My son was six when we started playing D&D. Digging my AD&D rule books out for the first time in 25 years, I quickly realized what an overly complex, disorganized, and over-explained mess they were. So I went back for B/X books and we played with that for a year. Until I discovered this excellent "retro-clone" / rewrite, which expands on the two slim original books just the right amount - reorganizing, refreshing, and extending the game without changing the tone. In the past year I've used Labyrinth Lord as the foundation for some house-rules and more substantial edits (e.g. imported concepts from Dungeon World) and 20+ year old ideas that I've always wanted to have in place. Labyrinth Lord's simplicity allows this.

The write-up of the basic facts of this mini-adventure conflict with the write-up for the map, leaving the result of the core plot undefined. Which would be fine, but this is billed as a self-contained drop-in, ready to play. There are some glitches with the quality as well; spelling mistakes and that sort of thing. I'd encourage the author to clean this up and re-post, however: the basic concepts are sound.

I needed a small castle for a scene in a campaign with my seven year old son. It took ten minutes to read through the handful of sheets, and I really appreciated the detail in the drawings and the obvious thought/knowledge that went into the castle design. This is one of the few castles I've encountered in the game (since the 80's) that a) made any sense and b) seemed like a real castle. I'll add that the author's quite right in his estimation of how many men it would take to hold the fort; it took more than a mundane army of foot soldiers and archers to seize the thing back from some renegade elves.

As an accessory to game play, this piece did its thing perfectly: it lent itself to story-framing and tactical planning perfectly. After my son's gang of adventurers and a supporting armed force successfully stormed the castle, they found the hostages had been secured in the chapel but that something, perhaps smelling human meat, had dug up through the floor, slain/eaten the captives and stolen the fabled Orb of Plenty, which the hostage-takers had stolen. The story continues.