Summary
“The Tower” refers to the colossal, sky-high structure at the center of Citadel, one of the protected planes. It plays a pivotal part in the life of the plane, housing the sun at night and releasing it each morning. It also plays a crucial part in the death and destruction of the plane, being responsible–somehow–for the roving bands of marauders that waylay travelers and invade towns and cities elsewhere on the main continent. It is also something like a petrified honeycomb of dungeon adventures, offering hundreds of thousands of rooms full of the stuff of traditional dungeon delving: monsters, traps, puzzles, and treasure.
Dimensions
The Tower is about 4.5 miles high, which is equivalent to 23,760 feet. The core structure and trunk of the tower is 1.9 miles in diameter (10,032 feet), but it sits atop a huge base that is just under 7 miles in diameter. The Tower also has five stories below ground, called “The Reeking Hells” because of the fetid, poisonous odors they emit. Each story of the tower is roughly 30 feet. From the bottom of its fifth hell to the tip of its pinnacles it is an estimated an estimated 797 stories high.
To put this in perspective, its 4.5 miles in height is about 16 times the height of the Empire State Building. A fall from the top would take about two minutes. The diameter of the base is 7 miles. Measured in feet, that’s 36,960. If one were to take a standard sheet of mapping paper, where each square is equivalent to 10′, you’d have to lay 93 sheets of mapping paper from end to end to cover that distance. You’d have to lay down more than 6700 standard sheets of graph paper to cover the first story alone. A story on the trunk of the tower would require a more modest 490 pages of mapping paper.
History
There is strong evidence to suggest that Citadel was once a home plane for a sphere or powerful alliance of immortals. From this it seems a safe inference that the tower was built by many gods, perhaps over many generations. The outer walls appear to be made of a primitive form of chustra, suggesting that they were erected very early in the Age of Giants. Most of the inscriptions etched into the tower are in an a non-standard variant of Ancient Runes, suggesting that the builders spoke and wrote in a lesser-known dialect of the Ancient Tongue. The layout of the tower suggests that most of its residents were giant sized, although many sections in and near the base seem tailored to creatures just a bit taller than the average human.
Entrances and Exits
What everyone knows:
The Tower’s ground-level entrances can be divided into two rough groupings: the main gates (of which there are four) and the lesser portals (of which there are many). The main gates are massive double-doors with three layers of portcullises. These occasionally open on their own, usually unleash an army of marauders or some powerful monster. The lesser portals include giant-sized single doors, human(ish)-sized double-doors, and five external sewer gratings. These never open on their own. One must track down any of a small number of magical, giant-sized keys in order to open them, and each key opens only one door. If you don’t know which door your key opens, you could spend a long, long time wandering around The Tower’s dangerous perimeter trying different locks.
What hard-core adventurers know:
There are key-holes for each portcullis in each of the main gates. So someone could voluntarily enter through those gates by choice. But no one who has entered that way has lived to tell the tale. Adventurers usually opt for one of the 62 lesser portals (13 in Zenon, 19 in Arisilon, 16 in Brynthia, 13 in Durnin, and one that moves back and forth across the border between Durnin and Brythia).
Contrary to the popular view, the number of keys in circulation is rather high. There must be at least a hundred in circulation already. Many get lost inadvertently or disappear along with their adventurous owners when The Tower swallows them whole. But among the hordes of creatures that The Tower releases, there will invariably be some that carry keys of their own, perhaps, in some cases, because they occasionally intend to return back home. Hard-core adventurers circulate a book that includes tracings and rubbings of about 45 different keys, each accompanied by the name and location of its corresponding door. So if a party finds itself in possession of a new key of an unknown source or history, chances are decent that they can figure out what door it could open, provided that it matches one of the 45 in the book. The “lore” spell does not reveal this information.
The keys detect mortal-level magic, but no mortal mage or cleric has ever figured out how to create or duplicate one. It would take a brilliant philologist and a great deal of dangerous information-gathering to figure out the runes inscribed on the keys, and they seem to include some materials that can’t be found anywhere but in the keys themselves. One tooth of each key is made of material that cannot be melted down by any known means, no matter how hot the furnace.
The Tower shifts on its axis, in something like a super slow-motion back-and-forth shimmy totaling no more than a mile every year. This makes it a little difficult to find the door you’re looking for, but it’s not too daunting.
