It's a beautiful book. The amount of information is just staggering. Anything you could ever want to know about the provinces is in this book. Also, it seems like the editing has really improved since the core book.

Sounds great! Was this an early release copy, or did you get it at your local store?

More details please. As the rest of us wait for our copies to arrive would love to hear a review/thoughts on the book.

CanadianPittbull said:

I'm very happy with the level of detail they give each territory. Right down to the percentages of the various nationalities present in the province. There are a variety of story seed and adventure ideas sprinkled throughout each section. The only issue with this is that there really isn't much of a breakdown as to what a player should know and what a GM should know. So say that place X is secretly a Y, they'll just mention that spoiler so anyone who wanted to read about place X will automatically be spoiled.

The sections on the various languages are nice, and I like the idea of having to have specific requirements before knowing some of the more obscure languages.

The religions are basically just copy-pasted from real world religions. But that's not entirely a bad thing, since they all add a sense of diversity to the world.

A big problem I've noticed is that the book suffers from the same poor editing as the core book. Nearly all of the stats on Arlan are in Spanish, which doesn't matter too much since you can cross-reference it to another area's writeup. I just feel like they should know better by now.

They advertised a number of different rules but most, like the rules for trails, pacts of the dragon, and fame, are entirely forgettable and don't do much for the game. The advantages and disadvantages are nice, even if none of them have any real mechanical benefit. My favorite being Ancient Blood, making your character a distant blood relation to the people of Solomon.

Thanks for the quick response Yanma! Looking forward to the book even more. Sucks about some of the issues but they sound pretty easily workable. I think at this point just getting more Anima material is enough for me. As far as the spoilers are concerned I will read the book first and then if the players want to know more about an location or what have you I can direct them as to how far they can read and what they can read on that end.

Again your thoughts and response are appreciated!

Yanma said:

Thanks for the quick review. Too bad about the editing, but I think Anima fans have (unfortunately) gotten used to it.

Can you tell us what the Pacts of the Dragon are? I mean, don't worry about mechanics or posting the actual powers or anything, but are they similar to Invocations or are they closer to Elan?

Just Got It In The Mail Yesterday, Just Got To Get Time To Read.