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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