Hi All

we played our 1st session tonight. 4 players + MC. Had great fun.
Character generation took a bit longer than I expected, 60 mins including building a relationship map for all the treasures, accommodations, etc. However much quicker than my recent PbA experiences, which is a refreshing change of pace.
Initial situation generation was great, had priestess on a barge summoning a gibbering, franken-zombie cluster of human limbs while her acolytes threw javelins at the PCs on shore under a bridge.
Didn't leave long enough for the end of session as it is more involved than other PbA games with treasures etc.

Questions/Issues
1. In char gen it says pick one of 8 skills but only 7 are described there (warfare is missing)
2. Is it possible to help on a saving throw?
3. Am I correct that you cannot communicate with a ghost/spirit if you don't take necromancy - does this mean you can or can't have a guardian/advisor without necromancy or is it sufficient to assume the ghost will help when it can for the non-question-oriented abilities?
4. We were confused by the help rules under "Demand Something" - does this mean that only 1 character can roll or should both roll? If only 1 roll, then should it really say you cannot help?
5. Can you mark experience for Establish and Improve an estate when you only establish it? (Maybe better to use Establish _or_ Improve?)
6. Some hesitation around timeframes for Recover, Regroup & Prepare - seems to incorporate a bit of Read a Sitch which implies short time-frames but most options seem to imply longer and hence hard in fiction to choose more than one option in a short timeframe use.
7. Players felt a bit more time on worldbuilding would give them better context, maybe a longer intro paragraph than the current one on p1? (I was happy to just go)
8. Really would like name list(s) - eg people, places, cults/organisations
9. Would like some MC prompts/lists for describing magical items when examining treasure
10. Would like a MC move list to act as prompts for what happens on a miss
11. Is the idea to start with a new opening situation every time we play? (we still have a lot of mileage flowing from the 1st one!)

Looking forward to playing again

rgds
rob

Hi there,

some quick comments from a 1st playtest in Ireland. We had a trollslayer (sorry! :-), dragonherald and outlaw heir.

We made the mistake of assuming that the Outlaw heir actually had his rights so he is an Earl opposed to the king (his uncle) and controls a population of 23,000. Oops!

Questions
* Unsure if fortunes should be rolled for at session start, we didn't as the players felt we had enough to go with.
* Should it be suggested to create a genealogy for each player? Eg I wish I had asked each "What is your bloodline?" or somesuch.

Issues
* Harder than AW to zoom in on what the PCs needed in terms of NPCs/resources as we spent so much brain-power on the map (which was mega-fun). This resulted in less NPC triangles . Bad MC Rob!
* Players didn't feel that Take stock/Take bearings had strong enough fictional triggers to tell which one was being used. Instead they started to reverse engineer the move from the question lists depending on which ones they wanted to ask
* My map ended up poor in sites/regions relevant to the Religion of the Empire as the players all allied themselves with the old ways and Christos was the main opposition.
* Need a name-list, pref segregated into 3 cultures based on the religions so you can instantly assume which side someone is on (rightly or wrongly)
EDIT: * Everyone felt that being higher rank was simply better and would prefer more inducements to take low rank

Everyone loved
* XP
* playbooks

Best moment:
When the dragonherald tried to sacrifice a monk of bloodless X, found his skin invulnerable to weapons and the Troll-killer said "does anyone else have a sharp sword of good iron that may spill the blood of any mortal being?". The looks from the other players were hilarious!

rgds
rob