Great product! Build your clan, name your king (Archon), create your dwarf and fight for your people against all comers. The game has captured the spirit of the dwarven race like no other. Each dwarf has a way to fight, a way to serve, and a craft to deliver to their clan. Simple mechanics allow a group to be created in a short time. The rules also allow for the cooperative creation of the clan with its own attributes and history. I highly reccomend A&A for anyone seeking to play dwarves against the world!

I'll be honest - I never expected this thing to see the light of day. Now that it has, to my pleasant suprise, it's exactly what I was looking for when I didn't even know I was looking.

It is unabashedly a traditionally-inspired RPG (GMs and dice and hitpoints and the occasional dragon) but it's highly streamlined, modernised, and built to let people pick it up and get on with play easily, even while its systems are recognisable enough that new players who've even heard of D&D before can pick up the concepts quickly while avoiding any baggage from more direct roots. Instead Axes & Anvils does its own thing - it uses a d12 for routine skill resolution, players roll all the dice when battling NPC targets (a great timesaver for the GM), and there's nary an equipment table in sight - and one thing it does particuarly well is immediately give everyone a reason to be there: Dwarves serve their Clan - an entity collaboratively created at the start of the game - and everything revolves around furthering its interests via your actions. Drop-ins and intermittent players are supported too, and there's even a GMless option possible if you've got the Under The Mountain GM resourcebook, with mechanics to track just how canon such adventures end up being, in case such a session goes a little off the rails!

It's a lower-magic setting - though rules for magic do exist as an optional component, the system is easily adaptable if you want to play in a different world; and notably it's perfectly possible for a party (and even the entire setting) to function without any magic at all. Either way, the combat manages to stay relatively light and fast while still allowing character differentiation (the system focusing on teamwork and a frequent emphasis on avoiding getting overwhelmed) yet still holds a remarkably elegant amount of grit - take too much damage in one blow, and you risk being Wounded, and it's these mounting Wounds that risk fatal peril. Stubborn as they are, a dwarf can spend their Resolve to fight harder or keep standing, but that's a limited resource... one recovered by morale-boosting victories, heroism, and comraderie itself. Brilliant!

I've yet to spot a typo in the book, and the occasional art - while black and white and largely limited to styleised art of a variety of dwarves - is fitting enough and doesn't get in the way. A lack of even more of it is the closest critique I would have, but I appreciate that's a matter of budget, and the rest of the book remains artistically servicable nonetheless.

Simply put, if you're the kind of person that likes to roll up Fighters in D&D and wished you could do an all-Fightin' party without it being redundant... this is the game for you. If you wanted to run a classic adventuring game without overcomplicating the mundane in the process, this is the game for you.

And if you want play a game about Dwarves, this is the game for you.