Editing Tower of the Stargazer

Tower of the Stargazer is (allegedly) an introductory adventure to LOTFP, written by James Edward Raggi IV. To quote the author, the goal of this adventure was to "be an example to new Referees about how to design and run adventures", which apparently involves a dick toward your players as much as humanly possible.

The premise is quite simple: an abandoned wizard tower, full of treasures and weird contraptions. It's supposed to be somewhat dangerous because the wizard was paranoid, but (once again, allegedly) unless the PC "fiddle with things “just because” with no actual identifiable purpose", there shouldn't be "too much in the way of danger to be had". I’m sure this will end well, so let’s go!

=The adventure=

The first step is obviously opening the doors of the tower. We’re already off to a good start: using the handle instead of the knocker will trigger a poison trap. If you fail your save roll, you die. Yep. You can die literally a few seconds after starting the adventure.
There isn’t much to discover on the first floor, except some valuable bottles of wine, one of which being poisoned and requiring a save versus poison to not die (I’m already sensing a theme, here). It is advised to the GM that “in no circumstances should the poisoned bottle be described any differently from the others unless someone actually drinks from it”.

The third floor is the wizard’s room (the second floor being mostly empty). The wizard is still here, trapped within a circle of salt after a spell gone wrong. The trick is that freeing the wizard (who is friendly at first) will end the adventure, as he will ask the players to leave or simply kill them.  After 5 minutes of play, you’re either getting a TPK or leaving empty-handed (well, or with a certain bottle of wine). Fun fun fun.

The final floor is the telescope’s room, which is somewhat complex to activate. If your player manages to find the missing pieces and activate the mechanism, you can reward them by LITERRALY TELEPORTING THEM INTO SPACE (and kill them, if that wasn’t clear), because that’s what telescopes do. Of course, there’s a fake treasure room (and the chests are, of course, trapped wit poison darts, whom trigger, you guessed it, save versus poison or die). 

There’s also a fake workshop, with unidentified potions (none of them having benefic effects, but at least some of them being a great way to open a door to magical realm). Then there’s the REAL workshop, which will make you regret the fake one. It contains fials of living blood (hope you have a wizard in the group, because it’s invulnerable to physical attacks), a mirror which trigger a save versus magic or have your soul destroyed, and a zombie. At that point I take a little pause and remind you of that little paragraph in a lot of RPG books telling you that you should ensure that everyone is comfortable with the tone of the game. None of that bullshit in LOFTP: there’s a little textbox advising you to make a very graphic description of the zombie ESPECIALLY if that make your players uneasy. I can’t resist giving you this wonderful quote:

''“The game system is designed for convenience and expedited resolution, not to protect the sensibilities of the players! Nobody can blame people who want some mindless entertainment, but people who want to swing swords and slay the bad guys without ever thinking about the sucking wounds and spurting blood and screams of agony that are implicitly involved are not just living in the fantasy world of a game, they are living in denial.”''

Oh, there’s also a mirror which trigger a poison save for some reasons. 
The adventure ends with the treasure room (and a leech in a corpse triggering a save versus paralysis or die). The treasure room is a standard puzzle, and once again, new quote:

''“For the record, the playtest group failed to collect the treasure. As they pulled the levers, they did nothing more than look at the force fields, hoping for a visual sign of change. There is none. So they destroyed the mechanism, hoping that would drop the force fields. It did not, so they were stuck staring at the treasure but not really having a way to get to it.”''

Because that’s obviously how you GM.

Well, that's it. It's not that bad actually, but if you want a good exemple of why James Edward Raggi IV writing is infuriating, read it.