If you're curious about Castles & Crusades, this free PDF download is absolutely the best place to start.
There's a "Castles & Crusades Condensed" PDF edition of the C&C rules available here on RPGNow, but that edition is fatally crippled by having key information cut out (e.g. classes such as the ranger; certain races) in the name of condensation. Add to this, that the Condensed Edition material is all based on the game's first printing, while the print-edition Player's Guide is about to go into its third printing as of March 15th, 2008, and you're basically paying money for an incomplete and an obsolete version of Castles & Crusades with the Condensed version.
These Quick Start Rules are even more drastically cut down from the print books, of course, but then they don't promise to be anything more than an introduction to the game. Plus, they're free. Free helps a lot.
For those wondering, "Okay, but what IS Castles & Crusades?" Simply put, it's an intentional retro-clone of 1e D&D using the d20/OGL rules at core.
Unlike games like OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord, however, C&C is more than just a straight clone of what's gone before. There are rules mechanics (most notably, C&C's so-called SIEGE target-number dice-mechanic) designed to mirror character skills and ability usage, and to allow for character customization (even within the same class), without ever complicating the straightforward action of "classic D&D" play.
As another RPGNow reviewer put it, if you're tired of "swimming through skills and feats" every time you want to make up a D&D character, you might want to give the Castles & Crusades Quick Start rules a look.
The designers at Troll Lord Games are quite explicit in their intentions that Castles & Crusades is a game focused on action and roleplay and imagination -- in the very best traditions of first-edition D&D. They make clear that this game is designed to be understood in fifteen minutes, and that you should be able to create a satisfying starting character in fifteen minutes more.
You won't require miniatures or battlemaps to play, either -- just some game dice, paper, and your imagination.
Where does Castles & Crusades fall short? Well, for all that it does a great job of introducing a clever all-in-one dice mechanic for handling skills, abilities, combat, traps, saves, and all the rest -- without ever bogging down the game flow in rules detail -- in other ways, C&C will seem awfully familiar to those who've actually played D&D prior to 2nd edition, or even 3rd.
Castles & Crusades is more than a straight retro-clone game like OSRIC, as I said -- it does streamline some of the clunkier, counter-intuitive bits of original/pre-3e D&D in admirable ways. The problem is, I found myself wishing they'd have made the system even a little more flexible and streamlined. For example, monster listings are almost verbatim the data-clutter you remember from classic D&D, and adventures are still tightly bound to a set number, and level-range, of player characters.
My other complaint, as above, is with the whole "Condensed Edition" rules idea. With the third paper printing of the core rules due within days of this writing, Troll Lord Games needs to make a command decision as to how they will treat their PDF rules editions from here on out.
They can either release the current, unabridged core rules X months after the print edition, as many companies do, and trust that everyone who would've automatically bought the game already has -- and that the PDF edition now becomes a "recruitment tool" to bring in new gamers who never would've otherwise bought Castles & Crusades ...
... or else they can do what companies like Mongoose Publishing do, and list the full PDF editions here for almost exactly the same price (and in some cases, more) than what one would pay for the actual print books at retail. Those like me, who prefer PDF, then get to make a choice of format, but Mongoose gets paid their full retail amount either way.
Things like the Condensed Edition stink of weaseldom -- the new buyer can't know specifically what they're not getting until after they've paid their money, and it's too late. Troll Lord Games needs to stop doing things halfway, and either commit to a proper PDF sales strategy for their core game rules, or else acknowledge that they don't really want to sell their core rules as a PDF at all. Step up or step back, but somebody needs to make the command decision here.
Happily, the only decision curious gamers need to make about the free Castles & Crusades Quick Start Rules download, is what sort of sandwich they want to eat while reading over the PDF for the first time. I would recommend egg salad, but I do know that's an acquired taste.
All in all, a 4 out of 5. The promised included "adventure" is so short as to be more properly a mere encounter. I do appreciate that it's a free product and all, but that bit of dodgy marketing hype kept me from loving the Quick Start Rules with my whole, nerdy heart.
Check it out!
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