Tyr Alomere Tower

Here's where the tower is located on the town map:

And here are the details for the overhead map:

Tyr Alomere Tower

Nestled in the foothills of Mt. Alomere, the sleepy village of Alomere was primarily notable for being a local lord’s vacation villa. Generations ago, it grew to become a prosperous, bustling town when the powerful wizard Marius built a mighty tower there for his retirement.

The wizard, now known as Marius of Alomere, quickly developed a prosperous business. Adventurers flocked to his tower to seek his counsel about their quests, and to purchase scrolls and potions that Marius and his apprentices created. The adventurers then returned after their quests to have curses removed and magical items identified.

Tyr Alomere Tower was later inherited by Marius’ daughter, a powerful wizard in her own right. She bypassed her own children to leave the tower to her most powerful apprentice, and thus began the tradition of keeping the tower in the hands of a mage. 

The tower is the present home of Madeleine Eyraux, a mighty enchantress, and her husband. The grounds include a cottage where the staff live, and a barn where visitors can stable their mounts.

Floor 1

This floor is used primarily by the wizard’s staff. It included a kitchen with a dining nook. There are two rooms for food storage that are kept chilled through the use of magical crystals – one cold enough to freeze water into ice. The boiler room also includes laundry facilities. 

As this is the ground floor at the base of the stairs, there is no external access to this level of the tower. An internal spiral staircase on the northern wall allows for descending into the basement or rising to the second floor.

1. Kitchen

2. Dining Nook

3. Freezer

4. Cold Storage

5. Boiler Room & Laundry

6. WC

Floor 2

The tower’s main dining room dominates this room. It is accessed through a staging room where the tower’s staff can plate dishes before serving them to the wizard’s guests. A small lounge off of this room includes a balcony overlooking the main stairs leading up to the tower, allowing the wizard to greet guests and direct them up to the second landing. Although there is a secure, metal door leading to the exterior stairs, this is primarily used as an emergency exit, and this floor is generally only accessed through the interior spiral staircase. That staircase leads down to the kitchen and up to the tower’s main entryway. This floor does not have proper windows, but arrow slits allow for a little light during the daytime. It is primarily illuminated with torches enchanted with a Continual Flame spell that allows for perpetual heatless, smokeless flames. 

1. Dining Room

2. Lounge

3. Balcony

4. Staging Room

5. WC

6. Emergency Exit

Floor 3

The tower’s main entrance is actually on the third floor of the tower, guarded by an iron gate and a steel door. It enters into a vestibule equipped with an armoire for guests’ cloaks, and a small WC. This room provides access to a cozy sitting room with a fireplace where the wizard can greet guests, as well as a private lounge where the wizard can have more discrete conversations with select guests. Most of the rooms on this floor do have have windows to the outside, but a circular passageway provides access to seven arrow slits. An interior spiral staircase allows occupants to move throughout the tower without having to return to the exterior stairs.

1. Entryway

2. Vestibule

3. WC

4. Reception Lounge

5. Private Lounge

6. Security Hallway

Floor 4

Although this floor has a doorway to the exterior stairs, it is generally accessed by a spiral staircase on the northern side of the floor. This is the lowest floor in the tower to have proper windows rather than arrow slits. The main room on this floor is a comfortable lounge equipped with a wet bar, with water piped all the way up, where the wizard can entertain overnight guests. The floor is also equipped with a private chapel, two guest bedrooms, a WC, and a bathing chamber with a fireplace for heating water.

1. Lounge

2. Chapel

3. Guest Bedrooms

4. WC

5. Bathing Chamber

Floor 5

This floor is entirely devoted to guest accommodations. The best suite includes a spacious sitting room with a fireplace and a rare upper-story sink with running water, and best of all, a balcony overlooking the river and gardens. The second best doesn’t have a balcony, but does have an extra large window in the sitting and a double window with garden views in the bedroom. Both of these suites are large enough to accommodate an entire adventuring party if they don’t want to split up and some are willing to sleep on couches or the floor. There is also a third, much smaller room without a lounge, as well as a WC and bathing chamber.

