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I bought the box. (Honestly an incredible deal, 2 faux leather hard covers for 50 bucks plus a big ass map that has game play functionality and some stickers for the map (I put them on clear plastic disks so I don't permanently modify the map) and a pamphlet from the kickstarters with alternate character creation rules and a random monster generator for building all kinds of features and statistics for whatever creature you decide to make or randomly generate.
Heres my feedback having not played yet but having poured over the books a bunch.
The quality of the product is great the artwork is awesome. It's all solid black inks in a style reminiscent of old Conan stuff. It's great. The whole game has a very Conan vibe.
One of the greatest things about the whole box is the pages 167-193 of the GM book. It's all incredible random tables for generating towns/cities/villages, castles, dungeons, npcs, monsters, and loot with unique features, histories, all kinds of stuff. It's great and it's all setting neutral. Besides having great game play elements that help push themes that any GM may want to lift for their other games these tables are unrivaled in there usefulness. It's incredible. Also a bunch of stuff for generating events while traveling around and stuff... just... a wonderful tool box for every GM.
The game itself... again, having not played it yet... has some really great and fun looking stuff, but also has a couple things I know I am going to end up house ruling.
I want to explain the mechanics I don't like first and then how I intend to address them.
The first one is part of the character advancement and is simple enough.
So you have your Kin (race) Profession (class) some skills (what it says on the tin) and Talents (little perks that really give you your unique edges in the game). No levels. Experience is spent point buy style. The talents come in ranks 1-3 and get progressively more perks based around a theme (Axe mastery for example). They also come in 3 categories, Kin (every race has their own Racial Talent) Profession (Every class has 3 class Talents that again, each have 3 ranks) and General which makes up the bulk of the talents and are mostly pretty generic but also all pretty useful if maybe a little circumstantial.
In character creation You get a rank in your Kin Talent, 1 Rank in a profession talent of your choice and a number of ranks in general talents based on some stuff (not important).
What I don't like is 2 pronged. 1) All the most interesting talents are Profession Talents and yet you are restricted from taking the vast majority of them (no cross classing). 2) I HATE the idea of classes as such a defining feature of a character.
What I intend to house rule is I am going to let players purchase the talents of other professions at a increased cost. It shouldn't be easy to buy all these other talents for other classes, but if your willing to pay the price then I don't see why a person couldn't learn what amounts to a advanced technique of a skill. They wont be able to do this in character creation but they will be able to do it in the game itself. Easy enough.
The second thing has to do with the combat. Each turn a player can make 2 actions. 1 slow and 1 fast or 2 fast. Slow actions tend to be attacks. Fast tends to be everything else including defending yourself (parry and dodge). That means if you want to move forward and attack an enemy you can no longer defend yourself until the next round of combat. Talents can gain you bonus actions either for a cost in a resource you generate when playing the game or for free. (for instance a Talent for "Charge" lets you make a free melee attack after moving into Arms Length with an enemy). But it's still a very hard cap with a very strict and tight action economy that can leave players standing around unable to act.
I think it's more interesting to have a soft cap instead of a hard cap. My plan is to let players do more than their 2 actions. Each additional slow action with come with a cumulative -2 penalty and each additional fast action will come with a cumulative -1 penalty.
So if the player wants to move twice and attack its move (Fast), move (fast) attack (slow -2). The opponent attacks them back. Parry (fast -3). The action economy stays but the strictness is lifted. The player is still given choices and consequences but they are no longer put into a position where they are no longer incapable of acting. Talents still provide bonuses by giving free actions at no penalty or bonus actions for that previously mentioned resource which will not incur the difficulty penalties. I just feel like the combat as is in the book can result in a lot of everyone walking in slow circles doing nothing or acting and getting crushed because their very limited number of actions each turn were eaten up.
That being said, the games other mechanics are soooo good. Your are encouraged to get out there and explore and act and run into dangers and deal with them in interesting ways. One of my favorite things is that nothing in this game comes for free. And by that I mean everything has consequences that lead to other hooks and adventures. As a simple example, in the random loot tables there is a table for interesting perks about the loot. One of those results is that it's part of a dragons hoard. Every night after the players take anything from it you roll a dice and on x result the dragon returns home, realizes the hoard has been fethed with, and starts hunting for who took it. If you find a magic sword it's never JUST a magic sword. It's benefits come with some drawback, sometimes severe, sometimes dangerous. Often any legends you hear about, any treasure you are hunting or stumble on or anything, is also something someone else is interested in for good or ill (often ill).
You could run this game 100% by rolling on tables and letting the consequences of the players actions generate a story for you, and you should! You went to x tomb to get the dragon slaying sword and kill y dragon to take it's loot for your own. But a crystal in the swords hilt is really a part of z artifact that this faction has been hunting and now that the story of you slaying that dragon is spreading around and your spending your new found riches that faction is looking for you because you are now caught up in a far larger story.
This is just what happens when you do things in this game. Nothing is free of ties from somebody else. Nothing comes without it's price. And the players pay it as the story unfolds organically. It's wonderful how easily it all moves forward for you. How effortlessly the actions of the players return in on themselves with call back after call back. Il be trying to play this very soon.
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