Never Going Home - Experiences running the system thus far

 For a bit over a month now I've been running an open table game of Never Going Home and I'm starting to feel like I'm maybe having a grasp on the system by now, as well as few different experiences from our sessions.
Sounds like a time for a review/first-impressions.

Book & Layout

Let's first adress the elephant in the room, which is the layout of the core book. It's all over the place.
First of all, the book is 7" x 10" in size which makes it just shy of an A4 but all the text is laid out in single page-wide column and there are un-broken blocks of text that tend to clog up even three quarters of a whole page at a time which is very slow to scan through during a game.

While reading it through casually the issue doesn't seem that big, the core rules are explained in the span of 23 pages, including character creation. Most of the sections even have neat bullet points to comb through at a glance, and I suppose so far my only issue with the book is that there's few large chunks of text that could have been condensed a lot to keep up with the theme of making the actual rules section be easy to thumb through and find the details you're looking for since it usually is the smaller details of how things work that you end up needing to look up during game. To this day I still don't know if it's a fever dream or is it actually mentioned in the book if you can choose the same modifier for a spell's effects several times.
The issue here is that the rules needed for play are scattered among the just over twenty pages and at times even repeated under other sections despite being already explain under a different header. For the games I've ran so far I've ended up making somewaht condensed player handouts for each section of the rules in Roll20 and at this point I almost prefer opening that game in my browser to check on rules rather than flipping through the book even outside of running the game.

Then right after the book jumps into giving out the setting backstory and roughly two page long details for nine of the "factions" involved in their version of ww1 including themes, general officer attitudes as well as soldier attitudes. Not a bad springing board for when you want to run your own adventures instead of the pre-written ones they offer, these just so happen to put a whole thirty pages of lore stuff right in the smack middle of the book followed by some GM advice and the bestiary which now ends up in very not easy to find place. Right after the book closes up by giving you three example inroduction scenarios, each one with a very different feel to them which can be either a good or a bad thing depending on reader.

Oh, and in the pdf version there are no bookmarks or links at all.

In conclusion, so far the feel I've gotten out of things put out by Wet Ink Games is these better than average books carried by the amazing art and suffering from akward layout choices that take away from the usefullness of their books.

The art is just gorgeous, snippets of art by Charles Ferguson-Avery

Running the game

We've certainly had a lot of fun with the system. Creating new characters on the fly takes less than a minute, making up a name has in fact been the most time consuming part for us so far, which works really well with the system as things can get deadly really fast when shit hits the fan and as a GM it doesn't make me feel too bad about having killed a character since we can drop the player right back into the game without any prep needed.

So far we have been playing through pre-written scenarios from both the core rule book and Once More Unto The Breach which is a collection of 21 adventures by various authors. There have certainly been hits and misses, different adventures have had different feels to them which isn't bad by any means and all of them are pretty much designed to be run as oneshots since that is where the system even pushes itself towards when explaining the adventure structure in the core book.

Speaking of adventure structure, Never Going Home has the absolute best presentation of adventures I've run into so far in tabletop rpgs. Each adventure comes with mission briefing which details how things have come to their current state or what/why the players are about to go through, it then gives out a concrete mission objective for the players so they know what they should be focusing on this particular oneshot before laying out the main "incidents" to run the players through. 
I really enjoy this approach as there is a lot of free space given for the GM and for me it felt like there was a lot less pressure on getting a ton of things just right and according to some tight module structure which some more traditional D&D adventures have. Instead Never Going Home simply gives you the high points to hit during play and leaves the GM to make stuff up to fill in the gaps however they see fit.

The experience so far

I thought I should also share with you guys what we actually have been through so far. For those familiar with the pre-written adventures we have so far, in order, played through Terror in Tannenburg, The Lamps are Going Out, The Angel of Mons and The Longest Night. (Heads up, the longest night needs some modifications to be fun for players as there's very little to interact with.)

We began our adventures right at the beginning of the war, before the veil between the worlds was torn and whispers from beyond started to mess with the more mentally sensitive soldiers, zooming in on happenings on the eastern front and a unit in the Russian 2nd Army.

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August 27th 1914, outside Tannenberg, Prussia — The Eastern Front.

The guns were silent through the night, but it was difficult to catch much sleep due to the oppressive heat hanging over the trenches like a wet blanket. Nearby, the village still burns and drifting smoke cloaks the dense woods all around you. Before the sun even breaks over the horizon, you are shaken out of your fitful slumber and summoned to your commander.
There, you are given new orders. You are to be sent on a special top secret assignment.

