By the time I was done reading it, I was left with a feeling of ambivalence. Then, we ran through some trial combats, and while the feelings were generally positive, we also spotted some problems, as you will soon see.

First Glances

Looking over the book, it is of decend quality layout, in clean type in a 265-page book. The pictures span the ranges of quality, and much of it I recognize from other sources - most of the pictures do a good job of reflecting the feel of the game. The text is easily read, except in a few sections where the text and pictures interfer with each other.

Overall, a good, solid layout with just a few small problems, and decent, but not overwhelming artwork - although a few pictures here and there do stand out.

Each chapter starts with flavor text, and the text from one chapter to the next, in general, tell a story, although a few of the chapters' text have nothing to do with each other. The flavor text doesn't stand out as either great nor awful, except for one chapter, which I shall address when I get to that chapter's review.

Book 1: In the Beginning

This chapter introduces you to the die rolling conventions of the game, a description of the attributes, etc.

For anyone who has played any Word of Darkness / White Wolf games, there are no surprises here in the game mechanics. For those who haven't, it works on what is known as a dice pool system.

A dice pool system simply means that you roll multiple dice for resolving a task; each die is checked, indivually, against a difficulty number. The greater number of dice that meet or beat the success number, the more thorough your accomplishment.

Dice pool systems such as this have the advantage that they allow for task resolutions that account for varying levels of success quite well; their disadvantages are that they are generally dice-heavy. I generally dislike dice-pool systems (although I loved Godlike - see my review on that elsewhere on RPG.net).

All tasks are resolved my rolling a # of 10 sided dice equal to an attribute, sometimes with more dice added or subtracted for modifiers, and each die equalling or exceeding the difficulty number, or Task Number (TN) is one level of success; if you fail, and roll at least two 1s, then you fumbled. The only other die you will ever roll is a single 6-sider, for hit location.

There are four sets of 5 attributes available to all characters: 5 phyiscal, 5 mental, 5 derived stats, and 5 spiritual. The first three are pretty typical, standard fare, with nothing of any real surprise.

The five physical stats are: Strength, Agility, Toughness, Endurance, Health.

The five mental stats are: Willpower, Wits, Mental Aptitude, Social, and Perception.

The five derived stats are: Reflex, Aim, Knockdown, Knockout, and Move. These five are derived from various combinations of adding stats and dividing by a number, generally 2.

Reflex and Aim are then used as the base for determining your Combat and Missile Pools. Your combat pool is the # of dice you roll when fighting in melee, while the missile pool is similarily for missile combat; these pools are determined by your score in the appropriate proficiency plus your reflex or aim, depending on the kind of combat such proficiency covers.

The last set are what stand out. Spiritual attributes are attributes defined by the characters. Things like Luck, Destiny to Become King, Drive to Find and Kill Wife's Murderer, etc. These stats are a stroke of genius: whenever you are in a situation that involves these spiritual attributes, you get to add your score for the spiritual attributes involved when making a check. For instance, if you had a combat pool of 10 (which I will explain later), and a spiritual attribute of: Avenge Wife's Death - 3, then when fighting a minion of the man who killed your wife, you would roll 13 dice in combat instead of 10.

Spiritual attributes have another, very important roll. Your character's skills improve as you use them - but his stats and weapon proficiences evolve only by pursuing your personal goals, are reflected by your spiritual attributes; you can spend these spiritual attribute points to purchase higher levels of attributes or proficiences.

And every time you act in accord with your spiritual attributes, you gain more points in them. So, as you pursue your own goals, you grow far more than otherwise.

And finally: as you spend spiritual attribute points, you gain what are known as Insight points. If your character dies, then you get to use these insight points to make your next starting character more powerful - again, when pursuing your goals, if he dies, your next character will be even better - a kind of consolation prize, perhaps.

I loved this idea; it makes games more character driven, and puts players in the position where they can (and must) play more dynamically, more actively, rather than the reactive playstyle engendered by most RPG styles.

