High Fickle
Low Fate
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Part I: High Fickle
You’re in a wizard’s tower. You’re stood
on the ceiling, looking ‘up’ at the floor.
The wizard is nowhere to be seen.
Several book golems - animated piles
of books - are floating up towards you,
papery hands outstretched.
Behind you, the doors have turned to thick glass
(You can see where you came from, but now at a
ninety-degree angle.) Your young companion has
already drawn his blade.
Where did the youth come from?
What has the wizard promised for your help?
What memories have the Book Golem’s touch taken
from you? (What your third cousin looked like, for
instance.)
What might be the best route out of here?
and, as always, what do you do?
2
stakes
What’s at stake, should the party fail to act?
What are the wizard’s true intentions?
What will the long-term ramifications of the youth’s
meddling bring about?
How does the wizard, or their tower, threaten nearby
settlements?
questions
How did the players get here?
What power(s) does the wizard wield?
Where is the tower in relation to the rest of the
world?
Is the wizard mad? If so, what is the source of his
madness? Could this madness spread to the party?
understandings
What do we understand might be true about this place?
The wizard has some unknown power over dragons.
The tower was not built by human hands.
A magical breastplate contains a secret route
through the Perilous Deeps.
Time itself gets lost within the wizard’s halls.
Impressions
Libraries: ancient and crumbling, or shiny and pristine
Rooms and stairways, defying physics
A huge source of water, still obeying gravity
A wine cellar, in the wrong place
3
Encounters
When the party fumble, waste time, or encounter shadows in the
dark, roll 1d20.
1-4: Book golems
10hp each, Flapping pages, Animated piles of books
in humanoid form, whispering snatches from the
books they’re made of. Attack via a hundred
paper cuts (1d8 damage and lose a memory).
Want to take your memories.
When hit, the victim is aware they’ve lost
something as soon as they’re struck (“5 dam-
age, and you’ve forgotten the face of your
2nd cousin.”) The memory might be hidden
in the book golem’s pages, after it’s dead.
1. Waiting in ambush, as piles of esoteric books.
2. A selection of spellbooks; they can cast cantrips and basic spells.
3. A selection of bawdy material; their humanoid forms are particu-
larly lithe and alluring.
4. A selection of ancient, forbidden tomes; half health, but double
damage. Constantly whisper in forgotten languages.
5-8: Old Dragon Priest
10hp, Loose and patchy scales, taller than a man but hunchbacked,
leaden staff (1d6 damage). Want to include you in their choir.
Once you agree to pray, the contract is soul-bound. Every time
a priest starts chanting, anyone in earshot who’s agreed to pray
with them gains a weak draconic trait (patchy scales, nub of a tail,
shoulder-nubs for wings, mismatched teeth, a fire in your belly, etc.)
Actually, they’re more like symptoms.
5. Leading a congregation of followers. (3hp, 1d4 damage)
6. Having a crisis of faith.
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7. Searching for signs of the wizard, or other dragons.
8. Chanting furiously, gaining power all the while.
9-12: Spider Queen
20hp, centauroid body, spider’s thorax and abdomen, alluring eyes,
sibilant voice, silken-white wraps, mouth stained green, sharp talons
(1d12 damage, critical damage means you’re gutted on a talon.)
Wants to find a mate, and isn’t fussy as to sex or race.
9. Long dead, wrapped in head-to-toe in silken white, like a
mummy. Her decaying web is still full of traps. Someone else (roll
again) doesn’t want her disturbed.
10. Will bind herself and conceal her spider-parts in webbing,
pretending to be a stuck victim until they come closer.
11. Her webwork is particularly fast and intricate; on every strike,
get webbed up and lose 1d6 DEX.
12. Once the Wizard’s consort; when she ate him, she gained his power.
13-16: The Steed of the Tower
15hp, Seven foot long, naked pale body, black hooves and claws (1d12
damage) elongated horse-head, faster than you’d like, it’s wandered
the shifting halls for years. Wants to find it’s master, the Wizard.
13. Nearly blind; mostly searches by sound and smell.
14. Appears to the players as a beautiful black stallion; will reveal
itself when the party leave the tower
or openly discuss double-crossing
or harming the Wizard.
