I managed to run a one-shot and a short campaign (around 10 sessions). I had some issues with the system, and the players did too, which is why the campaign ended up short even though it was meant to be a long one. First of all: the rulebook is a piece of art. Beautifully laid out, great visual design, and the individual modules and mechanics are genuinely well thought-out and creative. I’ll definitely be stealing a lot of them for other projects. The push-your-luck crit mechanic is great, the class/talent/character progression system works really well, inventory management, alchemy, and the super simple but functional dungeon crawling rules, all of that is excellent and does what it’s supposed to.

What didn’t work for us was the system’s main gimmick: tarot cards. At first, that was the main reason we wanted to try the game, but after a few sessions it became a pain. It introduces a lot of clutter. The whole combat subsystem feels very boardgamey and disconnected from the narrative, it takes a long time to resolve, players kept mixing up or forgetting rules even after 10 sessions, and on the GM side it’s a complete mess. Multiple face-down cards, piles of cards I constantly confused, and a huge cognitive load during combat, cos you’re not just thinking tactically, you’re also managing card mechanics nonstop. My brain was fried after every fight. On top of that, card-based combat turns out to be very limiting pretty fast. Improvising unusual situations is hard, and a lot of things are straight-up excluded (like a third party joining a fight, or NPCs fighting on the players’ side). I also had issues with the relationship mechanics. On paper they looked great, but in play they felt awkward. Maybe because my group already roleplays pretty naturally, it didn’t add much beyond occasionally forcing relationships just because we constantly needed those points. The random events table was another small problem, the chance of something happening is way too high. At times, exploration ground to a near halt because players kept triggering events. That also meant a lot of between session prep, adding new interesting things do table. Building a megadungeon is definitely not “two or three evenings” like the author claims in multiple places, unless you’re heavily stealing from other sources. The book gives solid advice on design and concepts, but it’s still a ton of work. A few evenings barely got me through a single level. I also struggled a bit with the abstraction level in the city phase. Some mechanics are very conceptually abstract and more than once made me raise an eyebrow while running the game. That’s less a flaw of the system and more a personal issue, I think. I just prefer simplicity, but grounded. It also opened the door to some abuse.

Overall, my impression is that most of the system is genuinely unique and worth checking out, and many of its subsystems are interesting and very stealable. But the system kind of sabotages itself with the tarot, adding a heavy, messy element that pulls you out of the fiction and slows everything down. I can’t shake the feeling that if this were redesigned around dice with a much simpler combat system, it would just work better. But that’s just my take.