My group and I had good fun playing Torchbearer last night. I ought to have made pre-gens, though, and saved us time at the front end, letting them pick skill specialty, social grace skill, weapon (but not general gear), and BIGs. Aw well. I kinda wanted to see character creation. I think one player, a guy I’d played MG with, summarized it well:
The system is pretty interesting, with some notably clever (and retro-actively obvious) updates on a pretty road-tested engine. Definitely a fun campaign setup.
For our one-shot, there were no rats in the basement or kobolds in the cave for us. No, we had our scarred, firebrand-cleric try to sweet-talk a traumatised teenager into talking to us, argued over the proper treatment of a tomb’s desecrated dead within earshot of a troll… and tricked a troll to not kill us or tell it’s dark lord of our intrusion (pity about the cave-in [compromise], true).
Would play again : )