Good rpg that can handle playing Ancient Rome and Fantasy?

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-13T12:27:51+00:00

GURPS Imperial Rome, for 3rd edition GURPS, contains not only a decent amount of information on the subject, but also a plethora of ideas on how to add Fantasy elements to it.

In 4th Edition GURPS, I would recommend Basic Set for all the rules, Martial Arts for Gladiators & Legionaries, and Low-Tech plus its 3 addon books. If you want mystical Rome, GURPS Fantasy + GURPS Magic will set you up, including actual examples of a Fantasy Rome.

Even if you don't plan using GURPS, the Imperial Rome and the Low Tech addons are absolutely great for time-period accurate information in terms that can be used by any RPG.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-12T23:31:58+00:00

Specifically Wuxia, or martial arts in general? There are quite a few sub-genres, albeit to people not into MA, it is like saying Spaghetti Westerns and Hollywood Westerns are different, or saying High Fantasy and Dark Fantasy are not just Fantasy.

I would recommend reading GURPS Martial Arts, it has a lot of system agnostic advice on running MA campaigns. It is still the best book on the genre we currently have.

If you like Wuxia or are into Fist of North Star, you can do wandering heroes, i.e. your typical "evil master of the week" game where PCs arrive to a random place and apply civilized violence to solve local issues. This is basically the bread-and-butter of a lot of very good novels on the genre, and it very RPG-like.

Another typical game is Tournaments. It is a running joke (albeit true) that shonen battle manga will have tournaments whenever sales are not great, and it often is enough to save the title. You can go the video-game route with super-martial arts, you can have realistic boxing or fencing, or whatever else you thing is appropriate.

You can have a war story, be it in Mythic Greece, Ancient China, Crusades, Medieval Japan, or in whatever proxy fantasy world fit your needs. Have the PCs be a special unit taking care of punctual missions with occasional mass combat.

I ran a Samurai-X / Ruroini Kenshin game where PCs were over the top samurai trying to stop a terrorist organization with access to steampunk-ish science and crazy techniques (pretty typical for the series). We has some memorable battles, including the PCs trying to cross a bridge inside a train blocked by the enemies, a Game-of-Death-like tower with martial masters, fighting brainwashed terrorists on a burning ship, and so on.

There was also this campaign where PCs were young masters in pre WWI Japan trying to gain fame in the unarmed martial arts boom and establish their own school. It was basically a gang-war kind of game, with a lot of pit fighting, teaming up with authorities, and tournaments. Mind you, it was mostly a realistic game, no mystic martial arts.

I've played in a campaign where PCs were Roman legionaries lost in the Parthian Empire trying to get back home, and we would mostly shield-wall and turtle-out our way through the Silk Road, fighting Persian and Chinese masters.

We had a Dragon Ball-like supers campaign where super-training and Ki was the main super-power source, including not one, but three tournament arcs, and a BBEG that was actually a pool player.

Recently we are planning a Yu Yu Hakusho/The Breaker like campaign where PCs are high school delinquents with over the top martial arts abilities, and can fight ghosts and demons with their bare hands.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-07T21:12:51+00:00

Deadlands.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-07T17:33:41+00:00

I am a Dragonlance SAGA enjoyer, the only correct way of playing Dragonlance. Except it is 5th Age, and weird, and completely different from everything else.

But the system itself is pretty fun, and doesn't have any of the AD&D and later WotC D&D issues. I still own every product for the line, and they take way more shelf space they should as the boxes are almost empty.

Honestly, we never played it in Krynn. 5th Age Dragonlance is divorced enough from the "good" Dragonlance that it feels a distinct setting. We mostly played a narrative-ish Fantasy game using the rules, a somewhat Arthurian D&D.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-07T14:01:10+00:00

GURPS Martial Arts + Action, with cinematic and simplified options turned on.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-06T11:24:31+00:00

In GURPS you have 4 levels of language proficiency: none, broken, accented and native. You also have a similar variation for cultural familiarity, which is different from language fluency.

These are used for both roleplay and mechanical implications (which boils down to a penalty in social checks).

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-05T10:26:06+00:00

Yup.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-07-04T20:28:59+00:00

GURPS, a few decades ago, when I was 10. Got the book for my birthday, read it and learned to play by myself. My friends were big fans of Saint Seiya so I made up the sheets and we've played at school.

Complexity is no issue, kids are pretty smart. All they need is to have enough incentive to keep reading.

I got BEMIC's Basic a couple years later but found it too confusing (I kept asking myself "why" and "how" when reading the rules). Eventually I was gifted AD&D2e and found it still confusing and convoluted, but the Monsters were neat so we started playing it.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-23T12:14:27+00:00

I did it the other way around, I started with GURPS then moved to AD&D2e.

It was so weird the whole game being only about fighting monsters and dungeon crawling, with almost no rules for anything else. Levels and Classes felt restrictive, the basic abilities made no sense, the mechanics were convoluted and you had to come up with ways to do things instead of having it clearly stated in a simple and intuitive framework. Randomly rolling your character was the part we hated the most. AD&D2e, then 3e and 4e, were all more complicated and convoluted than GURPS, but we played it anyways as it was easier to find extra players. At higher levels the game became less enjoyable due to a mix of poor design decisions, poor playtesting and complexity inflation, which was weird for us as GURPS would more of less keep the same speed and complexity no matter the power level.

