Paul, about your two latest posts, which both happen to include links to other threads, I'm thinking maybe I could move these parts of the conversation to those other threads, if that makes any sense to you?

Well, when you roll for treasure you're really "zooming out" of the scene to a more "abstract" or "montage" mode of play, so I suppose that could turn awkward if somebody doesn't "get" it. I also assume that's why examining treasure is more of a "peripheral move" than a basic one. At my table, that takes a few assumptions, that that's what they're entitled to so let's not get hung on the small details of when and how, that we're willing to stretch our imagination a little to the PCs advantage.

In general, I don't see anything like a "what is the treasure" roll in here, though. To me, the point is exactly is that you don't care, or rather that's implied by the circumstances, while the examine treasure roll is a roll to determine what you get to trade your (never described, not important in itself) treasure for. However rolling doubles reverses that, making the actual found thing important: this was (just slightly) awkward - in that we knew where the treasure was from and this imposed limits on what it could plausibly be, as explained in my top post - and required some retconning:

• Did I tell you the dwarf had paid you out in a mix of bottled smoke and other valuables? I guess the bottled smoke was a negligible part of the overall value, then. What's really interesting here is... uhm... a bunch of silver coins... and they're, like, very old coins...
• The thing you were examining was a piece of jewelry from the Black Hostess, right? Oh, well, I guess she never realized she'd got magical jewelry in her chest, possibly because she's always worn both earrings at the same time. I wonder where she got these from? But to you, it's immediately apparent that these are no normal earrings...

Also, I've started thinking that tracing these magical earrings to their source (I mean, doing it myself in my prep) may bring some new interesting Trouble.

There seems to be an assumption that, though the humans are basically... human, all the fauna and flora is exotic and alien.

Funny how this makes perfect sense now that you say it, but isn't what I'd read in the text myself, at all. Interesting inkblot test indeed!

That's cool with me. But if there aren't any war steeds, some PCs will invent them eventually. :)

So, I had half-dreamt that placing the antique silver coins to a buyer would have been a bit of an adventure, potentially yielding 1 unexamined treasure to each player participating in it, as their share...

However, Iago started making a plan for selling the coins while the other PCs were busy doing other things (you know, Dix was getting lost around some or some other cemetery, as usual, trying to help out some lonesome ghost, while Vetin was enjoying High Living to a battlecry of "shopping! shopping!!!" and Nictus - his player absent from the session - was studying alone, having left strict instructions not to disturb him).
Iago rolled successfully to Regroup & Prepare, chose to study the situation and make a plan - the situation being he'd got a bunch of antique coins from the age of the Wizard-Emperor Zagyg* weighing in his purse - and asked me who in Vanetys was well known to buy collectible antiques. It made sense for me to answer openly and not withhold information (it had previously been established that Iago is from the city and knows his way around it, so he'd know such a thing), so i rolled a bunch of dice looking at the "powerful person" sections of the Job Framework table in Hand to Mouth, for inspiration. Then I answered:
"The wealthy overseer of a commercial enterprise... the boss of the calendar-making house, you know... is known to be an avid collector of antiques. You've also heard rumors that Aktebeth, a mercenary wizard providing sorcerous services to the wealthiest [I'd rolled a "young ambitious wizard" and opted to slot in a character who was already in my notebook], buys anything related to Zagyg,* for some reason of their own. Oh, and of course, there was this princess from House Turisvadys - what was her name - everybody's heard about her collection of coins from all over the world, and possibly other worlds as well."

Iago opted to contact the publisher and the princess, stating he was quite afraid of dealing with wizards. As part of telling him about the situation and having him make a plan, I told him that everybody knew where the calendar-making house was as well as which palace the princess lived in and that, while getting the princess to receive him would have been an astonishing feat, getting to speak with a house clerk was trivial enough. First he went to the publishing house and we quickly role-played a clerk setting him up with an appointment with the master, the he went to the princess's palace and lined up with other petitioners, to a similar effect. But it just happened that the princess's clerk took one of the coins as a sample, to submit to his mistress's attention, and gave Iago a written receipt...

Little I knew that the receipt was later to prove a classic Checov's gun! When Iago was in the middle of breaking and entering into a dead necromancer's butcher shop to plant false evidence connecting the deceased to a murder he had perpetrated, he rolled to size up the room for extra information but got a 6, and I was all like: "Ask me a question anyway, but then tell me what is it that you accidentally drop and unwittingly leave behind..."

But back on track. Iago had originally planned to sell the coins to the highest bidder, but when he got to meet with the calendar publisher, that shrewd collector asked him where the coins where from... After babbling something about a family heirloom, Iago got the collector to cede to his Demand to stop asking questions, but as it always is with that move, there had to be an "if": the collector's condition was, of course, that Iago had to sell the coins to him immediately, before "he changed his mind". In the end, Iago got the equivalent of 2 unexamined treasures out of the deal, but skipped his appointed audience with the princess, never getting back the sample coin. This leaves a loose thread, with some opportunities for even more future trouble...

