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Degenesis: Rebirth Edition
DEGENESIS - REBIRTH EDITION SLIPCASE PRIMAL PUNK 352 Pages, Full Color Introduction into the world of Degenesis, it's Cultures, Cults and the history of the world, featuring two A3 sized maps for Europe, Africa, and the Protectorate. KATHARSYS 352 Pages, Full Color Features
704 pages, Hardcover
First published October 10, 2014
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December 7, 2017Took me almost a year to work my way through this behemoth, mostly in lunch breaks or quiet shifts at work - an incredible graphic work of lore and design, but as a game book I'm not as convinced. The entire first book is dedicated to the lore and world of Degenesis, the second book is, on the face of it, dedicated to the system (KatharSys) that the game runs on - however, it fluctuates wildly between rule explanations/systems and more loredumps. I'll probably never run the game, but goodness me the books are pretty.
February 22, 2023
Whew! Ok, where to begin? Man, this is going to be tough.
This review is for the two-volume core set of Degenesis, which in total amounts to about the page count under this listing (some zealous soul must have added it as one book to Goodreads' catalog; also the chapter numbering is consecutive between both books, i.e., book two starts on chapter 5, which leads one to believe they are intended as one thing by the authors). It took me months to navigate it, put up with it and make sense of it. This was NOT an easy, casual read. The writing is remarkably obscure, dense, and intense in ways that sometimes make it unintelligible, and other times make it impossible to put down, if only to find out where all of it is going.
The answer for me, after all this time, is that I'm not quite sure. This is a role-playing game, but with the exception of chapters 6 and 11, nothing about it feels even remotely familiar for anyone who has read roleplaying games before. There are no friendly introductions describing what an RPG is, no glossary of terms, or helpful guidance on how to play. The book dives right into the world and pushes it into your face through a series of vignettes that quickly escalate into chapter-length, in-character descriptions of the setting that don't so much as do you the courtesy of explaining to you what all these terms mean. The whole book is drenched in the lore of the world it's describing, leaving one with the constant sense that you're eavesdropping on a conversation, by people who have a running inside joke going on, which you're not a part of. The style is very dense, and at times quite intricate (the fact that it is a translation from the German is clearly apparent in the way it is structured, with long subordinate clauses opening sentences, and rarely bothering to give you the respite of a comma; the German penchant for making up complex words by clustering smaller words together wasn't entirely weeded out by the "Englishing", either).
When I first started trying to explore Degenesis, I hung out in the official Discord channel for a few weeks, and read many of the avid fans say that the only way to understand this book was to have already read it before. They made it sound as if the first read-through were a sort of leap of faith, unsuitable for the weak of will and heart. Reading this book for the first time is a massive act of trust on the part of the reader to an author that is describing a completely novel, fantastical world that never does what you'll expect it to. In the age of the Internet and ridiculously short attention spans, it beggars belief that anyone but the hardiest, shrewdiest, most committed of people would ever submit themselves to this. Yet I can point you to where they gather, a whole lot of them. And their love for this game is just as intense and over-the-top as you would expect to match such an intellectual commitment as this book demands (those fans are a big part of my beef with this book, but more on that later).
Still, I persisted through the first book, Primal Punk, reading through large swaths at a time trying to connect the pieces, a frustrating exercise to say the least. When I finished I felt like I'd overstuffed myself with turkey at Thanksgiving. IT took me months to allow all of that to percolate down to the point where I could tackle the second one, KatharSys. This book has all the rules, which are precious few (107 pages of the total 702). Other people have reviewed this book as a game and said the same thing I found, i.e., the game system is quite simple from a mechanical perspective, and nothing innovative in terms of what the industry offers. Not having actually played it, I can't say how it would work, but it seems pretty standard. A list of skills subordinated to 6 attributes, all played with D6 dice pools with extra perks on results of 6, and the basic rules for opposed rolls and extended actions. Nothing to see here.
The rest of the book is lore. Drenched in lore, swathed in lore, splashed and dashed and covered in the lore of the world. So what is it about? It's not really apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, although it is a far(fetched)-future Earth that has been shaken not by one, but by a series of cataclysms and catastrophes that have reduced things to a really intricate, dense patchwork of cultures and cults risen from the ashes over and over, made grittier and darker than almost everything else out there. It's futuristic and dystopian, primal and sensual, bleak and hopeless and offering only the short-lived hope that you might live to fight another day before the final, ultimate doom engulfs it all. This is not a game for the faint-hearted, or for anyone that wants happy endings and a salutary feeling of accomplishment upon finishing an adventure or campaign. It's dark.
