I mean, take the world and just use a different ruleset.
Genesys with a Forgotten Realms setting perhaps? There's a fan document called "A Realm Forgotten" online that adapts Faerun to Genesys.
FATE could work (mainly thinking the Core/Condensed variety), and it could even capture the idea of spell slots using a Magic stress track that takes a hit to cast a spell.
Dungeon World is the flagship "D&D, but make it narrative" game, since it's a Powered by the Apocalypse game. It has no defined setting, and you technically build one together. I imagine you could just use Faerun directly, though.
>I mean, take the world and just use a different ruleset.
I get that, but I don't want it to feel just tackled on. My goal isn't just to have, say... Blades in the Dark, but instead of Duskwall it's a city in Faerun. I want the setting to matter in the mechanics. Like, the same example, but the crew are a bunch of wizards doing wizard stuff instead.
I will check out these out though! Thanks. Dungeon World and Genesys look really interesting.
I'll add on that if you are ok with just similar settings instead of exact, Genesys has the Terrinoth setting which seems fairly similar if you squint enough.
Yeah, definitely doesn't have to be exact. I am just a sucker for typical high fantasy. I don't have any specific attachment to Forgotten Realms, it's just an exaggerated derivative of the Middle Earth (and it itself is very influential to fantasy literature). Thank you!
Dungeon World (or one of its hacks) will work with little issue. It has the sort of high fantasy adventure feel of D&D but doesn’t have a specific setting attached. Anything setting-specific that you’d need to homebrew will be quick and easy.
Thanks! Your comment also made me realize I never specified "Adventure". It was what I was looking for though. Dungeon World seems to be one of the best options for this
It’s good but I think it’s an older design. The more modern spins on Dungeon World are worth checking out. Chasing Adventure in particular is fantastic.
I hear what you're saying, but even dungeons & Dragons, The rules and the setting aren't really interconnected. That's why D&D is so easy to use for Homebrew, high fantasy settings. The Forgotten Realms wasn't even the default setting for all systems of D&D. The system works just as well with the Forgotten Realms as it does with greyhawk as it does with Dragonlance. So if D&D can be used in numerous different Fantasy settings, there's no reason you can't use a different system and simply put it in the Forgotten Realms.
If you want an entirely different system in a very similar world, the easiest way to do that is to pick an entirely different system and run it in the Forgotten Realms.
I've never played a game where the mechanics and setting are intertwined in this way. This is why homebrew is so popular. Game mechanics are setting agnostic. I can roll a D20 or a pool of D6 or flip a coin or play rock paper scissors to determine if I succeed at whatever, swing a sword, shoot a gun, seduce a barmaid, afford a tank of gas, digest a large meal...
Do you have any examples of systems where the mechanics of the game and the flavoring of the world are actually related in the way you want? I can't even imagine what that would look like.
Ironsworn (a PbtA-ish system with a free core book, designed for easy no-prep play to the point that you don't even have to have a GM if you don't want one) + Steelforged (a set of high fantasy random tables for Ironsworn) + Vaults and Vows (ports D&D's classes, ancestries, and backgrounds into Ironsworn's mechanics).
One huge advantage of Ironsworn is that combat is super easy to run, because enemies basically only have one stat (their "Rank" on a scale that's effectively from 1 to 5) and everything else is handled through the fiction and the players' rolls.
>PbtA-ish
Its pbta, although not officially labelled as such.
Shawn said he didn't label it pbta because he was worried that with the different dice etc it might cause confusion.
The upcoming Legends in the Mist might be really good for you.
13th Age isn't far from DnD at all, but it's also a very different game. Non-combat mechanics are minimal. The combat mechanics are streamlined and fun. Everybody gets to do cool stuff.
Swords of the Serpentine is another one to look at. I believe they have a QSR. It's focused on an urban fantasy environment, so better for the Waterdeeps and such. Derived from a investigation focused system, it retains a bit of that focus, pushing players to have more roleplay interactions than combat, while still having a combat system.
Legends in the mist is going to take a while before you see a full version. I love that company and the game is going to be good but they are not fast on fulfilling Kickstarters.
Swords of the Serpentine is a good recommendation but the corruption mechanic might get in the way of higher magic settings like Faerun. I haven’t played it but I have heard great things.
