Paul,
I’ve been keenly following your GM adventures with Invisible Sun and have to admit that I’m a little bummed out that you only played three sessions, but, like you said, THAT PREP and YOUR PLAYERS!

I bought the PDF only version of the set on a Black Friday deal at drivethrrpg.com for $25, but printing up a couple hundred pages of cards is a hobby all into itself. I was secretly hoping your deep dive would tell me if my investment of hours and hours of printing all the game components was worth it. (Although I do feel vindicated when you said the details on the Sooth Deck were hard to read. I thought it was a problem with my ink-jet, and wound up rewriting all the info much larger by hand with a gel pen!)

What I’m very curious about is when you say, “(Invisible Sun) doesn’t build on the lessons being passed around in the hothouse of “indie” storygame design…” what indie “lessons” do you think would’ve made stronger? And are any of these “learnings” elements that could be added without basically turning it into a different game altogether? That’s would be in addition to your other suggestions, such as figuring out character connections first; maybe writing or painting in the color of the sun on the Path of Suns (and making the Sooth cards readable); letting players be the ones to determine if events gave their characters Joy or Despair; and somehow making the character builds more thematically uniform?

Thanks,

Larry