Interesting review! Phenomenal blog! 🙂

Trophy is currently one of my favorite games. So far, I’ve led a few incursions in TD and started a campaign in TG.

Interestingly, you mentioned a few observations about TD that are like the complete opposite of my experiences:

Almost everyone who played a TD incursion wanted to play more modules.
Absolutely everyone who died during an incursion wanted to then serve the Forest, as ghosts or monsters.
The whole table agreed that Flocculent Cathedral was for us definitely the weakest and least interesting of the incursions we’ve played (the highest ratings went to the Gift of the Sea).

On a side note: Characters managed to survive a TD incursion twice, both times in Witchwood. The second time, a player who was playing a faeborn reached the end of the labyrinth and it turned out that Witchwood is in a time loop, and the fae regularly reenact the disappearance of a little girl for fun, in order to lure other faeborn into the fae world. It was fun!

And to be honest I’ve never played Dark in a one-shot 😀 – it has always been 2-3 sessions, and with Gift of the Sea, even 5 :0 (in fact, I’ll try to expand Gift of the Sea into a module for Gold – i think it deserves it).

As for TG, there are also the journey rules, which introduce more downtime and interesting, emergent exploration into the travels between expeditions and the city. There’s also the Scoundrel’s Quarter procedure from TD, which allows an even deeper portrayal of the world.

As for a longform play – I think Jason Cordova is pulling this off. He introduces quite a bit of freeform between expeditions. But I totally agree – the idea of building a simple procedure and rules for playing between incursions could really add a whole new dimension to Trophy.

From my perspective Trophy is still not yet a popular game in indie circles… And Rooted in Trophy is not generating a whole of new games either, unfortunately. Even games like Carved from Brindlewood suddenly exploded much more!

Greetings from Poland – great blog! 😀