The right system for peasant central campaign

Burning Wheel. The lifepath system excels at creating a party of peasants and tradesmen. The main disadvantage for you is that it does use skill kits and an abstract wealth system. If that's not a deal breaker then it can do the vulnerable characters living hand
to mouth in a gritty fantasy world quite well.

Take a look at the fan online character creator. 4 Lifepaths from the Human peasant, village and outcast settings should work though theres nothing to stop the characters dipping into some of the other settings if the concept fits.
charred.herokuapp.com/#/

The gear section of the PDF version is a bit broken though, the descriptions will overlay instead of formatting properly.

gurps may be a good option now that I'm looking at it, with 25 character points

i've played in modern settings with gurps, was a fun experience, and we once had a single session of this weird legendary fantasy gurps that a gm bailed out on just post-second session (was probably a good thing, the group didn't make a lot of sense, though it was kinda cool from a roleplaying sense to have an aztec blood ritualist shaman in greece with a nordic giant and a rich but frail man who made flies drop dead by pure virtue of being near his being)

so really it hadnt occurred to me to be a good system for this

Zweihander, WHFRP 2nd ed.

Sounds more like a project for grade school students to learn about life in the middle ages than a fun campaign. Think of all the reading everyone would have to do. Does anybody remember that pdf that talks about the exact number of logs and volume of iron necessary to build a medieval house?

for peasants? 0 and 0

>Sounds more like a project for grade school students to learn about life in the middle ages than a fun campaign.
I mean, I probably would've had a blast in grade school. It's certainly better than just reading rote out of a book.

The thing I'm talking about is a huge pdf with dozens of pages. It covered everything from farming to medieval economics, man. Wish I saved it haha

You could certainly use Ryuutama and tone down the comfy. The original premise is that the players are a group of typical NPCs (Cooks, Merchants, Artisans, etc) who have decided to go on a journey. There is also a DM character who is watching over the group and recording their tale who can use magic to manipulate them to a certain degree. The characters have limited carrying capacities and even weather affects them heavily if they are not well prepared.

For your idea I would recommend amping up your tone you want them to feel, since this can come off as Miyazaki's Oregon Trail.

not even joking

Dark Ages line from White Wolf

Aquelarre or HarnMaster.

LITERALLY WARHAMMER FANTASY ROLEPLAY 2E

CAME HERE TO POST THIS.

harnmaster
runequest
rollmaster

RETURNED HERE TO RESPECT THIS.

There's Dungeon Crawler Classic, which has starts at level 0 with peasants at 1-6 HP. You start with multiple characters, and mill them out until you have your heroes. Though it's meant for dungeons, don't see why you can't take it anywhere else.

>but how
AD&D 1e, is in my opinion, a fantasy system that dies a great job at making you feel like Joe schmoe. This is with abilities and magic and clerics as readily available things. Hell man, 3 4HP goblins can be devastating even at level 4. Now, take away all those assets and proficiencies and skills and magic, and get ambushed by 2 bug bears and their 6 goblin underlings. You can really feel helpless, even if there is 10 players. Additionally, there is a large amount of material in the phb, dmg, and ua that provides a wide breadth of information concerning backgrounds and prices and everyday mundane stuff that you can tap into to really build the world.

WFRP, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. 2nd edition is probably the best for it. It has a wide array of peasant scum classes, rat catcher, dung collector, camp follower etc etc, and the warhammer world is typically portrayed as fairly grimy. My 2nd campaign they started in Gongport-On-The Riek, and the party NPC was Jonas Crap-Shoveller

I JUST WANT TO FIT IN

Seconding Zweihander & Warhammer, they are the best. Zweihander even has a table of commoner only professions you could restrict your characters to.

I second the posts of everyone who's mentioned WHFRP 2e

This one? It's not exactly how much you need, but it helps to build up your economy and your prices.

Unironically, WFRP 2ndEd. It has all the classes you could ever want, including farmers, charcoal burners, rat catchers, militiamen etc.

>>your character is being forced out of your village in an emergency and can only take what you are able to carry on your back and in your hands
Orcs, beastmen, chaos marauders, skaven, the undead, pissed off neighboring Imperial states....
>the setting is in a relatively dangerous fantasy world
Oh yeah.
>players are all peasants (not heroes, or ex-soldiers of any sort, just peasants)
Easy
>you'll pick a profession, and base your inventory and relative stats and skills around it (so far there is a baker and a carpenter confirmed, another is hinging between being a cobbler or a smith)
Literally already done for you.
>there are no 'carpentry kits' or 'cooking kits' you need to have the specific items you plan to use for your task.
>each and every item in your bag must be accounted for, or else you do not have it, so if you forget to write down sock x2 you do not have socks
easy enough to do.

>people build huts of simple materials because they can't 'afford' hired help
jesus christ the absolute state of educational textbooks
there's practical reasons for these things outside of 'couldn't hire daylaborers'

'or an education to get the necessary skills to make a fancy house they didn't need since they were fucking peasants'

is that better for you

people in the age of Charlemagne had far more complex houses than the tiny straw lean-tos in the image there

and so did the people of the time shown.
the difference is whether or not they were filthy mud peasants or people with money you dolt.

commoner vs expert if you will

>Are there any systems out there that are peasant/commoner centric..?

Pic related without the eldritch/supernatural stuff.

Could be Fief or Town?

...

WFRP has loads of professions that characters could start as and really shows development of characters as they go through the campagin.

Savage worlds where players only have 1 point to bump up their attributes, and no edges