Return to Dark Tower RPG: Components/Quality Review + What It's About

I love Return to Dark Tower.   Having played 13 times with a group and 6 solo, I can safely say it was worth the money, especially since people still like it, want to play it, ask about it, etc. It's a dub. I recently bought sleeves, token upgrades, and the Hordes miniatures upgrade because, well, why not? I love this game. 

There's an RPG. I liked the base game, MAZES enough, so I figured, with a bit of extra cash in my pocket, I would pick up this game. I also bought everything for it, because nobody else seems to have, and it needs to be reviewed. 

 tl;dr This game kicks ass. Before I get to the meat of the RPG, I'm going to review the accessories. With photos!

DICE TOWER ACCESSORY / ROLEPLAYING KIT

I am very mixed on this one. It's got what I would call a mixed value. 

The actual tower itself is cardboard, and it's got one of those covers, very nice colors and glossy. Cardboard is hard. It wouldn't hold up your weight, but it's thicker than like, cereal box. Probably just a little thinner than say, the Leviathan box for GW(any of their thick boxes) similar. It's sturdy, has valuable stuff on it. 

 

Behold! The Tower!

This is a tracker for keeping track of a metacurrency the GM gets

This is a list of all of the results of the reinforcement die

And here it is again. Probably could have left this side blank but there it is again.

The top half and the bottom half have magnets on them so the tower stays together and you can rotate it to face you. I actually really liked this.

 

This is the "resolver" that tells you what rolls you need to make to do what actions. More below.

However. The actual tower is not functional enough as a dice tower, as it works about 90% of the time. There's an insert you put in the "top" of the tower, and a tray you put between the top and bottom. Your dice emerge from the tower from a front door, and while it didn't happen a lot, it does happen that the dice, even when dropped to give them more energy to bounce, in my testing, did get stuck a small amount of the time.

 

Tower's center. The dice got stuck here a couple times in testing. Hm.

 I dunno man. You can get dice towers. You don't really need them unless you have asshole players who will literally throw their dice across the room without one. If you know someone with a 3D printer, you can get them for a few bucks and there are free STLs everywhere. Even a 3D printed one from an online seller should be relatively cheap. I dunno. It's not great. The cheat-sheet elements on it are fantastic. The value it adds? I don't know. Because while that's useful, the system is so simple that they put these cheat-sheet elements everywhere. It's not great. 

 Dice! For all your needs.

The dice included are fine. They're colored to match the palette of the original game, but unlike the official MAZES dice you can buy, they are not coming with little symbols on them. The official dice come with crowns and keys, this one should honestly have come with the banners and reinforcement symbols. Disappointingly, it did not. They're fine however, and if you're a Towerhead(I am coining that term) there's a variant, gold colored reinforcement dice. It's the same quality as the RtDT game.

 Basically shorter but longer than an index card and too much info crammed in there.

The sheets included are garbage. They include the tally sheet and the main character sheet, but they're tiny, and the colors, bright and vibrant in the books and basically every other accessory, are washed out here. They're double-sided too, and they're just too goddamn small. Second picture is it on top of a 6x4 inch MDF board I'm using for Hobgoblin move trays. These add zero value to the product. Complete waste of time. They will never be used at my table, holy hell. 

The tokens? They're almost exactly the same as the ones for the board game. I've included one of each of the board game tokens. Slightly smaller, good thick cardboard, they're fine. 

The last thing is the cards. These are awesome. Nice, thick cardboard, glossy, they come with player aids:

- Resolvers for the game (this limits the value of the tower) but also include the "scale"/mass battle resolvers

 - A card for every single pre-built hero in the game, which are all of the heroes in the expansions and base game. Just fantastic, you could hand out blank sheets then just let people choose characters based on their art alone, then fill out.

- A card for every board game Adversary(final boss) and every board game foe(normal enemy)

- Player aid for the darkness metacurrency and explanation on the back what it does. 

- Player aids for every single march action in the game and for bonds.

