forms from each tile surrounding the fallen. Humanoid in form, and pliable as supple flesh, the muscled arms of men and graceful arms of women embrace the prone individual. No matter the form, the arms' strength is hard to deny, requiring brawn from the victim of help from others. Echoing off the walls, a sigh without gender rolls through the hall along with a series of sudden shifts from the floor. [Another check is required for the other people in the group not to fall and suffer the same fate] After the sigh, the floor stills, now sated with it catch(es). Those embraced soon find a mind slipping into a soporific euphoria, as the body begins sinking onto a overly pliant floor. [Victim has to make some king of save vs. poison or magic not to zone out, friends and the victim have to make strength checks to pull the arms away].

[If and when the group succeeds at either not falling or escaping the floor's embrace]

Undulations roll down the hall, risking a fall at every step for the graceless. A long walk, made longer by the threat of hard embraces and euphoric suffocation, leading to a downward view of two new diverging paths. [If someone falls again during the 100 ft long hall, go through the embrace effects again. Wash, rinse, repeat until the group is out of the hallway]

A hallway smoothed with pearl.

7 – And I'll Take the High Road

The upper of the two paths has an obvious, but gradual, in the dip of its elevation. Its yellow walls, checkered floor, and off white ceiling with its fixtures all have a smooth opalescent sheen covering them. A myriad of subtle rainbows unveil themselves in the light cast upon the hall's surfaces. Corners and edges have been rounded by the substance covering them, as if it was poured over the entire hall in one thick coat. Perfectly smooth floors make movement difficult, though then entire hall is dry. After a hundred feet the floor begins to dip, spiraling down into themselves, though the direction of down still stays with the floor. Within a dozen feet the spiraling become tighter, making the curve of the floor more pronounce with the direction of down still staying with the floor. As the inevitable terminus approaches a gentle tick-tack can be heard in an arrhythmic tempo, interrupted by a tiny bell and then a long zip.

At the near terminus of the hall, a woman can be seen sitting at a desk, her slender long fingers tapping away at the mechanical source of the tick-tack, ding, and zzzzzzip noises. Behind her is a wooden door, a window framed in its upper portion, lettering stenciled in gold upon the glass' surface. Golden words read:

Edsel Q. Forsythia

Project Station Manager

[So, the 'secretary' is actually a strange crustacean with moveable armor plates that combine to make her look just like a lovely redhead in her twenties. When in place, the plates do not move, so she always appears to be bent over typing. Her voice would be 'normal' but having a hollow quality, as if she was speaking through a short pipe. The players should be given a chance to notice there are no legs or feet beneath the desk. She will bar entrance into Edsel's office, since the door is just another piece of moveable chitin. If pressed she will attack, casting aside the desk to reveal a lobster like body with hundreds of feeding appendages and swimmers below a vertically aligned mouth and two black eyes on stalks. The 'door' is actually just the upper parts of two HUGE pincers fitted together to appear like a door. The hall is just the interior of the secretary crab's shell] 

An all seeing eye.

 

6b – Eye Above, Floor Below

Same checkered floor, same yellow plaster walls, same white plaster ceiling and light fixtures, new direction for 'down'. Acrobatic skill is needed to land and cope with the new sense of 'down', otherwise a hard fall is the only other option. A few yards into the hall, its ceiling opens up into a wide dome painted a midnight blue, its surface dotted with light fixtures to simulate stars. Set upon a ledge opposite of the entrance is a large eye-ball. Attaching the eye to the ledge are movable silver struts, allowing it to pivot in any direction. Though it is painted to appear life-like, closer inspection reveals it to be mechanical, rounded rivet heads dotting the yard wide sphere. Lit green, the iris expands and contracts as it regards the new visitor(s). A pencil thin green beam of light is emitted from the pupil aimed at the floor directly beneath it. Juddering and sweeping, the light beam creates the illusion of green words flickering on the floor. Unsteady green words spell out:

Please do one of the following options, otherwise lethal force will be used.

1) Present Valid Process Company Identification.

2) Halt all forward progress.

3) Return by the way you entered into the area.

[So, I was thinking one of the things the Moon Maiden can give the party is a valid Process Company badge. This badge can be used to smooth things over with the Moth and Reptile party in room 5. Otherwise the party has to turn back or fight a laser shooting robo-eye.] 

