Thank you, Brad. Great review, it very much mirrors my sentiments and makes my own unfinished review somewhat redundant. So I will give my take here instead.
First off, I am owner of the Solis softcover, delivered through the spanish printer of Lulu. I have not played this game yet, but I'm looking forward to do so. My biggest beef with the game is in the presentation department and it's where some disagreements with Brad will occur. That's because I have even less friendly things to say than Brad.
Reign could have been a beautiful, above average game, but unfortunatly it is not. Brad said all about the cover, so I will only add that my printing is not skewed and looking good. The interior art is beautiful, evocative, black and white ink and pencil art. Unfortunatly it did not survive Lulu's printing process. For whatever reason Lulu opted to print the book on cheap paper, using a very bland photo repro printer. Everything that should be black is in fact a dark, dark gray. The paper is also not very well cut and the overall impression is one of copy shop. This is aggravated by the fact that the designer, probably unsuspecting, used a lot of decorative borders, gradients and bleeds. All of them suffered from the poor printing processes at Lulu. The (glue) binding, OTOH, seems to be sturdy and durable. Just like Brad I blame the lackluster final result on Lulu, too, but I also want to point out that this has not to be the case. My other books from Lulu, Don't Rest Your Head (softcover) and Spirit of the Century (hardcover) don't suffer from these setbacks.
Anyway, what hardly can be blamed on the printer is the overloaded layout of the book, the poor choice of fonts and an unconventional and often confusing content organization. Brad seems to like that, but I don't
I guess that a lot of work and good intention went into it, but all it does is to create a busy and hard to navigate book. At least four different fonts (a bad serif -- probably Linotype's Times Roman used on Apples, a font optimized for screen display but not printing -- two bad sans-serif and a nice fancy serif font) have been used to denote contentual separation but the separation is not kept up all the time, e. g. examples, sidebars, optional rules and tables all use the same sans-serif font at one time or the other. Big graphical elements are used to mark boxes, breakouts and sidebars but those are also not consistent. The basic page layout is confusing, there are pages with one, two or occasionally three columns plus sidebars here and there, often changing every other page.
There are many, many detailed tables of content available but not a single unified one. The way those tables are presented makes them hard to use, showing confusing formating, surprising order and yet another font type. I found that I don't use them very much.
Another point I disagree with Brad is that the mixing of rules and setting information was a good idea. For me they break the flow of reading and just require me to flip through the book to get to the next rules or setting chapter. Here the idea of the split table of contents clearly presents itself, still I would have preferred a more conventinoal approach.
Not all is bad, though. Brad already mentioned the funky in-chapter page indicator at the top and a useful but somewhat sparse index at the end of the book. And even if the book is not as beautiful and organized as it could have been, it is still useable and durable.
For style I would rate this as a 2. There are many good ideas and qualities in there, but the final result, with a clear understanding of Lulu's shortcomings here, just requires more work. The art is beautiful, though, but alone it can't push Reign any higher.
With regards to content I also mostly agree with Brad and all I want to say is that this is my first contact with the ORE and you can get a game, Nemesis, using it
here. It certainly is crunchy with a lot of fiddly bits and it brings a few wonky probabilities to the table, but nothing you can't deal with. Especially because Mr. Stolze really went the extra mile to explain why and how a rule or mechanic works. Generally I want to point out how much useful advice on many RPG topics is contained in this book. E. g. while the magic chapter certainly is, like Brad said, slim, the discussion of what magic systems can do to a game and setting is a good inspirational read and gives you a solid framework to extend the given samples. You'll find such small gems throughout the book, sometimes hidden in a small paragraph, sometimes very present in a breakout. So, to come to an end, Brad is right, substance is good. 4 points are well deserved.
I know this is not really in line with what forum posts usually do, but I hope this additional opinion was useful to some of you.
I hadn't noticed that the roman font was Times (though to be fair it's not one that's optimised for display, but still a pretty inelegant roman) and will point out that (review in the queue) the supplements are set in Palatino, which is substantially prettier to my eye.
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