Also if you use The Estate box set you have a nice, episodic little campaign pre-built for Mausritter. It’s a small hex crawl with a bunch of pamphlet adventures scattered around them, complete with hooks to tie them all together.

Might be a good ongoing structure, especially if you have an inconsistent group, or intend to be swapping GMs periodically.

Rather than a specific system or style, I think the important thing is what gets you and your players excited. Pick a genre or theme that you are your players are into, then find a system that matches that. Once you get into it a bit more you can start digging into different styles of RPGs because you’ll have more context for what it all means and some idea of what you all like.

I like rules light systems because they’ve got a shorter “time to table”, but if everyone is very excited to play DnD, then DnD works because it’ll keep everyone motivated and engaged.

Some ideas:

Sci fi horror game along the lines of Alien: Mothership

Hardscrabble, fools forced to delve into dangerous dungeons and weird woods to make a living: Cairn

Grannies solving murder mysteries a la Miss Marple: Brindlewood Bay

A gang of thieves in a Dishonored-esque whale oil powered city: Blades in the Dark.

A gang of thieves flying a space ship in a star wars or firefly styled galaxy: Scum and Villainy

A doomed world undergoing heavy metal apocalypses: MÖRK BORG, or CY_BORG for the cyberpunk version of that.

Buffy and friends taking down vampire threats, or Mulder trying to find the truth that’s out there: Monster of the Week

Personally I’ve had really good luck introducing new players with Mausritter. The physical version is gives people a tactile card based inventory, the digital version is totally free. It’s super easy for people to get into the head space of tiny mice! There are also tons of fantastic modules to run which makes your job as a DM a lot easier.

This comment got a bit away from me, but I’ve run and played a ton of different systems, so if you have some idea of what you think you and your players will be into I can maybe point you in a more specific direction.

Mausritter is also great at getting people into the “old school” adventuring mindset. It’s easy for people to get that they’re a tiny moues, so they need to be careful, be clever, and run away from dangerous situations.

Plus it’s got fantastic first and third party adventures to run.

Might not be sufficiently fantasy magic for the brief though?

Both the NSR and the Cairn discord servers are friendly and helpful places, if you’re looking to chat with someone about running games like that. Or just hanging out and talking about games.

If I can self promo for a minute, for anyone that likes to do some physical dice rolling to generate stuff, I’ve written a little business card sized dungeon generator: Wallet Dungeons.

I’ve also got a sci fi version for making space stations.

Just ran a rad one shot of CBR+PNK, a forged in the dark cyberpunk system.

Otherwise I run a lot of my own system Brighter Worlds, which is a Cairn (and more) hack with the d20’s removed. Not that I was going out of my way to avoid d20’s, but that’s how it ended up. I’ve been playtesting it for more than two years now, I think, and I finally feel like I’m starting to close in on the finish line.