I bought the game to see if it was something for my group, and wanted to give a brief review in case it might help others decide.

Preface: Haven't played the game and probably never will, so I have no idea if the game works mechanically. I will say however, that the game is not based on the Year Zero Engine from Free League, which was a disappointment for me. It relies on a mixture of d6 and d12 with unique symbols on some of the numbers - yes rather annoying unless you like buying special dice all the time.

Graphics: The book is gorgeous and the font, style, art etc. is taken 1:1 from the LotR movies. Whether this is a good or bad thing for you naturally depends on whether you think Peter Jackson and co. have a perpetual artistic patent on visualising the world of Tolkien. I personally find it flavourful, but I can easily see why someone might be fed up with it.

Style of game: Interestingly, from my reading of the rules it seems like a game focused around exploration and travelling, instead of a combat simulator with the rest tacked on. Rather refreshing actually.

Unfortunately, but very much in line with the lore, PCs do not have access to magic. I have several players who never play games without magic, and as such I'll never run this at either of my tables.

Thus my very short overview ends as I have way too many games to read through to learn stuff I'll never run :(

I wanted to give a thorough review of this title, as it seems some of the other reviews here are a bit short. To blunt my review a bit, I will be fair and state that I fully support indie developers and understand their limited time and resources. I don't expect (or want) Pathfinder when I buy products like this. However, I have a hope that feedback can help the developers improve over time.

My group: We mostly play simple systems and prefer low fantasy. We wanted to take a break from our usual system (SWADE, Beasts & Barbarians) and tried a short trial of Sword of Cepheus (6-ish hours).

Here are the bulletpoints of our experience:

Mechanics: Surprisingly clunky resolution mechanic despite being a 2d6 system. Rolls need several modifiers both from the player and GM. This might get easier with time, but it didn't get intuitive for us. For an easier 2d6 system in the same genre I'd recommend Barbarians of Lemuria. The modifiers need a special mention. Your main stats are rolled as 2d6, with equals a modifier. Exactly like people are used to from DnD - except that the modifiers corresponding to a given score ARE NOT the same values as in DnD. Insanely confusing for people who have grown up playing DnD (basically everyone). Obviously 2d6 isn't 1d20 but I would strongly advise the authors to redo the math to make it fit with what players are used to.

Nomenclature: Sword of Cepheus have decided to use their own words and nomenclature. A refreshing, albeit very confusing, choice. For instance there is no "rolling", it's "throwing". Why? No idea. Stat are written in their own hexadecimal typeset, so a 15 is "F" for instance. Why? No idea. Presumably it is to avoid misunderstandings when writing your stats in a long line (they call this UPP). But there is no reason to do such a thing, just as there is no reason to translate your character-sheet into binary code. When writing a skill level it's written as: "Medicine-1". This means that you have +1 to Medicine... Except when it's a modifier denounced by the ever-familiar acronym "DM". Then DM-1 means 2d6-1. Ohh, and DM of course means Dice Modifier silly. What made you think otherwise?!

Character creation: Character creation is a game in itself, and one probably best left for a fun night with beers on the table. You roll into a career to get skill points. The longer you manage to "stay" in the career, the more skill points you get. I.e. it's impossible to make a balanced party. Which is fine in itself, but very hard to sell to players. It's literally impossible to min/max since EVERYTHING about character creation is randomized. Which is technically a somewhat good thing since the power difference in skills is vast. For instance, guess what's more important of these two skills: "Melee Combat": fighting hand-to-hand, either with a weapon or unarmed." "Steward: the care and serving of nobility, celebrities and other guests of high status and importance." Yes, you guessed right - this is not a game about being a butler. Or is it (see under Combat section). Instead of using the normal way in modern game design of removing virtually useless skills, or at least folding many of them into one, Sword of Cepheus have gone with the interesting choice of forcing players into playing a Vagabond with high Crafts. We're talking about a game with a giant, firebreathing dragon on the front here, not The Sims: Iron Age.

Oftentimes it's actually better to kill a character in creation than play it and slow the group down. Which is lucky since dying in character creation is super easy! Not like in Dark Heresy where it's a fun 1:100 thing. Nope, it's very easy to die before you start, to the point where it took us waaay too long to make characters. Which is ok for a Pathfinder game, but not what you expect from a 2d6 game.

An example: Say you want to play a Barbarian. You roll your stats and get an average Endurance of 7. The "Survival" roll of the Barbarian profession is 7+, so you need to roll 7 or above on 2d6 unmodified or you will die. Fair enough, you got about a 60% chance of not dying, right? Wrong - you need to make the roll 4 times to get the average skillpoints the game seems balanced around. So in fact you have about a 87% of dying in character creation.... You're welcome to quit before (and thus let your character live to actual gameplay), but again this will nerf you substantially. Or not, since you might roll completely useless skills. From a background standpoint, I really think the authors have a good idea here. There are tons of tables with fun things that can have happened to your character before session 1, which is good for less imaginative people. But as it stands, it's virtually unusable to players used to point-buy systems and designing their own character concept. I don't play Sword & Sorcery to be an artful farmer, I play to be Conan!

Combat: Prepare to whiff a lot. Like, really a lot. The target number on 2d6 is 8, with a -3 penalty if you didn't get lucky enough to roll Melee Combat at character creation. Yup, you have an 8% chance of hitting the enemy. Fun times. You don't have hit points. You use the sum of your Endurance, Strength and Dexterity. So you have 3 pools to manage and balance out, since if one or two goes to 0 you suffer wounds. Does it affect your abilities to lose these points? Are they like stats-drains in DnD? No idea, the rules do not say. Why not just sum them up and use that as a hit points pool, and say you suffer a wound if you go below half? No idea whatsoever, other than the authors felt the game needed more number-crunching (hint: It doesn't).