All things considered, Iago had started with a piece of treasure and doubled it, but with a lot of strings attached.

* I know, I know... It was the first name which crossed my mind when I first described the coins, and now I'm stuck with it. Accidental Gary Gygax tribute (not that any other player got it, but I feel sorta silly writing it here).

In yesterday's session, the first pet pig debuted on screen in the lap of an important NPC.

Having agreed that I hadn't mentioned any horses so far, we've also been thinking about a world without horses a little. It was a funny conversation ("I'll ride a giant goose, then!" "Sorry, no birds." "Aw, right", etc.):

• One player asks: "No horses, OK, but are there donkeys? Donkeys are lovely!"
• One player wasn't at all worried about lack of horses and advocated giant lizards. I suppose, as scary war mounts everything goes, but as everyday working animals? That would detract from my suspension of disbelief while enjoying my personal fantasy-anthropology sub-game. To me, it has to be mammals.
• Looks like camelids are fair game: camel-like and llama-like species can be used as pack animals and a few, like our Terran dromedary camel, could be effective war steeds as well. Though Venus as we've known it so far is too humid for most Terran camelids, they're an extremely adaptive bunch - maybe they're limited to the driest areas of the planet, or maybe there's such a thing as swamp-camels.
• Elephants don't have too be huge! "Dwarf" elephants, if domesticated, could fill a lot of horse-like roles.
• Bovines can't compare to horse as fast runners, but have widely been used in the real world as draft animals. Cattle, water buffalo, yaks... Such animals could be an ordinary sighting on busy city streets, pulling carts and carrying weights. Maybe larger, fierce auroch-like bulls pull Venusian war-chariots.

Great, thanks! What shape has the game taken over these five sessions?

Has it been mostly a game of the MC causing trouble and the players interacting with the MC's prep?

I definitely hasn't. Because, when I prep trouble, it's always as a consequence of something they did, or a distant consequence of something already in play, or to make sense of something I had to make up on the spot when they rolled a 6 or less. So it feels more like a game of them inviting their own trouble, and trouble inevitably honoring their invitation. It feels like an extended Fiasco, except that their hopes for success are much higher.

How does it feel different in play from, say, AW?

The main difference is in the kind of world they're interacting with, its feel and sheer scale.
AW was a "small world" game to us: no faceless crowds, almost everybody on screen had a name, everyone knew everybody. Outside this small circle, the world was a blank slate, with literally everything being possible. But, on the other hand, we were very serious about it being a SF game - a near-future SF game with an environmental main theme - and we very consciously kept to our real-world expectations. The threshold for our suspension of disbelief was a very strict "this could fucking seriously be our world 50 years from now". Plus our Maelstrom was fucking scary, arthouse horror film stuff, with a damn strong undercurrent of "something's wrong with both the world and our mind". Every PC's core motivation was to "fix" their world at some very fundamental level, and their own human frailty was what held them back - while, as the MC, I was concerned with highlighting what's wrong with our contemporary, real wold.
Our FV is set in city of 1 million people with a sophisticated culture and lots of social complexity. You can literally hide in plain sight in the middle of a busy marketplace, and there are such things as bureaucracy, etiquette, banking... It's less personal, less scary, more lighthearted. Very close to a cyberpunk RPG "sprawl", if you'll just replace hacking and the cyberspace with necromancy and ghosts (but not the mercenary hit squad, "go on missions and be betrayed by your boss" playstyle I've learned from the Forge many roleplayers associate with Shadowrun), And we're constantly talking about how the wider world works, in general. The opposite of a "small world". And while a lot of people are fucked up, it's also a place of beauty. The PCs are mostly concerned with bettering their own lot in life and fulfilling their own ambitions, some of them also with doing what feels right for its own sake, but they aren't trying to change the world in any fundamental way.

Also, in AW you have all these different playbooks meaning PCs each deal with their own, specific concerns, possibly on a wholly different scale. In FV they're all playing the same character type, for now at least (my understanding is that in the long term the various "modules" will become the equivalent of AW playbooks: a PC wizard establishing their own seclusium has very different mindset and perspectives than a PC who's leading a warband, say).

Have you tried my little magic hack, or are you playing it as-written?

Playing it as written, for now. But, to be fair, there have only been two spells cast  so far over 5 sessions, one by a PC and one by an NPC, thus we haven't really felt the need for any added variety or flexibility.

It's #3, then!

No horses, really? Oh, noes! I was totally assuming horses. I'm pretty sure there are already horses in my game, though just as background noise. Will it somehow "break" the game at a later date, if I have horses in it? Like, in Banners of War? ^_^;
(But please tell me there are war elephants!)

As for no domesticated canids, I guess that's just fair to cats, and I do have ideas for replacements. See this other thread.