So we recently did a playtest of one of the first two or three adventures that will be coming out for Fae Noir. The specific adventure is The Paris Escapade and it was originally run a couple years back to actually playtest the first batch of Fae Noir rules (everything other than the magic and glamour rules). I asked the guy who GMed that session to write it up as an adventure and it evolved into a mini-campaign that should take about 4-6 sessions depending on how thorough players are and how much role-playing they end up doing. I think we learned a lot from the session. First, it took two solid 4-hour sessions to get through the main storyline of the Paris Escapade, which is good, because we had shortened that to hit the high points, which means we're on target as far as length.
Obviously I can't delve too deeply into specifics of the storyline because this will be a published adventure, but let's go over the good things and the things that needed some polishing.
Good: The setting (Paris) engaged the players. They were interested and seemed fairly eager to explore.
Good: The NPCs also seemed interesting to the players. They tended to want to hang out with the NPCs.
Good: The action sequences were consistently awesome. This is something that we've discovered since the first playtest oh so long ago, but combat in Fae Noir is completely insane. Did you just jump out the window to escape from the knife-wielding assassins? Awesome! Did you just use illusion to make it appear the theater was on fire, creating a stampede, in order to save your friend from being beaten to death? Nice work! How about busting an elephant gun out on that griffin? Okay!
Less Good: The main plot lacked focus at points. The players said that they were unsure about what they should be doing. This was subsequently cleaned up by adding additional encounters that aided in directing the PCs.
I think the main issue with this particular adventure is that it was, essentially, a mystery. Mysteries are very hard to do well for a role-playing game because they depend on the intelligence of the players, and you can never count on the players doing anything. I really feel that the addition of the extra clues to the module will alleviate this problem, especially since the players said that they had it all figured out once those clues were presented.
Not Actually a Problem, But Interesting: At one point in the story, the players were attacked by a group of goblin assassins. They jumped into combat, laughing all the way. None of them had armor. Only one was wielding an actual weapon, and it was a 6-shot snub-nose .22. Then, the guy playing the troll was like; "Ow! The goblins keep cutting me with their knives! Why isn't my candleholder killing them? I'm a troll!" which means that they hadn't realized that combat is BAD and getting stabbed is a BAD THING. Does this point to a learning curve that people will have to go through to play Fae Noir?