I went in wanting to love this game, and at first Ithought I would. Character creation was fast and intuitive. I started to run into trouble when I tried to work out my character's capabilities in comparison to the sample combat. There were too many blatant contradictions in the rules to figure anything out. Specifically, the armor tables list a defense value but later, a deflection value is mentioned, and neither are worked into the sample combat. There are also disparities in the general trait list (shield training). I just had a hard time determining how the game was supposed to run, and for a rules-light game, that is a fatal flaw.

WHAT WORKS: I'm a sucker for a magic system with some flavor, and this one has some good flavor. The character generation is FAST, and there are a ton of option for customizing your characters by mixing and matching the Three Words, as well as the vast array of Talents (with an additional 30 Talents available in a free sourcebook).

WHAT DOESN'T WORK: The bestiary just isn't very inspiring, due in part to the avoidance of common fantasy monsters combined with the lack of art. If you're going to go off the beaten path, that's fine, but pictures always help. There are only hints of a setting in the book, and the two factors mean it falls a bit shy of the promise from the great cover piece.

CONCLUSION: The lack of "spark" in the bestiary and lack of a setting aren't a deal breaker, especially given how easy it would seem to be to customize the rules, adding new Talents and Professions, maybe even races and certainly monsters. The system shows a TON of promise...hopefully it'll get the kind of support needed take it up that notch to truly capture the "epic" feel the cover evokes. Well worth checking out the PDF at a minimum.

http://mostunreadblogever.blogspot.com/2012/02/tommys-take-on-ingenium.html

Seriously, three words! That's all it takes to make a character. Not only does the system get out of the way in play, it gets out of the way in character creation. I seriously made a character in 10 minutes. I understood what he could do, and he was well balanced.

The art is well done, and the writing gets to the point.

I like the idea behind this game.

The three word system makes it easy to create a character and know how you are going to play that character from the start.

The game is definitely not crunchy. The combat and other skill mechanics are very simple. d10 plus modifiers versus a GM generated difficulty. This is neither good nor bad. If you like to play fast paced character driven games this is a good engine to try out. If you like crunchy try Savage Worlds for a bit more crunch or one of the plethora of d20 games if you want to spend all day on one fight.

Ingenium has a good beastiary for a basic core set of rules.

It does not have any scenarios or setting with the rules or out in any other form.

If you want adventures or a setting you'll have to wait.

For 5 bucks that may be worth it to you. For 10 you can pick up Savage Worlds that has a ton of Freebies on their website and tons of fan support. Presently I'd recommend Savage Worlds.

I'm tempted to like Ingenium's creativity, and I feel it does good at what it says it's trying to do. I do, however, have some gripes.

Characters can almost always be custom tailored for any purpose, but it's also very easy to create a very, very powerful mage quickly (admittedly, he'd get no more than five shots, and most likely just one right off the bat), which seems a little dangerous.

A d10 is very, very easy to have result in an almost guaranteed outcome, and somewhat imprecise, but in a game meant for heroic fantasy, that can be excused.

There is a mix of information overload and not terribly much in some parts. The section on casting magic takes about five pages, but the actual lists of spells go 21 pages, meaning that over a quarter of the book is devoted to magic alone (though, admittedly, the lists are nice to give diversity, and it beats a d6-style system in terms of how much math you have to do for the result).

There's almost no setting information, but this is not plain negative, since there is some merit in having the setting open to players and game masters, but the creativity elsewhere paints this in a bad light.

All in all, I like it, but instead of just leaving me wanting more, it leaves me hungry for more, which is probably not desired.