15. Desperate for kinship, but barely
remembers language.
16. Sick of this bloody tower and the
stupid Wizard, just wants to get out.
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17-20: The armour, animate
20hp, Intricate chestplate, mismatched pieces of armour (some
missing), some kind of broken magical ax (1d12 damage, leaks ecto-
plasm everywhere) believes it’s the breastplate’s owner but doesn’t
understand why parts of it are missing. Wants to become whole again.
1. No shield-arm, will attempt to wrench their left arms off. Will
prioritise those holding shields.
2. No legs, just floating like a ghost. Will attempt to sweep them off
their feet, then chop them in half.
3. Mostly whole, but lacking jewellery or other ostentation; will
target the best-dressed PCs and ensure they’re smashed to a
pulp so he looks the smartest
4. No head; will prioritise helmet-wearers and rip their heads off.
A safe route across the perilous deeps is etched on the inside of the
monster’s chestplate.
6
At the start of the game, or if you roll the same encounter twice in a
row, they find the swaggering youth instead:
Swaggering youth
10hp, dressed smartly in short pants and long shanks, well-equipped,
wields a dagger (1d6) or crowbar (1d8) or both (1d6+1d8). Wants to
prove they can do it, all by themselves. (“It” is left to be defined by you,
but shouldn’t directly oppose the party.)
When they reach the top of the tower, then and only then do they
encounter the Wizard instead:
At the top: The Wizard, in the flesh
5hp, five foot tall, wrapped in an oversized coat, forgotten more than
he remembers, prejudiced against one PC for a petty reason, copper
staff (1d6 damage, random magical effect.)
Wants to double-cross the players and keep himself protected during a
ritual. The ritual will restore his memories, but summon (and piss off)
a horde of book golems and other nastiness in the process. He’ll not
listen to the party unless they help him first.
If they help him complete the ritual, he’ll regain all his old memories
but conveniently lose any recent ones - like agreeing to help the play-
ers. (At least, that’s the excuse he’ll tell them.) He’ll reset the tower and
disappear in a puff of smoke. The tower will also reset upon his death.
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Magic Books
You’re not likely to find spare rope, coin, torches, and other mundane
junk lying around a wizard’s house, they have magical solutions for
these sorts of things instead. Really powerful wizards won’t even have
magical reagents around, they’re so powerful they don’t need them.
On the other hand, one thing you’re guaranteed to find are books.
Lots and lots of books. Whenever you would find non-magical
treasure, you find a book instead. There’s a 3-in-6 chance the book is
nice, maybe worth a few dozen coin, but mundane. Otherwise, it’s a
grimoire.
Grimoires are incredibly powerful, but also dangerous. Firstly, book
golems and other magical servants can smell a grimoire from a mile
away, and usually won’t take kindly to any old schlub picking them
up. Secondly, anything more than looking at the cover can have
disastrous consequences for your health or sanity. Finally, assuming
you don’t die reading the first chapter, to get the full effect you’ll have
to read the whole damn thing.
Grimoires
When you open a grimoire for the first time and read a passage
or two, you’ll take a condition. When you finish the book, you gain a
benefit (usually the reverse of the condition, or an additional benefit
that doesn’t make it such a curse.)
Conditions and benefits are never just “+1 to a stat.” That’s what you
get from a masterwork arquebus; this is some extra-planar malarkey
you’re meddling with now.
It’ll take 1d6+6 hours to read a grimoire from start to finish. If you
pass a WIL save, you can finish the book in 1d6 hours but have to read
the lot in one go, without sleep, interruption or distraction.
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Which grimoire have you found?
Roll 1d6. (If you’ve rolled that book already, use the next result up.)
A On the Longevity of Life through Careful Breathing. Lose 1d6 strength and
hack up a great wad of your lungs every few hours. When finished, return
to the strength you started at and double your HP.
B On the Benefits of an Early Night. You fall asleep easily, but are impossible
to wake; you basically fall into a coma. You always wake up exactly 10
hours later feeling refreshed. When finished, you only need an hour of this
coma-sleep to feel the benefits.
