Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/01/28/tabletop-review-castles-crusades-the-book-of-familiars/

I really love how creative Troll Lord Games is with their Castles & Crusades line. A lot of retro-clone publishers put out content that sticks heavily to OD&D or First Edition AD&D with very little original thought or creativity. It’s just a giant mega dungeon or a generic hack and slash adventure. If you’ve been reading my Castles & Crusades reviews since I started doing them, then you know this certainly isn’t the case with this system. Perhaps no book highlights how outside the box Castles and Crusades is willing to go than The Book of Familiars. It takes a rarely utilized concept that 95% of all Wizard players tend to forget even exists after they take it, blows up the concept to where it fills an entire sourcebook and makes it apply to all character classes! This is an amazing idea, and it can really be a game changer. Even if it’s something you would never use in your own personal tabletop game, the concept is intriguing enough to read about, as you’ll walk away with a very different outlook on familiars and role-playing in general.

To be clear, The Book of Familars is not just about familiars. It also includes a good deal of information about animal companions and how the two differ. I know I see a lot of gamers run their animal companion like a familiar and vice versa, even though they are two very different concepts and the creatures in question have extremely different thought processes and intelligence ratings. Thankfully, The Book of Familars goes out of its way to compare and contrast these two different ideas and still give lots of ways each class can use either a familiar or animal companion. I loved this. Instead of getting one core, but rarely thought of, concept fleshed out, we actually get two for the price of one. How is that not awesome?

In addition to extensive familiar coverage, The Book of Familars also introduces a new concept in Advantages. These are similar to feats from D&D 3e/Pathfinder in that you get them every few levels. However, when you get them depends on the level of power and/or challenge the Castle Keeper has in their campaign. There is a suggested guide to when characters get Advantages, but it isn’t set in stone. Advantages differ from Feats in that they are more of a class ability rather than something you roll dice for. Almost all of them are passive bonuses that permanently affect your character. As well, Advantages can be purchased with experience points, and in some rare occasions, gold. Due to the nature of The Book of Familars, most of the Advantages contained therein revolve around enhancing your familiar or giving classes outside the Wizard a chance to have one of their own. Not all are familiar or animal companion based, but nearly all are. Whether or not Advantages are fleshed out in further books is something we will have to wait and see, although honestly, the idea in and of itself probably deserves its own sourcebook instead of being found piecemeal throughout multiple books ala prestige classes and feats in D&D 3.0 style systems.

Once the Advantages chapter is done, you have twelve chapters on familiars – one for each character class in Castles & Crusades. Each chapter talks about how its class can get a familiar and/or an animal companion and why they would do so. An Assassin might channel a reaper spirit, a cleric might be given their familiar as a gift from their deity, a fighter might get one as a reward for completing a special quest and so on. The type of familiars and their special abilities will differ based on character class as well. Some classes might not even have an animal based familiar. A Paladin could end up with a holy spirit, a Bard with a muse or a Druid could get an elemental as their familiar. Each chapter really takes the generic idea of a familiar and fleshes it out so that it becomes tailored to a specific class. Fighters can even get an intelligent weapon as their familiar! This is a really great read, and I think anyone who runs a fantasy RPG, even if it is not C&C compatible, should pick up this book just to take in the excellent ideas presented here. Kind of like how I feel even non Shadowrun fans should pick up a Shadowrun Missions adventure to see the excellent layout and flow of those pieces.

After you get through the specific chapters on class based familiars and animal companions, you still have a full fourth of the book left. What’s in it? Four different appendices – one for familiars, one for new monsters, one for new spells and one for new magic items/artifacts. For those of you who love stats and mechanics, you’ll have a blast looking through all four of these sections. Now remember, all the bits in these appendices are familiar oriented. This is The Book of Familiars after all.

