Playtest Report – Legacy Vix
Presential table with quite a mixed group: Attila (literature professor, 3 Legacy sessions), Sérgio (lawyer and former cop, 10ish Legacy sessions), Thalles (portuguese teacher and drummer extraordinare, new to the system) and Tato (art director for a marketing company, new to the system).
Step 1: Broad Strokes
I usually skip this whole session and pretty much described the game premise to the new players. My advise for them was to let ideas flow in organic fashion and follow playbooks instructions and all would be ok.
Step 2: Family
The Families are where our scenario would be drawn and our background history told.
Sérgio picked the Lawgivers (first option was the Starfarers, but they were not ready)
Attila picked the Enclave (again!)
Tato picked the Merchants.
Thalles picked the Cultivators.
🙂 I rewrote the Sworn Hunters and presented to them as an option. At first there was almost a fight about who would get it, then nobody got it, then a new fight so no one would get them. People loved the concept, but nobody wanted to have to deal with the Behemoth – my fault, i keep calling them Kaiju 🙂
:-/ The more experienced players discouraged anyone from picking the Tyrants, claiming it to be a “difficult Family to play with” :-/
Family values
The first part of Family creation is picking stats. Depending on the stat array you choose, you’ll make certain statements about the world.
In turn…
Thalles told us that much of the natural world survived the Fall intact.
Tato told us the Fall was a gradual and grinding event.
Attila tolds us the Fall unleashed many new technologies.
Sérgio tolds us that only law and order saved Mankind from extinction.
So, good chances we are on Earth and the technological level from Before can be a mystery, since it was rendered obsolete by the technologies discovered during the long grinding Fall. The landscape is wild and ruins were reclaimed by nature.
Next, each Family has options for Traditions – who’s in your family, how they relate to each other and what their style is.
The Merchants are the middlemen between a redoubt of priviliged people and the teeming masses at the gates. They look and behave like nobles of old.
The Lawgivers are guided by christian-judaic laws (Commandments?) and function like a recruiting secret society of vigilantes.
The Enclave… pheeww… are a monastic order lead by the gestalt mind of their council. They research and hunt down whatever Fall Tech they can get.
The Cultivators renounced the world before the Fall and prepared to survive it and to emerge in the aftermath to nurture mankind. Really “primitive”.
Drawing the map
Next comes Landmarks. Each playbook has options to add to the homeland map so that you build the initial setting together. Here my on the fly teaching style got the best of the group (or it was the booze) and they had difficulties building upon their colleagues ideas in an organic fashion.
Tato with the Merchants added:
Center: The Warren where hundreds of thousands of people’s flight for safety came to an end. A sprawling mess of vehicles and tents that slwoly became a shantytown
North Center: The Haven is nested in a deep valley. It guards the last redoubt of the priviliged, sheltered from the Fall and secluded from the world.
Sérgio with the Lawgivers added:
South: Deepwater, an oil rig right off the coast that houses a lawless settlement
South to East: The Shore, littered by the carcass of hundreds of vessels, also a corresponding stretch of polluted / irradiated land along the shore
Attila with the Enclave added:
North East: Skywatch mountains and settlement, where a scientific outpost was once built around an observatory
East Center: The Zone of twisted laws of physics, an expanding area inimical do all life.
Thalles with the Cultivators added:
South East: The Grey Wood, a vast forest, calcinated and killed by whatever was unleashed from The Plant
Further South East: The Plant is a huge factory / scientific compund, isolated from the world, where the Fall once started.
The Threats were more organic and we came back a lot to it when distributing Treaties. Summarizing, the ecosystem is breaking down: massive drought, infertile livestock, sterile seas. Obviously, panic among survivors has been listed as a definite Threat. But also, there is a certain rogue Councillor Lopac from The Enclave, which became the Age villain after hounding the Merchants… we came back a lot to him during Characters Backstory.
Making history
The Family History section was next, with everyone working out what obligations each Family owed each other.
The Cultivators rely on the Lawgivers to provide protection.
The Enclave thinks the Lawgivers have the greatest minds of the homeland.
The greatest criminal of the Wasteland came from the Enclave, and led a band of raiders, the Smillers, on a raid on the Warren, victimizing the Merchants.
The Lawgivers saved the Merchants from extinction at the hands of the Smillers .
Doctrine and Lifestyle
Each Family had two choices: one move based on their personal philosophy, and one based on their distribution across the homeland:
The Enclave are settled in Skywatch, holding back another Fall.
The Lawgivers roam around as righteous vigilantes.
The Cultivators slowly drift from the natural world in the Clearing farms.
The Merchants are the new nobility of the Warren.
Resources and Moves
Finally, we get to the resources each family can bring to bear.
The Enclave, named The Parssons, have a surplus in Culture and Knowledge, but need Recruits, Leadership and Defences. They have deep knowledge of the monsters unleahsed by the Fallt’, and medical treatments able to heal any artifice (based on the evevntual sacrifice for dissassembling).
The Lawgivers, aka The Black Towers, have a surplus of Weaponry and Transport but need Leadership, Defences and Recruits. They’re committed to persecuting those beyond the reacj of the law and are fanatically against raping or any sort and can brandish their authority to recruit a gang of locals to fight at their side.
The Cultivators, aka Owls, have a surplus of Medicine and Land but need Culture, Trade Goods and Progress . They can sacrifice progress, land or trade to make drugs, crops or livestock, and can genetically engineer themselves over the ages.
The Merchants, aka Cerberus, have a surplus of recruits and culture but need Medicine, Barter Goods and Contacts. They have a stock in trade of Food and Art and they’re skilled at assessing the worth of things they find.