- Player aids that list all of the named locations, one of each for each kingdom(if you don't have space/interest in the map)

The cards win. They're the best thing here. They do take away from the value of the rest of the package. So if you want to buy this thing, it's 50 USD. The tower works 90% of the time, the character sheets are garbage, the dice are perfectly fine but lack official branding, the tokens are high quality and the cards are probably the best RPG player aids I've ever seen. Value is up to you. It will look cool on the table.

Adversary Screen

The Screen is a typical GM screen. Same thick but not heavy cardboard, glossy, some art. The front has the tower on it, which is a good choice and a couple monsters. It's up there. I like the thing. 

Otherwise there's not a ton to say. It's cheaper, but you know. I don't use GM screens, really. 

 

Okay, now to the meat of the matter...

 

Before we can talk about this game, we have to talk about MAZES. MAZES is an RPG system that borrows a lot of "story game" elements and is full of references to other works.

It uses the Polymorph system. The system gives each player a sigle die - d4 - d6 - d8 - d10, and that's basically your character. There's four types of checks, Books for brain stuff, Boots for agility things, Blades for murder, and Bones for any sort of physical save or strength check etc. The numbers as you likely have seen with the resolver are static. There's Edges to give you more variety in your build, and when you roll the "1" you succeed if the check has something to do with your die type. The highest number on your die is an auto-succeed - but as the GM accumulated metacurrency, namely Darkness - it goes from autosuccess to negotiated success, to never working and becoming an autofail. It's a fun little system, not really built for leveling up but good for telling stories in shorter campaigns. There's spellcasting which uses the dice but there's a lot of abstraction here and it's more about the fiction than the dice. So if you're a fighter(d8) you're going to roll the 4/5/6/7 to hit people a fair bit, and during the start of the adventure you're going to autosucceed a lot. You can fluff this as a battlemage throwing fire bolts or a guy stabbing people. "Blade" is not literal, it's combat. Not a bad idea. There's a health system, you don't get a lot of health but enemies don't do a ton of damage, and the game is sort of designed around you spiraling a bit the longer the adventure goes. You wouldn't go into Kharmlund here but you might want to check out Gahamenzant, my Lankhmar-esque cit1y setting. Never Conquered! So what's different about that compared to here? This is a good system for first time roleplayers, kids, people who just want a small amount of mechanics. It's horrible for people who want any sort of granularity. Like, treasure/inventory is a metacurrency you spend if you have it, you don't mark down 100 gp, you mark down 1-3 treasure points or whatever, and that's a communal resource.

Compatibility

This is so compatible, mostly because the system itself is so simple/good. The book provides specific page numbers and gives clear instructions on using everything from MAZES here and vice versa. Honestly? The word I would use is "fuckin' stellar". I am aware that's two words. 

Map

 

There's a map. I don't like it, it's just a paper map, and if you're buying this, you have Dark Tower. So use that, or the tally sheet which has the regions listed.

Lore

They added lore. Or this is the lore and I didn't see it in the manual. There's not a lot here, basically Nagash's backstory - evil wizard made a big evil tower, got betrayed, died, and now the Tower is just a big pile of "fuck you all" in the center of the continent ruining everything for everyone. I like it enough, the framework lets you add lore in and out as you please. They did explain what all of the monsters were now, which is nice because people going "what is a mormo" got really annoying!

 

Mechanics

 

So, it's MAZES. The game works the same with some added fun stuff. For one, the "key" is now a "banner" action. It's the same. The crown is now a "reinforce action", and it's the same, but if your "forces"(basically a personal army that follows you around, more below) would help you succeed at it, you get it. It requires negotiation at higher darkness levels like in MAZES and it fails at the highest levels of darkness. So its not bad.

