I love the setting of Brancalonia. I love the humor, I love the folklore, and I am currently learning Italian in evening classes to boot, so this is basically a perfect mix.
But I do not love that the authors picked D&D 5E as the rule system for this setting. Don't get me wrong, I find D&D 5E perfectly acceptable for heroic fantasy campaigns (and, in fact, I am running such a campaign right now). And I can understand this choice from a business perspective - it makes a lot of sense to tie your setting to the most popular RPG system out there.
However, Brancalonia PCs are not supposed to be great heroes, but fairly unimpressive never-do-wells. The rules deal with this by capping character level at 6, but I feel that this leaves the PCs with too little room to grow and removes much of the proper D&D experience. I'd rather use a rule system that was intended for weaker protagonists, rather than trying to distort D&D into something that is not.
So, what alternate system would you use for Brancalonia?
The Cypher System is great for everything, but especially underdog scenarios like yours. It also helps the GM be a participant in the game rather than an adversary or a god. It’s such a rich, rewarding system.
This! Such a fantastic system for storytelling by the players rather than against them (fuckin' Gygax), and years before its time, too. 🤘🏼
Gotta say I got the opposite feeling when I DMed it a while back. It's a clumsy system that badly needs a 2nd edition where they fix all the papercuts. I remember it being particularly unnecessary how the difficulty number has to be multiplied by 3 before you can use it. Just have the scale be from 3 to 30 to begin with so I don't have to remember what numbers are pre- and post-multiplication.
That said, it is somewhat easier to DM than 5e (which itself is heavily simplified compared to older systems).