C A Brief Lexicon of Nearly Everything. You can no longer read anything, in
any language, except this book. When finished, you can read any language
that has an alphabet. (Reading orcish is fine for example, but none of this
‘reading body language’ malarkey.)
D Also Sprach Zebedee. You begin to doubt the existence of a certain god
or gods. Wherever you are, you’ll find devout believers drawn to your
presence, like moths to a flame, who want only to convert you and save
your soul. When finished, you become videntur ab deus - invisible to gods
and their servants.
E To Serve Man; A Cookbook. Anything but human flesh tastes dull and
coppery in your mouth. When finished, you learn how to prepare a pound
of flesh into 1d6+6 servings of hearty jerky (requires a kitchen oven and
about 24 hours.) Eating a piece of jerky during a short rest will restore 1
point of strength. Anyone can eat the meat if they want, but only you get
the strength benefit.
F This Infinitude of Dust. There’s a tickle in your throat, you might get rid
of it with a swig of water for half an hour or so but it always comes back,
especially when you’re trying to be quiet or respectful. When finished, the
cough goes away and you learn how to compress a handful of sand into
a crude glass globe. The globes are kind of pretty, they might make a few
coppers each.
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Part II: Low Fate
The ritual ends with a moment of perfect, terrible
stillness. Then, your world explodes.
Over the yells of your companions you hear a grinding of stone
against stone. The last thing you remember before passing out was a a
dizzying sense of vertigo and a flash of violet light.
By the time you come to, everything’s changed. You’re standing
on the ceiling; the floor spirals above you. Outside, everything
below the tower is blue skies. The world as you remem-
ber it continues, upside-down, above you.
Something - a lot of somethings - are flooding through the
exit above. They’re either spiders in armour, or knights with eight
legs, from here it’s hard to tell. They’ve already started spooling their
way down to you on strands of thick, white web.
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Stakes
Will the wizard be found?
Can the spell be reversed?
Are the new creatures reality or illusion? What will become of them
when the party leaves?
Questions
What happened while the party were knocked out?
What can you use (from your pack, from the What are...
environment) to get to the stairs on the ceiling? Stakes: Questions about the world
that you play to find out the answers
What else is upside down, beyond the tower? to. May have long-term ramifications
for the party and their world.
How much time has passed outside the tower?
Questions: Things to consider (by
yourself before the adventure, and
Understandings your players during it.)
The wizard sought your help, and you scaled the Understandings: Facts (or rumours)
about this location that the characters
tower - no small feat - to reach him. After helping, (probably) already know.
he disappeared, and double-crossed you. Impressions: Descriptive aids for the
GM: locations, and sights, sounds,
During the climb, you met a solo adventurer: a smells, etc.
swaggering youth, who wanted to go it alone. You Rewards: Interesting objects or
lost one another somewhere before the peak. knowledge to be discovered within.
Encounters: Creatures and situations
In this tower, time and space flow like water. that could threaten the party, or
Floors, walls and ceilings are relative. make their lives harder.
Gravity is constant to the surface you’re standing
on, unless it isn’t.
For those inside the tower, everything has always
been upside-down.
Impressions
Places and objects, now decades or centuries older
Something from before the ritual, seemingly unchanged
New people and places; ancestors of who the party once met
The sky below, and the ‘normal world’ above
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Rewards
The Upside-down torch
Darkens bright places, chills warmth. If thrust into someone’s face,
target must pass a DEX save or their blood starts flowing the wrong way.
Webspun weaponry
Thick and resinous; primarily spears and shields. Will stick to surfaces
until prised free, including skin.
Tales from the years that never happened
Fascinating scriptures, written over generations, on the long war
between the denizens of the tower. May fetch a fine price as a stellar
work of fiction in the outside world. Impossible to open the book
right-way-up first time.
Encounters
When the party fumble, waste time, or encounter shadows in the
dark, roll 1d20.
1-6: The Order of the Ebon Clutch
8hp each. Ancient legacy of the Spider Queen; armoured, centauroid
spiders; judge, jury and executioner; at war with the fairytale-made-
flesh. Attack with webspun shields and blackened lances (1d10, critical
damage means you’ve been impaled.) Want to find them guilty of their
cryptic laws.