(I kind of jumped ahead with elements of other chapters here, but the pertinent information for you, the readers of this review, fit in here nicely with the intro for the concepts.)

Book 2: The Birth of a Legend

Or, Herein lies character creation.

Following the theme of a near World of Darkness lookalike, you learn that your character creation is based on a system of priorities.

First, you come up with your character concept. Then, you get 6 priorities to assign. These priorities A-F, where A is the best and F the worst.

The 6 areas to assign your priorities are: Race and Sorcery, Social Class, Attributes, Skills, Proficiencies, and Gifts and Flaws.

So, you might assign your A priority to attributes, B to skills, C to proficiences, etc. The higher the priority, the better it is.

For instance, if you were to assign an A in attributes, you would gain 47 points for attributes, while if you assigned an F, you would only gain 27.

Attributes are granted a number of points, which represent dice you roll for tests involving those attributes; they must have at least 2, and no higher than 7, with only one stat at the "highest". You only assign the 5 physical and 5 mental; the derived stats are, of course, derived from these first 10, and you get a standard 7 spiritual attribute points to assign from any 5 you care to effectively make up for yourself, with some minimal guidelines from the rulebook and your GM.

(side note: the game master is called the Seneschal - thats ok, I guess, but a minor pet peeve; I grow really weary of every new game needing to find some new name for a GM, such as narrator, storyteller... or seneschal. Its a GM for petes sake!)

Proficiences are combat proficiencies - rather than for specific weapons, though, these are combat styles, such as Sword and Shield or Longsword/Greatsword. Your priority assigned here grants you a number of dice to assign to your proficiences, which then add to your reflex or aim stat to determine the # of dice to roll in using that particular combat style - and, higher levels of a proficiency grants you combat manuevers denied those with lower levels of the same proficiencies.

Gifts and Flaws: anyone who has played WoD, champions, ars magica, or any other of a number of games where you can gain benefits or flaws will be no stranger to this idea. Gifts are otherwise unquantifiable benefits for a character, such as ambidexterity, while flaws are difficulties a character has as part of his nature, such as Greed or Addiction. Unlike these other game systems, the higher your priority assigned here, the more gifts you have versus flaws, and visa versa.

Social class is pretty simple: the higher it is, the higher on the social ladder you are, the more power you wield, and the richer you are. With a proficicency of A, you are a landed, powerful noble, starting out fairly rich, while at F, you are a slave, starting out dead broke.

Race and Sorcery: this is one of the two more interesting ideas in this section. People cannot wield magic unless they were born with the capacity. Anyone who is just your regular, everyday human just puts their lowest priority, F, into race and sorcery.

If you are one of the Fey, elves, or what have you, with the capacity to wield magic (known as the Gifted), then you assign a racial priority of A. If you are a Hafling (in this case, one who is half human and half... well, non human) then your priority is C.

If you are a Gifted Human or a Gifted Halfling, capable of wielding magic, you put priority of B here.

The final, and last area for assigning a priority, is skill. This grants you one or two skill packages, ranging with a number of 9 (which is worst), to 6 (which is best) for a score in each of these two skill packages.

The reason for this is as follows: you get one or two skill packages; you then select these one or two packages as fits your character, which has lists of skills, with modifiers. then you get each skill in that package equal to the score listed in the previous paragraph, with the modifiers added. For instance, if you had Lockpicking - 1, and had the package lockpicking came with as a 7, then you have the skill lockpicking as a 6.

The reason lower is better is that this is your TN (Target Number) you are trying to roll with your stat checks. For instance, if you have 5 in agility, and lockpicking at 7, and you are picking a lock, you would roll 5 dice, with each 7 being a success. More or less difficult numbers can add or subtract dice, add or subtract to the TN, or require more or less successes to succeed.

