Product Spotlight: Ruins of Symbaroum for 5e—An Atmospheric Take on D&D

This post was sponsored by Free League Publishing. As always, all opinions are entirely our own.

What is Ruins of Symbaroum?

Ruins of Symbaroum is a D&D 5e expansion of Free League Publishing’s gritty, dark, survival tabletop roleplaying game, Symbaroum.

The original TTRPG, which was published in Sweden in 2014 and had a wider release in 2016,  promised players a dangerous world where the greedy, meager forces of civilization were constantly threatened by the forces of nature that lurked in dark and undiscovered places.

In 2021, Free League Publishing launched a Kickstarter to fund a project to port Symbaroum to D&D 5e mechanics.

The Kickstarter was a resounding success, no doubt due to Symbaroum’s popularity, and Free League released three books under the new Ruins of Symbaroum banner: The Player’s Guide, Gamemaster’s Guide, and Bestiary.

How Does Ruins of Symbaroum Differ from D&D 5e?

The original Symbaroum was entirely built on its own system to suit its dark, atmospheric world. It utilized a D20 roll-under system and had a narrower focus on character progression. Though there were various archetypes (classes) and races you could choose from, the experience you gained was used to make certain focuses of your build more potent rather than leveling up and gaining a wider array of new abilities.

In the D&D 5e adaption, Ruins of Symbaroum, Free League has brought as much of the original system over as they could, layering it on top of the popular 5e Basic Rules to make it more approachable to D&D’s large player base. They also brought a substantial amount of lore, worldbuilding, and art from the original Symbaroum system.

The Setting

With its familiar core system, Ruins of Symbaroum seeks to introduce players to the world of Symbaroum. This isn’t the Forgotten Realms or Middle Earth—it’s a dark world full of danger and corruption

The setting revolves around a nation of humans called Ambrians who had to flee their current home south of the Titans—a mountain range that divides the old Kingdom of Symbaroum from the rest of the realm—and return to their ancestral lands.

When the Ambrians arrive in their old, new home, they begin conquesting, driving out barbarian tribes and clans of elder folk (elves, dwarves, goblins, ogres, and trolls). They also start venturing into Davokar, a dark, sprawling forest that holds the ruins of the Kingdom of Symbaroum.

This conflict and the surrounding region of the Ambrian’s center of civilization are the focus of Ruins of Symbaroum’s setting.

The Similarities

When playing Ruins of Symbaroum, D&D fans will see plenty of familiar aspects:

• Characters: While they have setting-specific classes, races, and backgrounds (more on this below), player characters feel the same way they do in D&D 5e. You choose a race, gain some racial abilities, choose your class, learn proficiencies and class features, determine your ability scores, gain feats, choose your subclass, and eventually level up to level 20.
• Gameplay: The gameplay loop is mostly the same as D&D 5e. Combat, ability checks, and other aspects of the game rely on the fact that you have D&D 5e’s Basic Rules accessible.
• Monsters: All monsters in the bestiary come with D&D 5e compatible stat blocks.

The Differences

Ruins of Symbaroum brings unique mechanics over from the original Symbaroum to help D&D’s core ruleset fit the setting:

• Corruption: Rather than relying on spell slots, magic use is tied to the accumulation of Corruption, reflecting the inherent risks and consequences of delving into the arcane. Each spell cast adds temporary Corruption, and if your Corruption threshold is crossed, you can suffer permanent consequences. There are other ways to gain Corruption, like using magic items, environmental hazards, and encounters with monsters. If you ever gain too much Corruption, you’re character will be overwhelmed by its dark forces, and the character will be placed under the DM’s control.
• Resting: Resting has been changed to support the new mechanics for spellcasting, the gaining of Corruption, and to make exploring the dangerous parts of the world more difficult. The main difference is that a long rest no longer entirely refreshes your character; it just allows you to gain the maximum hit points from your hit die and to reduce your temporary Corruption level more effectively than a short rest. The new “extended rests” require at least 24 hours of resting in a safe place, and allow you to regain all hit points and hit dice, and reduce your temporary Corruption level to 0.
• New Classes: The book introduces 5 classes and 24 subclasses (known as approaches). The classes in Ruins of Symbaroum combine various D&D classes into their approaches. For example, the Mystic is the only “full caster” class and includes approaches for sorcerers, artifact crafters, and wizards, among others. The Hunter is kind of like a magic-less ranger, the Scoundrel is a rogue, the Warrior is a combination of fighter, barbarian, paladin, and monk, and the Captain feels more like a 4e warlord than any 5e class.
  
