I backed the game since I was looking for a replacement game for shadowrun which I could play with lesser experienced players. Overall I have to say, that I am very satisfied.
The Character Creation
Creating characters is done by assigning different priorities to different concepts of your character (like augmentations, skills, traits) which will determin the amount of points you get to spent on the chosen concept.
If you want to play a fully augmented character, you assign A priority to augmentations, if you want to play a magic based character, you assign A priority to magic for instance if you want to build a character driven by their background you asign A to your background and so on.
With the priority system you can achieve a character design through multiple ways which keeps the character creation interesting and fresh but at the same time it never gets to complicated. We liked it very much, but it took a while until we got used to it.
Legend
Each character has a legend which defines their overarching goal. The legend can be anything from Zoro's "becoming the greatest swordsman in the world" to stuff like "being the idol my city needs" from batman. It's basically what drives the character forward.
If you do cool stuff which helps your legend to grow, your legend will increase. The legend is also a resource you can spend to do neat stuff like exceeding in combat or other situations.
The Fate Card
Each character gets a so called fate card. If you do a skill check, attack or similar thing, you roll on your fate card which is a list of % ranges in which fancy stuff can happen. The results from the fate card can range from crits to botches or from special actions caused by augmentations to stuff that meddles with your background. The fatecard adds a bit of randomness to every roll which can spice things up quite a bit. (For the better or for the worse. My group definitly likes randomness so we are quite happy about it)
Rolling dice
NewEdo uses a pool dice system with the difference that you add up the dice rolled from your pool to achieve a certain target number. (I am more used to dice systems where you have to accumulate N successes to achieve what you want) The pool, consists of a variety of dice from d4 to d12 while d10 are the most common dice as they are the ones provided by your core traits. (eg. heart, power, reflex etc.) Every 10 on a d10 in NewEdo explodes which leads to even more dices rolled. If you like to roll many dice, the system will definitly scratch that itch.
Combat
The combat in new Edo is fun and overall well designed. We had fun with our first encounters and liked the way things turned out. Combat is resolved in multiple steps which factor in environmental details like cover and visibility and later revolves around turns within "classic" initiative order. The combat can be quite deadly at times but we made it through our fights without loosing characters despite me being new to the system as a game master. It's also nice that melee characters keep their relevance despite the extensive existence of fire arms. Both, melee and ranged characters are feasable.
Conclusion
All in all I can say that we enjoyed our first sessions very much and I have zero regrets backing the project as stuff turned out very neat. In addition to the cool system I have to say that I love the art very much. I can't speak about the setting in very much detail as I only know it from reading the rulebook since we are currently playing an adapted shadowrun adventure as a first run. But from what I've read, the setting is very cool. The different lineges are interesting and range from normal humans to creatures from japanese folklore like Kappas, Kitsune and Oni (We reflavoured them for shadowrun) and the futuristic cyberpunk setting mixed with mythologic japanese influences makes for an interesting combination in my opinion. I can definitly recommend the book.
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