TL;DR: A complete hit 'n' miss. Did you folks forget that your game is titled GRIMDARK Future? Or did you regret it?

I was afraid of this happening. I was already sold on the game without any lore, so a world book can hardly do anything more for me -- but a badly written world book could throw me off of the game. And now I'm contemplating whether the latter has happened after reading the book or not.

Let's get one thing straight right away: I did not expect a carbon copy of That Other Product. I didn't even expect anything of the sorts. But I expected GRIM and DARK and this world is neither. In fact, it's kind of a hopeful, generic, flavourless, scentless, space opera sci-fi.

Pros. Dwarves. Dwarves are the only, proper grimdark element in here. The origins of humanity are kind of OK, too, but that's the best I can give them. Kind of OK. Big fan of the portrayal of Battle Bros in general.

Cons. Authors don't seem to understand that, while grimdark generally doesn't have to revolve around war everyehwere, it has to be heckin' horrible. Sure, there can be peace, but even peace should be mmmmiserable. This is what fans of the genre are here for.

Also, I get that you guys liked Mass Effect, but lay it off. You want a space opera setting, create a space opera setting, but don't call it Grimdark, for god's sake... I don't care for a highly educated, prosperous and enlighted galactic core region, where the greatest problems are differences in wealth and "inequality."

In fact, I don't care for the Inner Sphere and the Outer Sphere and the Frontiers at all. You had a great advantage at hand initially: the scope you set for yourself. FIrst you said that, okay, this game is set in a SECTOR, the Sirius Sector. This was a stroke of genius! Smaller scope means more details, more tensions, more chance for intricate undercurrents of politics and ideologies, alliances and betrayals, but all the while a managable network of stakeholders and interests.

Aaaaand you bonked it. You barely managed to draw the outlines of the Sirius Sector and immediately attempted to jump to some galactic core this and inner sphere that hogwash, which has nothing of effect on Grimdark Future and the Sirius Sector itself and reeks of Mass Effect fan fic. Should have stayed laser focused in Sirius, should have made it properly grim and dark and left the remaining of the galaxy a mystery to be revealed later in small, incremental steps.

Also, do you understand how big of a plothole you punched through your world building by establishing wormhole technology the way you did?

Honestly? It feels like you did not forget you titled your game GRIMDARK Futre.

It feels like you regretted it.

You seem to be afraid of locking in anything truly horrible in your setting. You use more than 200 instances of weasel words like "some" or "others" or "many", so you basically wrote a lot of stuff without actually attributing it to anyone concrete, reserving the right to determine the volume and significance of these things at your convenience or even retcon them later.

Where are the details on the Havoc Bros? Where are the details on the Demons? Why does everyone feel like a bunch of goody two-shoes, especially Alien Hives, Blessed Sisters and the DEMONS?

I get it, you did not want to just copy James Workshop's homework word-by-word and submit that. Good on you. But couldn't you have at least been inspired by at least the right GENRE?! Alright, you don't want to be That Other Product, okay, but then go and look at CapCon in BattleTech. Or Grim Hollow. Your goal when creating a grimdark setting should be for its fans to say "OH HEEEEEELL NAW, I'M GOOD HERE, THANKS" when you ask them if they wanted to live in your setting.

And yes, I understand that YOU, personally, did not write much of this. These seem to come from the writing jams or straight up fan fictions written by the community.

But in the end, someone picked and collated these with the intention of building a universe and an atmosphere which is supposed to be grim and dark.

And it failed miserably.

I have just recently started to prep for my first session of Brancalonia. I was a duca-conte level supporter of their Kickstarter but only just recently managed to bring together a game and I've got to say: I expected more. Here are my pros and cons for the product.

TL;DR: This book works best as a system agnostic setting book. Just rip out their original host system and plug in something else that was built for a grittier, low magic gameplay from the get go.

(+) The fluff. Anything not directly tied into the rules is just great. The entire book oozes atmosphere.

(+) The art. Combined with the written fluff, the high quality art helps to immerse the reader into the setting.

(+) The "Dive Games" rules. Despite this being our first, full-on Brancalonia game, I've been using these rule subsets in every other game I've been wanting to have the players to play some interesting minigames in the inns they visit.

(+) The concept of the Den and the Company. Very much seems like something out of Blades in the Dark. I really like it, gives a structure for your game and simplifies swapping PCs in and out of the campaign.

(-) The host rule system. I came to the conclusion that writing this for D&D 5th Edition was most likely a business decision. Problem is that low magic, low fantasy gameplay doesn't tend to work with this ruleset. Their new setting rules try to "hardcorify" the game, but here's the problem. The rule sets that do this kind of gameplay very well are the OSR or the completely new wave rules. Why? Because they are very, very loose, leaving a bunch of room for player creativity. D&D 5E tries to be somewhat complex, but not too complex, but still not rulings before rules, fast and dirty. This results in a rule set that works best for heroic fantasy games, does some other settings in a "meh" quality, and does more gritty play horribly.

