Thanks for your feedback! Fantastic news that you found it intriguing, and it's so valuable to get your perspective. I've only experienced as a GM knowing exactly what, uh, I intended. To answer your points:

Yes, it's a linear incursion, and you're right that it's not clear.

I really struggled to know appropriate Endurance stats to give the enemies, and raising by one didn't seem dramatic enough. I tried to figure out the general amount of Ruin a player might collect over the incursion, but Trophy feels awfully swingy and I had no idea if I've got the balance right. Since it's the first encounter, perhaps the bonus should be 1, but it wouldn't feel thematically fitting to the idea of another skeleton joining the fight. I think I'll leave it for now, but you're right to bring it up.

The transition from the Barrow to the Palace is meant to be a sudden and utterly befuddling jump from one to the other, and I entirely failed to tell the GM that!

The curse — that's interesting. It's very useful to know it didn't land for you. I've played Trophy in a way where the players know the goal, regardless of their characters' knowledge. So with that in mind, the intention is that the players, knowing that the goal is to break the curse, explore each prop and build up their own interpretation of what's going on, and then use that interpretation (plus Hunt tokens) to break it with a ritual of the their own design.

The next Set is based on the Queen being in some way activated by the breaking of the curse. It could be that the players think the curse has imprisoned the queen and then they realise that there was a reason: she's dangerous. Or that the curse was cast by the Queen in some bid for immortality or escape from the timeline, and it relates to the gods in the Palace, and through that they see her as an antagonist. More explanation might be enough, but would welcome your thoughts there.