Speak the Words... Just not those ones
Instead of finishing my reviews of ACKSII, I picked up the Stormlight Handbook (part of the Cosmere RPG), hoping to find a Heroic Fantasy RPG but finding instead yet another RPG with a full-blown identity crisis. First, why was I expecting a heroic game? Two main reasons, the complex one first: D&D 5e had an identity crisis of its own, it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be an heroic fantasy quest-hopping world-saving game, or a gritty, dungeon-crawling tomb-robbing game. It ended up being neither. With the advent of OSR games during the life of 5e, the people who wanted a gritty game, or a game about dungeon-crawling or tomb-robbing, or about bloody world conquest, had their games. An innumerable, ever-expanding morass of games. BUT, after the life of 5e, there was, and still is, I would argue, a Heroic Fantasy shaped hole left behind. 6e/5.5e is utter trash, and so fails to fill that hole. Other game blatantly s...