Lets talk about our opinions about this book.

Mine can be summed up as... Realms of Terrinoth is a very beautiful, high quality tease with incredible expansion potential.

It has so much art that takes up so much page space that FFG could have easily added in a lot more actual game content but decided to use this book as a display of its many beautiful art pieces. This is especially true of Chapter One and while Chapter Two adds a bit of new game stuff for us... Heroic Abilities, new Races, new Talents, Alchemy and the Runes are all good but... They totally chimped out on expanding on the core Magic Skills rules in the Genesys core book. Like, this could have been so much better.

Chapter 3 is incredible. Lots of world fluff (I want more of it) and super cool bestiary with a lot of different flavor. But even here the amount of fluff isn't a whole lot. Just enough to get started, but could easily be expanded into its own 250 page book.

For me the book is just about perfect, one or two more creatures maybe.

Actually convinced me to take a second crack at getting my players to play genesys but in Terrinoth this time.

I wanted some of the additional rules (mounts, alchemy, crafting). I think the gear section, particularly the materials bit, is well done and useful. I really wanted new talents and insight into how magic talents should be designed, which I'm mostly satisfied with (magic talents seemed a little skimpy and lore-specific, but enough to give me grounds to invent my own).

The setting isn't very interesting to me. Not that there probably isn't anything good about it, but getting into another European-style fantasy, particularly one that seems to embrace its homages, which doesn't really set it apart from the pack much.

Bottom line: I never really planned to play in the setting, but I need the crunch.

I’m actually really liking the setting, it’s reminding me of a Grey Box Forgotten Realms. Just enough detail to shape the setting without you needing to be a lore master to run it.

The talent section could use a handful of additional magic related talents and I’d have liked a smidgeon of extra magic materials.

I'm only 26 pages in and I'm loving it.

I really like the book so far. I agree it could have had a bit more of a toolkit vibe in places, like more direction for creating magical talents, weapons, magical materials for crafting of magical items, etc. etc. This is one area where the Genesys approach leaves something to be desired compared to the GURPS approach (GURPS Magic is all of those things but very little of the background flavor and setting). Hopefully the book sells well enough so that we get a followup called Magic of Terrinoth or something, as others have suggested. Or perhaps online articles about this sort of thing.

So far I love Realms of Terrrinoth. It feels so good to finally hold and page through, looking at all of the beautiful art, and reading about the world.

I think the runestone mechanics are really interesting, and I'm excited to play with them! I haven't looked at the bestiary too much, but everything I've seen so far looks really interesting.

I've read through Verse magic a few times, but I think I need to read it a couple more to fully understand how it works. That's been the most confusing part for me so far.

I think it's a great vehicle for introducing the total novice (like me) to the world of Terrinoth. I need artwork to sort of immerse myself into the feeling of a setting. I love sweeping, visually complex or narrative art pieces to help me see what the world is like. I hate something being described as "a tall humanoid made of iron, covered in runic wards and glyphs, wielding a halberd in one hand and a shield in the other"; actually SHOW me a picture of an Ironbound.

The book provides supplemental rules for fantasy tropes and themes, but the book is a showcase for someone to run a Terrinoth game. I feel FFG did a great job with this book and look forward to similar treatises for Android, Twilight Imperium, and especially Tannhauser.

Tony and I will be reviewing this book a week from Sunday on The Finding The Narrative Podcast with Jamie (the 3rd Magi from The RPG Brewery show) and Stephen (from the Dragon's Toolbox). So, my detailed review will be in that show.

But, I can definitely say this book pretty awesome! Like Stacie said above, incredible expansion potential with this evocative art being very inspirational for new ideas. I wanna play in this game! =)

"Not Another One" Kobold ability ... just money! LOL

Z

I flipped thru the book and it is beautiful. I will read more the mechanic stuff then the setting since I never played board games in Terrinoth. I find it too close to other medieval fantasy settings to peak my interest for now. I am more excited for future books, like Android. I don’t think I’ll run games in it, but it will give tools to use in other futuristic setting. I am sad to not have heard any plans from FFG to do a Arkham Horror Files setting book. I guess I’ll buy some Call of Cthulhu and Achtung Cthulhu and convert. Still Realms of Terrinoth is a good buy.

I found it curious that there is no Intellect-based race. That is what I usually would play.

Question regarding this release: I am someone who has no desire to run or play in this setting and is mostly just looking for additional rules that add to the experience of Genesys, whether it be crafting, magic, net talents or other rulesets. For someone with this strict interest in expanding the Genesys toolkit, is RoT worth the price?

