Bandit Gangs and Caravans

Thieve's Guild Module No. 10

Review by Aaron Allston

by Kerry Lloyd, Richard Meyer, John Fonda, and Janet Trautvetter
Garrielords Ltd.
18616 Grosbeak Terrace Gaithersburg, MD, 20879
Released: June, 1984
Catalog No. 1910,
Price: $5.95 Complexity: Experienced
Solitaire Suitability: None

In Bandit Gangs and Caravans, Gamelords has presented us with a detailed and thorough explanation of how bandit gangs and caravans can function in a fantasy world. Also packed into the 81/2 by 11 inch, 36-page booklet are a set of butglary scenarios involving a merchant who~ unwilling to ante up protection money to the Thieves' Guild.

The bandit/caravan rules take up the majority of the booklet. Crammed into this booklet are rules for bandit gangs covering size of gang, experience of the leader, composition of the gang members, their abilities, and a sample gang to serve as an example. The caravan rules deal with size, means of transport, value of the guard, space available for storage and passengers, abilities of the guards and scouts, and a sample caravan, cargo determiners, rules for determining if a caravan has passengers of special status, and more, and mass combat rules.

All in all, it -- a pretty ambitious set of rules. I liked the amount of detail that has been stuffed into this rule book. However, Bandit Gangs and Caravans falls short when it comes to presentation of all this material.

Graphically, the supplement isn't much. The cover art is adequate. The interior typesetting is actually justified letter-quality printing, pasted up tight, with washed- outlooking headlines-all of which means that the product is difficult to read. it's also difficult to skim through to find the precise section you need. The credits page could've been squeezed a bit to include a table of contents, which would've helped things enormously The interior art is poor; however, I would like to have seen more of it, if only to break up the grey monotony of the pages.

Editorially, the gang/caravan rules are awfully dry reading. This won't make a difference to SPI aficionados or other boardgamers, but it's possible to make just about any set of role-playing rules interesting to read, through creative use of examples and a less ponderous style of copywriting. And the Gamelords folks, as ever, are awfully fond of their abbreviations, interminably substituting them where plain English would suffice.

What all this boils down to is that it~ a chore to read most of Bandit Gangs and Caravans. Once you do, you have a useful and thorough set of rules appropriate for any campaign where caravans are the primary mode of goods transport and gangs prey on them.

The adventures presented later in the book look as though they belong to a different supplement altogether. The pages are more readable; the writing more personable. The adventures have nothing to do with bandit gangs or caravans. They're good scenarios, though; not worth the purchase of the supplement in and of themselves, but worth having. I would prefer to have a largish caravan adventure included instead but, barring that, the adventures involving the merchant Talen are all right.

Overall, this supplement gets an A for replay value, a B for overall usefulness, and a D for presentation. If you're a Thieves' Guild gamemaster interested in the topic, you should definitely pick this one up. Otherwise, pass it over.

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