So as you can tell, I really loved The Book of Familiars. It’s such a great idea. Innovative and outside the box yet such an obvious choice for a sourcebook that I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before now. I loved see all the options, from a Koala familiar to over a dozen homunculi. Surprisingly though, there wasn’t an option for a rabbit or a hare. That would be only tiny minor complaint about the book. I mean giraffes and walrus familiars but no bunnies? Still, everything in this book is fantastic from cover to cover and I just really love seeing fresh new ideas like this come to life. Whether you want an in-depth look at what exactly a Paladin’s Mount is, or just a ton of fun new abilities and tables for your standard familiar, The Book of Familiars has it all. Again, even if you never plan on letting Rogues or Barbarians have familiars, the concepts and ideas presented in this book are well worth reading and taking note of, because they’re so well done. This is definitely one of those sourcebooks that is as fun to read as it is to implement. Between this and the upcoming Haunted Highlands and Codex Nordica books, 2014 is shaping up to be an awesome year for any Castles & Crusades fan.

The folks at Troll Lord have done a fine job of converting the classic AD&D devils and demons to the Castles & Crusades system so far. It's an odd release since you are buying it as a subscription as they turn out the entries (generally in groups of three to four monsters at a pop). They claim they are doing updates every 2 weeks but that is a rather optimistic estimate.

Generally speaking, you will see additional entries every 3-4 weeks but if you don't need every demon and/or devil RIGHT now, this is a worthwhile purchase.

This is good resource and supplement for anyone who wishes to write a story or an adventure. It contains very good descriptive words for various objects, people, events, terrains, etc.

The idea is good (and I am going to borrow it to increase my repository of words) but the content is thread-thin. Index starts from page 150 to 551.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/10/17/tabletop-review-tome-of-the-unclean-castles-crusades/

Tome of the Unclean is the latest release from Troll Lord Games for its Castles & Crusades system. This is the oddest release yet as it’s being made available even though the book is nowhere near finished. Instead, Troll Lord is trying out an installment plan option, something I’ve never seen a RPG publisher try before. It’s similar to episodic content for video games, in that you pay a lump sum up front and then will be given regular updates with new content. In this case the PDF will be automatically updated over at Drivethrurpg.com or RPGNow.com whenever new content is added. Updates should be every two to three weeks and there should be two to three monsters with each update. If you prefer to wait for the finished version, you can, but the PDF will cost five dollars more and the physical version of the book will be twice what you pay for the installment version of the PDF. I decided to go the installment route since it’s such an odd but intriguing concept and I wanted to see how things would go down. I have no idea what the eventual final page count (It is expected to be roughly 100 pages) will be or how the book will turn out quality-wise, but at least it will be an interesting journey, right?

Tome of the Unclean will be focusing on demons and devils. Yes there is a difference in most fantasy games. This first installment looks at three creatures: two demons and a devil and it clocks in at nine pages. Of course, two of those pages are the front and back cover and another two pages are devoted to the Open Game License and cover page. That means you get five pages of content for your ten dollars. Sounds crazy expensive, right? Well it is right now, but with each installment, you’ll more than likely start to get your money’s worth.

Tome of the Unclean currently provides a half page definition for devils and demons for Castles and Crusades. As a retro-clone, it is very similar to the old Dungeons & Dragons hierarchy for both. In this first installment you’ll get the classic Balor and a Glabrezu for the demons and Beelzebub for the devils. All three denizens of the Hells are written up nicely and are accompanied by an excellent illustration. This is a very nice start to what looks to be an incredible book and I’m really hoping that the remaining updates will be as great as the first impression. Speaking of art, though, the cover for Tome of the Unclean is just amazing. It’s one of the better fantasy pieces I’ve seen this year and Jason Walton deserves a special shout out for his work here (He also did the interior illustrations for this installment).

I definitely think that if you are a Castles & Crusades fan, you should go for the installment version of Tome of the Unclean. Not only will you get the book for far cheaper than you would otherwise, you’ll be privy to the editorial and writing process by seeing changes occur and new content being added with each update. Tome of the Unclean certainly is going to prove to be an entertaining and unique experience for tabletop gaming fans, even if the book doesn’t manage to stay as impressive as this first update. I know I’m excited to see this blend of classic D&D denizens of darkness with a new way of releasing a manual. Here’s hoping Troll Lord Games can keep the regular updates coming.

