I'm looking for a good sword and sandals RPG. theRPGSite gave me some great recommendations a couple of months ago when I was looking for a swashbuckling game, but this time rather than being a player in an upcoming campaign and wanting to give some system ideas to a GM, I'm going to be running this game.

So here's some of my thoughts:
1. I don't want to have to rewrite a game system to do it. A couple of houserules is fine, making major changes is less so. This unfortunately means that D&D 5e is out - too many classes are using too much magic. In my mind, while magic has a place in a sword and sandals game, it's not a rangers, paladins, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, bards, druids, et al kind of place.
2. I could be cool with an OSR game, but I don't know how enthusiastic my players would be about me just doing a reskinning of weapons and armor and otherwise running something like Labrynth Lord - but I do wonder how ACKs is? By name, it's describing the broad stroke arcs that I think I'm wanting to cover.
3. I have a personal bias against games with open ended die rolls, especially open ended damage. Over the course of a campaign, the players going to have many, many more attacks thrown at their characters than any one bad guy has thrown at them. On a long enough campaign, if there is open ended damage, one or more characters will be killed by a single, random shot. While this may be true to life, I find it more rewarding when players get to read and react to tactical situations, and consider withdrawals when the tide of battle turns against them, and take measures to foul pursuit, and so forth. If they get in over their heads, and decide to damn the odds, they're going to take their opponent down, and a character dies in the fray, that's cool. If they blunder into a deadly situation because they weren't being cautious, that's cool. But just getting dropped by a single bizarre die roll isn't cool.

So hit me with what you've got!

Mazes & Minotaurs -- it's a "What if" game. What if OD&D had been set in a psuedo greek age of heroes instead of a psuedo middle ages. Actually two games. the "1972" original rules and the "1987" revised rules.

RQ6/Mythras.
Even though it has armor and weapons up to the medieval age, the system's original default assumptions were Bronze Age.  Magic comes in various forms and levels, there's lots of magic that isn't Fireballs and +3 swords everywhere.  If you did want to move more towards a D&Dish game, the new Mythras supplement Classic Fantasy is out.  Combat can be deadly, and an assault definitely will require strategy and planning, and combat itself can be very tactical without using minis.  Players have Luck Points which they can use to defy the fickle dice gods, and Passions which can be used kind of like Pendragon, or don't use them and it doesn't affect anything.  

It's a d100 system, so is broadly usable with any BRP or Runequest version, especially the award-winning Rome: Life and Death of the Republic, a BRP supplement written by Pete Nash, who also wrote RQ6/Mythras.  Also Pete is currently working on Mythic Greece as we type.

If you're going to do Roman Legion stuff, there's also a supplement Ships and Shield Walls, which covers ship combat and unit combat.  As the ship section was originally written for the world of Thennla/The Iron Simulacrum, there's Bronze Age ships there.  Galleys and rams, etc.

Quote from: ArtemisAlpha;8996312. I could be cool with an OSR game, but I don't know how enthusiastic my players would be about me just doing a reskinning of weapons and armor and otherwise running something like Labrynth Lord - but I do wonder how ACKs is? By name, it's describing the broad stroke arcs that I think I'm wanting to cover.

I used ACKS for a completely straight (ie non-magical/non-fantastical) historical game set in 300BC called Tyche's Favourites. My alterations are on there include some serious rethinking of the default shield/armour balance in D&D for a non-medieval context.

ACKS also plugs in to an excellent mass combat system called Domains @ War, which can do skirmish scale (tens of combatants) up to armies of tens of thousands. Though the regular system is fast enough to do skirmish scale too.

Mythras was my first thought.
The Thennla stuff for Mythras/Legend... Shores of Korantia has a solid take on non-historical ancients-style setting. Mind you, Korantia is a setting book. You'd still need Mythras for the rules.

There's also the free Warlords of Alexander for BRP.

I'll 2nd Mazes and Minotaurs as well. It's fun and also free. I've been playing in an M&M campaign and it's pretty fast and light on its feet. Some of its flavor is only skin deep though... a lot of the magic feels the same as D&D... though with spell points rather than fire-n-forget.

AD&D 2nd did a number of historical supplements. I ran 2 short Sword&Sandal campaigns using 1 of them for each.
The Glory of Rome Campaign Sourcebook
Age of Heroes Campaign Sourcebook
http://www.waynesbooks.com/Guides.html

Quote from: RandallS;899632Mazes & Minotaurs -- it's a "What if" game. What if OD&D had been set in a psuedo greek age of heroes instead of a psuedo middle ages. Actually two games. the "1972" original rules and the "1987" revised rules.

