Castles & Crusade Dreams In the OSR & More Campaign Commentary

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Castles & Crusades while going over the The Castle Keepers Guide (CKG) again for the ninth or tenth time now. I've sort of last track at this point but its been very interesting to say the least.


I'm not entirely convinced about fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons taking over & saturating everything lately in the rpg table top hobby scene. I understand & like the game but there's something that sort of saturation  rankles me as dungeon master about this. We saw this during the D20 boom back in the early '00's. So I've been circling the C&C & OSR drain again looking into the archives at Casa De Fabiaschi for some sort of insights into the D20 weirdness that seems to have been infecting me. As getting a hold of original D&D & AD&D books seems be becoming an issue many are turning to print on demand as Tim Brannan writes about in his recent blog post. I fade back into a mode that I was in back in 2014/2015 the idea of using other OSR resources with Castles & Crusades such as Dominique Crouzet's Fantastic Heroes & Witchery. This game seems to be the name not spoken of in some circles of the OSR. Well those are not my circles so I steadily look into the options & ideas of a great many OSR products from both an economic stand point & from a practical  one.



In practical terms I've been talking with my players about a Castles & Crusades/ Dungeon Crawl Classics hybrid campaign using several of the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea adventures. 



But right at the moment work has been killing me & in practice this is at the moment a mental exercise with some bare bones skeleton outlines & ideas. I'd start this on Hyperborea & begin to adjust as needed for DMing. For an on the ground starting adventure I'd run The Anthropophagi of Xambaala™ by Corey R. Walden .


Right now all of the options are on the table as far as how & when this game  might happen & this is more of a mental exercise then anything else. But the ideas are flowing & its going to be a matter of scheduling with the players.