This is a fascinating 'semi-campaign' of a dungeon crawl accomplished in four stages. There is an underlying backstory about what is actually going on, and at intervals the trouble flares up and the local leadership hire adventurers to deal with it. In between times, the party had better go off and do something else to pile on the levels, for they will surely need them as the adventures progresses!

The first section can be handled by smart and capable adventures of low level (1st-5th). The moon has gone a funny shade of green and the better part of a whole village's inhabitants were dragged off screaming in the middle of the night. Something must be done - and the characters are hired to do it. The trail leads to a cave at the foot of a mountain...

There's a neat trick here. The 'Bad Guys' do not just sit and wait for adventurers to come by, they are getting on with their own thing. So as the adventure requires the characters to return to the same dungeon over and over again, it will not be the same - for a start the damage they did the last time may have been repaired, and other developments will have taken place. To accommodate this, descriptions are coded so that the Castle Keeper can amend his account of what the characters find where depending on which stage they are in the overall adventure.

Phase 2 of the adventure is aimed at characters of 4th-7th level, and it is best if some time elapses after the first part of the adventure before you spring this on them. This time the moon has gone a reddish colour and the local ruler's castle is attacked by creatures coming through a magic portal. The adventures are tasked with finding out where they came from by braving the portal...

Assuming they survive this and get to about 10th level, they will be ready for the third part. The characters are sent to explore that complex under the mountain thoroughly and make sure nothing nasty remains. This time it is the mountain itself which has gone a funny colour, purple this time...

The final part is a tough combat-oriented 'crawl for characters over 10th level. That mountain is now a volcano, and the world is that a massive attack is to be mounting on the ruler's castle at the full moon. Given that they've barely survived the last couple of attacks it is up to the party to stop this invasion in its tracks.

Throughout, the dungeon is jam-packed with things to see, things to discover, things to fight... and things to take. It's an epic sequence that will leave those who survive feeling that they have accomplished something - and they will rightly be hailed as heroes!

A classic adventure in three parts - which can be run stand-alone or as a sequence - this involves a journey, danger, thrills and high emotions. And a princess. Gotta have a one of them!

The background is deep and intense, supplying not just a backdrop to this adventure but - should you so wish - a situation that you can mine for more adventure ideas if not whole campaigns. Advice is given on how to weave this into the start of the adventure, and how to have characters that are suitable for the mission as no pre-generated ones are provided (this was originally written as a convention adventure and probably had them).

Much of the adventure involves overland travel, and you can make as much or as little of it as you want, depending on player interest and the time available. Each portion of travel is well-resourced for those who want to make the actual journey itself an integral part of their adventure, and it is supported by some rather nice maps. One point to be emphasised is the 'ordinary' drovers who accompany the party on their journey - no adventurers these, but ordinary men and women who enjoy a song around the campfire and get scared when monsters attack! As well as contributing to the adventure itself, this highlights just how special the player-characters are within the world - a nice touch.

The challenges to be faced include keeping the mission secret from prying eyes, a fine set of puzzile-challenges to be completed, bandits, coping with accidents along the way and the weather as well as whatever wandering monsters you choose to include.. and rather a lot of giants! It's left pretty flexible as to how much of the journey apart from set-piece encounters you want to actually play out.

The whole sequence is full of neat twists and turns and builds into a coherent adventure: it's the sort of story you could well imagine as a movie. Those who complete it successfully will get a real feeling of achievement (as well as some more tangible rewards) and will likely have songs written about them. A classic adventure, well written and presented.

While some have criticized TLG for separating monters and treasure rather than combining it into the PH, I think it's fine to have this separate so that (mostly) CKs are the ones who will read this. Following the great traditions of AD&D 1E, the monster stat blocks are short and sweet. The descriptions are succinct but provide plenty of info, and the artwork is very nice. The treasure section offers a good selection while not being over-bearing. The editing in this printing leaves a little to desire (miss-spelling "laout" on the title page is unbelievable). I hope M&T eventually gets a nice reprint like the PH has, and some additional clean-up will result in one of the best monster books available.

