It does what it has to do succinctly and moves right along. The introduction, at one page, is barely long enough to cover the heavily-treaded ground of explaining RPGs and the lot. This, of course, brings us to those “hard rules.” The book breaks into a brief introduction, five chapters and an index. The layout, while Spartan, does the job for this kind of “hard rules” book. All in all, the art holds up well both in quantity and quality. There are some misses, particularly on the sci-fi pieces. I still enjoy seeing similar fates befall Daffy Duck and I find myself enjoying them in this book. One suffers from hypothermia while another receives an electric shock. These doomed little cartoon avatars must suffer the various damages that could befall characters. The comic characters at first seemed odd to me, but they grew quickly on me. The art ranges from martial artist dragons to anime coolness to downright comic silliness. The artwork, derived from a stable of six illustrators, seems to enjoy the fact that it rests inside a generic system’s corebook. Like most, my first impression of the book came through a skimming. It’s a modest read at eighty-seven pages. The first book in the HDL line is strictly the nuts and bolts of Boyle’s system. HDL Universal Tactical Role-Playing Game Basic Rules I’ll try to separate these books for clarity’s sake, but I suspect I’ll have to trip back and forth between them on occasion. The exact products I’m including are the HDL Basic Rules, Perfect Horizon, Demongate High, the HDL cards, and Lucid: Dreamscape Reality. I normally tackle one product at a time however, Sean Boyle’s line of HDL games is so entwined with one another that it’s simply easier to treat them as one massive project.
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