well, lo and behold. nearly 3 months after writing to them and receiving no response, what should arrive on my parents' porch? But HARP.
Now, Jeffe gets it, but I've already read nearly half of it. (it's fair, he looked through my birthday present before he gave it to me). It seems pretty straightforward. Nearly every class and race is stolen straight from D&D, and they have talents instead of feats (which admittedly, have a different flavor). It's based on d100 rather than d20, and combat works different. Skill ranks work funky (lots of math, but once you have the bonus written down, you don't have to recalculate during play). Spells are just skills (but only available to certain classes).
and uh... last thing... for some reason, despite all the direct parallels to D&D, it feels more like WHFRPG. Maybe it's the soft cover book and d100 system. <Shrug>
There is 0 setting info in the book other than the basic traits of the races (and let's face it, you can change that quickly), so the GM is expected to get his work done, but there are monster stats and magic items in this 160 page volume. I'm not sure who it's targeted toward. I'd say people like me who don't like settings anyway, but the system isn't original enough. Still, it's a pretty good deal for a complete RPG with a generic fantasy feel
This one's going to be easy to munchkin, since even with random determination, with three acceptable char gen options, 2 of which are point based. Then skills and talents (and even attribute raising) are bought with points (which is kind of a viscious cycle: the attributes determine how many character points you have, but you can raise attributes with them).
I haven't read the combat section (that's next), but a quick perusal of the crit tables (there are 14, based on attack type) shows that Jeffe will be pleased again. No earwax references, but there is "Help! He's fallen and can't get up in the 6 rounds it takes for the fluids within his body to congeal and he dies."
I also liked that they had the guts to say that a round has a fixed amount of time (2 secs). Ok, I guess that's almost a whole review, but I haven't read combat yet, or much about spells or magic items or monsters, so there'll be more to come. I may even let Jeffe write it.
(you know, since I still have D5, tons of Pendragon, and M&M to do)
