Volume II of the Arduin Grimoire and the original Arduin trilogy.
Presents 8 new character classes, space creatures, aliens, and more.
Web Review:
"The second Arduin Grimoire is the delightfully named Welcome to Skull Tower (1978). I regret to tell you that despite the name, we don’t get even a glimpse of Skull Tower within.
This is organized (or, disorganized) along the same lines as the first book, collecting a potpourri of new classes, spells, monsters, treasure, rule musing and helpful random tables. Hargrave’s combat system gets increasingly complicated here (which, it was already complicated). This volume also gives us the clearest look at the world of Arduin, through a capsule history and a list of tavern and inn names and locations (but no other context, frustratingly). There are even thoughts on best practices for running a game and dealing with problem players. It’s a lot.
But let’s discuss the experience of reading these books. For one, they are the same size and basic aesthetic as the OD&D supplements, clearly intended to be seen by players as usable with that game (something that, along with directly cribbing some material in the first volume, drew the ire of TSR). Unlike the original D&D books, though, the zine vibe is much stronger. The print is typewritten and reduced and the whole thing feels, well, photocopied. It is actually hard on the eyes to read. Despite this, the books feel fuller and a bit more professional, probably because the art is of a higher quality – Skull Tower even keeps a couple of the original Erol Otus illustrations, an artist I believe Hargrave can take credit for discovering.
The overall effect is one of glimpsing directly into the late 70s RPG scene (for better AND worse – there are lots of cool ideas but also some crappy, sexist ones too, like the “female attributes” chart that translates measurements into Charisma bonuses and penalties), but one outside the well defined nostalgic boundaries of Dungeons & Dragons. D&D has always sucked up all the RPG oxygen, but Arduin proves that there was always a wider, weirder world out there under the D&D substrate."
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