Mixed Genres: Renaissance & Middle Ages

The more I read ACKS and realize how much this game is like an "OSR Runequest," and the more I learn about the Middle Ages, and the more I contrast this with the Renaissance and the game Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the more I realize what a freaking mess D&D made of the fantasy genre.

Granted, Runequest is "Bronze Age," and ACKS is "Middle Ages," but the parallels are there. What are we used to? Renaissance fantasy. What are we getting? The age before, without as many world-changing technologies, without the modern tropes, and with a lower, more primal technology level and set of survival-oriented concepts and kingdom-building stories. So much of B/X thrusts you into already divided-up and settled Europe-like worlds, and you feel nothing is left to explore - with only politics and "threats to civilization" as your driving campaign forces.

In the Middle Ages, you are in the ruins of empires, discovering and settling the land.

The D&D fantasy genre isn't in the fantasy genre anymore; it is "science fantasy," with magic replacing science. This is as bad as people thinking all science fiction is Star Wars or every space adventure should be Guardians of the Galaxy. By default, the D&D genre is Renaissance-flavored with "magic Star Wars technology" thrown on top. Everyone is a Jedi Knight/caster class.

100% Recycled Fantasy Content

And we could be in a better place. Fantasy feels stuck in D&D, and while this started with Tolkien and the Appendix N greats, the genre now is just recycled tropes and stereotypes done over and over. We have always stayed in the typical D&D fantasy style, and we can always escape its generic gravitational pull. Today's D&D fantasy style is like when people complained about "corporate rock" in the 1980s; it sounds like it was made for radio play, please, no guitar solos, and keep it ear-friendly and non-controversial. And corporate rock really had no artistic or musical merit.

It sold well, and it sounded good, but what was it?

And these days, we are stuck in this horrible generic "corporate fantasy," and you know it when you see it. It whitewashes any injustice or conflict inherent in the genre, ignores history, and the world is essentially a modern world dressed up in Renfaire clothing full of cosplayers and cartoonish tropes.

It does not even feel like fantasy; it feels like a "dress-up action battle game" where you are meant to win, and the same generic tropes enable these almost "Power Rangers" style fights where violence as conflict resolution is encouraged. The consequences of using violence are ignored. Using magic to kill enemies and blades to hack living things apart is "okay" and "fun."

And these tropes and almost ignorant simplification of the world become a part of the modern-fantasy genre, and you see this recycled again and again. To escape it, we either need to do new and different things or go back to the past and rebuild the genre entirely.

The Renaissance

You look at the actual Renaissance, and you have the origins of:

• Colonialism
• Slavery
• The Killing of Native Populations
• The Modern Banking System
• The Wealth Gap
• The Founding of Nations
• The Rise of Science and Modern Knowledge
• International Trade
• Modern Religion
• Climate Change
• Environmental Destruction
• Wars as Commerce
• Gunpowder, Coal, and Oil and the Printing Press
• And the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

Yes, there is a reason I prefer Lamentations as my Renaissance game and not D&D because a horror game better fits the era and all the destruction and damage that we are still living with to this day. Renaissance societies were lavish and wealthy because they went around the world killing native populations, enslaving them, and stealing their resources. The characters in a Lamentations game are as guilty as characters in a horror movie and meet the same ends due to their sins and greed.

But my D&D world is a fantasy world, not that! In the real world, the empires used gunpowder and science to subjugate native populations; in D&D, it would just be magic. Look at the magic in a D&D game and figure out how today's corporations and governments would use it. Yeah. It isn't good. it almost is a Robocop-level of corporate greed bad.

D&D characters with their ultimate powers thematically feel like the "have it all" western society.

They have that "savior complex" built in. Granted, the hero has the same thematic arc - but a hero typically has to fight against the odds, going from zero to hero. D&D characters start as entitled and get more entitled. And they reach the ultimate epic levels of entitlement, where they are too entitled to even face death. D&D characters feel too invulnerable, especially at higher levels, and that is a problem for basic storytelling.

They are all Superman.

The Middle Ages

And a setting change to the Middle Ages would not help since that would not fix broken rules. Also, the Middle Ages were not so squeaky clean either, and you have:

• The Fall of the Roman Empire
• Nation Building
• The Crusades
• The Silk Road
• Vikings and Marauders
• Mongol Invasions
• The Dominance of Religion over Society
• Religious Wars
• Inquisitions and Religious Persecution
• The Rise of the World's Major Religions
• Peasantry and Serfdom
• Religion's Persecution of Science
• The Destruction of the Old Faiths and Gods
• And, of course, let's end it all with the Black Death

If the Renaissance is Star Wars, the Middle Ages is "hard sci-fi" Traveller. And there is a clear difference between the genres and times. My lists are a bit loose and have a lot of overlap, but in gaming, there are some things more Renaissance than Middle Ages, and I see the concepts and themes mixed all the time. And it drives me crazy.

