Part 2, notes from actually running this location, here.
The Needle is the tower of a wizard, although not a wizard who knows magic - by dnd standards probably more of a sage: someone in possession of powerful artefacts, lots of esoteric knowledge, and a number of contracts with magical beings.
The wizard was King Mag, an eccentric, intelligent, and ambitious noble. Political sidebar - kings and queen in the current political structure are ranked beneath the Baroness, who is the actual sovereign ruling in the capital. Their actual titles are petty-king and petty-queen, but they generally don't effect these within their administered territories, and the Baroness doesn't care as long as they pay their taxes and don't try anything obviously seditious.
Mag became aware of a secret invasion from another dimension, and set up the Needle to act as a testing site (vivisections) and prison for the extra-dimensional beings that he was able to capture. All of these beings were invisible. Things about the Needle:
- It is designed to imprison and study invisible beings. The entire building is constructed around the Lamp at the top, which emits a unique light that makes invisible things visible.
- It has two separate sections. One is above ground, and looks like a strange lighthouse. The other is below ground; a prison of iron cages, sunken into the earth, that mirror the structure of the tower. The prison can be flooded (this is a failsafe, for if the lamp fails and the invisible occupants try to escape), and will be half-flooded when the players discover it. The mechanisms of flooding are entirely mundane plumbing systems.
- There is actually not much magic in the Needle. The obvious exception is the Lamp, and there are one or two magical artefacts scattered around as well, but by and large the functions of the various rooms and compartments are achieved via optics and fluid engineering. The tech base of the tower is higher than the world around it, and involves mechanisms, mirrors, and lenses.
- The light of the Lamp looks like very cold, white fluorescent light - it is utterly alien in a world that depends on candles and lanterns. It has various strange properties when refracted or concentrated, and reflects as you would expect light to.
- Sections of the Needle are built from ironwork and tough sheets of absolutely transparent crystal, which means the the light of the Lamp falls through the entire room (nowhere for an invisible thing to hide), but the enormous expense of this construction technique meant that Mag had most of the core structure built from stone. These opaque stone rooms often have mirror reflectors built in that allow large beams of Lamp light to flow through them, but are not as absolutely covered as the transparent rooms.
- The construction is obviously paranoid. Mag was an intelligent man whose long term exposure to extremely dangerous invisible entities eroded his stability. His personal apartments and his laboratory are at the top of the tower, and are built from crystal.
- There is a central shaft that runs the entire length and depth of the Needle. The light from the Lamp shines down this shaft and can thus be redirected through opaque sections with mirrors.
- There are two dangers in the prison. The first are the weak, but vicious, Dimensional Vermin. Two of these are loose in the top section of the tower, and the other four are held securely below, in the iron prison. 12 more were drowned in their cells when they were flooded. The second is a single Dimensional Soldier, aka a Killing Machine. It is securely imprisoned in the bottom cell of the prison, which is currently flooded. Soldiers do not require air or food, so it has survived intact.
DIMENSIONAL VERMIN
Invisible humanoids, sent to our reality from the future as terror weapons. They are physically unimpressive and quite stupid, but the fact that you can't see them makes them extremely scary to fight against for most people.
They kill things around them, it's all they do. Their bodies are human-like, and because they are invisible that's what most people assume that they are. They are actually bio-engineered by whoever is sending them back in time. They have no genitalia. They have been feeding on rotten meat from the dungeons, and small animals that have wondered into the tower. It the players get one into the light of the Lamp, they will see that they are bright red, slick, and shiny - obviously inhuman. They try to kill things by forcing their fingers into soft parts and orifices, and by strangling and beating people to death. Stats as commoners with permanent Greater Invisibility.
DIMENSIONAL SOLDIER
Mag calls these the Killing Machines, and is obsessed with them. They are large, about the size of a horse, and are mechanical, not biological. They move on tank tracks, absolutely silently. They have a large pneumatic ram attached to them, which is what they use to kill things. It has enough force to slam through solid walls - human bodies that are hit simply come apart in a gory mess.
Dimensional Soldiers are horrible paranoia machines. They move silently and are invisible, and generally the way that you realise that one is around is when someone next to you explodes. Once he discovered them, King Mag spent most of his life trying to figure out how to deal with the idea that one could be anywhere. They are mechanical, but also obviously magical in some obscure way. They seem to know who to kill, and they have a weird, slow, cunning intelligence. They can also fade out of existence when in darkness, which takes a few hours and means that they go back to where they came from (the future, but the players won't know this). They are always deployed into our timeline with a specific mission in mind, and will feel the presence of any specific people around them that their masters need eliminated.
They are horrible, but they follow a series of rules. They can't go up and down stairs (tracked vehicles). If they are in lit areas (even though they are invisible most of the time) then they can't fade out - this is how Mag originally imprisoned the one below, by immobilising it and keeping it lit at all times. It the players can see them then they are not really a threat, as the ram is a large and cumbersome weapon and you need to be in a specific danger zone for it to work. Under the light of the Lamp the Soldier is a black iron machine with weird controls and mechanisms covering its surface area. The ram on top is a block of polished steel. If you can see it, you will be revolted and creeped out by its silent movement, which is obviously, screamingly unnatural. You will also see small visual distortions around its 'body' as whatever makes it invisible tries and fails to do its thing beneath the light of the Lamp.
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