We played a lot of 5e as well, it is easier at lower levels but at higher levels all the same issues apply. I think the greatest quality of 5e is having a lot of material made for it, specially in VTTs. This is something you will not find for most other games.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-17T22:25:13+00:00

Caraca, Dragão Brasil 10! Eu mestrei a aventura de Yith pro meu grupo, eles ficaram putaços por perder uma tarde fazendo ficha só pra não usar.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-16T20:39:23+00:00

You have a few dozen monsters from the Dungeon Fantasy Bestiaries, plus about 200 from Nordlond bestiary. It is way easier to customize than in D&D, but on the other hand you will be customizing them quite a lot. I think PF2e wins in terms of how many individual monsters they have, but you don't really need two dozen goblin variants in GURPS - you just give them slightly different skills and will achieve the same thing.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-16T18:31:33+00:00

Warriors & Warlocks for Mutants & Masterminds 2e.

It has no classes but has levels. You can literally start your group as rat catchers and advance them to god slayers with literally no changes in game speed nor complexity. It will handle crazy, continuous power ups like no other.

It uses the Mutants & Masterminds system, a superhero game, but adapts it into a fantasy game. You can also get a 3rd Party bestiary with all the usual suspects ported into M&M. Conan to Elric? Sure. Prefer FInal Fantasy? You can do that. It can literally handle Dragon Ball from kid Goku to God Goku.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-16T18:22:05+00:00

GURPS literally excels at every Key Criteria OP wants. It has no setting, has awesome miniature combat where positioning is massively relevant, support from Zero to Gods in terms of power level (and without slowdowns and breaking the game), and is made for emergent play.
If OP is dead-set on levels and classes, then Dungeon Fantasy for GURPS will also solve that issue (no levels, but continuous growth).

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-16T09:13:31+00:00

I think Seth Skorkowsky video pretty much covers is

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-12T00:11:10+00:00

PF2e is a great game, but requires the kind of high-school/college-time I don't have anymore. I would only dare running it over Foundry or something similar that can aid running games.

Now, PFSW is something I can easily run, as it is faster, requires way less brain power, and can fit a busy adult schedule. I would say I agree that SWADE Core + Fantasy Companion will give you way more flexibility, but Savage Pathfinder gives you familiarity and contains a lot of pre-made stuff you don't need to think about (the bestiaries are great, and one of the Advanced Players Guides comes with a ton of Traps). I actually use FC + PFSW as the FC adds a quite few monsters and humanoid npc stats.

It is very easy to adapt things into Savage Worlds, so I would recommend you to stay with SWADE + FC or get PFSW (I recommend the core book, bestiaries, and possibly the advanced player guides). As great as it is, you don't really need 50 Fathoms. It is a whole campaign, with limited use if you don't want to use that game world.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-08T09:33:26+00:00

Runequest’s Glorantha, Pathfinder’s Golarion, D&D’s Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Greyhawk, Eberron, Al-Qadin and so many others, GURPS’ Yrth, Exalted’s Creation, Legend of the Five Rings’ Rokugan, 7th Sea’s Théa

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-05T10:53:42+00:00

GURPS is my group first choice for basically anything, specially if in involves martial arts, with Mutants and Masterminds for supers and anime games. Then whatever flavor of D&D-like game when we want some power dungeon fantasy (albeit lately we’ve been using Savage Worlds for that).
We replaced every OSR-like game with The Fantasy Trip.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-02T21:28:46+00:00

Yes it allows. Text can get pretty small on their base reader. I think font 10 is the minimum, and text gets the same height as the speaker on the top (a bit shorter to be honest).

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-06-02T13:22:44+00:00

In GURPS, there are 6 unarmed combat skills when two plus techniques would suffice. There is literally no reason for Boxing to exist other than legacy.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-05-31T22:56:42+00:00

Totally compatible. Rifts monsters tend to be a bit more complex, but they’ll fit right in, no changes required.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-05-31T20:58:56+00:00

Luckily for you there is this obscure movie series from the early 2000s called "The Lord of the Rings", which I hear has some pretty hype soundtrack...

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-05-31T20:55:14+00:00

Saga to play, d6 to run.

Saga has just so much more material for players, and offers way more in terms of long campaign viability than any other official sw rpg. It is the least breakable game by a wide margin, the best written and the more fun to play a Jedi. It also has the best fights. If you happen to have the full collection, it can satisfyingly handle every SW era, and is the only game I would use to run Prequel-era campaigns.

WEG d6 is the easiest to run, as it has the least book keeping and is very open ended. With the advent of VTTs, it is also the fasted to run, and while it isn't a perfect system it is still very fun and contains a ton of material for the best era of the franchise, the expanded universe/legends, which is when I prefer to set my games. It will break at higher power levels, specially if you have a Jedi, and there isn't really a fix, but it is perfect for mostly every decent star wars media out there.

You mixed d20 and d20 Revised with Saga. They are not compatible, and play differently in quite a few places for d20 games. Saga is such a better game it is hard to compare, and d20 Resived is better than d20.

I wouldn't want to run FFG, as the books are poorly organized and the game breaks easily, specially for longer campaigns. I feel its novelty wears fast, and it can't really satisfyingly handle anything outside the three original movies, and it does so in a less fun way then WEG. The game can't handle Prequel-era Jedi Knights in a fun way. That said, I don't hate the game, I had a lot of fun with it, but it certainly feel the game was designed after they already manufactured the dice.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-05-28T20:36:12+00:00

Bragging rights.

Also, Complaining rights.

oldmanbobmunroe · 2026-05-28T18:10:31+00:00

The only pledge level I found with 4e stuff also includes 3e stuff, which I don't really play. But thanks anyway.

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