There are “windows” of sorts in the higher altitudes of the tower, but they aren’t much. They are essentially spots in the pseudo-chustra that aren’t as opaque as the rest, usually about the size of a patio door. There’s no known way to enter or exit through these windows. The first window is 31 stories up from the base. There appear to be at least four located just 100 feet below the top. You might think people would be curious enough that some of the more intrepid folks would fly up and peer through, but in fact this rarely happens. Most people who fly higher than the third or fourth story get attacked by thunderheads. And there’s really nothing much to see: although the glass isn’t opaque it’s still milky and it’s almost always dark inside anyway.
What the gods know:
The vast majority of immortals know very little about the The Tower, because they have too few followers to really care about the plane. Accordingly, it isn’t widely known whether immortal-level knock spells or other immortal magics can force open a portal without a key.
Culture and social structure
What ordinary people believe:
The Tower produces evil beings (marauders, trolls, manticores, etc.) and unleashes them on the world. And yet it also releases the sun every morning and houses it every night. That’s because the good gods live in the upper stories and Mon, God of the Outlaws, lives in the lower levels. The Tower is so vast and huge that the gods are often competing with one another for control of its various sectors and regions. The people have to pray very hard every day in order to encourage the good gods to keep up the fight, lest Mon eventually conquer the upper reaches and extinguish the sun.
What hard-core adventurers know:
The gods are no longer allowed on the plane, for reasons that only the high priests seem to really understand. In any case, there was never much evidence that the gods occupied The Tower in person. In the experience of most adventurers who have made multiple forays into the structure, the place feels a bit like a vast, labyrinthine hotel that has about 2% of the staff it needs for regular maintenance. You can tip over a chair or release a trap and it will take years before anyone puts them back in place. The primary caretakers seem to be these dog-shaped clay golems that have hands instead of feet. You’re in a small minority if you’ve ever caught glimpse of one. But the golems don’t appear to be in charge. It’s thought that they work for these metallic-skinned giant men that adventurers call “Silver Giants” (or, more informally, “the Caretakers”). They are spotted even more rarely, and seem to spend most of their time in the upper floors. There’s not much reason to think that they are gods. They’re just powerful, intimidating, and know their way around The Tower–all of which gives them a big advantage over anyone that challenges them directly.
What the gods know:
The immortals know that no gods live in the tower–the Council of Intrusion can check for the presence of exalted creatures, and it would be crazy of Deus, Ordana and company to violate that prohibition. But the Five Gods of Citadel are very secretive and won’t reveal much about the inner workings of The Tower. The larger community of immortals know that The Tower does have some giant-sized creatures responsible for maintenance but don’t know much about them, or who is in charge. Perhaps the Five Gods know more, although the caretakers predate their takeover of Citadel.
What’s inside
What ordinary people believe:
It’s a vast labyrinth of rooms and passageways, with illusions and shifting walls that make it easy to get lost. Marauders have set up large barracks in some sections. Mon lives in the fifth and lowest layer of the Reeking Hells. If he learns that any intruders are present he sends a great horde of slimy green snakes to corner and then swallow them. He then saves their head or a favorite jewel and arranges to have it sent back to the family by way of some horrific monster released from one of the main gates. Many children have had their adventurer parent’s ring or skull returned to them by a cyclops or beholder. Somewhere in the uppermost reaches of The Tower is the great chamber that houses the sun. The surrounding area is so hot that anyone who comes too close will shrivel and burn. Oh, and there’s great wealth inside, for those who are willing to face all of these dangers. The higher you go, the more wealth there is (and the more dangerous it becomes).
What hard-core adventurers know:
Hardly anyone has ever gotten above the 3rd story, and no living adventurer has been above the 6th floor, so the layout and contents of anything above that is largely a matter of speculation. God only knows what it looks like on the 700th floor or higher, and probably even He has a pretty fuzzy understanding of it. There are legends about the upper reaches, but legends are often wrong. The more credible stories are written down by credible historians.
Every serious explorer’s favorite resource on The Tower is a book written three centuries prior by a thief named Porphyra. I’ll provide a brief synopsis below.* On the whole, shockingly few adventurers have committed their discoveries to writing. The reasons should be apparent upon a little reflection about the nature of the enterprise they are engaged in, and how the enterprise usually ends.
