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Exalted.

This would appear to be White Wolf's attempt at High Fantasy. As it uses the storyteller system, one might be forgiven for thinking it might be World of Darkness in fantasyland, but there are more significant differences between it and WoD than just that- principally, though, this is a very "crunchy" system, quite unlike WoD except as regards the core mechanic (and even that gets one tweak, thankfully for the better)

Anyway, in the interests of readability, I'll break the remainder of this down into sections and attempt something resembling organisation and coherence. I should perhaps add that I have no experience with the first edition, so no comparison will be forthcoming. To begin...

It's thick. Very thick. This makes me slightly concerned about its long-term survivability, but it seems to be holding up so far. The cover art is very good and evocative of what its supposed to be evocative of, i.e. cinematic, epic, high fantasy. Interior art is generally very good and all in full colour. Most in comic-book style, a good portion of that at least vaguely animesque, if you'll accept that as a word. There are some less good pieces, of course, as in any RPG book that doesn't feature art all by the same artist. Some of the best pieces are the less comicy, such as the impressive coach on page 312 or the panoramic landscapes illustrating the gazeteer section. Also, the art illustrates the text well, with the pictures in the right places.

Each chapter begins with a double-page comic strip. These are generally pretty poor, and I'd definitely rather have had a really good piece of art or some more text instead. There's a longer one at the beginning that is no better. I wasn't entirely convinced by the short stories in the World of Darkness core rulebook, but I'm substantially less convinced by these, and unclear as to what purpose they were supposed to serve. Fortunately, Exalted does a rather better job of conveying its setting in its text than WoD does, so there's not a lot lost there.

There's a map on the frontspiece and endpiece (the same map). It shows the world of Exalted, christened Creation. It's quite pretty, but suffers from a severe lack of detail. While it's certainly better than nothing, any GM is going to have to fill out some sections of it in far more detail if they want a consistent map.

The book is divided into eight chapters, in a fairly logical manner. It suffers from a severe lack of cross-referencing, and a very weak index which mostly contains a list of charms in alphabetical order; this being completely useless, as one wouldn't look up a charm alphabetically; and lacks much in the way of other keywords ("experience points" for example, isn't even in the index, and the game does use them, before you ask.) However, the information is generally presented in a logical fashion, and where you expect to find it, so this isn't disastrous.

That probably sounded quite critical, but generally the book does pretty well on this score, and looks really nice. The text is in a readable font, and free of any obvious spelling or grammatical errors. There are a (very) few typos, but nothing major.

Actually, I've skipped the introduction, with a "What is roleplaying" section, and a reasonably useful glossary. No complaints there. The setting chapter is effectively in three parts (not laid out as such; these are my own divisions). Firstly, there's about ten pages on the history/mythology of the world, explaining also who the PCs are going to be and where they fit into the rest of Creation.

In summary it goes like this:

The Primordials created the world from the formless chaos (called "The Wyld" (go weird spellings!) to escape from the creatures of the Wyld (called the Fair Folk). Getting bored with maintaining Creation, they created the Gods to look after the world for them. The Gods tolerated this for a while, then rebelled by infusing mortals with a little of their power, creating the Exalted and using them to bring down the Primordials. Some of the Primordials were slain, becoming the necrotic essence which created the Deathlords (nasty pieces of work if there ever were any), while others were imprisoned and became the greatest of the demons, called Yozi, creating as they did more demons (also fairly nasty pieces of work).

Meanwhile, the Exalted remained. The Gods then pretty much left Creation to them and went off to play "games of divinity". Well, the major gods did. Minor local spirits/gods are still hanging around all over the place.

The Exalted come in several types. There are the Terrestrial Exalted, or Dragon-Blooded, who are the weakest and by the far the most numerous. Then there are a number of much more powerful, much less numerous Celestial Exalted, of which the PCs are expected to play the most powerful sort, the Solar Exalted. Finally, there are the Abyssal Exalted, twisted reflections of the Solars created by the Deathlords.

