A pillar of the table top RPG industry, Castles & Crusades embodies the spirit of the old-school gamer with the easy to use modern mechanics. The Players Handbook has all you need to get started in a wild ride of adventure!
It’s easy to learn attribute-based rules system allows players to choose among 13 archetypal character classes and 7 races to create their characters. Spells, equipment, fast-paced combat rules, and all essential information needed to play a game of Castles & Crusades is in this book.
Dice and Monsters & Treasure sold separately.
You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumbleor YouTube - Tenkar
I'm a huge fan of Castles & Crusades and have nearly every printing of the Player's Handbook and the C&C White Box. I'm all in on the Castles & Crusades Starter Kit.
In your hands you hold the very font of imagination, where all things can become real. Play as mighty warriors and weavers of powerful spells, face off against terrible dragons, giants, and monsters of lore. Win gold and glory, or die trying.
Castles & Crusades—the best in fantasy gaming is finally available in an introductory box set. Within this box, you will find 3 booklets specifically designed to help new players learn what a role playing game is, how to play and how to use Castles & Crusades to bring to life exciting adventures for you and your friends and family. You will learn how to create scenarios, people them with monsters and how to create characters to embark on unforgettable stories of high adventure.
Book 1 Character Creation is all about players, and includes an immersive and detailed example of play, where YOU get to join the fray without having to know anything in advance. It also teaches how to generate a character, how to inhabit the role of that character, how to equip, create descriptions and use that character’s abilities. With these rules, a character can be taken all the way from 1st to 6th level!
Booklet 2 Directing the Game is all about the Castle Keeper, the world builder. The Castle Keeper acts as the game’s referee and in Directing the Game you learn how to run the game, how to build your own fantasy world, and how to handle any situation.
Book 3 Into the Dark The final booklet is a full-blown adventure where the players test their mettle against a hideous giant and his goblin minions in a quest absolutely bursting at the seams with opportunities for new ideas and scenarios. Into the Dark is designed for three to eight 1st level characters.
The Starter Kit also includes characters sheets where you can track your character name, statistics, abilities, and equipment as well as PDF versions of all the books for you to use.
Even a set of polyhedral dice are Included!! (actual dice may differ from art displayed)
This box set contains absolutely everything you need to learn, play, and master Castles & Crusades!
You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumbleor YouTube - Tenkar
My son! The Original White Box begat Swords & Wizardry, which itself begat the Swords & Wizardry White Box. Alas, by then, the Swords & Wizardry White Box had strayed too far from its source material, and this begat Delving Deeper, an attempt to be closer to the "true" White Box. So it is written.
Delving Deeper is a legal emulation of the original 1974 fantasy role-playing game published under the Open Game License. As well as being a game in its own right, Delving Deeper is also a legal platform for publishing supporting material compatible with the “Original Edition” games.
Why Original Edition?
0e games are accessible! A player needs to know so few rules that even a novice can immediately jump in and get involved. The rules themselves are coarse grained and uncomplicated which makes the mechanics easy to grasp, and game play fast.
Delving Deeper is pitched at just the right level of abstraction to facilitate dungeon, town, and wilderness exploration as well as combat scenarios from man-to-man duels to veritable battles involving superheroes, dragons, or scores of orcs. What might take hours to resolve with more “advanced” rules might take mere minutes to resolve in 0e.
You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumbleor YouTube - Tenkar
It's no secret that I'm a massive fan of Phil Reed's work as an independent publisher of system-neutral RPG material. Phil likely is responsible for 10% or more of the Kickstarters I've backed (I am, sadly, a SuperBacker).
Adventurer! This Fantasy Sites and Scenes Bundle presents system-neutral city and dungeon encounters from Philip Reed Games for any tabletop fantasy roleplaying game. Light your imagination with dozens of locations, characters, and encounters, and hundreds of rumors and magic items, that help you make any campaign city your own. Funded through just a few of Philip Reed's 104 Kickstarter campaigns (you read that right), these inspirational treasure chests of ideas fit easily in any setting above or below ground level.
For just US$14.95 you get all eight system-neutral gamemastering aids in our Fantasy Sites Collection (retail value $76) as DRM-free ebooks, including all three Fantasy City Sites and Scenes volumes – I, II, and III; The Book of Collected Rumors and The Book of Dungeon Encounters; and three little magic shops: Marco's Market of Magical Merchandise, Zeck's Shoppe of Riches, and Tischler's Tome of Treasures.
The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.
DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumbleor YouTube - Tenkar
I enjoyed the West End Games version of Star Wars decades ago. The inheritor of the mantle was the D6 System, which years later became an Open D6 System under the OGL.
Mini Six: Bare Bones Edition distills the Open D6 System into a mere 36-page document. All for the price of FREE!
