I’m really not too sure what to make of this one. Overall I think the three “I” series adventures went progressively downhill with each installment. The main problem here is that this isn’t even really an adventure module in the usual sense, it’s a mass battle scenario. Perhaps it was a ploy to encourage players to take notice of the mass battle rules “Fields of Battle”, although you don’t need these to use this scenario, a simple rule system is included. That however, is part of the problem. In a 24 page PDF, only about half of it is really the “adventure” itself, the rest being advice on running it and the rules and stats for it. The real “meat” of the material is a little thin on the ground.

I’m not sure that the goblin leaders motivation for starting a full scale war against the local region (ie: the PCs attack on the small stronghold in I2) are entirely convincing, but such things are probably best decided by the CK on the basis of what best fits your campaign setting anyway.

Despite liking the previous two in the series, I have to say unfortunately, that I probably wouldn’t have bought this one if I’d read it first. Whether you’ll feel the same way depends entirely on whether you want to include a mass battle against some goblins, etc, in your campaign at 2nd-3rd level.

My overall impression of the published C&C adventures I’ve read so far (including the two I’ve used in a game) are they although I liked them enough to buy more, I don’t feel they’re up to the same standards as the C&C rulebooks.

I bought I2 because I liked the first in the “I” series, and although I also liked this one, the negative points about the first one go double for this second installment. Firstly, I didn’t feel that it was really playable “out of the box” and that a certain amount of work is required to make it usable. As with the first, a pretty thorough reading of it is required to make sense of what’s supposed to be going on, since there are various sub-plots and the different NPCs motives and plans can get a bit convoluted. Since a major reason for buying ready made adventures is lack of time for preparation, these points do count against it.

There are also elements of this adventure which don’t entirely make sense and suggest either bad editing or just being poorly thought out. The most glaring one of these is the placement of the “dungeon” part of the adventure at the end, which makes no sense at all in the context of the story. By the time the PCs get access to the entrance to this complex, they will not only have defeated the main opponents and achieved the main objective, therefore having no good reason to enter it, but it it seems difficult to integrate the party spending a day or two poking around in a dungeon bearing in mind what’s about to kick off in the third module in the series.

That said, there are some good points too – the setting is different to the run of the mill, and quite atmospheric, and has more of a “swords & sorcery” feel than high fantasy, being mainly concerned with fighting humanoids, bandits, etc, than magical elements (although these do appear in a minor way). Personally, I like this kind of setting, but if you want lots of magic and fantastical elements, you may not.

Overall, it’s not bad, but could have been so much better with a bit more editing and overall thought put into it. There’s nothing to stop you as CK doing this yourself of course, and as it happens I found a lot of interesting ideas spun off from the process of doing exactly that, so I felt it was a worthwhile purchase.

I should probably lay my cards on the table and say that I’m a huge fan of C&C, which to me captures the feel and flow of play of the original game without the clunky, sometimes confused mechanics, so it was perhaps inevitable that I was going to like this.

The presentation here is not as lavish as the latest (6th) printing of the Players Handbook, but it’s decent enough, and the same goes for the artwork.

Since one of the appealing things about C&C is that all you need to play is the Players Handbook rather than a small library of rulebooks, you may be asking yourself; why would I want this book?

Well, what you get here is not exactly an expansion of the rules, but a sourcebook full of ideas and suggestions that you might want to pick some ideas from to customise your game or setting.

There’s far too much in this book to cover in a review, a huge range of ideas are presented, covering things like additional character abilities, stats for height, weight, age, languages, literacy, guidelines for adding new races such as monsters as player races, variants on the standard character races, different approaches to spells, spellbooks, material components and holy symbols, mana points, vehicles, lodgings, and hirelings. There’s a chapter on world design, including discussion of such elements as climate, geography, weather, calendars, government, alternatives to the usual high medieval cultural setting such as Greco-Roman, Iron Age, Renaissance, or even Meso-American or Stone Age (and a later section even discusses futuristic and horror settings). You get discussions of fortresses, cities and smaller settlements including types of buildings, occupations of citizens, etc. There’s a chapter on dungeons and underground adventures including different types of caves, different sorts of rooms you might expect in an inhabited complex, lighting, visibility, different kinds of traps, etc. There are sections on air and water adventures, a chapter on mass battles (a recurring theme in C&C, perhaps a homage to the genres roots in tabletop wargaming), an extensive section on monster ecology, plenty of advice on designing and running adventures and campaigns, incorporating things like luck/fate points, skills, racial advantages, etc, etc…..

All of this consists of detailed, high quality, well thought out ideas, that will work well with the rule system, and how much of it you will want to make use of is going to be very subjective. I don’t think the idea of the authors is that anybody should just graft all of these rules onto their game, it’s more of a sourcebook that you can pick anything from that appeals to you and suits your setting, or just use as inspiration for developing your own custom rules. In fact, the whole book is rather like a compendium of the “Best of” house rules for C&C.

My only real complaint is that there is no indexing of the PDF, and the file is not editable so you can’t add your own bookmarks. This makes navigating it much more difficult than it should be, and is a pretty major oversight that affects the usability of the book, especially for reference purposes during a game.

Overall though, it’s a great addition to the C&C rules which anybody running a game with this system is likely to find useful, and is very much of the same standard as the Players Handbook in terms of the amount of thought and work that’s clearly gone into it.