The Solars ruled Creation for a time after the defeat of the Primordials. Then they began to go a bit mad due to the "Great Curse" that the Primordials had inflicted upon them in defeat. The Terrestial Exalted rebelled against their masters and defeated them, imprisoning their essences beneath the sea that they might not escape again (when a Solar Exalt dies, their essence finds a new mortal to exalt to Solar status. The dragon-bloods pass on their powers to their offspring, unlike the other exalted). They then proceeded to rule creation for 1000 years or so, under the banner of the Scarlet Empress, an immensely powerful dragon-blood (it's never quite explained how she came to be so powerful or so long-lived), fighting off fair folk (no, we haven't seen the last of them) and deathlords as she ruled.

Then two things happened together. Firstly, the Scarlet Empress vanished without any explanation. Secondly, the deathlords managed to free the essence of the solar exalts, hoping to corrupt it all to their own ends. They succeeded in getting only half of it, releasing the rest of the Solars to the world again.

Now the dragon-blooded have taught for hundreds of years that the solars are "Anathema", and should be destroyed on sight, and the PCs are newly-exalted solars hoping to change to world, and must avoid getting killed by dragon-bloods while doing great things. Or something like that. That about sums it up, I think.

There's nothing wrong with any of this, and it makes interesting reading (a lot more interesting than my rendition, I should emphasise). It's not quite as original as it seems to think it is, but it's a perfectly servicable premise.

The next section, twenty or so pages, discusses the Scarlet Empire- the empire of dragon-blooded who rule the world (even now, with the Empress’ disappearance, for the most part). This is not bad. The focus on the dragon-blooded when the PCs are going to play Solars does seem a little odd, though, since the one place a Solar won’t be (at the start of the game, at least) is on the Blessed Isle (the seat of the dragon-blood power). Indeed, I skipped this section when first reading the book. Granted, the dragon-bloods are by way of being the default antagonists for the PCs, but there are certainly other ways one could take a campaign. However, no real complaints.

We have the Immaculate Order, a religious group who preach the unremitting evil of all Celestial Exalted; the Imperial Legions, who are pretty much what you’d expect from an army; and a whole host of other offices and groups. There’s also a discussion of what’s likely to happen to the empire in the next few years and the power struggle going on between the various noble houses.

Nothing in this is sufficient to blow one away with delight, but it’s a solid backdrop for the game.

The last section in the setting chapter, another twenty-odd pages, is basically a gazetteer, going through all the places on the map and fleshing them out a bit with short descriptions. This is, in a word, dull.
It basically suffers from being too broad. Each place gets mabye a paragraph or so of description. Enough to start a prospective GM thinking, but scarcely enough to set a campaign there without a lot of extra work. It’s also not terribly inspired. We have barbarian tribes and snow in the north, cannibals and jungles in the east, nomads and deserts in the south, and pirates and archipelagos in the east.

OK, I’m being slightly unfair there, but there certainly isn’t anything earth-shatteringly original. This is definitely the weakest section of the setting chapter.

I’ll discuss these together, as they basically form a complete whole between them- neither makes much sense without the other. The first takes one through creating a character, introducing along the way a lot of terms which aren’t explained until the second one. But I suppose one has to do the character creation/ traits in some order, and either is potentially confusing. Generally the writers don’t do too bad a job.

We begin with a short section on making sure characters are appropriate to the campaign and will work well as a group. Very good.

Basically, characters have the following:

A Caste: This is like character class, only a bit less role-defining (It’s perfectly possible to play a warrior Twilight Caste, for example). We have Dawn (warriors), Zenith (priests), Night (rogues), Twilight (scholars) and Eclipse (diplomats). A character’s caste affects only two things- half of their ten primary abilities (the other five of which can be chosen freely), and their special caste-power. These are varied., and reasonably well-balanced, though Eclipse get a set of powers that aren’t likely to come into play that often, but are very cool when they do. Twilight get the best power; this being a damage-reduction effect; but it’s also the least interesting. My only real complaint about them is the inconsistency of the mechanics for using them with other effects. More on this later.

A motivation: This is the character’s primary goal, and is a good and well-exectued idea. It gives the player a focus for the character, and has a game-mechanical effect sometimes when resisting influence. There is a note about making sure it is epic enough- Exalted is a game where the characters, at least in principle, have the power to make substantial changes to the world.

Attributes and Abilities: Aha. Each of these is rated 1 to 5 (abilities can also be 0; attributes must be at least 1). We have nine attributes (basic qualities), divided into Physical, Mental and Social and 25 abilities (skills, essentially). I have a couple of gripes with these.

