[Editor’s Note: This is an exclusive sneak-peek of the upcoming Tower setting piece in WizKids’s Dungeons & Dragons: Icons of the Realms line. The pictures featured in this article are from a near-final prototype and readers should note that the final product will come pre-painted and ready-to-play out of the box!]
WizKids is always looking for creative ideas, and to continue branching out into new and innovative ways for you to amplify your storytelling experience. This November, we are excited to release our next entry of playable terrain for your Dungeons & Dragons adventures – The Tower! Towers are the archetypal location for adventure, and our new tower set piece is an awesome way to add more depth to your game. Whether you are exploring the ruins of a long-forgotten tower along the Sword Coast or stumbling into the domain of an eccentric wizard, The Tower can help you elevate your game to the next level and bring a sense of immersion to every player at the table. The design was modeled using the iconic art from Dungeons and Dragons as reference, so no matter where in the Forgotten Realms your adventures take you, you will be able to utilize The Tower as an exciting new discovery to explore. And with its modular design and easily removable layers, you can customize its design to meet whatever goals you have for your play experience! The Tower features removable windows, buttresses, stairs, and floors, and can be split into three levels for ease of play. Additionally, the tower also features three double-sided floor tiles, with a gridded and non-gridded version, so you can further customize your play experience. Each floor of the tower is balanced so that it can sit on the table on its own, allowing you to set up each floor ahead of time and reveal them to the table when the time is right. The buttresses on the ground floor can be removed or rearranged to suit your needs, and the windows and skylight on the upper floors and roof of the tower can be removed as well. Your players can rappel through the broken glass atop the tower or climb up to a destroyed window in order to stealthily enter a decrepit ruin, or they can march right up to the iron doors of a fastidiously maintained tower. The roleplaying opportunities afforded by the modular tower allow you to craft any number of unique encounters for your adventuring party! When designing The Tower, we were always looking for more ways to make it more functional, and to have it be a high-utility piece for your game. As we designed each piece, we asked ourselves how we could make it as easy as possible for you to integrate your Icons of the Realms miniatures into the scene. The Tower’s eight-inch diameter means it’s large enough to fit your entire adventuring party, with room to spare for any foes who would block your path. Each section of the tower is 100 mm tall as well, so even large foes can comfortably lie in wait to ambush you as you climb. The staircases between floors are also one inch wide and are slotted at the base of the stair, so your player characters can climb or fight with ease and not worry about being thrown to their doom by an errant die. The top floor of the tower was also built with the best play experience in mind. The skylight and walkways are removable. to allow you to reach into the floor below or simply set up a tower with upper floor. The walkways leading to and surrounding the skylight are all one inch wide to accommodate your miniatures, and there is one inch of space around the perimeter for your miniatures to stand as well. The ring of statues is friction fit into the top of the tower, allowing you to remove them and customize the feel of the tower, and whether it is more martial or magical in nature. Since this is the first tower we have made, we wanted it to be as flexible as possible to support your game! On the first floor, the door and buttresses were created to be modular as well. While you will often want a door at the front of your tower, finding the open hole leading into an abandoned-looking tower can also be a great way to kick off a story and pique your players’ interest. The removeable door and buttresses also allowed us to plan for expansions in the future, so that your tower can match what is found in the book in future Dungeons and Dragons modules. Having all new doors, windows, buttresses, or even floors can allow you to further customize your experience and tailor the tower to your needs, and we are excitedly planning for more pieces to release in the future. We are also planning to release additional floors for The Tower, along with the modular pieces. During the design phase, we planned the locking mechanism that allows for stacking to work for any number of floors, so all future floors will allow you to create even bigger towers! You will be able to pick up your own copy of the D&D Icons of the Realms: The Tower this November! We are so excited to see all of the amazing and creative scenes our fans will create with The Tower, and hopefully this article has sparked your imagination about what is possible to create for your players. Keep an eye out for future announcements as well, as we plan to release additional products to allow you to customize your tower! Creating immersive new set pieces for Dungeons & Dragons has been an incredible experience for us. Starting with the Falling Star Sailing Ship, and now continuing with The Tower, we are committed to creating larger-than-life products that bring your game to the next level. We hope you have as much fun playing with The Tower as we had creating it!
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