Gonna start with the critique and move on to the "well done," for a tonal upswing
The "Room for Improvement" Stuff:
-A game this short doesn't leave a lot of time to recover from someone you get invested in dropping. It also limits the scope of what a character's (or player's!) ambitions can amount to. With only one GM, and trying to slot it in between other games, more or less, not sure how I'd address these issues, but I felt 'em. In a longer campaign game, we'd
just now be really ironing out some of the characters' quirks and tics, and it's already time to put the toys back in the box! Like, the zuK thing didn't really hit anyone but al-Haddar until late in day 3.
-The Khadi's dicepool in the last event being unfair isn't such a big deal (Khadi gonna Khadi) but a 7k4 vs a bunch of 55XP spuds without armor is practically an auto-hit, and should probably have not been downplayed as a "fortunately, she's not an expert."
Just a kind of fluff/expectation thing. I think most of us who know the dicepools weren't too lulled by it, but still and all... Likewise, the dangers of 5k2 damage rolls that practically auto-hit vs a crew where Earth 3 was likely the peak of damage absorbtion were probably underestimated. But hey, nobody died, so I guess not by much!
- Juggling factions and origins isn't a big hassle, but with just about all of the factions being Super Secret, anyone with no stake in a faction is going to be very hard-pressed to care enough to do any digging- and anyone
in a faction is mostly going to be flailing around hoping they have some buddies who also happened to sign up to be Assassins or Qolat or whatever.
- With an even halfway decent Perform roll, Kezia (a "common" Ra'Shari and therefore not stereotypically all that well off) was pulling down 50 pool a session with minimal fuss. It made chasing coin by other means seem kinda... silly.
The stuff that kicked so much ass
- For only having one GM, this game was a masterclass in responsiveness and attention. Seriously. Hats off.
- For what was largely a sandbox game with the archery event serving as more of a backdrop than a driver for most characters, it was surprisingly well-structured.
- Weird little events popping up that people could just run with were, in fact, run with.
- Given LBS' generally... different power curve from L5R, the danger within the city was generally kept to a survivable level for these little 55 XP spuds.
- Sucking at archery wasn't allowed to be a serious drag. It's a small thing, but appreciated
- I liked threads being categorized by day rather than by location. Made the bookkeeping a lot simpler.