Alright so, I got this game in the Trans Rights In Florida Bundle a while ago and finally got around to reading it only recently.
I thought this games Premise was incredibly strong, a more Meta Layer ttrpg that leans into God-Game type stuff in a way that hooks directly into the game mechanics themselves had been in my brain for a long time, and I might still end up doing a pitch on it myself. However, maybe it was just because I was personally too excited, but this execution leaves something to be desired for me.
I found a lot of the ideas here genuinely inspired, my personal favorite is Seer who as a player charecter gains the ability to roll on random generation/event tables as a player charecter. That perfectly pairs the "Old School RPG" games this is rooted with the high minded and arcane ideas its specific take has. Rulebook in strategist also achieves this to similar ends with the rulebook feat, using the simplicity of rules in these older games to its advantage by allowing you to twist them or invoke them at will. I also enjoyed almost all of the npc rules, the villains being based on popular negative player types was extremely cute and while I am usually a bit hesitant around symmetrical enemies and players I feel like it works in this case. The Archetype NPCs are all spectacular, and often made me smile. I do wish there were some more explicit rules as to things like "non-meta npc exclusive features" since all that is really listed is immunity when things like magic are called out as existing.
I suppose my core... issue with this game is that I feel like despite its high minded and metaphysical premise and aesthetics, this game will mostly just play and act like a normal Old School RPG, which is cool if that was what you came for but I was hoping for something a lot more narratively focused on that "weirdness". I feel like the games this wants you to play is like "this is a normal adventure game, but both you and the antagonists are secretly also weird cosmic beings" when I feel like there was a lot of potential to a game where you just Are Weird Cosmic Beings Adventuring. Like it has a mostly normal leveling system, which is... fine I suppose but I feel like the game could have gotten away with starting you off extremely powerful with a premise like this. Honestly, If you wanted to fully commit to the bit of you being a cosmic entity pretending to be an adventurer you could make the entire "feat list" base kit for all METAs of that type, and then stack a more "normal" rpg class on top of that which does do traditional leveling and stuff.
In general the games seems alright!!! For all my criticism the game seems like it would be fun to sit down and play with some friends and has a lot of neat little ideas in it that I just feel could have been explored further.
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