Mini Six is a slimmed-down version of the original OpenD6 game system. It is a multi-genre RPG that focuses on handling action-oriented games with a light-to-medium amount of "crunch." It serves as a toolkit for designing your own games and has been used as the engine of several published games by third-parties through the use of the Open Game License.
The basic mechanics and character creation are covered in the first few pages. Stock NPCs, creatures, vehicles for a variety of genres, a simple magic system, optional rules, and conversion guidelines for mixing in standard OpenD6 materials round out the middle of the book.
Mini Six Bare Bones Edition finishes with five nearly ready to play mini-settings which showcase some of the possibilities of the system.
Perdition: Space Cowboys surviving on the edge of the frontier.
Rust Moon of Castia: Classic Fantasy
Farnsley's Phantasm Investigations: Spook hunting in the Victorian Age.
Precinct '77: Busting punks in an homage to 70's and 80's cop shows.
Imperium in Revolt: Rebels against the Imperium in classic space op
The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.
DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumbleor YouTube - Tenkar
Years ago, when I looked more closely at non-OSR Indi titles, I came across the Ubiquity System. To my eyes, it seemed like an even easier Savage Worlds-type system. But then my eyes wandered to other games, and I lost track of Ubiquity.
Well, Leagues of Adventure is powered by Ubiquity.
Adventurer! This new Leagues of Adventure Bundle presents Leagues of Adventure, the Ubiquity-based Victorian steampunk tabletop roleplaying game from Triple Ace Games. In the Age of Exploration, a semi-fictitious 1890s right out of Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne, globetrotting scientists, crazed inventors, and daring explorers equipped with airships, mole machines, and Weird Science gadgets venture across the world and to other planets to uncover forgotten cities and civilizations, map the wilderness, and defeat nefarious villains in bare-knuckled Victorian action. The flexible and cinematic Ubiquity rules (Hollow Earth Expedition, Space: 1889) use an easy dice-pool system that puts your player characters in the spotlight, lets them invent their own gadgets, and keeps the story moving fast. Create your own League of Extraordinary Ladies and Gentlemen!
For just US$12.95 you get all four titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $55) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Leagues of Adventure Core Rules; Dramatis Personae, an array of more than 100 pre-generated characters; the Weird Science Compendium; and the Globetrotters' Guide to London.
And if you pay more than the threshold price of $25.20, you'll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with fifteen more titles worth an additional $87, including The Great Campaign and the lunar adventure Tides of War (the "Black Editions" free of AI-generated art); Letters From the Leagues Vol. 1, V2, V3, and V4; and nine Globetrotters' Guides: Expeditions, Unusual Places, The Ancient World, The Old World, The New World, Cads & Cultists, the Cads Appendix, Dramatic Developments, and Miscellanea.
The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.
DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumbleor YouTube - Tenkar
Looking for a Fallout RPG with the serial numbers scratched off from an OSR game designer who avoids using an OSR ruleset this time around?
Atomic Punk 2240 may just be up your alley. It's today's deal of the day, and it's marked down to 8.99 until tomorrow morning.
Atomic Punk 2240 is a post-apocalyptic role-playing game set in an alternate future where, in the 1990s, the nuclear holocaust occurred. The wasteland is full of gangs, raiders, mutants, power-hungry factions, and the player characters themselves, who may or may not be any number of these types.
Atomic Punk 2240 is a 2d10 system where, generally, there is a target number of 11. All rolls are modified by difficulty modifiers, weapon and armor match-ups (references on a weapon vs armor table), and other factors.
The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.
DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumbleor YouTube - Tenkar
Un-American Activities
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I am halfing prices for all False Machine books held outside the U.S.A.
This discount will last until sales the the U.S. are re-started, OR until
the ...
October Lantern Advance Copy Available
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I've finished the advanced version of the October Lantern, posted on
patreon. I've taken the requisite three hours rest and now I'm writing
about it her...
Grozz keeps gettin' graphic...plus, a Soldier!
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I hate to start out posts by just lamenting my lack of posts...
BUT...man, I'm really having a tough time working regular blogging back
into my schedule,...
Miskatonic Monday #370: Rryonn
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Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha
and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s
masterpiece of...
Return to the Cursed Labyrinth
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AI Toy catalogues make wildly inappropriate choices for the user. Automated
incencerity.
We had two drop in players joining our Sat...
Designing Tables
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In my Friday Twitch stream where I share my work in progress for building a
campaign world that is an ocean world with archipelagos instead of
continental ...
Monstrous Mondays: Guardians of the Library
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[image: Photo by Дмитрий Пропадалин:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/knight-in-iron-armor-9968878/]
Photo by Дмитрий ПропадалинStill working through a bunch o...
August ‘25 In Review
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Starting the month with a thunderstorm and a cold front making the
temperature much more bearable, and ending it with a long weekend was
definitely the w...
