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My initial thought are below. Please chime in with your own, and feel free to disagree :)

Although there are a few negative points below, most of them relate to the presentation. I hope this sort of feedback might influence the final, printed edition. There's a lot to love here, and I don't want presentation issues to get in the way.

My other nits are with the lack of some content, which hopefully can be filled in via the web or printed edition.

Here's the off-the-cuff review. This is cross-posted from the latest thread at rpg.net....

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I purchased this yesterday.

All-in-all, for $8 it seems like a good value. I've spent $20 recently on other PDF's which I don't like nearly as much.

Here's my initial reactions after reading some sections and skimming others for a couple of hours....

BAD STUFF

The lack of a TOC and the page numbering issue is really goofy. I get the feeling this was a result of a rush to get it out the door. I hope they issue a corrected PDF, since this is a deal-breaker for me to be able to print it out and use it as a reference.

The layout and art is typical small press. There's a lot of generic/bad art, and a few really nice pieces. Mostly, the art lacks consistency. On one page you've got a very nice, atmospheric piece, and on another you've got some clipart or some of that typical 3d Poser stuff. The cover and logo are great, as are most of the character class illustrations and a few spot illustrations throughout. Other stuff, not so much. I know that there's a limited art budget here, but I almost wish that the not-so-awesome stuff was just left out. For my purposes, I'm glad I can just remove them using Acrobat before printing, but that leaves me with a bunch of nearly-empty pages. Suggestion for the printed version: focus on the nice, consistent pieces (the atmospheric water color style stuff) and a clean layout and dump the rest. Save on pages, and save some pain for my eyeballs.

The flow of text is sometimes a bit ackward. There are some typos.

Some sections are very difficult to browse. For example, the army lists and monsters could really use some stat-block style presentation. Overall, the book could really use a style for subheadings to help break things up and reinforce scanability. There is a big blue font for main headings, but subheadings all just use the standard body font. On some pages, this leads to the "wall of text" syndrome.

In the free combat primer there was a summary of the various combat styles (called "Gloss"). There is a reference to this in the full book (under magic it says: "Combat spells are spells that are quick enough to be cast in a combat. They appear on the magic school’s style sheet and are explained in the gloss."), but it's nowhere to be found. I'd like to know something about the styles, who uses them, their history, some description of the specific manuevers.

There's rather complete army lists for mass combat, but no pregenerated NPC's at all. Character stats are pretty simple, but I'd still like to have things like typical guards from the various regions and what styles they use, bandits, pirates, courtiers, etc. Also, some more robust sample NPC's to represent the movers-and-shakers of the world would certainly be helpful. The author apologized during the release about the lack of monster styles, but really it's the lack of NPC's which is an issue for me. This is a human-centric RPG, which is fine, but it needs some sample humans.

Ok, that all sounds pretty negative, but I'm hoping that this sort of feedback can help to improve the printed version.

THE GOOD STUFF

The structure of the book works pretty well, and leads naturally from overviews to more detailed rules. The placement of the character creation chapter (late in the book) is a bit odd, but I think it mostly works because it is built upon the foundation of the previous rules.

The system is really interesting, overall. It's a cool mix of some new-school narrative stuff (scene construction, inspirations) and some old-school tropes (classes and levels).

Task resolution looks to be fast. The main mechanic (die step, roll over) is cool and sleek.

The target number of an unopposed task is generally the "doom" of the region. This is a nice way to smooth out and speed up play, while making regions feel different from one another. Players can act to try to reduce the doom of a particular region.

Inspirations are a very cool take on the typical "Hero Points". They represent your loves, fears, ambitions, etc. and give you bonuses in relevant situations. Other characters can attack your inspirations. For example, a bad guy might burn down your farm, thus destroying your "No place like home" inspiration. On the other hand, the book describes going after really powerful bad guys by first attacking their inspirations and softening them up.

The combat system, which has recieved the most attention thus far, looks to be very cool. I've yet to play it, but at first glance it has a lot of potential. Style sheets should help to reduce the decision-lock which can hamper manuever-based combat, and the simultaneous resolution should speed things along nicely.

The rules support a variety of scene types, including combat, social conflicts, investigations, and mass combat. The resolution for each type is pretty robust, with lots of gamey hooks.

The world seems atmospheric and fairly well detailed. It seems like a robust setting, though this is the most dense area of the text and the one that I've yet to read beyond a fairly quick scan.

That's my initial reactions. Although it may not sound like it, the positives outweigh the negatives thus far. I hope that feedback can improve the printed version of the book and/or help to guide the release of some supplemental materials to fill in the gaps.

I'm just zooming through this thread right now, but yeah, the basic idea: DEFINITELY needs some polish. Time pressure was definitely an issue. Frankly I'm a little embarrassed at the state of the game, but on the other hand, it is worth an $8 pdf. At least in my opinion - or else I wouldn't have released it!

Oh, and BB, there is no "they." :) Just me! I definitely can see why RPGs are usually put out by a lot of people - I had Zach (MLM) to help some, and my wife a bit, but... let's just say I'm considering taking on some help for the hardcopy version. If you want to help, email me. I haven't totally thought that through - but thinking about it now.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback. And I haven't had time to check the thread at rpg.net, but thanks for alerting me. I'll try to jump over there. And thanks for posting about the game!

I've had a quick read through the full version and the original combat primer and the newer version 1.2 of the primer. So far, I like the original take on some of the traditional ways of doing things. Combat looks like it should run fairly fast. If I had any gripes at all, it would be similar to what other people have said. Text could have been laid out better, say using Bold instead of indentation. There appear to be a few ommisions however. In the combat primer there is a glossary that explains in more detail what each individual action does, unless I've missed it, those descriptions seem to be missing from the final pdf version of the rules. Secondly, putting magic attack styles in the same format as the regular one is cool, but does that mean there are no uses for magic outside of combat. Are there plans for a more extensive bestiary?