Including postage, it cost me about $40 yankeebucks, so about $65 Kiwibucks.
I got it purely out of curiosity, since I'm pretty happy with running AD&D2e and don't intend to change that any time soon.
The author, Joseph Bloch, has said words to the effect that he was trying to write the game that Gary Gygax might have produced as AD&D2e if he hadn't been kicked out of TSR. How well he has succeeded I cannot really say, but it does read very much like AD&D with a few house-rules tacked on. If you're familiar with AD&D1e, there are no real surprises here, at least, none to be found on my initial reading.
Unlike OSRIC, it doesn't attempt to hew absolutely closely to AD&D1e, but it does hew pretty close nevertheless.
This is the "lite" version of a much heftier pair of books. The core rule book and bestiary are about 500 pages each, and they're about eighty yankeebucks each too: by the time postage is figured in they'd come to near enough to $NZ300, and my curiosity does not extend nearly that far.
This volume is 170 pages, and includes the usual bunch of stuff: character creation, spells, treasure, and monsters. Its character information tops out at 8th level, but I don't see that as a major drawback. It's complete enough that you could easily run a campaign for years with just this single volume. If you're prepared to spend the extra money for the full rules, there's a lot more stuff in there.
As I said, there aren't really any surprises here. If you want to run an AD&D campaign — because that's basically what it is — with a minimum of hardware, this will do it for you.
It's also available as a Pay-What-You-Want PDF, if you want to go even cheaper.
No comments:
Post a Comment