MilSims has delivered the final 3.5e books I ordered about a month ago. So, that’s that for 3.5e purchases, I guess.

For those who are interested, the books were:

* Cormyr: the Tearing of the Weave
* Shadowdale: the Scouring of the Land
* Fortress of the Yuan-Ti

Together, they finished off two 3.5e adventure trilogies. Yeah, I know… I had part 3 of the Realms trilogy before parts 1 & 2. Just the way MilSims had stuff in stock. 🙂 These last three adventures cost me a total of aus$30.

I also picked up a few (eight?) Castles & Crusades adventures (in pdf format) yesterday. Rpgnow had them on special, and I have a credit card. Eek. That’s scary.

I’ve read four of them so far – the four in the “A” series. Brief notes:

The editing for each is terrible.

A1 talks a lot about letting the players do what they want, but what it actually presents is a nice town plus a dungeon. It seems from the map that the dungeon is about 2 or more days of travel away from the town. I don’t like that type of design, especially for 1st level PCs.

A2 is another town + dungeon. The town is enemy controlled, and the dungeon is 6 days travel away from the town! Huh? I really, really don’t like that design. The encounters don’t look too bad, though.

A3 is a single dungeon. I can’t quite work out if the PCs are meant to infiltrate it (in which case, why it doesn’t give them a firm goal?) or fight their way through. It’s noted that the entire dungeon should be finished in a single expedition (not session). That’s tough on low-level PCs, especially magic-users. 24 page module… how many encounters are in it again?

A4 is a city intrigue adventure. At least, it wants to be. It’s one of the most incompetently handled adventures I’ve seen. You see, it gives the locations, the NPCs and their motivations… but fails to draw the PCs into the adventure at all. Indeed, there isn’t an adventure that I can see. City adventures aren’t dungeon-crawls; they rely on an event-based structure. Pity there aren’t any events described in the book!

I’ve got hardcopy of the C&C rulebooks on order from MilSims. I hope I may have them next week. I’d like to review the adventures, but I’m not sure if I’ll get around to them.