An amazing small TTRPG, though it calls itself an adventure game instead of a roleplaying game for undisclosed reasons (you will very much play a role, a player character in it, however). Presumably, it's made for a game master (called the Judge in this case) and 1 to 5 players. It's got everything you might know and love about D&D and other typical fantasy RPGs except that everything is distilled down to the barest essential core elements. No classes or levels, not even heroic archetypes, no progressing in levels or stats at all - but you are encouraged and expected to discover magical secret abilities, items, weapons, and treasure, and build the world narratively as you go along. Witch Dream requires no traditional attributes like dexterity or intelligence for its characters. You get three skills at the beginning, and those are not gradable or broken down into levels, and picked freeform-style. Also, all player characters come with three Hits (wounds that they can take). After taking the third and final Hit, your character could either be dead and removed from play or still alive but out of action within the story for a while. Apparently, this is entirely dependent on context. So, the GM or Judge has above-average narrative say over the characters and the world. But also the players are expected to keep adding to the world and fleshing it out over time. It's also recommended to build not one, but three characters so you have a pool of adventurers to draw on. A group with four players could have a dozen adventurers all living in the same world and appearing in different combinations in different short adventure stories. There is very bare-bones dice rolling, but the math is super-easy. In fact, I have felt that the core resolution for skill rolls and risk rolls and so forth was pretty well hidden in the text. It is almost a case of "blink and you missed it," but I am happy to say I got the rules memorized and instantly understood them. Players typically roll 2d6 against a case-by-case fluctuating difficulty number of 3-12, with 3 being the easiest. The higher the better, meet or beat the target number. If you have an applicable skill or favorable condition while performing an action, that means you are allowed to take an extra d6 and use the highest two out of three d6 results. Unfavorable conditions do the opposite: Roll 3d6 and add the lowest two. I was in fact deeply familiar with that mechanic from Barbarians of Lemuria and Everywhen myself, had been using it for years. But Witch Dream is simpler because skills never add any bonuses to the pips on the d6. It's minimalist because it wants to be minimalist. It is definitely not for the min-maxers or for the number-crunching type of gamer. There is also a section on magic and spellcasting, called Sorcerous Runes. Under those rules, all magic happens by casting runes (possibly, imagined as "rune stones" that are literally thrown from a bag or a pouch?). You have to discover a rune first of all. Then it becomes basically a matter of speaking a phrase aloud and with intent, and the spell simply happens. This turns the runes into one-use super-abilities that allow the characters to do seemingly impossible feats and break the normal rules of reality, such as stepping through a mirror like Alice in Wonderland, or gaining the power of flight, or turning invisible for a while. Fifty sample runes are provided. Whether that is truly, definitively the only magic available in the setting is debatable at best, and might go against the freeform narrative nature of the rest of the game. If there are only runes, and the runes' effects and fixed, then what are all the alleged witches and sorcerers of the setting really doing? The Runes chapter is likely intended as the only form of magic available "on the go" to adventurers, yet slowly discovered over time. The world is probably full of other magic secrets, power batteries and artifacts, and the fragments of scrolls and tablets containing spells. It is likely one of the strange dark fantasy worlds where magical knowledge is mostly forgotten and unavailable, with magic slowly receding from the world, and only a few sorcerers left. Those will also almost certainly be corrupted and evil. Think more Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja than your typical D&D world where every village has spellcasters. There is a liberating ease of gameplay in Witch Dream. It got me very excited within 2 to 3 days. To me, it sits exactly midway between the Everywhen system and the one-page story games like Sorcerers & Sellswords (also available here on itch.io). With the latter, it shares the tone and feel of psychedelic weird fantasy worlds such as Ralph Bakshi's Wizards (that weirdly mesmerizing animated feature film from 1977) and possibly also his Lord of the Rings adaptation and the Frazetta-inspired Fire and Ice, so, all three of Bakshi's fantasy epics. Combine that with Richard Corben comics and other weird and whacko over-the-top fantasy from Heavy Metal (the magazine), far-out 1970s rock album art like the stuff by Hawkwind, and the retro dungeon-crawling fun of DCC, Swords and Wizardry, and more, only with a lot less math. One of the philosophies I took from Witch Dream is contained in the catchphrase "Play the world. not only the characters!" This is the type of freestyle story game where even the GM doesn't necessarily know where the heck the story is going. Mutual trust and easy-going cooperative storytelling are key here. There is no prescribed or fleshed out world setting for Witch Dream, deliberately so. In fact, the whole thing seems appropriately dreamlike to me. There are a few references to dreams, dreamwitches and the realm of dreams sprinkled throughout the PDF. The monsters and locations are barely two or three lines each (in very large lettering), they are just interesting or compelling-sounding phrases that are meant to get the players' imagination going. There are a dozen weird and fairytale-like locations that are meant to exist somewhere in the world, but strictly speaking they are just names: There are the Gordalian Fjords, the Cascarian Plains, the Gulch of Gundahar, etc. Also, places named "Ord" and "Thornhold" are mentioned several times, without specifying what they are like and what they look like. As long as it is wondrous and foreign and important-sounding, you're good to go. This is probably where one might criticize that Witch Dream is not really a beginner's game as it requires so much previous familiarity with fantasy tropes, legends and fairytales. If you have years of experience with those and can easily ad-lib and flesh out ideas, you can go crazy with Witch Dream. I like it immensely because it ties in so well, perhaps unintentionally, with several of the weird fantasy and sword & sorcery RPGs I already have. It can act as a bridge between or a gateway to those other games. Or you just play it as is and see where it might take you. I appreciate the retro "psychedelic rock" '70s aesthetic in the fonts and the colors used throughout the PDF. Maybe with a bigger budget and a full-on art direction, it could be redone with its own unique artwork. For now, it uses strictly public domain art, which might look too generic or blurry to some gamers. My other tiny gripe about it is that the pages don't display well on a smartphone screen or small tablet. You will have to swipe carefully from left to right and up and down to follow the text. That is why I didn't read the game in its entirety weeks earlier. I had to wait till I had time to read it properly on a big screen (I am almost 50 y. o. and have trouble reading anything on a phone). As a matter of fact, the fan-made character sheet included here looks great but is a nightmare to print because there is a  huge black cloak taking up the lower left quarter of the page. If Witch Dream had a more printer-friendly version out as an alternative, and a less art-intensive character sheet, it would be nearly perfect as an inexpensive "crazy weird" mini RPG.