Welcome to the Forbidden Lands (2019)! The blood mists have receded for the first time in recent memory, allowing ne’er-do-wells like yourselves to pour out of the towns into the countryside to scavenge and loot to your heart’s content, so long as you manage to survive.

Forbidden Lands is a gritty game – no heroes here. It is a hex crawl across a massive map (that includes stickers for newly discovered locations as well as grave markers for dead players!). Across the map are adventure locations for player to, well, plunder, basically. Plunder is a necessity, as surviving the wilds is not an easy task. Plus, if you last long enough, you have to provide for your Fortress (the rules for which are robust and probably the main selling point of the game for me).

Mechanically, it is light (in a similar vein as Tales From the Loop, actually). Add together your attribute, skill and item values, roll that number of dice. 6s are successes, 1s are banes. Combat is broken into different sorts of attacks – slash, stab, disarm – each with their own matrix of pros and cons. Damage is dealt directly to attributes (so, a sword damages your strength but, like, cynicism damages your Empathy).

Presentation is a big part of the appeal for me. Very nice art throughout. The box contains the aforementioned map as well as two faux-leather rulebooks. There are a few adventure locations included as well, with the main campaign detailed in a separate product. Which is interesting – the game feels somewhat finished? Here is the system, here is the map, here are the locations of interest and here is a big campaign that tells the central story. You can always write more, of course, but I like the idea of this being basically everything. We’ll see how it develops in the future, of course.

D&D is a murder hobo game that pretends to be about heroic fantasy. Forbidden Lands dispenses with the heroic pretenses, and I love it for it.