The art and production values of this game are legendary. These massive, sleek, white hardbacks are beautiful, impressive to behold. The interior art is of magnificent quality, but portrays the world graphically and pulls no punches. There is deformity, full nudity, violence, and a gallery of insanely detailed grotesqueries that, whilst not uncommon for the genre, do stand out for their intense, sharp definition and contrast. Black pages with white text highlight the darkest stuff, both graphic and textual, and together with the layout lend elegance to a product that is obviously unconcerned with what you think about it. This is the reason that I, along with several other people I've met, initially were drawn to this game. People who buy RPGs are always to some degree collectors, and from this perspective, the Degenesis library is nothing less than an objet d'art. The modest line of supplements maintains this standard throughout.
The setting itself is really well thought-out and massively developed. Each of the cultures and cults is fleshed out in intense detail, and their excellent design gives a lot of nuance and option, so that who the bad guys and the good guys are is open to interpretation, depending on where and what you want to focus on. The real evil guys (the "monsters") are so monstrous as to be enticingly alluring. The descriptions of all these elements are engrossing, which is all the more frustrating for the lack of a glossary to refer to, to keep track of who and what everything is. Yet the strange familiarity of these setting elements walks the line between innovation and cliché in ways that leave parts of it reeking of the present. The tone of the book is decidedly postmodern and scientific. Humans have either maintained a level of civilisation that glorifies the current achievements of the dominant culture to an almost romantic extent, or have devolved into superstition that is almost insulting in its baselessness and simplicity. People are either trying to reclaim the pinnacle of civilization or ignorantly sacrificing to pagan idols that mean nothing. Meh. The use of chakras and the tarot, one as the expression of an extraterrestrial life-form bent on world domination through mutation and collective consciousness, the other reimagined as a collection of psychological archetypes to aid in character creation, are both in poor taste in my opinion. Still, they are as well executed as the rest of the elements of the setting, so the whole doesn't suffer from it. It's internally consistent to a degree I've seldom seen in RPG literature, and the authors need to be commended on that.
The question that kept asking itself at the back of my head whilst I was wading through this is, who is this for? In this age of super-compact RPGs, where "rules-lite" is King and the Industry is largely controlled by a toy manufacturer, who has the time to learn all this lore to play, let alone run, this game? This isn't one that you can "harvest for ideas" or "ad-lib" from. Did I mention the lore is dense? When I read an RPG, I am *constantly* mining for ideas, thinking how I'd adapt that or break this, how I'd create X or Y to fill a gap in what I'm reading, how it would look in *my own game*. Degenesis flatly and inelegantly dispenses with this by filling up all the available space with its massive lore. The world is thus. Play in it, but don't change a thing, it seems to say. Here is where my beef with the rabid fans on the Discord server comes in. I've seen people chased off that server for daring to suggest how they'd modify the Degenesis setting or play it with another rules system, and ridiculed for discussing openly what it looks like or means to them. Gatekeeping is such a problem in this hobby; yet Degenesis is unapologetically monolithic and resistant to change. It is a world, a "universe" as its creators call it, which isn't interested in your contributions so much as it is interested in you as a cheering audience. It's take it or leave it; railroading, hard-baked into the game. And the fans love it.
I can already hear the pitchfork mob. And I know what they'd say. "If you don't like it, don't play it." Yes, that is a correct way to deal with dissension in the ranks. But here's the problem: I like this stuff. Despite all its very real problems, I found myself enjoying Degenesis (after around page 600, when it finally started to make *some* sense...), but I still had that question in the back of my head: who can I play this with? Most people I know and play with don't have the time, the patience or the inclination to learn this much stuff *for a game*. Those fans that I mentioned would tear me apart with their superior and more perfect knowledge of the setting in the first session, because *I* don't have the time or the inclination to master it to the tee. I like my games more open to interpretation. This feels constrained, even if I can understand why it is that way. And that's not a good thing.
Of course, I don't have to bring this all out in the open. I can just leave the Discord server, edit my own copy, play my own game (or not), and make this into whatever I want to, right? No need to disturb the rabid zealots with my gripes. However, this is my review. My opinion, just as free as anyone else's, and just like the game, if you don't like it you don't have to keep it. And my opinion is this: I think this game does itself a disservice in being so inaccessible. It would still be possible to make it as deep and amazing, without being so abstruse. I read through this thing because I really *wanted* to like it, and the Gods help me, maybe once I'm done digesting its massiveness, I *will* go back and read it again. Maybe it will start making sense from earlier on this time.