I like the Middle Ages as a fantasy setting. It strips away a lot of the more-modern themes in a Renaissance game, and brings the entire Conan-like "ancient culture" decline into sharp focus, and pits that "old ways of magic" against the "new religion" and of course, the seeds of state power. It gives us the typical "destroyed empire" to explore and rebuild in, and many lost cities and places of ancient power. The fight between the old ways and the new is happening now, and by the Renaissance, that battle has been already won and the fleets of empires are out sailing the world and killing off native populations. The Middle Ages does have a very 4X "survival horror" feeling.

The modern D&D genre is this strange recycled reality built off Tolkien. Then it goes through a series of game world transformations - Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, the D&D 4 and 5 planar cosmology, and pop culture rebranding. It gets mixed with the MCU and anime, and it just is this own reused and regurgitated set of assumptions and standards that feels "D&D" to us. It is very much like recycled cardboard, endlessly derivative of itself and repetitive. Even the art style feels "D&D" after a while, and you can tell immediately.

The easiest way to resolve it is by saying D&D is not in the fantasy genre anymore.

D&D is its own genre, like Star Wars is its own genre (and not sci-fi).

While D&D is Renaissance-flavored, it isn't really that time. This is science-fantasy. They play on the Renaissance tropes, though, sometimes to their detriment (Spelljammer's art comes to mind). Instead of hiring and cultivating visionaries, they rely on the past 50 years of fantasy gaming as their genre. They endlessly recycle, borrow, appropriate, and copy, and I feel they suffer for it.

Just like Hollywood.

Not Real, Recycled

I have a bit of D&D fatigue, like Star Wars fatigue. I go back to my real history books, and I read, and I get this feeling the recycled modern D&D genre is just too corporate and clean. It feels sterile. It feels overly safe. There does not feel like there is any conflict built into the setting, nor is there much danger. Play a high-level campaign, and you realize that all the danger is manufactured, death is impossible, and failure is infrequent. The entire game feels like a video game in "easy mode," you are meant to win, and you get the option to skip challenging sections. And you can jet off to other planes and live in utopias if you want.

I crave the real these days.

I crave enlightenment, not entertainment that repeats ideas from the last 50 years only, like some sort of Hollywood nostalgia time loop. I feel stuck in the D&D genre, and I can't break free. Even now, the way I think about fantasy feels stuck wearing the D&D rose-colored glasses. To get away from this, I need to play OSR games.

I need my history.

I need lower fantasy and OSR games that give me that "real" feeling. I don't want magic to be the answer to every problem (another D&D trope) and for every class to have magic. If most of the classes are casters, magic isn't special anymore. One D&D is making more classes full casters - thinking magic will fix a broken class design. It won't. You will have D&D 4 all over again. Everyone is a caster, and nothing feels special.

Magic is Not Technology

We also have the pitfall of "magic is technology" in the modern fantasy genre, and you end up giving it to every class thinking technology solves all your problems. It can create more problems than it fixes.

And thematically, magic in history was never technology. It was always heritage and culture, peoples' beliefs, and that faith created temples, great cities, and pyramids. To say magic is a metaphor for technology is to colonize magic with the Western ideal. It is not that, nor was it ever. Magic as technology was never a thing, and I bet it was made up by 1950s advertisers trying to sell toasters.

But most of all, the nature of magic created the universal set of myths we all live with - and we are born with. Magic is metaphorically myth, and myth is rooted in culture and heritage.

Why does that ship sail through the stars, and the city float on an island in space? Is it because you need a cheap science-fantasy excuse to make that happen? Or are those concepts part of a culture and part of their beliefs and ancestry? If you say it is the former, you take away the latter.

If magic is an essential part of a culture, you give power to the people of the world and cultures.

If magic is technology, you worship and cede power to the corporation.

Magic has no resource cost! You can regain spells and cast them as much as you want! Magic is progress! And you replace magic with the climate-destructive consumer culture, and you begin to see why modern fantasy is so "corporate-friendly" with these concepts. You make people ignore the costs of progress and power, and you can continue to siphon money from them by playing on that belief that all progress comes without a cost.

