Xend'rik:

If your'e talking about the Xendrik book (Secret's of Xendrik?) I think your fears might be unfounded. It presents a few monsters, some sample locations and some jungle rules, and just a bit about Stormreach but it's fairly sparse. More toolkit then gazeteer.

However, not that great of a book. I think it's ok.

Xend'rik Expeditions on the other hand is very cool. It's not a product, it's a new "living" campaign you can play at cons and stuff. It has four opposed factions and an interesting metagame: normally you adventure along with your own faction to complete faction goals, and then sometimes they have feature adventures called "Expeditions" where the group is mixed up between factions and you have to work together, while simultaneously accomplishing your own factions secret goals. So there's a competitive element. Very cool for an RPGA organized D&D campaign.

Best of 2006: I say Faery's Tale.

Worst/funniest of 2006: weird self-loathing and wallowing in gamer-hatred from those Story-Games fucks.

Quote from: WarthurI'm playing in a campaign of this at the moment. The basic combat and task resolution systems ended up being less complicated than we expected, although the magic is still puzzling us. (For example, while the game presents a huge array of martial arts styles, once you've chosen which class your character will be and what stats he'll focus on the choice is narrowed down a lot.)

What's really getting to us is how poorly the rulebook is organised. I'm going to have to get some post-it notes and put little bookmarks on all the pages on the rulebook I need to refer to frequently.

You know, from the author's name, that the game is going to be crap.

You don't know just how much crap it is till you try to read the fucking thing.

But then you REALLY don't know how much crap it is, until you get and read Qin.

Qin is so unbelievably awesome that its like shining a spotlight on the huge mountain of crap that is Weapons of the Gods.

RPGPundit

Weapons of the Gods has classes?!  Color me baffled.

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!I am getting a serious, unsettling Serenity vibe offa this.

...and you'd be about right.  i mean, i'm certainly glad to see others (like Warthur) getting some mileage off the thing, and the book is certainly interesting to read in places, but it's one of those games where, when you start reading the rules, you immediately think "christ, maybe i'll run this with Risus."  (or maybe that was just me...)

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!I am getting a serious, unsettling Serenity vibe offa this.

Yeah, but from what I understand, at least MRQ, sparse as it is, did sacrifice the space for one of those brilliantly worthless full page adds to have a character sheet.

Quote from: SosthenesWeapons of the Gods was rather disappointing.

Although came out at this time in 2005 (at least in the UK) so probably doesn't count...

For me, hmmm, not really had any particular disappointments this year RPG-wise, other than having so little opportunity to play regularly that is!

Quote from: jrientsWeapons of the Gods has classes?!  Color me baffled.

Warrior, Courtier, and Scholar.

Quote from: JongWKEDIT: Speaking of True20, the Pocket Player's Guide is available now. I haven't been able to find out if it includes the setting-specific crunch (something tells me that it doesn't, which means the book's value as a toolbox goes down a big notch).

The book contains neither the settings or the GM advice chapter and bestiary found in  the True20 hardcover according to GR reps on the True20 forums.

On topic, let me nominate Cadwallon. This is an aesthetically beautiful RPG marred completely by clumsy writing and poor editing, which makes the rather high price tag more than a bit insulting. The errors were so grievous that the publisher has already committed to do a revised edition in the near future (though no date has been set yet).

I flubbed my last post. The "third after Magic" was in reference to Dragonmarked.

Quote from: Abyssal MawXend'rik:
Xend'rik Expeditions on the other hand is very cool. It's not a product, it's a new "living" campaign you can play at cons and stuff. It has four opposed factions and an interesting metagame: normally you adventure along with your own faction to complete faction goals, and then sometimes they have feature adventures called "Expeditions" where the group is mixed up between factions and you have to work together, while simultaneously accomplishing your own factions secret goals. So there's a competitive element. Very cool for an RPGA organized D&D campaign.

