Okay, so the title here is total click bait, designed to get guys like Shark to smell blood in the water and prepare to rage
But in fact this is related to my thread a few weeks back where I was questing for my OSR "Unicorn" game. Turns out, much like the the narrator in Rupert Holmes' classic Pina Colada song, what I was looking for was right in front of me all along.
So essentially over the past few months I've messed around with a bunch of OSR systems like OSE, LL, S&W, Hyperborea, DCC, ACKS, and Castles & Crusades trying to find the perfect fit for me and my group. Like most of us I ended up house-ruling to get where I wanted, cribbing from these and other systems. Then, upon going through all my house rule documents I discovered that the system which I had house-ruled the least because it was the most flexible in design was actually the first OSR system I had played: Castles & Crusades. And it also has several features that make it essentially Rosetta Stone (or Rainbow coalition, if you prefer) of old school games. So I'll enumerate the ones here that I find especially salient.
- Unified mechanic in the form of their Siege Engine system
[/b][/u]
This is super easy to grasp & very easy to implement in practice and can be tweaked as needed. But it really requires no combat or saving throw charts or tables; just glance at your character sheet or the monster's stat block
It plays like 1e AD&DIt has mechanical adjustments like ascending AC but for the most part, it "feels" like the AD&D I grew up with from the character classes to the monsters to the spells & magic items.
They make small tweaks to AD&D that improve itDespite what I said above, there are some interesting improvements to AD&D such as 0 level spells, which effectively make low level spell-casting characters much more interesting; great rules for multi-classing; and encouraged racial class restrictions, which I like. But they add tweaks like saying all races can be bards or half-orcs can be monks. Personally I like racial restrictions on classes, so this is a plus for me. They have a version of the DMG, called the
Castle Keeper's Guide, but it's totally optional. You don't need it to play. But it includes a variety of interesting alternative rules, some of which we've adopted.
It's easily compatible forwards & backwardsWith the possible exception of 4e D&D, you can pretty much adapt any module from any edition of D&D or one of its retroclones and play it on the fly. Sure, this is somewhat true of other OSR games, but the C&C Siege Engine makes this even easier, especially with respect to say, 5e stuff
They have systems for other genresTroll Lord Games also have systems for Indiana Jones-style pulp (Amazing Adventures) and Sci-fi Gaming (Star Siege) so you can use the base system for other styles. But at their heart the mechanics are exactly the same. You're just getting different classes and setting info. And from what I've seen, you can just supplements for the other games just using C&C. I have the massive
Starship Warden book and I'm planning on a Barrie Peaks type one-shot using it solely the core C&C rules
They don't fuck around changing editions every 3-5 yearsWhile they have added a few supplements and do new printings and alternate covers, the base rules have stayed the same since 2004. That's great for older guys like me who don't want to mess around learning new systems.
The Troll Lords are good guysSteve & Davis Chennault are veterans and very friendly to the veteran community. If you're on active duty you get free stuff and free shipping. They produce all their products here in the USA and only work with American companies. They're not printing your stuff in China or Serbia or wherever. They are also very responsive to the community & offer great customer service. During Covid last year they started making their PHB available as a free pdf and have kept that going. On the negative side, they tend to run too many Kickstarters, are often late on delivery, and their editing is shoddy, to put it nicely. But the positives far outweigh the negatives.
Note that I have no affiliation with TLG. I'm just an old school gamer who has cast about looking for my ideal system and I think I have found it. I'm currently writing up a mega-dungeon based on Nargathrond from
The Silmarillion and while using C&C as the base system, I'm drawing monsters, magic items, etc., from a full range of OSR games and it's been seamless.
So consider this my rainbow unicorn....