[L.J.Steele]

More player feedback (if it is easier to do this off-board, PM me with an email address.)
We did use Stitches to do some refreshes. (I don't recall personally ever having more than one Stitch available to me early on which I used to avoid taking some Chronal Stability damages. I would have saved it and spent from the RP perhaps.) Don't think we used them on GA pools. I could be wrong. We got the basic clues as I recall. My issue here is with GUMSHOE design itself. If I have to spend my Investigative Abilities that don't refresh, that's a real annoyance. I'm not necessarily going to waste on a simple boost. I suppose spending a point from an IA pool that I wasn't expecting to use to boost a GA roll might help.

So on the briefing point, it was not clear to me that it's a "go here". That's in keeping with the genre being "temporal beat cops" but against my personally preferred play style. I'm much more accepting of that in a convention run. You don't have a lot of luxury and there's pressure to finish the game within the slot. In essence, you have to start in Florence in this adventure, and in any future adventure you'd also be starting at a fixed point. That's great for the author having a known start and it seriously reinforces the breadcrumb trail nature of GUMSHOE. It's kinda terrible for players if you like the sandbox approach.

I do think that the flashback to the prior mission would have "anchored" us a little better ha ha if only to give context to jumping ahead to a time where we didn't start once we figured out how this all came about. No worries. That's how one learns the system. (I saw the other email need to think about it.)