I got my Savage Worlds Horror Companion...

Here's the TOC





It does an excellent job for covering nearly any kind of Horror type game you'd want using the SWADE Core + Horror Companion. Genres covered with examples of other media for inspiration:

Cosmic Horror - This is one of the most popular types of horror, in no small part due to the work of our friends at Chaosium, creators of the popular Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game. Based on a series of stories written by author H.P. Lovecraft—and subsequently expanded upon by many other authors, including popular pulp writers like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith—cosmic horror pits humanity against unknowable, alien, and all-powerful beings from beyond time and space.

Examples:  H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and other stories, Ambrose Bierce's Shadows of Carcosa, Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids, Nick Cutter's The Deep, Stephen King's The Mist, Annihilation, Stranger Things, In the Mouth of Madness, Cast a Deadly Spell, Event Horizon, the Darkest Dungeon video game.

Gothic Horror - Another very popular subgenre of horror rose out of the writings of authors during the Romantic and Victorian eras. These stories of "gothic horror" were known for melodramatic writing, bleak and oppressive settings, and strong emotions. The supernatural was present but more subtle—perceptible only to
those directly affected, and sometimes even then with enough margin for doubt that the protagonists often wondered if they were simply losing their minds. And in true literary
spirit, the supernatural evil functioned as a metaphor for temptation, the dangers of playing God, the sin of adultery, and so on. Modern gothic horror has left behind the
symbolism, but the tropes are alive and well—vampires, ghosts, castles, foggy Victorian streets, remote provincial villages, desolate graveyards, and musty crypts. Locations tend to be isolated, emotionally cold, and almost abandoned. Often there is a sense of lost grandeur—a castle with dusty passages long since forgotten, a neglected manor house
on a distant moor, a crumbling colonial plantation on the bayou. Even urban areas are bleak, places of crushing poverty, dilapidated architecture, and fading hope.

Examples: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, the Dungeons & Dragons® Ravenloft setting, Crimson Peak, Suspiria, House of Dark Shadows, Sweeney Todd, Van Helsing, The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Action Horror - This very modern invention is a unique crossover subgenre which blends typical horror trappings (classic monsters, eerie locations, the fight against all-consuming evil) with the exaggerated, over-the-top mayhem seen in action movies or comics. Unlike other horror subgenres that depict the struggle against the supernatural as
hopeless, dangerous, or even symbolic of a larger struggle against sin, action horror frames the conflict as a mainly physical one, where defeating supernatural evil is more often accomplished with grit and firepower. There might even be a touch of the comedic as the heroes dash off witty quips while taking out a pack of werewolves.

This type of horror is at home in nearly any time or place. The investigators might be pulp adventurers in the 1930s fighting mummies, stalwart werewolf hunters in the Victorian era, cybernetically-enhanced vampire hunters in a postmodern urban sprawl, a team of Navy SEALS stopping a zombie outbreak, or even plucky high schoolers fighting summoned demons.

Examples: Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids, Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Justin Cronin's The Passage, The Mummy (1999), Army of Darkness, Zombieland, Van Helsing, Planet Terror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Shaun of the Dead, Dog Soldiers, the Blade trilogy.

Slasher Horror: Made popular by John Carpenter's 1978 movie Halloween and countless similar movies in the years that followed, the slasher subgenre focuses on a group of people being hunted by a single (possibly unstoppable) killer. The victims are taken out one by one until a single one remains. Slashers can take place in a variety of
locales and times, but are almost always set in a modern or near-modern era.

Examples Stephen Graham Jones' The Last Final Girl, Sergio Gomez' Camp Slaughter, A Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Scream, Halloween, Alien, Nightmare on
Elm Street, Friday the 13th, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Cabin in the Woods, Child's Play, Candyman, Malignant, Jeepers Creepers, Don't Breathe, The Quarry
video game.

Pulp Horror: Unlike the other types of horror in this list, which originated from literature or movies, pulp horror was born in the world of cheap comic books of the 1940s and 1950s. Intended to be read and then discarded much like newspaper, comic books of the day often featured daring heroes, cliffhanger situations, simplistic plots, and two-dimensional characters. The supernatural in pulp horror exists purely to tempt humans into vile acts, and then punishes them for it. Black magic (stereotypes of "voodoo" or "witchcraft") interferes with the thoughts or feelings of the target, but always comes with a hefty price. Victims of dark betrayal inevitably get revenge from beyond the grave through bizarre misfortunes, unforeseen consequences—or even by returning as a shambling corpse.Pulp horror adventures are best geared toward one-shots, as they tend to dish out permanent justice on the main characters.