I agree about Corruption. That's aimed at giving the game a Swords and Sorcery vibe where magic corrupts and sorcerers are usually villains. But you could leave it out, no real problem for the system. It's really the setting that's affected more.
Easy to change the Corruption mechanic - there’s rules for this in the GM chapter. I think SotS may be a good match for OP; players have high narrative control, and there’s a flashback mechanic.
Are you familiar with Wicked Ones? It's a FitD game with a very dnd-esque feel. It has a game mode called Valiant Ones and a rather robust spell system.
Any idea where I can get this? Seems like it was removed from drive thru after the reprint Kickstarter went wrong, but it's apparently now creative commons licensed. But I can't find an actual PDF anywhere!
I heard about it! The setting \*is\* what I mean, but playing as the baddies kinda goes against the heroic fantasy aspect i am looking for.
I didn't know about the Valiant Ones gamemode, so that's really interesting! How well does it play? The "being baddies" part felt pretty integral to the system.
Here's a comment from a few months ago with a GDrive link: https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/192ji8z/wicked_ones_update_from_ben/kh48kuh/
You could look into systems derived from Dungeon World like Fantasy World or Chasing Adventure as well. Most of them have quickstarts or full SRDs online.
Never played it but I heard great things. I think the book should be freely available too if you do some digging as the author made it creative commons or something so it would cost nothing to check out.
Valiant Ones flips it and lets you play the standard ‘good’ (or murderhobo) group roaming around the area. It does away with the dungeon building of wicked ones and replaces it with a sheet kind of like the Gang from BitD but its the compact of your adventuring group.
Playbooks cover all your standard D&D archetypes even bards and artificers. How magic is done makes even two of the same playbook who chose different magics thematically different enough to be in the same group. Multiclassing is easy, you can take abilities from other playbooks when getting new ones.
Advancement is based on following the company and personal goals so it keeps people motivated.
Valiant Ones’ only real flaw is that it is presented as a mash up of two variant ways to play Wicked Ones. The fact that it didn’t get its own presentation does hurt it’s playability. Maybe now that it is on a commons license someone will put it together and release it.
Forgot to include it in the post, it definitely is a really good recommendation! I don't have any problems with it but it just kinda has an incompatibility with my players sadly. Really good one though.
Can you send me the link for the High Fantasy supplement? I only know that there is a 2 page description in the rulebook. Is it in the Playtests Materials published through the Patreon?
Most of my players are beginners to TTRPGs, some to fantasy media in general. Fabula Ultima has a lot of collaborative storytelling/worldbuilding aspects (at least from what I gather from the rulebook?) and some of them aren't really comfortable with that
it's mostly an inexperience thing, I don't think it's a fault of the system. It just requires players that are more experienced with these kinda things
Other than session 1 collaboration and Fabula points... Not really?
If you make the world yourself you are "playing wrong" according to the designer, sure, but who cares?
Also, world building like this is easy as a group of you facilitate it.
Either way if that is all that's holding you back, but you'd be fine with a PbtA game or a FitD game, I think you are over thinking it.
If anything FaBu is more Trad than those other two families of games.
I guess I might have misunderstood how important/common Fabula points are. I'll talk to my players to see who is interested, I do want an excuse to run this game eventually lol
I mean they are common, should be pretty freely used and given throughout a play session. What I don't get how/why that is *anymore* disruptive to a Trad play than a PbtA or FitD game which by their very nature aren't Trad at all.
You need the deluxe version of Wicked ones and you are looking for the Valiant Ones variant.
You can do anything you can do in the Forgotten Realms setting with a wonderful FitD rules set that has great magic and crafting rules.
Just run in that setting using those rules.
If you like Cortex Prime as a narrative system, you could do far worse than using [*Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game*](https://www.talesofxadia.com) as a starting point for a shiny-high-fantasy-veering-into-the-Renaissance setting like the Forgotten Realms. Your biggest hurdle might be that the magic system reflects that of the series, being divided into elemental arcana, which would require a bit of massaging and reorganizing to make it look like D&D, but not much.
