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).

Full disclosure: I contributed to Vol. IV of this anthology

This is well worth the price. I have both the PDF and hardcover when I had only intended to have the PDF. What made me want the hardcover is for the same reason people love having the WotC D&D books. The art is so gorgeous and there's something incredibly satisfying about flipping through the pages and and lightly running an admiring finger across the lines of color and shape. For those who are curious, when on the shelf next to my 5e core books, it sits a few centimeters taller than the others and its heft is enough to give a small creature disadvantage when using it as an improvised weapon.

The stories in the adventure collection of one-shots run the gamut from whimsical and almost comical to sad and a bit macabre. Most of these adventures can be played in around 3 hours, a few are longer and maybe one or two are shorter. These one-shots can be used to introduce people to D&D who might not be into a more traditional campaign. People who have been playing D&D for some time will enjoy the subversion of lore tropes as well as real-world mythology.