Examples: W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," Saki's "The Interlopers," Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Telltale Heart," the Tales from the Crypt comics, The Twilight Zone, Pumpkinhead, Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside, Hellraiser, Tales from the Hood.

Superheroic Horror: This type of horror centers around extremely powerful protagonists with extraordinary—perhaps even superhuman—abilities. As horror usually relies on powerlessness to inspire fear, superheroic horror is less concerned with the fear of physical defeat but rather with spiritual defeat. The main character is often an "anti-hero" who has become powerful due to the supernatural, but that power also comes with the gradual, maybe inevitable, loss of his soul. The superheroic character must use his dark powers to prevent harm befalling others, thus flirting with an even deeper slide into darkness. Ironically, his salvation comes from not using those powers—but he would then
carry the guilt of inaction forever.

Examples: The Marvel Zombies comic book series, Ex-Heroes, The Tomb of Dracula, Spawn, Hellboy, Batman, Justice League Dark, Midnight Sons, Werewolf by Night, Swamp Thing, Constantine, Blade.

Survival Horror: Survival horror as a subgenre is most commonly associated with zombie apocalypse scenarios, where (due to a virus, parasites, alien energies, magic, etc.) the dead all over the world have risen to destroy the living. But as its name implies, the only real requirement for survival horror is that the characters are plunged into a life-or-death scenario with no apparent goal beyond sheer survival. Unlike other horror subgenres, survival horror is about teamwork and pits the heroes against many foes, rather than one which prefers to divide and conquer. The monsters are never humanized or sympathetic, nor are they interested in corrupting their victims. They just want to kill—perhaps to eat, or maybe it's just the reason they exist.

Examples: Max Brooks' World War Z, Justin Cronin's The Passage, The Walking Dead graphic novel series, Night of the Living Dead, Tremors, Aliens, Dawn of the
Dead, The Descent, As Above So Below, The Last of Us, the Resident Evil video games, Dead Space, Days Gone.

Obviously you can mix-and-match subgenres.

It covers Setting Rules specific to the Horror genre. Among those being:

Buckets of Blood - In "splatter films," victims often explode in showers of blood far beyond what the human body might possibly hold. Anytime an individual dies in some
gruesome fashion—whether it's an Extra or a player character—his corpse erupts in a massive blood spray. Mechanics include heightened Fear checks (penalties) and the implied environmental issues with blood being everywhere (slippery, enemies can smell the splashed PC/NPC's etc.)

Difficult Healing - You only get ONE chance to heal a particular Wound. After that? It's all natural Healing.

Slaughter Rules - This is effectively SWADE on *hardcore* mode. PC's/Wildcards get ONE Wound, No Soaking UNLESS they have Conviction, Bennies are awarded to Players, not their characters (so the expectation of their PC dying is high, and you get to keep your Bennies with your next character) Critical Kills - anytime you role a Critical Failure where the there is a possibility you could die? You DO. Don't roll Snakeyes, kids.

Lots of archetypes for players to choose from or for GM's to use to build their scenarios and sandboxes. You could easily replicate any kind of Horror setting or convert an established one with ease. Plus you could use (and I already have been doing this) the Horror Companion to add some spice to your other genre-specific games. I'm running a Savage Worlds Bloodstone Lands game and leverage a lot of the Horror Companion here.

There are rules for Corruption, Insanity, new Fear rules. They even have a section dedicated to stat-blocs for Lovecraftian Mythos. Yes, they stat those bad boys out. So you could even drop these things into your Rifts game without missing a beat.

Supernatural "races" are totally doable. At a glance you could recreate World of Darkness with very little effort. ANY aspect of it could be done without ANY of the metaplot baggage with *ease*. Mage? Yes. Vampire? Yes. Were-anything? Yes. Mummy? Yes. And pretty much anything else.

Lots of rules for Rituals, Bindings/Wards. Magic Items, a *really nice* Bestiary in the back. All in all - I'm impressed with it more than I thought I would be.

Between the Core Rules, the Fantasy Companion and this Horror Companion, GM's have enough material to run for years if you're DIY. There's some adventures already made, I haven't gone through them.