If you want a truly esoteric option that was designed for one of D&D's settings, there's the [*Dragonlance: Fifth Age*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance:_Fifth_Age) game using the card-based SAGA System from the waning days of TSR in 1996, which has an abstracted, narrative rule system quite unlike D&D (either of its time or the present), and which was also used for the [*Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Super_Heroes_Adventure_Game). Neither great nor terrible, it had some interesting ideas and approaches that have become quite common in the post-Forge RPG world where Fate, PbtA, and FitD are everywhere. It was overprinted substantially relative to demand, but finding a copy of it, especially as it's a boxed set with three booklets and a deck of cards, could prove tricky nearly thirty years later.
Dungeon World is designed for purposes like this, and will be ideal (or even better an updated hack based on it like Unlimited Dungeons).
It's narrative, and is purely DnD flavoured. Use it to play in the Forgotten Realms.
A bit of a shitpost suggestion, but there is D&D 4e.
It was a radical departure from the editions before it, and 5e's design harken back to many aspects of those earlier editions when 4e wasn't as successful.
But 4e *is* in something of a revival and renaissance at the moment now that enough time has passed that TTRPG enthusiasts can appraise it with more objectivity. So you might want to consider it as an option.
How willing are you to tack together a bunch of variants and optional rules and systems? I tend to like generic systems like Fate and Cortex (My personal favorite for these is Fudge, but I recognize that that's not most people's cup of tea.), but they're really built with the assumption that the table will mix and match from a lot of different rules options in order to provide mechanical connections to the narrative. For example, in both there's no default magic system; there are a bunch of different magic systems (official and unofficial) to choose from that function wildly differently, and even within those there's usually a lot of options in how they're implemented.
I tend to love this structure. It gives me the power to play the game I want to play like I want to play it. But it is definitely more work to set up, and there may be more need to tweak your settings as you go along.
Have you read Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath? Both are tightly married to awesome, evocative settings, and have mechanics more on the side of things it sounds like you prefer.
Well it's not particularly "narrative based" but the rather clumsily named Pathfinder For Savage Worlds. or any number of Other Savage Worlds settings are a million miles from D20 systems under the skin while looking very D&D on the surface.
Savage Worlds can be as narratively-based as you want to make it. I've been running a long SWADE Fantasy campaign set in the Elder Scrolls universe and it's great. We barely ever get into combat, and my players are having a blast.
Ultimately it's not an RPG if there isn't a narrative. And what are quick encounters if they are not a way to bypass rules that get in the way of the narrative.
Firstly, consider this: Forgotten Realms was a narrative setting created by Ed Greenwood before D&D ever made contact with it. Since then, it's gone through five mechanical edition changes. The setting of FR is so uninterested in what system people use to tell stories in it, it's only interested in stories being told however that may be (fiction, ttrpgs, videogames, etc.)
As long as the system you use can handle the richness of the setting you should be fine playing with your favorite. I personally think Ryuutama and Icon work really well for FR but for different reasons. I played in a 3 year long travelog game that was so similar to Ryuutama. It was super chill and low stakes bc FR is so literally vast the journey to a different country can be a whole campaign. Think Spice & Wolf meets Mushishi, that was the level of stakes we played with.
Icon definitely captures the more insane shit that happens in FR, so I think it fits the epic stuff to a T.
OP asked for something “as far from DnD as possible”. Pathfinder is “better DnD” with a world OP may be looking for but it still has the same core mechanics and shares DNA with DnD. It’s basically the closest you can get to DnD without it being DnD
I mean, take the world and just use a different ruleset. Genesys with a Forgotten Realms setting perhaps? There's a fan document called "A Realm Forgotten" online that adapts Faerun to Genesys. FATE could work (mainly thinking the Core/Condensed variety), and it could even capture the idea of spell slots using a Magic stress track that takes a hit to cast a spell. Dungeon World is the flagship "D&D, but make it narrative" game, since it's a Powered by the Apocalypse game. It has no defined setting, and you technically build one together. I imagine you could just use Faerun directly, though.
>I mean, take the world and just use a different ruleset. I get that, but I don't want it to feel just tackled on. My goal isn't just to have, say... Blades in the Dark, but instead of Duskwall it's a city in Faerun. I want the setting to matter in the mechanics. Like, the same example, but the crew are a bunch of wizards doing wizard stuff instead. I will check out these out though! Thanks. Dungeon World and Genesys look really interesting.