A climb through a mechanical heart.

 

6c – Through the Works of Restive Machines

Beyond the mechanical gaze, the floor slants down to a larger, dimly lit space. Tapping, clicking, and humming pervades the air while the form of a large machine is resolved in scant light. Flush against the floor, the smooth black face of the machine looms over the floor. It blocks progress, requiring a climb of forty feet over the obstacle or some way through it. [So, I was thinking of having a very difficult climb check, or a easier check for secret doors]

[For a successful climb check]

Atop the smooth humming block, another machine can be seen before the slant of the floor levels into another room. Black and vibrating minutely, the surface is covered in small tessellated images of candles subtly lit in the shifting hues of flame. Below is a short area of slanted floor before the corkscrewing form of another machine.

[For a successful secret doors check]

A panel slides smoothly back and away into the machine, revealing a space the width of a human and half as tall. It is lit in the hues of flame, the colors shifting slower than any flame. Steel grating makes up the floor of the space, the same light follows the space beneath the floor down beyond the sight of a bottom. To either side of the path through the machine are rows of black cylinders filling back into an infinity that spreads beyond the boundaries of the machine. Each cylinder is topped with a teardrop curve of wire that gives off the colors of flame filling the room. A similar panel has slid away from the far end of the passage, allowing an exit through the machine.

Another small stretch of checkered floor, another machine rises up to block further progress. Rotating planes of bundled wire orbit a smooth black cylinder, the wire inwardly lit the color of fire. Spinning wire the color of fire creates the illusion of a flaming crown surrounding a black candle. It spreads to take up the entire width of the room, requiring a jump between the wire to get beyond the obstacle.

[So, some kind of dex or acrobatics check is needed to get beyond the obstacle, otherwise they get burned by heated coils of wire. Maybe allow a spot check and a to hit roll to notice a switch or machine box. To hit roll to hit the switch or destroy the box to make the wire stop moving. If they jump through then they will need a second roll to get back out.]

Beyond the coils, the floor continues to slant down until it levels out at the floor of a large room bathed in shifting hues of prismatic light.

Small Post.

So, I have been kinda dry in the imagination department. This is all I was able to produce today. I wanted to post at least something in the hopes to kick-start my flow. This is just a small hallway description for my Tower dungeon.

Like this, but twisty.

4a – Torqued Moments of Distance

Lights flicker, creating the illusion of subtle movement in a debris strewn hall. Papers in crumpled piles dot the checkered floor tiles, desks overturned to form barriers, chairs broken and blackened mark spots where fires had burned. Bare walls, colored yellow and water stained, cracked plaster dusting the tiles. Walls, floors, and ceilings corkscrew away from the entrance in sudden turns, gravity staying with the checkered path. Lights flicker is succession down the hall, making it seem to visibly stretch as the light moves away. Moving down the hallway, the perception of time vacillates between extremes of brevity and magnitude. Each step is juddering, an uncertain stride that may cover yards of space or a modicum of inches. It all ends after prolonged moments of travel, the terminus a metal hatch at the foot of solid stairs.

Thomas, Chad, and I to the Dark Tower came...

This is the continuation of my first collaboration piece with other creative minds. Thomas Novosel, created the picture of the Tower as well as a dungeon map (not included in this post). Thomas created the picture first, and then my mind latched onto an idea. The idea grew, and I found that my idea could mesh with another of Thomas' called The Black Candle Society. I've included a link below to his blog entry about the society, as well as another link to his blog's main page. Read his stuff, this guy is my kind of crazy. Chad Robb has been doing a wonderful job keeping my prose from turning into the street-corner rants of a madman. Editing is often a thankless job, but it is also incredibly important to any writing project. Thank you, Chad. Thomas has come up with some awesome monsters and items that I need to get off my lazy butt and include in the write up. As always, comments, critiques, and suggestions are always welcome.

