I'm pretty sure it's out of print but 3rd edition Runequest was a fine generic system that could be very easily adapted to high medieval Europe. Failing that, I'm sure that GURPS would do just fine.
I don't recommend the Harnmaster system as it is a pretty exhausting, overly intricate system to run. I recall spending a whole afternoon rolling dice just for our party to stab a bandit in the elbow; she eventually stopped fighting, not due to us injuring her further but due to loss of blood and exhaustion. But by then, the afternoon was over.
I do not recommend Ars Magica as a setting because it is grounded in a bizarre conspiracy theory/alternate history which needs to be true in order for its setting materials to work. Ars Magica is sort of the way a 16th century Florentine intellectual might imagine the early medieval period was; the fact is that Hermeticism was not part of the medieval worldview. Its emergence is one of the things that people use to delimit the end of the medieval versus the beginning of the early modern period.
I don't recommend the Harnmaster system as it is a pretty exhausting, overly intricate system to run. I recall spending a whole afternoon rolling dice just for our party to stab a bandit in the elbow; she eventually stopped fighting, not due to us injuring her further but due to loss of blood and exhaustion. But by then, the afternoon was over.
I do not recommend Ars Magica as a setting because it is grounded in a bizarre conspiracy theory/alternate history which needs to be true in order for its setting materials to work. Ars Magica is sort of the way a 16th century Florentine intellectual might imagine the early medieval period was; the fact is that Hermeticism was not part of the medieval worldview. Its emergence is one of the things that people use to delimit the end of the medieval versus the beginning of the early modern period.
))