Physical attributes are Strength, Dexterity, and Stamina. Nothing unusual there.
Mental consists of Intelligence, Wits and Perception. The last two are usually combined into one, in my experience, and I’m not sure why they decided to split them. But I can live with it- both see a reasonable amount of use, though Perception perhaps a bit less. My bigger issue is the lack of any mental resistance attribute. Willpower (cover later, not being an attribute per se) sort of covers this, except that it functions as a pool of points to spend and recover, not an attribute to roll.

Social attributes are Charisma, Manipulation and Appearance. The last of these is my biggest complaint about the attribute set. Basically, it’s far too narrow. After its introduction here, it is mentioned precisely one more time in the book (excluding antagonist stats), where it features in one of the game’s most flawed mechanics. No skill or charm rolls (see later) ever use Appearance. Any function appearance does have ought to subsumed as part of Charisma.

The abilities are mostly solid, but they suffer slightly from an insistence on the rule that every roll uses exactly one attribute and one ability. This necessitates abilities that sound far more like attributes, such as Integrity (which is kind of mental resistance), Awareness (which sounds much too like Perception, though it is treated slightly differently), Presence and Resistance. However. No real problems. Some castes (notably Eclipse) get a less impressive set of primary abilities (Bureacracy, Linguistics, Ride, Sail and Socialise), but since one gets to pick another five from among the rest, and can have points in other abilities anyway (at increased cost), this isn’t a serious problem.

Virtues: An interesting, but lamentably flawed, idea.
Each character has four virtues: Temperence, Valour, Conviction and Compassion. These are rated 1 to 5 again. The idea seems to be that having a high virtue is good in some ways, but has drawbacks as well. The drawbacks come out because if one’s Virtue is rated 3 or higher, one must fail a virtue roll to act against that virtue (i.e. running away in combat rolls against Valour; ignoring suffering rolls against Compassion, and so on), or spend a point of Willpower. Also, a character’s highest Virtue has an associated Virtue Flaw, something that causes them to go a bit crazy if they resist it for too long. Fine; no problems there, though I should note that the list of associated Virtue Flaws is in no way balanced, but it doesn’t matter too much as it’s mostly a role-playing point.
Then there’s a minor bonus in that one can spend 1 Willpower to get bonus dice on a roll equal to a Virtue for a task related to that virtue. This is mechanically very weak given that one can also spend 1 Willpower to get a bonus success at any time.

The idea, I think, was that each Virtue would have other uses where it would be added to a dice pool or used in some mechanic. Unfortunately, only Valour ever does this. None of the other Virtues is ever mentioned in the book again, with the exception of one throw-away mention of Conviction as an optional rule for regaining Willpower. Given one can raise Virtues with experience points, one has to wonder why a player would ever do so, because with the exception of Valour, nothing good mechanically comes out of a higher Virtue, and quite a lot of unpleasantness does.
This is a great pity, because Virtues could have been very cool.

Backgrounds, Charms, Willpower, Essence, and Health: Backgrounds are things like Resources, Followers, Allies and Artifacts- traits which aren’t rolled, but which indicate what the character is able to do. The system works very well- I particularly like the way artifacts aren’t automatically preferable to more mundane items. Charms are special Exalted powers, and in many ways the real focus of the game- more on them later. Willpower is an independent stat, initially derived partly from Virtues, but after character creation is entirely independent of any other trait. It basically functions as a pool of points to spend.

Essence is the "raw magical power" trait found in every World of Darkness game. It affects minimum dice rolls in combat, is a prerequisite for charms, and crops up all over the place in the mechanics throughout the rest of the book without a great deal of logic as to how and when it applies. All players start with Essence 2 unless they spend Bonus Points (see below). All players start with 8 health levels, unless they have Charms that say otherwise.

Bonus Points: Basically, each of the categories above gives you a certain number of points to spend. Once you’re done there, you have a pool of bonus points to spend on any traits you like, at varying costs. These are not the same as experience points at all. There are separate tables for the costs of each trait in experience points, and cost of each trait in bonus points. Quite why the designers didn’t just give players a number of experience points to round off their characters, but created a new concept, is beyond me.

This is basically the core rules chapter.

