For Halloween season, I wanted to pull back the curtain on one of Rosenhall’s oldest mysteries: the Tower.
Rosenhall is the homebrew setting I’ve run across a decade of D&D campaigns. The “Rosenverse” is the larger collection of worlds and histories those games produced, including the alternate continuities that eventually became part of this mystery.
If you played in the old Rosenverse, you probably remember the image: a tower floating above the skyline, represented by modified artwork from Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time. It appeared in cryptic Discord posts and our “iceberg”, lists of the setting’s increasingly obscure mysteries. Occasionally, it appeared inside a campaign, wearing a completely different face.
The honest explanation is that the Tower changed because I kept reinventing it. A character’s unfinished quest became a dangerous library, then a base outside time, and eventually a way to connect campaigns whose histories could no longer fit together neatly.
Some of that story reached the table. A great deal remained in my notes or surfaced through hints outside the game. Understanding the Tower means separating what happened, what I intended, and what changed along the way.
A Wizard’s Home, Then a Windmill
The Tower actually predates Rosenhall.
Originally, it belonged to a firbolg wizard played by Sam, whose name is, ironically, lost to time. He travelled between planes with his master in a flying tower, somewhat like Howl’s Moving Castle. It eventually crashed in Ravenloft, becoming Van Richten’s Tower in our Curse of Strahd campaign.
Its purpose was straightforward: Sam’s wizard would reclaim his dead master’s work and discover enough esoteric knowledge to become an archmage.
Then he died before completing the quest.
Rosenhall was initially designed as a high-level continuation for that same party. Bradford’s Misty Cliffs exist because they were supposed to provide a bridge out of Ravenloft’s mists. Unfortunately, the Amber Temple and Strahd nearly wiped out the group, leaving one survivor. We decided to start Rosenhall with a new level-one party instead.
Sam and I still liked the Tower, so we imported the idea. Rosenhall became the wizard’s original plane, with his old home waiting somewhere as a hub of knowledge and planar travel.
In Rosenhall 1, it appeared as a mundane windmill on an otherwise featureless island. The island had originally been placed on the map simply to be mysterious. Eventually, I put the Tower there.
At the end of the campaign, Garrus used its portal to leave Rosenhall for Eberron in his epilogue. That was the first payoff: the planar hub that had connected our old campaign to Rosenhall could carry a character onward into another setting.
The Archive and the Timekeeper
Several years later, Sam and I tried again through Qryrymariondias, usually shortened to Qryry. He was a diviner—a wizard concerned with discovering hidden knowledge and possible futures, whose wife had been taken into the Underdark by Torog. His quest was to reclaim her from that underground realm.
The Tower became a potential source of forbidden knowledge, incorporating third-party homebrew Sam wanted to use: the Accursed Archive.
At the center of its opening hall stood the Index Incarnatus, an endless book containing the location and description of every piece of forbidden lore in the Archive. It was the means of finding the knowledge you wanted, but consulting it was dangerous. Even looking at it caused discomfort; reading could hurt both body and soul.
Under the homebrew’s rules, a reader made a saving throw, with the difficulty depending on the knowledge they sought. Failure caused exhaustion, although they might still locate the correct book or scroll. That exhaustion cleared after a long rest. Research had a physical cost, and pursuing difficult answers could leave you increasingly vulnerable.
The Archive also had a guardian: the Silent One, a blind, tentacled nightmare whose purpose was to curate and protect its contents. It located intruders through sound. Every time someone spoke or made noise, the rules called for a d20 roll; a 1 attracted its attention.
Despite its seemingly slow movements, it was deceptively quick. Ordinary weapons and magic could only drive its tendrils back briefly. The intended danger was having this thing find you while you were trying to consult the Archive. Noise, exhaustion, and the desire for one more answer could all work against you.
The intention was finally to make the Tower a playable location. Qryry would have a reason to enter, the Archive would provide the homebrew spells and knowledge Sam wanted, and acquiring them would involve an actual encounter with the place and its dangers.
Naturally, he died before getting there.
His death changed the entire premise. I had begun experimenting with time as a cosmic horror device, including ways to make revisions to the campaign happen within its fiction.
Ashtunar, the Timekeeper, operated somewhat like the TVA in Loki. His role was to intervene where events disrupted their intended course, treating contradictions in history as problems that needed correcting. This gave me a character through whom changes to the story could become actions within the world.
During the encounter in which the party killed him, Qryry fell into the paradox Ashtunar had been trying to close. That ended Qryry’s life as the adventuring wizard, but it also made him Ashtunar’s successor.
Qryry became the new Timekeeper. The Tower became his base outside time.
A wizard’s unfinished dungeon had become part of the setting’s cosmology.
One Place, Different Worlds
When Sam returned through Qryry’s elven reincarnation, Impu, that cosmology expanded considerably.
