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Wednesday, October 3, 2018

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.


8 comments:

  1. I give you credit DevDigs, for a robot tasked with harvesting clicks for Pakistani search engine optimization services, your comment, though no where near the mark, was at least in the right hemisphere.

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  2. I didn't know people still reviewed C&C material. Good to see. Cheers.

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  3. I was equally surprised that C&C was still putting out material.

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  4. Anoushy... WTH? You need to lay off the electrons. Too much speed is scrambling your simulated English.
    BTW, "backpacks for girls" reminds me of an ill-fated sortie into playing monster characters. I believe the DM ran Rahasia. It was definitely something with a dead elf maid. So my brother's bugbear stuffed her into his backpack for a snack along the way. Not what the authors had in mind.

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  5. Sorry D, I deleted Anoushy's comment before I realized that you were responding to it. I could undelete it, but that would require me admitting to Skynet that Anoushy's message was not spam; I just can't bring myself to do that.

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  6. You can delete mine too, but then you would be admitting that the only comments you get are spam. However, I will save you that ignominy by declaring my statement to be meatloaf, which is the homemade equivalent of spam.

    While we are on the subject, I am pretty sure your offspring would not like Pathfinder since he cannot bear to spend the five minutes to roll up a basic character. My oldest has a Christmas themed adventure he wants to run. He asked us to roll up 8th level characters. It took me 2 full days. You will love this: he is am over-sized goblin rogue (haha, take that) who carries a large bag of holding and an enormous chip on his shoulder. His homies and "clients" call him Grinch. He is called Gilford Papadopoulus by his parole officer, played by my 3rd son, an arctic elf inquisitor who detects alignment via a list he keeps for his employer. My youngest is playing a gingerbread witch. The other is probably going to play a knockoff of the Nutcracker, but he has not worked up the mental fortitude to start to eye-gouging process.

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  7. Is that you Darrell? Have you changed your alias again?

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