1. Standing in judgement over [roll again]
2. Taking part in an honourable joust
3. Taking communion from their long-dead mistress
4. “Upholding the web”; on patrol for neer-do-wells
5. Repairing the web domains after a recent attack
6. Rebelling from their own laws; a batch on the run from their own
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7-8: The Steed of the Tower, Still going strong
2d6hp. The same steed, only now he’s even older and mad-
der; also his skin is inside out (following an encounter with
some inside-out gas.) The only other one who believes the
world is upside-down.
7. Forging an alliance with the Order of the Ebon Clutch
8. Writing down his memoirs
9-12: The fairytale-made-flesh
18hp. Final solution of the papermen; the
worst aspects of every wronged child,
from every cautiounary fable; attacks
with oversized nails or runs at you with
giant scissors (1d10) or reminds you of
your own failures (-1d8 WIL.) Wants to
kill them, or drive them insane.
9. Stalking a lone creature [roll 1d8]
10. Reforming itself by consuming old
tales
11. Empowered by their fear; for each creature
nearby with WIL 10 or lower, +1d6 damage.
12. Invisible to all but the player with the lowest
WIL.
13-14: The swaggering youth
8hp. Lost in the halls for decades; dirty white beard and crazy-man
eyes; barely remembers his life before the tower. Equipped with
nothing but rags and a big stick (1d8). Wants to survive, and remember.
13. +1d6 damage; has a selection of battered trophies
14. Has been lusting after one member of the party (randomly
determined) for all these long decades.
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15-18: other Explorers
1d6+6hp each. Smogtreaders, Minelurkers or Larchbinders; once,
the wizard’s foes. Well-equipped; no knowledge of the party, or their
civilisation; passing similarity to men, dwarves, or elves (respectively)
from the future. Want to steal treasures from this ancient site.
15. One is a distant relative of one of the PCs.
16. They see the PCs themselves as ancient treasures.
17. In pitched battle with [roll again.]
18. Wielding future-tech (rayguns, light-swords, etc.)
19-20: A wronged room, righting itself
A parlour or study, cursed to grow sprawling and cancerous. A mess
of sprouting staircases, bookshelves and armoires, spiralling out into
a fractal infinity. In the centre (?) lies a way out, a clue to the parties’
predicament, or a most valuable treasure.
19. Absorbed a kitchen at some point; meat and sinew grows from
the walls.
20. It’s growth is a virus, and can spread to organic matter.
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My Thanks
To my munificent patrons, who helped make this possible:
Aaron Merhoff, Ackinty Strappa, Acritarche, Al Billings, Alex Norris,
Alexander Grafe, Amy Stringer, Andrea Parducci, Antoine Pempie, Bay,
Ben Rosenberg, Benjamin George, Brad Osborne, Bruce Curd, Charles
Wotton, Chris Patterson, Chris Sakkas, Christian, Christopher Giles,
Dane Ralston-Bryce, Donna Almendrala, Eduardo Caetano, Eric Loren,
Felix, Gozuja, Hani Musallam, J.Walton, Jeff Tilotson, Jeremy Riley,
Jeremy Strandberg, Joe Barnsley, Johannes Stock, Jonathan Spengler,
Kenji Ikiryo, Kevin, Lester Ward, MapForge, Marco, Marcus Flores,
Martin Deppe, matt greenfelder, Matteo Casali, Matthew Everhart,
Matthew Klein, Michael Prescott, Michael Raichelson, Oleg Krapilsky,
Olle Wilhelmsson, Orion Cooper, Paride, Rafael Rocha, Robert Rees,
Roland, Ryven Cedrylle, Schubacca, Shane Knysh, Spenser, Stephanie
Bryant (Mortaine), Tim Dennett, Tim Jensen, Tim Reed, Tom Sambles,
Wes Fournier, Zane Dempsey, Zane Gunton.
Writing, editing, publishing & layout by Joe Banner.
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17
HIGH FICKLE
LOW FATE
A W I Z A R D ’ S TO W E R F O R I N T O T H E O D D
