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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malacoda" data-source="post: 1043476" data-attributes="member: 6345">I have had the book for a few days now, and these are my general impressions:Ugly. I do not find the book visually appealing. The cover is fairly good, but the insides do not look good at all. Weird spacing and margin choices, with headers that I do not find distinctive enough. Plus, I don't like most of the art. Even Sam Wood, an artist I like, doesn't seem to be in top form.I dislike much of the skill section, as I feel Monte made some odd choices on what skills to keep and pitch, especially as compared to 3.5e.  He got rid of Read Lips completely, but kept Innuendo and Intuit Direction?The races, while different from the generic D&D races, are generic in their own ways, with a few exceptions. Overall, the races didn't do much for me, and I can't see using any of them.A lot of the classes look interesting. The one exception is the Warmain, which strikes me as Monte basically admitting you need Fighters in most campaigns, since the differences seem negligible.Magic looks cool, but sometimes seems ill-defined. For example, do all spellcasters know all spells they could theoretically know? Do Mageblades know all the spells they have access, should they be of sufficient level? Or do they have to go out and learn them? What about the others?Magic, out of all the new stuff, seems to be the most problematic when it comes to integrating with D&D. I do not think this is a crime, since it allows Monte to go different directions. My one real serious complaint is the idea that spells themselves are less powerful for a given level in most situations (which I have not seen as of yet, but many people say it), which means the spells don't compare to D&D spells well. I think sticking with the same power/utility for a given spell level would have been preferable. Who knows, though, perhaps those people are wrong.Unless I am reading wrong, most spellcasters seem capable of readying more spells than they can cast. This is not an "error," I suppose, but it is not how I expected it to work.Ultimately, it seems to me that AU is going to be much harder to integrate into D&D than I feel we were lead to believe. It has a lot of interesting ideas, and I have not truly dug into the meat of some sections, but I am still, currently, disappointed. I also dislike the fact that the guidelines for integrating the new rules into a D&D game are going to be in a different book. Yeah, yeah, it's a company, make a living, and so on, but I still believe those guidelines should be a free download; many people likely bought it thinking such guidelines would be unnecessary.</blockquote>

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