The minions and I have a regular Dicey Tales game going on every weekend. The episodes feature the adventures of Dr. Arachnid and The Skull, two intrepid crime fighters that roam the fog-shrouded streets of 1930's San Francisco in search of evil doers to thwart.
Now as much fun as that is, I still have the hankering to do a bit of old fashioned "dungeon crawling". So in celebration of "Teach Your Kids To Game Week" I've decided to restart our fantasy campaign for a few adventures. We had a regular Pathfinder game going for a bit but I noticed that it ran a bit slow. I'm thinking that the Pathfinder system may be a bit much for my lads at the moment, hell it's a bit much for me most times. When I switched them over to Dicey Tales the sessions seemed to glide on rails as opposed to our Pathfinder games. I would normally just switch to Legends of Steel for a fantasy fix, but my minions want to play Gnomes and Elves, which we all know is pure blasphemy in Legends of Steel. So I did a little research and turned to Castles and Crusades.
Now personally I'm an old 2nd Edition fan (at last count I think there are at least 3 or 4 dozen of us left world-wide) but I want my boys to have at least one foot in modern gaming and still get a little Gygaxian influence in their game. I'm hoping that C&C has the right mix of what I'm looking for. First I bought a PDF of the Players Handbook (PHB) and then I tried to go budget and get a copy of their "Little PHB", thinking that it would be like the Savage Worlds Explorers Edition-wrong answer- the print on that damn thing is so tiny, it gave me a headache. I finally ponied up the money and picked up the PHB in hard back-that was more like it. I'm going though it now and so far I think I made a good choice. It has much that is reminiscent of 1st & 2nd Edition AD&D but with enough common sense changes to make me smile- and it has Monks!
The truth will be in the playing though so I'll let you all know if C&C makes the grade here at the Lair.
C&C FOREVER! Dude, I think you will love it! It's the game that got me back into roleplaying, seriously! It's got the flavor and feel of 1E/2E with a variation of the 3E when it comes to unified mechanics (what they call the SIEGE Engine).
ReplyDeleteI've posted about the game on my blog before:
http://unto-the-breach.blogspot.com/2011/09/in-praise-of-castles-crusades.html
I just switched my minions over to Microlite74 Extended Edition from 4E D&D, and things ran a lot better. Even the six-year-old was able to participate, and we had a blast. I was in the same boat as you, and I've found it to be an excellent blend of D20 rules with Old-School sensibilites. And all my old 2E books are super easy to adapt, pretty much as written.
ReplyDeleteAnd its free!
I have been playing C&C for some time now and it is my favorite D&D style game. It has enough of the modern system to it with a definite old school feel to it. I highly recommend it.
ReplyDeleteGood choice. I find C&C to have one foot in the past and one in the present, rules-wise.
ReplyDeleteI saw your post over at TLG, but the captcha there is a nightmare.
ReplyDeleteHalfling Hall is a decent one. It has some nice creepy elements. I'd make sure that exploring the outlaying farms is an option. As written it's a little too easy to just show up in the village and hit the haunted house immediately afterwards, skipping town exploration. The outlying farmers should be fun to roleplay, if you can stop the parties steamroller to the dungeon.
You should be able to use just about and pre-4E supplement with C&C, so the classics and OSR stuff are available also.
Most of the C&C modules have been reviewed over at my site, tenfootpole.org
Good Luck!
I think you'll like C&C a lot. It plays a whole lot like AD&D with a quick & consistent mechanic for handling everything that isn't a fight. Plus not only is there a boatload of free stuff available on Dragon's Foot, you can use old AD&D stuff converting literally on the fly.
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