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I won't mention the book itself much. It's a well done book. The art could be a lot better, but there's an entire setting inside, so that makes up for a lot.
The character creation is a bit long at first, mostly because of the Spiritual Attributes. However, these SAs are the most original addition to any role-playing game I've ever seen. It's a fantastic mechanic that encourages role-playing over roll-playing (What a concept, huh?). These SAs are facets of your character, that help make him/her a real person. They are beliefs, desires, goals, and etc. Your character will not advance if he/she does not follow these beliefs, which I think is great! But that leads to a problem for the Seneschal (GM - don't ask), and is a major flaw in the system, if you ask me. The GM must create an adventure where a character's SAs are utilized in order for that character to receive any "experience points". I once ran a session where one character received 6 points at the end of a session, and another received zero. I had to give him a "doggie bone" of one point, just for being a good sport about it. And the GM can't necessarily always run his adventures that way, either! The SAs can change on the player's whim, or worse yet, they can be so odd and "far out" that they never come into play. This can be adjusted by giving everyone 4 at each session, plus one or two more as bonuses. But this isn't a fair system either (you'll hear me use that word a lot here).
The dice mechanics of the game are good. Simple, fast, and yet very detailed. My only complaint here is that the skills and combat worked differently. It's generally best to use a universal dice method for everything. To keep players from making lop-sided characters, combat skill is kept separate and different from other skills. To use a skill, a lower skill number is better. To attack, a higher combat number is better.
Combat is easy to pick up, very cool, and very realistic. But again, this is it's major drawback. See, I enjoy games where the players are heroes. They should be able to get into combat once in a while without death approaching at every turn. The main flaw with the system's combat is the fact that it's TOO realistic, and unforgiving. Any wound, from any creature is a horrible, horrible, crippling thing. Every combat made my players devise careful plans to kill the one enemy they had to face. While sometimes this is needed and a good thing, it shouldn't be present at EVERY combat they encounter. One player started joking about how he'd run and hide if he encountered a little girl with a butter knife. I couldn't agree more with his sentiment. When faced with rescuing the fair maiden from the lone bandit, or running away, even the knight considered fleeing, until his role-playing ethics made him attack.
Getting into combat, while it can be fun, was on average a sucky, nail-biting experience, where I had to fudge rolls and make the enemy act dumb (attack generic body parts, not the head, or hit the well armored chest, etc.) to keep the players alive. Combat, basically sucks in this game for this reason. Combat should be fun and exciting, not like going to the dentist. Plus, for all its talk and bragging about how realistic the system was, it fails to give you more than three armor types (leather, chain or plate), and could use twice as many weapons as it currently has.
To come to the game's defense, the system has some really nice features, and each weapon has a number of cool maneuvers that can be done with it. Plus, for once in a game system, maces are cool. They can knock your opponent down, and knock them out. Although there were still a few "glitches" that needed GM adjusting. For example, staves are under the polearm proficieny. Polearm proficieny has maneuvers that a staff can't perform, such as Hook. Yet, the game designer leaves it up to the GM to decide what a player can and can't do. And staves are seriously under developed. Staves should probably be under their own proficiency with their own manuevers. But this is a minor gripe.
The other main problem with the combat is the lack of a system to deal with monsters. See, the game was designed so that two "men" could fight each other realistically. But what if you encoutner a zombie? A giant rat? A dragon? NONE of this is covered. In this game, nobody has hit points. You take a wound, and get jacked up. If you enjoy having fantasy elements in your game, like monsters of any kind, you have to design your own system on how to handle them in combat. Granted, this game was made as a gritty realistic system, not a high or epic fantsy one, but I think this was a major oversight on the game's creator. Even Tolkien had trolls, demons, and wraiths.
Now let's talk about the magic. The magic system is actually absurd to me. Sorcerers can create any spell they want, at any time, and their only restraint is the fact that they may age some months here and there. Their spells can destroy towns, rip apart your carefully laid plots, and make your other players feel rather inferior. The game creator makes no apologies for this, and simply states that magic is wondrous and powerful, just like Merlin.
Well, let me shake some reality into your "realistic" game here, Jake. Sorcerers do not START off being gods. They may work their way to that level in time, but they shouldn't be masters at the start. To illustrate, Luke Skywalker didn't have cool powers until the second movie, and didn't become a jedi until the third. Willow (Buffy) didn't start getting powerful spells until much later in the series. My point is that there is a serious game balance missing here. The creator, again, makes no apologies for this. He doesn't value game balance very much. I DO. This game would be the equivalent of playing vampire, only forcing everyone to be human, except one lucky player, who gets to be the vampire. Or, it's like playing DND at level one, except the mage who's level 10. I'm not even kidding. Plus the magic system iteself appeared to me to be a quick addon, not very well thought out.
On top of that, after making a speech about how magic is mysterious and powerful, yadda yadda yadda, the magic system itself uses science to explain and dictate what a mage can do. Excuse me? Example: to heal a wound, a sorcerer needs Vison 3, so he can see the wound on the molecular level. This just ruined the entire concept of magic for me. I envison magic as a force that sorcerers don't always understand, and can barely control, perhaps, not a scientific process of manipluating the winds of energy. But this was not the worst part of the magic system. The worst part is that because the character has to create his own spells, often on the fly, new players and GMs alike have a hard time creating spells. Very few example spells are given, and the few that are are hardly explained enough for beginners. I don't want a magic system that is like learning calculus. No thank you!
Also, character generation is unholy in it's length for sorcerers. The magic system is closer to psionics without limits, than a magic system in the traditional sense. There are a few people out there attempting to replace the current magic system with the one from Ars Magica. That may be a whole lot better, but again, I have to question play balance. In Ars Magica, everyone plays a mage (basically). I like having all my players feeling good about there characters. If one player outshines all the others, I think this takes away from the game. But that's just me, perhaps. To even the playing field, I doubled the months aged when casting spells, and made sorcery illegal and punishable by death. To top that off, I created a group of men called the white cloaks that are basically witch hunters. All this, just to keep the sorcerer in check.
The setting for the game is quite good. Realistic, and well developed. My only complaint is that I'd have liked more pictures and descriptions of the people of each nation. Plus, beginners, again, have a hard time. I may have read all 30 countries, but the players shouldn't be expected to. In most games like this, you have 5, 7, maybe 10 different "countries" you can choose from (L5R clans, Vampire clans, etc.). The game has around 30 or so (I didn't count - I'm just guessing), each with it's own character adjustments (much like races in DND). It was impossible for beginning players and GMs to effectively do this, so I chose a nation for each player, based on his character description and background.
So, this game's strengths, it's realistic combat, is also it's greatest weakness. After playing this 6 times so far, my group is just about ready to switch to something a little more forgiving. Which is too bad, because they enjoyed the character creation so much, and had such high hopes for this game as a "savior" from less realistic systems. I guess I expected too much.
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