strategic defense. towers provide options to cast Magic in 360 degrees, gain visibility from on high to see approaching caravans, psychic falloff is less with LoS
Hey don't blame the messenger. What do you expect from an evil wizard?
I tried complaining to the magic council but they turned me into a toad. Took me 30 minutes to write this lol. Webbed feet are shit. And you can forget using speech input.
From a fruedian perspective a wand and a tower can both represent a penis. Also a witch's broom.
TV tropes cites two references to this in Terry Pratchett Discworld novels in the Freud Was Right article:
"Going Postal: As she looks over Moist's ideas for stamp pictures, Adora Belle Dearheart notes that the stamp with the highest value has a picture of the Tower of Art at Unseen University — the tallest building in the city.
Adora: Oh, the Tower of Art... How like a man.
Lords and Ladies: Naggy Ogg tells Casanunda "Magrat says a broomstick is one of them sexual metaphor things." (Footnote: Although this is a phallusy.)"
In any vaguely medieval setting, a tower is a conspicuously high-status abode, with both "loner" and "don't mess with" vibes. Whether looking down at us from a window, or up at the stars from the parapet, the Wiz is both physically and metaphorically above us mere peasants.
And, when story-telling, a wizard's tower is a very cheap bit of the narrative. The audience visualizing a mere house might need mention of the size, materials, style, color, etc. - not so the tower.
And it references the "ivory tower" of academia, the pursuit of "higher learning". In the age of skyscrapers we don't appreciate the inherent power/awe that tall structures likely had on people. It symbolically indicates power from ability, technology, competence, engineering, and use of resources.
Actually, skyscrapers ARE the modern equivalent. The "wizards of finance" and the like inhabit them, exerting power with the magic spells of technology, finance, bribery, influence, and organization. Corporations seek them for the same reasons that fantasy wizards, kings, and churches used to.
And duh, Tolkien. It's the title of the second book.
The United States recently elected a leader that lives in $100M gilded 3 story penthouse atop a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. This leader made amongst the most enemies of any living person I can name and was ostracised from popular society upon exiting the presidency. One of the ways he pitched himself as a worthy leader was boasting of all the Resplendent Wizard Towers across the world with his name on them.
Ehhh, Trump got popular in part because he says what he thinks and doesn't want to make friends with the then establishment. Making enemies is expected.
When you say ostracized, do you mean removed from Twitter?
Wizards are physically weak, have finite spells to use and require solitude and rest to regain them.
Living in a tower gives them substantial physical security. You can have one point of entrance at ground level that is significantly guarded.
A typical house has numerous points of entry. Not as big of a deal for a fighter that can defend him/herself at a moment’s notice but much riskier for a wizard.
I believe it's a symbolic reflection of their knowledge and wisdom.
Low to the ground, you can't see much. There are obstructions in the way. What lies beyond those mountains? Ascend high and find out. Atop the tower, there is nothing obstructing your vision. You can see for miles. One who has scaled the tower is all-seeing.
Wizards have reached great heights of knowledge and wisdom. They are all-knowing, or all-seeing, as is the one who's scaled the tower.
Now why a tower rather than something like a whole castle? Towers are a bit more humble, independent, and potentially isolated, as the wizard himself often is.
Living in a tower allows wizards to focus on spellcrafting at the top while business analysts and product owners make unintelligible noises in the basement.
D&D (& most modern high fantasy) was heavily influenced by LOTR. Saruman lived in Isengard (a tower), therefore the common modern high fantasy trope is that wizards live in towers.
The Neverending Story (Die unendliche Geschichte) by Michel Ende was published in 1979, and mostly takes place in the country of Fantastica. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (which mentions and describes Saruman and Orthanc) was published in 1954, 25 years earlier.
Fantasia was a Disney animated movie from 1940, but did not, as I recall, feature a wizard’s tower.
He was the only one of the three named wizards in LOTR who lived in a tower. Gandalf didn't really have a fixed abode and Radagast lived in tune with nature, on the western side of Mirkwood.
Radagast fits the druid archetype more than the wizard archetype nowadays. Gandalf is a unique case in my head. He’s more of a battlemage, the way I see it, if you ignore that he’s basically an angel.