1. Balcony Suite

2. Garden View Suite

3. Guest Bedroom

4. WC

5. Bathing Chamber

Floor 6

This floor has the wizard’s own bedchamber, complete with a fireplace, sink with running water, and both a double window and a balcony overlooking the garden. Two smaller rooms have been used as bedrooms for younger children, but are currently used as a small office and for storage. The floor also includes a WC and a bathing chamber. It is the topmost floor that the exterior stairs reach. It is also the topmost floor that the northern spiral staircase reaches. Another spiral staircase towards the center of the tower begins here and extends up through the tower’s central turret.

1. Wizard’s Bedroom

2. Office

3. Storage

4. WC

5. Bathing Chamber

Floor 7

This is the top-most floor of the main tower before reaching the tower’s roof and turret. This floor includes the wizard’s library and arcane workshop. A secret passageway leads to the wizard’s private teleportation portal, and another leads to a secret summoning circle. 

1. Library

2. Workshop

3. Teleportation Portal

4. Summoning Circle

Floor 8

The lowest floor of the tower’s turret has a gated metal door that provides access to the tower’s roof, where the wizard can stargaze, enjoy the views, or defend the tower. The turret has seven arrow slits that can be sealed with metal shutters. The granite spiral staircase continues up.

1. Turret Floor

2. Tower Roof

Floor 9

The second floor of the turret provides eight arrow slits for defending the tower’s roof. The spiral staircase ends here, but metal handholds on the wall allow for ascending to the turret’s roof.

1. Turret Floor

2. Handholds to Turret Roof

Floor 10

The metal handholds lead to a tiny room at the top of the turret, where luminescent crystals shed bright light through three windows, lighting up the top of the tower like a lighthouse. These windows can be shuttered when darkness is preferred, to study the stars or to hide from airborne attackers at night. A locked metal door provides access to the turret’s roof.

1. Upper Turret Floor

2. Turret Roof

Basement 1

The first level of the basement includes a wine cellar, a freezer chilled by enchanted crystals, a cold larder, and a storage room. A small room provides access to a 10-foot-wide shaft, a chute for depositing debris and other waste. This waste will be managed on the third level of the basement, which connects to the township’s sewers. The spiral staircase continues down another level.

1. Wine Cellar

2. Freezer

3. Cold Larder

4. Storage Room

5. Waste Management

6. Waste Chute

Basement 2

The spiral staircase ends at the second level of the basement. A square room secured by a locked stone door provides access to the sewers. This room is brightly lit by luminescent crystals that are bright enough to deter light-adverse oozes used to digest waste in the sewers. While the light isn’t bright enough to damage the oozes, who are hypersensitive to sunlight, it does trigger their flight reflexes. Several flights of stairs descend down into the sewers. Although inaccessible from this level, WC and waste chutes pass through this area to the sewers, while wells bring up water piped in from the river.

The most striking room in this level, perhaps of the entire estate, is the wizard’s Subterranean Grotto. The room is lighted with different-colored luminescent crystals and luminescent fungi. A pond is kept at a refreshing temperature through the use of heat-producing enchanted crystals, while even more crystals are used to warm a second pool to be as warm as a piping-hot bath. 

The remaining rooms on this floor are concealed by secret doors. A secret passageway near the spiral staircase leads to the wizard’s hidden treasury. The outer room contains valuable coins, gemstones, jewelry, and other valuables. A second chamber protected by a Glyph of Warding contains magical treasurers. In addition to being deep below ground in solid rock, these rooms are lined with marble walls that are ten feet thick, as well as a second one-foot wall of lead to prevent scrying.

Another secret passage near the stairs to the sewers leads to a mostly empty cavern. An open doorway on the west wall leads to another Teleportation Circle. In the southwest corner of the room, a passageway has been sealed by a Wall of Steel, with a Glyph of Warding inscribed before it for extra protection. Beyond it, a passageway is blocked by the collapsed cavern roof. The passageway has been sealed for so long that no one now knows about the existence of the passageways beyond the collapse, much less where they go. Human remains punctuate the dangers of the parasitic rafflesia plants that grow there.

