Droll Initiative

• The game’s art is quite lovely. That’s probably a very un-controversial, quotidian opinion, but it’s true!
• The character structure – purely cosmetic/RP Ancestry, Classes, and Calling – which merges RP prompts with mechanics – is pretty neat. I like how the classes are all messed-up versions of D&D classes.
• Boy howdy, I found the organization of the book lacking. Like, take the bit about how taking Fallout clears Stress. Sure, it’s mentioned on the quick reference, but I’ve learned not to trust quick references until I can look them up in the actual text. The actual rule is not lumped in with the Fallout section, but rather dropped in with the healing rules. I sorta understand why, but it doesn’t flow as logically as I think it could. And I still don’t have a concrete definition of what “refresh dX” means. I had to infer its meaning, which isn’t good for someone new to the game as I was.
  Not a cardinal sin, but it was/is vexing.
• Trade was confusing, but once I understood the mechanics, it made sense. (Another victim of the less-than-stellar organizationof the book, perhaps?) Basically, if you need a d6 weapon, you need to trade a d6 treasure in exchange. Either that, or burn d6 worth of Supplies. They don’t explicitly say you can trade Supplies for other forms of healing, but if a player really wanted to trade one Stress track for another, I wouldn’t see why not.
• Speaking of interpretations and house rules, I’m glad there are a handful of optional rules. It’s good that the designers thought about flexibility.
• I think that the GM’s section has one of the best guidance for story games that I’ve read.
• Despite there being a good bunch of supplements for the game, the core book is complete. The supplements expand on concepts already established in the setting, but are entirely unnecessary to play. That’s a relief, and a testament to how much stuff is in the book.
• If I were to run it (and I think I might), I’d run it as a nodecrawl instead of a hexcrawl, as offered up in the book. It’s just the level of abstraction that makes the most sense to me.

Overall, I like this book quite a lot, despite my misgivings with some of the organization.