After saving the daughter of Damaskos, A party of adventurers arrives in the Town of Tourville in the Kingdom of Treft. They are there coincidentally for an annual contest of regional youth.
There, in the middle of this Treftish backwater rises a massive tower -- a vestige of a bygone age. Allegedly built during the days of the Vyrum Empire, the tower rises 200 feet in the air and is sheer-faced with neither window nor door.
Tourville merchants have made a cottage industry of those who come to the contest -- spectators and contestants alike. Young men from all over try their skill at climbing, each hoping to make the top of the flat-topped tower and to gain renown. Other folks come to watch those contestants and to wager on their outcomes.
All through the day and night, youths fall to maiming and even death. To the chagrin of the party, few seem concerned that the sport is lethal.
One local boy has survived the fall of 200 feet, but his speech is impaired and he is given to violent fits of madness -- some say from hitting his head on impact. As best as they party can determine, he claims that there is no tower at all. Contradicting himself, he claims to have been to the top of it, too. All the witnesses to his ascent and plunge claim otherwise -- he never made the top.
Curious, the party sends its thief out in the dead of night to make the tower heights. If it is a Vyrum tower, there will no doubt be great treasure or magic within. The thief climbs successfully and lets others up. From within, an elaborate and ornate ruins is found, filled with creepies and nasties of many stripes.
All of that proves illusory, however. The "tower" is nothing more than a fifty foot pile of ancient rock, set with a powerful phantasm.
In the basement of this tower (the cave beneath the rock) the party discovers a lone man -- he is a handsome man, tall and well-built with salt and pepper gray hair and brilliant, electric-blue eyes.
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