I love the concept of a world run by dragons, but this roleplaying book takes harmony and friendship to an extreme virtues angle and divine intervention. <p>The game revolves around the concept of "Darkness" as a corrupting shadow that once threatened Dragonia and has now returned. This is not a physical entity but rather a manifestation of negative traits like selfishness, greed, and pride. It is tasked by elder dragons to newborns to investigate without public knowledge.</p> The game encourages players to work together and emphasizes the value of friendship as players protect Dragonia and help its inhabitants from this ‘Darkness’ that has resurfaced again. Like a clash between classical dragons of old stories and this new age of culture and though. In the game lore, dragons do not have sex or gender, and they use gender-neutral pronouns (e.g., "dre"). There is no natural family structure. Instead, dragons are families by bond of affinity. Dragons must form an ‘affinity clutch’, which is a group of dragons sponsored by elder dragons. This group is dedicated to caring for one another, and upon approval, they are granted the privilege of yielding eggs from a magical Hatchery and looked after by Guardian plants. These plants then sort dragons into Great Houses. Each institutional house has charged with caring for the land and maintaining strongholds built in honor of older, influential dragonkin, protecting and serving Dragonia in their own way. Magic is granted by 5 moons, which dragons must give gems to each other to use powers, not grant them yourself. The moons are derived from virtue and wellbeing to chaos and destruction. There is this odd reward system that emphasizes Virtues among friends. Each player holds 10 gems of a colour. Players give each other gems based on their virtuous actions. If a game move requires you to roll +Friendship Gems, you count the number of gems you have from a specific clutchmate and add that number to your roll. You return Gems when performing a moon magic move. Players who are more active or vocal might receive more gems, leading to a disparity in the power to influence the game’s outcomes. The system relies heavily on subjective judgment. What one player considers a virtuous action worthy of a gem, another might not. This subjectivity could lead to inconsistencies in how gems are awarded, potentially causing friction among players. There is not much to the world itself. There is history, grand houses, and a central capital on a large continental landmass. The map is blank and uncharted, so it up to the GM and Players to make up the world itself. All actions are described as Moves and Triggers. Players gain experience points through failed rolls. Main story goals are known as ‘Agendas’. Dragons can be wounded physically or emotionally, which contributes to Darkness. There seems to be a forceful negative interaction among players when your own darkness reaches curtain thresholds. Maximum Shadow turns players into Shadowself, and you can no longer receive gems. However, you can now use Shadow Magic and can accomplish significant feats, without help. You can return from your Shadowself when a player convinces you to humble yourself and acknowledge what you have become. Each dragon architype has its own way of returning to normal. At the end of game sessions there is a moral of the story questions and answer round about all your actions and what you learned, like a ‘My little Pony’ end of an episode.

A wholesome game focused on collaborative worldbuilding and storytelling. I can't wait to be a Dragon Master for a charity stream on June 8th for the Red Knight Inn on Twitch. Ok, enough self-promotion, let's talk about the game.

Things to love:

A worldbuilder's dream

The world of Dragonia is rich enough in lore that a more casual group could get together and jump into a game with what's provided in the playbooks, but the true joy for me is that there is so much left open for the players and DM to create together. This isn't like in D&D or Pathfinder where if the campaign setting you want isn't published, then you have to create something entirely new; Epyllion provides the foundation for a world and gives you the keys to create something as fantastical or mundane as you and the players might want it to be. There's so much to work with both in terms of what is provided and what is left open that no two games of Epyllion will look the same except by design.

Things that could be better:

So how does this work?

As I've mentioned, this game is mostly about worldbuilding and storytelling. The mechanics play second fiddle to the narrative and that's well and good, but I wish there was a real straightforward summary somewhere that explained how the mechanics work. Instead, it's spread across the books (as is common among Powered by the Apocalypse books, so Epyllion is not uniquely guilty of this). You have to read through the books a couple times to get a sense of how it works, and even then I feel less confident about how it all works than I did when I read through the Player's Handbook for D&D 5e.

Epyllion is worth every penny and while I rarely get to play ttrpgs anymore, I'm glad people recommended this to me and I'm glad I get to use it to raise money for charity (St. Jude Children's).

Among my players, Epyllion is often described as "My Little Pony: Flight Rising Edition." The game is set in fantasy world where the only intelligent life is dragonkind. An Epyllion campaign follows one clutch of dragon friends from their earliest days to their old age and eventual passing, along the way making friends and pushing back a nebulous evil given form, known as The Darkness.

This game definitely skews to a younger audience; even for an Apocalypse Engine game, the rules are stripped-down and focused on narrative. That isn't to say the game has nothing interesting to offer mechanically, however! In particular, the playbooks have some very interesting things going on. Each playbook has a Signature move-- a move that your character gets by default. When advancing your character, you may choose to advance your Signature move, usually giving you access to more situations you may use to call upon it. It really lets each character shine at what they were meant to do. Harm is not tracked-- like I said, there's a young audience in mind, and player character death is off the table. Epyllion instead opts for a damage tracker based on negative emotions. While none of them have an adverse effect mechanically, marking one immediately forces the player to escalate the situation with rash action; marking them all triggers a move very much like Monsterhearts' Darkest Self, of all things. I'm too nice to my players and don't have them mark damage nearly often enough, but it's been interesting to watch when it does happen. The escalation leads to some very interesting situations!

The relationship currency here is interesting, and I can see where it'd be very helpful with young players, but it tends to be hard to remember when you play games over the internet as my group does. In meatspace games there's a very physical act of giving another player tokens for roleplaying, but over chat I find myself asking players "hey, do you think you should give another player your friendship currency?" It does the intended work of keeping players not currently in the scene focused on other players' turns, though, which I really like. I tend towards setting up small and intimate scenes, and I worry a lot less about whether or not my players are focused when I know that there's a mechanical reward for focusing.

But I think the best thing that Epyllion does is set up its world. It encourages players and the DM to think about what exactly a world where humanity isn't and never was a thing would look like, and it's been a blast doing that. I love describing mountain-sized buildings that comfortably house a single dragon, or weird gambling games, or how currency works in a world mostly powered by friendship and goodwill.

If you're looking for something for a laid-back game night, I strongly recommend Epyllion regardless of your average player age! Our group is made up of 20-somethings who enjoy a break from our more emotionally taxing other campaigns, and we'd be hard-pressed to find a game that does it was well as this one.

In Epyllion, Marissa Kelly shows us how to play dragons in a lively and unique way. Every part of the setting teaches us important aspects of dragon culture. Every aspect of character creation lets us know more about the world she's crafted, and yet there is clearly room for interpretation. The whole thing has a bit of a Young Adult Fiction feel to it. The game begs to be played and I am looking forward to finding a clutch of raw-scaled gamers to jump into the world of Epyllion!