After reading the game I envision a gritty fantasy mashup of a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser meets Sons of Anarchy... or the Sapranos. Heck with this rich setting both would rock. The system reminds me of a Fate lite system. It's actually quite elegant. I really like the setting of Everthorn which is know in the world as the City of Black Fog. Its basically a gigantic overpopulated city that has been build ontop of older versions of itself for a thousand years. Ripe for story ideas! You could also do a really good gritty sword and sorcery detective story game. After reading it, alot of campaign ideas pop off the pages. Politics, Machiavellian plots and moral ambiguity runs roughshod in this setting. I would say it was well worth the cost. It really is a good investment.

I have been tinkering with game design for some time. Now that I have read this, well, I can pretty much stop. SEP managed to capture everything I could want out of this genre mesh-up. I really am speechless, it is almost as if my mind was being read when this was written. I wouldn't go so far to claim plagiarism, Cthulhu knows he's been through enough of that.

WHAT WORKS: A very professional, yet low-key, presentation, especially for the price. The art and layout aren't fancy, but they both fit the feel of the product. The system is a nice little mish-mash of various systems, but thought has actually gone into how to make the pieces fit, rather than just jamming them together. I like the Critical Failure and Success bits, as well as the corrupting influence of magic.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK: I wasn't a huge fan of the city or adventure, just personal preference I guess...although I did like the cops being "incorruptible" for a change. I would probably have preferred a more generalized approach to building fantasy noir adventures instead. The author has explained the reasoning behind the lack of nonhumans on the company website, but I still would have preferred a treatment of them. There were a couple of spots where the writing could have been tighter, and frankly, calling NPCs "NCs" (Narrative characters) just bugged the crap out of me.

CONCLUSION: Minor quibbles aside, I really liked what I read. The Qualities/Aspects stuff is well defined, I dig the take on magic, there is no abstract "stress" in place of damage, and there are some cool bits like gaining advancements off of critical failures. Still, a great game packed into a small package. With a "monster" hack, it might even be a prime candidate for a worthwhile Ravenloft replacement. Highly recommended if you wanna get dirty with your next fantasy game.

For my full review, please visit: http://mostunreadblogever.blogspot.com/2011/06/tommys-take-on-sword-noir.html

Excellent concept – badly in need of editing, or perhaps just more focus.

I like parts of it - the magic system (similar to Amazing Engines’ - For Faerie, Queen & Country), the idea of Sword Noir, and adventures. They were done well. I’ve been thinking of how to run a game based on something I read on a forum – “live fast, die young, and leave a 3rd level corpse.” Now I think I can do that.

However, the author (Ronald) created his own system for the game, and I don’t think it supports the authors’ stated goal. The stated intent was to make a system where the Characters are specialists, and also that they are to be simply “mortal men” – not Mythic Level Characters.

However, the system (which they stated as being part PDQ and part FATE) uses Attributes plus Faculties plus Abilities plus a die total (but it doesn’t explain that until page 16). And, after reading further into the system you discover that the Player gets 6 points to bump Qualities up from Average to Legendary (the max). But, since attributes, faculty and abilities stack a character that is a specialist could have a better than Mythic Level Ability right from the beginning. If they spread out their points they would have 3 or more qualities at Great Ability. But, the author also states that a generalist is not recommended and would “most likely to fade into the background” of the story. It doesn’t match.

Using the FATE 1.0 System (and its’ ability pyramid) instead of designing a new system would have been better if enforcing a specialization was that important. Or, better yet, if the author had NOT USED A SYSTEM AT ALL, and simply made the book as a genre sourcebook, it would have been more satisfying.

As a genre book it covers the basics – but more pages covering what makes the genre different would have been better. The book is 70 pages long, but only 6 are actually devoted to covering the new genre. It mentions the Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past, and advised the GM to emulate them – without breaking down what they think are the essential parts of those stories.

If they had spent the page used for the system instead to better defining the genre – or how to use it in some other systems (in PDQ, FATE, BRS, D&D, etc), it would have been better.

Also, it is hard to read some times – it wanders a bit, repeats itself a lot, and needs more examples (ie: editing). And, using 7 pages for Characters that could have all been summarized on one page was a waste of space. Whole sections of the Character Sheets were empty; an each sheet took up a whole page by itself. And, the numbers on the table or contents were wrong.

Like I wrote earlier, I like the concepts, but it needed a lot more editing. But, for a typical RPG book it is about Average (+0) Quality in editing.

Hoo boy, when they said this was dark and gritty, they weren't kidding. Take everything you know about film noir, only instead of using guns, use swords.

Ok, it's maybe not that close, but it's pretty darn close.

The hopefulness of this setting lays between SLA Industries and Eclipse Phase, both of which are pretty darn depressing (though at least in Eclipse Phase the uninitiated live a upper-mediocre life). It's dark, and unhappy, but at the same time that makes it rich and fulfilling. The rules are simple and the combat quick, and by the end of the day, someone will die. You, your friends, your enemies, or any combination. They'll die, it's the way life works.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel, but you'll try your hardest to get there.

Combining the two classically "dark" genres of Sword and Sorcery and film noir is a great idea and a wonderful way to draw on a couple of my favourite genres. Character generation creates detailed, rounded characters that feel like they have come from somewhere other than just a bunch of random numbers, though I would have liked a little more emphasis placed on the moral ambiguity that is discussed in the introduction to the book. For example, the character generation rules allowed me to create a Tolkien-style elf as easily as a noir gangster, which is great flexibility, but I can see players needing clear direction to ensure all the characters fitted thematically. The rules themselves are sound but unobtrusive, letting you quickly resolve situations or conflicts without ever getting caught up in minutiae or endless modifiers. They are a nice blend of rules from games like PDQ and Fate, where the descriptive details of the characters (and their adversaries) are more important than any specific numbers. The layout is neat, straightforward and easy to read and the art is very nice, helping to set the scene. There is an example city-setting and an adventure included in the book, but no mandated setting - players are left to take the resources provided and their knowledge of the source material (Conan, Elric, Marlowe) and do with it what they will. This is definitely a toolbox-type game, giving you mechanics and ideas but leaving the specifics to the players. The author's passion for the source material comes through loud and clear and overall I am impressed with this game.