Savage Pathfinder: Meatier Enemies

I was doing some test plays with Savage Pathfinder, and wow, the enemies are "meatier" than your typical B/X enemies. They display quite a degree of toughness and resilience, and even though most foes are "extras" in SW and get incapacitated on just one wound, getting them to that point is a lot tougher in a one-on-one fight.

It comes down to getting an extra into the shaken condition, winning initiative on the next turn, and shaking them again (with damage, not a condition). It is far easier with a 2-on-1 situation, but I had this test fight between my barbarian character and a gnoll, and there was a long back and forth where the gnoll would get shaken and throw the condition off on the next turn.

And the toughness values ensure you need an excellent damage roll to inflict a shaken condition, which is more challenging than it first seems. And the game adds the "resilient" and "very resilient" monster special abilities that allow you to throw one or two extra wounds onto an extra (not wild cards) onto extra to simulate higher hit point monsters.

The Savage Pathfinder Bestiary was created by some really talented monster designers who know the Savage Worlds rules inside and out, and the designs are a masterclass in taking a 3.5E style monster and translating the difficulty and challenge of that creature into a new rules system and keeping the experience intact while working within the rules of the new game.

But meatier monsters mean you need less of them, and you get a lot of B/X adventures and classic D&D and AD&D monsters that equate challenge with quantity. Many classic D&D modules will think nothing of throwing 6-10 goblins in a room as the "guard post." If you are trying to convert this into a Savage Pathfinder adventure, you would probably reduce the numbers in the encounter and always remember to group them up into groups of at least three, so they can get the +2 "gang up" bonus to their fighting rolls when they attack (and also remember, this can be canceled out by a similar number of defenders on the other side).

Also, Savage Worlds has the option of "one roll per group" for skill rolls - but in combat, the rules assume "one roll per group member." Savage Pathfinder, page 133, emphasis mine:

If three goblins attack a single hero, for example, each of the three goblins add +2 to their Fighting rolls.

B/X and C&C can handle large combats pretty well, with a single d20 vs. AC roll plus hp damage, and the AD&D game has its origins in a wargame, so there is that "mass battle lineage" in the rules. Savage Worlds is a much more cinematic game, and it does better with those "one on one" battles and fights with a fewer number of more formidable enemies and the tense back-and-forth swings of combat. You can do mass battles with Savage Worlds, but to avoid each combat from turning into a night-long slog, I would reduce the number of enemies, give the flavor of the challenge, and keep the story going faster.

If you halve the number of goblins in a room, you can always throw those extra ones in or have them run in as reinforcements if the encounter is a complete blowout in favor of the players. Or have them as a hall encounter if you feel things are moving too quickly.

Again, Savage Worlds is a game that simulates a "movie reality" instead of a "reality simulator" like a GURPS or a Champions. Focus on the pace and beats of the story instead of worrying about the encounter challenges, and adjust on the fly as you referee the group of players and gauge their combat power. Forcing the players to "burn resources" in non-story encounters is the goal since that heightens the tension and raises the stakes of end-boss fights.

5E: Precalculated

I did more YouTube D&D watching, and I found a few having an issue with how everything in D&D is precalculated and complaining about the minimal choice in building characters or selecting weapons and armor.

Single-handed weapons? Pick one that does a d8, and go for martial weapons if you can.

Two-handed weapons? Ignore damage, and always go for reach.

Dual wielding? Go for the d6, and your damage output will equal a two-hander.

Armor? There is really one best pick, and that depends on your DEX.

And as you level, all the choices you make feel like they were run through a computer thousands of times, and the damage outputs and effects really don't matter much beyond "the best choice you should make." Either that or the statistics majors have gotten to them and found the absolute best choice.

And the martial-caster damage gap gets worse at every level, so no choice you can make as a martial character matters. Even defenses get better for casters.

So, just play a caster.

Wizards have always made overpowered casters in D&D; every version they made of the game was superheroic-magic and, frankly, overpowered the casters to an insane degree. And they can't maintain a version and keep the game stable for more than 5 years before the overpowered options creep in, and we need a new edition again. Yes, the game is insanely popular, but design-wise they have not done the best job.

The game they were given with AD&D 2nd edition worked fine. The OSR proves that easily.

Every edition of D&D since Wizards has taken over has been another significant change.

