I started my old-school journey a couple years ago with BECMI D&D, then tried OSE, then Worlds Without Number, then OSRIC. My players (who are used to 3.5 and 5e) bounced off each one for one reason or another.
I should have started with Swords and Wizardry.
The complete revised edition of S&W strikes a perfect balance of classic adventure game tone while not being so streamlined it feels sterile the way Old School Essentials does. The prose is flavorful, clear, and doesn't meander. There's strong GM guidance and lots of different options for specific rules subsystems (initiative, for example) that empower the GM to make the game their own.
It's a testament to the '74-'78 D&D game that its core mechanics still feel great at the table half a century later, excellently repackaged and cleaned up by Matt Finch and his editor at Mythmere. The rules are loose where they ought to be and tight where they need to be.
This book is my old-school rosetta stone, completely compatible with my entire OSR library virtually without adjustments. The new revision has monster morale scores that make the ruleset even more compatible with the popular B/X (OSE) and BECMI modules, though with the benefit of much stronger class identity than those rules due to classes having more meat on the bone in S&W.
The game is imminently customizable. If you need a rule for something, you could drop in rules from any of classic D&D's lineage effortlessly. I often supplement the game with spells and magic items from OSRIC, monsters from the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, or a subsystem from more modern games such as Errant. The game has held up to anything I've thrown at it so far, and the players keep coming back every week.
Everything you need to play in or run a campaign is covered in a single book. While the book lacks an index, I haven't missed it at all. The table of contents and 144 page count makes navigation easy. The formatting and layout in this revision is also excellent, bucking the "control panel" trend that works great for modules, but makes rulebooks feel clinical and bland. Both the print on demand and premium offset books from Mythmere's site are high quality.
If you haven't played S&W and you enjoy classic fantasy adventure games, you owe it to yourself to give this a shot. If you're just starting out with old school D&D retroclones, you could not do better than starting with Swords and Wizardry Complete: Revised.
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