Yet I can point you to where they gather, a whole lot of them. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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 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. There are no friendly introductions describing what an RPG is, no glossary of terms, or helpful guidance on how to play. 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. The answer for me, after all this time, is that I'm not quite sure. 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. It took me months to navigate it, put up with it and make sense of it. 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). Whew! Ok, where to begin? Man, this is going to be tough.
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