I'm not sure how I like this, particuarly in conjunction with combat. Combat adds dice to your attributes - and then you have a target number based on the weapon you are using. Meanwhile, skills determine your difficulty number directly. It seems that for a more fluid game, both systems should do either one or the other together, not both.

but the system does work, and works well.

Book 3: Training

This book details the skill packages, skills in packages, gifts, flaws, and combat proficiencies.

Herein this chapter contains an element of the game I really like, and two MAJOR pet peeves.

Combat in this game is very intricate and detailed. You dont just swing or parry. You cut, or thrust, or duck and weave, or counter, or evade, or bind and strike, or....

there are a lot of maneuvers; this creates a slightly larger learning curve as the players will need to learn and understand these - although a cheat sheet or 3x5 cards, and a few practice combats, will show you that learning these can actually come to you really quickly. I love this, as most games have very simple and non-detailed combat.

I was afraid that combat would be bulky, but as you will see at the end of this diatribe, it actually goes pretty fast, regardless of the details, and this added to its appeal even more.

The rest of the book, skills and gifts and flaws, were pretty standard fare with little comment needed, except for my two pet peeves.

These two pet peeves involve two skills, Herbalist and Traps. Herbalist says it can be used to, say, create poisons (in addition to life-saving elixers), and traps is used to spot, make, and remove traps.

There are ZERO guidelines on these at all. No lists of poisons (or diseases), what they do, how they effect characters, in any way whatsoever. I even discussed this on a thread at their message board, and their response was to have fun making it up!

Their attitude towards the game is that it is a toolkit that you should feel free to tweak as necessary - and thats commendable - but I entirely disagree in this instance. There should have been at least some of the vaguest guidelines - all the rest of their skills provide these, so why they didn't provide guidelines for these two items are beyond me, and frankly, it really is driving me up the wall.

(As a side note, the game has no info on diseases of any kind, even though later on they discuss how to resist or recover from diseases... add that to my list of major pet peeves - I really find this unacceptable, and I hope they errata these three items soon).

This chapter also includes the formal method of advancing your character, and earning insight points as mentioned above. Again, as I said, this is a really cool method of the game.

Book 4: The Codex of Battle

Or, the Combat rules.

Combat in this game has something that very few other games can match; a game system that is at once both very detailed and still maintaining speed and fluidity. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but once learned, it is easily maintained.

You will have to refer to a number of charts for damage, but dont worry - you wont have to refer to them often. Combat is also very gritty and realistic, and combat will end, one way or the other, soon....

Basically, it works like so:

When combat begins, each combatant drops a white die or a red die. A red die indicates attacking, and a white die indicates defending. If both drop a red die, its likely going to be a very, very short combat.

Each combat round is composed of two, one-second exchanges. The attacker looks at his combat pool and decides which of his various maneuvers he will perform, announces this, and how many dice he is going to use in the combat. Some maneuvers cost dice just to initiate the maneuver.

Then the defender does likewise. This means you are splitting your combat pool over two exchanges; some players may choose to spend all of their dice in their first attack exchange, hoping to slay their opponent in one blow, but god help you if you fail, and make it to the second exchange with no dice left.

If the defender succeeds in defending himself, depending on the maneuver he performed, basically the role as attacker shifts to him. Otherwise, combat continues with the attacker still attacking.

When attacking, the attacker declares a general region he is aiming for; such as the left or right shoulder via an overhead diagonal swing, the head via a vertical swing, the arms and chest via a horizonal swing, etc. If/when a blow lands, you refer to this region and roll a d6 to learn the exact location hit.

When a blow hits, the attacker adds his strength to a modifier contained by the weapon, and adding the number of NET successes you have (the attacker's successes minus the defender's successes); the hit location is rolled, and the target's toughness plus any armor in that location is subtracted from the attacker's damage total is; if the number is above 0, then you refer to a chart, based on hit location and damage rolled, to learn the effects.