A beautiful revision of the Players Handbook. I really like the new logo as well as the full-spread artwork on the cover. The interior is a mixed bag for me; some of the artwork in color is gorgeous, while others have very odd color choices. I like the goldenrod background of the page, but the brown text is not a very good complement and is hard to read on-screen (I have no idea if the hard-copy version is any better or not). Otherwise there aren't too many changes besides encumbrance. If you have the 4th printing, I don't think you'll be missing much. If you're new to C&C, then I would say either get this printing or go ahead and get a hard-copy version.

A great improvement over previous sheets from TLG, and I really like having the new C&C logo. I also like this sheet has a plain white background, rather than the goldenrod one from the PH 5th printing. I would only advise downloading this sheet directly from the TLG site as it won't have the watermark at the bottom.

http://www.trolllordgames.com/cnc/downloads/C&C%20Universal%20Character%20Sheet.pdf

Originally posted: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/07/15/tabletop-review-to-kill-a-king-castles-crusades/

To Kill a King is a follow-up adventure to The Goblins of Mount Shadow. Both adventures can be played stand alone from each other, though locations and characters do repeat. As such, you can play the two back to back as the start of a campaign, or you can play Mount Shadow, play a few more adventures, and then come back to To Kill a King and show how the landscape of the kingdom has changed in their absence.

To Kill a King, as you might have surmised, is all about regicide. Obviously, this is not an adventure designed for good-aligned characters, although it can be run as such by having the players tricked into murdering the king. The team’s rogue, or better yet, assassin takes center stage in this adventure, and I have to admit, I’m really pleased to see an adventure that puts the Assassin class in the spotlight. I have always had a soft spot for the class, going all the way back to First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and so often, the class is treated as an afterthought or like it doesn’t exist. If you have an assassin amongst your players, it’s worth getting this adventure just for them, because let’s be honest – every other adventure for fantasy gaming systems tends to focus on warriors, clerics, thieves and magic-users.

Now, I’m not really a fan of wetworks adventures, as can be seen in my various Shadowrun reviews. Wetworks adventures are notoriously hard to pull off, because they are nothing but cold blooded murder, and while most players and their characters have no problems killing monsters or obviously evil horrors from another dimension, they tend to balk at outright killing a innocent or good aligned person simply for a payday. Most of these wetworks adventures are written in such a way that they are without any branching options or considerations for if/when one or more players refuse the mission, even though this is a well known and commonly occurring problem with these adventures. Thankfully, To Kill a King is not such an adventure. It provides many pages of alternate outcomes and what can happen if some or all of the party says no to the assassination attempt, including everything from a new party of NPCs hired to take the case on up to a rampaging dragon hellbent on destroying the kingdom. I was utterly impressed by the sheer level of detail this adventure has to it, and that every possible outcome has been thought of in advance, and so the Castle Keeper is given ways to plan accordingly and still run the adventure. To Kill a King is one of the most well thought out adventures I’ve ever encountered and I applaud the foresight by the author.

Besides diverging adventure paths based on how the players react to the assassination attempt offer, there is an amazing amount of detail in To Kill a King. NPCs are given a lot of back story and are fully fleshed out. The castle is described down to the smallest nuance. I’m just blown away by how much information, characterization, plot and content is crammed into these twenty-six pages. I’ve honestly seen adventures two or three times as long with less detail put into them. I also loved the sheer amount of political intrigue in this adventure. There are so many factions with shadowy goals and a willingness to let guile and cunning do the work instead of swords and sorcery. It’s so rare that you see an adventure for a fantasy RPG that is all about talking head and politics. I honestly love those types of adventures, because they are so rare and force players to do role-playing instead of roll-playing. Indeed, there is so much under the table backstabbing and doubledealing potential here that To Kill a King feels more like a Vampire: The Dark Ages adventure than your typical Castles & Crusades one.

Best of all, To Kill a King is far more than a single one-shot adventure. The ramifications of the assassination or not taking the job are wide-spread and can affect your C&C campaign for the remainder of its existence. After all, the players have just taken out a king or exposed a conspiracy against him. Are all the nearby kingdoms plunged into war? Will the heroes seek revenge? Will the players be labeled traitors to the realm or heroes? If the king is killed, will they betray their employer by helping someone else gain the throne, or will they themselves be betrayed? There are almost limitless outcomes that can occur from running To Kill a King, creating adventure paths and subplots of their own to ensure there will always be a story to be told or an adventure to be had in your Castles and Crusades campaign. This is simply brilliant, and I really hope To Kill a King gets the attention it deserves and also helps to bring in new players to the system.