Lastly - there is nary a note of "trigger warnings" or nonsense like that. Given the fact they have a whole section on Lovecraft, these days, it's nice to see they didn't veer into that silliness.

Feel free to ask questions/comments, I'll answer as I can.

Interesting.  If I get back into Savage Worlds I may look at picking this up.

So I know you must have answered this before, but what compelling reason is there to use SW vs. something like GURPS or HERO? I suppose that's a more general question, so I'll make it specific and say I have Horror HERO and GURPS 3rd edition Horror and have yet to run either of them; I have run Chill, Silent Legions, Beyond the Supernatural, and Cryptworld, which I guess is just a Chill clone. Why use SW instead?

Some backstory...I used to play GURPS with a bunch of hardcore fans of the system, they ported everything over. One of their favorite games was Twilight 2000 but using GURPS. So a few years pass, I thought about playing GURPS again, the main advocate told me they had moved to SW because it did everything GURPS did but with 1/10th the effort. I always found that interesting so I got a copy of the rules, but didn't find them that compelling. I also have SWADE and still can't really see much reason for using it, honestly. Is this one of those, "You need to play it and not theorycraft," scenarios?

Savage Worlds mostly avoids edge-cases, and the GM workload can be pretty light. It's not that different from most other medium-crunch games otherwise. I'd say the GURPS comparison is probably an exaggeration if you use templates for GURPS and mostly original stuff for SW.

Is this a compleat game? Or is it a supplement to be used with a core rulebook?

Any game with "Slaughter rules" gets my approval

SW really is trying to branch out. I'm waiting on Savage Shadowrun.

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on February 22, 2024, 05:04:13 AM
Is this a compleat game? Or is it a supplement to be used with a core rulebook?

It's a supplement. You'll need one of the Savage Worlds rulebooks to use it (it's designed for the latest, the Adventure Edition rules).

Quote from: Theory of Games on February 22, 2024, 05:54:44 AM
SW really is trying to branch out. I'm waiting on Savage Shadowrun.

Is this something official or something someone is doing on the side?

Quote from: Brad on February 21, 2024, 09:17:23 PM
So I know you must have answered this before, but what compelling reason is there to use SW vs. something like GURPS or HERO?

Savage Worlds is easy to use.  I used to be a fan of the HERO system but I don't have time these days for complicated systems and the HERO system was hard to get people to play.  They would look at the book and roll their eyes.  And that was 30 years ago.

GURPS is just terrible and overcomplicated.  I bought the books wanting to get into it but the rules are so poorly written and confusing I just gave up and moved on.  Character creation didn't have a easy to follow flow.   Eventually I found Savage Worlds but that was after some time looking.   I find Savage Worlds easy to teach people while playing and easier for people to pick up.

Quote from: Brad on February 21, 2024, 09:17:23 PM
So I know you must have answered this before, but what compelling reason is there to use SW vs. something like GURPS or HERO? I suppose that's a more general question, so I'll make it specific and say I have Horror HERO and GURPS 3rd edition Horror and have yet to run either of them; I have run Chill, Silent Legions, Beyond the Supernatural, and Cryptworld, which I guess is just a Chill clone. Why use SW instead?

Some backstory...I used to play GURPS with a bunch of hardcore fans of the system, they ported everything over. One of their favorite games was Twilight 2000 but using GURPS. So a few years pass, I thought about playing GURPS again, the main advocate told me they had moved to SW because it did everything GURPS did but with 1/10th the effort. I always found that interesting so I got a copy of the rules, but didn't find them that compelling. I also have SWADE and still can't really see much reason for using it, honestly. Is this one of those, "You need to play it and not theorycraft," scenarios?

  It takes playing.  I had several editions and would read and re read the book and did not see the appeal.  Finally played it with our group and it was much better on the table than it was on the page. 

Quote from: Brad on February 21, 2024, 09:17:23 PM
So I know you must have answered this before, but what compelling reason is there to use SW vs. something like GURPS or HERO? I suppose that's a more general question, so I'll make it specific and say I have Horror HERO and GURPS 3rd edition Horror and have yet to run either of them; I have run Chill, Silent Legions, Beyond the Supernatural, and Cryptworld, which I guess is just a Chill clone. Why use SW instead?