Two men from the same squad were found dead this morning, killed in their sleep. There were no visible wounds found on their bodies, and no bullet holes in their clothing. Despite the heat they were found with a layer of frost covering their skin and their eyes were wide open, as if terrified. A cursory examination by the medics indicated that they had indeed been frozen to death.
Your mission is to investigate the bodies, interview those who might have seen something, and uncover the reason for their peculiar deaths. If this is some new weapon at work, the Generals need to know about it immediately. 
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Mission Objective:  Your mission is to investigate the bodies, interview those who might have seen something, and uncover the reason for their peculiar deaths. If this is some new weapon at work, the Generals need to know about it immediately. 

From here on out we skipped forward in time to bit after the tragedy of battle of Somme where the massive amounts of death during the war had finally reached the tipping point of tearing down the veil between worlds, causing horrors beyond human imagination to pour out into our world.

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March 20th 1916, near Lake Narach, Russian Empire — The Eastern Front.

Near the end of a long day of fighting, deep in the enemy trenches, the rush of victory almost compensating for the twist of fear and disgust in your gut, your squad rounds a corner just in time to see the members of an enemy squadron retreating up a ladder and back to the relative safety of the captured ground they’ve held for months. Your unit surges forward and quickly piles out of the trench after them. Ahead of you the enemy soldiers rush into a small village. Arriving at the edge of the village you don’t see the soldiers, or anyone.
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Mission Objective: Find the enemy soldiers.

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March 26th 1916, somewhere west of Lake Narach, Russian Empire — The Eastern Front.

Several days after the hasty retreat from an unknown monster that a bunch of corrupted soldiers were calling the Night Master, the squad can still sometimes hear screeches and flapping of wings in the dark nights as you've been hiding trapped behind the german lines.

Surviving soldiers of your unit scrambled together beyond the accursed village of purple flames in the past few days that you have pushed through on shared and carefully conserved rations. Some familiar faces are still missing but now there is barely enough food to survive through another day.

The german soldier that Ivanovits and late Pyotr saved from the village has been following your unit like a lost puppy, and few of your guys have actually built some sort of rapport with the poor soldier to the point that there appears to be some kind of mutual understanding going on among them. These same guys from your unit have now informed you that according to the german soldier, there is supposed to be a town or a village of some sort not far from where you are currently hunkered down. All that sits between you and the town is barren no man's land left behind from when the russian army had not yet been pushed as far back as it is now, lined with a maze of assumedly empty german trenches.

Even without understanding what the german soldier is talking about most of the time, everyone in your unit has recognised few words from among his utterances as he's been pointing and throwing his hands towards the direction of the supposed town; "Angel", "Saviour".
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Mission Objective: Investigate the town, find food for the unit.

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March 29th 1916, Kovno, Russian Empire — The Eastern Front.

During your stay in what you've found out to be the town of Kovno the unit has been making themselves comfortable to the best of their ability, enjoying this sudden bout of normalcy in the empty town. Somebody had even found a radio in one of the houses near the train station.
Most channels are dead, and one is playing a nationalist sounding german anthem over and over. It may not be your preferred musical genre, but anything is enough to constitute as entertainment for the men in the unit. The German soldier can even sometimes be heard humming the tune or seen sitting by the radio while looking lost in thought.

But sometimes, when the radio briefly turns to static, people are swearing they've heard someone speaking russian amidst the white noise. More inquisitive members of your unit had made it their goal to decipher what it is that you are hearing mixed in with the static.

One of these days when walking by the building one of the men investigating the mysterious static noise pulls you in to the building. The small group of soldiers that have stationed themselves around the radio press for you to take a seat, one of them starts to fiddle with the channel selector while the others explain to you how they have found a channel where the spoken russian keeps repeating over and over behind the white noise.
After listening to the static for a moment you can make it out as well. Coordinates, as well as a roughly estimated location a day east from Kovno that someone is repeating over and over in russian.
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Mission Objective: Investigate the location heard on the radio. It's on the way back to the front and the message is in a friendly language. On top of that the amount of food you can scavenge from this town is running low anyways.

The missions after the first one were modified slightly in terms of the fiction involved to accomodate for the location of the unit we're following for these games.
Currently they have broken out of some form of time or space anomaly that the radio signal was coming from and have made it back behind their ows lines. No friendlies in sight as of now, so we shall have to see what the unit decides to do next.