It's not a book I'd recommend to anyone but the most hardcore sort of nerd, and I think that most of them who were going to like it, already have it, so I can't really give it five stars. Still, the execution is impressive on all fronts, and it would deserve a wider audience if it weren't so full of itself. It is really good to know that someone out there has the balls to publish something like this, so way off the beaten path of what RPGs have become, and succeed. As niche as it may be.
This review is for the two-volume core set of Degenesis, which in total amounts to about the page count under this listing (some zealous soul must have added it as one book to Goodreads' catalog; also the chapter numbering is consecutive between both books, i.e., book two starts on chapter 5, which leads one to believe they are intended as one thing by the authors). It took me months to navigate it, put up with it and make sense of it. This was NOT an easy, casual read. The writing is remarkably obscure, dense, and intense in ways that sometimes make it unintelligible, and other times make it impossible to put down, if only to find out where all of it is going.
The answer for me, after all this time, is that I'm not quite sure. This is a role-playing game, but with the exception of chapters 6 and 11, nothing about it feels even remotely familiar for anyone who has read roleplaying games before. There are no friendly introductions describing what an RPG is, no glossary of terms, or helpful guidance on how to play. The book dives right into the world and pushes it into your face through a series of vignettes that quickly escalate into chapter-length, in-character descriptions of the setting that don't so much as do you the courtesy of explaining to you what all these terms mean. The whole book is drenched in the lore of the world it's describing, leaving one with the constant sense that you're eavesdropping on a conversation, by people who have a running inside joke going on, which you're not a part of. The style is very dense, and at times quite intricate (the fact that it is a translation from the German is clearly apparent in the way it is structured, with long subordinate clauses opening sentences, and rarely bothering to give you the respite of a comma; the German penchant for making up complex words by clustering smaller words together wasn't entirely weeded out by the "Englishing", either).
When I first started trying to explore Degenesis, I hung out in the official Discord channel for a few weeks, and read many of the avid fans say that the only way to understand this book was to have already read it before. They made it sound as if the first read-through were a sort of leap of faith, unsuitable for the weak of will and heart. Reading this book for the first time is a massive act of trust on the part of the reader to an author that is describing a completely novel, fantastical world that never does what you'll expect it to. In the age of the Internet and ridiculously short attention spans, it beggars belief that anyone but the hardiest, shrewdiest, most committed of people would ever submit themselves to this. Yet I can point you to where they gather, a whole lot of them. And their love for this game is just as intense and over-the-top as you would expect to match such an intellectual commitment as this book demands (those fans are a big part of my beef with this book, but more on that later).
Still, I persisted through the first book, Primal Punk, reading through large swaths at a time trying to connect the pieces, a frustrating exercise to say the least. When I finished I felt like I'd overstuffed myself with turkey at Thanksgiving. IT took me months to allow all of that to percolate down to the point where I could tackle the second one, KatharSys. This book has all the rules, which are precious few (107 pages of the total 702). Other people have reviewed this book as a game and said the same thing I found, i.e., the game system is quite simple from a mechanical perspective, and nothing innovative in terms of what the industry offers. Not having actually played it, I can't say how it would work, but it seems pretty standard. A list of skills subordinated to 6 attributes, all played with D6 dice pools with extra perks on results of 6, and the basic rules for opposed rolls and extended actions. Nothing to see here.
The rest of the book is lore. Drenched in lore, swathed in lore, splashed and dashed and covered in the lore of the world. So what is it about? It's not really apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, although it is a far(fetched)-future Earth that has been shaken not by one, but by a series of cataclysms and catastrophes that have reduced things to a really intricate, dense patchwork of cultures and cults risen from the ashes over and over, made grittier and darker than almost everything else out there. It's futuristic and dystopian, primal and sensual, bleak and hopeless and offering only the short-lived hope that you might live to fight another day before the final, ultimate doom engulfs it all. This is not a game for the faint-hearted, or for anyone that wants happy endings and a salutary feeling of accomplishment upon finishing an adventure or campaign. It's dark.
The art and production values of this game are legendary. These massive, sleek, white hardbacks are beautiful, impressive to behold. The interior art is of magnificent quality, but portrays the world graphically and pulls no punches. There is deformity, full nudity, violence, and a gallery of insanely detailed grotesqueries that, whilst not uncommon for the genre, do stand out for their intense, sharp definition and contrast. Black pages with white text highlight the darkest stuff, both graphic and textual, and together with the layout lend elegance to a product that is obviously unconcerned with what you think about it. This is the reason that I, along with several other people I've met, initially were drawn to this game. People who buy RPGs are always to some degree collectors, and from this perspective, the Degenesis library is nothing less than an objet d'art. The modest line of supplements maintains this standard throughout.
