tacojohn4547 wrote:WHOOT! My copies arrived today. WHOOTY WHOOT WHOOT!
It is indeed a thing of beauty and complexity! I will do a more through review of the current version of this adventure when I get a chance to read the whole thing. But based upon a casual flip through, it looks really great.
I really like the textured leather look of the cover (IIRC, Badabaskar has this leatherette look about it, too). The new art compliments the old PJ original art pretty well. And the maps - fantastic. I still look at them and am amazed they were originally done in 1980. The maps are very intricate and elaborate. These maps were meant to confound the most astute mappers out there.
Great job, team!
tacojohn4547
The covers texture was actually intended to represent stone, but I can see how it would resemble leather as well, I am glad you approve of the covers though, it took a lot of time debating how to improve on Jaquays perfection, including consulting Paul himself.
The art is pretty well done, except I wanted more of it, alas, not enough funds in the budget and for legal reasons, even with permission from paul, we couldnt use any of the original art that we had. I wanted to include the lions of mitra and the rest of the sons of set, the high priest avvakris and his half fiend son, the other major characters would have been nice to haves as well. I may post some of this original art as web art in the near future, but would prefer to put it out in a pdf compilation of all the art ever done for Dark Tower as a downloadable for sale or free depending on the conditions of licensing. That would be three editions of the art, which wasnt half bad in the quicklink version, exceled in the original and the new one though.
The maps, yes paul did a great job on the original layout, we had to make a few minor corrections and add some detail. Rob was very particular about the maps and there overall design in this one, as he had criticism about the ones in Citadel of Fire. He took his time and got them right, matching everything up and trying to make them as visually appealing as is possible with grey scale. I think they turned out well.
The complexity was mostly my doing on top of the original. I recreated a lot of the monsters, rethinking there functions and design, hopefully they add a updated and more flavorful addition to what was already there. Some suggested methods of doing the golden bones and the undying swordsmen just didnt fit to me, so I had to redo them, as well as a lot of the Sons of Set, which was a major project. The lions of Mitra were interesting to convert and keep the original context of what they were. Let me know if all of these creature work well. They seemed ok in playtest, but then, I have a conservative GM style. You could possibly do a lot more damage with these if you tried.
Another item of note that was entirely my fault, many of the traps, I seem to have ended up editing every trap in there. I think traps should be deadly and here I tried to rival the traps in the Grimtooths. The slider spiker trap aint got nothin on the horrible hall and a few other creative ideas. Given credit, the original designs were Jaquays to be sure, but I hope I made them more efficient with my upgrades.
Kara
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