SW is much lighter than HERO or GURPS. The whole point of SW is navigating tropes while giving you mechanical heft to them. It errs on the side of the players and since it keeps the number calculations low, it's very easy to assimilate as a new GM and get on with the good stuff.

What it does super-well is scale with very little mechanical overhead. For example, it's not important to know HOW much stronger that metal plating is on your giant robot. It might have an Armor Rating of 15 (which is decent) but since it's a giant robot, it's now got Heavy Armor. That means any weapon *not* with the Heavy quality simply bounces off. And just like that, you have effectively created Palladium MDC without having to retool things. Sounds simplistic? And yet, it works marvelously.

It's not so much that it's giving you mechanical specificity (Like GURPS), it's giving you fast resolution and approximation that lowers the nitpickyness of trying to aim for absolute detail that can get in the way. A simple +4/-4 range due to environmental/ability/gear has *massive* impact on the outcomes of task-resolution which keeps your overhead down without sacrificing anything.

By comparison a +1 bonus in SW is the equivalent of a +4 in D&D. This works both for/against players. So the stakes are always high/low as you need. Plus the system has a wonderful array of switches and levers to dial the game up/down or even sideways with simple options that do not fundamentally change the core task resolution.

What this does is allow you to fully lift material literally from *any* Savage World product and drop it into your game as needed. So when they dropped Savage Rifts... it wasn't *just* a standalone game as it's designed. It's now a vehicle for us to leverage the insane power-levels of Rifts into our other games piecemeal. Want Archmage level gaming? Well Rifts *starts* there.

On the other side, if you want to play gritty, grimdark sword and sorcery? A couple of setting rules like Betrayal (Can't soak Sneak Attacks), or Difficult Healing (One chance to heal a wound), Gritty Damage (any wound causes a roll on the Injury table), Hard Choices (When PC's spend Bennies it goes into a pool for the GM to use for his NPCs). etc. etc. There are TONS of Setting Rules that you can use to customize your campaign with huge effects but little mechanical footprint.

Can GURPS and HERO do the same things? *ABSOLUTELY*. But both of those systems have far more overhead for GM's that have not fully assimilated those systems, much less players, to run as smoothly. SW can be jumped into in minutes. The core task resolution can be explained with "Roll higher than a 4, or your opponents Parry rating." That's 80% of it minus bonuses and modifying Edges.

I've played with GURPS GM's that can run blisteringly smooth games. They live and breathe GURPS. But as a player? The choices are paralyzing even for someone like me that loves options on top of options. SW gives me the best of both worlds: mechanical fidelity to its core premise - "Cinematic Tropes - Fast, Fun, Furious!" while giving you nobs and levers to add as much detail as you want with little overhead. Plus TONS of meaningful options.

Quote from: Brad on February 21, 2024, 09:17:23 PMSome backstory...I used to play GURPS with a bunch of hardcore fans of the system, they ported everything over. One of their favorite games was Twilight 2000 but using GURPS. So a few years pass, I thought about playing GURPS again, the main advocate told me they had moved to SW because it did everything GURPS did but with 1/10th the effort. I always found that interesting so I got a copy of the rules, but didn't find them that compelling. I also have SWADE and still can't really see much reason for using it, honestly. Is this one of those, "You need to play it and not theorycraft," scenarios?

You sound like one of my trusted players. Dude is whipsmart but he said the same thing. "I don't get it."

Backstory - *I* was converted to SW in the Deluxe edition. One of my friends suggested we play Deadlands, which I heard a lot about over the years, I made a Shaolin monk (c'mon! You mean I can play Cain, walking the earth, whipping that ass?) and after the very first fight - less than 60 seconds into the game, I *knew*. It FELT right. I hadn't even conceived of anything with SW being a "game about Tropes" - but when I was playing it, all the Tropes were happening. My monk was dodging bullets, deflecting tomahawks with his hands, moving between opponents, elbows, circle-kicks, etc. All up until one player rolled a Critical Fail, then rolled insane success on me and blew my head clean off.

My takeaway had nothing to do with the Deadlands game itself (I loved it, despite dying to player bad choices) - was that this could have been a D&D game... only faster, higher-octane, and *right out of the gate*. I didn't need to memorize the PHB, or know the nuances of obscure combat rules, or gear to maximize my efficiency in delivering damage per round. No. I was kicking that ass right out of the gate and it felt AWESOME. Second realization was the fact we're in the Wild West and I'm working very well right alongside people using *firearms*... and on top of that, technically I was a spellcaster (Chi powers are "spells" just with different trappings) - so the incessant problem of blackpowder "realism" and Gish concepts being half-assed were immediately eliminated theoretically, with zero effort. The ONLY thing no one at the table other than myself saw: This is what DnD should be.

