I'd add that if people are interested in listening to people play Fabula Ultima, Perpetua is the current season of the excellent and long-running AP series Friends at the Table and a great choice. Some of their seasons are sequels or otherwise connected to one another, but this is a standalone...
The Natural Fantasy Atlas has a little bit of stuff that is relevant here, in a section on "Vertical Worlds" which is designed to adapt the normal travel and worldbuilding rules to something involving exploring a large vertical setting, e.g. descending into a deep chasm or scaling an enormous...
FWIW the author of Undead Awakening managed to get in touch with the original creator of Wicked Ones in order to get the rights transferred. While they couldn't do anything to fulfill the failed KS (or the one for Relic, by the same creator) they did make Wicked Ones available for free via...
Unless I'm mistaken, this play is real, but is definitely not by Shakespeare; the story of its purported 'discovery' is the plot of the 2011 work of fiction The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips. Phillips wrote the play and included it in his novel.
Closer to the former. As the name suggests, the basic expectation is for there to be a new monster every week. There are some alternate campaign frames that add more of a throughline, but by default you'll go up against a new beastie each time.
Dungeon World (in its original edition; a new edition is coming soon-ish) is very much an attempt to translate D&D-isms into the PbtA engine, and while it's fairly successful at doing so, that doesn't necessarily make it the best PbtA fantasy game. Personally I'd recommend Fellowship for that...
My recommendations:
Old School Essentials comes up a lot here, and indeed it is a very good, clean presentation of BX play.
Just play BECMI, or pick up the Rules Cyclopedia if you want (almost) all of the rules in one book. Why reinvent the wheel?
Take a look at the work of Kevin Crawford...
I played a fair bit of V:TM back in the day (1e and 2e) and ran a game of V5 just before the pandemic. I'd agree with your assessment; in fact, I'd say that V5's mechanics do a much better job at delivering on the horror element of the game than any prior edition.
This year's Gen Con is a little odd because some publishers from overseas won't be attending thanks to our current political situation - Rowan, Rook, and Decard aren't going to be there, and I think Pelgrane is missing the con as well. They typically run a good number of games using their systems.
I'm interested to see how they handle the mixed enemy pool situation for superheroes as well. One thought I had, similar to @Ruin Explorer 's suggestion of having the encounter change at various grit thresholds, would be to take a page from 2LM's earlier game, Household. In Household you play...
I wouldn't say it's good, exactly, but Once and Future King inspired a long-running desire to do a sci-fi take on the Arthur story. I've thought about doing it in a Battletech-ish setting, with possession of a mech being the rough equivalent to the arms and armor a knight would have possessed in...
A handful of other classes get AoE or multi-target at-wills - swordmages, artificers, battleminds, monks, and sorcerers get AoEs and rangers, fighters and barbarians have multi-target attacks.
I'm not @pemerton , but I've heard others express the idea that the fighter is the martial controller before. Fighters in 4e got a lot of powers that overlapped with controller abilities, including forced movement and imposing action-denying conditions. Other defenders could do this, but not to...
When 4e was just coming out, I ran a bunch of "Dungeon Delve" events at Gen Con with what was then called the RPGA. These were relatively short two-hour sessions that were essentially just three combats back to back, designed to show off the combat system, and there were prizes for getting...