So, it's been literally months since I got my group together and we made characters - but we finally had our first session yesterday!
We had a blast! Our Knight is a private detective trying to solve a cold case, our Thief a kleptomaniac street racer, and our Seer is a duelist with questionable morals. I knew there was no real point to preparing any story, as it would inevitably get derailed, but I did prepare some NPCs with traits that would mesh with the characters' - and I can definitely recommend that approach if you're looking to GM this and have a chance to prep in between character creation and first session.
On top of that, I had prepped a bucket of random traits I could use for generating more NPCs on the fly as needed. That turned out to be incredibly useful, as I often struggle to come up with such things on the fly. I was able to use one of my prepped NPCs unmodified (they fit right into what the players were already trying to do!), another NPC was quickly modified to fulfill a different role in the story (but keep their narrative role), and three more NPCs were generated as we were playing. We'd sometimes stop to discuss together as a group who this new NPC is and what kinds of traits they might have, which was fun to do and led to the NPCs getting all sorts of history with the players' characters.
I had planned for the players exploring the City and the Dreaming, but the story pretty quickly wanted to go into a different direction and we explored the Network instead. I struggled with that initially - I particularly missed having a Ritual for transitioning to the Network layer, and my players were very interested to know how that works (do we really go there or do we just project there like in VR? What happens to our bodies in the City, do they get left behind? Is it more like Tron or more like Sword Art Online or something else?) - we made our own answers to all those questions, but it was a bit of a struggle initially. (In part also because the places in the Network tend to lack descriptions of what they look like.)
Even so, we had loads of fun. After a while players caught onto the fact that by spending tokens, they're not just making their character do a thing - they can also make something happen to the character, narratively. Occasionally someone would ask "do I need a token for this?", and I found it worked great if I answered: "well, do you *want* to spend a token?" - the general vibe was that if you spend a token doing something (or making something happen), it's going to have a meaningful impact, no matter what it is you're doing. And if you're not using a token, then it might be less important to the story, and act more as flavor or characterization.
At one point, the Seer got into a swordfighting duel with an NPC. After an initial moment of panic - no stats, no dice, no hitpoints, how do I resolve this? - I realized I just have to ask my players: which outcome to this duel would be most interesting? Very quickly the players agreed that our Seer should lose the duel, but it should be due to a shady trick on the NPC's part. Our Seer then learned something interesting about dueling as a result, and got to recover that trait. It was a very exciting moment during play, and I love how the system encouraged us to finding the most interesting resolution that would lead to character growth.
So, overall, we had a great time with this, and we agreed to play another session to try and bring our story to a conclusion. We stole a motorcycle and dueled the femme fatale arms dealer, we bartered for a very special car engine and started a probably-friendly rivalry with a mechanic raccoon who wants to race in the Undercity Street Subway Tunnel Race, and our Knight finally found a new lead in his case, which is that the murder weapon was probably a two-of-a-kind flying piano. Also, the local mafia seems to be involved, but we haven't found out how yet.
I can't wait to find out how the story continues. Thanks for this weird wonderful little book, and for all the help you offered us along the way!