My players loved this! One of them was completely new to D&D and it was my first time DMing. The last boss fight was a nail-biter, and one of my players said the stained glass golem fight was one of their favorites ever playing! Highly recommend!

I have ran this adventure with two different groups now, I love it, they love it and good times are had by all.

But, I've had to double the size of each level of the tower, that's my only issue.

For the past few days, I have soloed my way through Tower of the Mad Mage (16 pages). It is a fun Fifth Edition D&D adventure, but I used Hyperlanes (189 pages). It is a sci-fi system that uses the Fifth Edition mechanics and rule books (not the monster manual). I used the FlexTale Solo Adventuring Toolkit as the solo engine. I created a human engineer character and five robots (all Player Characters and each one unique). The adventure started when the engineer and his five robots were being transported down to a planet for a job. There was a transporter malfunction and they were sent to another multiverse.

The PCs found themselves in a gambling den. Skwelch the goblin barged in and asked for help. The PCs agreed to help because of the rumor of gold. The proprietor (a goblin hater) made them leave the establishment. Skwelch was still wounded, so they took him to a farm outside of town. The goblin was able to rest in the barn and the PCs were put to work on the farm (day two and three). Owen realized that the robots were too passive, so he reprogrammed them. On the fourth day they travelled and ran into the Constable (another goblin hater). He ran through the list of crimes committed and tried to arrest him. At this point, the specialist robot (medical), THX 1138 stabbed the Constable with a needle (paralyzation drug). This gave the robot a new name – Stab. The PCs dragged him off the road and into the bushes. Owen explained to the Constable that it was not nice to hate. Owen took his two swords and the PC robot Aly San San took the Constable’s boots. This gave her the new name Boots. The PCs continued their travels and ran into three boars. They were killed. Next, they discovered a naked man who would not speak. When they freed him of his predicament, he sniffed an animal trail and off he went.

On the fifth day, they entered the tower and were forced to fight three wolves. They were killed. Next they killed two goblins. The PCs were following the instructions of Skwelch. In the third room they killed a minor stained glass golem. In the fourth room they were sealed in with a specter. It brought Owen down to one hit point and then tried to possess him. The five robots fled the tower. Skwelch screamed at them to finish their job in the tower. They left him there at the tower. The robots went back to the farm. They had enjoyed doing the farm chores and spending time with the cats. They immediately went back to work on the farm. Will they ever see Owen again? Only time will tell.

This is a perfect adventure for an introduction for new D&D players. I've ran this multiple times in our gamestore for complete new players! Beautifull adventure. Who doesn't like a goblin NPC

Excellently written one shot, I have hosted this fir 3 different groups of players, all aging 18+ with groups of 6+ people. All three groups loved the module, great amount of combat, and problem solving, I took some of my own personal liberties at the ending however ;)

Absolutely reccomend this to any DM!

My party really enjoyed this adventure. The inciting incident can easily be tweaked and reskinned to fit any campaign setting. My party HATED Skwelch, the annoying goblin, in the best possible way, with two of the PCs actively trying to kill him while a third tried to adopt him. He managed to survive in the end and has become a recurring NPC in our campaign. The map is basic but functional and I like that there are a variety of different enemy types. Additionally, the party being able to fight a Dragon at such a low level was great, and in the end I added the dragon wyrmlings mama showing up to try and take revenge on the players before Skwelch used his knowledge of the area to quickly help them escape via some old tunnels which help establish the danger of the wider world and introduce a much Bigger Bad that they have to worry about down the road (we rarely go more than a session, and they're now level 5, without somebody saying "Plus that whole full grown Green Dragon that has our scent and wants us dead thing is still out there). This adventure is great for the newer dungeon master as its straight forward and easy to run but also highly adaptable and easy to riff off to fit what you need from it.

I ran this last night with a group of 6 who were completely new to D&D and it was brilliant. I was specifically looking for something with more roleplaying and exploration that the typical early level dungeon crawl and this worked really well, the party had a lot of individual moments to shine and created fun story hooks for future sessions.

I'd reccommend being ready to cut rooms & encounters if you want to get it done in one session, but its quite modular so that's easy to do on the fly depending on how the time is going.

Great short adventure. Fun, funny, and a boss fight that could be a TPK or a walk in the park with nudges in the desired direction.

What a fun packed adventure! Quick story start with a memorable NPC. Explore a wizard's tower with something interesting in each room. Some respectable treasure with unique monsters and traps. Even fight a dragon in the end! That's a lot without overwhelming five 2nd level characters.

I ran this as a single-session adventure for a new group to get to know each other and it worked really well. The tower had something interesting in each room, and the structure of the adventure worked really nicely by following a linear path up to an open ended final encounter.

I ran this scenario as a brand new DM. I added some, removed some as per usual but I have to say that this is the perfect introduction scenario since it's contained for most of the time which makes it easy to focus as a DM. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a good introduction adventure for D&D 5e! We actually even added our playthrough on YouTube, which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIPnVHPmyThpo7-uEYvSqdKuqR7YYReHW

I had so much fun running this adventure for my oldest as a one on one. A+ good story. We loved Skwelch. He turned out to be a surpisingly helpful sorcerer, and he became (probably) a very good leader.