To Kill a King is easily my favorite Castles & Crusades adventure of all time, and this is coming from someone who has been playing the system since first edition. Hell, it’s easily one of the best adventures I’ve encountered this entire year, and I’m sure it will be on our short list, if not the winner, for our Adventure of the Year (Solo) award here at Diehard GameFAN come that time of year. To Kill a King is simply an amazing adventure in all respects, and even if you don’t play Castles & Crusades, it’s worth picking up this adventure to try and make it fit in your own fantasy RPG or, at the very least, to see how well done and insightful this piece really is. It’s extremely detailed and yet “open world” enough that the Castle Keeper won’t feel like they are running a generic linear dungeon crawl. Indeed, To Kill a King is the exact opposite of that experience.

Ripe with high-level intrigue and capturing the feel of a semi-mythical Wales (although it would be possible to place this adventure in your own campaign world if preferred), this adventure draws the characters into the centre of court politics as a Queen wants her King dead... and wants them to attend to the matter!

Wth several 'hooks' to choose from - including those leading on form other adventures by the same author - the characters are swiftly dragged into the Queen's plots and will have to stay sharp if they are to survive, never mind complete their task and receive their reward. Never mind what they are there for, there is plenty going on in the royal castle this evening - a feast in progress with many notables in attendance, people to meet and events to become embroiled in as a full-bore mediaeval banquet plays out around them.

Now, I speak Welsh but if you do not you may find the names a bit of a challenge although attempts have been made to provide phonetic versions... just console yourself that your players will not see the written names so will only have what you say to go on! Otherwise, the scene is set magnificently. Although a detailed plan of the castle is provided you might want to go online and research a suitable Welsh castle for an impression of what the place is like (perhaps Harlech - it's ruined now but enough remains for you to get the feel of the place).

Consequences are covered well, although it is rather assumed that the characters will succeed at the assassination attempt, and while early parts of the adventure involve intrigue, interaction and stealth, there is no shortage of full-on combat later on (earlier, too, should the characters botch entry to the castle or get caught up to no good!). There are other options, of course, and notes are provided to help you deal with just about anything the characters decide to do.... and the political ramifications whether the King is killed or no bode well to be far-reaching - as indeed they should be.

This is a cracking adventure and I'm looking forwards to running it!

I ponied up for the subscription of this module so I will probably get a few words in on each piece as it becomes available. The pdf for this installment is 10 pages long, which for $2.50/2.99 might not hit people’s sense of value too well, especially when the first page is the cover and the second is the licensing information, so right there you’re down to 8 pages of content. I appreciate material for my favorite game system and I’m willing to pay to keep the content coming, but I was concerned with the low page count from the moment I opened the file and that nagging voice at the back of my mind never quite let up the entire time I was reading the content.

As for the content it is packed fairly tightly, for my group this would be an evening worth of fun…well fun if I enjoyed it, I’m not sure how well my players would respond to some of the viscous traps. There is very much the potential to kill characters here and at the very least you can expect some of them to be poisoned or gain a cursed item or two. So for all this negative potential, how does the treasure stack up? There is some good loot to be gained from the Beneath the Dome; a few +1 weapons, a +2 long sword, some protective gear and a smattering of scrolls with new spells. The magical items seem geared towards fighter types primarily.

What I don’t like: • The length; a couple extra pages of content with a few more rooms would have tipped me towards the positive on this. • The new spells. Honestly if I were playing a spell caster I wouldn’t consider using any of them except in incredibly limited circumstances; they seem underpowered for the level. As these appear on scrolls in a place where they could be useful this isn’t terrible, but the fact that there are limited rewards for spell casters makes them a form of treasure, one which is lacking for the wizard/cleric types that came along. • Some of the text is confusing; there were a few minor grammatical things that threw me off.

