There are a lot of RPGs out there that try to sell themselves as being dark. Whether it’s through the tone, featuring gratuitous gore and violence or by simply being GOTH (funnytext), ‘dark’ is what a lot of games seem to want to be. Our Symbaroum review will let you know what we think of this dark fantasy TTRPG from the folks over at Free League.
What Is Symbaroum?
Symbaroum is a dark-themed fantasy RPG set in the world of Davokar, an ancient forest that was reportedly home to the ancient civilisation of Symbaroum. Though the civilisation itself is lost to the mists of time, its ruins are still filled with treasure, and so many people constantly search the depths of Davokar in search of fame and fortune. There’s also a lot of political intrigue because a kingdom from the South has crossed the mountains that surround the forest and set up shop in the open plains between the mountains and the trees.
With the new kingdom firmly established after the past couple of decades, there is now slightly less tension between the invading Ambrian civilisation and the various Barbarian clans that were originally inhabiting the forest and surrounding regions. Throw in the Elder Races, such as the Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Ogres and Goblins, and you’ve got a recipe for all kinds of trouble, as well as a recipe for one hell of a vibrant TTRPG setting.
A Truly Living World
If you can’t tell already, Symbaroum is one hell of a dense setting. The first third of the Core Rulebook is devoted entirely to giving you some idea of the background of the world and all the people living in it. Far from being a generic fantasy setting, Symbaroum has a pretty unique approach to fantasy races, with a good chunk of them not even being available to players when creating characters.
There’s some real-world-feeling history here, and it helps that the core rulebook goes into so much detail. You get a timeline of what’s gone on right at the front, but the book is chock-full of sidebars and text boxes that fill in completely optional world details as you go through. I think part of the success of the book is in the approach to world-building. Rather than trying to give you an impression of an entire world or even a continent, we’re basically getting a super-specific location surrounding the forest of Davokar itself.
But How Does It Play?
When it comes down to the nitty-gritty of mechanics, you’ll probably be at least a little familiar with how Symbaroum works. It’s a roll-under system, so when you’re making checks, you have to try and roll equal to or below whatever attribute you’re testing against. This also means that crit successes happen on a 1 and crit failures on a 20, which is probably a bit mind-melting for anyone used to D&D or Pathfinder. Not that you’ll have to worry too much because another key factor is behind its use of optional rules.
Rather than going for the ‘golden rule’ of dropping anything that isn’t fun anymore, Symbaroum presents a lot of these tertiary features as optional in the first place. Everything from crits to rolling for your attributes is presented as add-ons for the GM to apply to a gaming group when appropriate, rather than being an expected basic rule for some groups to cut around. All in all, it ends up with a system that feels incredibly flexible and allows groups to ease into things without having a really stripped-down ruleset from the start.
A Game with Character
Symbaroum also has an interesting approach to character creation, doing away with the rigidity that is pretty common in TTRPGs. There is a class system, here referred to as Archetypes and Occupations, but it’s another optional extra. You can pick one of the three archetypes, each with its own sub-occupations, which can steer you in the right direction, or you can say “bugger it!” and just throw together any combination of traits and abilities, give it a convincing backstory, and call it a spellsword like we’re still playing The Elder Scrolls: Arena.
It’s another element that leads to a game that feels flexible. You’re allowed to get creative with everything from the way that you play the game to the way that your players make characters, and none of it has the “get out of jail free card” that is the famous ‘golden rule’ backing it up. The game is designed from the ground up to support freedom rather than having freedom grafted on as an afterthought.
Striving for Balance
My unqualified praise aside, there are some issues with the game. Firstly, of all the magical schools available to you, Witches seem like a clear choice. Some of the abilities they have available to them turn them into formidable opponents pretty quickly, and the drawbacks are relatively few. There’s also a minor niggle with some of the names, such as the queen of the realm being called “Korinthia Nightbane”, which might have sounded different in the games’ original language but makes me wince a bit in English.
Those problems are, at best, nitpicks. Symbaroum is a fantastic TTRPG with a great amount to teach old and young RPGers alike. The focus on community-gaming, with the call-to-action for sharing your group’s ideas about the setting, is a nice touch, and some of the advice to GMs in the back is better than I’ve heard from 99% of the books I’ve picked up over the past few decades. The focus on creating a breathing and thriving world over getting too heavy with niche mechanics is also a wise choice that produces a game that manages to be pretty dark in tone without falling into the edgelord, controversy-chasing business of games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
The Final Word
I’m excited to play more of Symbaroum. The small taste that my gaming group got to try out was enticing, and the differences from other traditional fantasy settings are enough to make it feel fresh despite coming hot on the heels of the group’s latest adventures in everyone’s favourite generic fantasy setting of Faerûn. While there are a few nitpicky problems when it comes to balancing, and there’s possibly something lost in translation from the game’s original language, the good is really fantastic and more than makes up for any roadblocks you might stumble into
Gaming Respawn received the copy of Symbaroum used for this review directly from Free League Publishing.
