I’m making my way through The Nightmare Underneath, and it hits the “what do you dooooo?” button pretty precisely and decisively. “You live in the World of Dreams, which is basically like a normal human world but with magic. There is a Nightmare World that wants to invade. Your characters are, for whatever reason, partly immune to Nightmare curses, and you suck at living a normal life, so you go into Nightmare Incursions (dungeons) and kill monsters. Eventually you will die from this.”

I also keep bouncing off of UA3. I got them all in PDF, but I demur at the challenge you’ve mentioned. Like, how on earth am I expected to read all this, AND summarize it in a way that’s accessible to my players AND keep track of all the little minutiae in play, short of making constant fiat calls?

AM, both in 4th and 5th editions, are great failures of mine. I’ve literally never brought a whole group through character creation. I think once I had a full cast in front of me, I would be able to find lots of little things to do with them. This mage needs special components to work on their artifact, this companion wants to get married to a local lord, but the family doesn’t approve of her associating with wizards, these grogs got drunk in town and got arrested, but one of them has a map to the Covenant’s vis source tattooed on his back. But, like, I can do that same stuff with much easier rules.