Part of me feels they change things to sell books, as this is the Magic the Gathering sales method. And I get the feeling for the last 20 years, the game hasn't really been in the best of hands. They refuse to support their world settings. The lore past 3.5 feels dead and unsupported. They embraced the World of Warcraft-style default setting, and the fiction and excitement around their "worlds of adventure" feel long gone.

Given D&D 4's mess of a design, the damage gap between martial and caster characters was not that high. D&D 5 went back to the "glass cannon" caster design philosophy, and then, later on, they just went and added equivalent defenses for casters anyways. Because I suppose casters complain the loudest. And there are designers at Wizards who have no clue what some of these changes do to the game.

I am still reading Level Up Advanced 5E and seeing what they did to address this problem. Part of me feels like the obvious answer for 5E is "more rules," but the game is already heavy enough with rules, so why would I need more to patch issues? Fighters and martial characters are very cool in Level Up - I give them a lot of credit for making them enjoyable again.

I honestly get the feeling trying to patch 5E's flaws is like taping together a shelf, so it keeps standing up. At some point, just get a better shelf.

Low Fantasy Gaming does many cool things, too - primarily by throwing out 5E rules and replacing them with "fun play" systems like exploits. Exploits in LFG solve many of 5E's problems and add that "Savage Worlds" flair to the game. Out of all my 5E clones, LFG is hands-down the best and one I would play to get my investment out of the 5E third-party books on my shelf.

But it does this not by writing more rules but by throwing them out and replacing them with thematic systems. The exploit system, the resting system, arcane dark & dangerous magic, the faith & favor system, the escape & evasion system, the supply system, the skill system - seriously, read this book and check out all the fun "minigames" they added to 5E and realize all the heavy rules they replaced. They didn't patch and tape; they did some fascinating game design to enhance OSR-style play but abstract a lot of the bookkeeping away.

LFG is honestly a genius design.

But it also has a lot of baggage in the base system to deal with, including Wizards' habit of overwriting and over-connecting every rule to each other and introducing complexity where there should be clarity and simplicity.

The 50% (or more) Price Increase

This is how the world works. 

https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-third-quarter-financial-results

And Hasbro wants to increase profits by 50%  - or more - over the next 5 years. I expect the prices of books, and the number of them to buy, to go up dramatically for One D&D. And it will probably be the only game you can afford to play since companies these days have this way of making you feel left out if you don't give them your entire gaming budget.

This is the world you live in with "influencer brands" and the revolving money wheel between Wall Street companies, advertisers, and YouTube influencers who honestly give more than they get (and very few there earn a living wage).

So here comes One D&D and more ways for you - the customer - to spend money.

And there goes D&D YouTube; if they want a part of the sweet ad money, they will start creating buzz. Remember that most YouTube performers work for free and give billion-dollar companies free labor.

And yes, you will be expected to pay more and buy more to "be on the hype train!"

And here comes the nostalgia to help lubricate the sales push! It would not surprise me if they started to roll out One D&D Campaign setting updates for every TSR property and mostly cut and paste while inserting a few controversies here and there to create B&O - buzz and outrage.

What did they do to Elminster!!!? This makes me so mad!

I never used that character, and I have the power to say he doesn't exist, but the controversy!!!

And most people will be suckered in by B&O because it works so well.

This is also why those who play the influencer brand game dislike the OSR. I can buy (or get the game for free) and be completely free from having my entertainment budget drained by influencers and the corporations who support and create those parasitic brands and experiences. Some games I play are decades old. Others have stayed the same and only done printings to keep things fresh.

I am not being pressured to spend money with the OSR. I can play many games for free. And I do not have to create a budget for my fun and feel "left out" if I can't afford a book or online service.

I love 5E, but I feel the marketing and sales of the game feel predatory. It does not feel like the game I started with nor the one the original creators worked on. I push OSR alternatives, even for 5E, because some still love the framework and feeling.

I can love and support the game without loving and supporting the business practices behind it, and some of the social media influencers feel like levels in a pyramid scheme of marketing and buzz.

You know, if you don't buy the thing I am talking about today, you will feel left out!

You wouldn't want that, would you?

We spend so much time together!

Friend.

One D&D Needs Simplicity

When I first got into Magic the Gathering with my brother, I bought a starter set, and the one thing I learned is rulebooks - the size of a playing card - that are hundreds of pages long - for a card game - in 6-point type so small you can't read - are one of the dumbest things the company ever did. You would think that for a card game, you could figure things out with the information on the card.

But no.

