From the introduction to the PDF:
Band of Bastards is a role-playing game inspired by the dark fantasy stories of Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy and Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher, by the fast-paced swashbuckling of Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers and the obsessive revenge of The Count of Monte Cristo, by the political intrigues of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and the intimate tragedies at the heart of Hamlet and Macbeth. This game is our love-letter to the kinds of stories that get our blood pumping and capture our imaginations.
‘Bastards is a game about passion, violence, and general skullduggery. The players are tasked with taking on the role of men and women driven by steadfast convictions, ravenous ambitions, and danger- ous intention. It is a game of personal conflict and political power plays, of subterfuge and sacrifice, of honest thieving and dishonest flattery, of tragedy and gallows humor, of profane, subtle sorcery and fast-paced, brutal swordplay.