Has anyone played Legacy: Life Among the Ruins? can you tell me about the legacy mechanics. I havent seen much on it. Seems like it could be a lot of fun or kind of a flood of half developed characters just to push the age forward.
Has anyone played Legacy: Life Among the Ruins?
Has anyone played Legacy: Life Among the Ruins?
I’m really curious about this one too.
I’ve picked it up but haven’t read it all the way through yet. Been hoping for someone to post an actual play report.
Happy to chime in about the design intentions and how things worked in play tests, but I understand I might be biased as the designer!
I would still be happy to hear, it looks like a good hack in all. I looked at the playbooks already but was a bit more curious on how the Age mechanic works. Is the game meant to be played episodically?
Essentially, yeah. The idea is that each age takes a handful of sessions to play through – we averaged 2-5 – and then you use the Age Turns move to move to the next time period of interest. The amount of time that passes is intentionally vague, so that you don’t get people burning through ages with throwaway characters to grind age bonuses for their families – if the group has started playing through a particular time period it should have something interesting to do for every Family, not to mention some wider threat or opportunity that everyone should be interested in.
Does that make sense?
yeah that does, glad to see that, you had the same concern in mind when designing it. Thank you.
No worries, glad to help!
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for our group.
It was really hard for us to switch from the family moves to the player moves and back.
One session, we used no family moves at all and it felt like our characters were lacking substance. We also missed some AW moves, like Read a sitch or read a person.
On the following session, we tried to use the family moves more, but then our characters felt like pawns and not real persons.
And then, after 4 sessions (and two ages), two players in our group decided they wouldn’t play this game anymore,, which was frustrating to me because I felt there was more to explore and that we should keep playing to find out how those two categories of moves would complement each other.
Maybe one day I’ll have the chance to try it again.
Anyway, I think it is a different breed of game than AW, although it borrows heavily from it, and it should be approached with an open mind.
Ah, that’s a pity. Striking a balance between the different move types does need a particular mindset, and I feel like I could have done better with the player and GM advice to help get people into the right frame of mind. Thanks for trying it out!
Well, I still bought the hardcover because I liked it anyway.
But it’s never too late to write a short “how to play” guide to your game James Iles (wink wink nudge nudge)
Haha definitely! I actually have a small collection of posts I’ve made over the last year about play advice that I’m planning on including in a revised version. Just need to take the time to write them out fully – I’ll probably put them up on the UFO press blog when done.