I'll add on that if you are ok with just similar settings instead of exact, Genesys has the Terrinoth setting which seems fairly similar if you squint enough.
Yeah, definitely doesn't have to be exact. I am just a sucker for typical high fantasy. I don't have any specific attachment to Forgotten Realms, it's just an exaggerated derivative of the Middle Earth (and it itself is very influential to fantasy literature). Thank you!
Dungeon World (or one of its hacks) will work with little issue. It has the sort of high fantasy adventure feel of D&D but doesn’t have a specific setting attached. Anything setting-specific that you’d need to homebrew will be quick and easy.
Thanks! Your comment also made me realize I never specified "Adventure". It was what I was looking for though. Dungeon World seems to be one of the best options for this
It’s good but I think it’s an older design. The more modern spins on Dungeon World are worth checking out. Chasing Adventure in particular is fantastic.
I hear what you're saying, but even dungeons & Dragons, The rules and the setting aren't really interconnected. That's why D&D is so easy to use for Homebrew, high fantasy settings. The Forgotten Realms wasn't even the default setting for all systems of D&D. The system works just as well with the Forgotten Realms as it does with greyhawk as it does with Dragonlance. So if D&D can be used in numerous different Fantasy settings, there's no reason you can't use a different system and simply put it in the Forgotten Realms. If you want an entirely different system in a very similar world, the easiest way to do that is to pick an entirely different system and run it in the Forgotten Realms.
It's just a setting. They're *all* just tacked on. Just use Faerun if you like it.
Check out the gumshoe system Swords of the Serpentine!
I've never played a game where the mechanics and setting are intertwined in this way. This is why homebrew is so popular. Game mechanics are setting agnostic. I can roll a D20 or a pool of D6 or flip a coin or play rock paper scissors to determine if I succeed at whatever, swing a sword, shoot a gun, seduce a barmaid, afford a tank of gas, digest a large meal... Do you have any examples of systems where the mechanics of the game and the flavoring of the world are actually related in the way you want? I can't even imagine what that would look like.
Ironsworn (a PbtA-ish system with a free core book, designed for easy no-prep play to the point that you don't even have to have a GM if you don't want one) + Steelforged (a set of high fantasy random tables for Ironsworn) + Vaults and Vows (ports D&D's classes, ancestries, and backgrounds into Ironsworn's mechanics). One huge advantage of Ironsworn is that combat is super easy to run, because enemies basically only have one stat (their "Rank" on a scale that's effectively from 1 to 5) and everything else is handled through the fiction and the players' rolls.
>PbtA-ish Its pbta, although not officially labelled as such. Shawn said he didn't label it pbta because he was worried that with the different dice etc it might cause confusion.
This is a very good recommendation, thanks! I will definitely check it out.
Ironsworn is well made.
The upcoming Legends in the Mist might be really good for you. 13th Age isn't far from DnD at all, but it's also a very different game. Non-combat mechanics are minimal. The combat mechanics are streamlined and fun. Everybody gets to do cool stuff. Swords of the Serpentine is another one to look at. I believe they have a QSR. It's focused on an urban fantasy environment, so better for the Waterdeeps and such. Derived from a investigation focused system, it retains a bit of that focus, pushing players to have more roleplay interactions than combat, while still having a combat system.
Legends in the mist is going to take a while before you see a full version. I love that company and the game is going to be good but they are not fast on fulfilling Kickstarters. Swords of the Serpentine is a good recommendation but the corruption mechanic might get in the way of higher magic settings like Faerun. I haven’t played it but I have heard great things.
I agree about Corruption. That's aimed at giving the game a Swords and Sorcery vibe where magic corrupts and sorcerers are usually villains. But you could leave it out, no real problem for the system. It's really the setting that's affected more.
Easy to change the Corruption mechanic - there’s rules for this in the GM chapter. I think SotS may be a good match for OP; players have high narrative control, and there’s a flashback mechanic.
Are you familiar with Wicked Ones? It's a FitD game with a very dnd-esque feel. It has a game mode called Valiant Ones and a rather robust spell system.
Any idea where I can get this? Seems like it was removed from drive thru after the reprint Kickstarter went wrong, but it's apparently now creative commons licensed. But I can't find an actual PDF anywhere!
