Humanizing the Job
Lately, I’ve been pretty heads-down in the evenings working on my puzzle dungeon, A Familiar Tower. Something unexpected came out of playtesting and editing—something I didn’t anticipate when I first put it in.
I made a magic mirror. And it kind of messed me up.
Mirror of Affirmation
Full-length, free-standing mirror framed in pale holly wood. Its edges are engraved with: “I am loved. I am enough. I am brave even when I feel fear.” Any creature that meets its own reflection and recites the affirmations aloud gains the effects of a Potion of Heroism. The mirror may be used once per day.
Neat little item. Fun to identify (here's how I do that), but nothing flashy. What surprised me wasn’t the mirror’s effect—it was what it revealed.
Minor spoilers ahead. You've been warned.
The party arrives at the wizard’s tower to loot it. That’s the job. The wizard hasn’t been seen in over a decade—dead, disappeared, who knows. But the place is full of valuable arcane goodies, and if the PCs don’t pick the bones clean, someone else surely will.
They know the risks. They've done the math. This is a classic high-risk, high-reward heist.
And then they find him.
Not in some central boss chamber, not in a triumphant pose. He’s off to the side—captive, weakened, and largely irrelevant to the dungeon's progression. The wizard is alive. But saving him? That’s not the obvious play. It’s dangerous. He might want his stuff back. There’s no clear reward. The party can easily walk past him.
But by then, they’ve seen the mirror.
They’ve read the words he engraved for himself: “I am loved. I am enough. I am brave even when I feel fear.”
And maybe that hits a little different.
This isn’t a faceless moral dilemma. It’s a scared, aging man who once stood in front of that mirror and spoke those words aloud. The party doesn’t have to save him—but now, they know him, just a little.
I think all of us put pieces of ourselves into what we make. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes not. Looking back over this dungeon, I see patterns: my love of pets, my distrust of plants, and—especially—the fear I carried for my partner and daughter through some of the hardest parts of the last year.
I didn’t plan to write something personal. But I guess I did anyway.
I didn’t expect to be affected by a magic mirror. But I was.
Maybe it’s not as meaningful to anyone else. But it felt worth sharing.