Much of what the common folk believe about The Tower is wrong (see above). There’s not much reason to think that Mon or any other evil mastermind is lying in wait, ready to dispatch minions the minute he learns that outsiders have intruded. There are hordes of giant snakes that ooze green liquid, but they stay on the 4th layer of the Reeking Hells. If someone is unfortunate enough to fall into a pit that drops so far down, you can actually watch the snakes descend upon him (or her) in a matter of a couple of rounds. But they never climb any higher. It’s also false that the structure deliberately thwarts efforts to keep track of one’s location. There are some illusions that lead people astray, but it’s not like there’s some intelligent force moving walls and shifting passages so that people are getting lost at every turn. If you hire a good mapmaker (or are good at mapmaking yourself), you can be 80-90% certain that you won’t get lost.
The base of The Tower is three stories tall. After that you have to climb into the core structure of the tower–the “trunk”–which is narrower. The vast majority of adventurers have never been above the base. As a general rule of thumb, those who want to climb should head toward the middle of the structure. If you fall into the first or second layers of the Reeking Hells, explore a bit and look for trap doors in the ceilings. You’re not likely to come across an obvious staircase that will take you back to ground level. If you fall into the third, fourth or fifth layers of the Reeking Hells, commit suicide; you won’t regret it.
Beyond that, it’s very hard to generalize about what you’ll encounter. Many sectors are like the typical dungeon adventure but multiplied by two or three: lots of monsters, traps, secret doors, clues or hints about the location of treasures or special access points. But other sectors are trap-heavy without a lot of magic or monsters. And others might as well be barracks for humanoids or undead, with very few traps but a lot of stuff that wants to kill you. There are a few sectors that are eerily quiet and seemingly without major hazards. There are some sectors that are as much a test of wits as a test of one’s strength and magical prowess–rooms where you have to find the right medallion to put in the right door to move ahead, and the danger lies choosing the wrong medallion or the wrong door. Some sectors have a kind of local authority figure–such as a beholder or a cyclops chieftain, but that authority rarely reaches very far. The organic creatures in the Tower need food, and somehow the Tower manages to provide it to the ones that are native there, but there isn’t a lot of human or demi-human food, so pack your own. Many sectors do have water running through them, but many do not, and you can’t be sure that it’s potable anyway. So pack water too.
One of the great psychological challenges for adventurers is to develop the willpower to cash in and leave. It’s a given that you can’t conquer The Tower. The only question is how far you can go before being killed. So, like a prudent gambler, you should set a modest goal, meet it if you can, then congratulate yourself and go home. To do otherwise is to be like the immoderate gambler–the one who, after enjoying a lucky streak and winning a lot of money, can’t resist the temptation to keep gambling and win more. But in the long run, the casino will always win, and so will The Tower. So the adventurers who thrive are the ones who know when to rest content with their earnings and call it a day.
What the gods know:
Very little.
Notes
*Porphyra’s Book: In her written account, Porphyra portrays herself as a the respected leader of a powerful band of clerics and warriors, a band that included her own brother, a powerful priest of Akesi. As she tells it, she and her party made several dozen forays into The Tower, mostly from the door called “Howling Mouth” (because an eerie sounding wind emerges from the mouth of a face that’s carved into the door). She and her group also mapped several miles of rooms and passages that connect to Howling Mouth, and her book describes in detail some of the encounters they had. At some point they became interested in tracking down something called Archon’s Song, which was something like a long but feather-light scroll with the power to talk to the gods and turn mortal magics into immortal magic. In pursuit of this goal they had to climb all the way to the 14th story of The Tower. Members of her party were picked off one by one (her own brother stepped into a trap that dropped him down to the fourth layer of the Reeking Hells, a trip that no one ever survives). In the end only she and two companions survived. One of those companions, Scellomi, eventually became a major political figure and principal advisor to the King of Durin. The other died of excessive drinking. Porphyra retired and wrote, and for that she’s beloved by adventurers of all types and persuasions. Most are too suspicious and covetous to share their discoveries freely, but Porphyra (although a thief) was generous and trusting by nature. Before she died she gifted Archon’s Song to the daughter of her deceased brother, and it has remained in that family ever since. Her brother’s descendants, known as the Drakons, are based in the Citadel of Durin and are regarded as one of the most esteemed and powerful clans alive, comparable to the royal families. Because so many people have a copy of Porphyra’s book and maps, the passages accessed by “Howling Mouth” are now the most thoroughly explored and looted.