Review - Blood & Treasure - Part II - I've Got Class

I almost didn't want to do another review post on Blood & Treasure at this point. Why? Because I don't want to influence the poll that is currently going on at this blog. Swords & Wizardry Complete and Blood & Treasure are fighting for a very close place behind Labyrinth Lord.

That being said, running a game of Blood & Treasure would be a blast ;)

Anyhow, lets look at classes in Blood & Treasure.

We have Clerics and their subclass Druids; Fighters and their subclasses of Barbarians, Duelists, Paladins and Rangers, Magic-Users with their subclass of Sorcerer and Thieves with their subclasses of Assassin, Bard and Monk.

A few things to point out:

Assassins are in the game as PCs. It's just like AD&D again, without the assassination chart but with spells ;)

Duelists, which I only remember as an NPC class back in issue 70 (71?) of Dragon are a PC class. If you want to play a lightly armored "fighter", this is the class to take.

If you remember Sorcerers from 3x, you should feel comfortable with the Blood & Treasure version of the class. He also gets a few weapons beyond that of a Magic-user that he can use.

Bards - again, similar to the 3x version of the class. I'm always partial to bards. I like bards. I like this version of the bard. Well done.

Monks - A very workable version of the class. Not a subclass of cleric, which always seemed awkward and wrong to me anyway.

Barbarians - the only class with a d10 for HD. Fighters and it's other s subs are D8, Magic-users and Sorcerers are d4 and the rest are d6.

The subclasses have some high minimum scores to hit, especially if you make your players roll in order. Monks need Con, dex and Wis at 13+.

If you are comfortable with any edition of D&D from BECMI through 3x, Blood & Treasures character classes should have a familiar feel for you. This is definitely a good thing.

I'll put part III of the review up in a day or so.