Review: Take the Tower

Today we are looking at Take the Tower, a level 0 gauntlet adventure by Alex Dworman. It takes place in a 33-room wizard’s tower where the players will command a horde of would-be heroes dying gruesome and often hilarious deaths as they try to make it to the top or at least steal everything that isn’t nailed down. 

The setup is that the local wizard, normally a chill dude, has been kidnapping people and bringing them to his tower. Now folks (including the PCs) are rioting and storming the tower, looking for answers and revenge. Unbeknownst to them, the wizard has died and his troupe of homunculi are gathering body parts to frankenstein him a new body. 

There’s a clock on the whole affair - every 30 minutes in real time, lightning strikes the tower and charges one of six capacitors. Once they are all charged, the Frankenmage is animated and starts to lay waste to anyone in the tower. This is a good mechanic, reminiscent of the bells from The Waking of Willowby Hall with a somewhat important exception - the way this clock is communicated to the players. In Willowby Hall there are sigils in the main hall, clearly visible to the PCs, that each crack as the clock ticks down. This builds tension and expediency. Take the Tower does telegraph the clock with a humming noise that grows louder and louder, but I think it would benefit from something more obvious and quantitative.

Random encounter checks happen every round (hell yeah) and the table is populated with actual encounters that give us a creature and a few notes about how it behaves. Nothing fancy, but exactly what the GM needs to keep them interesting. 

There’s also a potentially controversial choice on lighting - we’re told every room is well-lit with an oil lamp. It makes sense in context, but does eliminate one of the core tenets of Shadowdark. 

Let’s take a moment to talk about previews. All adventures should have one and it should be generous. I don’t buy an adventure without a preview and I’m not alone. It should show more than just the table of contents and the background. It needs to show a few actual room keys. You won’t lose any sales and no one is going to run half your adventure from the preview. 

I bring this up because when I read the first room key in the preview for Take the Tower I knew I wanted to read the rest. “A glimmering chandelier illuminates a slaughter.” That really paints a picture. Six words, not overly purple but extremely evocative. Room descriptions are solid throughout - just enough to spark the imagination and invite curiosity. Perhaps bordering on too brief in a few places, but it beats the alternative. Additional information for bolded words is laid out in bullet points, per the popular format. 

The layout puts the room keys in ⅔ and monster stats and map details in the other ⅓. Because there’s not quite enough space for the map details, it often splits the rooms up in strange ways that are difficult to parse. I would either make enough space to put the room in one chunk or leave it out entirely. 

The whole place has a wonderful dynamism where almost every room has something happening. It’s not a static location waiting for the PCs to come and interact with it - it’s a living place that will go on with or without them. Humunculi go about their tasks, an entitled knight demands help, and giant rats gnaw on an important corpse. There are many places where the PCs will need to decide whether to intervene and how. The constant activity in the tower demands that impactful choices be made in a very natural way.  The giant rats, by the way, are a good example of an open-ended hazard. The PCs want to search the corpse, but they probably only have 1 hp each so they aren’t looking for a fight. So how do they lure the rats away? A simple problem with nearly infinite solutions.

One of my favorite rooms in the tower is the ol’ “demon in a circle asking to be released” trope. In this case, helping her will benefit the PCs and possibly lead to further adventures as she asks to be escorted back to her wizard lover. She can also be an ally as the party explores the tower, but the author carefully nerfed her by noting that she is wounded with reduced hit points and disadvantage on all rolls. So she won’t completely overpower any enemies they face and it may even end up that the party needs to protect her when things go sideways. 

There are lots of things to do besides fighting, but when a fight does break out we get a few notes on enemy strategies that will spice things up. Animated armors will try to throw PCs off a balcony, the kennel master won’t attack anyone threatening the dogs, etc. You might argue that the GM should be able to come up with this type of stuff on their own, but it doesn’t hurt to include it. And in the heat of battle when the GM is trying to keep track of 30 different things, a little help with the cognitive load is welcome.

I have to pick this nit. In one room we find: “Books. Histories. 1:6 chance PCs can find a book on any esoteric subject can be found, but it will be in a random language. Collection is worth 700 gp total.” How many books and how many gear slots? If I had a nickel for every time an adventure forgot to list how many valuable books were in a room, I'd have 2 nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice.

Besides the books there is a ton of loot lying around. Enough to make the PCs decently rich if they play their cards right. There’s more treasure than they’ll be able to carry, and some of it has a much higher return per gear slot than others, so it will be an interesting puzzle to get out with the highest amount possible. And unlike some dungeons where they would be able to make multiple trips, this is likely to be one and done.

And one other complaint that is not a nit: I think a gauntlet should have a pretty clear “win” condition. There needs to be a denouement where you can draw a line and say, “the characters that survived this get to move on”. Whether that’s escaping a prison, confronting a terrible evil or passing a mad wizard’s trial. DCC funnels have been criticized for being linear or railroady, but when players have defeated the chaos lord and set off on the starless sea it will feel like their PCs really earned their first level.

Take the Tower is a little weak on this point. The party doesn’t really have a clear goal. Or at least one that is telegraphed clearly. They might just grab a bunch of treasure and bail. Which is fine but not a great story to tell about how Grimpants the dwarf became an adventurer. Or they press on to the top of tower where they will either disable the resurrection apparatus by rolling a DC 18 INT with disadvantage (that’s a whopping 2.25% chance for the average PC) or they will fight the Frankenmage, a level 5 monster that’s immune to damage from non-magical weapons. They probably have better odds with the INT roll. There is a single magic weapon in the tower that will be very difficult to acquire, and although the aforementioned demon might be able to help, she’s not in top form. So combat is not a winning option.

I think it needs some more options for shutting down the mechanism or defeating Frankenmage. Something that rewards careful exploration of the tower and creative gameplay. Success or failure should depend more on player skill and engagement rather than ability checks.

So it’s not perfect but it’s got heart. I could see this being run as a level 1-2 adventure rather than a gauntlet. In fact, that might be preferable to running it as a gauntlet. Either way, Take the Tower looks like a delightful romp.

On a scale of 2-12, Take the Tower gets 8 stingbats.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548122/take-the-tower