In Rosenhall: The Age of Twilight, also called Rosenhall 2, Qryry was conducting endless temporal experiments across different universes. Qryry remained outside time, while his reincarnations lived within those worlds as different Impus, each being tested under different circumstances.
That arrangement let Sam play Impu while Qryry continued as a figure behind the larger plot. It also allowed separate campaigns to become different versions of the experiment.
His goal was to produce a successor powerful enough to replace him, break the cycle, and prevent the Age of Darkness: the future depicted in Tides of Chaos, where the gods were killed. That campaign had already happened at our table, even though its events lay in the future of these stories.
The Raven Queen kept killing Impus as they approached their goal. The intended solution involved an Impu killing her, gaining control over fate, and finally escaping the cycle.
Eventually, the story reached a desperate revelation: Qryry had failed. Impu was the last reincarnation, in the last Rosenhall that had not succumbed to that dark future. Player conflict ended the campaign before we could resolve his intended role.
This was also where the Tower’s earlier reinventions became connected within the fiction. It was now one place wearing different faces, linking the separate continuities involved in Qryry’s experiments.
Although these experiments were sometimes described as “simulations,” their worlds were fully real. Their inhabitants had actual lives, and the events we played mattered. An NPC such as Titus could die in one campaign and live in another because their histories differed.
Every game contributed to the Rosenverse. There was no secretly “correct” universe that made the others disposable, even when we tried to establish a shared chronology.
The Age of Twilight did try to merge several histories into a central continuity, something resembling Marvel’s Earth-616. Tales from the Sapest inherited that foundation, but it never settled into a timeline where everything fit.
The Library Trevor Didn’t Know Was the Tower
Cracking the Codex explored another continuity, where Ashtunar had died without a replacement. The succession that produced Qryry in the other story had never happened here, leaving the world without its Timekeeper.
Reality was destabilizing. Mezer Dread, a merchant operating across dimensions, was also involved in destabilizing the world and intended to open the Library and leave the plane with it.
Drotvek, played by Trevor, went after him.
Marked for death by the Raven Queen, he crossed the ocean by boat as reality fractured around him. Ghosts of characters who had died during the campaign offered aid and comfort on what he believed was a suicide mission.
The Library rose from the ocean as a huge, black, featureless pyramid. Drotvek defeated Mezer on its steps. Inside, he found a lectern holding an orb that flashed with every possible event across reality. He took hold of it and wished to stabilize his world and escape his impending death.
The Library was the Tower.
This version gave the mystery an actual conclusion within a character’s story. Drotvek reached it, used what it contained, and changed his fate.
When the Tower Became a Retcon
In Tales from the Sapest, the Tower increasingly became involved whenever we revised events that had already happened; a “retcon” as it was called.
The first major intervention followed a civil war. An outcome had gone so badly that it destroyed the narrative the party had been trying to build, and they wanted a do-over.
At the time, I was a narrative purist. I worried that replaying the events with knowledge of their outcome would make metagaming unavoidable. My solution was to incorporate the reset into the story.
Hannah, one of the PCs, met the Timekeeper. He told her the world had diverged from its intended timeline. Her companions: Antigone, Oni, and Ilwe, were “unstable”, and continuing down that path would lead to the Age of Darkness.
He would reset the events while preserving Hannah’s memory, allowing her to temper her companions and prevent that future.
Looking back, I consider this the first major crack in the Tower’s foundation. A distant cosmic mystery had become an explanation for a change everyone knew we were making at the table. Hannah’s special knowledge also gave her an ongoing responsibility to influence the other characters, tying an ordinary campaign disagreement to the prevention of a cosmic catastrophe.
As the campaign approached two years of play, I kept expanding it. Hannah gained powers over time. The Timekeeper appeared more frequently. I also made an ARG, an alternate reality game, with cryptic material for players to investigate outside the sessions.
It was presented as a DOS-style computer within the Codex orb, trying to reconcile rupturing histories and communicating from the world we had retconned. It hinted at future events. This was another route for players to encounter the mystery, even when its information never reached their characters.
Each intervention created more lore to explain the previous intervention.
Eventually, Trevor, playing Oni, told me the fourth-wall-breaking metaphysics had become impossible to grasp and wanted to scrap the plot. I pulled back.
It returned near the campaign’s end, when a fallout between players left only Hannah and Ilwe. Qryry retconned the fight so we could leave peace within the narrative, give the departing characters epilogues, and let the remaining two finish the final chapter.
The strain of altering so many important timeline anchors killed him. Hannah inherited his hourglass and became the Timekeeper.
That inheritance also provided three free rerolls per session, helping us manage level-20 gameplay with only two PCs. Once again, the Tower supplied a fictional explanation for a practical change.