It looks better than most, but a lot of stuff was banned not because it was game-breaking, but because it _looked_ game-breaking. The Master Specialist PRC from Complete Mage is one example. The CharOp boards at Wizards.com (an entire board of people who specialise in breaking games) has an ongoing thread discussing the choices the designers made, and finding a great deal of fault with them - ignoring truly potentially problematic combinations while banning anything that looks scary without regard to how it plays.

True 20- the game is not as good as I first thought and the settings are absolute crap.

MRQ- Biggest disapointment in quite sometime for me.

I'd also say the new RuneQuest is a stinker, for two reasons:

1.) The look of the book is unattractive and uninspiring. RQ is a major RPG, with decades of legacy behind it. It should rate better art and design.

2.) While the actual game looks decent, it seems rather thin and bereft of personality. It should have included more about rune magic and the original setting, Glorantha. One of the things I felt distinguished RQ from other major RPGs was how the game system and setting were so intertwined. While this is something that other games have done, I think RQ did it the best.

True20: I still think it's a pretty nifty system and the best iteration of classes-and-levels d20 yet produced, but the product as published has two crippling flaws.  One, the writeup of the damage track and Toughness rules is complete ass... which is unforgiveable considering that it's essentially the same as the assworthy version that everyone complained about in the original PDF for months before the hardback was printed.  In most games I'd play using the True20 system, having clear and easy-to-use rules for combat damage is pretty vital so this does a lot to kill the game for me.

Two, the sample settings range from competent but IMO completely uninteresting (Caliphate Nights, Mecha vs Kaiju), to disappointingly subpar (Lux Aeternum), to incomprehensibly bad (Borrowed Time).  Honestly, given the potential for pseudo-generic sample settings that would help make the game more applicable to a wide variety of gamers' needs, I can't imagine why GR greenlighted some of the ill-conceived crap in the last quarter of the book.  I'd rather have no samples at all than have Lux Aeternum or Borrowed Time taking up space!

KoOS

Quote from: King of Old SchoolTrue20: I still think it's a pretty nifty system and the best iteration of classes-and-levels d20 yet produced, but the product as published has two crippling flaws.  One, the writeup of the damage track and Toughness rules is complete ass... which is unforgiveable considering that it's essentially the same as the assworthy version that everyone complained about in the original PDF for months before the hardback was printed.  In most games I'd play using the True20 system, having clear and easy-to-use rules for combat damage is pretty vital so this does a lot to kill the game for me.

Two, the sample settings range from competent but IMO completely uninteresting (Caliphate Nights, Mecha vs Kaiju), to disappointingly subpar (Lux Aeternum), to incomprehensibly bad (Borrowed Time).  Honestly, given the potential for pseudo-generic sample settings that would help make the game more applicable to a wide variety of gamers' needs, I can't imagine why GR greenlighted some of the ill-conceived crap in the last quarter of the book.  I'd rather have no samples at all than have Lux Aeternum or Borrowed Time taking up space!

KoOS

I love the game, and I listed it in the best of thread, but I agree with all of this too.  
I am hoping for a second edition that fixes all of this, but the idea of spending money on such a thing pisses me off too.
We worked though the damage stuff, but it wasn't easy, and we might even be doing it wrong.

Quote from: ColonelHardissonThe look of the book is unattractive and uninspiring. RQ is a major RPG, with decades of legacy behind it. It should rate better art and design.

Yeah, but once Mongoose was announced as the publisher this was pretty much a given.  I can't think of another major RPG publisher with such a well-deserved reputation for craptacular design and production values.  Whoever does the design work for Mongoose is more than likely both (a) colour-blind, and (b) thinks the highwater mark for graphic design was reached in the late 1980s and should be consistently emulated today.  Of course, they make up for the crappy look of their books by giving them crappy editing and crappy bindings.

Matt Sprange seems like a decent enough fellow I suppose, but for me Mongoose is the very embodiment of lowest-common-denominator, cut-rate crap (for premium prices, too!) in RPG development.  I wouldn't touch a Mongoose product with a ten-foot pole.

KoOS