How is that, by the way? Obviously you dig it....but do you mind elaborating?
It's bloody brilliant. They've taken GUMSHOE and done something really interesting with it. The Investigative pools, rather than just finding clues, are treated more like little nuggets of narrative control and apply to, well, everything. Rather than an exhaustive preview, I'll just highlight some of my favorite things about the game.
Character generation is a hoot - there's a lot of narrative involved, not that it takes very long, but the design is that you should be able to read the character sheet and have a really good idea who that character is without additional backstory. And it works. It's also a free form system, and while there are classes, they are more like templates rather than silos and you have access to the full range of character mechanics with every character. There's also a really nice tension between specialization and breadth of skill for char gen that manages to do both well without really favoring one over the other.
In combat, attacks versus morale (talking) are treated equally to melee combat, and they use the same rules, and sorcery does one or the other depending on the type. It's a
great system. The game generally runs on an economy of Investigative pool spends that are occasionally partially refreshed during play (via roleplaying) and refresh completely between adventures (not necessarily between sessions). It's a neat way to handle resource management.
There is both a flashback mechanic and an "of course I have that, it's right here in my pack..." mechanic, so it's a very smooth system for running intrigue and heist type stuff.
The rules for allies and factions are really good and they're treated as a stat with a full range of associated mechanics. They have useful specific in-game uses and still provide solid adventure hooks. The game generally does a really good job with social stuff. It's possible, for example, to make a character who's primary skill is high ranks in various allies, which would make them 'important people' and as such they can use their ally pools to actually do stuff during a session.
Anyway, that's not by a long shot all the stuff I like about it. I haven't even started talking about the fantastic setting. I know it sounds like there are a lot of mechanics, but it's really not that crunchy and I find the whole thing very intuitive. If you want more granularity there's a
great thread about the game over on RPG.net that gets daily attention from one of the two designers, Kevin Kulp, and he'll answer questions and spitball about hacks and whatever with whomever stops by.
I use a lot of books for a lot of things. Here's a list of stuff I've at least cracked in the past week in the course of doing something RPG related:
But I am usually up for trying new ones:
