RPGaDay: Tower

Wizards' towers are a staple of fantasyland scenery of course, but I mostly run modern games set in something resembling the real world.  Doesn't mean I can't have a tower though.

This magnificent erection is the National Lift Tower in Northampton.  It was built as a lift testing tower and is 127.5m tall.  It regularly appears in any game played by my home group in a modern day setting.  It's been a weapons platform in D20 Modern (aka the Northampton Supergun), a horrific mouth-filled monstrosity in Don't Rest Your Head, and a hilarious place to put a stolen dinosaur skeleton if you happen to be Puck in The Dresden Files.

I'm currently running a modern day game (Liminal) so it's probably time to think about the tower again.

Starting at the bottom, the tower is built on the site of an abbey, the remains of which still exist underneath the surrounding housing estate.  There was also a cemetary where around 300 burials were excavated prior to the housing estate being built.  Potential there for a ghost realm in the form of the old medieval abbey, or its later use as a mansion after the dissolution of the monasteries.

It would make a good site for a geomantic node.  Perhaps the lifts are somehow connected to it?  It's one of only two lift testing towers in Europe so perhaps there's a reason this specific site was chosen.  Whatever rituals the Augustinian canons and later the Giffard family performed here are long forgotten, and the height of the tower ensures dangerous energies are kept away from those of us on the ground.

The place has potential for a modern day Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green game.  A corpse found at the bottom of the tower, having apparently fallen from the top, would certainly start an investigation off with a bang.  (Or, as I'm reliably informed, a splash.)  What's that tower really for?  If the lifts all move up and down in a certain pattern, does it start to resonate?

It's jokingly referred to as 'Northampton Lighthouse'.  The local paper ran an April Fool's joke about it being used as a mooring station for airships.  But what if it wasn't a joke?  Who's to say it isn't really a beacon for something beyond our reality.

M R James had an ash tree as the home for a witch and her horrific minions.  We already know the place was used for burials, and you could fit a lot of giant spiders inside those lift shafts.  Just imagine them boiling out of the top and pouring down the sides...

Come to think of it, I'd rather not.