I ran a game of Castles & Crusades on Friday evening for my wife and a friend. I realized two things:
- It’s not a good idea to GM when the only thing keeping you conscious is a melange of cold medications.
- C&C is pretty darn close to my perfect ideal of Dungeons and Dragons.
I’ve run C&C off-and-on for several years now; it’s my go-to game when we want to do something with an old-school vibe but don’t feel like wrangling with the generally Byzantine rules of the actual old-school games themselves. It’s trivially easy to master and to teach to new players, and yet it manages to preserve most of the charm of Gygax-era D&D.
We played through the first half of Shadows of the Halfling Hall. Despite the aforementioned cold medication, it was surprisingly fun. It’s rather rare, in my experience, to come across adventures set in halfling/hobbit settlements, which due to the nature of their inhabitants tend to be dull, safe, and pleasant locations. Kudos to Troll Lord Games for finding a fun way to work dungeon crawls and zombies into Hobbiton-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off.
(Speaking of Hobbiton, one of the better MERP supplements was The Shire, which did a nice job of showing how many adventure possibilities lurk within the superficially dull Hobbit homeland.)
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That seals it. I’ve been looking for “the perfect” RPG to get started with and after reading your post I’ve decided to give C&C a whirl. I’ve only RPG’d a few times, but I want to start my own group, grab some newbie friends and get started. Sounds like C&C will fit the bill.
By the way, thanks for your wonderful blog site. Very nice indeed.
Mythulto, I hope you enjoy C&C! Everybody’s ideal RPG is going to be different, of course, but C&C is awfully close to perfect for me.
It’s very easy to learn, although if you are really new to RPGs, the book might seem a bit unwieldy. I recommend that you just skim through the character creation section, then skip to the chapter at the end that goes over the actual rules (combat, mainly). Most of the 100 or so pages in the middle is spell descriptions, equipment, and class/race descriptions, and you can just reference the specific parts of it that you need.
Not long ago, I ran a game of C&C for some newbies and they picked it up quickly.
Have fun, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask!
Oh, and one last thing–the only annoyance I have with C&C is that the core rulebook doesn’t have any monsters in it, so you’ll need to dig those up elsewhere. You can buy the C&C monster book (which is good), or if you are strapped for cash, it’s not too hard to just use monsters from the free online d20 SRD and convert them.