So I need to separate out gameplay from lore, because judgement of TTRPG gameplay is 1. highly subjective and driven by personal taste and 2. really hard to judge accurately without playing the game. Also because the level of effort spent on the gameplay portion of this TTRPG and the lore part of this TTRPG are clearly different. (Hiding the rest of this under the readmore because it's going to get long and maybe people don't want to be spoiled? Just in case, stuff comes up from games all the way through Daybreak 2. I will make the spoilers as light as possible.)
Gameplay wise, the Trails TTRPG is a hack of the Promethium System, which is a brand new system from Promethium Books, an indie TTRPG publisher.
For background: There is a single lead designer credited for the system, not uncommon for indie systems, but a little bit of a red flag for me for a licensing deal. There are a few other TTRPG red flags: the publisher has one prior system and a 5e hack listed on their site, no con appearances, very infrequent updates to their website/socials, and they tweeted the announced cover with "art subject to change" still stamped on it after the artist had tweeted it on their socials, obviously excited. None of these are damning, but overall they seem to indicate some inexperience and a lack of interest in connecting with the broader TTRPG community, which concerns me for a licensing deal where the usual goal is to reach out to non-TTRPG players that are fans of the original IP. So I had some hesitations even before I got to the book.
But back to the gameplay. This is a very crunchy system.
(For people who don't spend too much time with D&D nerds, crunch is used to describe how many rules/mechanics and so on a system has. Pathfinder is crunchier than D&D 5e which is crunchier than Monster of the Week which is crunchier than One-Page RPGs like Honey Heist. The amount of crunch that is acceptable will vary by person by day. If you're about rules of cool and don't want to read a bunch, rules-light systems are probably going to be more fun for you. The min-maxers usually prefer the crunchier systems. (I personally like the middle.))
The main rolls are 1d20 + a bonus die when applicable (from skills,etc.). The number to beat to succeed is called a Victory Sum (VS). The bonus dice default at d10, but they can be improved various ways up to a d100. The lowest suggested VS is 5 and the highest is 150 (when they get to rolling those d100). That number is ABSURDLY large for a D20 system. Even with Pathfinder flat mods, the highest number I remember seeing was like 60. There is also no level limit. No bounded accuracy here! I personally find this design choice questionable at best, due to the tendency for players to try to only do one or two kinds of checks (because there is no possible way to succeed otherwise). Other people may love it. This is very much a matter of taste. This system also has a burst mechanic if you're familiar with those from d10 systems. There's also a mechanic called Destined, which essentially behaves as a critical success. Given that there are multiple ways to get Destined, it's too complicated for me to summarize here.
It's also a highly simulationalist system. There are rules for traveling, and swimming, and environmental hazards, and reputation tracking, and how much food you need to eat in a day, and suffocating, and so on and so on. These feel like unnecessary carry over from the original system which probably has more of a traditional medieval setting. In a setting as urbanized as Zemuria, it's just a bunch of unnecessary bulk. (Again, this is my opinion.) There are also sixteen damage types, which is just overkill, especially given the source material uses 9 (more on this later).
Character building starts with assigning two tarot cards for character background and personality. Then they are assigned elemental affinities, connections (NPCs and factions), Temperament, Ability Scores, Reputation, Guard & Ward (like AC in D&D/Pathfinder, also DEF and ADF from Trails), Armor Rank (I think this is like the Daybreak shields but I had to skim this book is 500 pages), Durability & Health (like Stamina and HP in some other systems), Vigor & Mana (these are poor substitutes for CP), Orbal Energy (for some reason they don't call this EP???), Skills & Talents. And then there are custom crafts and orbment lines.
This is a LOT. Because it's a crunchy system. The skill trees and the talent trees and the craft building system have a lot of overlap, and it's just way too much to wade through. The factions and reputation system is overly structured and hierarchical, having players jump from lower tier to higher tier organizations as rewards. There are so many pages of weapons and armor and options. I have issues with the orbments as well but that can be saved for a later day.
But this is the point where I need to start talking about the two serious flaws of this specific TTRPG book: their understanding and incorporation of Trails lore is haphazard at best, and they didn't bother doing a professional edit.
For edits, I am usually pretty tolerant of typos and grammar mistakes, but there are reasonable limits. We've passed them. Things like: spelling "Adios" as "Aidios". And "Kruga" as "Kurga". And including the phrase "Eisen Schilt (sometimes rendered as Eisenschild)" multiple times. They refer to Fie as Rutger's son at one point. There are references to things being determined by your species - a concept that doesn't even exist in this book, much less Trails. This is clearly a case of taking an existing system and carelessly slapping Trails onto it. If I can find these continuity errors skimming through one day, I imagine a professional and diligent editor would find enough to make these pages bleed red ink.
And the lore errors. Oh. Adios above. There are so many lore errors. It got to the point in the setting chapter that EVERY SINGLE ENTRY had a lore mistake. Every one. The Bracer Guild has three founding dates. The Epstein foundation is now in Liberl. President Dieter Crois is in charge of the IBC, except the Crossbell section states that it's currently annexed by Erebonia. Aramis is now an entertainment city in Calvard. The faction section tells you that you can join Iscariot from the Gralsritter (lmao, imagine). Also there are now 22 stigmas instead of 12 but the church acknowledges 13. Ored now has Hot Springs! (Remember that Azure sidequest where Xin asks about these and it's a trick question? I sure do.) The only thing they seemed to put effort into getting right was the generations of orbments.
Were seven elements not enough for you? Don't worry, they added more! The new elements are Ash, Ice, Lightning, Wood, Divine, Divergent, and Salt Pale. Yes, you read that right, the Salt Pale is an elemental affinity now. (But only in the first list, in the affinity chapter it is suddenly missing!). The additional elements don't line up with the damage types.
They also just... make up things? Which is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, but unfortunately they tried creating a company called the Tyrell Corporation that was monitoring abuses in Crossbell during annexation. There's also a White God One Blade School. Magic exists outside of orbments and the Hexen Clan, and now alchemists can make quartz using their occult skill. And they get a low level ability to analyze artifacts.
The continuity of Trails is pretty well-established at this point, and Trails fans are probably going to notice this egregious level of wrong. It's so wrong, and so inconsistently wrong, and sloppy; that reading through it has me convinced that all of the flavor sections are either AI or bad machine translation or both.
This TTRPG is an overly-complicated mess that doesn't bother to even do the bare minimum edit and fact-checking. At the very least someone skipped an edit or 500. At worst, they used AI for like 80% of the text. It is not worth your money, or your time, or even your consideration. If you would like to play Trails as a TTRPG, let me know because I can recommend systems to hack and how to do it. Please don't use this.
To close, my personal favorite Hall of Shame moment from this clusterfuck:
germansingergirl
blakekathryn
snowghoul
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
