Sharpened Hooks: The Tower at the End of the World

Atop a tall ridge in the Bloodstone Crags is a tower, a tower built by an ancient wizard, a wizard awaiting the end of the world.

"This is all that will remain when the Drown'd World reigns."

The Wizard is alchemically perfect, a Rebis changed by the Chymical Wedding*.  Their features are soft, young, and feminine, but with the white hair and long beard and wizened eyes of an old man.

Tales say the Wizard is one of the Fair Folk, both as old as the stars and as young as a fleeting line of poetry flickering through the mind.  Tales also say that the Wizard used to be as human and as mortal as the rest of us, but only achieved their exalted state through spiritual alchemy, through meditation and symbolic interactions.

The Wizard has no name.  Are they so old they forgot it?  So young they have yet to earn one?  Did the process of alchemical exaltation scour it away, a forgotten bit of dross vaporized and floating around the upper atmosphere?  Did they sell it to the Terrible Old Man in exchange for the knowledge necessary to complete this feat?

Who can say?

We only know what lonely travelers to the tower have told us.  The Wizard is mercurial, but often kindly.  (Sometimes they are spiteful or angry, like a spurned lover or an Alzheimer's patient.)  The tower is sturdy, of ancient style but possibly recent manufacture.  (Did they find the tower or build it?  No one knows.)  The Wizard is a skilled astronomer in addition to being a skilled alchemist, and they claim to have learned the secret patterns allowing them to read the firmament as casually as one might read a book or scroll.

They claim they have foreseen the end of the world, and that the location of this tower is the only thing untouched.  (Although the addled mind of the Wizard often gives contradictory accounts of what the end will be.  Flooding is a perennial favorite.  Perhaps the world will end many times.)  They must survive to record The-World-That-Was-Lost for The-World-That-Shall-Be in the hopes that the same mistakes are not repeated.

The Tower at the End of the World is poor in terms of treasure and has few (if any) magic items, but is rich in terms of knowledge.  The Wizard and their library could conceivably hold any fact forgotten by the world at large.  (For a change of pace from the standard consult-the-sage quest, the player characters are sent specifically to cover up a fact that would be dangerous if released into the wider world.  Bonus points if covering up the fact or murdering the Wizard also destroys an equally important fact for the world to know, prompting a moral dilemma.)  Unscrupulous PCs could also steal the library and research materials for their own magical research, or murder the Wizard and start using the remote tower as a stronghold.  At least it's apocalypse-proof, right?

The obvious choice is to make the Wizard some kind of double-digit level badass archwizard, but it's probably infinitely more interesting if they're just low-level.  It's up to you whether they're delusional, or they have a unique ability to read the stars à la Joop van Ooms.  (If you want to combine "badass archmage" with "low-level neophyte," you can always run them as something akin to a BECMI Immortal on their second pass through the leveling scheme.)

* This is hardly the first time the Chymical Wedding has been referenced by sages and scholars.  Could the wizard in fact be Thearch-in-exile Giovanna d'Amalia of distant and forgotten Trias, member-state of the doomed Three Kingdoms?  Hard to say.