Customer Reviews

Monsters & Treasure (Castles & Crusades)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have played Dungeons and Dragons for about 25 years. In that time, I watched the game progress to the bloated state that it is in now.

Monsters & Treasure does a good job at trimming away that bloat. Monster descriptions are short and to the point. They have taken away "Templates" and have just presented the creatures in a normal format.

This trimming, however, seems to be only skin deep. It appears that in the design of the monsters the SRD has been used such as HD assigned by creature type, and in certain areas such as AC and Flying, rules from the SRD are just ignored. So, for example a creature has a 16 AC, the rules don't say how, and if you match the creature with the SRD, it is the same AC.

The tresure section has nice tables that cover a variety of things that the SRD doesn't include, and I have enjoyed that section the most.

There are some editing mistakes, but the online community has done a good job of putting together errata for the book.

Overall, I enjoy and play the Castles and Crusades game with my weekly group. This is a system that demands rulings at the table by the game master because there just aren't a lot of rules to go by. This quickens the game as every situtation does not devolve into a rules lookup session.

There is also a great group of gamers, who share their opinions at the Troll Lord's forums about rules and such.

A good purchase if you are looking to reduce the amount of books at the table and get back to "old school" play.