Black Candle Society: http://thomas-novosel.com/2016/04/11/black-candle-light-setting-notes/

Thomas Novosel's Main Page: http://thomas-novosel.com/

The Tower - Thomas Novosel

 

The Tower –

Afar

A stained brick and concrete construction, canted as it points towards the sky. A tower of right angles and straight lines in a place of curves and oblique turns. The decorations on the edifice are made of simple geometric shapes clustered together to make complex forms. The flourishes are few, corralled within the bonds of rectangles and squares, leaving the majority blank. Golden glints are cast from the few bits of brass not corroded from the elements. Broken and grimed windows run up the sides of the tower. Straight sided and curved at the top, the frames end in a spike shape at the curves' apex. Atop the tower is an incongruous temple-like structure, a profusion of etched columns supporting an arched roof. It draws the eye, seeming to have been plucked from an ancient city of art, and placed upon a basic tower as a base. Imbedded in the sands of a beach, the grains of soft browns and yellows climb up the tower's sides, placed there by the wind and water. Roads to not turn to this place, mapmakers having ignored its very existence. A tower that is setting without purpose on a beach that is working to consume it.

Near

No door leads into the place, and the placement of the broken windows suggest there is more of it beneath the sands. Its dimensions, and very presence, suggest a tower far taller than what is seen above the sand. Its sides are misaligned, some bricks too prominent from the walls' face, others too recessed. Rows and stacks of bricks set aligned and misaligned, without apparent purpose or design. This irregularity is not a product of shoddy construction, the rows and stacks, while misaligned, are perfectly placed in regards to one another. Somehow it's walls have been shifted brick by brick, a feat that has managed to keep it structurally sound. The bricks are stained black in places, large swathes pressed into the tower's sides. Shining in the sun, the stains are coated in a waxen residue that can numb any skin it touches. Temple foundations set far above the beach, its slate roof pushing at the dome of the sky. At times parts of the walls, and even the entire temple, can be difficult to look at. Sections of brick and the temple shift perspective subtly, becoming too blurry or too sharp for the distance they are viewed at. The only way into the place is through the broken windows and their verdigris and brass frames. 

Not an exact representation, but you get the drift.

 

Through The Windows

The room takes up an entire level of the tower, its misaligned ceiling twenty feet overhead. Water puddles in places on the black and white checkered floor, collected from weather reaching through the empty window frames. The outer portions of the room are devoid of furniture, though the gouges in the floors mark their previous occupancy. Piled to the ceiling, taking up the center of the room, is the furniture that once was spread throughout. Tables, chairs, cabinets, desks, and other miscellanea are woven and piled atop one another. Closer inspections show that these pieces have been fused to one another, legs and seats seamlessly emerging from desktops and drawer fronts. Sodden papers adhere to the walls and floors in clumps and single pages. Their ink has run to unreadability, save for a single sheet torn in half, set dry and crisp atop a desktop with a chair emerging from it. The page is typed (or written in a perfect and bland script, for those worlds without typewriters), it reads:

The Process Company, Inc.

Lantern Branch Office

To: Edsel Q. Forsythia – Project Long Burn Supervisor

From: Mavis L. Ferris – Company Wide Projects Supervisor

I have been informed that Project: Long Burn is running behind schedule. This lack of timeliness is beginning to reach and unacceptable level. Your lack of progress has been reported to the Process board of directors. The board has given you 96 hours (Central Plane Temporal Accounting) to remedy the situation. Your reports have been reviewed, and it has been determined that the precautions you have ordered are unnecessary. Furthermore, these precautions are greatly reducing the possible profit margins that could be generated by Project: Long Burn. You must bring the Lantern Mechanism online in the allotted time, otherwise a new supervisor will be assigned to your project. Below are the flow specifications you are to implement in the Lantern Mechanism, as per Process Engineering.

Centered in the northern wall are a pair of corroded brass, sliding doors, one slid closed the other tipped onto its side. Beyond the doors is a shaft, blocked ten feet above with twists of stone and metal, below is open to the darkness below. Ajar in the north-eastern corner is a metal door, askew on its broken hinges. Beyond it is a stairwell, the stairs leading down to darkness tinged with the scent of old books and thunderstorms. The stairs are slick, water puddled in the centers and sides of concrete steps leading down.

