Swanosaurus
Adventurer
From today, the English translation of the German RPG Mythaloria is available on drivethru - for a very low price, if you choose so. I'm not involved with it in any way besides owning it in German and knowing the author from social media. If you're into fantasy with a Bronze Age vibe, lots of original ancestries and some hints of the setting being actually post-scifi, you should check it out. The ancestries are truly original (no "elves by any other name" to be found, at least one is non-binary). The setting description is concise, but vivid. The rules are kind of okay, as far as I am concerned - at their core, they are simple, but they have their intricacies. Basically, it's a d4-based dice pool system where you add your roll up to meet a difficulty; that's pretty simple, where it becomes fiddly is that with different types of rolls, different character abilities act as a fixed bonus to your roll. So if you roll a skill check, you use your skill and your attribute as dice pool and add your species bonus and your profession (if you have a fitting profession) as fixed bonus; but if you roll one of your professions special skills, you roll your profession and your special skill and add your attribute and your species bonus as fixed bonus. It all kind of makes sense, but I guess that in the beginning, you'll keep looking up a lot of this (I have only actually played the system once, as of yet).
What I love about the system is that it comes with an interesting take on lifepath character creations (you don't roll, but answer questions about formative events and characteristics of your character), and that character devolpment is fully organic (so you can take training time, and you can improve abilities by certain rolls - think RuneQuest), and the rules for it are pretty simple and straightforward. No XP.
Be advised that the setting presented contains elements that can be problematic: While the main society described is not terribly dystopic, it is a deeply unjust matriarchic caste system built on hereditary slavery. The dominating church might seem benevolent at first glance, but factually, it looks more like a force of oppression (even more so if you notice the subtle connections to the publishers other RPG, Ultima Ratio, which might be the forgotten scifi pre-history of Mythaloria). While not straightaway telling you so, I think the setting very much wants you to rebel against the powers that be.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, I'd recommend buying it while it's on sale for pay what you want (I think the minimum is 1$; but I'd just as much recommend it for the regular price of about 10$ for the pdf).
What I love about the system is that it comes with an interesting take on lifepath character creations (you don't roll, but answer questions about formative events and characteristics of your character), and that character devolpment is fully organic (so you can take training time, and you can improve abilities by certain rolls - think RuneQuest), and the rules for it are pretty simple and straightforward. No XP.
Be advised that the setting presented contains elements that can be problematic: While the main society described is not terribly dystopic, it is a deeply unjust matriarchic caste system built on hereditary slavery. The dominating church might seem benevolent at first glance, but factually, it looks more like a force of oppression (even more so if you notice the subtle connections to the publishers other RPG, Ultima Ratio, which might be the forgotten scifi pre-history of Mythaloria). While not straightaway telling you so, I think the setting very much wants you to rebel against the powers that be.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, I'd recommend buying it while it's on sale for pay what you want (I think the minimum is 1$; but I'd just as much recommend it for the regular price of about 10$ for the pdf).
