Three of us met today to test out the AW:Dark Age rules. After a little over an hour of set up (and borderline paperwork fatigue from one of the players) we had a solid setting with a rich background and history. We dived in for about 2 hours of play and plan to meet again in a few weeks.
Below you can find what I learned and some questions I have:
(1) Season moves are a possible way to start from the game out, but they should be followed up with at least 2 or 3 questions to build context and discern motivations. At first, they didn't seem to provide enough to play on -- but asking questions about the motivations behind the choices or for more detail about the circumstances surrounding the moves started to offer a bit of inspiration -- the Liege Lord chose to have a beloved elder pass, his older brother, and the Battle Champion to spend the season hunting.
Some more poking around with questions helped me to find out that the elder brother left behind a wife and daughter (who subsequently became important antagonists) and when I asked why the Battle Champion was so concerned about food, I learned that she'd heard a big raid was on its way.
(2) The failure consequences for some of the moves are linked to the original move and that felt restricting at times. I think this kind of guidance may be useful for MCs new to powered-by-the-apocalypse games, but I personally found it a little frustrating -- I like more creative freedom in the interpretation of the results of a failed roll.
(3) A question came up in character creation -- for the guards that you can get as part of your house holdings, how many? How well armed? How do they factor into warband stats?
I think that's all for the first session. More to come as play goes on.