My Review on Navathem’s End

The Game:

• Attributes and Values:

• The three attributes Blood, Crown and Will are great, with how they have skills attached to them in both role-playing and combat

• For the Harm and Armor system, I can see inspiration from the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game, and I feel that Navathem improves on it further.

• Dice System

• I've seen the usage of d6's in their previous work, and I'm not opposed to it.

• Being able to keep advantage tokens is pretty great, and resetting them at dawn is a nice balance.  

• EXP System:

• I really like that EXP is gained from role-play rather than just from enemies, It really puts an emphasis on connecting with your character and the world to advance. 

• I like that progress is split into attributes, skills and veterancy. I mean looking at three bars going up is much better than one bar, plus there is more player expression through it, I can make a character that fully focuses on the veterancy gauge, which would be pretty fun to see.

• Combat System:

• I can’t fully review the combat system without experiencing it for myself, however my first impressions are that it seems very fun, with enemy tags bringing a different kind of difficulty, as opposed to the normal HP system most RPGs have.

The World

• I really like the world-building here, no continent feels out of place and they are all very interesting

• Once you find a place that you like, you become very invested in it, I am also happy that there are also given origins for these continents/places, it really brings out the hard work of the world builders here.

• It’s really easy to envision what the world of Navathem looks like even without the illustrations, which is pretty great.

Character Creation:

• Expression

• I was able to create the character that I wanted, and that’s what matters to me the most. 

• Skills and Abilities

•  The Skills and Abilities are pretty great, I especially loved the weapon creation skills.

GM Systems:

• Enemy Generation:

• Tags make it very easy to create any enemy very quickly and I feel that this is very important. It also helps that the only things GM’s have to memorize for enemies is the difficulty and what tags they have.

• Mission Making / Story:

• As I was reading the Campaign seeds, my mind immediately started thinking of how I would use this story, so I really liked them.

• Missions have a clear structure to them. even though Navathem is designed for long time play, it is very easy to create one-off stories thanks to Missions.

• NPC Generation:

• The Tower Building section really helps beyond what the tower needs, you could create non-tower NPCs based on tower NPC questions and no one would question it.

The Book

• Arrangement: one thing that I didn’t really like but fully understood was that the tower building wasn’t connected to the character creation section. I can understand the reasoning for the placement. It’s just that I feel character creation would feel more streamlined without page jumping.

• One of the major aspects of the book I appreciated were the script examples, they were very informative and fun to read.

Points for Appreciation:

• Windback: I appreciate the Windback system as a means of ensuring that everyone has a fun time playing and as a course correct for GMs.

• Emphasis on safe spaces: This is one of the first Tabletop role-playing games I've seen that puts player safety first, with how it reminds GM’s to talk with their players, and Windback being a great tool to reassess and improve. I say that this should be a standard in all games.

Recommendations:

• A preferred music list: unsure if it’s allowed to be added to the book itself, but it would be nice to have a list of recommended themes to play while playing.