Symbaroum: my experience and my two cents

©Free League Publishing

I'm a dedicated attendee of Italy's (maybe Europe's?) biggest "nerd" convention, Lucca Comics&Games, since 2009. In recent years, as I progressively shifted my interests from comics (mainly manga) to ttrpg's, I started roaming through the immense Games pavillion. Among hundreds of stands dedicated to boardgames, rpgs, videogames and near-useless trinkets of geek culture, one time I noticed a roleplaying game called "Symbaroum". To be honest, I didn't inquire, as I was in a "I'm mind-wrestling between the D&D 3.5e game I'm dungeon-mastering and the 5e game that I'm playing" situation and I didn't simply have energy to spend on another game.

Now some years after, I can say that if I actually did buy the book that day, I could've come more prepared to the game that a friend of mine started in the waning days of 2019: a Symbaroum campaign. The game master was new, not only to Symbaroum but to game mastering in general, and none among us did try the game ever before. So, as we began playing we made atrocious rules mistakes, involving Corruption management, the number of Active actions one could perform in a round (spoiler: just one, we dumbasses) and many more. When the pandemic hit we tried online play (only audio, no video, thanks to Italy's shitty internet) and this didn't make learning a new game easier for sure. But we endured. Eventually, as the situation got better, we started playing live again in public parks (which added to the atmosphere I must admit).

At that point, we were able to finally get a hold over the mechanics and I personally understood a thing: my character, from a mechanic standpoint, sucked. I mean, ok, he was my first and only character at that time and I surely did not take the straightforward route, but geez he was weak. Now he has become powerful, specifically through the use of an ability called Dominate. At the Master level (which is the maximum), this ability lets you impose your will and personality on someone to the point that he simply flees or even surrender. Wow, really quite powerful. But hey, why am I talking about this, what's the point?

©Free League Publishing

Symbaroum is a fairly new game (it has been around since 2014). It has obviously different playable races (three types of humans, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarfs...) and a skill-based progression with soft class boundaries. How does it work? You technically could build a character in a free-form way, cherry-picking skills and boons, or by following an Archetype and the relative Occupation (the soft class I mentioned) or even a Profession (a more tight, class-like array). The character advancement is based on the improvement of already known skills or the acquisition of new ones, which you do by expending experience points. There is no "character level": you could say "my characer is built with 50xp" or "since I reached 300xp I've become unstoppable". You have an array of attributes and to succeed a test you need to roll below the specific attribute value (or much below, if it's a hard task).

The setting is very, very intriguing. I'm not going to spoil it, simply know this: a human kingdom wants to expand to the north, cutting down an old and dark forest. Some ancient races are not okay with it, since the forest protects the world from the ruins of an old and powerful empire called Symbaroum. There is war and Nature suffers. For more detail than my ugly summary, there is a free pdf you can download from the publisher's site, called "On the Nature of Davokar".

©Free League Publishing

The game is interesting both mechanically and setting-wise. It has depth, you have space to roleplay or to just go for the classic dungeon crawl. The art within the books is the most amazing I've ever seen in a RPG manual, period. There are wonderfully illustrated games out there, but Symbaroum beats them all hands down. The main drawback of this game is the fact that its ruleset sometimes is confusing and, in my opinion, it is not really mature. Let me elaborate on that.

I can't remember all the instances in which we realized that a particular enemy has been played wrong (usually nerfed) for three whole turns, for example, because it wasn't clear how different skills interact or even stack with each other; or when a player has access to godlike abilities that nullify the GM's effort in just one roll with almost no expense at all (yes, I'm talking about that Dominate I mentioned earlier); or when the rules aren't clear enough and an argue on what interpretation is more appropriate pops out every session; or when you have ability scores that become completely useless if you take the right skills (Accuracy, for example)... One could say "homebrew a fix for rules that aren't clear". We did that, but the rules here are so hardwired into each other that a quick fix could turn out as a major issue later on.

Don't get me wrong: I like this game very much! But I'd want its rules to be more refined, more clear. If it's already fun to play, imagine what it could become with a solid revision or better, a second edition. 

©Free League Publishing

After more than a year of playing the game weekly, in now two different campaigns, I discovered Ruins of Symbaroum - The Promised Land on DriveThruRPG. This is a quickstart of the official 5e adaptation of Symbaroum. I was intrigued. It does what all other 5e third party products do: tweak a little the rules of D&D to represent something else. In this case, they adapted them to their setting. Then it came the Kickstarter of the overhaul/conversion, with three base manuals and the usual digital and material goodies. I was wondering "are they doing this to jump on the D&D bandwagon or because they know that their game could benefit from a more mature system?". I don't know the answer, even if we can imagine that of course, people who are playing D&D now in many cases do not get into other games. In my opinion, is a bit of both. Fortunately, Järnringen (which is the studio that created Symbaroum) stated that they are NOT abandoning their game in favor of 5E. This makes me happy. This makes me hope for a second edition of Symbaroum, which I'll excitedly buy if they fix the present issues. For now, I partecipated to the Kickstarter for Ruins of Symbaroum. We'll have to wait a bit for it, but I'll surely review it when it comes out.

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Be safe out there.

Daniele