Forbidden Lands

In order to generate Willpower, players must re-roll failed checks, at the risk of taking further damage to their attributes or to their gear.

Each 'bane' will generate one point of Willpower[1] Writing for Tabletop Gaming, Richard Jansen-Parkes called the game "a delightfully old-school take on the traditional fantasy RPG, creating a sense of freedom that rewards GMs for a hands-off approach and allows the players to truly forge their own destiny."

The single frustration Jansen-Parkes found was that "the towns and villages seem plucked straight from a conventional dark fantasy world rather than one where settlements were forced to survive in near-isolation for hundreds of years.

But the evocative text sold me on the promise of a dark world far-removed from routine high fantasy tropes, and characters that sounded a lot closer to sword & sorcery archetypes than I'm used to.

"[2] Free League has released a number of campaigns, sourcebooks, and shorter scenarios for the Forbidden Lands setting: The game was distributed in the United States by Modiphius Entertainment.