Hey, thanks for your response. I finished the book and really enjoyed the lore chapters. Looking forward to giving it a go.
If you don't mind, I have some more comments and suggestions about the rules :)
There is a typo on p. 55:
Drives and goals and goals
About the correction for Sinner (and sorry about not noticing this before):
Sinner may be marked when you are Starving, at 0 blood and consume blood.
and further below
When this impact is marked, you have 0 blood and you consume more blood
I would interpret consuming as drinking, i.e. increasing blood from 0 to something higher, but I think you mean pay/spend/lose blood points, correct?
Elegies
Without reading Ironsworn and being familiar with iron vows it might be difficult to imagine what elegies should look like. A few examples or even faction/lineage-based starting elegies to choose from could help with that.
Blood usage
On p. 10 it says
Power assets are vampiric abilities that always consume blood when used.
and further down in the comments you mentioned
You always expend 1 point of blood when you [...] use a supernatural power or heal yourself
However, this could be made clearer in the book. It would be nice to have a short section "Using powers" in chapter 3 ("Playing the Game") that explicitely
Moves
I noticed that there are no moves in your game. This reminds me of World of Dungeons, where practically everything is Dungeon World's Defy Danger move, which is formulated similar to your Action Rolls. Do you plan on creating specific moves in the future or did you specifically decide against them? I always find moves to be a good way to introduce more structure to the game and especially to capture the atmosphere of the genre you play in.
Health
Last but not least, I would be interested to know what you think about and if you ever thought about replacing health and blood with only one Blood resource that represents both health and a character's pool to spend on powers. This would further increase the impact of the decision when to use blood and for what.
Cheers!
Firstly, thank you for your awesome feedback. You've been extremely helpful.
I'll correct the typos, add some examples of elegies (maybe all in the same section, maybe along relevant text parts) and change consume to spend — this one is so obvious, I can't believe I didn't see the confusion!
About the blood usage, I'll make all that clearer. I guess I'll expand the Hunger section instead of adding another one, but I'm not sure yet.
On having no moves (only two types of rolls): Elegy started with almost as many moves as Starforged (so more than 30). It might be partly a matter of personal taste, but I found out that having so many moves was getting on the way of the actual storytelling — I hate stopping my game to look for a rule. To me, that kind of rhythm is more important in a more atmospheric game like VtM than it is in Ironsworn.
Lastly, I actually considered merging Health and Blood in the beginning of the development. It's a very interesting concept, but I couldn't think of an elegant way to pull it off considering aspects of the meters (how fast they go down, how often they should be almost empty, how scarce their resources should be, etc.). Plus, the greater diversity of resources creates richer combinations of situations and challenges your character could face.
Again, thanks for the feedback. I'll implement it and credit you asap.
Have a nice day!
