Castle Zagyg

 Lord the store would love to back the Castle Zagyg part 2 kickstarter but unfortuately it written compatible with Castles and Crusades, no 5E material included. We backed part one of the set which came out a couple of years ago and still have 4 of the 6 books on the shelf, so will pass on getting this one. However, if we get 4 people contacting us and putting a down payment on the set, we will back it.  However the books do not release until march of 2027

RPG of the Week

Since we stock a whole lot of role playing games (RPGs) and sell very few of them (we sell 5 times as much D&D 5th edition per month as we do all other RPGs combines) we decided to start talking about one of them once a week in the hope of calling your (yes you) attention to some of the fine ones out there. We will also be doing this with some of the less popular boardgames we stock as well.

This week, we feature Castles & Crusades. This RPG dates back to the 3.0 D&D boom when dozens of companies brought out all sorts of RPG supplements for D&D under the OGL. Castles & Crusades is one of the very few companies (Paizo's Pathfinder RPG is another) to still survive from that era, the tagline being "Third edition rules, 1st edition feel." Troll Lord Games has always focused on recreating the style of adventures from the early days of D&D and AD&D, before there was a heavy emphasis on plot and campaign and adventures stood on their own, rather than linking together.

While characters have skills, character class is a major focus of C&C, much as it was in early AD&D and your character class defines what your character can do. If you like D&D 3.0 (or 3.5) or the play of Pathfinder, but Pathfinder has gotten too complex and materials for D&D 3.0 and 3.5 too hard to find (it is out of print after all), take a look at Castles and Crusades.

D&D Is THE Role Playing Game

Dungeons & Dragons is, in the eyes of most people outside of the hobby game industry, THE role playing game. They haven’t seen Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, FATE, 13^th Age, Numenera or Dark Heresy played on Community or The Big Bang Theory.  Despite the fact that D&D did not rank in the top 5 sellers according to ICV2’s spring sales chart, (though lack of new D&D product certainly had something to do with that), viewers  saw Dungeons & Dragons played and in the viewers’ minds, there are no others.

Casual customers will come in looking for the new D&D books, as they have heard of them through popular media and we will hopefully sell them a copy of the $20 Starter Set. While I expect to sell quite a few Advanced Class Guides and fewer copies of the Iron Gods campaign, I do not expect to have any casual customers coming in looking for either of those books.

Jean Rabe: From RPGA to USA Today

If you played AD&D in the late 80s and early 90s, and especially if you played RPGA (Role Playing Game Association, the Pathfinder Society of its day) events, you may never have met Jean Rabe, but she certainly had an impact on the Organized Play of the day. I used to run into Rabe fairly often at Midwestern gaming conventions but hadn’t seen much of her for more than a decade. During the past couple of years, though, I have seen her at a few more cons and wanted to find out what she has been doing the past 20 years.

Rabe’s association with the gaming industry started in Evansville, Indiana, back in the late 80s where she helped run the Glathricon gaming convention. At one of the conventions, Rabe struck up a friendship with the Guest of Honor, Penny (Petticord) Williams, who worked as the RPGA Network Coordinator. When Williams decided to leave TSR and the position in 1987, she contacted Rabe to let her know the position had opened. Rabe, tired of covering murder, theft, and assaults in her job as a newspaper reporter in Evansville, applied, interviewed for and got the job within 48 hours.

Rabe spent the next 7 years working full time for TSR, first as the head of the RPGA, making certain events got processed in a timely manner and editing the organization’s magazine, Polyhedron (yes, this was an era when all magazines were printed on PAPER and sent out via the MAIL), then as a full time designer and editor, working on the Child’s Play and Vale of the Mage AD&D modules, among others.

Wanting to pursue her own writing, Rabe left TSR in 1994 for a freelance career, though she continued to work in the gaming and fantasy genre, editing the official BattleTech magazine MechForce Quarterly for FASA  and writing several novels for TSR, including the Dragons of a New Age trilogy, which focused on the next major event to take place in the Dragonlance series. She also wrote three short stories set in the Star Wars universe, which appeared in West End Games’ Star Wars Adventure Journal and three Endless Quest books, all in the late 1990s.

Moving beyond gaming related novels (though she works actively in that field; WOTC published Goblin Nation, the three-volume Storytellers series in 2009, and she just finished the novella “Maiden Voyage" for Strange Brew: The Ultimate Witch and Warlock , a Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades compatible supplement, scheduled to appear later this year), Rabe wrote and edited mainly in the fantasy field, writing The Finest trilogy, the Rogue Angel series and Fenzig’s Fortune. However, she also has the murder mystery Submerged (as Jordan Grey) and a number of collaborations with authors such as Andre Norton, Stephen  D. Sullivan, and F. Lee Baily (yes, that F. Lee Baily). Just this year, The Cauldron will see print, written with Gene DeWeese.

Though she hasn’t written a gaming module in decades, Rabe still loves roleplaying and is active in the Pathfinder Society, though as a player, not a coordinator, but she does have outlines of another gaming related novel in the works. With 30+ novels under her belt, including a couple that made USA Today’s bestseller list and a handful of awards for her writing, “all in all, I’m happy. I think I’ve had some amazing opportunities and have a basically awesome life”.

Free RPG Day

Just a reminder that Free RPG Day is coming June 21. To celebrate, we will run RPGs all day. The store will open at 8 a.m. for a Pathfinder Game Day with games at 9-1, 2-6 and 7-11.  We will run the Free RPG Day Pathfinder adventure at each of those times, along with standard PFS event. The Game Day is free if you just want to play the Free RPG Day event, $5 otherwise. We will also run D&D 3.5 at 2 p.m. and Castles and Crusades at 7 p.m.

Local Artist Matthew Miller of Capybara Ink will be on-had doing sketch cards for donations to the Southern Illinois Autism Society (the store will donate $1 for each sketch card he does) and full character illustrations for $20.

Entries into the 2 page Dungeon Contest are due by 9 p.m, either uploaded to the web or dropped off at the store.

You can get one Free item just by coming into the store, 1 for each 2 Castle Card Stamps you earn, 1 for each $20 you spend on RPG books, 1 if you are a preferred customer and 1 for each 5 cans of food you bring into the store. See you then.

Coming for Castles & Crusades

Coming Soon!

TLG8127

C&C: Rune Lore: The Winter Runes

$ 24.99 SRP

Rune Lore introduces the magical Rune Stones and the Runemark to Castles & Crusades. The rune stones and their accompanying runes are presented for use as both magic items and as spells. Integrating them requires no new rules. The magical stones and runes are usable by any character of any race or class, allowing players to quickly and seamlessly integrate the runemark into their existing games. Spell Casters use them as spells to flesh out their magical grimoires. The spell versions of the runes are slightly more powerful, either in duration or in a affect due to the nature of the magic using class's archetypical abilities. The series of loosely connected adventures in Chapter 3: The Runemark, lends themselves to a highly scripted campaign or as drop in adventures as the Castle Keeper may need. Each adventure is 2-6 pages long and laid out in such a way that they should be playable in a single nights play. CKs may have to flesh out the adventure with smaller jaunts of their own design. Rune Lore offers the game a highly compact, versatile expansion to the C&C game without any noisy rules or cumbersome add on systems. The Rune Lore material offers the CK and player a wide arena for expansion either on their own or with other Runes as detailed by TLG.