System is setting. Setting is system.

I dunno if that means rules-free setting books are a good idea or not, but I have to wonder whether a setting product created with no rule system in mind is the creator essentially saying, “I have absolutely no idea what you would do with this in an RPG context.”

(A kinder reading of that might be: “I think you could do a lot of different things with this setting, so I am not going to pin it down for you.”)

And, admittedly, this is also what I think when I see RPGs that, even when they Kickstart, offer to produce rulebooks for different systems; Savage Worlds and Fate seem to be the most common combo. I mean, those two games are polar opposites, which I think kinda screams, “We have no clue what the purpose of this setting is.”

I’m probably being uncharitable, though. There have been system-less products, like Brad Murray’s Deluge, that I thought were pretty damn cool.

As for EP, I feel like both its native system and the Fate conversion are both “lemme just revel in the genre, okay” systems — albeit one is sorta passive and one is sorta active in approach — and so that doesn’t bug me, either.