8 thoughts on “What themes and principles make Legacy different from Apocalypse world? They seem like the same type of setting”

  1. From what I understand, Legacy is about generational play, I believe? Someone call me out if I’m mistaken? While AW is about the here and now of the apocalypse, I think Legacy tries to do a more sweeping kind of thing?

  2. Hi! Alfred has the right of it – Legacy is about playing on a broader scale, by giving each player their own family to guide. Over generations the family grows, changes, and makes sweeping alterations to the rest of the world. There’s also a broader scale in moment-to-moment gameplay – each player has access to the resources of their own family, allowing them to jump between directing spy networks, armies and research projects and exploring pre-Fall ruins with their character. 

    While the Family playbooks are theoretically able to be dropped into AW there’ll be some mismatches – AW is going for a sort of of HBO post-apocalypse TV show vibe, while Legacy’s feel (and principles) aims more for sweeping sci-fi literature – think something like A Canticle for Leibowitz. The desired feel is that sense of wonder you get when you encounter something again after centuries have passed and see how the passage of time has changed it, or realizing the impact your past character’s decisions have had on the present. Legacy’s Basic and Playbook Moves try to create this sense of history and, well, legacy, with pretty much every move having some potential to change the state of the world in a dramatic fashion. Every time you navigate the wasteland you might discover a new way of travelling through it; every time you try to activate the tech of the Before you might set something into motion that changes everything. 

    Finally, as for the setting: Legacy gives the pre-fall civilisation much greater prominence. They reached levels of development far in advance of the present, and their tech, scattered across the wasteland, is capable of wonders bordering on magic. Think something more along the lines of Fallout or Numenera rather than Mad Max, although part of the procedure in starting a game is coming to a consensus on what your group’s World Before had as their technological marvels and how it all went wrong. Still, Legacy assumes the world isn’t permanently broken, and fixing and repurposing the remaining wonders left intact as your Families rebuild the world is definitely a possibility.

    Hope that helps! (Sorry for the wall of text)

  3. Love the attention to detail James Iles that sounds kinda fantastic! Ever sense I dove into reading pendragon, I fell in love with the idea of legacy style games… I’ll have to pick this one up.  the sample looks real pretty too

  5. My understanding is that in Legacy, your true character is your clan/family. You play the face of that clan, possibly over long periods of time.

    Edit: I should refresh before posting comments 🙂

  6. I’m not certain how enthusiastic my table will be able playing a family predominantly [they may like it, just not sure].

    in those cases, does the game support staying mostly zoomed into one generation and their exploits for a full campaign, then the next age be a new campaign with new protagonists

  7. Certainly! I tend to run it so that an age is 4-5 sessions, but you can run it for longer. There’s three main things that tune it for short ages: the limited number of advancement options for a single character, the broad scope of the moves players have access to, and the reasonably lethal nature of the harm system. The base book has some advice on things you can do to tweak these – it’s on page 109.

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