A Familiar Tower

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A Familiar Tower is an escape room dungeon adventure for Old-School Essentials—a mind-bending journey through a non-Euclidean wizard’s tower where players must uncover its strange rules and twist its logic to their advantage.

Inspired by the “puzzle box” dungeons of The Legend of Zelda series, A Familiar Tower delivers challenges that feel natural to its world—mechanics that click into place the moment you discover how they work.

This 36-page zine will be available in print and digital formats, and is crowdfunding via BackerKit from February 2nd - February 27, 2026.

Follow the project here: https://puzzledungeon.com/tower?ref=pk

What is a Puzzle Dungeon?

A puzzle dungeon is more than rooms filled with puzzles, it is the puzzle. Each space teaches players about the unique mechanics of the dungeon or re-contextualizes previous information in new ways. Players get to experience the feeling of untangling an understanding of their environment a bit at a time until they reach their "eureka moment." It's a trick that's hard to pull off in the design process, but is supremely rewarding at the table.

But one of the best parts about puzzle dungeons is the part where players get to prove their mastery of the space by coming up with clever ways to use their knowledge to their advantage. What makes it different from the puzzle dungeons in video games is the tactical infinity of TTRPGs. The players' mastery of the gimmicks in the dungeon are just more OSR-style tools for them to muck around with. So you can have a Zelda-style puzzle dungeon with your Dwarven megaton hammer and your OSR-style challenges with fire crocodiles in rivers of lava, but you can also have the things like faction play.

Puzzle Dungeon Jam was hosted by directsun from November into December of 2025. Folks made their own puzzle dungeons and got help doing it through editor feedback workshops with guest creators.

Team

A Familiar Tower brings together the creators behind some of OSR’s most inventive adventures: directsun (Chris M), author of the critically acclaimed puzzle dungeon Aberrant Reflections; Skullboy (Sam Mameli), whose striking art appears in The Waking of Willowby Hall, Barkeep on the Borderlands, and Old-School Essentials; and Sam Sorensen, editor and layout designer of Seas of Sand and Secret of the Black Crag.

A Familiar Tower is published by directsunGames.

Art Assets

The promotional art assets for A Familiar Tower can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1A64z4yMmfap3nrTvDYOHEs7W5ImzlTtG?usp=sharing

From The Author, Directsun (aka Chris M)

Our hobby needs better puzzles. Not the frustrating kind, but the ones that click—sparking creativity, rewarding curiosity, and elevating your game. That’s what I build: puzzle dungeons that belong at the table and are a blast to play.

Praise for A Familiar Tower’s predecessor: Aberrant Reflections

Aberrant Reflections is BONKERS and I love it. It’s a mind-bending, “Legend of Zelda”-esque puzzle dungeon module with really good art and creative information presentation. This is the kind of module I like to run.

- Brad Kerr, Author of Hideous Daylight

If you have a group of players that love shenanigans and love putting their brains to work to solve problems in unorthodox ways, this is probably going to be an adventure that they would love and it's the sort of thing that I love. Strongly recommend this.

- Ben Milton (Questing Beast), Author of The Waking of Willowby Hall

“My favorite puzzle dungeon, full stop.”

- WasabiBurger

Follow Up

If you have additional questions, would like to schedule an interview, set up a play-through, or have any other questions please feel free to reach out via email to directsunGames@gmail.com