The core system is very similar to the Storyteller system. Each roll made consists of an attribute plus an ability, which each give you as many dice as they are rated. Bonuses for favourable circumstances, charms, and like are added and that many d10s are rolled. Each 7, 8 or 9 counts as a success, with a 0 counting as two successes (not one success and a re-roll, thank goodness, since with Exalted’s dice pools being generally 10+, often up to 20+, you’d be rolling dice all day if that mechanic were used). You need a number of successes equal to the difficulty of the task to suceed.

This works very well. Some might object to the large number of dice that ned to be rolled, but I’m a fan of bell-curve distributions, so I tend to like multiple-dice systems. Perhaps preferably not quite so many as Exalted often has, but I live with it.

There are two kinds of penalty that can be applied to a dice-roll. We have "internal penalties" which subtract dice from your pool, and "external penalties" which subtract successes (or add to the difficulty, if you prefer- it’s the same thing). The distinction is slightly odd, and I should add that the designers make no mention of the (fairly obvious, I admit) fact that on average an external penalty of –n is twice as bad as an internal penalty of –n. Reading casually through the section one would be forgiven for believing them approximately equivalent.

We then get some rules for opposed actions, combining multiple actions into one, extended actions, and Stunts. Stunts just give players bonus dice for describing their actions well. Not too many bonus dice- maximum of three, and usually no more than two, but enough to encourage dramatic description. All fine.

Oh, I almost forgot. You get a "botch", that is, a critical failure, if you roll no successes (actually roll none, that is, not just fail to beat the difficulty) and at least one "1". More than one "1" makes the botch worse. Now, I’m no statistician, but even I can see that makes botching (even singly-botching) more likely the more dice you roll because the chance of a success on one dice is less than one-half. Add on to that the fact that serious botches are far more likely with dice and you have a flawed mechanic. Not a big deal, really, because one could quite easily ignore botches if one was that way inclined- they don’t support any other mechanics.

There’s then a longish section describing how to resolve various non-combat tasks, from climbing to diagnosing diseases. Social interactions are also missing from here, for reasons we’ll come to in a bit. We do have rules for Thaumaturgy, one of the three kinds of magic in Exalted. That’s slightly mis-leading, because most charm generate magic-like effects, but there are three things actually called "magic". This is the only one avaliable to mortals, and is generally fairly weak by comparison to Sorcery and Necromancy, the magics avaliable to exalted only, though it does allow one to be a bit more flexible, as you don’t need to learn each spell individually. Further, it gets precisely two pages devoted to it. It clearly isn’t complete, as it presents only four "arts" and none of them is sufficiently fleshed-out to use properly. It serves reasonably well for a storyteller wanting to create an NPC mortal thaumaturge, but they’d have to do a bit of work if a PC wanted to use it, so one wonders why it isn’t in the Storytelling section.

Then we get combat. I have one big issue with the combat system and a number of much smaller ones. The big one is this:

Combat rounds are one second long.

No, you didn’t misread that. And this isn’t so that characters can attack one another at improbable rates either- generally characters get to attack only once every five rounds. Of course some weapons attack more quickly- every four rounds or, with magic, fewer, and some more slowly- every six rounds or even more. And PCs will start the combat at staggered intervals due to the intiative mechanic.

This is needlessly complex, absolutely requiring tediously precise book-keeping by the GM (sorry, "storyteller") to keep track of who gets to act when. There’s a reason the usual "cycle through each character in the combat until you get back to the beginning" sort of mechanic is common- it actually works.

Worse still, little is gained from this mechanic, as most weapons have a speed of 5 (meaning they attack every five rounds) and almost all others have speeds of 6 or 4.

With that out of the way, we can discuss the basic process. One rolls to attack much like any other dice roll, with an accuracy bonus or penalty depending on the weapon, and then rolls damage if one gets more successes than the defender’s Defence Value (a static value calculated from the Dexterity skill and other bonuses); dice rolled for damage being dependant upon the weapon, the successes rolled over the DV, the attacker’s strength, and the defender’s armour and natural "soak". Successes subtract from the target’s health levels.

This isn’t exactly simple, but it is workable, requiring two dice-rolls for each attack if it hits. It’s a much more detailed system than the Storyteller combat system, but this is pretty much required due to the high-combat nature of Exalted. Generally I like it.

There are then rules for aiming, grappling, running, fighting multiple opponents and the like. All the usual stuff, and mostly very good. With a perhaps one exception (I’m going to be saying this a lot). Firstly, running decreases your defence value against all attacks. So it’s much easier to hit a running opponent than a stationary one with an arrow. Hm??

