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A while a back I posted that I was giving some products another chance. One of those products was Swords & Wizardry.
I picked up the Frog God "Complete Rulebook" and spent a lot of time with it. I think my biggest issue with S&W is that was sold to me as "0 Edition" or "OD&D" and it isn't. I played OD&D and S&W is nothing like it. Well, not "nothing" but it's made some serious changes. Those changes I think kept me from enjoying the game for what it is. So after staying away from the game for a number of months I came back and looked at in a different light. I dropped the idea that is an OD&D clone but instead a Retro Clone stripped down to it's most basic form. Now that is game I can get behind. If you ever played any version of D&D or any clone you can play this. S&W is really the basic essence of what D&D is. The most basic stuff you need to play. In this new light I saw the changes for what they were, really nice and intuitive changes.
The classics are really basic, but they work. In this Frog God edition you have a more classes, Assassins, Paladins, Rangers, Druids and Monks join Thieves, Clerics, Magic-Users and Fighters. Races are Human, Elves, Half-elves, Halflings and Dwarves. So again all easily recognizable.
There are a set of good multi-classing rules (which is always nice in an OSR game).
Spells go up to 9 for Magic-Users, 7 for most others.
There are plenty of monsters, tons really. The monster blocks are simple like everything else.
Really S&W does take a lot of what made OD&D/Dasic D&D so fun, the advances in AD&D and the features that made 3.x so popular. Yes. It has Ascending AC (which is still the best, sorry old school guys) and I like single saving throw bonus.
This Frog God version shares a lot of the art that appeared in The Tome of Horrors Complete and the layout. This is not a big deal as far as I am concerned.
At a 134 pages it is a complete game. You don't really need anything else here, though you can use it with nearly other OSR product or any of the scores of products created for S&W.
I am glad I gave this another chance.
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