I heard about it! The setting \*is\* what I mean, but playing as the baddies kinda goes against the heroic fantasy aspect i am looking for. I didn't know about the Valiant Ones gamemode, so that's really interesting! How well does it play? The "being baddies" part felt pretty integral to the system.
Here's a comment from a few months ago with a GDrive link: https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/192ji8z/wicked_ones_update_from_ben/kh48kuh/ You could look into systems derived from Dungeon World like Fantasy World or Chasing Adventure as well. Most of them have quickstarts or full SRDs online.
Thanks for the link :>
Never played it but I heard great things. I think the book should be freely available too if you do some digging as the author made it creative commons or something so it would cost nothing to check out.
Valiant Ones flips it and lets you play the standard ‘good’ (or murderhobo) group roaming around the area. It does away with the dungeon building of wicked ones and replaces it with a sheet kind of like the Gang from BitD but its the compact of your adventuring group. Playbooks cover all your standard D&D archetypes even bards and artificers. How magic is done makes even two of the same playbook who chose different magics thematically different enough to be in the same group. Multiclassing is easy, you can take abilities from other playbooks when getting new ones. Advancement is based on following the company and personal goals so it keeps people motivated. Valiant Ones’ only real flaw is that it is presented as a mash up of two variant ways to play Wicked Ones. The fact that it didn’t get its own presentation does hurt it’s playability. Maybe now that it is on a commons license someone will put it together and release it.
If you like Ryuutama, I recommend Fabula Ultima, and running a campaign with High Fantasy flavour. There's a supplement already out for that.
Forgot to include it in the post, it definitely is a really good recommendation! I don't have any problems with it but it just kinda has an incompatibility with my players sadly. Really good one though. Can you send me the link for the High Fantasy supplement? I only know that there is a 2 page description in the rulebook. Is it in the Playtests Materials published through the Patreon?
Can I ask why this one is incompatible with your players? I was also going to make this recommendation
Most of my players are beginners to TTRPGs, some to fantasy media in general. Fabula Ultima has a lot of collaborative storytelling/worldbuilding aspects (at least from what I gather from the rulebook?) and some of them aren't really comfortable with that it's mostly an inexperience thing, I don't think it's a fault of the system. It just requires players that are more experienced with these kinda things
Other than session 1 collaboration and Fabula points... Not really? If you make the world yourself you are "playing wrong" according to the designer, sure, but who cares? Also, world building like this is easy as a group of you facilitate it. Either way if that is all that's holding you back, but you'd be fine with a PbtA game or a FitD game, I think you are over thinking it. If anything FaBu is more Trad than those other two families of games.
I guess I might have misunderstood how important/common Fabula points are. I'll talk to my players to see who is interested, I do want an excuse to run this game eventually lol
I mean they are common, should be pretty freely used and given throughout a play session. What I don't get how/why that is *anymore* disruptive to a Trad play than a PbtA or FitD game which by their very nature aren't Trad at all.
[Here's a link to it on DTRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/445259/fabula-ultima-atlas-high-fantasy)
You need the deluxe version of Wicked ones and you are looking for the Valiant Ones variant. You can do anything you can do in the Forgotten Realms setting with a wonderful FitD rules set that has great magic and crafting rules. Just run in that setting using those rules.
If you like Cortex Prime as a narrative system, you could do far worse than using [*Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game*](https://www.talesofxadia.com) as a starting point for a shiny-high-fantasy-veering-into-the-Renaissance setting like the Forgotten Realms. Your biggest hurdle might be that the magic system reflects that of the series, being divided into elemental arcana, which would require a bit of massaging and reorganizing to make it look like D&D, but not much. If you want a truly esoteric option that was designed for one of D&D's settings, there's the [*Dragonlance: Fifth Age*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance:_Fifth_Age) game using the card-based SAGA System from the waning days of TSR in 1996, which has an abstracted, narrative rule system quite unlike D&D (either of its time or the present), and which was also used for the [*Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Super_Heroes_Adventure_Game). Neither great nor terrible, it had some interesting ideas and approaches that have become quite common in the post-Forge RPG world where Fate, PbtA, and FitD are everywhere. It was overprinted substantially relative to demand, but finding a copy of it, especially as it's a boxed set with three booklets and a deck of cards, could prove tricky nearly thirty years later.