It's not about being realistic, it's about exemplifying the play at your table you want WITH mechanics that back it up.

Back to my player with opinions like yours - he flatly didn't see it. He said that he didn't see how the system had the legs to express the totality of what DnD had given us all these years. And in truth - he wasn't technically wrong. I started looking at SW's settings, and they *did* have some fantasy settings, they had the Fantasy Companion, but I was fighting an uphill battle against a group that had campaigned with me for two-decades in the Greybox Realms and made it ours. Selling them on wholesale going to a new setting AND a new "untested" system that I believed would deliver what I've been giving them for the last few years was an insanely ridiculous tall order.

And they weren't wrong. My selling point had to be something smaller and more intimate. I had to go back to my Sword and Sorcery roots, low magic, high adventure, blood and steel mode, with gold and tits, and kingdoms to conquer. I knew I was still a beginner with SW and wasn't comfortable designing a setting yet. And SW had that setting: Beasts and Barbarians. It's a loveletter to Hyboria that stands on its own. Yes the magic is low-key, but it showed my most jaded players that SW rocks the fucking socks on Fantasy.

The possibilities were now obvious to them, they just needed that DnD feel. Fortunately by this time SWADE dropped, and we were doing other games (lots of MSH) but when I started to feel comfortable with the system they announced Savage Rifts. That was a milestone for me as well - because I loved Rifts, and I was SUPER skeptical about SW being able to handle the sheer powerlevel of Rifts. And it stuck the landing. Now the full extent of what SW could do was apparent. While I don't think at the highest end of the power spectrum it's perfect, it's damn solid. It lets you run any kind of encounter - player fighting normal monsters, to players fighting Kaiju sized monstrosities without any change in rules.

Further the sub-systems like their mass combat, are brilliant. I've run battles that were 90k men in pitched combat that came down to the wire, where the players were literally terrified they were about to die only to pull it out at the last second... standing amongst the fallen of 70k dead and counting during the rout... and feeling great about it. Those same rules apply to Space fleets, to City Sieges, to literally anything without missing a single beat. But still we hadn't played D&D fantasy yet.

By then I'd felt very comfortable with the system - I started converting Greybox Realms to SWADE. In mid-design or thereabouts, they announced Savage Worlds Pathfinder... That's when I knew we'd "arrived". While I knew it wouldn't be the perfect rendition of what I like in D&D fantasy, it would be close enough. And it was. It's *not* perfect, but it IS Pathfinder rendered into SWADE.

With the Fantasy Companion (and now Horror Companion) all the pieces are there to create the exact game you want in whatever setting you want (if you're willing to do the work) with fairly low effort since all the component parts are freely interchangeable. You *can* have super-heroic fantasy, or grimdark gritty fantasy, swashbuckling pirates with black powder? No problem. Loincloth wearing barbarians? Done. Want to put them on Cybernetic Laser shooting Velociraptors? No problem!

SW is intensely plug-and-play with very low effort... but I do not sell it as a "light system". I define "Crunch" as - the minimum number of sub-systems required to know with the core task resolution in order to run the game. In this area, it's Medium Crunch - but you can ratchet that UP or DOWN as you see fit. In terms of "Complexity" - it's the maximum number of calculations to run the core task resolution - in this area it's light.

The combination of these two factors makes SW punch *way* above it's level. It's low complexity, but the mechanical heft it gives allows for a remarkable array of genre emulation possibilities where navigating tropes is the key. And it gives you additional layers of options to fine tune it to make it yours.

Perfect? No. I find that it doesn't quite suit my needs for Superheroes - but that's largely because of my MSH and DCHeroes biases and the decades I've spent perfecting running those games at my tables using those dedicated systems (which is another thread). But I do own the Super Heroes Companion for SWADE, and I'm tempted to try...

or you know... I could just lift some of those rules into my other games... maybe I'll do a Savage Worlds Exalted game...

Quote from: Theory of Games on February 22, 2024, 05:54:44 AM
Any game with "Slaughter rules" gets my approval

SW really is trying to branch out. I'm waiting on Savage Shadowrun.

