Castles and Crusades

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I just got my hands on a couple of Castles and Crusades books. I've been hearing a lot about it and decided to try it out.

I was originally designing a Palladium Fantasy 1st edition campaign but decided to go with C&C instead. Particularly after I read Grinding Gears by Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

So, I had to make new races for my campaign; Goblin, Hobgoblin, Orc, Kobold, and Troglodyte.  I'm still using the race descriptions as they are for Palladium (I like them a lot more than the D&D versions).

Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and Gnomes are the enemy! In some cases, individuals of these races can and will be allies to the characters, but this will be very rare.

The idea behind the campaign was inspired by the Goblins webcomic. Basically, the characters have gotten fed up being fodder for low level "adventurers" and have decided to become adventurers themselves in order to protect their people. Not only are the players playing monsters (and from the monster's points of view) but the characters themselves are vaguely aware that they are part of a game. Breaking the 4th wall and all that.

I'm also including a lot of humor in the campaign, mixed with quite a bit of potential death for the characters. 

I'm going to be running this game for two different small groups (scheduling conflicts have forced this). One is my main gaming group, and the other is a group of people that for the most part are brand new to role playing. That's another reason I chose to go with Castles and Crusades - it's so ridiculously simple.

The final reason I'm using Castles and Crusades is because my roommate has an extensive collection of 1st and 2nd edition AD&D books that are all easily converted to C&C.

As a GM, I've never been big on pre-made adventures or modules. In fact, I've only ever used one pre-made adventure in over 15 years of running games. However, due to my own time constraints, I've decided to start the players off using two different low-level adventures; Grinding Gears by LotFP, and Beacon at Enon Tor for C&C. I actually have no idea who wrote the conversion for Beacon, but I'm aware it was originally printed in Dragon for D&D.

Both adventures are very different from each other, are good for introducing the game to everyone, and are short enough to fit into a single game session.