4th of July, 2022
[Manus artificis in caelis: WIZARD EDITION]
Three very different wizard towers
Manus artificis in caelis: WIZARD EDITION by Tabletop Hotdish: Building wizard towers out of dice! (note: I didn't have polyhedrals, so I added a rule: if a roll was higher than the previous roll, the tower's unstable, and if it's unstable twice in a row it collapses)
The Tower of Kamunan #
- The Tower: 3
- Vine-covered red stone
- A Feat of Magic: 3
- Mass potion production
- Residents: 8 (unstable)
- Alchemical golems: living glassware for ease and safety
- The Tower: 6
- Tall windows clouded by black dust
- A Feat of Magic: 1
- Panacea
- A Resident: 3 (unstable)
- One bright-eyed apprentice
- The Tower: 1
- Flowers
- The Wizard: 18 (unstable)
- Sad sea-green eyes, flowing hair in an opalescent veil, white robes deeply stained from which emerge chemical-scarred hands
- A Rival: 9
- Sivaram, priest of the god of snakes and cures
- Legacy: 4
- The end of disease
The Tower of Brilliance #
- The Tower: 2
- God's bones
- Residents: 3 (unstable)
- enslaved despairing angels
- A Feat of Magic: 3
- Solar eclipse mastery
- A Collaborator: 8 (unstable)
- Ha-Shaitan, God's prosecutor, later the Gadfly of Paradise
- The Tower: 5
- Cavernous orreries of angel eyes
- A Feat of Magic: 4
- Commandeering the celestial spheres
- Residents: 2
- Anti-theist anchorites
- The Tower: 2
- Aeolian labyrinths
- The Wizard: 12 (unstable)
- Masked, cloaked, decrepit; supernumerary joints betray either post-human self-experimentation or inhuman origin
- The Tower: 6
- Vast, cloudy windows of iridescent chitin
- A Resident: 6
- Gleb, a weather forecasters' guild courier
- A Feat of Magic: 12 (unstable)
- The abolition of the Archives of Virtue and Sin—including their own
- The Tower: 4
- Gardens in God's hands
- The Wizard: 14 (unstable)
- Often foul-tempered, but capable of genuine, if distant hospitality; insists on reciprocity in gifts
- A Rival: 6
- Michael, Father-General of God's Conquering Army
- A Feat of Magic: 4
- Directs the Cardinal Winds
- Legacy: 3
- None remember God
The Tower of Radda #
- The Tower: 2
- Tarnished copper
- Residents: 7 (unstable)
- Hallucinogenic dragon-priests reaching new levels of dissociation
- A Resident: 3
- Skerrig, coal dragon
- A Feat of Magic: 9
- Constantly disguising the priests so Skerrig doesn't murder them
- A Collaborator: 3
- Nauseating glamour-scientist Helkip
- The Wizard: 19 (unstable)
- Bathed in radiance when they have the energy to cast glamours; otherwise, ageing well, but sick of this shit
- A Feat of Magic: 11
- Invented several new ways to transform people into corpses; uses none
- A Resident: 8
- A large rat; no, it's bigger than that
- The Tower: 3
- Creaking piping-choked crawlspaces
- The Tower: 6 (unstable)
- Scorched earth and poisonous fruit trees
- A Feat of Magic: 1
- “Babelocracy”
- Legacy: 1
- ↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑
Post-play #
A neat little world-building game, quick to play. The word limits force vivid brevity.
Feels like it'd be pretty simple to swap the wizard stuff for e.g. cyberpunk corp towers, or dungeons/tombs, or maybe something a little weirder like possessed dollhouses.