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Like the art, the setting cheesy good fun orginally from the comic Weapons of the Gods. Its based on ancient China, but only in the way that Forgotton Realms is based on dark ages Europe. There's a big ol' Martial Arts competition, a corrupt empire, the mandatory evil eunuchs, and everything else you'd expect to find. The revolutionary aspect is the presentation. Borgstorm describes the setting through a series of short fiction on topics such as "the Celestial Goddess", "The Shang Dynasty" or "Married Life". Everything in the setting is explained in this way. If you enjoy Borgstorm's idiosyncratic storytelling style, you'll love the setting chapter. If you find it incomprehensible, as I do, you'll feel like the setting chapter was a complete and total waste, as I do.
The crunch is equally revolutionary. You roll dice and look for matches, and read the result as [number of matches]x10+[the match]. That's less weird than it sounds. So if you roll......
two sevens, you have 27. one nine, you have 19. four ones, you have 41.
And so forth. The system has some of the best attributes of a die pool, but its much easier to add bonuses to the roll. And its easy for a small die pool to roll a really tremendous result, which is very much in genre.
There's a lot of wacky subsystems. There's Martial Arts, which is largely about resource management. Unforunately, they're very poorly done. You need to know a lot of techniques to do well, but many techniques do two or three things at once (add your skill to iniative, +5 accuracy, +one damage die, -1 blueberry die, et cetera.) I found it hard to pick out techniques for a sample character, I imagine keeping everything straight in play would be sort of a drag. The techniques also seem unbalanced.
There's Secret Arts, which is a flexible way to put curses or bonuses on people: "As long as you ______, you get ________". You define x and y, so if you proclaim "It is your destiny to die young and glorious or live to old age", the poor sap gets -10 to some defense related roll as long as he seeks glory and +10 as long as he doesn't. But the system is very poorly defined. There are eighteen ways to learn Secret Arts (astrology, herbalism, Sorcery, et cetera). I can't tell if there are supposed to be mechanical differences between the different styles.
This brings us to the problem which really sinks this book. The whole thing is incredibly confused and disorganized. Important points (How many dice do you roll as part of a skill check?) are hard to find, while small details (different ways to recover damage) are scattered about like some sort of goblin army. The chapterrs are not consistent in their presentation. Borgstorm's writing is confusing for aesthetic reasons, Elliot's is just plain incompetent. The whole thing is in desperate need of an agressive editor.
Anyway - cool ideas, bad execution. Buy Weapons if you want to steal from it, if you're willing to wade through some terrible writing, or if you just really like Borgstorm's stuff. If you're not a hardcore fan or you just don't have the patience, look elsewhere.
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