I've heard nothing but good things about Free League, especially when it comes to supporting Foundry releases in a timely fashion. But unfortunately I don't have any experience with their games. I'm seeing Dragonbane, The One Ring, and Forbidden Lands for "traditional" fantasy games, but how do they compare with one another? Are they good games?

Feel free to give your opinions on their non-fantasy games as well. I'm pretty much interested across the board when it comes to their games.

I only have some of their games but I can give my opinion about them.

Vaesen is an interesting take on the supernatural investigation thing.  The book is evocative.  The vaesen are interesting antagonists and fit the flavor of the game well.  The system is simple and works well.  Combat is pretty unforgiving and characters can get taken out pretty quickly.  There's a base building system which I suspect that some players will love and some players will completely ignore.

The Alien rpg is very evocative and well done.  I'm not sure the base building part of the Year Zero engine belongs here but that's easily ignored.  The material is heavily weighted toward cinematic play rather than campaign play.  It's made to emulate a movie more than to play a long term campaign.

Tales from the Loop is very atmospheric but it's one of those games where I am not sure what the characters are actually supposed to be doing in this game. 

Forbidden Lands came out in 2018 but it looks and reads like something that came out in the 80s.   It's made to support that old school sandbox style of play.

Mork Borg?  I don't know.  I tried reading the sample and got a headache.

Mutant Year Zero?  Swedish Gamma World I guess.  I only played a few sessions and we didn't get much of anywhere or do much of anything.  It was one of those GMs who doesn't know when to wrap this up and get the hell on with it so it drug on quite a bit.  Not sure about the mish-mash of serious post-apocalypse and wacky mutants.

I've played several of the games in their catalogue.

Year Zero Engine:

This is their flag ship engine and it's pretty good at what it does.  Every stat is a pool of hit points and as they go down, you loose your ability to succeed.  The purpose is to replicate the idea that one can be defeated by more than just physical damage.  A person who looses their will to live is just as much out of the fight as someone who's been shot in the chest.  In turn, this turns every encounter into some form of combat that could result in the loss of your PC.

Every skill check is a high stakes gamble that the player makes where it could result in great gains or further injury.  This is counterbalanced in that the player can decide not to take the risk and roll.  It's a lot of fun watching a player stress over whether or not to make the roll.

There are players that hate this system.  The PC is always at a disadvantage.  In a way, at it's most harsh, it's a lot like playing Rogue; you know you're going to have to roll up another PC eventually.  One stupid decision can cascade into a TPK very easily.  (This is why Aliens is a short adventure game rather than a campaign game.) 

Some of the games using YZE are better than others.  And some of the later iterations are changing the system quite a bit.

Mork Borg and derivatives:

This is a straight d20 system in the vein of early editions of D&D and OSR with a little bit of a twist.  It only used 4 stats rather than 6 and magic is at will but with a skill check.  PC creations is simple as roll stats, pick a class, roll for gear.  Anyone who's played any iteration of D&D will feel right at home with this system. 

One of the things about the game is the settings and the art; it's inspired by the Scandinavian Death Metal scene.  The art is very loud.  The over all theme of all versions is you're doomed, the world is doomed, what are you going to do between now and the last sunset?  The setting isn't hardwired into the system so you can run a non-doom and death game with no changes mechanically.  That said, it's not unique mechanically, the draw is the settings.

There's some innovations that aren't baked into the setting or the system I like.  Their way of mapping dungeons for the GM is fantastic.

Into the Odd and Electric Bastion Land

Into the Odd is about exploring a surreal fantasy land experiencing reality warping events.  It's more like being members of the Royal Geographic Society (Victorian and Edwardian era English explorers and cartographers) exploring a world created by Salvador Dali than a D&D style of fighting monsters and getting loot.

Mechanically, this game is too rules light for me.  Attacks in combat always land, you just roll damage.  It's very stripped down in other areas as well.  I would prefer something more crunchy, like ICRPG.

Into the Odd and Electric Bastion Land are both great for players looking to GM as reading material to get the juices flowing for how to do things behind the screen.  When someone asks me about becoming a GM, these games are one of the things I point them to for further reading.

Quote from: Monero on November 24, 2023, 12:10:45 AM
I've heard nothing but good things about Free League, especially when it comes to supporting Foundry releases in a timely fashion. But unfortunately I don't have any experience with their games. I'm seeing Dragonbane, The One Ring, and Forbidden Lands for "traditional" fantasy games, but how do they compare with one another? Are they good games?

