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!