And this "writing too many rules" bloat and waste have stayed with the company ever since.

Even the D&D 5 Basic set is around 180 pages of rules.

Many TSR games in the 1980s were under 64 pages for a complete game.

Stars Without Number has one page of rules summary that covers 95% of the game.

I think Wizards needs to learn how to write fewer rules, be concise, brief, and to the point, and simplify a set of rules. They write way too much, and worse, they have little self-control when making one-off rule changes and modifications because a designer wants a power or feat to work a certain way. They write too much, toss in exceptional cases whenever they feel like it, and keep piling on extra books, overpowered options, and complexity when they need to meet their monthly sales numbers.

One D&D should exist as a core set of rules in under 8 pages of text, and that is very generous since many other games can do a complete system in less. A description for a class should be under two pages per class. Everything should be pared down and simplified to the least information possible.

Old School Essentials does an incredible job of simplifying and presenting the information. What I want out of One D&D is this book, but for 5E, and just as tight and organized. No fluff, overwriting, no going on and on, and no making exceptions everywhere. And this game proves you don't need to overdo it, just do it very well, and you will become the de-facto market leader in a genre of gaming.

5E is an excellent set of rules, but it needs an OSE level of simplification and rewriting. I can only imagine how great the game would be if someone turned 5E into a "New School Essentials" book.

And I feel Wizards is incapable of creating a set of simple rules because that level of organization, self-control, and discipline is not in their company DNA. Is this part of why I like them? Yes. It is a huge problem? That can also be a yes.

And keeping backward compatibility may make writing a book like this impossible. They may run into the "Win32" problem that Microsoft and Windows suffer with, in that the company can never get rid of an outdated and insecure API. Backward compatibility with 5E may drag down the entire company and prevent them from revolutionizing the game.

5E Third Party Products

So I recently wanted to go and shop for 5E books to support my Low Fantasy Gaming book and...

While 5E is enormous, I am not seeing all that much stuff I can use.

Monster books are fantastic and give me options, and there is a handful of generic adventures. Then several companies are putting out previous OSR modules for the system (the OSR versions are better values), and there are a few setting books here and there. The market is dominated mainly by Wizards and these hybrid adventure plus rules expansion books.

There are the 5E adventures reincarnated books, and that is a solid series, but I am a little tired of nostalgia. Several OSR mega-dungeons have been converted to 5E, but the OSR versions will work with several games and stand the test of time. Once the cross-over OSR-5E books are out of consideration, my options are minimal.

Planar Vacations

Many 5E books are also not very useful because they assume the plane-hopping campaign that Wizards has been fond of since the D&D 4 days. I want adventures in one world, locations, and fun epic places. I do not want to diminish my campaign world by popping in and out of reality and heading off on planar vacations. This is a strange feeling that D&D 5E is not really suited well for realistic, generic, or simulation games - and the entire D&D genre has moved into the science-fantasy realm (with magic as science).

Everything feels thematically similar to Starfinder, with hundreds of "talking shape" lineages, planar/star travel is everyday and commonplace, clockwork, androids, and even the classes are more fantastical out-there than grounded in realism. Magical/robotic companions are everywhere. Technology has advanced (steampunk or magic-punk) to the point where every modern convenience has been simulated by proxy. It is beginning to feel like D&D 5E, Starfinder, and Pathfinder 2E are all the same game - not in rules, but in the setting and genre.

It is all science fantasy now.

Don't Stay Here Too Long...

I do not like the default D&D cosmology these days; I feel it has been massively overdone and turned into a garish theme park meant to sell you books. It used to be strange, dangerous, and mysterious - with sub-planes where nothing worked as you expected and insane infinite realities of monsters and strange architecture and environments. Nobody lived there because they couldn't, and it was never safe. Entire regions could disappear overnight or be lost forever, and gates would never return there.

These days? Fantastic and it feels mostly safe. People live out here! The planes used to be strange, impossible to travel to, and mysterious. These days they are overdeveloped and sprawl-filled suburbs full of 'lazy writer ideas' that would have worked better in a real campaign world, but, you know, it's the planes! Anything goes! Plane of clowns? Sure! Plane of bored typist stenographers? Sure! Plane of stand up comedy clubs? Why not?

The outer planes feel like a dollar store filled with disconnected junk.