Music Monday - Cry Little Sister
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My friend Stew sent me think link to this video with the message "Relevant
to your interest" and before clicking it I knew at least one hot alt chick
would...
Greyhawk News You Can Use - Harvester 2025 Edition
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I’m well-overdue for another Greyhawk news roundup, and a recent post by
/u/talktoh in /r/Greyhawk prompted me to complete catchup on Greyhawk news
for the...
Brink of Calamity
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By Trent SmithStorm Fetish Productions1eLevels 1-6 The town of Warnell,
straddling a trade route that crosses two great forests, seems at first
like any ot...
Rock Troll #4 (and last, probably)
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Yet another 3d printed Rock Troll, this time painted red.
This will probably be the last one, unless I develop a pressing need for
more, which is unlik...
Random Links & Notes for 8/29/2025
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- 9 and 30 Kingdoms talks a bit about mapping. I'm okay with players
mapping or not mapping. It's up to them, as long as their characters can do
it. If the...
On Two in one Day!
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Free quickstart, has everything you need to get a group up and playing in
10 minutes. Contains *everything *you need to play.
drivethrurpg.com/en/produ...
Up Your Game with Rubber Stamps
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[image: Up Your Game with Rubber Stamps]
This isn't a Free GM Resource, but a product, well company really, that I
think is a useful resource for the prep...
Halflings (ODD Race)
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I discovered a handful of recent stripped down D&D hacks online this last
week. One immediately jumped out at me, probably because of the old school
aesthe...
Mythic Rivers
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Not *The *River, of course.
A typical *Mythic Bastionland* realm, following the procedure in the book,
has a navigable river. It’s an extremely fast way t...
Tomb of the Blind and Deaf Dead
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So the cat is out of the bag thanks to Tobias Schulte-Krumpen, who posted
the above image to the Lamentations of the Flame Princess facebook group. I
...
Eyes of Idola, Part 2
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This is Part 2. Here is Part 1.
*Concept 1: Entering the Dungeon*
Descending the stairs into B1, the party reach rooms that are dark,
crowded, flooded, a...
The 'I Want' PC
-
Readers who do not live in the dank earth beneath rocks with only woodlice
and earthworms for company will no doubt have heard of something called *K-Pop
D...
More Star Wars/Traveller ship scale
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Today’s contribution to I Made It So I Might As Well Share It. Might be
interesting or useful to someone else as well. A selection of some of the
most icon...
[BLOG] News on the March! Episode X.
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This post continues the series of brief play reports I have been posting on
Discord. This does not cover every single session (sometimes, recon and
setup...
A New Epoch: Stone and Spell...
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Why does fantasy have to be medieval? It doesn't, and our hobby provides
numerous examples (Call of Cthulhu comes immediately to mind). Great stuff;
but ...
GM Companion for Shadowdark
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Let's talk about Mr. Chubby Funster. Greg. If you go on RPG DriveThru and
check out the Shadowdark section you'll see he had three books in the top
ten....
Rulings, Not Rules: A Foundation, Not an Oversight
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There's been a lot of discussion over the years about how Original Dungeons
& Dragons handled (or didn't handle) the common situations you'd expect in
a ...
How I Run OD&D Combat
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Link to discussion
Over the years I’ve settled on a way to run 0e/OD&D/White Box combat that
keeps the action moving and is pretty simple, while covering...
A long overdue hobby update!
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Welcome back to the Vault everyone! 2025 is going by in a blur; I last
posted in February, almost started a post in March and now it's the end of
May. W...
Pulp: Adventure Location: Trindade & Martim Vaz
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History is fractally interesting. Start examine any event, or following any
citation, and interesting facts emerge. But some places, for whatever
reason,...
Playing at the World 2E V2 Arrives
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With the release of its second volume, the second edition of *Playing at
the World *is finally complete. The two books combined total well over
1,000 ...
Blogs on Tape season 6 has begun!
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Hi everybody! Its been a minute. How are you? Everything is awful all the
time? Horrors never cease? You’re being driven mad by the weight of the
unfathoma...
Articulations
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Creating house rules, custom rules specific to a local group or campaign,
has been common throughout the history of D&D. What makes an effective
house rule...
Writing playlists for all occasions
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Hello again! Going off the idea of inspiration elaborated on by the prior
post, I also have music playing while I write my various games and fiction
pieces...
The Tarot of Pips
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Somewhere in your dice collection is a die like this one, the humblest of
dice. Although you don't know it, this small white die carries with it a
secr...
Pirates and Necromancers, a Play Report
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Over the Thanksgiving weekend we did a lot of gaming ranging from
“off-table” domain level stuff to some solo adventures to spell and magic
item rese...
It's been a bit
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Hey everyone, I hope you are doing well! I've had a lot going on and
haven't had much time to blog lately. Heres a recap of gaming events and
other st...
