Hi Ed, my party are about to travel to Featherdale, and I suspect will want to enter Cholandrothipe’s tower. Is there any information you can give about the tower or Cholandrothipe himself? regards ~GG Hi, Gareth! Here we go (warning: long thread):
1/Cholandrothipe was a short, rotund, dignified pedant who had a long but narrow white beard, piercing emerald eyes, and an advanced case of paranoia: he was CERTAIN the world was out to get— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
2/him, unknown foes lurking and keeping watch over him at all times, waiting for the slightest weakness or vulnerable moment, in which to pounce.
As a result, his tower north of Feather Falls—a long, thin, diamond-shaped (when seen from— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
3/above) walled compound of black stone—was crammed with secret passages, traps, and magical guardians.
The long axis of the diamond ran east-west, with a tall dwelling-tower of black stone forming the western point. The northern point was— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
4/a short granary tower (built over a deep well of clear, sweet drinking water), the southern point was a short stables (with workshops and storage above) tower, and the eastern point was a tall entry tower, home to Cholandrothipe’s guards
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
5/and cooks, with kitchens and a dining room and their living quarters above; they cooked hot food and took it on dome-covered trays to Cholandrothipe’s tower via an underground passage running underneath the central courtyard, which was
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
6/given over to a thriving vegetable and apple-tree garden, now run wild and vine-choked. (The tower has a dumbwaiter shaft connecting to all of its levels.)
The walls were forty feet high, the short towers sixty feet high, the entry tower— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
7/eighty feet high, and the wizard’s tower a hundred feet high. The compound was built on bedrock and so had few underground areas; just the well, the passage under the courtyard, a simple two-cell dungeon (mainly used for growing edible
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
8/mushrooms) beneath the entry tower, and a cesspit under the stables tower. Adventurers’ reports of extensive underground passages and “grisly laboratories” are the result of a collapse of the floor of the underground passage at its
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
9/midpoint caused by the Thayans who slew Cholandrothipe blasting naturally-cracked bedrock to try to find “hidden treasure” that wasn’t there—and breaking through into an older underground complex beneath the tower not known to
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
10/Cholandrothipe.
This “dungeon” connects in two places to the natural caverns of the Underdark, areas long abandoned by the drow due to repeated flooding and everpresent damp, which makes them fungi forests roamed by many wild creatures,— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
11/large and small, of the Underdark. The fungi are slowly colonizing the subterranean complex, expanding to carpet everything with spore-ridden soft growths, including the “grisly laboratories” which were constructed here by a renegade
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
12/apprentice of the archmagi Mycontil who fled here from Halruaa in 584 DR to work on augmenting and transforming humans by magical means (successfully grafting onto them living crab-pincers, scales, prehensile tails, and extra beast-eyes
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
13/capable of darkvision, and with only sporadic success arm bone-spines, fangs, and tail stingers). The apprentice, a megalomaniac mage by the name of Izander, considered humans who did not have the innate ability to wield arcane magic
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
14/to be “lesser” beings, that wizards had the right to enslave and transform. He eventually died here at the hands of his creations, because his attempts to magically alter their brains so they’d serve him with unbreakable loyalty, to
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
15/the point of unhesitatingly sacrificing their lives at his whim, failed—and as he invariably altered them without bothering to abate the pain of doing so in the slightest, so that most of them died of shock after suffering acute
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
16/agonies, eventually some of them broke free, turned on him, and slew him (literally tearing him apart). A few descendants of some of these transformed humans still roam this dungeon level and the nearby Underdark.
Cholandrothipe— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
17/magically specialized in magically altering items in size without damaging them (he made his daily living miniaturizing barges and skiffs for “passage past the Falls” and then returning them to proper size, so the River Ashaba above
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
18/the Falls could be navigated. However, he also enjoyed and collected traps (mainly of the trapdoor and “peril swinging back and forth on a line,” like a long-ram appearing out of a wall to slam intruders against an opposing wall, sorts;
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
19/he disliked poisons, gases, and piercing features), and became very competent in the making of guardians, such as animated objects (animated armor, flying swords, and rugs of smothering), iron golems, stone golems, helmed horrors,
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
20/shield guardians, and automatons of his own devising (at least one of which resembles a Slaughterstone Eviscerator). Many of these survive (and function!) in his abandoned tower and the underground areas below to this day, because
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
21/Cholandrothipe’s slayers fled or perished long before they could “scour out” his complex.
Very few of another sort of trap he lavishly equipped his tower complex with survive: spell-traps. Most of them have “gone off” and so been— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
22/discharged forever, though a few still wait, silent and deadly, for someone to trigger them.
Cholandrothipe died in spell-battle against nine or more Red Wizards, killing at least three of them before he perished. Another five fell to— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
23/his traps as they explored his complex after his death. At least one survivor fled, never to return, and warned other Red Wizards that a more thorough exploration of the place just wasn’t worth it. Some, of course, didn’t believe in
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
24/this warning, and paid the price—as have many adventuring bands in the years since, until now few dare to even approach the tower complex closely, and it’s become utterly overgrown by thick, tangled forest, a haunt of birds and wild
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
25/woodland creatures.
Cholandrothipe’s servants all died or fled in the initial Thayan attack, and their descendants would be hard to trace today. They did, however, bolster the legend that somewhere in or under Cholandrothipe’s home are— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
26/powerful magic items, perhaps even an artifact or four, because Cholandrothipe liked to collect such things and dream of enhancing, combining, and improving them. Perhaps, in a few cases, he did…
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
27/And there you have it. Potted Realmslore. Have fun!
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
Many thanks once again! Thats amazing. I’ll try and let you know how the party fares! I hope you are having a good weekend ~GG You're very welcome. Have a great gaming time! I'm happily writing, now that my library shift is done. Soon I'll make dinner. Ah, the simple life.
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) August 4, 2018
