One problem people report quite often with Legacy is that it can easily fall into a series of single-character scenes with little interaction between players. As I’m working on revising the game, I’ve been trying to find a solution for this. Eventually, I realised that even when one character is doing something away from the other player characters, they’re still likely to be working with other members of their Family – so why not make it easy to have the other players play those lesser family members?
Based on that I’ve made these simple character playbooks to test out the concept. If you’ve played/read Legacy, have a look and see what you think! If you haven’t played it, I’d be interested to hear what you’d look for in a more zoomed-out, faction-focused PbtA game.
Originally shared by Jay Iles
Hello Legacy fans! Douglas Santana and I are hard at work on the revised edition of Legacy. One of the major changes so far is the addition of Quick Characters. See the attached playbook and description below, and let me know what you think!
Sometimes you’ll want to play out a particular character’s actions in detail, but the fiction makes it implausible for the other major characters to be involved. Other times, you might not want to build a full character for a particular age, and prefer something simpler. In these circumstances, you can instead use Quick Characters.
Quick Characters still use the Character basic moves, and have Force, Lore, Steel and Sway, but have simplified playbooks. They inherit a stat line, a move and gear from their Family, enabling them to be generated quickly.
We haven’t written up the family side of this completely yet, but as an example, the Enclave of Forgotten Lore would have:
Stats:
Add +1 to Lore or Steel
Gear:
Take gear according to your Surplus investment (more on this later), +1 to Data or Outfit.
Inheritance Move options:
– Radio Rig: Can sense when Tech is within a mile, and track it down to within 100 metres.
– Pain Box: You have a device that causes intense pain in anyone within a few dozen metres (melee, nonlethal, area, hi-tech).
– Survey drone: You can roll +Lore with Wasteland Survival, so long as your trail is visible from the air.
– Hot Rod: You have an exceptionally fast vehicle (land-based, Might 1 Chrome 1 Brawn 0), and can move points between its stats with 15 minutes of tinkering.
– Educated: If you give advice to somebody based on your knowledge of the Before, they take +1 Forward.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4KAK_EamMB9N0lnMEN5QVRiRGM/view?usp=sharing
James Iles, one idea you may want to consider is the idea Matt Wilson used in his game Galactic. In that game, each player was the Captain of a different space ship, and also a crew member on one of other player’s space ships. This meant that each player had one main character and (#players – 1) crew characters. The crew characters were simpler (if memory serves) than the main characters, on the order of Grogs vs. Mages/Companions in Ars Magica.
This same principle could easily be applied to Families in Legacy.
Ars M’s grogs/companions were definitely something I had in mind – I’ll check out Galactic. With this I’d definitely want to encourage the reuse of these simple characters, whether that’s putting them in a collective pool or having them be owned by a player.
You may not be able to find a copy of Galactic anywhere, to my knowledge it might only have been available in printed ashcan copy back 2006 or so. I can send you a copy of the PDFs of the character sheets, though, if you think that might be interesting. Or, maybe Matt Wilson might be able to help.