What arrived in my hands were no less than 5 books (part of a boxed set sans the box, I expect). A rules manual, Magic book, World atlas, Equipment Book, and a table’s book (yeah you read right a tables book). With my first skimming trough the material one thing was obviously clear, this was a game about details. Which definitely shows in the meticulous character creation system. Starting creation you roll your character’s star sign, which gains him/her a set of modifiers. Then after rolling 2d10 for each of the stats (except size which is determined by a d8 roll and based off of a chart.) Races are added by a template like format where players multiply their stats depending on the racial motif. (For example a dwarf multiplies his strength by 1.2, and agility by 0.7 etc.) In this respect our first character creation session as a group was a tough one. It was nice that the game has a tables book that could be sent around the table to help players build their characters but even making a normal human fighter with this system, is a chore that is right up there with making rolemaster characters.Skill generation is a matter of getting two skills from your parent, and the skills of your class each with starting modifiers based on 4 formulas for one each for the primary, secondary, tertiary and negative stats that affect a skill). (For example a skill might use a characters strength and agility for it’s primary and secondary, but then take a negative for a character’s size). In fact in many ways this system seems to capture the feel of this well-known and venerated system. In it’s most basic form the system is all about rolling a d100 with modifiers to beat a target number. While this sounds pretty basic (essentially D20, with bigger numbers) there is much more to the system itself. While combat does not use anything close to the huge one chart per weapon system that Rolemaster is known for, it is definitely a weighty game. IF you are afraid of math, or have a penchant for the fast and furious rpg mentality this game won’t suit you. Combat is actually rather engrossing (even though it has more numbers flying around the table than a game of Champions.) The detail is impressive, including taking into account the chance of weapons breaking, without a critical fumble chart. As for magic, the system is based off of the skill system, each magic is also associated to a color, which each player has a saving throw chance against. Think of it as making saving throws for differing magical natures though each type of magic has it’s own color which may not automatically be quite as obvious as say necromancy, or elementalism. For example Pixie trickster magic is black (as is necromancy). This makes the myriad of spell casting formats (including psionics and warrior monk magic) a bit more tricky to comprehend how they might affect your character until you know exactly what color of magic you are dealing with.
The world book covers the basics of their default world Korin-Thar. Including a few color maps and black and white maps for close up sections this book chronicles a decent albeit typical fantasy world. This is not to say it’s particularly a bad world, just that it works for what it is. Both equipment and parental career are based upon your location in the world making it harder to separate the world from the system than say D&D where you simply ignore the deities and go from there. However as a typical fantasy world it’s easy enough to place your campaign in this world or substitute your own data for this world if you like.
As for the production values they are rather good. They are soft covered books with mostly black and white art of decent degrees of quality. I would say it’s comparable to first edition Vampire, d20 Mafia. The are a bit of an awkward size (similar to the old first edition lace and steel books, making them just oddly tall) nothing alarming though. and one other comment I would make about format is the writing. In the tradition of older weightier texts, this game uses a sectioanl rules organization (I.e. character creation is section 1, generating your star sign is 1.1.1, rolling stats is 1.1.2 etc.) Perhaps taking this into a more conversational tone might make the game seem more aproachable, but this one feels like it's for the hard core gamers.
Honestly after playing this game a few times. I am not terribly fond of it. It’s a system that is good for what it does, but it’s more crunch and more math than I like in a system. If you are the kind of person who is looking for more realism and has no qualm with doing math to get it this game is a worth successor to Rolemaster, and does so in many different and unique ways. However if you are the kind of player who prefers Castles and Crusades over Blue Rose just because of the sheer amount of complexity that true 20 has, I would have to say you might want to steer clear of this game. The one thing it gave me was a sense of older games like Runequest and Rolemaster. And while I for one don’t plan to run it for a campaign in the foreseeable future, I cannot deny the quality of this game.