Combat damage will kill someone fast; level 5 wounds (that is, 5 more total from the equation above) will generally result in the defender's death. Even if not, damage will slow them down enough that defeat, barring luck, is inevitable, unless the defender had begun far superior, heavily armored, or whathaveyou.

Combat pools for melee refill at the beginning of each round; missile pools refill slower. You have to spend time drawing and knocking your bow, and then your missile refills a number of points each round equal to your Wits score. This is an interesting, and controversial, mechanic. Many people feel this "screws" missile characters over, as it takes a "long time" for a bow character to get a shot off, where in other games they can fire as fast as melee guys can swing.

Think on it this way. In many other games, you can take extra time to aim more carefully and get bonuses. In a way, this mechanic does the same thing, but in a "backwards" format. The longer you aim, the better your chances, IE refilling your pool.

And its not without precedence. While today's guns are easy to aim and fire, bowmen had to draw their arrows back, then aim carefully, accounting for wind and target maneuverability far more carefully. This, therefore, makes perfect sense to me.

When a blow lands, if it wasnt instantly fatal, then the defender receives three types of damage.

The first is Shock. Shock is, well, the shock from the moment of impact; this damage is immediately subtracted from any remaining dice in the defender's dice pool.

Pain is the second. shock is a one time effect, and your combat pool refills (as you will see below); pain triggers every combat round, subtracting from your dice pools each and every time.

The third is blood loss. Each round, you make an endurance check with the TN = to your blood loss score. when you fail, you lose a point of health... and when it reaches 0, you die from blood loss.

The reason this all means the first person to get hit will die is because your lose dice from your pools; an aggressor can take advantage of this and gains a greater and greater advantage over you, meaning you will be harder pressed.

This is realistic, and works well. And it does something well that was the goal of the game's author. He wanted to ask a question: What is important enough that your character would enter combat, if he had the choice, even if it could mean his very real death. No hit points here, no bouncing off 100' cliffs or pierced by dozens of arrows without effect.

It also asks you how you fight; in real life, people dont waltz out, generally, and bravely challenge others to combat, when its a matter of life and death. They try and outnnumber others, flank them, ambush them. They may well fight dirty, except in duels of honor. One-on-one "fair" fighting might well see you dead... in one blow.

With asking these questions, though, comes back in the whole idea of spiritual attributes. What is important enough your character would risk dying for? When spiritual attributes are firing, especially when several overlapping ones firing off at once, it cna transform a mediocre fighter into a one man killing machine.

"Damn you, Baron Zieg! You killed my wife and son! I swear, by all that's holy, you can throw your entire army at me, but I WILL have your head!"

I gotta say, I love it. I love it alot.

Book 5: The Laws of Nature

This is a rather bland chapter. It involves a few rules involving things like jumping, falling, etc. Very little of note, except it hits another two pet peeves.

Considering how much detail this game went into so far, its expected to determine encumbrance by... eyeballing it. You look over the equipment the character calls and just make a judgement call. It gives a set of pictures to go by as guidelines. I frankly found this a little silly, particuarly when the game goes into so much detail with combat (and coinage, as you will soon see).

The other is disease. See my rant on poisons and traps above. :)

A very short chapter, overall.

Book 6: Sorcery

To paraphrase another author of a TRoS review: woo boy!

Sorcery in this game was designed to be very powerful; sorcery is unshackled, as the chapter quotes, and boy, is it!

The chapter opens up with the typical flavor text. And the flavor text for this chapter is just awful, just terrible.

Well, maybe not the entire text. You see, there is some kind of barbarian barging into a sorcerer's sanctum. Instead of the author typing something like:

"The Barbarian growled in a barely intelligable tongue. The wizard frowned a moment, before deciphering what the creature before him uttered, 'Wizard! I wish an audience with you!'"

Instead, it was written as: "WIZARD! I wesh ahn oudience witch yuw. I kom doo see yue avoud ze reddul!"