• New Feats: Feats in this book are split into four categories: boons, burdens, origin feats, and class feats. Same as with D&D 5e, you can take a feat instead of taking an ability score increase. Boons are your classic feats, and all of which offer an ability score increase to go along with them. Burdens give you +2 to certain abilities but come along with a negative aspect, like gaining a thirst for blood. Origin feats are the same as race-specific D&D feats, and class feats are similar to the ones that Pathfinder offers.
• New Spells: Casting any leveled spell in Ruins of Symbaroum gives you 1d4 + the spell’s level of temporary Corruption, and cantrips give 1 level of temporary Corruption. Luckily for Mystics, they can choose favored spells, which significantly reduce the Corruption they gain from using certain spells. Based on the spell lists for each approach, most spells from the D&D 5e Basic Rules are available to take. Plus, you’ll find 25 new spells that are built to match the setting’s fascination with Corruption and are great additions to immerse your character in the setting.

The Atmosphere

Ruins of Symbaroum’s selling point as a D&D 5e product is the atmosphere it evokes. I love that the books focus the lore and worldbuilding on a relatively small area, so DMs have a lot of guidance when it comes time to run adventures.

I personally feel like running Ruins of Symbaroum ruleset in the provided setting of Symbaroum is almost a requirement. The way character classes and approaches are built is very specifically tailored toward a game that involves a lot of exploration into uncharted, dangerous areas. Plus, Corruption and the sense of dread it promotes would be hard to achieve in a more traditional D&D setting.  But I see this as a good thing rather than something that docks points from the book.

If I want to portray an atmosphere of a dark, dangerous setting where my players will have to contend with the forces of nature and ancient evil, these books give you everything you need.

The art also perfectly captures this feeling of ancient, mysterious danger (as you can see in the various pictures included in this review). The book’s graphics have a foreboding quality, which really helps drive home the fact that this is a scary, lonely world that also contains a wild sort of beauty.

How It Plays

Much like D&D, which focuses on delving into dungeons and saving the realm from powerful villains, Ruins of Symbaroum excels at evoking the atmosphere of certain types of adventures: conquest, exploration, and fetch-quests.

From the small amount that I’ve played, it’s considerably more challenging than typical 5e gameplay, but my players and I found that the difficulty helped support the atmosphere the setting tries to create.

I like that resting out in the wild doesn’t feel safe because you’re not regaining hit dice. It’s not until you’re behind the walls of a city that you can finally stop watching your back.

In addition, it really helps bridge the marital/caster divide in regular D&D 5e. Casters feel vulnerable when they have to start accumulating Corruption, so they depend heavily on favored cantrips and their martial party members to help them out on lengthy expeditions.

Colonialism and Paraiahs

There has been an obvious push in D&D 5e to make the game inclusive and skirt around certain topics. In Ruins of Symbaroum, there’s almost an expectation that you will conquer and plunder other civilizations, and if you build a character that’s a non-human race, you’ll experience in-game discrimination.

I personally think that conflicts such as these can help achieve a certain narrative within a setting, so I’m not against the inclusion of these conflicting topics. However, it is important to bring these aspects up during your Session 0 to ensure that your table is also comfortable and that they know what to expect if they build a certain character.

My players all chose to be Ambrian humans because they do feel like the main characters of the setting. Again, this isn’t bad. If anything, it helps focus the story and plays into the feelings the game is trying to put off.

The Verdict

Ruins of Symbaroum masterfully bridges the gap between Symbaroum’s unique world and the familiar mechanics of D&D 5e. These books are meant to provide groups that still want to run D&D with a way to shake things up. The world is unique, and the spellcasting mechanics and classes are different from the options provided in 5e. This will result in a different campaign from anything you’ve run in D&D.

For Dungeon Masters looking to expand their TTRPG group’s horizons, this is also a good way to introduce your players to a new world, with the intention of slipping further into the system offered by the original Symbaroum.

All in all, as a DM who primarily plays D&D 5e, I love the different take Ruins of Symbaroum offers from the epic, high-fantasy worlds normally seen in Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Free League has done a fantastic job with the worldbuilding in their original Symbaroum and the lengths they went to port the original game’s mechanics to a more ubiquitous system definitely paid off.