Friday, February 26, 2016

Review & Commentary On The Towers Two Adventure Source Book By Dave Brockie & Jobe Bittman As Old School Campaign

I want you to take a look at the cover art for the Two Towers adventure. Go ahead and look at it! This isn't an OSR adventure for the easily offended or the pantie waists out there. This is an adventure that has torn open a slime laden murder  blunt trauma hole in reality's sky and poured in the awesome down. It has leaked  onto a campaign source book of twisted proportions. You dear reader are in for a ride of sex, death magick, twisted adventure, and a hell of a ton of mutating weirdness. In the interest of full disclosure and all of that crap; I begged James Raggi for a copy of this adventure. First of all I'm friends with a few of the people who worked on this adventure/sourcebook and whose writing and artwork I happen to be a  fan of.  This is a media pack of OSR old school and new school goodness. You get a teaser version of the adventure, a stat pack which contains stats for Pathfinder and D20 versions of the creatures and horrors of the Two Towers, and a final version of the complete Towers Two 
GRAB IT RIGHT HERE, JUST DO IT! 



I've always been a fan of Gwar going all the way back to late Eighties when they crashed through the local New England music scene like a blunt trauma induced liquid spewing rage machine. The details of the nights that I saw the band are best left to the annals of interstellar legend. So when I heard that Dave Brockie (GWAR, Whargoul) was partnering with James Raggi  for an adventure. I was utterly aghast with shock & fan delight! And then he died before the completion of his vision. In comes Jobe Bittman (The Monster Alphabet, The One Who Watches from Below) to take on the task of completing this awesome piece of  OSR adventure. Not since Carcosa have I see a homage and love letter to a particular style of role playing. The pdf adventure is an artifact to behold. The artwork for this adventure is wall to freaking wall of brain melting awesomeness first of all. Then there's the death #$#@ sex toy magick which plays a central role in the middle of this adventure. You see this isn't one for the kids at all unless the kids happen to be twenty one or older. Seriously its that nasty in some respects but if your playing Lamentations of the Flame Princess you're going to be used to this sort of thing.
 But is there a playable adventure in all of this? As a matter of fact there is and more. There are two brothers fighting with each other and your PC's are dragged into the middle of this little affair along with some mercenaries, psychotic monsters, sex death magic toys and artifacts, and an bunch of deadly circumstances guaranteed to make you wish you had other PC's lurking in the background waiting to help replace the current ones. They might die in a blood induced hazy of epic proportions.
But is the Towers Two actually useful? In word yes! The adventure design focuses on the Two Towers as both adventure and source book. The tone here is half way between a twisted episode of He Man peppered with some of the most adult content seen since a Gwar stage show mixed in with lots of D&D. Everything here has a ton of attention to detail and is central to adventure from  the setting, the monsters, the artwork, the incredible maps of the region this is an incredible product and like nothing that would ever be release by a main stream rpg gaming company. This is mini campaign in the happening and many of the bits and pieces can be used for other OSR game systems as well.
What you get for ten dollars is going to last you months and months of play time and I can honestly say is one of the best products since Carcosa that has utility for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess rpg campaign I've seen. And folks I've read a lot of Lamentations in my time since the game's release.


I don't know that much about Pathfinder but if that's your bag then you can run this bad boy and that's with an X certificate if this was a grind house cult film. And this is one of those adventures that doesn't play nice with your PC's at all. This is a playable adventure that will keep your players busy for months to come. The writing is solid, the cartography is excellent and this is about as close to a head banging heavy metal OD&D adventure as I've ever seen. Five out of five and go grab this one! Its definitely not for the kids but man this was fun and deadly to read!

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