i havent got to the monster section yet, i’ve just been thumbing through it a bit here and there. Off hand, one critique is that i feel like there’s a lot of text for not really a lot of actual rules.

I’ve only kind of thumbed through the book at bit at this point, but it seems to be a very anime and video games focused system. The way they present and talk about different things can definitely evoke a video gamey feel. For example, instead of HP everything has “hearts”.

As for anime, there’s a lot of really anime-like things all over the book, such as a cat boy/girl race, a “chibi” race, and various other anime inspired material.

As for the actual game content, it seems rather interesting. The very basic mechanics aren’t that hard to grasp, but there’s a lot of detail thrown on top of it.

The basic rules of the game are the following:

• The game only uses a d20 as its dice
• There’s three types of rolls, aptitude checks (‘skill’/‘save’ rolls), attack rolls, and opposed rolls
• Aptitude rolls are rolls vs one of your aptitudes (your stats, it basically has D&D stats but with different names) and you’re trying to roll under your stat
• Attack rolls are pretty standard roll vs targets armor, equal or higher is a hit
• Opposed rolls are interesting. It’s an aptitude check, like above, but its vs an opponent, who you’re trying to roll higher than. So for example, if you’re rolling opposed might (aka strength), you’re trying to roll under your strength, but higher than what your opponent rolls. I’m not entirely sure how i feel about this mechanic.
• All bonuses and penalties are baked down to minor and major. +/-2 and +/-4 respectively. A bonus and penalty of the same type cancel out, while a minor cancels a major down to a minor. You can only have one bonus/penalty apply to a roll (i.e. you can only ever have +2 or +4). This is in addition to whatever bonuses you get from race and class, though.
• There’s also “advantage” and “disadvantage”, but just called edges and snags. These cancel as well.

Every character gets a calling (class), species, homeland and history (background), and quirk. Classes have a variety of traits, and choose from traits on level up at some various cadence.

Classes in the game:

• Factotum
• sneak
• champion
• raider
• battle princess
• murder princess
• sage
• heretic

Species:

• human (native)
• human (dimensional stray) (AKA isekai)
• chib (chibi/gnome-like race)
• tenebrate (some kind of night elf-ish monsterous humanoid thing)
• rai-neko (cat person)
• promethean (says theyre ‘perfected beings’ and basically seem like yuan-ti type people)
• gruun (pretty much orcs kinda)
• goblin
• dwarf
• elf
• bio-mechanoid (robot)

Most traits and abilities will give you either minor/major bonuses in certain circumstances or an edge (or prevent penalties/snags)

a few things i find interesting:

• All basic weapons do 1 damage. Abilities, traits, circumstances, or whatever might modify it. Also some weapons have a threshold that if you roll over it on the attack roll they will do an extra point of damage
• You start every fight with max hearts
• If you run out of hearts in a fight, you don’t fall unconscious. Instead, you take a wound. There’s three types of wound charts, light, medium, and major. The wounds can be penalties/limitations, going unconscious, beginning to die, or outright dying depending on the severity of the wound. You’re able to keep fighting at 0, you just take increasingly worse wounds when you get hit.

Overall, i’m not incredibly sure how the game will work out, but it seems interesting. The actual layout and design of the book, though, is extremely gorgeous.