 

The Darkness mechanic is a metacurrency. You spend it to do GM fiats or to make the permanent Darkness level go up. You get Darkness by getting it through end of session tally ups. You also get it by having players get dropped. In MAZES there's "conditions" but its a bit different in Dark Tower. You can also negotiate Darkness, like if the players (who are supposed to always be good guys) do something evil, fail a mission, etc. I'm still relatively new to metacurrencies but I don't really see any mechanical weaknesses here, yet. Rising Darkness is a permanent spend. It's the stuff that makes life harder for you. 

 

Mass Battles

There is an interesting mass battle system. I don't necessarily agree its the best way to resolve these, you should just be rolling down the neoprene mats, pulling out your armies of miniatures and having an epic fucking final battle. Alas, this is also fine. The mechanics basically just get another set of names: banner is the same, books becomes tactics, boots becomes march, blades becomes battle, bones becomes defend, and reinforce is the same. Still, it's a nice attempt at doing a mass battle, similar to other OSR games that just sort of say "do a normal fight but say it's a battle".

There are new metacurrencies that mostly function the same as the old ones. There's Spirit, and it does the role of Stars in MAZES. Spirit is casting "big" spells that wouldn't be cantrips, pulling off heroic actions, succeeding when you should have failed, overriding GM fiat. The d4(paragon) character gets four of these. The d10(sentinel) gets one. Treasure is the same as MAZES no changes. That's fine but it's a bit disappointing there aren't like...coin tokens or something. Then there's danger, which replaces the "hearts" from MAZES. Hearts functioned as HP and you spent them to both attack and absorb damage. Now, you take "danger". When you take a "danger" you roll. If you roll above, you're fine. For now. If you match, you're removing all danger, and getting an additional action. If you roll lower, you remove all danger, and take a "consequence". This means you immediately drop, are removed from the scene, take a corruption and finally the Adversary/GM gets a Darkness. Finally Danger is rolled at the end of the session, you basically roll a die for each danger you still have on a table using your class die and the results can either be nothing, the Adversary gets more darkness and such. In MAZES you take conditions and get back up when HP is depleted, worse off than before but not the worst, eventually you will be rolling to not die. I like this system a lot, it's waaay better than the one MAZES uses and it works well since it's a great way to tie in the board game mechanics. 

I'm not going to go into corruptions super heavy, they're basically conditions but there's more than the four standard ones, they're all from the board game and MAZES. You remove them by resting at the end of your session and there's also mini-quests you can do to cleanse them. If you get 3 corruptions, like the board game, it's game ove-I'm kidding of course. The GM gets a fiat, which does various things, but usually they just get carte blanche to be bad to you.

There is a system called Bonds, which are roleplaying prompts that let your characters get better friends with each other. Basically, little miniquests to keep people tied to one another. 

 

Henchmen

 

There is, surprisingly, a henchmen system. You can have a secondary character called a Companion who can go off and do other things for you. They use the same class die as you but you can pick different edges. It's not the old DnD torchboy thing, but I do like it.You can even just have your companion be your guy for the session, and spend that time mustering an army, which is really neat. So, armies:

Forces

There's a really good idea here: You have another "resource" called forces. In this game, you're an accomplished hero gathering forces and solving quests to build up your forces. The player gets to say what their army is, what they do, whatever. It's fun, fluffy stuff. You get a starting forces count thats the max number of your dice. You get 36 tokens in the accessories box, so you have 27 tokens used up and nine more as a float. You get as many spirit tokens which is sort of pointless but what-ever, it works. Also, they can act in your stead with the reinforcements roll as mentioned before. It's a good idea for an army/domain system. Each "forces" in the final battle is an entire army you can use. They still basically function like hit points in a battle, but yeah. Neato stuff.

One downside is for the character creation, which is generally good, each kingdom has a "homeland" generator that requires a d20. Why would you do this? There's no d20 in this game. 

All of the characters from the game are pre-generated here if you don't want to make one, but you can obviously make one easily.

Magic is more developed from MAZES. You have a list of cantrips to give more explanations as to what kinds of things should be free magic spells, you have a list of incantations which are what your spirit spends should be, and you have rituals that basically are your downtime action.

