The Not-So-Good
Writing has too much waffle. They take 3 paragraphs to say what could be 1 sentence. Often you encounter a wall of text. E.g. Pages 91-93. This is an unfortunate trademark of Onyx Path. Perhaps I am simply not their target audience - I want a game that I can bring to table quickly. A lot of information is presented in first person, as an unreliable narrator is describing how things work, which I also find meandering and imprecise. A lot of modern players don't read more than a few pages from rulebooks. This is not the game for them. My faithful players are eager readers, but we all complained.
Tricks require a reference sheet. If you roll more successes than needed, you can use the excess successes to buy Tricks. For example, knock an enemy prone (cost 1), or do a critical hit (cost 3), or push them to another range band (cost 1). There are all different kinds of Tricks; General Tricks can be used on any roll, and there are also Tricks for Combat, for Ranged Combat, for Melee Combat, and Defensive Combat There are Tricks for Investigations (buy a clue!) and Influence actions, and also Integrity actions. There are 39 different Tricks in the game. This is too many to simply remember, so it is necessary to have a sheet of them at the table. You have to make this sheet yourself because no summary is provided and they are scattered around the book on 7 different sidebars. I made a website listing them. And they slow the game down! "Cool, I got 3 extra successes! Pass me the Tricks page so I can spend a minute to choose which ones I want to use."
Overwhelming choices. It is time to create your first Curseborne character! First choose one from 31 possible Families. They are described over 120 pages. No summary is provided. Creating a character requires jumping around the book to different sections, and uses terminology that is often not fully explained. A quote from a player, "I have been playing roleplaying games for 30 years and I could not create a character without help." Here is a summary of how to create a character from the Gaki family: first start on the character creation chapter, page 222. Complete the steps described on the next 5 pages up to page 227. Then go to page 78-79 to read about the Gaki and get their character creation dots. Then go back further to page 70 to get their Damnation. Then go to pages 256-263 to choose your spells. Then return to pages 228-241 to finish up by completing the activities there. Now pass the book to the next player. It feels disorganised and overwhelming. The publishers ought to provide a website or app to help with character creation.
Quite a lot to take in for your first session. I already described how creating a character requires bouncing around the book. But there is also lots of new terminology: Torments, Entanglements, Damnations, and Inheritances. Discovering what an Inheritance is is not easy because it's not in the Index, but there is a space for it on the character sheet. There is also new dice-roll terminology for a new player; Enhancements, Complications, Tricks, and Momentum. I think it's quite a lot to take in, on your first session. The job of a GM is to teach the game. Well, the amount of explaining that is needed of a GM in the first session is simply too much, and the poor flow of information in the book makes the job harder. You could avoid some of this first session workload by using pregen characters. Oh wait, no starter adventure is provided in the core book, so I guess it would be up to the GM to make these pregen characters as homework.
Storygame scene control. For my playstyle, I don't like it when players can spend a metacurrency to introduce or change things in a scene. Momentum is a metacurrency that is easily earned (using one of the Tricks, see above), and spending 1 will allow a player, according to the rules, to describe a story element in a scene which becomes a fact. Players can modify NPCs in a scene or add story elements. That's not something I enjoy, as it whisks us out right out of believability in a scene. We are no longer immersed while imagining ourselves in the shoes of our characters; we are now in a writers room. I houseruled this out.
No embrace or prelude scenes. Some of the strongest roleplay scenes I have ever played have been the prelude stories of Vampire Masquerade where the player creates a mortal guy who becomes a vampire and has to learn the ropes. Or the First Change scene for a Werewolf the Apocalypse campaign. It is a terrific way to gradually introduce a new player to the setting and the world because they learn through the experiences of their character. Curseborne has none of that. There are no rules for creating a mortal, and it is assumed your supernatural guy is a fully fledged player in the supernatural court. This is not easy for a new player or GM who knows nothing about the setting. And it's a missed opportunity. I found launching my first Curseborne campaign quite difficult because of the volume of lore I was apparently expected to know and teach. And the book provides no guidelines or step-by-step walkthrough for a GM on how to create your city or run your first session. Just make it up, lol.
I don't like some of the Factions. Firstly there are too many; 31 factions is a lot. A working GM is hard-pressed to include even 30% of them in a city they create. Secondly, several of them are clearly merely a game mechanism for grouping types of supernatural beings together, rather than a real believable organisation. For example, the Faceless is purportedly an international crime syndicate of sorcerers. That's a cool nugget of an idea. But only sorcerers can join. And only sorcerers who use Acquisition, Illusion, and Thaumaturgy magic. It makes no sense to me that a criminal syndicate would not happily welcome sorcerers who can do teleportation magic, for example. Or a ghost who can walk through walls. Or even a werewolf who can guard VIPs. Nope. The Lineage / Family choice you make at character creation is clearly a Race / Class choice like in D&D, rather than a believable in-world organisation. And there is no option for a player to NOT belong to a family. I don't see why a sorcerer or vampire can't choose to be an independent and unaffiliated hedge mage or nomad but this option is never mentioned.
Incomplete details about how being a supernatural works. When I created a test Dead (ghost) character, almost straightaway, I had several basic questions about how being incorporeal works. Can I fly? How fast? Can I possess a dead animal? If I possess a corpse that is damaged, does it start with health blocks filled in? These are basic questions that would probably emerge in a first session of playing a Dead. None were answered in the book. Or consider the Hungry (vampire) lineage. It describes in the fluff text that one Hungry must create another Hungry (i.e. like the Embrace from VtM). But nowhere does it give guidance on how a player character can do this. Is there a limit? Does it cost anything? A player Hungry is almost certainly going to consider creating another Hungry. GMs are on their own for inventing how these supernatural abilities work.
Editing incomplete; feels rushed to print. Across the whole book, many paragraphs of information, which should be kept together, flow over columns or pages. For example, look at page 240-241, where the title of the Tweaks section appears at the bottom of one page, but the body of the text appears on the following page, even though there is loads of free space. This happens frequently, see pages 23, 266, 267, 279, 280, etc. I feel that a little more care in editing could have kept logical information on a single column or page. Transmutation (pg 277-278) is especially annoying, where they are describing a power in bullet points, but the final bullet point has drifted to the next page, underneath a sidebar - easily missed. C'mon.
Adversary stat blocks are minimum effort. Some stat blocks are missing crucial information, for example they forgot to give Cop an Initiative score. For each adversary they list the names of the powers they have, without information. So I guess the GM is supposed to memorise what all the possible powers do? No summary is provided, so the GM needs to do a lot of page flipping. Adversaries are not written in a way that is easy to be used at a real game table.
Players feel like superheroes compared with mortals. A Curseborne character has 7 health blocks. A cop has 1. One punch will take out the cop, but the cop must unload 7 shotgun blasts into the player to take them down (actually all weapons do the same damage). All players also have the ability to roll Stamina to reduce incoming damage, and can spend an action to go full defensive - both of which enemies cannot do (even supernatural ones, like werewolves, according to page 201). I wasn't ready for this reality and players quickly learned that mortals are not a threat. Our werespider player was regenerating 2 health blocks of damage each round. You need to flood the scene with loads of enemies to create tension, and that doesn't feel right in an urban fantasy game where secrecy is usually a big element. And it feels a bit weird that nerdy sorcerers and brutish werewolves have the same number of health blocks.
