I really, really want to like Fellowship. I love the pitch a whole lot: it's a high fantasy game for any kind of fantasy! Players have ultimate control over the world! The GM also has a character so they can get the serotonin hit of filling out a character sheet too! But I've played Fellowship a lot now. I've been in three games with false starts (one of them I GM'd) and one game that got past the first session that got to the end of gaining Fellowship with a community, and most of the time I enjoyed with those games, I wasn't engaging with its systems at all.

First of all: this is a game that, in all the times I've played it, is a resource management dungeon-crawling game, first and foremost. It has better capabilities for roleplaying and worldbuilding than a game like Dungeons & Dragons, but it still leaves a lot to be desired on that front. My main group is extremely into inter-character melodrama, and if there are any lulls in the action we will spend hours talking to each other in-character. Not a lot of systems explicitly support this, but Fellowship explicitly discourages this with its "rest" systems; taking any time to do scenes not directly related to dungeon-crawling makes the next encounters more difficult for really no reason. I wouldn't mind this so much if I was playing a very crunchy numbers game, but when I want to tell a character-driven story, Fellowship is more or less incapable of delivering an experience I want.

Another thing related to the game's inflexibility: the playbooks and worldbuilding associated with them. Fellowship's main selling point is that you get to decide what your fantasy culture looks like, with a lot of flexibility. In play, however, I found this flexibility was a lot less open than I would have liked. If you're playing the Elf, you're more or less locked into playing a holier-than-thou character who can commune with nature. If you have a different idea for an elf, you're going to be fighting the system a lot to put together the moves for your vision. Once, I tried to use the Orc playbook to make a character whose people were known for their ingenuity, even when that, in the past, meant giving up their humanity and bonding with parasitic fungus; after taking just my two starting moves, however, I ran out of playbook moves that fit my vision.

This is already getting long and I haven't touched on my frustrations with the moment-to-moment gameplay, or the frustrations the GMs of my groups have run into. Let me touch on the former (where it doesn't relate to the latter) briefly: advantage was not adequately explained in the original edition, and putting it entirely in an appendix for the revised edition is less than ideal; I already mentioned before that decompressing after long action sequences is basically impossible. The latter is a huge problem that bleeds over into the moment-to-moment gameplay, and most of it boils down to two things.

First, giving the GM a playbook makes them rather precious over their Overlord and General characters and fosters a hostile relationship between the players and the GM. In my experience, since the GM knows their villains are finite, they scramble to find reasons why the PCs can't kill them right now, and often resort to underhanded tactics. All the GMs I've played with have said they felt incentivized to give threats secret stats that negated certain attacks, creating an atmosphere where players were too nervous about wasting any moves in case they activated the GM's trap cards. Second, though the second edition is a marginal improvement, there's a notable dearth of information on how to be a good Overlord. The newer GMs struggled to find a footing or guidance in the GM's sections at all, and more veteran GMs were frustrated by lack of guidance for creating tailor-made threats/setpieces for whatever unique world the players created.

If you're really desperate to play a PBTA version of D&D, I recommend Fellowship over Dungeon World as it's slightly more flexible. But, honestly, I'd give both a pass. It's a shame and I miss playing high-fantasy adventure games at my table, but Fellowship doesn't scratch the itch for me at all.

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.