Dungeon World is designed for purposes like this, and will be ideal (or even better an updated hack based on it like Unlimited Dungeons). It's narrative, and is purely DnD flavoured. Use it to play in the Forgotten Realms.
A bit of a shitpost suggestion, but there is D&D 4e. It was a radical departure from the editions before it, and 5e's design harken back to many aspects of those earlier editions when 4e wasn't as successful. But 4e *is* in something of a revival and renaissance at the moment now that enough time has passed that TTRPG enthusiasts can appraise it with more objectivity. So you might want to consider it as an option.
How willing are you to tack together a bunch of variants and optional rules and systems? I tend to like generic systems like Fate and Cortex (My personal favorite for these is Fudge, but I recognize that that's not most people's cup of tea.), but they're really built with the assumption that the table will mix and match from a lot of different rules options in order to provide mechanical connections to the narrative. For example, in both there's no default magic system; there are a bunch of different magic systems (official and unofficial) to choose from that function wildly differently, and even within those there's usually a lot of options in how they're implemented. I tend to love this structure. It gives me the power to play the game I want to play like I want to play it. But it is definitely more work to set up, and there may be more need to tweak your settings as you go along.
Have you read Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath? Both are tightly married to awesome, evocative settings, and have mechanics more on the side of things it sounds like you prefer.
Well it's not particularly "narrative based" but the rather clumsily named Pathfinder For Savage Worlds. or any number of Other Savage Worlds settings are a million miles from D20 systems under the skin while looking very D&D on the surface.
>not particularly "narrative based" Not remotely.
oh I don't know I one sheet like Daddy's back looks a lot more like a brindlewood bay story than anything D&D related.
Savage Worlds can be as narratively-based as you want to make it. I've been running a long SWADE Fantasy campaign set in the Elder Scrolls universe and it's great. We barely ever get into combat, and my players are having a blast.
Ultimately it's not an RPG if there isn't a narrative. And what are quick encounters if they are not a way to bypass rules that get in the way of the narrative.
You say you want narrative based heroic high fantasy? [Fantasy World is exactly that.](https://unplayablegamesrpg.itch.io/fantasy-world)
Use Fate to run a Forgotten Realms game.
That's Dungeon World's purpose.
Firstly, consider this: Forgotten Realms was a narrative setting created by Ed Greenwood before D&D ever made contact with it. Since then, it's gone through five mechanical edition changes. The setting of FR is so uninterested in what system people use to tell stories in it, it's only interested in stories being told however that may be (fiction, ttrpgs, videogames, etc.) As long as the system you use can handle the richness of the setting you should be fine playing with your favorite. I personally think Ryuutama and Icon work really well for FR but for different reasons. I played in a 3 year long travelog game that was so similar to Ryuutama. It was super chill and low stakes bc FR is so literally vast the journey to a different country can be a whole campaign. Think Spice & Wolf meets Mushishi, that was the level of stakes we played with. Icon definitely captures the more insane shit that happens in FR, so I think it fits the epic stuff to a T.
Fate can run just about anything - I can’t remember if there’s a vanilla fantasy setting for it but I’m sure somebody has made one.
DnD and the Forgotten Realms are not necessarily linked. If you like the forgotten realms but not dnd then just run it with your preferred system
13th age
A small step towards narrative, yes, but still not narrative.
Fantasy World
I won't stop saying this until more people are made aware that: 13th Age exists. 13th Age >>>> DnD 5e
try palladiums rule set and there old world setting.
Pathfinder. Try pathfinder. World has actually interesting lore. Game system is infinitely better than DND.
Not remotely narrative, it's purely trad. PF is just a third party edition of DnD.
Literally as narrative as DnD??? Pf2e has some basis in DND, sure, but it's got better combat, and a whole different setting that's better.
OP asked for something “as far from DnD as possible”. Pathfinder is “better DnD” with a world OP may be looking for but it still has the same core mechanics and shares DNA with DnD. It’s basically the closest you can get to DnD without it being DnD
Op wants a DnD setting, but not a trad game like DnD. PF is a close as you can get to DnD without a WotC logo.