There are several lines of this text. I respect the author of this game, as I've "spoken" with him on the forums several times, but take it from various published novelists; reflecting unintelligible speech by typing unintelligibly is generally considered ineffective. Others might disagree with me, but I HATE this technique with a passion.

I could barely understand it myself.

Now, on with the rules.

recall that, during character creation, you could have put an A or a B for Race and Sorcery, then you can wield magic. In this case, you gain another 5 derived stats, only for magic.

Magic, in a word, is powerful. Really, REALLY powerful.

It was not designed to be balanced, and I think this is fair. While the system here isnt quite as good as Ars Magica in terms of magic, I think it runs a good second place. I'm not terribly familiar with Mage: The Ascension, but it seems awfully similar to that game's magic system.

To determine one's magic abilities, you determine the five magical stats, and your skill in magic. There are nine vagaries, or magical schools; three each for physical, mental, and spiritual.

Recall that one of your other priorities during character creation was proficiencies? for most characters, these were spent on weapon profiencies. Sorcerers can also spend these on their vagaries. And in fact, they must, in order to wield magic.

1 pt in a vagary gives you novice level in that vagary, level 3 makes you a master in it. when casting magic, you add up a number of modifiers, such as target type, range, duration, etc, and the level required by the vagary in question; if you have that level of vagary, then those numbers, added together, forms the Target Number. You roll your sorcery pool, determined by your 5 magical derived attributes; if you get one success, the spell goes off, and more successes means a more powerful spell.

how powerful is sorcery? a mere two points in the vagary conquer and you could make someone commit suicide immediately.

But not to fear: sorcery isnt without a few restraints.

In fact, there are several.

The first is the sorcery pool itself. the sorcery pool starts out pretty darned big, actually - but once expended, it takes an HOUR to refill for EACH point! or one hour for each 2 points while meditating. There are tools for sorcerers to refill their sorcery pool faster, but these are not without risks.

The second is the backlash effect of magic. The Target Number of the spell is also how many months the wizard ages. A sorcerer, when casting his magic, divides his pool between casting the spell and resisting the aging effects, each success reducing the aging effect by one month.

The third is casting time; a spell takes, at its fastest, a number of seconds equal to the TN of the spell. As a combat round has two exchanges of one second each, and as combat is so deadly, a swordsman right next to an unprepared wizard can end his life fast.

The fourth is kinds of spells. There are actually three types: Spells of One (using one vagary), spells of three (using up to three vagaries; more powerful, but more difficult and slower); and spells of Many (ritual magic; using as many vagaries as you wish, but even more difficult, and taking a LONg time to cast).

Another weakness is yet another pet peeve of the game: there is no "adequate" damage table for non specific damage. They have these great damage tables for cutting, bludgeoning, piercing damage, but a single generic table for, say, fire, lightning, etc. And according to the chart as read, its impossible to kill someone with, say, Ye Olde Fireball. Just cause lots of pain.

Of course, there are lots of other ways to finish an opponent off. The aforementioned suicide spell being one. But still, not all sorcerers are subtle even in popular fantasy fiction, and I think this should have been addressed with an adequate damage table.

And here is, heh, another pet peeve. One of the sorcery stats is called Draw. which apparently only triggers and has effect after a spell is cast; for instance, if you cast a Mana I spell, it grants you a number of dice back into your sorcery pool equal to your draw stat. but Draw does nothing on its own, that I can determine. I find this odd and not a terribly wise decision.

This chapter finishes off with a variety of things, such as countering spells, a list of example spells (you can create your own on the spot, as should be obvious), and a small article by Ron Edwards, author of the Sorcerer RPG, about sorcery in TRoS.

Book 7: The World of Weyrth

Unlike the other books, I havent read this one very well yet. This is basically the synopsis of the standard world that TRoS is based in. I didn't read it much, primarily because I usually run games in my own world. I did skim it a bit though, and here are my thoughts.