1 – The Light Behind The Door

After the descent, with puddles sliding beneath feet, darkness held at bay with meager light, the bottom is reached. ^The stairs end in a small room, plaster bulging from the push of water beneath, hexagonal white tile slick with mildew. At the near end of the room is a wooden door, perfectly hung, the frame dry and well polished. The door's upper half framing a window frosted white, illuminated from behind. Emblazoned in bold black script are the words: Questionable Acquisitions, casting worded shadows from the window's center. A porcelain, hexagonal handle is set along the right of the door at waist height.^

^[The stairs end in a small small room. Plaster walls and tile floors warped and buckled from water, everything slick with a film of mildew. A well made door is framed in the near end of the room, its upper half a frosted window with: Questionable Acquisitions written upon it. Its nob is porcelain, hexagonal, and white.]^ - This is a possible edit Chad recommended. 

The kind of photo found orbiting the desk - By Arthur Tress

 

Beyond the door, a room stretched, blown out from a cube to a sphere. Floating, fixed in the center is a wooden desk, the contents of its top perfectly arranged, a lamp on its corner casting radiance on the room. A wooden chair, upholstered in red, sets floating and equally fixed behind the desk, its seat rotating upon its base. Orbiting the desk: monochrome pictures, a cigarette smoldering in a black ashtray, blank Process Company letterhead, and a host of unused office supplies. Pictures leer at those is the room, poses subtly shifting with each passing orbit. Soon, poses are completely changed, loved ones belonging to the viewer appear, then replaced by men in Victorian suits and animal masks. The floor, checked tiles of black and white curve down, out, and back up in a hemisphere. The ceiling, domed above, stretches down to meet the hemisphere of the floor, allowing no room for walls. Opposite the entrance, and degrees above the room's midpoint, is another 'door'. Rectangular, the no-color of taupe, the height of person and divided equally into three sections. Attached to the center of each section is a silver, horizontal handle with a placard and frame above it. The placards bear upon them: Acquisitions, Expenses, and Mazes. Next to the 'door', a pair of still wet rubber boots tap out 'shave and a haircut, two bits', in an never ending loop.

When pulled, each handle extends a drawer, as wide as an adult human, and made of a thin metal painted the same color as the front. Within the Acquisitions drawer is a hallway. The black and white checked floor is aligned with the drawer front, making it perpendicular to the sphere room's floor. Hallway walls, made of white plaster, covered floor to ceiling with evenly spaced picture-frames, end after fifteen feet with the floor's sharp downward drop. Opposite the drawer-door, after the drop of the floor, a door much like the one to the sphere room, its frame in the opposing wall or the ceiling of the descending floor. Questionable Practices is printed on its frosted window in gold lettering, a soft yellow light illuminating from behind. The hall is lit by long lighted cylinders set into metal frames on the ceiling. Buzzing, they shed a harsh titanium-white light that flickers almost imperceptibly in time with their noise. The relative direction of down persists until at least half of whatever, or whoever, enters the drawer's hallway. Once at least half-way, the new direction of down takes hold.

Expenses is a normal drawer, having no hallways or rooms, just a large, tattered black leather book. On its cover the words, YOUR LIFE: DEBITS AND CREDITS are embossed in flaking gold leaf. Thick and heavy, the book bears with it the unforgettable scent of gold, silver, and printed money.

Mazes is another normal drawer, containing a manila colored folder nearly overflowing with papers, and a palm sized cherry-wood box. Sealed with a silver clasp, the box contains a globe that in turn contains a city. An island filled with buildings of similar design as the tower, save they have no temples atop them. Looking through the magnifying glass, also contained in the box, one can the city is alive with movement. Minute people go about their lives as metal carriages without horses travel up and down the tiny streets, oblong silver balloons ply the 'skies', everyone oblivious to the god sized people looking in at them.

An example of some of the photos from the wall - By Bryan Durushia

1a – Hallway Imagery

Steps echo oddly, sound returning as if from a larger space, or the originating sound coming under foot after the echo's arrival. These walls, unmarred by water's corruption, are covered in pictures within frames, all of equal size and spacing. Monochrome images of figures and settings from the mundane to the bizarre. Children wearing strangely formed masks on a playground. Men and women facing away from the camera, turned towards a lonely house. Doctors and nurses wearing animal masks, standing in places far too dirty to be called hospitals. All of the pictures possess a level of depth not present in other photographs or portraits. Scenes shift as the viewer moves, giving different perspectives from differing angles. If inspected closely, the frames and pictures show themselves to be windows into times made still and colored in grays.

