Tower of Magics (1983) is a sequel to the original Role Aids adventure, Beastmaker Mountain. That scenario involves Orlow the Beastmaker and his evil wife Frantasy. What a name. Frantasy. Anyway, as with Question of Gravity, the plot frame and macguffins are pretty secondary to the titular, puzzlebox location.

That tower is very…regular. It’s three floors. Each has a central staircase ringed by rooms. That ring is surrounded by a hallway and then the outer wall of the tower is riddled with more rooms. All the rooms are 6 meters square and 15 feet in height (really, really hate the mix of measurement systems); a grid and a set of tiles is provided for GMs to layout the room contents according to a key in the description. The tiles aren’t anything fancy—greyscale paper that needs to be pasted to cardboard and then cut out—but I can’t think of an adventure that includes them before this point (there were dedicated tile products, like Task Force’s Dungeon Tiles, and TSR would start getting in on the action with tile and standee-models in 1984).

The contents of the rooms are OK, more utilitarian than exciting, despite the subtitle describing the tower as a place “where magic has gone wild.” This was a tournament module and there is a central riddle with a correct answer to puzzle out, and the rooms conform to those needs rather than, like, rational building use. The monsters are a variety of undead, demons and evil humanoids, which is a sensible mix. The idea of these critters occupying and despoiling a once-noble edifice does a lot to counter the punishing weirdness of all the rooms being the same sized square.