The setting itself is really well thought-out and massively developed. Each of the cultures and cults is fleshed out in intense detail, and their excellent design gives a lot of nuance and option, so that who the bad guys and the good guys are is open to interpretation, depending on where and what you want to focus on. The real evil guys (the "monsters") are so monstrous as to be enticingly alluring. The descriptions of all these elements are engrossing, which is all the more frustrating for the lack of a glossary to refer to, to keep track of who and what everything is. Yet the strange familiarity of these setting elements walks the line between innovation and cliché in ways that leave parts of it reeking of the present. The tone of the book is decidedly postmodern and scientific. Humans have either maintained a level of civilisation that glorifies the current achievements of the dominant culture to an almost romantic extent, or have devolved into superstition that is almost insulting in its baselessness and simplicity. People are either trying to reclaim the pinnacle of civilization or ignorantly sacrificing to pagan idols that mean nothing. Meh. The use of chakras and the tarot, one as the expression of an extraterrestrial life-form bent on world domination through mutation and collective consciousness, the other reimagined as a collection of psychological archetypes to aid in character creation, are both in poor taste in my opinion. Still, they are as well executed as the rest of the elements of the setting, so the whole doesn't suffer from it. It's internally consistent to a degree I've seldom seen in RPG literature, and the authors need to be commended on that.
The question that kept asking itself at the back of my head whilst I was wading through this is, who is this for? In this age of super-compact RPGs, where "rules-lite" is King and the Industry is largely controlled by a toy manufacturer, who has the time to learn all this lore to play, let alone run, this game? This isn't one that you can "harvest for ideas" or "ad-lib" from. Did I mention the lore is dense? When I read an RPG, I am *constantly* mining for ideas, thinking how I'd adapt that or break this, how I'd create X or Y to fill a gap in what I'm reading, how it would look in *my own game*. Degenesis flatly and inelegantly dispenses with this by filling up all the available space with its massive lore. The world is thus. Play in it, but don't change a thing, it seems to say. Here is where my beef with the rabid fans on the Discord server comes in. I've seen people chased off that server for daring to suggest how they'd modify the Degenesis setting or play it with another rules system, and ridiculed for discussing openly what it looks like or means to them. Gatekeeping is such a problem in this hobby; yet Degenesis is unapologetically monolithic and resistant to change. It is a world, a "universe" as its creators call it, which isn't interested in your contributions so much as it is interested in you as a cheering audience. It's take it or leave it; railroading, hard-baked into the game. And the fans love it.
I can already hear the pitchfork mob. And I know what they'd say. "If you don't like it, don't play it." Yes, that is a correct way to deal with dissension in the ranks. But here's the problem: I like this stuff. Despite all its very real problems, I found myself enjoying Degenesis (after around page 600, when it finally started to make *some* sense...), but I still had that question in the back of my head: who can I play this with? Most people I know and play with don't have the time, the patience or the inclination to learn this much stuff *for a game*. Those fans that I mentioned would tear me apart with their superior and more perfect knowledge of the setting in the first session, because *I* don't have the time or the inclination to master it to the tee. I like my games more open to interpretation. This feels constrained, even if I can understand why it is that way. And that's not a good thing.
Of course, I don't have to bring this all out in the open. I can just leave the Discord server, edit my own copy, play my own game (or not), and make this into whatever I want to, right? No need to disturb the rabid zealots with my gripes. However, this is my review. My opinion, just as free as anyone else's, and just like the game, if you don't like it you don't have to keep it. And my opinion is this: I think this game does itself a disservice in being so inaccessible. It would still be possible to make it as deep and amazing, without being so abstruse. I read through this thing because I really *wanted* to like it, and the Gods help me, maybe once I'm done digesting its massiveness, I *will* go back and read it again. Maybe it will start making sense from earlier on this time.
It's not a book I'd recommend to anyone but the most hardcore sort of nerd, and I think that most of them who were going to like it, already have it, so I can't really give it five stars. Still, the execution is impressive on all fronts, and it would deserve a wider audience if it weren't so full of itself. It is really good to know that someone out there has the balls to publish something like this, so way off the beaten path of what RPGs have become, and succeed. As niche as it may be.
February 27, 2020
My favourite tabletop rpg setting by far. It features an incredible amount of great illustrations over 700 pages of world information.
This book is a behemoth of work and introduces you to a great world with several layers of intrigues and metaplot revealing themselves read-through after read-through.
This book is a behemoth of work and introduces you to a great world with several layers of intrigues and metaplot revealing themselves read-through after read-through.
April 19, 2021
rate : 6/5
February 25, 2023
Lovely
September 8, 2025
Looks great. Plays terrible. Not my sort of game.
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