As the title suggests, I am interested in opinions on this game. It looks interesting, a mix of PbtA and dicepool (but not in the BitD/FitD sense). The genre is high/epic fantasy if i got that right, kind of Exalted-ish or K6BD but with a Filipino Myth background.
I’d appreciate any and all tales about how this game performed at your table and its pros and cons. What did you like? What didn’t you like? And why?
Thanks in advance!
As it happens, @edige23 just recently finished up a four-session run of Karanduun and recorded the videos if you’d like to check them out! You can find the videos here, and maybe @Maria_Mison, @Puckett, or @Jane_Samborski have opinions to share! 
SO GOOD. We did four sessions and you should check out the AP videos. The first one is about half character creation but the other three are pure play and story. I ran this from the 1.666 version of the rules, but the author has done a couple of revisions and now its even stronger. Like most of the mechanical friction points and questions have been cleaned up in the latest version. It’s really good.
It’s a d6 pool system vs. a difficulty, with a 4-6 on each die being a success. You compare that to the difficulty. If you get just enough that’s a partial success; if you get more you get a full success. Actions are laid out PbtA style and so are the playbooks but there’s more depth and options for combat.
It’s pretty simple but super rich in detail. I’m a super white westerner, but I was able to pick up on some of the themes-- and it pushed me to read some secondary material including the Thousand Thousand Islands zines and a couple of books on Filipino monsters and myths. Those helped inform what I was doing.
I loved and ran a bunch of Exalted, mostly 1e (and Scion). I like this better. It scratches that itch and is super fun and fast. It’s probably my game of the year at this point.
I also feel like it helps if you have familiarity with other SEA games; having been in Balikbayan sessions with Jammi, I felt a LOT more comfortable interacting with little gods, like the little god of paper or pebbles, and making things up on the fly for my street urchin who treated all of the gods as Honored Uncles/Aunties/Elders, even sitans she had never met before (cue the entire table sucking in breath when I snuck up behind a sitan of wrath chewing on a foul-smelling stogie and said something like “Hello Honored Uncle. Would you like a beer?” Because street urchins in Karanduun apparently always carry beer?).
It was also really helpful as a player when Maria explained nuances in moves or some other aspect of the game that we might not get as people who aren’t part of the culture, like insisting that manananngals were misunderstood right before she opened the door that was keeping them confined … and from attacking us, which immediately happened due to a die roll going sideways (we made the BEST decisions as a group), but we had a better understanding of what was going on and why, and how shifting perspectives on myths and legends alter how players can interact with them.
One of the things I appreciated about it - and this may have been more about how Lowell ran the game than what is actually in the game - is narrating actions like heroic deeds, like the speed lines in anime. It seemed like my character was always frozen in speed lines as she kicked something or stomped with her ridiculous shoes and so forth. It really fed into the idea that we were heroes gifted with abilities that rendered us capable of taking on gods … and winning. I am so glad I got into this game (I was originally waitlisted and I think I was three or four people back - PSA: USE THE WAITLIST IF YOU’RE HAVING TROUBLE GETTING INTO GAMES). It was a tremendous amount of fun.
Very cool, thank you all for your replies. I will certainly take a look at the videos (or podcast versions). I am a frequent listener to stuff from the Gauntlet.
If more comes to mind, please don’t hesitate to post in here.
If you want to talk a bit more about mechanics, I’d also appreciate it. I’m always interested in the mechanics part of a game and its pros and cons.
Hmm so it seems the game has changed somewhat in that it has now some sort of attributes and skills where you always roll one of each for the pool instead of the two from the more open list of 5 traits it had? That’s kind of disappointing from my point of view. I found the earlier model more attractive (how i got to know it via the podcast on the Gauntlet). YMMV of course.
Is there a coherent reasoning behind that decision from the writer of the game?
Huh. I hadn’t seen the latest version which makes that shift. That’s a pretty big one. I’ll have to look at that more closely.