Fantasy world, Different races (sorta…), Magic, Psionics (really?), and adventure. Looooooots of adventure.

But, here’s some fun twists: the supernatural is both rather rare and also somewhat feared. So don’t go around parading that your a wizard or a mentalist, you might just get burned at the stake.

Two other nice features i found were Time, and Adaptability. The game has a rather large emphasis on Time. You adventure for a day or two, burn all your MP, lose a good chunk of your hitpoints, and eat a large amount of trail rations. Now, Spend a week getting all your MP and HP back boys! (not exactly accurate, but you get the drift). Gives you a more realistic recovery time if you ask me, and does help pace the calendar. Also, a good DM can also use the downtime to do some adventuring as well, giving the players a much more narrative story than just “we rested a week, let’s go kill something.”

Now, the Adaptability: It’s a D100 system. And in the back of the rulebook is a conversion table. Need the beholder from D&D? Snag it for your campaign! Due to the monster creation table being so rediculously open end as well, you CAN do just that. It says in there that you can make anything your imagination can come up with, and as a DM for it, i’ve made a little fire-bat elemental for the party’s summoner, and could make dragons, undead, cthulhu-esque elder gods, dragons of varying shapes and sizes, lego bionicles if i so felt inclined, and with enough work the predator from, well, predator, come to collect some new trophies. You can even use the ruleset to design games in other times, if you really wanted to.

So, for those of you curious to try something new, but don’t want to stray tooo far from the D&D roots, i’d recommend anima. A nice, beautiful confusion for the first little bit, but hey, the players can make their characters EXACTLY how they want them to be, and the DM has more options than he can shake a stick at.