This, with DCC, would do a pretty good job:).

Quote from: CRKrueger;899634RQ6/Mythras.
Even though it has armor and weapons up to the medieval age, the system's original default assumptions were Bronze Age.  Magic comes in various forms and levels, there's lots of magic that isn't Fireballs and +3 swords everywhere.  If you did want to move more towards a D&Dish game, the new Mythras supplement Classic Fantasy is out.  Combat can be deadly, and an assault definitely will require strategy and planning, and combat itself can be very tactical without using minis.  Players have Luck Points which they can use to defy the fickle dice gods, and Passions which can be used kind of like Pendragon, or don't use them and it doesn't affect anything.  

It's a d100 system, so is broadly usable with any BRP or Runequest version, especially the award-winning Rome: Life and Death of the Republic, a BRP supplement written by Pete Nash, who also wrote RQ6/Mythras.  Also Pete is currently working on Mythic Greece as we type.

If you're going to do Roman Legion stuff, there's also a supplement Ships and Shield Walls, which covers ship combat and unit combat.  As the ship section was originally written for the world of Thennla/The Iron Simulacrum, there's Bronze Age ships there.  Galleys and rams, etc.

This, too, and it would be my first thought;).

But it's actually tied with 43AD/Warband/Zenobia set by Zozer. Zenobia is even free, and has a lot of supplements, including for Egypt! 43AD is better for Roman and British tribal stuff, and has better magics overall, IMO;).

Any reason why you wound't consider Dark Sun?

5e works for Peplum style adventures.

The trick is to jettison about everything except the fighter. The reason being that that genre of adventure tends to lack much else other than fighter types as the protagonists. A cleric might fit in too. But in general you can live without and most of the movies deal near exclusively with fighter types. Dont make the mistake of using the barbarian. Limit NPC classes the same way and further limit caster classes to special NPCs and villains.

Otherwise grab the 2e AD&D Glory of Rome book and plunder that for ideas. Or grab any given Maciste movie.

TSR's Conan RPG can handle it as well. Just limit access to magic and PC wizards. Or ramp up the consequences.

And of all things. Call of Cthulhu can handle it as well. Again by limiting PC access to magic.

To quote from another thread:

Quote from: Kiero;899245Warlords of Alexander has already been mentioned, there's also the GURPS netbook Philos Basilikos covering the same period, too. That being the Hellenistic era of antiquity before the rise of the Roman Republic.

These look pretty decent as far as background info to the Hellenistic period goes (this includes the Roman Republic BTW).
For various reasons, I think this just might be the most interesting part of antiquity to play around with.

Quote from: Omega;899665And of all things. Call of Cthulhu can handle it as well. Again by limiting PC access to magic.

And there's Cthulhu Invictus to provide various technical bits.

Quote from: RandallS;899632Mazes & Minotaurs -- it's a "What if" game. What if OD&D had been set in a psuedo greek age of heroes instead of a psuedo middle ages. Actually two games. the "1972" original rules and the "1987" revised rules.

Another emphatic vote for Mazes & Minotaurs. I've run multiple campaigns with the "1972" rules and its consistently awesome. There is a cornucopia of supplements, adventures, fanzines, etc too.
 
BTW, its all free PDFs too.

Mazes & Minotaurs is criminally underrated. It was part of the very first wave of the Proto-OSR (Before the OSR even had a name) and was unfairly forgotten once the movement took off.

The module Bad Myrmidon for Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a neat little "Extreme Sword & Sandal" sandbox set on a mythical Greek isle. It has a lot of gore and weird elements, however, and is more Mario Bava than Steve Reeves, if you get what I'm saying.

HEROES OF OLYMPUS from Task Force Games. It is swords and sandals.

It is sort of the Harryhausen Jason & the Argonauts/Clash of the Titans RPG with all kinds of fun stuff for character creation plus a cool and original combat resolution system.

Mazes & Minotaurs is my go to for this sort of thing as well. The "joke" of it being the D&D of an alternate world where the hobby grew from Sword&Sandal flics grows thin after a while, lots of commentary on the development of the hobby, etc. but the game itself is great fun. I would love to see a version re-edited to take out the game culture and history in-jokes and just publish it as a straight up RPG.