Orlando Furioso
Summary courtesy of Andrea Angiolillo, used with permission.
In this very steamlined fantasy RPG, all player are Paladins, Moorish warriors and other characters of the Renaissance poems about King Charlemagne. The system is the same "Qui comincia l'avventura" that already appeared in Mediterraneo. Some special rules have been added to suit the specific setting as the one for combat on horse.
The literary setting has been choosed since the first publisher has been the Biblioteca Centrale dei Ragazzi, the Kids' Library of the Rome City Council: So the setting can appeal librarians, teachers and parents. But players too, since the game contains all the ingredients of the most classic epic fantasy: Heroic knights, wizards, monsters, magic items and so on. The tone is fantastic and lightly humorous, as in Ariosto's poem: paradoxes are even present in the adventures, as sometime where in the literary world of the Italian poet.
Since this book has been mainly aimed to people that could have never seen a role playing game, especially education professionals, it has a general introduction about role-playing games and the full list of the ones already published in Italy at the time (a bit more than 30, between original Italian systems and translations), with a short description of each.
The core of the booklet include all the rules, the character sheet, a bestiary and a complete adventure: "The patience of King Charles". The latter has been written in blocks linked as in a choose-your-adventure gamebook, so to help the beginner Master to handle his players' decisions about where to go and how to pursue their goal. The players have to rescue King Charles' patience: he lost it because his best Paladins are mostly running after Angelica, and as everything that he lost, it went to the moon.
At the end, some notes on how to handle RPG in schools and public libraries complete the booklet.