Covenant Boons and Hooks

If you are using the Covenants supplement, the Great Tower naturally provides a number of Boons and Hooks as it grows (pages 6–25).

The Vast and Labyrinthine Minor Fortification Boon clearly represents the target state of the tower, with no living person having explored the entire building and discrete communities living almost independently within the tower. The founding covenant may become Indebted (as the Major or Minor Resource Hook) due to the huge magical and mundane cost of supporting the ongoing construction. Echoing the idea that communities may divide within the tower, the Major Residents Hooks Divided Loyalty and Fractured Council may develop as the tower matures. And the Dedicated Covenant Major External Relations Boon is certainly appropriate for such a single-minded covenant.

penters, stone-cutters, and all manner of other craftsmen.

The tower would be covered with balconies, some to act as observation platforms allowing magi to observe the heavens and conduct their experiments, others to receive the enchanted crawlers that scale the tower taking passengers from level to level. Some might even be dedicated mooring points for the flying ships commissioned from Hermetic shipwrights.

As the pinnacle of magical achievement, there are bound to be many grand spaces: halls and cloisters, libraries, and laboratories. If the magi of the tower have pretensions of holding Tribunals, councils, and competitions within the tower, then grand amphitheaters may be built to house them. Conversely, many areas of the tower may eventually be left empty, cold, and silent while life carries on elsewhere. These areas provide quiet and secluded spaces where intrigue can be carried out and powerful unseen beasts may make their lairs.

As the tower approaches the size of a town, it needs to be supplied just as a town would. The tower must find ways to feed its inhabitants, and levels may be turned into gardens, fields, or orchards, with sunlight and rain brought magically from the outside.

Rate of Progress

While clearly slower than using magical rituals to create new levels of the tower, mundane craftsmen can be engaged to build the tower. This chapter assumes that a sufficient workforce can be retained and enough materials obtained to keep the building work going in perpetuity. If using the rules on page 68 of City & Guild, a mason with a Craft: Mason score of 5 can build one complete level, 20 feet tall, of the Great Tower each season. This means that four new levels can be completed every year. To maintain such a sustained effort, the mason needs sufficient assistants to ensure he is not forced to spend every

season on the project. Given the scale of tower, this is a generous speed and is far quicker than most mundane building work. Individual troupes should feel free to reduce or increase the rate of progress to suit their own play style. For comparison, the Tower of London took around 20 years to complete, and the cathedral at Chartres, started in 1194, will not be completed until 1260.

Allowing a constant rate and no other modifiers, the Great Tower grows by 560 feet between Tribunal meetings and 2,640 feet between Grand Tribunal meetings. However, there are magical effects described in the sections later that enable the mason to complete this work more quickly by providing bonuses to his Craft: Mason ability. When the mason has an effective score of 10, his work rate doubles and eight new levels can be built each year. When he reaches an effective score of 15, 12 levels per year are achievable. The list below describes the rate of progress on a building's height (given in feet) based on varying Craft: Mason scores.

Craft: Mason Score of 5 Progress Per Year: 80 ft Progress Per Tribunal: 560 ft

Progress Per Apprenticeship: 1,200 ft Progress Per Grand Tribunal: 2,640 ft

Craft: Mason Score of 10 Progress Per Year: 160 ft Progress Per Tribunal: 1,120 ft Progress Per Apprenticeship: 2,400 ft Progress Per Grand Tribunal: 5,280 ft

Craft: Mason Score of 15 Progress Per Year: 240 ft Progress Per Tribunal: 1,680 ft Progress Per Apprenticeship: 3,600 ft Progress Per Grand Tribunal: 7,920 ft

Storyguides may also wish to slow the rate of construction as the tower grows larger, due to the increased effort involved in supplying the work with raw materials. But the important measure of the tower's progress is the pace of your saga. During the early years, the tower grows from an idea to an unnatural size. As the saga matures and the magi at its center gain in power, the tower starts to express more of its own character and becomes a thriving community in its own right. And if the story of the tower is due to finish with your saga, then build the tower's final stages into the final stories of your saga. The actual height of the tower is not as important as the stories told throughout its construction.