The Good
Truths. This chapter guides you through the process of customizing the setting to your preference. You are given a series of questions, each one with 3 options to choose from. Each question also has a plot hook in a sidebar. This works very well, because you are building up your vision of the setting incrementally, and also seeding story ideas for yourself as you go.
Great technical writing. Language matters. The designer has taken great care to use specific language to mean precise things. There is a glossary PDF that explains the terminology.
Session Moves are a good thing. Moves like Start a Session and Take a Break give your characters a small attaboy mechanical boost and I found them good to include. Moves like Set a Flag are used for recording a safety flag (similar to a Line or Veil). I appreciate the inclusion of these moves.
Less Prep. It is quite possible to run a session for friends with just 15 minutes of preparation. Most of the story is generated at the table, by interpreting hits and misses on the moves.
Hard. This game is punishing. The recommended difficulty for a fight is Formidable. This means you need to roll plenty of Moves to accumulate successes against the progress track to win. The probability of achieving so many successes, without taking significant punishment is very low! I take this as a good thing. I have read several posts on Reddit where players have bemoaned this, and the usual response is that some players interpret the Pay The Price move too harshly on themselves.
Lots of Dice Rolling. The story is determined by the outcome of moves. This means that you are encouraged to make lots of Moves. It doesn't matter whether you hit or miss, the move description will help prompt you to make the story move in one direction or another. In a traditional rpg, if the players are roleplaying a scene with an NPC, we can go a long time without rolling dice, just describing what we say and dramatising. In this game, it is a good idea to mechanise those scenes as Compel or Gather Information moves.
Rules to help generate random dungeons on the fly. There are tables to help you generate ideas for rooms or features that you encounter, and there various flavours of Derelict or Vault that you can generate (e.g. Haunted or Sacred). I found this useful and a bit simpler than the Delve add-on moves for Ironsworn. I used these to generate some scenes in an undercity exploration, and it was good fun.
First Look and Revealed Nature. When you generate a random location or monster, you can roll on a First Look table. This gives you some keyword prompts to help you invent some cool details about what you see (e.g. dripping mucus). Later, after you have had a chance to investigate further, you can roll on the Revealed Nature table to get more keyword prompts that put a spin on what you already know (e.g. infested with parasites). This is genius! It emulates so well how fiction works for me. I bet I could use these tables in other rpgs to generate cool stuff for the table.