 

Questing

 

Finally, we reach the final bit: so basically, you're a group of powerful warlords and your job is to stop whoever is in the Dark Tower. There's a QUEST phase. You go on quests, these are standard adventure game adventures, however this is set in a region. Failing the quest means the adversary gets the region instead of you (it is possible to reverse this) and thats generally bad for the players. Once you finish the quest phase, you move to the TALLY phase. You resolve something called "claim". If you succeeded through normal adventure game stuff, you win the region, stop the adversary, etc. It seems to be the case that the territory you hail from is "yours" and you attempt to gather more, at least stop the bad guy from getting them. A realm can only be "LOST, FALLEN OR WON". Winning a quest usually means you get treasure, you all roll your dice to get more forces, and then you get the map. Then, the Adversary does the previously mentioned danger rolls, getting Darkness on a 2-3, and a fiat on a 1. 4+ means nothing. You roll for each one seperately so it reinforces well: taking dangers is not so bad when you're a d10 but you're weak magically. A mage can do lots of fun and cool things but you have a 75% chance of making the game harder. Then Adversary can then spend darkness to either add to the Rising Darkness, or spend a darkness to start to unlock the SEALS. These are basically "the tower made everything worse everywhere". Very few mechanics are there for SEALS, it's usually fluff stuff like "there are now packs of ghouls running around eating people" and you're expected as the GM to make the game harder and tie it in. 

There's also fiats, and the examples given are things like "lose a region you won" and "advance the main time limit" and "make an enemy tougher". Basically, all of the stuff from the game, but,  you know. Here. 

Then there's the MARCH phase. Finally, you put spirit back to starting value, reset dangers to zero, and then the adversary ticks down the countdown clock. This can be advanced by fiats but it always does after any mission. There are 12 of these "ticks" and you can probably do two quests a session, depending on length. So, I believe them when they say it could take 3-5 sessions on average to do the campaign. It could, depending on how slow your players are, take 12. This is why I recommend you take darkness whenever the players are being slow/wasting time.  The players also get a downtime action for the next tally phase: diplomacy - to win a region over. travel - you spend this time going somewhere else. Gather information - you get info from the DM/Adversary, recruit, roll your die to get more stuff, rest, which heals a corruption, and bond, which lets you and another PC bond together. I assume one person has to take a quest for questing to happen or you would just skip to the tally phase. But...you might be in a situation where nobody quests because corruptions, but that still wastes time. So they managed to keep the time stuff in.

Blood and Treasure

Finally, there's the final battle. How does it work? If you manage to get a good enough force and learn the Adversary's secret weakness, and you feel confident, you can start the battle at any time. If you run out of time, the Adversary can start a final battle. If the Darkness reaches 7+, the Adversary leaves the tower and becomes one of the things you fight in your quest to win. You can't kill him, just temporarily make him or her go away. So don't fuck around. You will find out.

This means that for every FOE still alive and causing trouble on the board and will give them an ARMY. There's not a ton of explanation how this works or if it's possible to completely delete a foe from the game, but they're basically the monsters and you choose four like the board game. The adversary gets an army (think like a hit point) for each region they conquered, each foe, plus one if they have the huge edge and if their FOE is huge is counts as two armies. Heroes get 1 army for each FORCES they have and for each region they WON. So the heroes start with 31 armies by default and the Adversary starts with....four? And there's undefined mentions that this number can be permanently reduced. Obviously there's still treasure you spend to get advantage (like 5e) on a roll, and you roll off doing battles like a normal battle, but big scale. The book sort of implies you just are supposed to kind of let the players win, but I think you should try to make them lose. 

Overall, that's basically everything how it works. The mass battles are a bit undefined. I really just need to know if you can destroy a FOE from the Adversary's thing forever or what. Otherwise this is a really interesting system. It's a neat way to do a certain type of epic fantastical adventure. It feels like the board game, but offers roleplaying opportunities. I like it. 

- Klang out