The combat section is followed by one on mass-combat, which works very similarly, only at a unit level rather than an individual level. I detected no issues with it, but I haven’t actually tried it out. Then we get Social Combat.

Hm. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the basic mechanics, which handle attacks almost identically to those in actual combat but use different attributes in the attack roll and Defence Value, seem reasonably solid. On the other, the rules force persuasion into a combat-round time which works the same way as in actual combat, and include bizarities like surprise social attacks (I introduce a topic of conversation without warning and therefore you are far easier to persuade. ?), and aiming. The trouble is, since persuasion is generally a one-instance thing, mass combat rules do not mimic it at all well. If I don’t want to be manipulated into some belief, but have nothing I wish to say to my "opponent", I have little choice other than running away, which seems a bit silly. Oh, and there’s another problem as well.

Any sort of influence, natural or unnatural, on a character’s beliefs or actions, can be resisted by spending Willpower, almost always 1 Willpower. Further, after spending 2 Willpower in one scene, a character is immune to further natural persuasion.

Now this works OK for PCs, I suppose, since you don’t really want the Storyteller forcing their characters into actions too often, though even then I think it’s a bit cheap. But for NPCs, particularly NPCs of no particular importance, it just serves to make persuasion (including charms that specifically generate this sort of effect and are rendered useless because of it) totally useless, because the NPC will always have Willpower to spend. Only by keeping up a barrage of attacks of this sort, including mostly supernatural charms (many of which cost Willpower themselves to activate, I might add), can PCs hope to influence an NPC in any way. At the very least, extras (NPCs of no especial significance) should be barred from spending Willpower to escape, and I think there should have been some guidance to the Storyteller as to when spending Willpower was appropriate for NPCs.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, the spending of Willpower only applies if the "attacker’s" social "attack" actually hits- i.e. penetrates your Mental Defence Value. So you’ve already failed at one attempt to stop the influence by the time you get on to spending Willpower. There’s also a bit of an issue in that there aren’t any penalties for trying to persuade the same target of the sam thing twice. Because the "twice is the limit" thing only kicks in if you actually spend willpower, not if the attacker just misses due to your high MDV< essentially, given long enough, anyone can erode an opponent’s willpower by two by repeatedly making social attacks against them.

One final stupidity. Appearance has an effect upon Mental Defence Values. It’s the only thing it does have an effect upon. One’s MDV against an attack is modified by one’s own Appearance minus the attacker’s Appearance. So the better-looking one is, the better one is at resisting influence. Excuse me??!!! Worse still, this is the most significant attribute as regards social attacks, because MDV subtracts directly from successes, and MDV is at base calculating by summing an attribute and ability and dividing by two. So Appearance is more important than Presence, Charisma, Linguistics, Manipulation or Integrity. This is perhaps the least well thought out mechanic in the book.

Social attacks basically don’t work at all well, and would need a good bit of effort to make them work well.

Chapter 5: Charms and Sorcery

Oh, boy!

Lots of kewl poworz here. On a more serious note, charms are basically what make a game of Exalted interesting. Charms can be purchased at character creation (players generallty begin with 10) or afterwards with experience. They generally supplement a single action, and cost Motes (magical power, essentially, derived from Essence score) and occasionally Willpower as well. One can only use one per action, meaning that if one uses an attack charm on one’s combat action, one can’t then use a defensive charm against attacks made against one before one’s next attack. Not normally anyway. See Combos, in a bit. It is, however, possible to use the same charm repeatedly during one action if it’s applicable, so one can use the same defensive charm multiple times against multiple foes. This generally creates interesting decisions.

Not all charms are combat ones, of course. Each charm is tied to a single ability. Some abilities get a lot more than others. Melee, for example, has 19, while Stealth has only 4. Each has an ability prerequisite and an Essence prerequisite, and some also have other charms as prerequisites.

Most of them are quite well designed. Useful, but not overpowering. The non-combat one tend to be slightly less interesting, but only marginally. There is the odd exception. Phoenix Renewal Tactic (no, I’m not making that name up. The names are … odd.) for example, allows one to recover Virtue points instead of Willpower points whenever one has the option of doing the latter. Which would be fine, except that there’s nothing in the game that causes loss of Virtue points. OK, I tell a lie. One of the Sidereal Exalts in the Antagonists chapter has an ability that can do this, which is of course not explained in any detail, nor is any advice given on how Virtue points would recover naturally.

