aramis erak
Legend
Seconded.
It's even more opaque when you're not a Cthulhu fan. I tried to read the setting info because a friend needed help grasping it... and it felt like word salad... no, not word salad, Voynichese. Clearly linguistic, but making no sense. It was, unlike the Voynich ms., eventually parseable...
Another where the setting is part of the hangup: Mechanical Dream. The "cool «bleep»" setting elements are some form of miasma that renders much of the world inaccessible at night. The edition I have is a "double book" format (first book is face up, second is upside down and face down; flip along text line axis to make second book face up and upright, with first now face down and upside down. So, literally, no back covers.) A later PDF is clearer, but the setting is still very unclear to me after reading another edition. (JJS, if you're reading this, I still can't grasp it.) It's one of the few where I couldn't get a clear enough mental image to play, let alone run, it. (There are a bunch where I grasp it, but don't want to run them.)
I think most setting first games suffer from this effect. Cases in point include Skyrealms of Jorune, Star Riders (the sequel to Teenagers from Outer Space), Ninja Burger, Coriolis: The Third Horizon, Coriolis: The Great Dark, almost all licensed games...
I found I lacked a lot of mythic context for the monsters in Dragon Warriors. The britanoceltic mythic landscape was something I learned partially from Pendragon.
I find Pendragon is one of the few setting-first games that has enough penetration of the underlying myth, and the myth being so varied, that it's widely acceptable for many - but I have had a few players who needed cuing in to grasp it, as they lacked a cultural context for not just the monsters, but the entire Arthurian myth.
