Aysle is Torg’s Dungeons & Dragons reality, which has taken over the UK and parts of Scandanavia (I apologize in advance for likely spelling it Alyse intermittently throughout this post). It works as a fairly straight faced parody of D&D – the book is illustrated by old school D&D artist Valerie Valusek, everyone is either Good or Evil, there are a needlessly large pantheon of gods and it has a world map that clearly rips off Earthsea.

As the D&D reality, Aylse introduces a frustratingly complex system for creating spells. In theory, it is interesting, allowing the caster to determine pretty much all the aspects of the spell’s effects from the ground up. But it is just daunting enough that I can’t see wanting to deal with it in a game. Making matters worse, a lot of the basic vocabulary is defined in lengthy section written in an in-universe style as a sort of archmage lecture, which, give me a break.

Nice cover art by Daniel Horne, though. (Look, I have a lot of Torg books and it is already Wednesday and we just need to get through this together, OK).