I love the book. I do wish they would have expanded further on magic, particularly on their method for controlling advancement in magic related skills. I also wish they would have given us some more guidelines on how to create our own heroic abilities if we didn't want to use the ones listed there. Other than that, I love the gear, talents, races, and other content. It helped confirm that we're on the right track with what we're producing for our own genesys game. I haven't read the setting details in general, and I probably will in the future for some ideas.

But overall, I definitely don't regret buying the book.

39 minutes ago, GroggyGolem said:

Question regarding this release: I am someone who has no desire to run or play in this setting and is mostly just looking for additional rules that add to the experience of Genesys, whether it be crafting, magic, net talents or other rulesets. For someone with this strict interest in expanding the Genesys toolkit, is RoT worth the price?

PDF it. Definitely worth the price of the PDF.

As for me, I'm not running RoT, but it did flesh out what was missing from Genesys Core (Crafting imho) to now I can get my campaign off the ground. Plus I needed some solid Alchemy rules for my big bag.

While I'm at it, Special Modifications from Star Wars is a neat little add if you already have EOTE at your table. And the force books can be okay to supplicant into Magic.

1 hour ago, GroggyGolem said:

Question regarding this release: I am someone who has no desire to run or play in this setting and is mostly just looking for additional rules that add to the experience of Genesys, whether it be crafting, magic, net talents or other rulesets. For someone with this strict interest in expanding the Genesys toolkit, is RoT worth the price?

Estimated by text area, there should be around 70~75 pages of "crunch content" centered on running a fantasy style game out of the 259 total pages; so generally around 25~30% is dedicated to expanding the rules. "Worth the price" is subjective and there isn't really a standard of measurement, however, the expansion of the rule is, in both quality and quantity, very similar to FFG:SW's source books; thus it could be thought as, in my personal opinion, a source book with a huge amount setting fluff. If you take this perspective FFG:SW source book is around 30~40 USD and Terrinoth is asking for 50 USD (or whooping cheap 25 USD if its PDF), and that could be, again personal opinion, used as a foundation for you to make judgment.

Are the rules mandatory for a game? No. However, they are quite fun and inspiring, especially the new Heroic Abilities and a huge amount of Bestiary they added is quite amazing; these rules can easily be used in any other setting, and can used by the GM to add more dynamic situations in both combat and narration to force players to think and sympathize with the story.

I love the bestiary additions, but man, I hate the way they format (or rather don't format) stats. One big paragraph for "Abilities" and another for equipment. They could bold the names but instead only bold when a check is listed. And I guess bulleted lists mean more pages overall, so more expense. I'll transfer what I plan to use onto nicer formatted "cards" anyway, so this is hardly a showstopper.

Content wise I'm very pleased so far, and looking forward to taking the extended tour of Terrinoth this weekend.

3 minutes ago, Dragonshadow said:

I love the bestiary additions, but man, I hate the way they format (or rather don't format) stats. One big paragraph for "Abilities" and another for equipment. They could bold the names but instead only bold when a check is listed. And I guess bulleted lists mean more pages overall, so more expense. I'll transfer what I plan to use onto nicer formatted "cards" anyway, so this is hardly a showstopper.

Content wise I'm very pleased so far, and looking forward to taking the extended tour of Terrinoth this weekend.

I do wonder the extent to which their stat blocks worked the way they did because they sold Adversary decks and could do the nice layout there. Without Adversary decks, it is a little crunched.

11 minutes ago, Dragonshadow said:

I love the bestiary additions, but man, I hate the way they format (or rather don't format) stats. One big paragraph for "Abilities" and another for equipment. They could bold the names but instead only bold when a check is listed. And I guess bulleted lists mean more pages overall, so more expense. I'll transfer what I plan to use onto nicer formatted "cards" anyway, so this is hardly a showstopper.

Content wise I'm very pleased so far, and looking forward to taking the extended tour of Terrinoth this weekend.

Its adds to the annoyance that some of the abilities are quite complex in their relations to the enemies weapons (i.e. Spine Thresher's Too many mouths, 216), or that they're mixed with the "substat" like Silhouette alphabetically. I wish they would categorize it similar to d20 stat blocks in the future.

First off, I'm wondering where all that art is the OP is complaining about. The short introduction uses more space for large illustrations than text, yes, and Chapter I beautifully illustrates the setting's backstory with round about a perfect number of faux stained glass windows, but after that? Where are they? And what little there is outside the stained glass pieces, the maps and the arbitrary selection of item sketches has (almost) all been used before, to boot. Well, two of the orcs, two of the catfolk, half the art in the introduction, and the opening illustrations in Chapter III for regions hitherto only visited in Runebound 1/2e and Descent 1e (if at all) I don't remember having seen before (outside promo articles for this book), but neither have I ever seen the booklets of those expansions. Frankly, I expected better. Especially since most of the - rather often quite samey - character illustrations are of little use in getting a visual feel for the setting as a whole. That said, much of what's in the book is beautiful and the only three visuals I actively dislike are the (in different ways) ludicrously armed and armored women on the reused box covers of Descent 2e and Manor of Ravens as well as Alys Raine's hero sheet. Although the dwarf with a sledgehammer like Alys's and the dwarf that holds his ax like one come perilously close.