Stats for the non human races you can play are found here. A bit irritating, as it was hard to find from the character creation section, and I had to hunt for it.

The world is summarized by a few paragraphs of each kingdom. Not a lot of detail; bad for people who love lots of world detail, great for people who like overviews to fiddle with. The world appears to be based heavily on medieval earth, but with a few twists and turns.

There is a moderate quality colored map at the end of the book.

All in all, what I saw made me think it might be fun to try it out, so I'm reading it in greater detail. It looks interesting - but it doesn't look outstanding either. But it does present a decent framework, and it has these summaries of LOTS of nations.

This chapter also has the religions of the world; I havent looked them over at all yet, but they appear to be based, again, mostly after earth religions, although Riddle-Seeking (apparently The Riddle of Steel isnt just the name of the game) is a big deal, and I plan to examine it more closely. Herein also lies some pertinent details on the Fey, Troll Spawn, etc, followed by the world's history, a rather in-depth economy system, etc.

Book Eight: The Seneschal

Or, Ye Olde GAMEMASTER section! :P

Contains GM advise, a few NPC/monnster stats, etc. nothing noteworthy either way here. Fairly standard fare.

The Appendices

Appendix One contains the damage tables; you will need these, but you can download them in pdf form for printing out from their web site, www.theriddleofsteel.net.

Appendix two contains weapon and armor stats and an afterward. They also chose to have swords pointing up and down for the pages' background, and is the one part of the book where the artwork/layout is really irritating, as it makes the text hard to read.

The index following is really good, and the standard character sheet in the back.

Go to their web site for more great downloads for this game.

Summary

You might find it uncertain whether I think this game is good or bad. So, let me summarize like this.

The general game mechanics arent terribly original; they are very very similar to World of Darkness style dice mechanics. If you like those, you will like this and visa versa.

The game, however, did some GREAT things with the dice pool mechanics. It grants some really great combat options without bogging down the system. It makes combat fairly detailed without a whole lot of complexity.

The spiritual attributes, and how they are used both in play, and in character advancement (and replacement of characters) are nothing short of genius.

The magic system will require a careful GM to keep a wizard from getting out of control; you can limit the mechanics, change the meaning of the numbers, or have a society of enemy sorcerers. Heck, in much of the suggested world, sorcerers are hunted, and while they are incredibly powerful, even they have their limits against angry hordes and marching armies.

Although when sorcerers are rare, making a world where sorcerers hunt each other for knowledge and power is also interesting. In any case. a GM will have to be on his toes with these guys.

The spiritual attributes are also great in that they make the game more dynamic and character driven; but the GM has to be prepared to deal with this, and be capable of ad-libbing.

But, the game had a few gaps that I found incredibly irritating as well. you saw them above.

All in all, I think its worth it. In fact, I ran it in a couple practice games, just to test the combat system and other mechanics, and once we understood it, it works fine and flows fast. Also, I like it enough that I'm excited about trying it out for a new campaign.

But due to these gaps, I'm going to have to do some work to seal them; a few of them were just style differences, but my issues with Traps and Herbalist, minor as they are, really sticks in my craw.

But this system will let me run a world or two I've had in mind for some time that previously would have been difficult to do. I considered using Ars Magica, as it does best with magic, but it makes non wizards too unrewarding.

TRoS is not quite, but almost as good, as Ars Magica, and non wizards are far more rewarding; it will let me run two games I had in mind for some time!

Final rating:

Style: 4 - a few flaws in layout, but otherwise decent, and does a good job of reflecting the feel. Almost gave this a three, but the text was crisp, and except in a few areas was an easy read.

Substance: 4 - the core game mechanics only deserve a 3, as they are so reflective of the World of Darkness stuff and I generally dont like dice pools; with the spiritual attributes and combat mechanics it might have deserved a 5; I'm making it a 4 though because of the gaps in the game that I'm going to have to fix.

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In 10 reviews, average style rating is 3.30 and average substance rating is 3.30.