Talyn

Some time ago, I was tasked with remastering the Players Handbook for the Castles & Crusades ruleset because it was older DLC, the kind where the whole book is split up into hundreds of small pages in the Library? It was also ugly, a bit messy to navigate, yadda yadda. I'm sure it was fine for its day but it's almost 2018 and users are more savvy now. I love my Men in Black references, so here we go:

Old & Busted:


See? Not pretty. Plenty of bogus data and links (see the image titles didn't even work), quite a bit of completely unnecessary markup, and the Spells... oy... I'd guess roughly 70% of the spell descriptions were missing words, sometimes sentences, often entire paragraphs. I was shocked no one had complained.

However, this being essentially volunteer work (commissions only go to the ruleset developer) I took my time with it and didn't even really get serious about tackling the remaster til a month or so ago. I hit a snag on the project I was working on, so my attention came back over to C&C and I went full steam on getting the remaster done! This is the 7th Printing which just released a few months ago, and includes both the original and the alternate cover artwork.

The Players Handbook itself is obviously in gorgeous reference manual format now, with embedded images, sidebars, reference tables, the works. I did submit a minor code enhancement to the ruleset itself which resized the class and race windows to the size all the other rulesets use, then for the C&C class and race descriptions I took the source text and rearranged it in a manner consistent with the layout we also see in the 5E and Pathfinder descriptions. The goal there was that if we want C&C to get more attention, there needs to be some consistency when they show up from what they've already been using. It's still the original text from Troll Lords, just tweaked in appearance for those windows, while the reference manual section is straight from the book.

Obviously, the spells were looked at pretty hard, due to the sad shape they were in. Practically ever single one of them had to be re-created from scratch to get all the correct info.

In addition, I created a "Quick Reference Index" so that both players and GMs would have a single, easy-to-find spot to bring up individual reference tables, or text pages such as the list and descriptions of all the standard actions, combat maneuvers, and so forth. No more flipping through the reference manual when you need to make a quick arbitration or look something up. As an added bonus, I included the wiki page for Effects in there so no more needing to tab out to a browser for the effect syntax, it's all right there in your FG window now.

New Hotness:


The remaster spent roughly a week on the Test channel, then went Live last week as a FREE update to everyone who owns the C&C ruleset.

So enjoy the updates, and spread the word, Crusaders!

The initial Release Candidate (still a Work in Progress!) of Monsters & Treasure 4th Printing just went onto the Test channel for feedback as well, and will receive regular patches until it's ready to get pushed to Live.