D&D General Reasons a haunted fallen technomage tower is still intact?

[Voadam]

So in my 5e Iron Gods (pathfinder sci-fi stuff in D&D adventure path) campaign the party did an undermining thing and toppled a haunted mobile technomage tower in the wilderness as a timber strike against a nearby unearthed giant killer robot so they would not have to fight the robot.

They knew there was a really important android brain hard drive in the tower they have been questing for, but got super pumped about making big things go boom.

I now have a 200 foot plus tower and its dungeon sub levels crashed on its side, and I am thinking it cracks open and they can do a Poseidon Adventure dungeon delve where some things are smashed, some experiments are now released and running loose as they explore, and I just shift the maps to be 90 degrees with lots of difficult terrain and difficult maneuvering to get to different rooms.

The tower is haunted by the ghost of "The Smoke Wizard" a former Technocratic League of Void Engineers technomage who does magic and tech and a mix of magitech and as a ghost still has magic but is tied to the whole tower as his lair. The technomagic tower was known to be mobile and has both magical and mad science technomagical stuff going on. He specialized in studying gasses and gaseous creatures and air magic. He was also a secret follower of the Demon of Suspicious Accidental Deaths and had various booby traps protecting his place before the collapse. His attachment to his secret technobase and his experiments there kept him attached as a ghost after the android brain's trap went off and killed him while he was trying to access its secrets.

Any suggestions on how his technomagic or ghost powers kept/keep his tower somewhat intact after crashing to the ground instead of the complete pulverization one might expect from a crashing two hundred foot tower?

This is a 5e game, but I have been using a ton of concepts from various sci-fi franchises and other game systems (such as Mage the Ascension, Werewolf the Apocalypse, and Shadowrun) so narrative stuff without a strong 5e basis is fine.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This is a 5e game, but I have been using a ton of concepts from various sci-fi franchises and other game systems (such as Mage the Ascension, Werewolf the Apocalypse, and Shadowrun) so narrative stuff without a strong 5e basis is fine.

Temporal back-up. When the tower is damaged, the emergency restoration method pulls an earlier copy of the tower out of the timeline, to fix it all at once. Unfortunately, this takes a massive amount of resources to do, so it can't be done more than once (effectively), so the tower has had suffered some damage since, but nothing like it would have without the copy.

An automated Time and Matter rote, in other words.

 

[mamba]

Magic

 

[mamba]

Temporal back-up. When the tower is damaged, the emergency restoration method pulls an earlier copy of the tower out of the timeline, to fix it all at once.

you could use that to fix all of it too and even have it be upright again

 

[Blue Orange]

Temporal back-up. When the tower is damaged, the emergency restoration method pulls an earlier copy of the tower out of the timeline, to fix it all at once. Unfortunately, this takes a massive amount of resources to do, so it can't be done more than once (effectively), so the tower has had suffered some damage since, but nothing like it would have without the copy.

An automated Time and Matter rote, in other words.

And then the Paradox Spirits show up. Easy way to do one-offs for the party--they get trapped in a Paradox Realm by the spirits, who are going after the closest disruption of the consensus, and have to find their way out.

Alternately, the rote draws Quintessence from the surrounding area, causing environmental destruction (so you're also referencing Dark Sun!) and the local Verbena...uh, druids enlist the party to shut it down so it stops killing all the trees.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Any suggestions on how his technomagic or ghost powers kept/keep his tower somewhat intact after crashing to the ground instead of the complete pulverization one might expect from a crashing two hundred foot tower?

The obvious answer is "magic" but I suppose that's too simple, eh?

Given the technomage stuff, maybe stick a gadget somewhere in the crash that was an emergency inertial damper for use in case of a crash (the thing could move, right? Floating towers are cool) and give the PCs a chance to learn about it as an explanation. It might be wholly burned out after (mostly) saving the tower from the impact, but it might be more interesting if it were currently overloaded with the inertial energy it absorbed (or whatever technomagical babble you prefer) and is dangerous to mess with. Maybe it's even glowing white hot with stored energy and if the PCs don't find a way to discharge some of the energy it will explode or melt down, damaging other sections of the tower they might want to interact with. Ideally there's some Big Dangerous Guardian around that they could discharge that energy into with a bit of trickery and planning, solving two problems at once.

Worth mentioning that the 13th Age campaign book Shards of a Broken Sky has a fairly involved sort-of-pointcrawl adventure set in a fallen-over tower much like this one. If you can get access to a copy (maybe through an interlibrary loan - someplace out there may have one) it might be a useful source of inspiration on how to run yours.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

you could use that to fix all of it too and even have it be upright again

And then life happens after that, so it's not a perfect tower any more, but not the ruin it would have been otherwise. So a good adventuring site, in other words.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Have you read Ghost Tower of Inverness?

 

[Tutara]

A fail safe causes tiny technomagical servitors to swarm out from the tower and break down any potential building materials within an appropriate radius. This radius also serves as a way of hooking the players into the realisation something is going on here - local farmers find their sheds disassembled during the night etc.

They return and use the stolen materials to rebuild the tower exactly as it was - although due to the effects of the impact everything is off by 90 degrees. This drives the smoke ghost mad, but there’s nothing he can do about it (can’t fix things if you’re intangible).

I love the Iron Gods - ran the first part in Numenera and would love to run the rest some day! The servitors would have been the equivalent of that setting’s Iron Wind.

 

[aco175]

You could have it just smash open and the cool parts lay flat once again. It would be the easiest thing to prepare and you can cut out the bits the party might skip anyway. Gives you a way to Jaquay/Alexander(ing)(ize) move around the dungeon to suit a better purpose.