[John P.]

Pretty good review all in all. I liked how the reviewer assesed the game on its own merits, rather than in relevance to Ascension.

That said, about the magic system, i think that its biggest issue is not that it is vague, at least as far as the more free form magic systems go. It is certainly a lot more clear about various topics that Ascension left undefined, or very losely defind.

It's more that it teaches you how to do magic in a way that is, for me, counter-intuitive. Instead of having the major part of its focus on the underlying principles of the Arcana and using sample spells primarily as a tool to help you become familiar with sai principles, it goes the other way around. The principles are very loosely defined, some times to the point of being practically meaningless, whereas the sample spells are very extensive. It's kinda like trying to teach someone trigonometry, and instead of giving him clear trigonometrical rules and a handful of actual triangles to test them on, you give him lots and lots of triangles and let him comeup with the gneral rules by himself. This is hardly productive, because in that later case, not only will he never be secure in what the rules are, but he'll also hae to redefine them whenever he's presented with a new, slightly different, triangle.