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I will give you a player perspective but as Neil ran the game he may well chip in here!

Symbaroum has a very D&D flavour but is darker. Our party consisted of a knight (fighter), a theurge (cleric), treasure hunter (thief), witch hunter (ranger) and a ritualist (wizard). I added the bits in brackets to give you more of an idea, the characters are not quite the same as their D&D equivalents. And races wise we had an orge, a goblin and 3 humans.

You have stats: accurate, cunning, discreet, persuasive, quick, resolute, strong, vigilant.

You abilities and powers generally relate back to a stat and you have to roll =under= that stat to succeed. These are d20 rolls but all the usual D&D dice are used for things like weapon damage etc. So all is familiar.. but different.

Encounters can be quite lethal, so it is good to use tactics, play to your strengths, even backing off and running away if that helps you survive.

The setting is interesting. We started in a sort of frontier town on the edges of the great forest of Davoka which is huge.. like the size of 3 countries. All sorts of creatures live there. There are lots of ruin and the like from a much earlier civilisation that was wiped out and the area reclaimed by the forest. Elves are not your friends. They guard the forest trying to stop greedy men from looting artifacts and maybe bringing on another civilisation collapse. The forest is considered forbidden.

Our group went is search of a previous expedition that was 2 weeks overdue. The leader was the niece of one of our group who were contracted by the leader's husband to bring her back. I won't say too much of the story as this is the starter adventure and you may wish to run it.

I liked it, most of us did!

Cool!
Ty for the writeup!

Yes, I'd play this one again in a heartbeat.

I love the setting, which is a melange of Warhammer Olde World and Middle-earth, drizzled with heavy Princess Mononoke themes.

The writing in the book is bad, however, what I call Swenglish---Swedish clumsily translated in English---but I deal with this on a daily basis in my job so I'm inoculated.

Although the game is set in the locale of a ginormous forest, the trees hide some remarkable secrets and surprises.

Davokar forest compared to mainland USA

The setup puts three factions in conflict with each other. The barbarians (who're Rohan-ish), the empire in exile (who're more Byzantine), and the elves of the forest, who are quite alien and hostile to all.

There are no fixed classes but there are pre-made packages that double as classes for those who prefer guided character creation. This is nice flexibility, and characters tend to have fewer useless or forgettable abilities than in D&D 5e. This can seem underwhelming at first because there's less on the character sheet but I like that Scandinavian minimalism.

But what I like most is that the GM never rolls dice. The players make all the rolls. So in combat, instead of the GM rolling for attack and damage for the monsters, he asks the player to roll their defence and armour mitigation. Players are always in action, all the time.

The Starter Set is $10 as a PDF and there's nothing useful in the boxed set for an experienced gamer. Do you really need another set of dice? ... OK, sorry I asked!

All in all, it's not as well written as D&D 5e, the artwork isn't as good so the products aren't as desirable. But in play I much preferred it to D&D 5e.

More dice, my precious!

Nice writeup.

Thanks!

I really dig the setting for this one as well. There’s a 5E variant and I didn’t think 5E seemed like a very good match for the setting, but people in one of my Discords were pretty down on Symbaroum’s own system so I was curious. It’s good to know that the bespoke system actually plays well.

I bought it shortly after it came out because it interested me. Like so many games I own, they aren't getting any play time. ;P

When I went to KublaCon this May in California, I was given the player's guide for the 5e version as a table prize.

Might have to pick up the GM's guide at some point.

Nice guys! I have mixed feelings about the rule book myself tbh. On the one hand, the game played really well in the Starter Set, I was impressed and liked it a lot. On the other hand I'm not sure how useful the book would be as a reference, given how irksome the Swenglish is. Would I use it at the table?

Hmm, then again, is the sign of a good system one that you don't need to keep referencing the book to play? Ah either way, book or PDF I think it's a game worth playing.

Besides the gift, 95% of the games I have purchased in the last few years are pdf only. I don't have the shelf space to display my hobby correctly. My wife is generous, she gave me two shelves of one 5' wide industrial shelving rack we have in the bedroom. But everything else is in boxes that weren't destroyed over the years by leaks in a roof etc... I just don't feel like hunting through a box to pull out some game I didn't think to have on the shelf. Better to have it in PDF and just go "Gosh I want to look at that again," when I get the urge and pull it up.

Plus they are easier to share when players are far apart geographically. Like, say 9 hours between you and me nem.

That is true!

I've had to go mostly PDF only due to space considerations as well. I've even boxed up my beloved complete WoD collection (though I'm never parting with it!) and got the PDFs. The last things I bought in print were the giant Torg Eternity boxes with all the tokens and cards and gubbins, and they take up an entire cupboard.

A good iPad makes the pain easier to bear. Almost exactly 1:1 with the size of a standard role-playing book. It's like they were made for us.

Heh going point!