First things first, while the link provided is technically correct, you will never find a RPG product there. If you want to experience Judges Guild games go to this link instead.
http://www.rpgrealms.com/JG/
Dark Tower is a conversion of the original printed in 1979 to the D20 system. It’s a 96-page adventure book. Two of the pages are used for advertising. One page for the OGL. One page for table of contents. Then there is a reprint of the cover and a credits page. There don’t seem to be many words per page, maybe the font is large, or the leading space between lines is large. I can’t figure out which it is. The art seem to be from the original adventure, I’m not sure because I don’t own it. Over all that seems ok for the 16.95 price tag.
The rest of the book is broken up into seven basic sections.
Introduction: 3 pages
Adventure: 44 pages
Named NPCs: 15 pages
New Monsters: 11 pages
New Spells: 4 pages
Artifacts: 3 pages
Maps: 10 pages
SPOILERS!!!!
SPOILERS!!!!
SPOILERS!!!!
The adventure is set around the a village that even tough is in the center of trade routs, people go out of their way to avoid it. It houses the founding temple of Mitra, who as a mortal battled and defeated Set’s avatar to put a stop to his evil scheme. Only at the end of the battle, Mitra died also. Eventually people started praying to him and he rose to godhood, ant thus the temple was founded. Hundreds of years later Set arrived back in the village to take his revenge. Right next door, a temple was erected in his name. Eventually there was a great war and the town and temple were buried in rockslides from the surrounding mountains. Again it is hundreds of years after. And again Set has an evil plan in motion. For the last couple hundred years, anyone who stays in the town, built over the old temples, seems to disappear. It is your job as adventures to figure out what is going on.
Well, looking at this adventure from a conversion standpoint, it is lacking. There are tables that refer to THAC0. ACs in the table also works the old way. It doesn’t seem to have been touched at all. There is a place in the adventure wear it says to increase a picklock check by x%. Many places in this module where a DC should have been, it was described in old terms. The thin with it was that it wouldn’t be consistent. The traps and checks would be done the correct way in one place, then wrong in the next.
Another thing that got to me was that the encounters were listed as below:
6 Hyaenodons, HP: 28,25,24,30,27,20
3 Young Hyaenodons, HP: 12,15,17
2 Trolls, HP: 47,52
That’s it! Nowhere in the book does it say you will require 3rd edition Monster Manual to play. There are plenty of encounters that need to be converted! The only things that got converted were Named NPCs and a few monsters. And to find those, you constantly had to flip to the back of the book. It was pretty annoying. And many of the conversions were wrong. Also, nowhere in the NPC listing was a list of their possessions. You need to read between the lines to figure out what they have. It gets to be a severe headache.
There are parts of the book that mention x level brigands. I’m still trying to figure out what a brigand is. There is no new class mentioned in the book, and there are no converted examples of these NPC.
The new spells seemed to mostly do what other spells in the Players Handbook do. No need to add them here with new names.
The only saving graces this book gets as a D20 product are that I may use a few of the monsters in my campaign, and it has a nice old school feel. It should, it is an old school adventure. But you have a lot of hurdles to overcome before you even think about running this as a 3E product. It seems to me like the person who did the D20 conversions didn’t want to change anything. He should have, this adventure could have been much better. Thus my rating is a 2.
