View source for Ancient Wizard of the Protected Tower

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{{Book}} and {{Merry}} worked together to piece together more background on the ancient wizard:

The books and notes reveal a tragic and bizarre story. The wizard sounds quite paranoid-- fearing a powerful society of mages and psions working together.

As you read more, you find the source of his paranoia. The wizard had a vision. He had seen a world where the mages and psions fought, controlling and coercing the people of the area to do their bidding. After years of war and betrayal, eventually both sides were so diminished that the ravaged locals rebelled and killed the mind controllers that remained. He rambles on further of visions of gods being destroyed and other terrible atrocities.

The wizard wanted no part of these visions. He wanted to remain secluded with his acolytes, hopefully finding the holy grail of immortality while the rest of the world fought themselves.

He had always loved force and extra-dimensional magic-- and now he would use those skills to build a spell that would protect his tower from the problems of the world. He called upon the help of a friend psion for a few years, training himself in the use of psionics. From his words you can tell he really had no interest in the subject, and abandoned study once he understood what was needed to protect his tower from psionic attacks.

Researching and devising the arcane aspects of this spell, though, was a great joy for the wizard. For almost a decade he labored in his tower, studying ways to modify and empower the basic wall of force spell. He made many smaller versions and worked hard at perfecting them. Yet he needed a permanent version that was large enough to encase his tower, and which would also block teleportation and similar attempts to invade his tower. He also needed a way to control it, to turn it on and off. Eventually he devised a spell that would do the trick. He also spent a fortune building a wondrous item to control the spell: a magically enchanted lever that he could use to turn the force wall on and off. The lever was placed at the entrance to his tower, and he could use it to turn on the force wall and lock himself in the tower. When he wanted to leave, he simply could pull the lever to drop the force wall, then secure his traps during his absence to make sure nobody locked themselves in while he was gone.

He prepared all his materials and readied the lever, then began the enchantment process on the top level of his tower. Over many days he labored and chanted, until the final word was spoken. His hair stood on end as he felt the massive force wall surge into place. His tower was now completely encased. Triumphantly, he went downstairs to test the lever. And there he discovered his fatal error. The lever, which was on the wall of the corridor leading into the tower, was outside the force wall.

In other words, there was no way for him to turn off the force wall. It was permanent and invulnerable, and blocked teleportation and all spells such as mage hand. He couldn't get to the lever that would turn it off. He had trapped himself for eternity.  The wizard went insane trying to devise a way out of the tower, but he failed over and over and over again.

<small>''DM's note: This story was adapted and adjusted for this campaign from a module by Joseph Goodman</small>