First up, this is NOT a bad RPG game. It just isn't a terribly good one either. I can't make up my mind whether this is because it is saddled with the Fabled Lands title or despite it.
I loved the Fabled Lands gamebooks. Apparently, we are now supposed to call them a sandpit game. Whatever, their scope was glorious, the gameplay a pleasure. Given how mediocre this conversion is, perhaps I ought not to go back to the books, and it is all a rose-tinted memory.
In the foreword to these rules, Dave Morris suggests that these are the rules that Fabled Lands were always meant to be. FL was always more of a RPG than a gamebook. Whether that is/ is not so, I got nothing from these rules. They are bland, at very best. RPGs have moved on, these rules have not. There is nothing unique, different, interesting. Worse, there is nothing that makes them specifically Fabled Lands. PCs are a bunch of bland stereotypes, most of which could be found in the most derivative of Gygaxian medieval worlds. Skills are minimal, magic is pitiful. This might all be fine within a gamebook as that concept is limiting and deliberately limited. But here we are also stuck with the same limitations. But those are not limitations in which I find myself saying, "but, ah, these are the Fabled Lands." They are not evocative, they are not special, they are a generic knock-off.
This is supposed to be the "Fabled Lands RPG". I am afraid that it looks more like a very ordinary set of RPG rules to which the Fabled Lands moniker has been added. It would seem obvious to me that gamebook mechanics do not work in a full blown RPG. Apparently not to the authors. Fair enough. But then you really must drive the gameworld into everything. They don't. Everything from sailing to buying/ selling to fighting to magic to characters is a yawn. And where we do get some details, there is never anything more than we got from the gamebooks - fine for a gamebook, but not for a GM who needs to develop the world and adventures. Oh yes, and adventures - if there is any adventure worse than the "Lair of the Ratmen" then I really, really don't want to know.
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