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