The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack's production. It's so huge that a single review won't do it justice, so instead, I'm blogging it. View the "Blogging the Complete Two Towers" category for the complete list of posts in this series.

My first impression as the music starts playing -- and I'm immediately confronted with notes I haven't heard since watching The Two Towers-- is that the difference between this and the regular soundtrack is like the difference between reading the books and watching the movies.

The movies give you a beautiful experience … but the books give you depth. And that's what the complete series CDs give you as well -- every note played on screen, evoking every musical sense that you felt. No short cuts, no abridgments, just Howard Shore's beautiful music.

Version 1.0 of the 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons-inspired game OSRIC is available for download from its official web site.

Also known as the "Old School Reference & Index Compilation", the game attempts to captured that 1st edition feel using a combination of the non-copyrightable portions of the original rule set with the terminology from the d20 SRD.