1. Sewer Security Room

2. Stairs to Sewers

3. Waste Shaft to Sewers

4. Subterranean Grotto

5. WC & Changing Room

6. WC Shaft

7. Treasure Chamber

8. Magical Treasures

9. Hidden Cavern

10. Teleportation Circle

11. Collapsed Passageway

12. Rafflesia Cavern

Basement 3

The stairs from the second level of the basement end up in a room used to manage the portion of the municipal sewers that are below Tyr Alomere Tower. Here, maintenance workers are able to open and shut sewer gates and the water pipes that keep the system flushed.

Gelatinous Cubes patrol the system on a circuit, traveling throw the sloped drains and gobbling up everything in their paths. Softer organic waste is digested while harder inorganic matter (like bones) as well as inorganic waste (like metal, glass, ceramics, and bones) are captured and ferried about. When the cubes return up the sloped return canal, they jettison indigestible matter, which is processed elsewhere in the municipal sewers. From time to time, a Gelatinous Cube may be diverted into a canal for harvesting. The cube is split, with portions lured into glass containers. When the cube is exposed to sunlight, its acids are rendered inert and the cube quickly breaks down to a nutrient-rich liquid suitable for fertilizing crops.

1. Stairs from Basement 2

2. Sewer Management

3. River Waterpipe

4. Outhouse Chute

5. Barn Manure Chute

6. Tower WC Chute

7. General Waste Chute

8. Subterranean Grotto Bottom

9. Return Canal

10. Diversion Canal

I like them!

For those who are interested in learning how to create these but learn better by watching, Ralf has a good tutorial about creating varicolor symbols, starting with the vector ones.

My personal experiences are more with desktop publishing, not design. Used to be reasonably proficient with things like PageMaker and Quark and MS Publisher — none of which is useful here. I used the Corel suite in the 90s but haven’t owned it in decades. To create the circular symbols for my Modern Journeys map, I did download GIMP and learned just enough of it to be able to crop an image to a circle. But for quite a lot of stuff, I have used (of all things)…PowerPoint!

The funny thing is: although I am not an attorney, my day job in the business side of publishing requires me to be involved in copyright permissioning on a daily basis. Fonts, however, are a new wrinkle for me.

I don't think I have formally reserved anything (please let me know if I have!), but if I may, can I take the opportunity to reserve the following, all in varying degrees of progress (albeit mostly mental plotting for several of these)?

• Doriant - Gold Coast - Redwick/Fort Wakefield (in between the Kingdom of Enia and the Eknapata Desert)
• Doriant - Gold Coast - Caltanna (across the mountain ridge from Fort Wakefield)
• Doriant - Gold Coast - Gongadur - Vale of Dread
• Doriant - Gold Coast - Gongadur - Vez Draka
• Doriant - Gold Coast - Súil Island & the Vortex

I had another idea: Hunting Lodge Trophies.

Taxidermied wall-mounted heads of typical hunting prey (deer, bears, boars, maybe mythological creatures)

Bear-skinned rugs

Weapons display rack

Welcome, Ryan! One more thing, which you might already be planning to do: when you break it down into smaller regional maps, you can then add more details that might be too small for this map. I'm not certain what scale this map is, but for example, this map might only have the major rivers, but smaller rivers and streams might then show up on your regional maps. Or this may only have major cities, with smaller villages and hamlets being too small for this scale until you start to break it down. That gives you the freedom to follow creative inspiration as you dive in deeper.

Looking forward to seeing more!

I just assumed some ents were going swimming. 😉

I love the Tolkien font -- I use it a lot with my maps designed with Mike Schley's styles. Seems to fit really well in that style. You're right, though: doesn't work as well for small text.

But actually, I was thinking of the runes like Sue used in the brass inlays in Marine Dungeons:

I discovered that FontSpace.com has a "Commercial" filter that allows you to limit the search/browse results to just the fonts that allow for commercial re-use:

There are some pretty elvish script fonts there, too. I am a little wary, though. Some seem to be based on Tolkien's elvish script, and while the person who designed it for FontSpace may have granted permission to use what they designed, I'm not entirely convinced that Tolkien's estate would agree.

I'm pro-heathen (embrace all people!), but Unheathen Ground would be awesome.