I’m looking for weird magical experiments. My players told me of a tower where mages are performing weird magical experiments and I’m looking for inspirations. Any ideas?
I’m looking for weird magical experiments.
I’m looking for weird magical experiments.
The tower houses an enormous circular atrium within which swings a massive iron pendulum tended by seven eyeless scrying warlocks. Every 28 days 13 babies (some kidnapped, some delivered from orphanages, some travelled from distant lands) are arranged in a circle around the pendulum. Should the massive swinging iron rod ever touch a baby, the child will immediately be anointed warrior king and then raised by the warlocks to reclaim a subterranean realm that extends beneath the tower for miles underground lit and watered by enchanted mechanical works.
In my last game I threw in a wizard performing surgery on an animal. She took out one of its organs, replaced it with a glowing crystal. The incision suddenly sealed itself up, and the creature fell to the ceiling. It was running around trying to jump back down to the floor for the rest of the conversation.
Go for the Teratic Tome by R. Chandler.
MAdness extracted from patients, taking the form of tentacled shadows.
Evil halflings whose spirits have been entrapped in beholder – like monstrosities.
A powerful sorceress who steals giant eyes and uses them to create her spidery spies…
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Not precisely DW fantasy. But tons of inspiration for over the top whimsical mad science.
The tower is over ley lines of particular power (aren’t all wizard towers so located?) and the wizard channels the energies into a baroque metal ring he has set up to attempt to create portals. The experiments have to do with placing tuning crystals of various sorts in the apparatus in differing arrangements. The intent being to figure out which configurations work, and, when they do, whats on the other side of each open portal.
The weird part is what the wizard has been pulling through these portals. He’s made friends with some tentacled elder things, and together they’ve hatched a plan to bring together singers from various races across the land, and less humanoid ones from other places in the portals, in order to perform a little musical number the intent of which is to mutate the environment around the castle for many miles into a nightmare.
The Wizards are trying to create a new type of golem. They are focused on finding a rare mineral, Sanguinist dust, found only deep below the tower. The dust comes from somewhere…. else, the far realm, the last drops of from a titan banished to the stars, who knows where it is from really. But the mineral has a rare property. It can transfer lifeforce. The wizards hope to fashion a golem from this material and use it to achieve immortality by having it slaughter nearby villiages . Will the heros arrive in time to prevent the wizards from animating the golem? The mineral dust has already been gathered in a large amount what happens if the dusts escapes its magical containment? Will the Wizards be able to control their golem?
There’s a group of experimental wizards called the Alchemists of D’Hirz or somesuch, in the Cadwallon setting. They are science-fantasy evil genetic engineers. It sounds bad, but I think it’s actually pretty clever. They are designing a race of alchemistic servants, maybe ?