*'s in SpaaaaaAaaaace
-
A lot of SF (including a certain 2D6 RPG grandaddy) deal with ancient
aliens taking humans from Earth and dropping them, fleas and all, on one or
more w...
Last move - to self-hosting!
-
As my vote regarding Substack in the “marketplace of ideas”, I’m moving to
self-hosting.
I’m now at (and hopefully staying for a long time at)
Blog: ht...
Clean Your Room
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Looking back at my little blog here. That last post… wow, I was having fun
playing WOW Classic! That was August of 1999 and I was having a blast… it
was ...
Steve Jackson Interview
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James Maliszewski recently did an interview with Steve Jackson over on his
Grognardia blog. Steve chats about the beginnings of The Fantasy Trip and
upcomi...
ToAD Monster of the Week: Crocoman
-
Now that I'm back doing the blog thing I thought I would use Tome of
Adventure Design to create monsters for The Black Hack.
Using the monster tables in th...
Strange, Dangerous, and Inhuman: The Fey and Fairie
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When I was a boy I loved fairy tales. Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in
Boots, Rumpelstiltskin - I devoured all of it. My fascination that there
was a strang...
Dungeons & Dragonmead Fall Schedule
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*As you know, I run public classic Dungeons & Dragons games at **The Loaded
Die**/Metro Detroit Game Night's Board Game Nigh at **Dragonmead**, in
Warren...
Fiction in Airhde
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On a whim this weekend, I picked up some fiction off the TLG store. *A
Houseless God & Other Tales* and *The Mirrored Soul & Other Tales*, both by
the T...
Ravensburg Reboot: Streamlined City Map
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I mentioned in my last post how I was tweaking and reworking parts of my
Ravensburg setting. Today I streamlined the city map. The old map had lots
of redu...
And Now the News Draft Download on Patreon
-
It's self-styled Throwback Thursday and *having just released the 34-page
draft booklet of Hill Cantons news to my Patreon backers* I am going to
indulge m...
The Withered Crag available now
-
I just enabled the sale of the PDF version of The Withered Crag at
DriveThruRPG a few minutes ago, and the custom print version will be
available startin...
Annihilation Rising Goes live
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The latest in Fail Squad Games’ Quick Kick projects has gone live and needs
your support!! This project is only running 11 days and ends on 5/28/2019!
...
James's Celebration of Life
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We could not have asked for a prettier day for James's service. It was a
bit chilly and windy but gorgeous. A heartfelt thank you to all that joined
us tod...
Trap Tuesday: A step back
-
I will get back to Tomb of Horrors soon. I found a topic that was
interesting enough to take a break. While interacting in a 5E group on
Facebook I talked ...
Let's Talk About Pacing!
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The idea, I think, is that the RPG is ultimately about the long game. Even
rolling back to the early days of Basic & Expert, the goal of the player
was...
Profane and Profound Prep Part 2
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This is part 2 of my work to edit my magic items for a DMsGuild release,
along with adding cursed items along the way. Here is part 1. Bone of a
Saint 8000...
Please, I don't do paid advertisements - don't ask.
-
A little note since people have asked me about this. My video channel's
*not* an advertising platform, so I'm not available for hire if you want to
promote...
New website!
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Slowly but surely, all the content here will make its way — in updated
form! — to my new website: timbannock.com. For fairly obvious reasons, that
site wil...
Please Update Your Link!
-
If you're seeing this, it means your link to the Greyhawk Grognard blog is
out of date.
Please update your link to www.greyhawkgrognard.com (RSS feed is
h...
Total Sales for WB:FMAG
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Hi Folks,
It's been a long time since I provided an update for the sales of White
Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game.
*LULU*
Print: 396
PDF: 433
*OBS*...
How can We Destroy this Campaign World?
-
d12
1. You must trick a bard into strumming the *Chords of Fate* on the *Lute
of Annihilation*
2. Legends tell of thermonuclear weapons beneath megadunge...
Mord Mar - Session 5
-
We had another successful delve into the dungeon yesterday. The delvers:
Moira, the Magic-User
Radovan - Human Cleric (of Odin?)
Khazgar Stonehand - Dwarf ...
Bundle of Fantasy Age
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Bundle of Holding: Dragon Age/Fantasy Age: Available until March 12. PA
Presents: Fantasy AGE Freeport live play Green Ronin in 2018 The Fantasy
Age RPG ma...
New Free PDF Module: The Hyqueous Vaults
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A new dungeon module—written in celebration of OSRIC's 10th Birthday—by
Rebecca Dettmann, Allan T. Grohe, Jr., Jimm Johnson, Matthew Riedel, Alex
Zisch, a...
Swords & Wizardry Light: Session # 6
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Two months after our last session (thanks to things like 8th grade finals,
a 4 year-old's birthday and party, Father's Day, etc.), we finally had our
next ...