Adventures Dark and Deep (Lite)

This arrived for me today, a PoD hardback via DriveThruRPG.Including postage, it cost me about $40 yankeebucks, so about $65 Kiwibucks.I got it purely out of curiosity, since I'm pretty happy with running AD&D2e and don't intend to change that any time soon.The author, Joseph Bloch, has said words to the effect that he was trying to write the game that Gary Gygax might have produced as AD&D2e if he hadn't been kicked out of TSR. How well he has succeeded I cannot really say, but it does read very much like AD&D with a few house-rules tacked on. If you're familiar with AD&D1e, there are no real surprises here, at least, none to be found on my initial reading. Unlike OSRIC, it doesn't attempt to hew absolutely closely to AD&D1e, but it does hew pretty close nevertheless. This is the "lite" version of a much heftier pair of books. The core rule book and bestiary are about 500 pages each, and they're about eighty yankeebucks each too: by the time postage is figured in they'd come to near…