Brancalonia

As a 5E setting, the spaghetti Italian fantasy setting of Brancalonia is good. As a GURPS setting, it is a great one. If you limit the 5E rules to the 6th level, the system fails to deliver rules that work for your setting. Wizards of the Coast has never been able to provide a version of D&D that works past the 10th level, and the 6th level is the sweet spot where it begins to go downhill.

We got to the 15th level in D&D 4E, and we laughed at how bad that was and wondered how Wizards ever thought they could ship such garbage high-level rules. Nothing has changed with them, and selling books feels more important than balance. Their answer is to ship a game that only works up to 6th level.

Low-magic and low-power settings using the rules are left in the dust.

Low Fantasy Gaming, a community version of 5E, has found its niche in Conan and pulp-style settings. However, even this team embraces change as they venture into their game, Tales of Argosa. This shift in the gaming community, away from 5E and towards independent game development or 5E versions, is palpable. It's an exciting time, with everyone taking the reins and crafting unique gaming experiences. But the community is getting tired of hacking 5E and moving on.

Me? Why buy a few more niche Kickstarter versions of 5E? Level Up. ToV. MCDM RPG. DC 20. And there are a few others. Everyone is rushing Nu-5E out before the 2024(5) books drop, and that is a good thing since they will get lost in the shuffle next year. Myself? I am tapped out on 5E Kickstarter projects and have the best two implementations with ToV and LU.

I can play 5E here, but it falls short of any low-fantasy setting. Primeval Thule is one of the best examples of a design team coming in with big hopes for 5E and the entire system blowing up. The infinite, free-magic blaster-caster classes outshine the warriors by level six. Conan is standing there with a broken bone sword and no plate mail while the mage is flying around, firing magic missiles like a helicopter in a war movie.

Low magic? Not 5E. Martial classes go from sucking to sucking hard.

GURPS works perfectly. You can have complete control over magic here. The martial classes are excellent in this game. The skills let you design any character, not just a handful of stereotypes. You have complete science and tinkering classes, history, social, alchemy, lore, engineering, art, performance, and any magic system you want. Minor magics only. Something from GURPS Magic or Thaumatology.

Or no magic system at all.

Dungeon Fantasy eats this setting up and opens up a world of possibilities. You don't really need much more, some of the GURPS sourcebooks or PDFs on W23 (the Renaissance ones), and possibly the 3rd Edition Swashbucklers book - though Italy is said to be in shambles, fractured, the remains of a fallen empire, and a frustrating place to do business. This sounds perfect for this setting since that is what it is, but not much more is said in this book besides a sidebar.

But the character-building keeps me coming back. Characters will wander the world and pick up roguish skills. If a mage needs to learn fisticuffs and swordplay, go at it; you can take your character in any direction. This fits in well with the setting of the characters being miscreants and opportunists and dealing with a world filled with the shoddy and second-hand, which reflects the shoddy and second-hand heroes themselves.

You aren't supposed to be "perfect archetypes," so why do your characters cleanly fit into class boxes?

Be different, embrace being different, and break free of the box these games put you in. 5E players are too conformist for this setting, needing a strict hierarchy of classes, subclasses, and powers to hang their identity upon. I get the feeling in 5E, nothing matters more than your class. Who you are means little compared to your power framework and the small number of choices you can make.

In GURPS, I am free to build anything.

That character on the cover of the book? In 5E, fighter or paladin. In GURPS, who knows? Maybe he knows magic. A rouge? A mage blade? A ranger? A bard? Who knows? He's cool and that is all that matters.

Like this setting, "fitting in" is not the entire point of the world.