Chapter I lore: Thumbs up.

Species: Mostly nice, but it irks me how singhara and hyrrinx are described as wildly different, yet we only get a single spread of catfolk stats for both.

Careers: Mostly neat, but that Verse doesn't get a dedicated career (while Runes gets two, to boot) irritates me.

Heroic Abilities: I dislike All the Facts and Connected on grounds of suspension of disbelief, but the rest sound great. Finally a use for Story Points I actually like.

New Skills and Rules: No complaints here.

New Talents: Other than the arbitrariness of the selection of "multiclassing" talents, they look quite promising. Although I expected more than two pairs of mutually exclusive talents after the preview article.

Weapons and Armor: Halberds, shields and war hammers each have a line worthy of major eye-rolling, but generally the fluff has much improved from the CRB. Interesting that the pike gets the reach rules suggested on these forums (and favored by me even before then until I switched to covering that aspect with Defensive) for most polearms and then some. Ironic that the text perfectly accurately describes the two-handed (reinforced farming tool) flails used by farmers to defend themselves, yet the illustration accompanying it shows a one-handed ball-on-chain flail (a two-balled one, to boot) that permeates popular fiction despite only sparse contemporary historical evidence for them; that's gonna confuse people. Finally, hand crossbows and repeating crossbows are ludicrous concepts, but if you want to have some, that's fine by me. As for the gear items' stats... well, I guess they fit into the range that's been established by the CRB.

Crafting etc.: Only skimmed through it, but looks good.

Runes: I like 'em. 'Nuff said.

Gods: Nice short stories, but: Not enough deities. No iconography. Three of the very few names lazily copied from Greek mythology (two here, one in Al-Kalim), to boot. And I'll eat a hat if Kurnos isn't taken from Warhammer's Kurnous. More generally, why on Earth are most creators of fantasy settings - especially ones for games - so averse to creating divine family trees akin to real-world humans' polytheistic mythologies?

Spiritspeaking and Elven Magic: Fine and all, fluff-wise, but it's really fuzzy (in these parts and other relevant ones) when Divine and when Primal would be the appropriate Magic Skill for a character. At times even Arcana isn't clear, either.

Chapter III lore: Thumbs up. Although having more than just "Europeans and close neighbors" would've been nice. It's frustrating how Legend of the Five Rings continues to be the only (commercially relevant) fantasy setting in the West with a sizable "East Asian" presence (outside some superhero and cyberpunk stuff).

Proofreading: Encountered almost no missing, superfluous or misspelled words, so that's great, but sadly two minor typos stick out like sore thumbs due to the circumstances they appear in - namely "Splig, King of All Golbins" due to being in large letters and "Coordination (PR)" due to being on the character sheet. For context, the latter is the only case on it in which the abbreviation for a Characteristic is given in all upper-case letters. And they've had how many months since GenCon 2017 to fix this? Jeez.

I found quite a few typos, but only one that causes a problem (one of the talents states it cancels an advantage when it should say cancels a threat).

Other than that, its a litter here or a word there.

1 minute ago, saethone said:

its a litter

2 minutes ago, saethone said:

I found quite a few typos, but only one that causes a problem (one of the talents states it cancels an advantage when it should say cancels a threat).

Well, "almost no" was by TRPG standards, of course, and I admittedly haven't checked for semantic errors, only for syntactic ones.

I'll get flack, I'm sure, but... as one of the people who no longer have time to make their own worlds, monsters, etc. How is this book in regards to "I have enough spells, monsters, talents and skills" to play a campaign/adventure?

I love the system (when I got pulled in via Star Wars), but won't pretend I don't still rely heavily on someone else's fantasy setting because it is "complete" and "ready to run".

Just now, Grungyape said:

I'll get flack, I'm sure, but... as one of the people who no longer have time to make their own worlds, monsters, etc. How is this book in regards to "I have enough spells, monsters, talents and skills" to play a campaign/adventure?

I love the system (when I got pulled in via Star Wars), but won't pretend I don't still rely heavily on someone else's fantasy setting because it is "complete" and "ready to run".

I'd say both Genesys and a Realms of Terrinoth are a full kit. I mean, the setting is there, weapons and gear are there, archetypes are there, there's a list of adversaries you can utilize (and you can always borrow from Star Wars if you need something else, as the majority of those are pretty general). You could even file the serial numbers off of a DnD adventure and run that, seeing as Runebound is so similar in concept.