I can't say much more about the combat system since my players got so fed up with it that they decided not to fight at all. Which is technically a rational decision and made for a very realistic, and very un-Conan-esque, game. They simply left the ruins/dungeon I had planned and went back to town to apply for normal jobs. Then we played watercraft simulator for an hour, until I wanted to inject some excitement and had a costumer pull a knife. Which mortally crippled one character and made the rest abandon ship. One drowned since he didn't get athletics at creation (thank God at least swimming is not a seperate skill). Then it was time for farming fun and I gave up.

Layout: Lots of tables and very little fluff, which in my opinion is good. I don't need another Sword & Sorcery setting. Text is easily readable, although the pages are a bit too dense. But it keeps the pagecount down. The art is sparse and pretty generic except for some almost naïve pictures that honestly look like something sketched on the back of a character sheet. It's certainly new, and does underline the indie quality of the product. However, it does nothing to set the mood or scene. Just take a look at the beautiful layout of the Beasts & Barbarians Steel Edition players guide to see how much art can do to hammer home the feel of a setting. I do realise that the Steel Edition was backed by a massive Kickstarter - I know art costs. It's not a critique, just an observation.

Magic system: Really, the one saving grace of this system and the reason I feel like I got my money's worth after all. Not that original in the design, but super flavourful and setting appropriate. You are set up to fail spectacularily and mutate, blow up or get corrupted into NPC-hood (or all of the above) in very short order. Don't expect to survive as a caster - but then again, neither does the rest of the characters. Think "Perils of the Warp" from Dark Heresy/Only War. Which in my opinion is just like magic should be in Sword & Sorcery. I will definetely be using the magic system going forward in our games of Barbarians of Lemuria, as magic is the one major weakness of that system in my opinion. In my own game I was unable to try it out since none of my players were able to qualify for a sorcerer despite trying.

Conclusion: I really wanted to like Sword of Cepheus, but as the product stands it's heavily scarred by what I can only assume is a severe lack of playtesting. I can't believe the authors themselves found trying to make characters for several hours fun?!? As it stands the system needs serious work in core mechanics of dice-rolling and modifier, not to mention simple balancing of skills. It really feels like the authors were trying too hard to come up with new solutions to problems that do not exist. Why not just use common spelling and mechanics? I cannot in good faith recommend this game to anyone in its current form. Unless you want to port/hack the magic system. If you want to support Stellagama Games, I would instead recommend Barbaric!2E which feels like a simpler, smoother version of Sword of Cepheus. Or just play Barbarians of Lemuria like the rest of us.

Edit: Spelling errors and formatting.

Different game system, but not my cup of tea

Bought the core book since my group have had so much fun with the "Vaesen" setting from the same publishers. However, upon the initiel read of the book I saw that it's not for my group, so I'll post a quick review in case it might help others decide if it's for them.

When I read a new core book for the first time, I always start with the dice mechanics to see if it will work for my group. Otherwise there's not much point in reading on. Looking at this system, and running a trial/test combat, I can see that it is way too clunky/cumbersome for us. The system is basically a variation of the Year Zero Engine like other Free League products, but my problem with it is that your pool of D6's need at least 3 colours - for skill, attribute and gear/weapon. And rolls of 6 and 1 means something different depending on which dice you roll it on, and whether it's a pushed roll or not. Basically it works like in their Alien RPG, only even more convoluted. At that point you might as well go with the trusted d20+modifiers.

The second thing I look at in any game system is magic, because that usually tells a lot about how a fantasy game will run. I really want to like the magic system in Forbidden Lands, and I love the spell list and the Sword & Sorcery feel of it all - less fireballs etc. I enjoy the component integration and the flavour of the schools. However, upon further inspection, problems arise:

1) In-world, with RAW, it would be impossible to actually be a practicing caster for any length of time. The dicepool for spells can be varied, but basically you need a least 1 die until you're a rank 2 caster. Presumably, you can't start at rank 2 or higher "lorewise", hence every caster would need to cast "with dice" (no safe casting) when starting their training. And the trick is that casting with even 1 die gives you a 1/6 chance of a mishap (basically Perils of the Warp), and from there a 1/36 chance of instantly dying. No save. So in effect, every time you cast, you have a 1/216 chance of dying. I can see why it's fun and very "Conan-like" for a one-shot, but for a campaign, and especially from a lore perspective, it makes no sense. Unless spells are really really powerful and not something you'd ever do, let alone train, unless it's your last option. Problem is, most of them are rather basic utility effects. This also cannot be mitigated by any talents, powers, gear etc. At least not in the core book. You're just going to have to suck it up.

2) The "mana" resource is called Will Power and you gather it by pushing rolls - in other words, failing a task and trying it again. Only, you can't push spells. So a caster that wants energy for casting needs to go fail at jumping over a gorge..... Yes, it doesn't make sense at all.

3) Your attributes and skills do not affect your casting. No more brainy wizards or charismatic sorcerers. While it's certainly a different approach, it's not what I was looking for.

Many other aspects of the system looks good. I really like the look of the crafting and the non-classical take on a classic trope-filled setting. I also adore the crit tables! Further, the production value is decent, with a good font and the book itself is very nicely decorated with flavourful art.

In summary, there's much to like about this system, but the dice mechanic and especially magic system kills it for my group. I give 3 stars since I can see the system working for people who're just doing melee and/or one shots, and who doesn't mind the clunky dice rolling.