I'd also point to the towers of ancient times being places where astronomy and astrology where practiced and the linkage between astrology, divination, and wizards.
I like to think of wizards as lone scientists like Galileo or Faraday or Tesla—dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge—where the wizard's tower is the scientist's laboratory. It's where they conduct research into arcane phenomena and invent weird new spells and artifacts.
Occasionally wizards venture out of their lab to conduct in-situ field research or collect rare materials for experiments. Adventuring wizards are kind of an oddity, like Indiana Jones is to most archeologists.
Evil wizards are mad scientists: their twisted experiments may inadvertently or intentionally create undead abominations or unfeeling automatons, unleash dangerous magical effects in the nearby lands like poisoning water or blighting crops, and luring criminals to buy or steal the fruits of the wizard's research for ill ends.
And yeah, the tower keeps the wizard safe from harm and distraction. No open tower floor plans please.
Well, maybe the adventuring wizards are like the engineers of the wizarding world, applying their acquired knowledge to concrete, real life problems. Meanwhile, the secluded wizard-in-a-tower is the scientist dedicated to pushing the boundaries between the known and the unknown. Also, I expect them to visit conferences, though not in person but by using telepresence-spells.
Towers improve the range of vision (at least in terms of distance of the horizon) . In mythology vision is often used as a proxy for wisdom -- the eye sees things, it points out things, and then wise thoughts (&actions) come forth to enact the will of the viewer (the wizard) .
As the stackexchange answer says it's a trope, but I think it's much richer than that. The territory covered by the field of vision represents the depth of wisdom and domain of the wizard. They are in a sense able to "rule" (or influence) over the area through a perspective and foresight that others do not have on the ground.
Exactly. Altitude improves visibility and gives humans (wizards included) improved perspective. The view from the top of a ziggurat, Mayan temple, wizard's tower gives the viewer perspective over their domain while also allowing them unimpeded access to the sky so they can keep calendars, predicting the seasons and astronomical phenomenon like eclipses, or even see a storm coming before anyone else.
A powerful wizard emerged from the darkness designed a tower to differentiate themselves from the other wizards, wizards of fruit, friendship, neighbourhood or next door. They cast a partial specification that stirred anger in other wizards but gave away a bag of spell tricks for free to the carpenters. Quirks such as only wood from the initial wizard's forest fitting the door frames correctly, or occasionally the height of the tower obscured by the blue sky, were fixed over the years.
As time went by, various other wizards devised new but still similar with variations on visual appearance and potion specifications, or even giving away wind chimes so visiting the forest to hunt song birds was no longer necessary, or imposed medusa-like speaking curses so that only those in the villages following them could use a mutually understandable tongue, locking out others for security, but resulting in many wars of flame.
As wizards are a vain lot, they employed wordsmiths to spread messages of lore when they added an extension to their tower. Sometimes they step too far, for example one wizard long long ago started living in a collection of fields, but this was too flat for even the townsfolk. They moved back into their old tower, sulkingly changing the entrance door to a doormat and fiddled with rivet shapes 11 times.
And as it was, so it will continue to be. Wizards will continue to live in towers that are minor iterations of each other, all imitations of The Mother Of All Towers from times long ago that only stories are told of.
It's a shame this was posted on the rpg stack exchange and not the world building stack exchange, I understand they're moderating it to keep it on topic but they're suppressing what could be some really great ideas and conversations.
When early tall buildings started to rise, you would find the most expensive lawyers and bankers in New York and London with offices on the ground floor, while admin staff toiled away on higher floors, having to walk up and down those stairs all day to move paper and transmit messages.
With the invention of the elevator, that pyramid was inverted.
Whereas Wizards, as everybody knows, have never required elevators.
IIRC it was similar in ancient Rome with their multistory insula residental buildings - the higher floors were cheaper, with smaller rooms and worse in all aspects.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadSo the wizards have the "hey you wanna see my tower" routine. A nice cup of mind control potion seals the deal.
I tried complaining to the magic council but they turned me into a toad. Took me 30 minutes to write this lol. Webbed feet are shit. And you can forget using speech input.
TV tropes cites two references to this in Terry Pratchett Discworld novels in the Freud Was Right article:
"Going Postal: As she looks over Moist's ideas for stamp pictures, Adora Belle Dearheart notes that the stamp with the highest value has a picture of the Tower of Art at Unseen University — the tallest building in the city.
