The Tower Between Worlds - The Crystal Spire

There is a strange tower that exists in many worlds, many places, many times. The Tower Between Worlds is a six-level spire in every version, but the interior (and often parts of the exterior also) can be quite different from each other. One element that each version of the tower has is the fifth level of the tower where the “tower shifting” mechanism is. On the fifth level (the upper left level on the map), there are four magical “tables” built into the wall, each with a small orb on it. Each corresponds to one of the versions of the tower, and any attempt at picking up an orb immediately transports everyone on that level of the tower to the corresponding tower (and the orb remains where it was – they cannot actually be removed from their respective tables). But it turns out there are more than four towers, and each tower might have different orbs on its four tables.

The tower layout goes from right to left, bottom to top – so the ground level on the lower left, level 2 on the lower right, level 3 on the middle left, etc.

This tower sits amid the brilliant blue crystalline outcroppings in the infinite wastes of the Cobalt Hells. The base of the tower is a massive growth of brilliant blue crystal with the masonry of the three upper levels being made of a darker blue-grey stone. The whole place is hot and unpleasant, like the hells around it. The first two levels are connected by a roughly circular set of stairs that lead up along the centre of the tower. The third floor is sloped upwards from the top of the stairs leading to it until a full rotation around the centre of the tower gets you to the masonry-finished fourth floor where stone spiral stairs continue up to the fifth and sixth floors.

The first floor is a mess of broken crystals and debris, a stark contrast to the second floor and above which are clean and well-maintained and furnished with odd crystalline and metal furnishings, many of which don’t have an obvious purpose or form. The sixth floor has eight clusters of magical crystals of different colours – salt crystals collected from eight of the different hells. With these crystals as a focus, one can open gates or summon creatures from those alternate hells.

*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 8,700 pixels x 12,600 pixels (29 x 42 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 100 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 200 pixels (for 10′ squares which is what this was originally designed at) – so resizing it to either 2,900 x 4,200 or 5,800 x 8,400 pixels, respectively.*

[https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/09/18/the-tower-between-worlds-the-crystal-spire/](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/09/18/the-tower-between-worlds-the-crystal-spire/)