The Tower of 10,000 Floors

By Play The Pulp Productions
Generic/Universal

A quick minidungeon, visit a few floors of the mad wizards tower. OSR-system neutral. My first dungeon, made mostly to practice Dungeondraft and dungeon design.

This thirteen page adventure presents thirteen floors of a wizards tower, one per page. It’s one set-piece/mystery per simple floor in this, with the focus appearing to be on the dungeon map rather than the encounter proper. And, the usual abstracted problem with the Generic/Universal crowd. 

I’m still bitter about the Nystul thing, so I’m reviewing this. Plus, our nameless designer wanted to practice dungeon design, so, maybe we can catch this one before more mistakes are made. This has twelve pages with a dungeon level on each page. Most of the levels are a single room or perhaps one main room with a couple of closet-like rooms on it. 

The wizards tower has about a hundred levels above ground. One the top two and the first floor are described (as three of the ten thousand) with the rest being noted as looted and full of junk. TThen the rest of the levels presented are underground. A few are connected to each other with stairs, but other are reachable only by major portal, with the ever popular “put the magic jem in the portal to go through the magic gate” thing going on. Each level/room is, essentially, a set-piece. You’re going to be doing one thing on that level/room, generally. 

We can start with the most obvious of things: the pdf proper. It’s thirteen pages long. And it’s 171mb. It runs/pages like frozen molasses on my PC. This shouldn’t happen. You’ve got to get the page resolution down to an appropriate level. Nothing here requires an overly large resolution. It’s a very simple background, a paragraph or two of text on page, and a very simple dungeon map. The map does have some features on it, like a bed or a piano or such, but it’s nothing that would require the 171mb tha the PDF is. Which make navigating the PDF a major pain in the ass.

This is also a generic/universal adventure, and it shows. It’s seems a truth, universally acknowledged, that a generic/universal adventure will be afraid of its own shadow. SPecifically, it will abstract descriptions and content. I don’t know why this is. If someone writes one then they immediately seem to switch in to some mode where they are afraid to actually describe something. “There is a treasure behind the bookcase.” What is the treasure? It’s up to you to put it in. There is a monster in the shed. What does the monster look like? It’s a beast. And yet specificity is the soul of the narrative. But there is little here. You have to fucking describe shit. You need to be concrete. You can still be generic/universal, that’s just the stats. But put int the fucking treasure. Describe the monsters. Make us see and visualize them in our minds eye. 

I note, also, that we DO get stats for the beasties, so, not generic/universal after all. It would be far, far better to stat something for OSE or Labyrinth Lord and then label it generic universal than to just make up some system. T$R is dead. Long live Dancey and the OGL.

The overall adventure design seems to be derided from the crpg market. There is a lot of “find the green gem to activate the green portal” sort of thing. It’s based on linear design principals. You are blocked and can go no further up/down, until you can activate the glowing COLOR portal. And, then, on each level, some sort of challenge to overcome. Oh no! Spinning blades! Oh no, living statues! Oh, no, an indescribable beast! Defest the obstacle, get the gem, go to the next floor through the portal. This is then combined with a weird power level thing. You’ll fight some 1HD skeletons. After you fight the 66HP Indescribable Beast. The power levels of the critters are just all over place, with little progression. And, of course, it’s all linear. 

This is, perhaps, the best written of the rooms “The memory of death looms heavily on this floor, the screams still echoing through the walls.Taunts and threats can be heard from the guillotine.If approached, he will mockingly introduce himself as Murray, ordering the players to return him to his body,so he can continue his evil conquest.” We’ll ignore the Memory of death nonsense. The screams and taunts of the guillotine remind you, I’m sure, of every french revolution scene you’ve ever seen. Thats good. This reference helps brings to bear more than the written word can convey alone. And, that’s about it. Otherwise, the descriptions are pretty padded out, what there is of them, with little evocative text.

You got maps made and text attached to them and got it listed on DriveThru. That’s all a great accomplishment in the mechanics ot dungeon design and publishing. Now, for the art of writing and design …

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/521517/the-tower-of-10-000-floors?1892600