I picked up a copy Sunday from the Hairy Tarantula here in Toronto, and I'm nearly done it. Anyone else here ever read it, or better yet, played it? How does it handle?

Reading through a review copy right now.

At half way my opinion is "one of the best games out there."  In particular, some incredibly good player and GM advice.

Only for those that like crunchy games

I think it was one of the best games to come out last year.

I really like the world burner, Alien & tech burners and the setting.

The base mechanics are ok.

Beautiful book.  It was sort of hard to wrap my head around at first until I read the graphic novels.  I think having your players read the graphic novels is a great way to prime them for world building.

I've played a short campaign (one infection phase) in it.  I love the world, and I certainly adore the intent of the system.  My group had a blast.  We ran some hard, nasty, vicious, terrible family dynamics around a Norse-esque feudal house being threatened by (a) the Vaylen, (b) planetary political rivals and (c) their own fucked up and divisive family relationships, and it rocked.

I did have a hard time really feeling the Disposition mechanic (which tracks roughly what each session's personal-level decisions mean to the global-level conflict) ... but I think that's largely because my group was interested in driving things home fairly quickly (we were originally looking at doing all three phases of Infection, and that made us think we'd better hurry with phase 1!)  The Disposition system seems geared more toward an indefinite campaign, where nobody gets upset if three or four sessions go by without any substantial change in the global situation, because that has nothing to do with the kind of journey they're paying attention to.  I had a hard time getting into that mindset, and so I felt like the disposition mechanic often wasn't paying off for the time and energy we'd invested in a session.

So, executive summary:  The games playstyle looks solid, fun and well-supported by the rules ... there are just some bits I don't have an easy time with personally :deflated:

How similar is it to Burning Wheel?  I had some fairly severe issues with BW...specifically their implementation of lifepaths and scripted combat.

I've read it, never played it.

I like the idea of communal world building and player buy in, scene economy, lifepath chargen, and many other aspects of the system.

After sitting on the fence on the issue for a while (and yes, this has already been debated here ad naseum), I think I've come down on the side that "let it ride" rule is a bust. Even assuming the more adversarial role the norm for GMs assumed in this book, it still doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me in a lot of situations; more concrete timelines on just how long the roll is good for seems like it would be more sensible.

Quote from: Tom BHow similar is it to Burning Wheel?  I had some fairly severe issues with BW...specifically their implementation of lifepaths and scripted combat.

Well, those are some of the areas where they've kept pretty close to BW.

There are some under-the-hood differences from BW which I (for one) appreciated.  For instance, the removal of dice-shades was welcome.  Not that black, grey and white dice weren't a cool and evocative idea, but simplifying is nice.

I also bought my copy from the Hairy T, about 6 months ago.  It should have been a no-brainer for me, because I'm an absolute goober for Chris Moeller's work in general and Iron Empires in particular, but I hadn't been interested in what I'd heard about BW.  I've read it (but not played it yet), loved it, and on the strength of what I found in BE I went and bought all 3 books for BW.

I adore chargen and the character scale stuff but that said, I'm still somewhat iffy on the Infection mechanics.  Maybe that'll change with AP, maybe not...

KoOS

I've only played a demo game and saw just a few of the mechanics.  There was no lifepath/character generation at all.  But I did like what I saw enough to buy my own copy.  The world building is fantastic though, I can probably have fun just doing that every session.  I have some concerns about Let It Slide as well, nothing I can put into words but there's something nagging at me about it.

I can't help but feel that it is going to require unrealistic levels of player buy in - everyone at the table is going to have to broadly grok 300 pages of rules, which I don't see happening very often.

600+ pages of rules, actually. Player buy-in is a concern I've been thinking about since I own the only copy of it amongst my friends and am the only person who's even heard of it.

I'm starting a PbP over in the PbP forum. Anyone interested in BE but unable to put together a group IRL, head on over there and let's see if we can get something going to scratch the itch.

Not having read the book, could somebody alleviate my uninformed hunch that the setting is those parts of Dune I dislike (family rivalries, religion) plus Starship Troopers plus mindworms?

Oh, and please don't pull an Exalted on me and say: Well yes Pierce, but it can be ANYTHING YOU WANT.

I said over on my PbP posting that it seems more like WH40K run with the Traveler mechanics for character creation and Nobilis-like world creation.