Wicked Fantasy Factory #1: Rumble in the Wizard's Tower is a d20 Fantasy adventure published by Goodman Games. The zipped file is almost twelve megabytes in size, and contains a single PDF (as well as an interface for Mac operating systems). The PDF is thirty-six pages long, including a front and back cover, two pages of maps, a page for the credits, and one page with both ads and the OGL. The PDF has full bookmarks.

Rumble in the Wizard's Tower has a fairly generous amount of artwork. The two covers are both presented in luxurious full color, with the effect that both covers appear to have been splattered with blood. Likewise, the two maps of the tower receive the same color treatment, and have markings on them denoting what kind of encounter you can expect in each area. The rest of the product is in black and white, with a picture showing up every several pages. Page borders are along the bottom of each page, and alternate on the left and right sides of pages as well. There is no printer-friendly version, so printing this out might take a toll on your printer.

As the first in the Wicked Fantasy Factory line of adventures, this isn't so much d20 Fantasy as it is d20 Fantasy Xtreme. For those who don't know, Wicked Fantasy Factory adventures are made to appeal to people who like games in the style of God of War, where you decimate everything you meet, performing killer finishing moves, annihilating bosses, and collecting phat lewt. This adventure presents quite a few new rules for all of that and more.

After presenting the adventure background, the product moves right on to the good stuff. It gives rules for your character developing a finishing move (which can possibly finish off an enemy in a single blow, but if it fails, means you wasted a round), rules on fighting mooks (so you can mow through them like grass), and boss encounters (these are the guys who never go down easy). It also introduces the E-Z stat blocks. E-Z stat blocks only have the simplest information, basically the attack and defense stats, and are given for minor characters. Of course, full stat blocks are given too, but you likely won't need to know a mook???s Charisma, right?

The adventure itself is fairly simple. The evil wizard Valdeez is in his tower, preparing to unleash a war effort on nearby countries, having already kidnapped a princess. The PCs, for whatever reason (several adventure hooks are given) need to kick in the door and kick some serious butt to put a stop to Valdeez's evil ambitions. Oh, and don't worry too much about rescuing the princess either, she???s gone to the dark side.

To spice things up, Valdeez has captured an outsider known as a ternion (no stats are given), which has power over time. Periodically throughout the adventure, the ternion will affect time for either the PCs or their foes, sending them into what is essentially bullet time, which gives them a variety of bonuses. At the end of the adventure, the PCs gain the ability to permanently call on this (though only once a week), ensuring your characters will be able to use it over and over.

The adventure itself doesn't pull any punches either. Despite the fact that your characters are first level, you???ll be facing everything from a ghost to a hydra in this adventure, to say nothing of the hordes of mooks that stand between you and the big bad evil guy at the end. Even though this is a kick butt and take names adventure, smart players will figure out how to avoid the toughest challenges. And of course, as with all WFF adventures, there's an instance of phat lewt here; a treasure thats worth the same amount as all the rest of the treasure in the adventure combined.

All in all, Rumble in the Wizard's Tower is a seriously bad@$$ adventure, setting the bar high for what we can expect from Wicked Fantasy Factory. The new rules are simple, but add serious flavor for groups that want to play through their adventures like an Xbox game. And even if you don't want to use the new rules here, the adventure still stands on its own perfectly well. There's really no way you won't find something useful, to say nothing of fun, in Rumble in the Wizard???s Tower. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: The new rules for finishing moves, fighting mooks, bosses, phat loot, and ternion time all take this adventure to a new level. The tagline says to make the dungeons sorry that they ever met you, and this adventure delivers! There's also five new magic items and two new monsters here, to boot. And of course, that's not even taking into account that the adventure by itself is notably awesome.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: The lack of a printer-friendly version can be a hassle if you want to print this out. <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>