It's an interesting system, but the magic rules in particular have big problems and are buggy and poorly proof-read. They aren't consistent within themselves and they also aren't very balanced: you can either be a really minor talent and do next to nothing, or you can be a modestly leveled wizard throwing 20d6 fireballs as if you were 20th level.

Worse, many examples in the book of calculating spell DCs have some kind of mistake or error, so you can't even rely upon the sample spells some of the time.

Extracting magic or restricting it to encounters with Taken or the Circle makes the system more playable. There's still the problem that having minor magic is pretty central to the setting.

I ran a brief campaign starting with the PCs getting recruited in Opal by the Nightstalkers, who were training up prior to tackling the Plain of Fear on the way to Rust. The first "finale" would have featured a confrontation in the sewers below that city between the characters, a member of the Circle, the Nightstalker's wizard Twilight, and the Faceless Man. If they survived, they'd have been agents for the Faceless Man at that point, and the next campaign would have seen them flown to the Tower at Charm for the part of the battle there Croaker missed.

The setting is pretty fantastic and the few missions I was able to run went really well, including a run into a ruined part of town to retrieve a stolen possession which involved a lot of rooftop climbing and jumping as a gang attacked them. The final mission saw them investigate a lost patrol and stumble across a "priest" who turned out to have magical talent, in conjunction with some kind of mutated creatures, which would have set up a mystery involving someone training minor talents for his own purposes.

I'd be interested to see what a version based on 5th edition D&D would look like.

David

On 11/8/2017 2:19 PM, Scott Bonner wrote: