The Dark Eye Core Rules Hardcover – December 19, 2016

I own hundreds of RPG books, and this is one of my favorites just because it is so different. The main mechanic is to roll a d20 and get a value lower than the attribute being tested. What's really neat though, is every skill is tied to three attributes (all color coded) and to succeed you need to roll three d20s (of the appropriate color to make it easy) and score under all three. To help with this, you have a number of Skill Points (SP) (based on how good you are at the skill) that lets you modify your roll to get it under your stats. If you run out of SP while doing this, you fail; if not though, how well you succeeded is based on how many Skill Points you had left. Pretty unique huh!I also like how you can build characters from the ground up with point buy to get EXACTLY what you want. If you're not picky though, there are plenty of professional packages to pick up to speed things along. Races consist of just human, elves, and dwarves, but there are many cultures to choose from that really bring them to life.Another reason this is one of my favorite RPG books is the crunch! Oh boy, is this game complex (if you couldn't tell from the skill explanation above), and I love it! I have dozens of OSR, indie, story-focused games, and it's just nice to have one that's super dense. So if you like light rules, this probably isn't for you unfortunately.Finally, I have to mention how beautiful this book is. Hard bound with full color, realistic illustrations and very well laid out charts really sets it above so many of my other books. I bought it for $35, but honestly wouldn't have minded paying $50 it's so nice.If you're a fantasy gamer who's interested in something different than the normal d20 systems, I highly recommend giving this a shot.

I am ecstatically happy here. I'd never heard of the game, not the 4th edition, not the computer game, not the kickstarter. But then I saw a mention of it when I went to Paizo to look when the next Pathfinder book was coming out, so I bought it to see if it was any good.I love it. First and foremost, because glancing through it, it didn't look simple. Games have gotten too simple, and a lack of complexity is boring. I like Pathfinder a lot, because it's way better than D&D 4th edition, but deep down, it's a rigid boring game that's made up of uniform (boring) rules. D&D 5th edition looks interesting, but I've never played it. I really liked Earthdawn in its first edition.Overall, with this book and one module out, I'd call this game completely unplayable past the end of the module. There are 3 demons, 2 elementals, a dog, a horse, a cat, a toad, and a raven available to fight in the core rules. But they seem to have an ambitious plan for supplement releases, and it all looks very promising. I shall continue purchasing things, because I think this game has real promise.EDIT: I've had some quality time to read, more than just skim. This game is refreshingly complicated. I like complicated! A lot of people don't, I know, but I'm not a lot of people. This game seems to lack the upward progression of more mainstream games. Pathfinder has levels, each level makes you a little tougher. This is a classless game, so you never level up. You incrementally adjust things to become slightly better. Moving to this system will be a huge departure for many people. It could be very exciting.

I am happy to see that Ulisses Games has decided to give the English speaking market another chance, after the 2003 (4th edition) failed to attract new gamers.The presentation is very similar to 5th edition D&D, with full-color glossy pages, and various character portraits. There is one downside to the full-color print: the ink has a very strong smell- definitely enough to cause nausea skill checks for elven characters. Quality of the illustration differs wildly between gorgeous drawings and novice sketches. Overall I miss the consistently good quality of earlier artists such as Biswang/Yüce. Having two bookmarks tassels is a nice touch. During gameplay you are likely to spend most of the time reading the appendix which contains most of the book's charts & tables. The English translation was done very well with only one minor issue: the skill "Gaukelei" (juggling / circus performances) was not translated at all and left in German throughout the book.As far as the "core rules" go, I am somewhat disappointed by the complexity of the system. 5th edition was supposed to simplify the rule set and make it more attractive to beginners, but I do not think that goal was achieved. As a point of reference, the 1st edition rule book contained ca. 60 pages, but to start with 5th edition you would have to read around 400 pages. The "core rules" contains optional rules- but only a handful of them. In my opinion this should have been reversed: only provide a handful of core rules and then provide a lot of pick & choose optional rules.Two of the examples in the book describe specialty skill builds allowing your hero to produce standing harps or write romance novels. I can honestly say that my heroes never had the desire to do either one in the past 25 years of role-playing; it seems baffling that such specialization is required for a core game manual.To summarize: the TDE Core Rules describe a solid, well designed role-playing world. Though I love the setting, I cannot unconditionally recommend the system to newcomers because it has become too convoluted making it an invitation to rules lawyering.