The Emperor is Undead

This was so wildly fun! A fantastic game for TLT fans and novices alike.

I facilitated for a group of 4 (including myself) so each of us played a Necro+Cav pair from the four houses in the rule book. We played across two sessions for fifteen whopping hours, we were so engrossed in our characters and the stories they created by colliding with each other. We played every mini-game at least once.

Highlights:

• Loved the collaborative nature of making characters, it really helped round out our characters & give us a good idea of what tropes to play into. Our group meant that each character had about 4 attractive qualities, which felt like a good number.
• Most of the games are really well designed to throw characters together and instantly charge the atmosphere (whether for good or ill).
• After the first turn or two, stories started flowing on from each other and it was often obvious not just to the current player but to the whole table what game would be chosen next.
• End game was absolutely devastating, in a great way.

Wishes:

• Our group played online & we very quickly wished that the pdf was formatted a little more cleanly (bookmarks, spelling/grammar edits & the similar).
• Similarly, possibly because this was the group's first Firebrands game, we weren't sure how to start actually roleplaying. We figured it out, but in spite of the rules.
• Multiple of us are chomping at the bit for the other canon houses!
• Exploration & Experimentation was the weakest minigame. Beyond the first, compulsory, turn no player chose it. It looks like it's intended to give players a prompt for why their characters might interact and give cards with little risk but in practice the prompts are detached from gameplay & often have little to no effect on the in-game story. This minigame in particular seemed antithetical to roleplaying between characters, ironically.
• The Trials of Lyctorship cascade at a certain point (sometimes you can't pull out from them at all, sometimes you can't pull out without forfeiting the minigame entirely). Our first session was 8 hours long in part because this cascade was the 'last mini-game of the session' and none of us wanted to stop the session in the middle of it. The group had mixed feelings on it, mostly erring on the side of the cascade either not happening so early or not happening for so long.

Overall, this was fantastic to play. Everyone in the group wants to play again and I certainly want to facilitate it to people again - hopefully many times! This game really captures the messy, political, drama-filled, social spats of Gideon the Ninth. I'm greatly looking forward to playing it again.