On RPG.Net the user Inamoena Tempora has posted the first review of Greg Stolze's REIGN. And he likes it. 

"Okay, I've just read it (6 hours for 350 pages...I admit I cut out most of the flavor text. So I won't comment on that).

I'll start with the bad things. There are a few screwed-up page references within the text and a tiny amount of typos. Taking into account the size of the book and the amount of people involved, I'd say this is frickin' impressive.

Then there's a few things within the setting that left me go "meh", such as men riding horses only with a sidesaddle, as riding astride "makes them impotent", or so they believe. So, cavalry usually consists only women and castrates.

(I could rave a bit about the masculinity of sitting astride on a horse and poking your enemies with a 12-foot long phallic implement of death, but you're here to hear about the game, so I'll leave it at this.)

Also, Mr Stolze can congratulate himself for inventing the most strangely shaped fantasy world since the inception of Great A'tuin and the Discworld. I won't spoil the surprise here, let's just say that the Geography is Wierd with a capital W. And so are the oddities in seafaring and day/nightcycles that result from this. Oh, and don't get me started on the location of that lightless jungle. I'll probably never get that "armpit" analogy out if my mind for as long as I own the book.

But, as it is written in the book, the setting is largely optional and can be discarded without a second thought. Would be a shame, because the description of the nations and the schools of magic are quite flavourful, which leads us to the...

Things I liked:
We all know the ORE, and those who don't can always download and read Nemesis. It's a fast, simple system on which Reign is built. But Reign doesn't just use a direct port of Nemesis ORE, it actually improves upon it in a variety of ways.

The Skill List has been culled. There are around 30 skills now, and all of them are useful and likely to find a place within a game of Reign (and if you find yourself not using one, there's a nice rules option dealing with cashing in unused skills and using those points for something more useful).

Several "Esoteric Disciplines" exist (Nation-scaled mooching and rendering your opponents harmless with a few well-placed jokes are among them), which are similar to Exalted's Charms, but ivolve a lot less bookkeeping and still work within the basic resolution mechanic without tacking on extra rules.

There are also several "Combat Secrets", which do the same for combat-related skills. No flashy displays of eldritch energies here, but they do get the job done and all of them look like they'd be useful at one point or another.

Speaking of combat, Reign introduces a set of "mook rules" into the ORE. Those rules are perfect for fighting larger groups of faceless rabble, treating them as a single entity when it comes to fighting. There are also some very nice moral attack rules, making it easy to disperse hordes of said faceless rabble with gruesome martial displays or devastating magic. The rules work best for group sizes between 10 and 30, but can accomodate larger amounts of people without slowing down.

Combat itself has been tweaked a bit and isn't as downright nasty and deadly as it was in Nemesis. The chance of randomly losing limbs is much lower now, as befitting to the Theme. It's also the first time that I have seen a game embrace the concept of a "finishing move", and attaching an actual in-game effect to it. (For the curious: going medieval on somebody's ass while his friend are watching is very likely to make them run in fear.) And not only that, even war cries and thrash talk are covered by some very simple rules.

And then there is the company system, which allows you to do all the fun things you ever wanted to do with your power, but left the GM sweating in fear at the amount of work involved. The company rules are very abstract, boiling down each organization into a set of 5 stats. But it covers all the options with a minimum of fuss and hassle. Mass combat? No problem. Raiding the neighbouring tribe and stealing their cows? Reign has you covered. Building schools? You can. Burning the enemies fields and poisoning his wells? There's an option for that. Brainwashing the people into accepting your doctrine? Just roll, man. There might not be many minutiae involved, but then again, the KISS principle works well here and prevents the game from becoming a mess of stats, rolls and bookkeeping.

Reign also provides a magic system, tailored to it's background world. The schools of magics presented are nicely done and quite flavourful. They also allow the players to play characters that are not quite human anymore, as attuning oneself permanently to a certain school of magic brings some rather peculiar...changes to one's body.

There's also a chapter near the end that covers poisons, falling, drowning, freezing to death and other sundry methods of character damaging, along with a footnote on why having characters starve to death is a stupid idea for the GM. I'd love to have seen a few more exotic poisons, but what is in there is a good basis to built upon and provides enough benchmarks to design your own.

There's also a short bestiary, covering animals that are only dangerous in large groups (and use the mook rules, accordingly), as well as more normal critters (with notes on how to train them; yes, you can have your very own pet attack tiger) and even two that use company rules (the notorious Hulgue and some overgrown demonspawn...they're just THAT big.)

Greg's writing is top-notch, I chuckled at quite a few decriptions in the book. (My favourite is the one in the "disfiguring strike" manoeuvre. Yeah, I'm a bit wierd.)

What can I say? I'm impressed. This is the System I wish they would have used for Exalted. Simple, fast, clean, with minimal bookkeeping involved. The background sprouts a few oddities, but it's interesting and flavourful, and it avoids the Tolkien pastiché so common to fantasy systems those days. Also, since the rules are very modular, you can use them to play whatever fantasy setting you had in mind, even crossing genre borders with all the other ORE publications available. Heck, you can simply lift the company rules wholesale and paste them onto your favorite game system without too much of a hassle.

This is one fantasy RPG I actually like, and this comes from a man who has harboured an utter dislike of fantasy RPGs in general for the last 10 years(*).

Splendid job, Mr Stolze. May your ransom be fulfilled in the next 48 hours and may you continue to bring us many more fine games like this."

Read the original review on RPG.Net