Adora: Oh, the Tower of Art... How like a man.
Lords and Ladies: Naggy Ogg tells Casanunda "Magrat says a broomstick is one of them sexual metaphor things." (Footnote: Although this is a phallusy.)"
And, when story-telling, a wizard's tower is a very cheap bit of the narrative. The audience visualizing a mere house might need mention of the size, materials, style, color, etc. - not so the tower.
Actually, skyscrapers ARE the modern equivalent. The "wizards of finance" and the like inhabit them, exerting power with the magic spells of technology, finance, bribery, influence, and organization. Corporations seek them for the same reasons that fantasy wizards, kings, and churches used to.
And duh, Tolkien. It's the title of the second book.
Here is an article where both a CNN columnist and one of Trumps former underlings warn of his dark magic: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/09/opinions/trump-lindsay-graham...
When you say ostracized, do you mean removed from Twitter?
Living in a tower gives them substantial physical security. You can have one point of entrance at ground level that is significantly guarded.
A typical house has numerous points of entry. Not as big of a deal for a fighter that can defend him/herself at a moment’s notice but much riskier for a wizard.
Low to the ground, you can't see much. There are obstructions in the way. What lies beyond those mountains? Ascend high and find out. Atop the tower, there is nothing obstructing your vision. You can see for miles. One who has scaled the tower is all-seeing.
Wizards have reached great heights of knowledge and wisdom. They are all-knowing, or all-seeing, as is the one who's scaled the tower.
Now why a tower rather than something like a whole castle? Towers are a bit more humble, independent, and potentially isolated, as the wizard himself often is.
https://critical-hits.com/blog/2017/02/22/the-wizards-and-th...
Here’s a thread explaining why Saruman lived in the tower of Isengard. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/33b4v3/l...
If it weren't for Tolkien there may not even have been a D&D. I'm in line with Saruman.
Does it? It has a wizard, and later there’s the mountan peak with Chernobog, but no wizard’s tower, from what I recall.
Fantasia was a Disney animated movie from 1940, but did not, as I recall, feature a wizard’s tower.
He was the only one of the three named wizards in LOTR who lived in a tower. Gandalf didn't really have a fixed abode and Radagast lived in tune with nature, on the western side of Mirkwood.
I'd also point to the towers of ancient times being places where astronomy and astrology where practiced and the linkage between astrology, divination, and wizards.
A single tower that you live in is also a castle.
Occasionally wizards venture out of their lab to conduct in-situ field research or collect rare materials for experiments. Adventuring wizards are kind of an oddity, like Indiana Jones is to most archeologists.
Evil wizards are mad scientists: their twisted experiments may inadvertently or intentionally create undead abominations or unfeeling automatons, unleash dangerous magical effects in the nearby lands like poisoning water or blighting crops, and luring criminals to buy or steal the fruits of the wizard's research for ill ends.
And yeah, the tower keeps the wizard safe from harm and distraction. No open tower floor plans please.
As the stackexchange answer says it's a trope, but I think it's much richer than that. The territory covered by the field of vision represents the depth of wisdom and domain of the wizard. They are in a sense able to "rule" (or influence) over the area through a perspective and foresight that others do not have on the ground.
As time went by, various other wizards devised new but still similar with variations on visual appearance and potion specifications, or even giving away wind chimes so visiting the forest to hunt song birds was no longer necessary, or imposed medusa-like speaking curses so that only those in the villages following them could use a mutually understandable tongue, locking out others for security, but resulting in many wars of flame.
As wizards are a vain lot, they employed wordsmiths to spread messages of lore when they added an extension to their tower. Sometimes they step too far, for example one wizard long long ago started living in a collection of fields, but this was too flat for even the townsfolk. They moved back into their old tower, sulkingly changing the entrance door to a doormat and fiddled with rivet shapes 11 times.
And as it was, so it will continue to be. Wizards will continue to live in towers that are minor iterations of each other, all imitations of The Mother Of All Towers from times long ago that only stories are told of.
- Response attributed to Talk to Transformer/InferKit
With the invention of the elevator, that pyramid was inverted.
Whereas Wizards, as everybody knows, have never required elevators.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.