I am very excited that I get to run Epyllion tomorrow, and I’m confident in my Powered by the Apocalypse GMing skills, but I am still curious about a few game questions not addressed in the kickstarter previews.
Basic mechanics questions
1. Does rolling a miss grant XP, or only end of session questions?
2. Do friendship gems carry over between sessions or reset? I would guess the former, but I’m not sure.
3. Does the first box of the XP track (the one that says “XP:”) also count as one to tick off? (meaning Raw Scaled Drakes need 6 xp to fill their track, not just 5)
4. When Flying through the Valley of Death, rolling +Gems probably refers to gems you have total, since there’s no other person whose gems would count, and the move is more about the moons’ overall stance toward you, right?
5. Is there anything official or public yet about how to run the collaborative map-filling activity at the start of a campaign that is shown in the YouTube Exhibition game? Does the GM just ask each player to tell about a bit of Dragonia history that their dragon was involved in and have them add a related location to the map?
6. Just to clarify, the default assumption is that dragons are the only sentient beings in Dragonia? The social moves all refer to dragons, and therefore don’t technically seem extensible to something like intelligent nature faeries or spirits.
— I’d love to hear any ideas or examples of how others have conveyed Darkness other than tangible predatory beasts or moral corruption among dragons.
I’m mostly gonna dive in on 5 and 6 since it looks like Marissa tackled the others.
5. I recommend picking some piece of dragon society that intrigues you and start asking your players question about it through the lens of their dragons.
I personally like to start by trawling the player’s ideas of their dragon’s lives with their houses until something sticks as a neat place to start, then ask questions from there – But, that’s my personal style.
6. Marissa, unless I’m mistaken the Nature Adept’s moves also can apply to the Dragon’s beast companion, riiight?
I’m personally torn on non-dragon sentients, for a few reasons. I can see room for great stories, but I think Epyllion’s principles would press you to fill those roles with Dragons, Or, the presence of the Nature Adept’s Move exception would make me wary about creating any such beings that everyone could talk to, without that move for fear of thunder-stealing. I think if you consider those pressures and still feel there’s a need… Maybe.
In my experience running Epyllion with my family, even if you have non-dragon sapient creatures, no one will care (my 8 yo daughter wanted humans for eating, lol). None of the moves really work for them, and you’re DRAGONS. Who cares about elves and humans and such? 🙂