Sharp taps of footsteps on the checked floor approach from the door, their echoes approaching from the hall's opposite end. A flash of quick movement through the pictures, a monochrome form whipping through black and white worlds. Originating sounds of running feet moving with a humanoid form moving within the pictures. In some pictures the form is as small as the rest of the objects in frame, in others it takes up multiple pictures as if they are individual panes in a single, large window. A hiss, a flash of bone white, the swish of claws cutting the air. Movement in the pictures as the form comes back around for another swipe...

2 – Questionable Practices Beyond This Point

Five feet lays between the Questionable Practices door and the sudden drop at the end of the hallway. Checkered black and white tiles continue down the steep angled drop of the hallway, the floor of the drop ninety degrees from the current position. It continues 'downward' for twenty-feet or more before angling downward again, out of sight. A hallway of similar height and width, though its walls are lined with doors too close together to allow for rooms of any regular size. Each door along the hallway different from the others, crafted in widely varying styles and even sizes.

Questionable Practices is unlocked, the door swinging in easily on well oiled hinges without a sound. Beyond the threshold, a room of many purposes compressed into a single space: a workshop, an operation theater, a jumble of mechanical equipment, and a cone-shaped object large enough to fit two adult humans. Floors blend into one another: antiseptic white tile, bare and smooth concrete, and black rubber. Dimensions bow out and flex inwards intermittently, creating a sense of travel without movement.

A tool strewn workbench is the closest destination from the door, an oil stained wood surface covered in tools and mechanisms. Most of the tools are familiar in one aspect or another, others having purposes that may only be guessed at.

An operation theater, stadium seating around the roof that appears in one moment to be too small for humans to sit in, and in another just seems very high up and far away. Surgical tools lay scattered on the floor, metal trays overturned onto their sides near an operation table atop a hydraulic lift. Ripped sheets writhe on the tabletop, though nothing lays atop or beneath them. Stains dot the area, some large enough to be called puddles. A technicolor fluid of luminescent, shifting rainbow hues cover scalpel blades, floors, and sheets. Shifting bands of color move in the fluid, at times taking on familiar shapes that soothe the mind into a soporific state.

Strange people in strange suits.

Beyond the theater, a black rubber floor supports a large metal cone. Constructed of metal bands with a silvered surface that reflects a landscape not present in the room. Striations in the metal make it difficult to make out the exact shape of the landscape, but it appears to be barren, rocky, and gray. A small hatch is built into the cone, a tiny porthole framed near its top. Within the cone, two humanoid shapes sit, dressed in silver jumpsuits and helmets, arms and fingers frozen in mid extension towards a panel of dials and switches. 

Not exactly like the hall, but you get the idea.

 

2a – The Descending Halls

Doors line the hallway that descends away from the threshold of Questionable Practices. A bucking and dipping binary checker board, doors of every make, size, and color lined to either sides in irregular spacing. Down's direction reorients to the new floor angle once the ninety degree bend is passed, requiring a short fall that soon becomes a forward stumble.

Most of the doors are without windows, their handles unmoving, keeping whatever is behind them sealed away. What few doors that do have windows give strange, and often disturbing views. Rooms too narrow to be comfortable, occupants frozen in bizarre poses only to blur with sudden movements only to become frozen in a different pose afterward. Those looking in remain unnoticed, the individuals in the rooms never approaching the door. All the windowed doors are unlocked, the occupants of the rooms remain oblivious until the moment the doors are ajar to peek through the jam. Once the door is opened, the things in the room move into action...

While the floors roll, buck, and dip for over two-hundred feet, they come to a sudden stop at another ninety-degree drop. Floors lined with dark, textured granite, drawing and bouncing echoes about without regard to consistency. There are no walls to speak of, rather they have been replaced by display cases. Their glass fronts reflect the light from miniature chandeliers suspended from a ceiling that is more a void than an actual structure or plane. Reflected light makes it impossible to see more than vague and large shapes within the cases, a closer look is needed to see their contents.

This would totally fit in with the other displays.

2b – The Exhibit Halls

Another dropping step is needed to enter the hall, the down direction once again reorienting to the granite floors of the new hall. Lighting is dim in the halls, save for directly under the miniature chandeliers where the light is almost blinding. Within each case is anthropological scene involving humans, and rarely, human-like beings in all manner of dress and in all manner of environment. Below each case is a brass plaque with the following format:

The People [Name] of World No. - [Number]

Each different scene has a different name for the people depicted within it, and a different number for the 'world' they must come from. The displays and their windows are nine feet on a side, with five lining either side of the fifty foot hallway before it comes to another ninety-degree drop.