Feel free to give your opinions on their non-fantasy games as well. I'm pretty much interested across the board when it comes to their games.

Dragonbane is a paradoxical game, it's both very good and very lacking at the same time.
It's good because the system is solid (it's a thinly disguised BRP/Runequest using a d20 instead of a d100 for task resolution) and strongly grounded in osr sensibilities (dangerous combat, exploration and survival are a thing, strategic, tactical and puzzle solving attitudes are encouraged over bruteforcing everything and so on)... BUT there's practically nothing in terms of worldbuilding.
The boxed set comes with a mini sandbox campaign set in the Misty Vale (a mountain valley that was once part of a larger, fallen empire), but everything outside the Vale is left a complete mistery: not even town names are mentioned. The aformentioned fallen empire ? Yeah, it's gone but whatever's taken its place is unknown.
Unless there's something else coming out in the next month, Dragonbane is right now nothing more than a very basic toolkit for the creation of gritty fantasy campaigns....except that the tooling for campaign creation is not there. You get a very good set of player level tools but nothing except your imagination for content creation.

FL's website states this about Dragonbane:

THE SETTING
Dragonbane is a game of fast-paced fantasy adventures. The core game presents a core mythology of this fantasy world, focused on the eternal struggle between dragons and demons. The ruins of fallen kingdoms, worshiping either of these rival godlike creatures, beckon brave adventurers with the lure of hidden treasures.

Rather than describing entire continents, the core game focuses on the Misty Vale, a hidden mountain valley until recently overrun by orcs and goblins. In recent years, the orcs have retreated into the mountains, leaving the land open for explorers, settlers and adventurers of other kin such as humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, mallards, and wolfkin. The land lies open for adventure.

Quote from: Batjon on November 24, 2023, 08:13:57 AM
FL's website states this about Dragonbane:

THE SETTING
Dragonbane is a game of fast-paced fantasy adventures. The core game presents a core mythology of this fantasy world, focused on the eternal struggle between dragons and demons. The ruins of fallen kingdoms, worshiping either of these rival godlike creatures, beckon brave adventurers with the lure of hidden treasures.

Rather than describing entire continents, the core game focuses on the Misty Vale, a hidden mountain valley until recently overrun by orcs and goblins. In recent years, the orcs have retreated into the mountains, leaving the land open for explorers, settlers and adventurers of other kin such as humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, mallards, and wolfkin. The land lies open for adventure.

What the websites states and what you actually get in the box are two very different things.
Every single word of that statement, while technically true, is at best a very big embellishment of the actual game material (the "core mythology", for example ? "Once, there were dragon riders. They ruled an empire. Oh, and demons are bad news"; that's it).
Dragonbane offers a lot to GMs with imagination and time to spare, but apart from character management and development rules right now it offers nothing to facilitate campaign play. Everything from cultures, history and locations will have to come from your imagination without any help from the game system.

I'm torn about Free League games.

I love the elegance of the Year Zero Engine. The push mechanic is great. The dice show the results immediately (no post roll arithmetic). But...Four attributes each with 4 skills and then a smattering of special abilities feels too cooked (for lack of a better word). Your character sheet is like a checklist that shows your present and shows you the limits of your future. Your attributes won't change much and your skills will increase. You get some special abilities (I forget the official term) and these mainly just alter how a skill or attribute works. It feels quite board-gamey. Everything is laid out in front of you, so there's no mystery. Yes, this criticism applies to all skill-based games, but the tightness of YZE makes it much more obvious.

I love the style, creativity, and production quality of TW2000, Forbidden Lands, and The One Ring, but at the same time they seem sort of...bleak. Not the best word, I mean there's a lack of whimsey and weirdness. The settings are cohesive and internally consistent but to me they lack something extra. The feeling I get is that they tread over all the ground, so there's nothing new to discover. I feel the same way about Dolmenwood, so take my comments with that grain of salt.

I have the most experience with Twilight 2000. The bleakness fits that setting and after a while playing it became kind of oppressive. The YZE was fun and fast. However, the rat's nest of modifiers took a lot to sort out. Take an extra die for aiming, lose a die for whatever, add two dice for some other factor. All of these things are on different pages and I had to create a cheat sheet, but it didn't help as much as I thought. We ended up sticking to several of the common modifiers and forgot about the edge cases or the ref would just make a ruling. As for the adventures that come with the box set, they were interesting and well made, and I love the organization of Situation, NPC Bios, Chronology, and Random Events, but at the same time they seemed overwritten. There's a lot of moving parts, where I would rather have more terse and open-ended stuff.

