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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheAlkaizer" data-source="post: 8443244" data-attributes="member: 7024893">I would suggest two games: Forbidden Lands and Symbaroum. Both are by Free League Publishing.Forbidden LandsThis is Free League's response to the OSR movement.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">It's lowish magic. There's casters classes, but you don't cast a ton of spells and their pretty impactful. There's few magic items, but they're quite potent (artifacts).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The game is low crunch. But there's a big side-management side to the game. Tracking ressources, tracking raw materials, tracking some conditions. You can have a mount and a stronghold, you have to track your hirelings salary, etc. If you decide not to play with Strongholds and just do the adventurers running around, it seriously reduces the amount of work.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">There's three elements tied to your character: his attributes (strength, agility, etc), his skills (melee, move, craft, etc) and your talents (something resembling feats). Your attributes will never increase. Your skills increase and you can get new talents as you spend experience you accumulate. But you do not become excessively powerful. There's no challenge rating system because lower-end monsters will end up being easier to manage but will always be a threat and higher-end monster will become more manageable but will always be a serious threat.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The elevator pitch is that the region known as the Ravenlands was covered by something known as the bloodmist for 300 years. People couldn't get really far from their villages as the bloodmist would reappear every night and kill anyone in it. Unexplicably, five years ago, the mist lifted. The whole ravenlands are ripe for exploring. There's ruins, hidden treasures. But there's no big cities, very little trade. There's only specks of villages around the map. The game is very clear about the players not being heroes but adventurers. Unfortunately there's exotic races but the setting is slightly human-centric.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The game is slightly brutal. It gets easier as your player progresses, but there's a lot of random tables and hunger, thirst, cold and dangerous enemies. Things can quickly spiral out of control.</li> </ol>SymbaroumThis is an actual dark fantasy product that joined the Free League family a few years ago.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Similar to Forbidden Lands. There's magic, but it's very mysterious. There's caster classes but they don't throw spells every round. And casting has a cost. There's something called corruption.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The game is pretty low crunch. It has a very simple roll-under your attribute system. I was impressed by how lean the rules were (maybe even a little too lean to my taste).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Similar to Forbidden Lands. There's no level, you accumulate experience and buy talents and boons. They give you abilities but you don't really progress all that much numerically. What was deadly will still be as deadly, you just have a better toolkit to manage it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The setting is locked on a limited region of the world. There's an area of plains known as the Kingdom of Ambria that's stuck between a mountain chain and a humongous dark forest known as Davokar. An old civilization known as Symbaroum used to be here and thus there's old ruins, castles and treasures to be found in the deepest parts of the forest. But there's dangerous monstrosities coming from the corruption, there's the elderfolks (elves, goblins, etc) that are really protective of their territory. Once again, you play adventurers and explorers but not heroes. There's exotic races, but they're pretty based and not as high-fantasy as others. The setting is also very human-centric.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The game can be pretty brutal. It's marketed as a gritty dark fantasy game.</li> </ol></blockquote>

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