Another ninety-degree drop in angle, another display case lined hall of the exact same proportions and make. As with the first hallway, these cases are impossible to see within without being near them. Once again another drop step reorientates the explorer to the new direction of down.

Display cases in the new hallway exhibit creatures instead of people, though the variance from 'normal' animals can be considerable. Shapes, skins, colors, means of movement, even taxonomic classifications can vary widely between exhibits, though none can be called familiar in the loosest of terms. Below each display is a brass plaque with the following:

Binomial Name:[Name] Common Name: [Name]  World No.: [Number]

Just as with the first hallway, there are five displays on either side of the hall, though this one ends in a set of metal double-doors.

3 – Double Doors to A Questionable Environment

Two stainless steel doors, set into a black iron frame marks the end of the animal display hall. Stylized scenes of industry are set into the doors, re-imagining the male and female forms in idealized clean lines. Figures toiling over geared machines, working diligently on tables with evenly space containers, and people holding aloft strange objects with halo-like rays bursting from them. Atop, and inset on, the door frame are figures made in a more natural style, though the condition of their bodies are incredibly unhealthy. Either morbidly obese or thin to the point of starvation, the figures lay about clutching bottles, trays of food, or weapons held to their chests. All of the figures stare sadly out at whoever stands before the door.

Each door has elongated, cubical rectangles for handles, the edges sharp enough to hurt the hand that squeezes too tightly. Set into the granite floor before the door is a mosaic of white and black tile that spells out 'Questionable Environments'. The doors and unlocked, and weighted so that they open with ease.

Kinda like this, only with black velvet leaves.

 

Dim blue illumination allows the features of the room to be seen, but creates a multitude of pitch back shadows. Objects in the room are the colors of silver and the night, dark blues, blacks, and white of the moon among silver forms. Stepping stones styled and colored to appear like the phases of the moon, arranged in a path straight away from the doors. One both sides of the path are a four stylized trees made of stainless steel with a mirror finish. All natural curves have been removed and replaces with straight lines at precise angles, rounded edges made razor sharp. Leaves on the trees, made to look like oaks, and the grass on the ground is made of black velvet. Three additional rows of four move away from either side of the path, creating a mirrored grid upon black velvet. At the path's end, is an upturned hemisphere, also styled and colored to be a perfect rendition of the moon. The half-moon is a basin, roughly thirty-feet across, filled with crystal clear water, a set of hemisphere moon steps leading up to the rim. At the far end of the pool is a small cratered island, its color a lunar off-white, from its center a golden ladder reaches to the room's far ceiling. Its golden rungs climb eighty feet into the air, disappearing into a perfectly circular hole shedding a dim white light. Bright, electric blue stars dot the black ceiling in a grid pattern, the stars being the primary light source of the room. Luminous, amorphous shapes dart in the depths of the water, and the cover of the shadows. Deeper into the room someone travels, the more agitated the luminous shapes become until they dart in for the attack.

The object in the sphere room looks like this, but only WAY more fancy.

4 – A Climb to a Questionable Heaven

After climbing for what seems like hours for some, or possibly seconds for others, the inside of the moon is reached. Spherical, and nearly sixty feet across, its walls emit the same soft illumination of the moon on a warm summer's night. Hundreds of bulges ringed by thin and deep depressions cover the surface of the room, making movement somewhat difficult. Occupying the center of the place is a gold and silver construction, roughly the size of a carriage. Its golden base is covered in lifelike and detailed reliefs of angels as well as robed men and women bearing halos. Extending from the base are four scaffold-like legs festooned with angelic reliefs and curving ornamentation. Atop the base is a silver egg shaped structure, covered in equally detailed and lifelike reliefs of men and women dressed in odd jumpsuits. Attached to the jumpsuits are boxes, ports, and hoses bearing clasps, switches, and nobs in an almost random profusion. The silver figures too stare upward, arms and fingers pointing out at some distant, and unseen, object. Set into the far side of the wall is a large gray metal door, a small round porthole at its top, the porthole's glass cracked. In the center of the door is a wide wheel, its spokes radiating out of a dark gray bolt. A golden ladder, similar to the one leading to this room, leads up to a small, railed platform set before the wheeled door. Looking out of the porthole window only gives a distorted and refracted view of a dimly lit room, filled with vague shapes.

