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I absolutely love this game. I would highly recomend for anyone looking for something unique and highly flavorful. The mechanics reward fast fast fast high-risk gameplay. Players nearly always succeed and are encouraged to push the boundaries of their abilities, to take risks essentially.
Coming from the OSR and 5e mainly, this style of game is like a breath of fresh air. I'm excited to introduce it to my regular group. Also a good amount of DM advice for running the game is present, which is amazing. My main critique is, maybe more player options. Not really a critique, but adding in more options for each character to be unique would make character creation more interesting. Although this does add in more work because for any ability you need another mirror version for the glitched class.
The game might be hard to run for a new DM or inexperienced group. I guess I should get into the actual specifics of the game. Every character is assumed to be a capable badass, who don't need to worry about many mundane issues. Players get to play as characters in Starglow Online, a massive full dive virtual reality game. One so big that a DM can set a wide variety of quests in it. The main city in Starglow Online, Archon, is where the characters start by default. It's a sprawling city with many different environments and quest seeds for the DM to expand on; the full game also includes one example adventure that would require little prepwork to run easily.
How does character creation work? Aside for the normal choosing a name and pronouns, the main choice is to choose a class. There are four classes (plus one bonus one) and no class can have repeats. Each class has a "glitched" version that compliments the main class. You don't start as a glitched class, rather as you play and take risks your character may turn into it. The glitched classes are interesting, they compliment another sort of take on each character stereotype. I won't get into each individual class and their counterpart, just each class in general.
Every character has three "approaches" which are how they tackle situations essentially. Each character has the magical approach, and the other two are determined by the class. For example, the Heart has the brave and passionate approaches, and it's counterpart has the deceptive and insightful approaches. Each approach has a number of die you assign to it, from 1-3. This indicates the number of 6 sided die you roll when using this approach. a 1-2 is a failure plus consequence, a 3-4 is a success with complication, and a 5-6 is a total success. You take the highest number on the die you roll. The complications and consequences give the enemy/obstacles a moment to react. Consequences are not always bad, and actually make the game more interesting in a way, which I'll get into.
Every class has three resources, fate, mana, and spirit. Fate and mana are basically the same, they just are used up by different kinds of powers. Spirit is essentially health, every character has 6 spirit. Reaching 0 spirit does NOT mean death, it just means your character must retreat from the conflict and recover, additionally they swap a power they have for one of the glitched class. After glitching three times, the character full converts to the glitched class, and future glitches slowly take them to the regular version, and vice versa.
Fate and mana are used to power different abilities. Each class has different powers that have different abilities, ranging from a hook that can drag enemies towards you or pull you to them, to simple spirit damage, to healing an allies spirit, fate, or mana. Each class and glitched class has different caps on fate and mana, maxing at 3 and the minimum being 2. Classes also have passive talents.
Finally, classes have "stars" which are this games versions of equipment. These Stars can be purchased from an in-game shop that the GM will expand over time (more specifics are included in the full PDF). Stars have the ability to deal damage as well as powers. These powers can be as varied and interesting as the GM allows.
Guidance on monster and obstacle creation, quest creation, Star creation, balancing stars, running the 5th class, and more are all in the full game as well. I found these sections to be well made and thought out. The core gameplay loop is very clearly laid out for the DM.
Okay, that's the end of my review, overall I give this 950 million stars out of a possible 1 billion. If this game sounds at all interesting to you, I would recommend spending 7 dollars on the full PDF. Also this is my first review of any kind, so I pretty much do not know what I'm doing at all, I would appreciate feedback at all. Also all of this comes with the caveat that I haven't actually played this yet, but I just had to get something out because only a few games have made me this excited to play them.
This review is also here I guess:
https://randomthingsithinkaboutsometimes.blogspot.com/2023/06/starglow-review.html
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