Somewhere along the way, I got it in my head the The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor (1978 — I think this is the first printing but it is a little hard to tell with JG printing variants) was a classic on par with Dark Tower and Caverns of Thrace. Now that I own it…eh. It definitely not on that level, but you can see the potential for a Dark Tower type scenario to spring out of this design.

Essentially, like Dark Tower, just a dungeon with a nearby town to use as a base of operations. The fortress was once, well, a fortress. Now it has been taken over by three factions — cultists of a would-be war god, the titular band of thieves and…a lot of dragons? Honestly, though the introduction uses the word factions, they are very slightly drawn in comparison to Dark Tower. Overall, the dungeon inhabitants are a weird mix with an unclear level of difficulty. The first three levels seem pretty OK for beginning characters with orcs and undead. Then suddenly there are dragons and sorcerer kings and, presumably, the corpses of a lot of PCs.

It is also head-scratchingly strange sometimes. One the first level, you can discover a torture chamber where orcs are tickling a young boy with ostrich feathers. On the second level, there are a jeweler and a goldsmith running shops in a very videogame-esque obliviousness to their surroundings. It is more perplexing than amusing and I can’t really express why. Oh, except the evil hobbits. Judges Guild products seem to have a strange concentration of evil hobbits and the mere idea of evil hobbits is hilarious to me. Or halflings, I guess. Tolkien Estate, please don’t sue me.

I love the cover art and the general layout of the fortress though. And the back cover illustration of the giant is pretty rad — it isn’t clear who the artist is, though.