I and Thomas to the Dark Tower came.

So, here is what I have been working on over the weekend, wracking my attention deficient brain to make something worth-while. This is my first collaboration piece with another creative mind. Thomas Novosel, created the picture of the Tower as well as a dungeon map (not included in this post). Thomas created the picture first, and then my mind latched onto an idea. The idea grew, and I found that my idea could mesh with another of Thomas' called The Black Candle Society. I've included a link below to his blog entry about the society, as well as another link to his blog's main page. Read his stuff, this guy is my kind of crazy.

Black Candle Society: http://thomas-novosel.com/2016/04/11/black-candle-light-setting-notes/

Thomas Novosel's Main Page: http://thomas-novosel.com/

By Thomas Novosel - The map will be included once the write-up is finished.

 

The Tower –

Afar

A stained brick and concrete construction, canted as it points towards the sky. A tower of right angles and straight lines in a place of curves and oblique turns. The decorations on the edifice are made of simple geometric shapes clustered together to make complex forms. The flourishes are few, corralled within the bonds of rectangles and squares, leaving the majority blank. Golden glints are cast from the few bits of brass not corroded from the elements, becoming beacons to those nearby in the day. Broken and grimed windows run up the sides of the tower. The frames are straight sided and curved at the top, ending with a spike shape at the curves' apex. Atop the tower is an incongruous temple-like structure, a profusion of columns and arcane symbols supporting an arched roof. The temple draws the eye, seeming to have been plucked from an ancient city of art, and placed upon a basic tower as a base. The tower is imbedded in the sands of a beach, the grains of soft browns and yellows climbing up the building sides, placed there by the wind and water. Roads to not turn to this place, mapmakers have deigned to ignore its very existence. The structure sets without purpose on a beach that is working to consume it.

Near

No door leads into the place, and the placement of the broken windows suggest there is more of it beneath the sands. Its dimensions, and very presence, suggest a tower far taller than what is seen above the sand. The bricks of its sides are misaligned, some too prominent from the walls' face, others too recessed. Rows and stacks of bricks set aligned and misaligned, without apparent purpose or design. This irregularity is not a product of shoddy construction, the rows and stacks, while misaligned, are perfectly placed in regards to one another. Somehow it's walls have been shifted brick by brick, a feat that has managed to keep it structurally sound. The bricks are stained black in places, large swathes pressed into the tower's sides. The dark stains shine in the sun, coated in a waxen residue that makes the skin that touched them numb for a short while. The temple sets far above, its roof pushing at the sky and the clouds that sail within it. At times parts of the walls, and even the entire temple, can be difficult to look at. Sections of brick and the temple shift perspective subtly, becoming too blurry or too sharp for the distance they are viewed at. The only way into the place is through the broken windows and their verdigris and brass frames.

Through The Windows

The room takes up an entire level of the tower, its misaligned ceiling twenty feet overhead. Water puddles in places on the black and white checkered floor, collected from weather reaching through the empty window frames. The outer portions of the room are devoid of furniture, though the gouges in the floors mark their previous occupancy. Piled to the ceiling, taking up the center of the room, is the furniture that once was spread throughout. Tables, chairs, cabinets, desks, and other miscellanea are woven and piled atop one another. Closer, it can be seen that these pieces have been fused to one another, legs and seats seamlessly emerging from desktops. Sodden papers adhere to the walls and floors in clumps and single pages. Their ink has run to unreadability, save for a single sheet torn in half, set dry and crisp atop a desktop with a chair emerging from it. The page is typed (or written in a perfect and bland script, for those worlds without typewriters), it reads:

The Process Company, Inc.

Lantern Branch Office

To: Edsel Q. Forsythia – Project Long Burn Supervisor

From: Mavis L. Ferris – Company Wide Projects Supervisor

I have been informed that Project: Long Burn is running behind schedule. This lack of timeliness is beginning to reach and unacceptable level. Your lack of progress has been reported to the Process board of directors. The board has given you 96 hours (Central Plane Temporal Accounting) to remedy the situation. Your reports have been reviewed, and it has been determined that the precautions you have ordered are unnecessary. Furthermore, these precautions are greatly reducing the possible profit margins that could be generated by Project: Long Burn. You must bring the Lantern Mechanism online in the allotted time, otherwise a new supervisor will be assigned to your project. Below are the flow specifications you are to implement in the Lantern Mechanism, as per Process Engineering.

