KS1 – Tower of Skulls

By Dave Olson
Cut to the Chase Games
Swords & Wizardry/Pathfinder/5E/Savage
Levels 10-12

Death and darkness has risen from churned black soil! A festering evil returns to the land, spreading a palpable fear to all in its area. A brave band of heroes are needed to seek out the site and cleanse it once and for all. But be wary! Brave heroes have fallen victim to the traps and dangers contained within the legendary … TOWER OF SKULLS!

This adventure is a series of linear set-piece encounters in a tower housing an imprisoned demon lord. Book magic items, gimping the cleric, long room descriptions (remember, they are all set pieces!).

Oh god I loathe shit like this. I was looking forward to seeing a high level swords & wizardry adventure. A feeling of dread came over me when I read the last sentence of the background: “So he has turned his former power base into a death trap for the unwary, cackling away at the mortals who blunder in to find naught but their doom.“ I know what that means. It’s the code words that mean stupid set piece challenges in a Tomb of Horrors like environment. All I see is a lack of imagination, or, maybe, extremely constrained imagination. The ability to write a set pieces is, I guess, some kind of talent, but the inability to link them together in anything other than a linear adventure is a significant gap. I always feel ripped off in cases like this and I’ve struggled greatly to make sense of those feelings. This doesn’t fit any definition of what a S&W adventures is, for me. Sure, it’s stat’d that way, but is that enough? I’m guessing that the answer is that it’s just a BAD Swords & Wizardry adventure, and it’s unfair of me to call it not even a S&W adventure. But it is SO bad, misunderstanding what the the system is and about, that it makes me want to place product like this in another category altogether. “New! Call of Cthulhu adventure!” Maybe it is stat’d that way, but if it’s nothing more than 12 combats,all in a row, with nothing in between, between the characters and CoC monsters? I’d say the designer just doesn’t get what CoC is.

Demon lord chuck challenges Orcus, loses, gets imprisoned in this tower which Orcus chucks in to the Prime Material plane. He’s converted it into some deathtrap “challenge” dungeon and now it appears during the full moon at random places. There’s actually a couple of nice things in the introduction. Separate sections for Sage information and Legend Lore are nice; these should be standard operating procedures for any high level S&W character: getting a leg up any way they can before they actually get near the dungeon. Likewise there’s a section on portents of doom that precede the towers arrival. Birds flees the tower area 6-7 days in advance of its appearance, and great squirming masses of earthworms appear. There’s a few other examples of things like this, including a skull that burns with black flames and has eyes that light up in the direction of the tower. Very nice little additions to get the party moving in the right direction and add a touch of dread and fun to the adventure. That’s great content.

I won’t be saying anything nice again.

The tower has undead in it. Level 10-12 clerics laugh at undead, so turn undead doesn’t work in the tower. I’m not cool with this. I don’t like it when the players powers are gimped arbitrarily by the DM. The cleric worked hard to get to level ten. Stripping them of their turn powers removes a significant ability. The wizard can’t cast spells and the fighter can’t swing a weapon? That’s not something anyone would do, would they? And yet adventure after adventure does this to the cleric. It’s like there’s some sort of mental block when it comes to undead. The designer wants to put in undead. The cleric is a problem. The solution is to gimp the cleric. A better designer would turn to other solutions. Like not including undead. Or putting in more powerful undead. Or increasing their number.

On a somewhat related note: the goal is to reach the top levels wherein resides whatever the players are looking for in the tower. You can’t leave the tower except through the top floor or through a special room on each level that takes 50% of your magic items and teleports you d% miles away. And you can’t rest in the tower, except for the one hour in those special portal rooms. It’s clearly written to gimp the players and control resting, forcing them to confront set piece after set piece in an artificial way. Short rest. I don’t think I recall that mechanic in S&W … hmmm, 5e perhaps? Let’s be clear, even if I were reviewing a 5e adventure I’d hate this thing, it’s just a poor adventure overall and the imperfect conversion just shows the lack of experience with S&W. Also, if I were playing this, I’d go to the roof and use any of a variety of wizard spells to drop in through the roof. Just saying.

Having put this off as much as possible, I must now address the 51 set piece encounters. 51-5 that is, recall there’s one “Room of Respite” on each level. Enter room. See something. Take an action. Monster shows up. Defeating monster allows an exit to show up. Go to next room. Repeat. The door opens when the monster appears. The door open when the monster is killed. The door opens when you remove all the candles. The door open when you burn up an item. The door opens when you answer a riddle. The door opens when the trap triggers. You get the idea. You encounter the room and then you are allowed to go to the next one. The set pieces are not the set pieces of an Indiana Jones film. Grand environments with lots going on that the party can use for creative purposes. That’s not this. These are extremely constrained environments, the only features present are the pits and traps the monsters pull you into. These are the worst sorts of encounters in any D&D game. A forced combat, the deck stacked unnaturally in the favor the DM. Roll the dice. Depend on luck. Go to the next one. The dreariness of round after round of mini’s combat. From this standpoint even the Battle Interactive at DDXP offers more interesting environments to adventure in. A not insignificant effort is made to describe each environment a bit. A titanic mushroom. An obsidian step pyramid. Great cages. Hanging vines. But each one feels like those final rooms in the demonweb in Q1. The purpose of the room is to have a fight. The purpose of the read-aloud is to describe the set pieces. And then there’s a column of text after that to go into detail on the description and monster tactics and so on. Described as a tower, it’s actually a ring of rooms with an additional room in the middle. One entry door and one exit door, and sometimes a third to the central room. This repeats level after levels, for all four of the “challenge” levels.

The reward for all of this … +2 longsword. +2 ring of protection. And so on. And so forth. Wand of fear. Ring mail +3. Book item after book item. No imagination and no creativity in in the description. Just the name “Ring Mail +3.” The fabulous treasure room in which all of those “leaving the tower” magic items were teleported to? Totally abstracted, just like in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. “Piles of glittering coin and gemstones.” And “There should be enough to tempt the most equipped adventurer.” That’s it. Nothing more. That’s the extent of the creativity you paid for. S&W is a gold for xp system, iirc. But that’s all abstracted here. There’s little understanding of the game. It’s not5e. It’s not Pathfinder. It’s not Savage Worlds, with their combat based advancement for plot point based advancement.

I’m very disappointed in this. $6 at DriveThru … I’m really on the edge of giving this one of my coveted “Worst Adventures of All Time” checkboxes.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/178325/BF1-Tower-of-Skulls-SnW?affiliate_id=1892600