So I’m about to start up the first session of a new Legacy campaign tonight and I’m pretty excited. I ran a single session of this a while ago as a ‘Con game and it went pretty well but I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for things to watch out for unique to Legacy. In particular I’m wondering how people feel it’s best to run transitions between the character/family levels. Just from my reading through I almost get the impression of a more story-telling game-style flow. The GM introduces a broad situation that is evident across the homeland and all of the players take turns setting up a scene to indicate how their family is responding, and any that end up overlapping will interact directly. I’m concerned that this might lead to a lot of me talking to one player will the other two wait politely for their turn.
Thoughts, or am I concerned over nothing?
Welcome, and thanks for picking up the game!
I’ve recently put up some examples of play on the UFO Press blog – see http://ufopress.co.uk/2017/01/11/legacy-character-example-of-play/ and http://ufopress.co.uk/2017/01/25/legacy-example-play-family-level/ – just to give you a picture of how I tend to run things! I also posted about the various sources of drama and threats GMs can bring to bear on player families here: http://ufopress.co.uk/2016/03/17/legacy-finding-the-drama/
Legacy can default to a lot of 1-on-1 scenes, and fixing that is something of a priority for the revised edition I’m brainstorming at the moment. The main things I’d recommend:
– The key threat to the homeland should be made by the group during Homeland creation – that makes sure everyone has an investment in solving it.
– Try to work out what problems each Family is facing (look to their Needs) and work out what the other Families (or Characters) can do to help them.
– Character Backgrounds mean that they ought to be willing to go to each other for help, especially as they are each the most competent people in their narrow field of experience known in the homeland.
Nathan Parrish So, how did it go?
After narrating some sessions, I ended up developing the rule
of
Characters actions – minutes and hours
Family Actions – days and weeks
Pretty much in distinct phases, determined by the fiction
Pretty well actually. We only play for a few hours at a time so we didn’t get super far, but we were able to play a short combat encounter, and everyone was able to participate while keeping true to their family motivations. The attack was a horde of rogue alien monsters on the lawgivers stronghold, but the enclave was encouraged to help because there was an ancient manufactory at risk and the xeno-tainted children family joined in because they’re breeders were caught in the attack. Afterwards we explored this new threat and settled on a somewhat uneasy alliance to investigate its origins.
Xeno tainted children, what family are they?!
I forget exactly what the name is, but the one from Mirrors that’s supposed to be like uplifted animals. See we ended up kind of making a very WH40k inspired world where they are trapped in isolated asteroid belt connected together ny a network of stargates. The collapse was because in the old days the ancients were decadent and discovered a species of aliens that were very zerg/aliens.genestealer-like in that they had “perfection of purpose.” So some of the ancients fell to worshipping them, using advanced genesplicing to introduce xeno dna into their children, and exposure to the alien hive material also introduces mutations. So now that society collapsed a significant portion of all survivors have some element of xeno-taint, and that’s kind of our main three-pole axis of conflict: people that advocate for a pure humanity (the lawgivers), people that advocate for a xeno-merged society (the children), and people that reject both and seek to merge with the great machine (enclave).
!! Very interesting !!
Keep us posted on how it goes and if possible share their playbooks. The Uplifted is a favorite of mine, no doubt.
Huh that sounds like a really cool setup! Best of luck with the rest of the game 😀