I ran this game for my brother and his childhood friend along with their now pre-teen sons. When asked to do so I was a little nervous because my own campaign takes up so much of my time so I plunged onto the DM's guild website and, after reading many reviews, settled on "Tower of the Mad Mage."

The adventure is a very easy read and doesn't take long to prepare. It's well laid out and a DM can easily skip over some parts if they wish for time or simplicities sake without losing much. The theme is classic D&D - goblins, magic, fighting and decision making. If you're looking to run something dark or heavy on roleplaying and intrigue, then this may not be your best bet. If, however, you want to start a standard campaign or wish for a way to introduce players to the game in a single night, then this is a great choice.

The players I had were a mixed bag of experience; my brother and his friend had played together in the 80's and I even found a couple of their Red Box dice to put out on the table. My brother has been teaching his son 5th edition, so that was easy. The final two players were new to the game entirely but had a good understanding of it by the end of the night.

"Tower of the Mad Mage" set things up nicely in that during the first day of adventuring you have several encounters which can be used to teach novice or rusty players most of what they'll need to know to play the game. One encounter requires a bit of roleplaying against authorities. The second, against wild animals, is an easy combat encounter which you can use to teach new players the basics of fighting. The third encounter is a bit of fun with a shapechanger which can teach players to expect the wierd; how they react is up to them but the DM is given an easy out to preserve the party. If the DM feels that the players already have a good understanding of the game's mechanics they can easily skip over any of these encounters and get to the meat of the adventure which is a nice dungeon crawl through a wizard tower. The difficulty of the tower is easily adjustable through the addition or subtraction of another creature, trap, or puzzle, but a DM rushed for time can feel comfortable that what's been laid out should be adequate for an average sized party. I thought the conclusion of the adventure would prove a bit much for the players, especially when they did something I didn't expect, but the old players reacted delightfully when I gave a description of a taloned paw piercing through the roof and did an excellent impression of King Arthur's knights fleeing the field in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

One note for DM's interested in using this as a start to a campaign is that there is a decent amount of magical loot in the tower. There is nothing game breaking or campaign derailing, but players may expect a similar stream of rewarads infuture adventures. Again, this is something that any DM can easily adjust to their liking. For a one-shot adventure it was great as I have yet to meet a player who doesn't get giddy over loot.

I'm afraid I have to end this on a sad note as my brother's friend passed away two nights ago. Though feared, it was not unexpected. I would be lying if I didn't say that this gave our session a somber feeling, or that I didn't have to sit by myself for a while and collect myself after the session ended. It was, though, an excellent experience as, for one night, they got to be teenagers again throwing dice at imaginary monsters. So I wish to give my thanks to the author for creating something well put together and helping me give them one last adventure.

My players loved the "Tower of the Mad Mage", and despite my having presented it as a "One Shot", are now excited at the prospect of developing a story involving the NPCs, and a new and terrifying foe.

Well done!

I ran this adventure for a group of two level 1 players and one level 2, split over two sessions. We played slowly because of introducing new players, etc., it's totally doable as a one-shot.

One of the facets I most enjoyed is the "stories with holes" from the constable at the beginning who tries to apprehend Skwelch, and in Skwelch's story. These give characters without high Charisma stats an opportunity to shine in roleplaying encounters by asking the pertinent questions. One particular player playing a "Tomb Raider" style character tends to be shy in roleplaying, but immediately latched on and came alive during these social encounters, quickly honing in on the missing details. Resolving RP encounters without relying on deception/persuasion rolls is very satisfying.

The tower itself is basically linear, which can be offputting to experienced players who might feel "on rails", but this was appreciated by the new players. Since the players experience the encounters in a particular order, the author can hang a lampshade on the "trap logic" of the tower, setting up the satisfying inversion of the trap logic which leads to a large material payoff.

The players got slightly hung up on an unsatisfying plot detail which they mistook for a mystery to be solved: how did the goblins get to the top of the tower relatively unscathed? The second-to-last floor shows the players that some goblins were in fact quite scathed, but this came after the players were investigating this for the two previous floors. Are we to believe that the goblins didn't touch those tempting goodies on the floors below? Prepared DMs might avoid this by adding more goblin corpses as additional hints for the glass and air encounters.

The final floor is excellent in that it throws all the linearity out the window and lets the PCs choose their fate. I want to run this several more times to see how different parties play the conclusion.

It's interesting to compare this adventure to another of the author's intro adventures: Temple of the Nightbringers. Both of them highlight different aspects of what makes D&D D&D. While the Tower takes the reins in order to show the players about the internal logic of dungeons and shifting/unclear NPC motivations, the Temple has a more interesting layout which highlights how different parts of well-designed D&D dungeons can be interrelated.

I would say the biggest weakness of this adventure is also shared with the Temple of the Nightbringers: a lack of interesting environmental interactions. Next time I run these, I want to flesh out the rooms a bit with more to interact with during combat.