Castles & Crusades: Adventurers Backpack and the demise of the Rogue

Until yesterday, I didn't fully understand my ongoing financial support of Castles & Crusades published by Troll Lord Games, and yet I keep buying new rulebooks whenever they come out. It's a perfectly good game, don't get me wrong, but I don't actually play it and every time I write about it I wind up getting my knickers in a bunch over some irrelevant bit of minutiae.

A couple of years ago I bought their Guidelines for the Keeping of a Fine Castle Worthy of Adventuring Within by Your Players, which was as lively as that title would lead you to believe, and yet that didn't stop me from procuring their latest tome: the Adventurer's Backpack. Old Timers will likely equate this book to AD&D's Unearthed Arcana; it's a book full of new spells, character classes, gear, and the like. It just arrived last night so I haven't looked at much of it yet but two new character classes caught my eye: the magic user and the thief. Yes, you read that correctly, the Trolllords are reintroducing the MU and thief; known respectively as Wizards and Rogues in Original C&C.

The new C&C Magic User is somewhat different from your standard spell-memorizing DnD MU in that the new MU has the innate ability to read and detect magic and a few other things that normal MUs typically have to cast spells to do, which is nice.

But the new thief class is exactly the same as the original rogue class thus making the "rogue" class completely redundant. If you know how I feel about the rogue class then you will understand that, clearly, the authors of C&C created the new thief class solely for my personal amusement which thoroughly justifies my ongoing support of the Troll Lords.