This book does an amazing job of capturing the ahem soul of the video game and bringing it into a playable and understandable format for tabletop. Basing the system in 5e makes the game accessible to millions of players already familiar with the system. Dark Souls the Roleplaying Game also adds interesting new mechanics and concepts that are easy to integrate and are simple to take to other settings to add some gritty alternatives.

Definitely fun on its own and super useful for players looking for interesting, and sometimes brutal, options.

Well-done implementation of 5E atop the Dark Souls themes and mechanics. Any errors present are pretty easily fixed by the GM. It's nothing game-breaking. People seem to look for things to pile on.

A lot of people have been overly critical of this product by Steamforged games. It's a subtle and refeshing take on the DnD 5e system. It keeps enough that you can rely on your existing knowledge or the massive amount of recorded knowledge on how to play DnD 5e while adding just enough to give you something new and interesting to work with. You could criticize it for using too much from DnD 5e, but it takes a lot of work to adapt the 5e system to a world like Dark Souls. People pay for homebrew all the time on DM's Guild and that should extend to the significant amount of effort that the authors have put into this product. You could criticize it for the errors in its content. The authors have remained committed to fixing those errors and pushing out consistent updates to the PDF. I don't expect anything different from an Early Access game on Steam, and I'm not going to hold Steamforge to a higher standard. The question you need to ask is do you want to play a TTRPG set in the Dark Souls universe without having to do the work yourself? If yes, this is the book for you.

I have not seen a bigger cash grab from any company, regardless of medium. Tons of mistakes, a blantant copy of the D&D OGL-available material, just with different names.

Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game is massive. Massive in size and a massive undertaking to compact over a decade's worth of material into a tabletop rpg book. At first glance, the PDF (I'm still awaiting my physical copy) is gorgeous. Steamforged Games has captured the essence perfectly. The tweaks to the rules, to make D&D 5th edition fall in line with the universe of Dark Souls, had to be daunting but were succesfully achieved. Spells, weapons, armor, mechanics from the video games, all are there in print form allowing one to craft their own stories around the gaming table.

To be fair, there were and are, some errors within the book. From simple grammatical missteps to larger and more invasive rules issues, the errors are quite glaring at times. But Steamforged has been doing their damndest to correct and update these rules. Not only that, but they have promised the people who have purchased physical copies through their preorder system that those errors will be taken care of. That's pretty good customer service in my book. I know many people are still angry, or at least harbor ill feelings, from the confusing releases of the Dark Souls board and card games that were also from Steamforged. But to their credit, they've been very good on giving free updates and clarifications for those games and I'm confident they shall do the same here with the TTRPG.

I would have liked it if the GM section was a little more in-depth. At times it feels more like advice to setting up a miniatures encounter as opposed to creating campaign or one to two night adventure. But all the bits and pieces are there to have at it. It definitely helps though if you have played the games and have some knowledge of the lore. So it may be a turn off to casual fans or people who are completely new to Dark Souls. I recommend hitting up some VaatiVidya lore videos in that case! Heh! But jokes and minor quibbles aside, the Dark Souls RPG is pretty phenomenal. As a fan who has collected all things Souls, is heavily invested in the games, and purchased both the card and board games I cannot recommend this book enough. I think you'll be pleased.

Despite what it says, there are no tips for running this setting in the brief gm section

Still has contradictions and grammatical errors present in the previous version.

I was torn between 3 and 4 stars, but I went with 4, because overall this is a good product. There are just several issues that I needed to address.

Let's begin with the good! First of all, I love the concept of Dungeons & Doggies and Cats & Catacombs. I've bought all the miniatures sets, and the designs are great. I like how they worked them in to D&D mechanics and a world of adventurers. The character types let you turn any kind of dog or cat into a proper character by use of the different sizes and racial traits players can choose, so there's some great character flexibility.

Gullet Cove itself is a location with a lot of thought put into it. Everything from the design to the setting to its inhabitants are well thought-out and developed, and there are a ton of great characters. I'm particularly fond of the Witcher-inspired dog.

Also, the artwork is fantastic. There are more than a few different artists, but every single animal that appears is adorable. I could just flip through, look at a random image, and smile.

The book also contains a few small adventures DMs can use to get their players invested in Gullet Cove. I look forward to running them as one-shots for my friends and building on this world.

Now for the criticisms. While it's great from a worldbuilding perspective, mechanically there are several issues.

Sometimes it's a matter of terminology, like talking about "tests" instead of "skill checks" or providing mechanical benefits for a skill check that doesn't actually exist in the rules as written. Sometimes it's just a matter of wording, like "nominating" a character to get advantage on a certain check instead of just using the Help action for one of those skill checks. While these are easily adjusted, consistency with the game rules is important.

There are also issues with balance. I feel like some of the race and class features were chosen with more of a focus on how they work thematically than mechanically. For instance, there's a cat racial trait that lets you add your proficiency to any charisma-based skill. So does that automatically grant proficiency in four skills (which is a lot for a racial trait just by itself), or if you're already proficient does it add the proficiency again, like Expertise? What if you have Expertise in a charisma-based skill - does that mean you add your proficiency all of three times?

Similarly, there's a first level cleric feature that just grants advantage on all charisma-based skill checks. No limit, just infinite advantage at level 1. There is no reason for any and every bard to not take a single level in that cleric class to gain advantage on every single charisma check they make from that point out.

I'm aware that these are the same in the Dungeons & Doggies or Cats & Catacombs rules, but I had the same concerns when I read them then.

There are also a few magic items that need revisions. For instance, there's one or two that talk about using charges to cast spells but don't specify how many charges each spell takes. Others seem entirely underwhelming, like a sword with legendary rarity that... deals an extra 1d6 damage on every other attack.

So while I do like the D&D/C&C world, and Gullet Cove itself is very well designed, I feel like this could have benefitted from an extra set of eyes looking over everything in terms of gameplay, consistency, and balance.

I hope you do not take this as an attack on the book, because overall I like it and wish you success. These are just issues that I noticed and wanted to bring up so they can be taken into account for future work. I hope my feedback has been helpful.