But I’m picking nits. There are very few oddities in the charms list, and many of them are very interesting. This is generally a good chapter. I will re-iterate the problem I have with the willpower-spending-to-negate-influence, which renders many charms of this type almost useless if the storyteller interprets the rules literally.

Oh, and this chapter finishes with the sorcery rules. Hooray! We have a whole, like, 19 spells to play with. Um…. This clearly isn’t complete. The magic system is explained (it’s very simple. Sorcery charms are need to cast spells (there are three such) Then basically it takes 10 combat rounds to cast a spell, costing motes and willpower, and then something happens), and 19 spells are presented. They are obviously merely examples of spells rather than a complete magic system.

This is the most unforgiveable ommision from the book. I can forgive the lack of detail on the Thaumaturgy rules, as this isn’t really meant for PCs. But Sorcery is and we don’t have a full system. I certainly wouldn’t want to play a sorceror with the system presented here. I might add that learning spells is expensive and each spell must be learnt individually, making Sorcery decidedly un-exciting. However.

Chapter 6: Storytelling

Yawn. This is nothing special. Not awful, but you’ve seen the sort of advice here before. Luckily, I know how to run a High Fantasy game, so the vague advice isn’t a serious drawback. There’s a bit about experience points as well, which looks like it works fine to me.

Chapter 7: Antagonists

This is the worst chapter in the book. It’s not that the enemies presented herein are badly thought out or uninteresting. It’s not that the chapter doesn’t have a lot of nice setting material describing the underworld, the Wyld, Gods, spirits, and the shadowlands. No, it’s just that the chapter is unusable because it references rules that don’t exist. Oh, and it’s also full of typos regarding enemy Dodge DVs, but these are corrected in the Errata, so we’ll ignore them.

Some examples of the unfortunate phenomonon.

There’s a reference on page 296 to "splitting dice pools" a mechanic which is mentioned nowhere else in the book.

There are references to innumerable Backgrounds which don’t exist as far as the book is concerned- Celestial Manse, Sanctum, Breeding, Spies, Whispers, Sifu, Salary, Command, Connections, Reputation

There are references to Spells which don’t exist. The Battle’s End, Dolorous reflection, Wheel of the Turning Heavens.

Even those mechanics which are briefly explained often aren’t explained in enough detail to make them useable. Of the chapter, all the flavour bits are useful to add to the setting, and the mechanics for mortals, fair folk, animals, and the lesser sorts of undead are basically OK. The elementals, spirits, demons, gods, deathlords and other exalted types are basically useless. Even if one could figure out the poorly described mechanics, because they don’t present any consistent rules, but just one or two example of members of a group, the storyteller is left hanging. This is particularly bad in the case of Terrestrial Exalted, the Dragon-Blooded, who are by way of being the obvious antagonists for PCs and are given very little detail.

Now I understand the desire to sell more books, and I’m sure much of this will be fleshed out in such books (indeed a lot of it looks like it was culled from half-written books without any of the associative mechanics explained), but we really could have done with some half-decent rules for Terrestrial Exalted. If the designers had removed all the information about spirits, gods, elementals, lunar and abyssal exalted, and demons (which are all fun, but not essential antagonists) and used the extra space to give some decent (even if they were slightly cut-down) mechanics for creating Dragon-Blood antagonists, this would have been a much better chapter.

Ahem. Onwards.

Chapter 8: Panopoly

This is basically equipment. Money is briefly discussed. We then get lists of weapons and armour. There are a lot of typos in this chapter, and some real oddities like the medium armour types, one of which is less contraining, less fatiguing, more concealable,. more protective than and the same price as, another. Hm. There are also artifacts, which are quite cool. It’s almost all weapons and armour, but hey, this is a high-combat game, and there’s enough here to play with. If you can overlook the typos, this is a reasonably good chapter to end on.

Phew. I’m done.

Basically, Exalted is a good game well-presented, with a number of minor-ish flaws which could be fixed, and a serious omission in the shape of the antagonists chapter. It’s crunchy and high fantasy and as such won’t interest you if you’re not interested in either of those things, but it does what it tries to do quite well.

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