Bruldan
Another intended reveal concerned Bruldan, the party’s barbarian.
An earlier plan would have hidden Nerull’s heart inside the Tower. Bruldan’s development changed the idea: Qryry and Sindatari, the angel of Death, had stolen Nerull’s memory from the Fortress of Memories in the Shadowfell and used it to create him.
Bruldan would be an agent of Death who could not die and whom the Raven Queen could not kill.
The intention was for the party to visit the Tower and discover that connection. That explanation never reached them in-world.
A Clocktower, a Custodian, and a Memory
After Tales from the Sapest, Nat and Kat, the players of Ilwe and Hannah, returned for the twelve-episode mini-series Rosenhall 3.
Nat played Zahkir, a paladin who dreamed of Hannah warning that time was running out. Those dreams also showed Ondor Sev, or Oni, falling into darkness.
In Rosenhall City, a clocktower sometimes appeared and sometimes vanished. Zahkir could unlock it with an hourglass pendant. This gave the new character a direct way into the mystery: a place he could enter, with a key he could use.
Inside was Amar, its custodian, around whom time flowed. The windows showed different times and games, making the connections between campaigns something the characters could actually see.
Amar discussed old characters as visitors from “some point in time,” while complaining about Hannah leaving him a mess to clean up.
Even in-game, somebody apparently had to handle the mess the plot had become.
I wanted Zahkir to use the clocktower to visit infamous scenes from past campaigns and discover their connections. That tour never happened, and I am still unsure what it would have added. The clocktower itself, however, supplied the appearance I currently use in Rosenhall: Remake.
On the topic of Hannah, in the short story The Fire Still Burns I gave the Tower a quieter purpose. It returned to its original stone appearance, with the portal from Rosenhall 1 restored. Hannah, now the Timekeeper, watched memories of her friends through it.
After so much emphasis on correcting history, the place became somewhere she could remember the good times.
That scene matters to me because the difficulties at a campaign’s end can overshadow everything that made it worth playing. Hannah’s memories gave those experiences a place in the Tower’s history, too.
A Hero, a Villain, and a Broken Door
In our conclusion to Vecna: Eve of Ruin, the Tower helped establish a new foundation for Rosenhall. This was our own ending to the campaign, incorporating the setting’s characters and history.
Vecna had won, destroyed the world, and remade it into a battleworld, somewhat like Doctor Doom’s: a replacement reality shaped by the victorious villain. The party escaped and found themselves in a distorted Tower, collapsing around holes opening into the Astral Sea.
At its center stood Francis Rathemore: the Puppet Master, “Tuppet,” Rosenhall’s central antagonist.
He looked toward Ondor Sev, one of the Rosenverse’s greatest heroes. The man Oni had killed was standing here, outside time, reminding him of their last conversation and the advice he had given him.
No more half measures.
Francis indicated the portal, now warped and melded into the floor. Oni said he would not make that mistake again and jumped in.
The portal carried him to immediately before Vecna’s victory. He fought Vecna, took control of the ritual to remake reality, and reset the timeline.
Oni’s intervention became the new canon anchor for future Rosenhall projects, replacing the framework built around Qryry’s experiments. Future stories could begin from the reality established by this reset, rather than requiring every older campaign to fit into one chronology.
The place I had repeatedly used to explain continuity changes finally became the passage through which a character could rebuild it.
Where the Tower Stands Now
There was never one clearly defined ending capable of explaining everything the Tower accumulated.
Some ideas were planned. Others were reinventions, abandoned character hooks, or attempts to keep a campaign playable. Over ten years, the connections and speculation grew into something larger than I felt capable of paying off.
It reminded me of the anticipation surrounding Half-Life 3, or the box in Five Nights at Freddy’s 4: the unanswered question could sustain more interest than any answer I knew how to give.
That history helped make a reboot necessary. A new story needed room to develop without carrying every unresolved thread.
The Tower has already appeared in Rosenhall Remake.
When Vulmer and Behzad died, Behzad awoke on a rock floating in the Astral Sea. At its center stood a clocktower, frozen halfway through its collapse. An empty portal frame looked out into the sea.
Vulmer said he was waiting for someone to “open the door.”
Then Behzad was revived.
To me, that image expresses what happened to the old continuity. The Tower has collapsed inward, and the portal that connected its worlds has gone dark. Those stories still matter, but Remake has its own foundations.
Some of the Tower’s original material has already become playable content in the Library of Dunedrift. That is why its final room was called the Accursed Archive.
Much of what I wanted to explore through the Tower has also been condensed into a simpler plot I hope to tell through Ondor Sev and Nys’ resurrection. Nys is a member of Remake’s current party, so those ideas can emerge through a character whose story is actively unfolding at the table, rather than a complicated revelation.