My original ideas were more of a Lovecraftian interpretation, but it worked incredibly well. We had one plane, which was a mirror realm, and there were broken mirrors everywhere, and the PCs saw reflections of themselves everywhere. Then those reflections started to do different things than they were currently doing. Some of the reflections were being killed by traps or monsters. Others were stabbing their fellow party members in the back and going evil. Then they started to meet other versions of themselves who may say a few things, act strangely, and then disappear when they turned around. Then more strange things happened...

They never went back there.

And whenever they saw a mirror again back home, strange things could happen. Yes, the plane's magic was sticky (and they never knew this), and since this was "creation magic," it could never be detected, wished away, or dispelled.

If you stayed in the Beastlands too long, you started developing animal features, eventually turned into an animal, and then scampered off to play with your animal friends forever.

There was nowhere safe, and the planes changed you, killed you, or slowly drove you insane. The only escape was going home to the Prime Material Plane.

Steampunk is Industrialization

Even the over-use of Steampunk, a trope invented during the Industrial Revolution and presenting all industrialization and technology as good and never showing the dark sides, is another Westernization of the genre. Massive industry in low-tech worlds is wasteful, kills the environment, puts massive coal-burning factories and smokestacks in your cities, sets up these colonialist resource grabs and industrialized wars, creates extreme wealth stratification, and takes an innocent fantasy world and smears coal dust, blood, and oil all over the society. 

Not to mention the entire mess of "automation rights" - are robots seen as property or citizens?

Yeah, it gets messy.

And none of this technology is "green."

Yeah, real messy.

There are parts of this current genre I feel dip into extreme Westernization and turn D&D 5E and Pathfinder 2e into "Bad American Tourists: The Roleplaying Game."

Where is the Cool Stuff?

I am likely looking in the wrong places, or great generic "traditional fantasy" 5E content is tough to find. Perhaps those who write books want their books to "fit in" with the 5E cosmology, and at this point, with all of the enshrined character options and builds for a late-version game, I can see why. Back in the early days of 5E, the game did not really have an identity yet, and people could take it in exciting directions. 

These days, it feels all the same.

It is a strange feeling since many of the newer 5E books have leaned hard into the superpowered magic, Harry Potter, science fantasy, anything goes, steampunk, and anything goes genres. This zany world of magic has become the "default 5E setting" in a way, and many third-party books follow along to fit in.

I know, the cool stuff is all in the OSR, don't tell me the obvious. The OSR has a lot of niches and historical settings and lots of grounded, amazing thematic stuff. The default 5E and Pathfinder 2e (let's be fair) worlds constantly have to top and outdo each other with each new release, and they feel more and more outrageous and zany - just to get attention.

Mail Room: Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion

I finally got my Kickstarter Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion in the mail, and it is a good set. Granted, you can do superheroes with the core Savage Worlds game book, but this is more of a "more" book, and it gives you a lot of tools and pregens to make running a superheroes game a little easier.

The Horror Companion is next, and I await word of the two other projects I backed: the Fantasy Companion and the second Savage Pathfinder set for Curse of the Crimson Throne. I am really looking forward to the Fantasy set since I was running a generic fantasy game with the old Fantasy Companion, and it worked very well.

The Horror Companion Kickstarter is live and in the sidebar.

If you want rules-moderate and pulp-feeling superhero action, this is the system to run. I say rules moderate since you have to put your brain into "Savage Worlds mode" when you play any of these games. Once you do, everything clicks and makes a lot of sense. Savage Worlds is the only game I have experienced this with since it has its own "reality model" of how the world and system work.

I like the Savage Pathfinder set, and that is also a good set of rules for anything Pathfinder 1e - back when the game was in its edgy and cool alternative phase. I have fallen off the Pathfinder 2e wagon again and boxed that game up - there are too many rules, too much steampunk, and the art feels reserved and unexciting. My Pathfinder 1e days will be what the world and the game mean to me forever since the game was still a fantasy game, and it wasn't afraid to appeal to its mature fantasy reader target audience.

My only issue with Savage Pathfinder is converting. I feel Castles & Crusades delivers a better overall fantasy experience with fewer rules, fewer conversions, better compatibility, and more classic flavor. For "fantasy superheroes" - where the whole post-4E fantasy roleplaying genre is these days, Savage Worlds nails the feeling and tone without the complexity.

Yes, the fantasy genre is split these days. You either play classic fantasy (AD&D and B/X), or you play fantasy superheroes (5E or Pathfinder 2e). People call them all the same genre, and disagreements start. Know what you like, and play what you love.

The Savage Worlds team is firing on all cylinders and making great games and sets. Hats off to this incredible team that gets things done.