Centered in the northern wall are a pair of corroded brass, sliding doors, one slid closed the other tipped onto its side. Beyond the doors is a shaft, blocked ten feet above with twists of stone and metal, below is open to the darkness below. Ajar in the north-eastern corner is a metal door, ajar and askew on its broken hinges. Beyond it is a stairwell, the stairs leading down to darkness tinged with the scent of old books and thunderstorms. The stairs are slick, water puddled in the centers and sides of concrete steps leading down.

1 – The Light Behind The Door

After the descent, puddles sliding beneath feet, darkness held at bay with meager light, the bottom is reached. The stairs end in a small room, plaster bulging from the push of water beneath, hexagonal white tile slick with mildew. At the near end of the room is a wooden door, perfectly hung, the frame dry and well polished. The door's upper half frames a window frosted white, illuminated from behind. Emblazoned in bold black script are the words: Questionable Acquisitions, casting worded shadows from the window's center. A porcelain, hexagonal handle is set along the right of the door at waist height.

Beyond the door, a room stretched, blown out from a cube to a sphere. Floating, fixed in the center is a wooden desk, the contents of its top perfectly arranged, a lamp on its corner casting radiance on the room. A wooden chair, upholstered in red, sets floating and equally fixed behind the desk, its seat rotating upon its base. Orbiting the desk: monochrome pictures, a cigarette smoldering in a black ashtray, blank Process Company letterhead, and a host of unused office supplies. Pictures leer at those is the room, poses subtly shifting with each passing orbit. Soon, poses are completely changed, loved ones belonging to the viewer appear, then replaced by men in Victorian suits and animal masks. The floor, checked tiles of black and white curve down, out, and back up in a hemisphere. The ceiling, domed above, stretches down to meet the hemisphere of the floor, allowing no room for walls. Opposite the entrance, and degrees above the room's midpoint, is another 'door'. Rectangular, the no-color of taupe, the height of person and divided equally into three sections. Attached to the center of each section is a silver, horizontal handle with a placard and frame above it. The placards bear upon them: Acquisitions, Expenses, and Mazes. Next to the 'door', a pair of still wet rubber boots tap out 'shave and a haircut, two bits', in an never ending loop.

When pulled, each handle extends a drawer, as wide as an adult human, and made of a thin metal painted the same color as the front. Within the Acquisitions drawer is a hallway. The black and white checked floor is aligned with the drawer front, making it perpendicular to the sphere room's floor. Hallway walls, made of white plaster, covered floor to ceiling with evenly spaced picture-frames, end after fifteen feet with the floor's sharp downward drop. Opposite the drawer-door, after the drop of the floor, a door much like the one to the sphere room, its frame in the opposing wall or the ceiling of the descending floor. Questionable Practices is printed on its frosted window in gold lettering, a soft yellow light illuminating from behind. The hall is lit by long illuminated cylinders set into metal frames on the ceiling. Buzzing, they shed a harsh titanium-white light that flickers almost imperceptibly in time with their noise. The relative direction of down persists until at least half of whatever, or whoever, enters the drawer's hallway. Once at least half-way, the new direction of down takes hold.

Expenses is a normal drawer, having no hallways or rooms, just a large, tattered black leather book. On its cover the words, YOUR LIFE: DEBITS AND CREDITS are embossed in flaking gold leaf. Thick and heavy, the book bears with it the unforgettable scent of gold, silver, and printed money.

Mazes is another normal drawer, containing a manila colored folder nearly overflowing with papers, and a palm sized cherry-wood box. Sealed with a silver clasp, the box contains a globe that in turn contains a city. An island filled with buildings of similar design as the tower, save they have no temples atop them. Looking through the magnifying glass, also contained in the box, one can the city is alive with movement. Minute people go about their lives as metal carriages without horses travel up and down the tiny streets, oblong silver balloons ply the 'skies', everyone oblivious to the god sized people looking in at them.