What I like: • The artwork is good, the cover especially. Also the art doesn’t intrude or dominate the pages as ‘filler’. • Lots of descriptions for the various locations. • The challenge is good for an appropriately leveled group. None of the monsters require magic or special weapons to hit and whacking zombies is always a good time.

‘Beneath the Dome’ will work for me and I will use it. This kind of adventure is something I would not throw at a general purpose group, it screams as a challenge for a group of Knights, Paladins and Fighters (good aligned) who need a challenge to clean out a den of definite, no gray areas, evil. 4-5 2nd level fighter types should be up to the challenge, swapping a fighter out for a 3rd level thief and another for a 3rd level cleric should work just fine too. Magic users can stay home for this installment.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/07/08/tabletop-review-beneath-the-dome-part-one-tombs-of-green-castles-crusades/

Beneath the Dome is Troll Lord Games’ second attempt to create an episodic adventure series for its Castles and Crusades line. The Adventures on the Powder River series consisted of five seven page short adventures, each for ninety-nine cents. I reviewed the first four adventures in the series (To the Damenheit Bridge, Thorns For Beer, River Walk and Golden Shingles) and found them to be all over the place in terms of quality, but I was happy to see a set of adventures for the system, or any system really, that were under a dollar and could more or less be played as stand alone or as one big story.

I have to admit, I was a bit surprised by the sticker price on this one. Sure, the Beneath the Dome series has a few more pages to the adventures, but is inflation so bad that the price for this concept of episodic adventures has tripled in just the past year? I can pick up full length Castles and Crusades adventures for the same price, and the subscription price merely knocks fifty cents off of each adventure. As well, for only a few cents more, you can get a full length adventure like The Goblins of Mount Shadow or the Dwarven Glory collection of adventures. I probably wouldn’t be heckling the price if we hadn’t just had a similar concept from Troll Lord last year for a fraction of the price, but it’s worth noting that the price is a bit exuberant compared to what has come before.

Tombs of Green is an interesting adventure designed for two to six characters between levels 1 and 5. This piece of information is in small print in the upper right hand corner of the legal text and credits page, so I’d forgive you for missing it. An entire town has been wiped out, and the PCs are called on to figure out what happened. Somehow, a nearby mountain appears to have been carved up without anyone noticing or hearing. The face of the mountain is now pale green, and a cave has opened up where once there was none. Approaching the cave causes PCs to be greeted by a calm rational orange person, who tries to get the characters to turn back. If they don’t… they are attacked by a horde of green zombies, who were once the villagers of the destroyed town! From there players investigate the cave, and things turn into a basic dungeon crawl. So you have a standard hook with some unusual creatures and a small dungeon. It’s an okay story to play through in a single night, but the adventure doesn’t have a set ending, or even a real climax, which is a disappointment. You just kind of go through the dungeon, kill things, and then leave. There’s no explanation as to why the town was attacked or even who the enemies are. My guess is that these bits have been saved for a later adventure, which is fine in terms of the collection, but as a standalone, there’s very little for the Castle Keeper to flesh this thing out with in terms of character development or motive.

Now, that’s not to say I only have negative things to say about Tombs of Green. I loved a lot of the encounters in the adventure. The zombie dragon was a lot of fun, as were the hilariously cursed magic items one can find in the dungeon. Living statues and an animated sword are also memorable encounters your players will have a blast with. Basically, if your friends are just looking for hack and slash goodness, Tombs of Green will be a lot of fun, but if you’re looking for story and depth, this probably shouldn’t be your first choice for a Castles & Crusades adventure.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the art by Peter Bradley in this adventure. The cover to Tombs of Green is exceptionally striking, and there’s something about it that made me want to pick up this adventure, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the adventure AT ALL. The interior art is quite nice too, and C&C fans will enjoy adding it to their collection just for that.