Bottom line, YZE is a good system and the games are well made and solid. But as a fan of idiosyncratic crunch (AD&D, Hyperborea, Aquelarre) and lighter "whimsical" systems (S&W), I find the games lacking mystery, wonder, or something else. Or maybe it's just my nostalgia talking, I dunno.

A few moments ago, I saw an advertisement for The Walking Dead Universe role-playing game by Free League and decided that this was an example of, "Not every media property needs a role-playing game".

Quote from: jeff37923 on November 24, 2023, 01:47:38 PM
A few moments ago, I saw an advertisement for The Walking Dead Universe role-playing game by Free League and decided that this was an example of, "Not every media property needs a role-playing game".

Most people want to play in a known setting, something that is familiar to them. It's a small segment of people who want to play in a novel RPG setting.

Zombie survival is also a genre that is well suited to more traditional RPG mechanics, which include tracking of resources and using them up.

Quote from: jeff37923 on November 24, 2023, 01:47:38 PM
A few moments ago, I saw an advertisement for The Walking Dead Universe role-playing game by Free League and decided that this was an example of, "Not every media property needs a role-playing game".

I agree that not every genre needs a RPG and this is not one I'm likely to pick up.  However, the stress mechanic in YZE is the best I've seen at replicating the horror and mental break down of a PC, much better than the sanity mechanic of Call of Cthulhu.

Quote from: BadApple on November 24, 2023, 04:29:29 AM
There are players that hate this system.  The PC is always at a disadvantage.  In a way, at it's most harsh, it's a lot like playing Rogue; you know you're going to have to roll up another PC eventually.  One stupid decision can cascade into a TPK very easily.  (This is why Aliens is a short adventure game rather than a campaign game.) 

I'd play it for a pick-me up game, but the whole notion of flubbing your area knowledge skill and then having to retreat until you got your confidence back (or whatever) just ended breaking my suspension of belief.

Then again, I get frustrated when I feel that the system is "playing the PC" if that makes any sense.

Quote from: Kage2020 on November 25, 2023, 01:52:09 PM

Quote from: BadApple on November 24, 2023, 04:29:29 AM
There are players that hate this system.  The PC is always at a disadvantage.  In a way, at it's most harsh, it's a lot like playing Rogue; you know you're going to have to roll up another PC eventually.  One stupid decision can cascade into a TPK very easily.  (This is why Aliens is a short adventure game rather than a campaign game.) 

I'd play it for a pick-me up game, but the whole notion of flubbing your area knowledge skill and then having to retreat until you got your confidence back (or whatever) just ended breaking my suspension of belief.

Then again, I get frustrated when I feel that the system is "playing the PC" if that makes any sense.

According to Mutant: Year Zero, a GM should reserve calling for a roll only when there would be a very real risk of failure.  Most of the kinds of low level check done in other games should be avoided and just allow the party to pass.  In essence, there should be a lot less rolls in a session of a YZE game than something like an OSR game.

A good example of a non-check would be picking a lock.  If you're not under any pressure and you have a reasonable chance of success, then you automatically pass.  However, the GM can state that due to the difficulty of the task, it took you two hours.

I don't know how other tables run it but when I have, there's very few rolls except when the situation becomes either take a risk or loose something significant.  It takes a lot of the randomness out of a lot of things that would be left up to the dice and puts them squarely on the shoulders of the GM to adjudicate.

Quote from: BadApple on November 25, 2023, 03:14:45 PM
According to Mutant: Year Zero, a GM should reserve calling for a roll only when there would be a very real risk of failure.

Ah, the GURPS approach.

The "area knowledge" example actually came from a discussion on an EABA discord, IIRC. I did some strategic reading but clearly missed the above point.

If curious about Mork Borg but the book gives you a headache, check out Pirate Borg. Same system, but much more sedate presentation.

Plus it's Pirates of the Caribbean with added Impending Doom and Peril.

I picked up TOR 2e on a whim and fell in love with the system. I own all the books for it and did POD of Strider Mode for solo play. Been playing in a campaign for a year now and loving my Ranger Warden.

I then bought Coriolis, mainly for the setting and inspiration for a Traveller game.

I bought Forbidden Lands and all the books for it and this is now my favourite of them all.

The system is easy and we are all having a blast.

I can't speak to their other games, but these would be my recommendations.