(-) There is almost nothing here for those who'd like to play beyond 6th level. Yeah, I know, it's a setting book and not a supplement, but still. Do NOT buy this if you like mid to high level play. In fact, do NOT buy this if you just want some extra options for your games outside of Brancalonia.

(-) You kind of have to have MM to play. I suppose this boiled my brain way more than it should have, but still. One of the starting adventures is an interesting experiment in providing an adventure which can be (and, honestly, is designed around being) solved non-violently. To each their own I suppose, but I was bored out of my mind just reading through it as a DM. The second starter adventure uses the stat blocks of some human NPCs detailed in the Monster Manual. And I flipped out on this. One could say "hurr-durr, how hard it is to come up with some stat blocks on your own for these enemies as a DM", which is, okay, fair enough, but if it isn't so hard then how come the writers couldn't do it? Especially in a setting which centers around low level gameplay? Which brings me to my next point.

(-) Their bestiary is almost useless for 1st and 2nd level gameplay. More than 20 new enemies. Sounds awesome, right? Well yes and no. Again, these new enemies and NPCs just ooze atmosphere. However, 3/4 of these new monsters are CR 2 or higher. Most of the enemies are CR 3+, which means that you are going to have to improvise a lot of enemies for levels 1-3. Agggaain, if the host rule system would be something other than D&D, then this may not be such a huge problem. There are systems out there which enable the DM to come up with stats for new monsters very quickly or even on the fly. Not to mention that I think they regularly underestimate their CRs. Have your Monster Manual at the ready or perish. I think I'm just going to plug in ICRPG instead of 5E rules.

(-) The pre-written adventures. Remember when I said that anything not directly tied into the rules is just great? I lied. The structure of the pre-made adventures expect way too much compliance from the players. The one thing they do right is that they outline potential scenes and that's about that. Honestly, seeing that start, I was hoping they adopted the Lazy Dungeon Master's Checklist, but no. After the scene outlines the adventure just becomes "then the players will do this, and then the players will do that, and then the players will speak to this NPC and learn how that NPC is involved." My brothers in the Ternal Father: have you EVER ran ANY games at the table? If anything, I bet that your players will do something completely different, hairbrained, borderline suicidal but all-in-all VERY entertaining shenanigans, which will probably lead to the death of at least one of your key NPCs and possibly the collapse of a key location.

So one of my choombas mentioned that he'd like to play some Cyberpunk one of these days, after playing Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. I was delighted. I already had the Jumpstart Kit, in fact, in an earlier Cyberpunk humble bundle I bought quite a few Cyberpunk 2020 books, but I went ahead and purchased RED. I wanted to see if the game became streamlined enough so that I could throw my friend's casual butt right into it.

Yeah, we are NOT going to play this game.

Cyberpunk RED suffers from an identity crysis. It wants to be more streamlined, but in some areas it overshoots streamlining (e.g. brandless-generic weapons, or the suppressive fire rule), and in others it doesn't go far enough (I firmly believe that the number of skills could be halved in the game by conjoining massively overlapping skills, maybe even STATs). The classes are almost all one trick ponies. I just can't wrap my head around having a gargantuan library of skills that anybody can progress in and then implementing this... this "parallel skill system", I suppose, with the dumbest stuff being arbitrarily tied to classes (roles and role abilities, sorry).

Let's take for example the Charismatic Impact role ability, which influences what kind of venues the Rockerboy can play and how many fans they possibly have, or, if they can convert people to be their fans. Why?! Why tie these to a specific ability? This is exactly the character stuff that should be roleplayed, and the game even has skills to show how awesome of a performer the charater is, or how easily they can impress masses of people or can strike deals, without this dumb "role ability."

In the end, I have found myself reading through the book, thinking "okay, I'm going to have to house rule this" and "yeah, I'm just going to leave out that entirely." I got about 3/4 through, when epiphany hit and I slammed the book shut, exclaiming "you know what, f--k you man" loudly. If I have to handweave or override half of your rules in your book, then your rules are crap.

The only reason I'm not giving it 1 star is that the art is nice, and it isn't a completely, utterly disfunctional game, so you COULD play it if you wanted. IF you wanted, that is, because the layout of the book will not make it easy on you.

For myself, I think I'm just going to grab the Cyberpunk 2077 setting and play in it with a setting-agnostic game system, accepting the fact that I the only thing I got from purchasing RED is buyer's remorse.