The Sci-Fi Companion kickstarter launched two days ago. BANK on cyberpunk stuff packed into it.

OR you could simply take Interface Zero and add supernatural races into it. It's pretty much Shadowrun if you squint. It has Psionics... the rules for Psionics are almost identical to Arcane Magic. If you wanted to use some elbow-grease you could easily port over all the gear, and write up race-templates (SWADE gives you rules for creating your own races) and just let it fly.

The Interface Zero rules for netrunning are SOLID.

I started my own SWADE Cyberpunk conversion I call CPRed-Zero, which is CP2020, with CPRed elements, and leveraging a lot of the rules and gear form Interface Zero. But I have yet to release it on my players. It'll happen soon. I'm working on my own custom vehicle combat rules for some Mad Max love... THEN we'll see.

So from my view, I've started GMing Savage Worlds (SWADE) for a Middle Earth setting. I like the core of Savage Worlds mechanics - they are fast work well, and I enjoyed playing in Savage Worlds games and my recent GMing.

However, I have to say, I was very disappointed with the Fantasy Companion - which biases me against the Horror Companion.

The Fantasy Companion, in my opinion, was dominated by dull and flat write-ups of fantasy spells, magic items, and monsters. It felt like it was trying to be devoid of creativity, so as to cover the most boring of fantasy tropes. While D&D or Palladium Fantasy or similar are generic, they at least try to be a little distinctive and interesting, with some interesting twists. I found it essentially useless for my Middle Earth game.

By contrast, the HERO System books and GURPS books have had generally interesting content. Fantasy HERO has good content about how to do different sorts of fantasy, with its checklist to tailor magic to a specific setting. GURPS Fantasy is the specific world of Yrth, which is generic but had at least some interesting twists, like populations brought over from real-world history.

The Fantasy Companion spent way too much basically showing you how to convert D&D 3e to Savage Worlds. I would have liked greater breadth of the fantasy genre, rather than assuming some kind of D&D/Pathfinder mishmash as the default. There is some support for other stuff, like pulp-style Sorcerery, but it's definitely the weakest of the genre books, and specifically I would say because it didn't try hard enough. Like, if I just want Savage D&D-finder, Savage Worlds Pathfinder is right there.

The Companions
They exist in their current form at their standard basic level to emulate what people think of as fantasy/horror/supers. They're not overtly trying to emulate any particular edition of D&D or whatever, they're trying to emulate what people conceive of generally within the tropes of what is popular.

Savage Pathfinder - *that* is trying to emulate 3e into Savage Worlds because it's directly taking Pathfinder as a set of tropes and "Savaging" them. The Fantasy Companion by direct comparison deconstructs those very 3e elements into distinct abilities for the sole purpose of the GM to decide what is/isn't going to be used at the table.

These general core rules are supposed to be described and colored by the GM to reflect his setting. It's not like when someone launches a Fireball in 1e DnD or 5e DnD there is much of a descriptive difference between editions, nor between means in which they're cast. But in Savage Worlds there is absolutely supposed to be a difference, via Trappings, and Arcane Background - the mechanics might remain the same, but the GM and Player have a say in that too. If you *don't* do that, then you're missing the whole the point of the system.

If you're insisting the mechanics are the game itself, I will highly disagree. I would disagree in any game or setting where mechanics should be the starting point of roleplaying. Otherwise by relative comparison, the Blast Power represents the Fireball spell pretty accurately as a *trope*. Anything else that is missing is for the GM to extrapolate on via Setting Rules.

@pawsplay - you're saying that Pathfinder = D&D. No they're different. No one can look at Greybox Forgotten Realms and pretend it plays like modern Pathfinder. There are very large mechanical differences, there are very large narrative assumptions. Further - I'm not sure what you're looking for in the Fantasy Companion? You're literally ignoring the setting rules that can transform your game into any kind of Fantasy you'd want.

You can literally make any kind of race you can imagine. You can literally make any kind of Powers, Skills, Abilities you need. They give you all the basic guidelines you need. If that's not in your capacity or desire to do, you're trying to pretend a toolkit is a full blown setting. It's not. Nor is it intended to be.

But without specifics I can't really address your issues. Nor do I think it would be beneficial to anyone since you're pretty disingenuous in general.