All in all, we’ll give Tombs of Green a thumbs in the middle. The combat is fun, but the plot is lacking. It’s shaping up to be a better quality affair than Adventures on the Powder River, but I think the large price increase from last year’s episodic adventures may turn away those hoping for a similar cost in this collection.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/06/10/tabletop-review-free-city-of-eskadia-jack-of-lies-castles-crusades/

As this is my fifteenth Castles and Crusades review, you can probably tell I’m a big fan of the franchise. It’s easily my favorite OSR style system, and I always enjoy seeing what Troll Lord Games and other publishers put out for it. Today we’re looking at a new massive campaign setting in Free City of Eskadia. This 138 page book contains everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, you could possibly want to know about a fantasy setting. The history of the area, guilds, stores, prices, important people, sewer system descriptions – you name it, it’s in there. Free City of Eskadia is a whopping thirty two chapters of information, which sounds crazy impressive and perhaps even a little intimidating. The good news is that many of those chapters could have easily been one really long chapter instead of broken down as minutely as things are. For example, the adventure in the book takes up five chapters, which is an odd way to do things, especially when the adventure is only twenty-eight pages. I personally think one chapter with five sections would have flown better, but really, it’s all semantics when it comes down to it.

The big problem with Free City of Eskadia is that, as impressive as all the information about the campaign setting is, it is one of the dullest, driest reads I have ever had with a tabletop product. I had to keep putting the book down as my eyes glazed over. We’re talking Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off dry. I understand that a campaign setting, or any book designed to set the stage, can sometimes read like a textbook, but this was exceptionally above and beyond hard to wade through – and this is coming from someone who is a big Castles & Crusades fan, and a professional non-fiction writer used to doing essays and papers with bibliographies, footnotes and the like. I was very impressed by the level of detail in Free City of Eskadia, but it was so hard to get through because of the writing style and narrative, and I can’t remember the last time I had to force myself to get through a book for review’s purposes. Even products I’ve hated were easier to read and get through than this. I hate saying this, but I guess you can’t win them all.

Free City of Eskadia is also riddled with typographical and grammatical errors, often times in unintentionally hilarious ways. Look at the following sentence, for example, from page 39: “The ghost is quite vengeful and needs to be exercised.” Obviously that should be EXORCISED, but it is quite funny to think of a malicious specter whose only weakness is a holy treadmill. This is just one example of the many I’ve found here. Although these issues can be corrected in the PDF version, I feel bad for the people who ordered the hard or softcover version of the book, because you CAN’T fix one of those once they’ve been printed.

The important thing is that, if you can wade through the writing style, there is so much to be had in this book. It may “only” be 138 pages, but it feels as in-depth as the 300+ page location books we’ve seen from other companies like White Wolf or TSR. There is a chapter devoted to just the guilds of the city, along with the major houses for political intrigue. Each of the nine wards of the city get their own chapter, and within each one are names, descriptions and stat blocks of major NPCs. Besides the multi-chapter adventure, there are five other chapters devoted to story seeds, short adventures and dungeon crawls (although most aren’t literally dungeons) that you can use for a full on campaign. It’s wonderful just how much content is here, and I feel bad that I just didn’t care for the writing style or the manner in which all the content was presented, because I was really excited for this book. There are new races, a new NPC class, a full chapter on new magic items, another chapter of gods to worship and two new monsters. Again, there is a shockingly large amount of content in this book for the size. Now, will I ever end up using this? Probably not, due to how dull I found the content, but that’s really a subjective thing, and what I find boring, you might find thrilling. I will say that if you check my Castles & Crusades review archive, I to tend like the majority of what comes out for the system, so you might want to read those reviews and see if our tastes match up. I will probably try in a year or so to come back to see if the book has aged well or if I’m more receptive to the writing style, but for now, let’s call Free City of Eskadia a thumbs in the middle. Yay for the sheer amount of content and level of detail, but boo for the errors and extremely dull writing style.

This is a color PDF document offered free of charge. To begin, I like maps and place names to help spur my own creativity in adventures and stories. "Aihrde" presumably relates to a fantasy universe given more depth and detail in a handbook. This then would be a supplement to that system. Several other maps of Aihrde are also offered for free. In my other reviews I stated that I was disappointed with maps of Aihrde. Sadly, this map of "human migration" from its title was very unhelpful. It's only use, in my opinion, would be for someone using the Aihrde system. It is provided free of charge, and that fact alone usually rates the product "Two Stars." Without offense to the author or design team, I can only in good faith give it "One Star"/Bad. I cannot suggest it be downloaded.