Playtest documents for Legacy 2e are now live on my Patreon here!
Go take a look – I’d love to know what you think.
Playtest documents for Legacy 2e are now live on my Patreon here!
Go take a look – I’d love to know what you think.
The relationship between your family and your character is Legacy’s big unique thing, but it’s distinct enough from the standard mode of RPGs that it could do with more support than 1e provided.
One of my priorities with the 2nd edition is to provide you with more tools to describe that relationship – how your family impacts your character, and how your character affects the broader family. To this end, each character in Legacy 2e has a family role: Leader, Agent, Rebel or Outsider.
The first thing this does – and maybe the most useful – is that it locates your character in the family’s organisation.
Leaders are those that guide the family. They might be…
Agents are those sent out from the family on a mission. They could be…
Rebels work against the Family’s orthodoxy. They could be…
Outsiders are only nominally a member of the family. Something’s set them apart – exile, strange beliefs, mutation, or something else. They could be…
The second effect of your role is that your character applies a particular modifier to family moves. To get this effect, the character has to be one of the family members who participated in the action. This gives you a concrete idea of the impact your character has on the family’s
This (hopefully) gives you a concrete idea of the impact your character has on the family’s efforts and if players have incentives to place their characters in the midst of the family-scale story you can easily zoom into their actions when you want to move to the character scale.
You can accept the help of characters from other families if they offer it, but their family automatically gains 1 point of Treaty on yours.
Your role isn’t set in stone, either. When you hit particular triggers in the fiction, you move into a new position. In general:
I’m also testing out playbook-specific triggers. For example, here’s the Firebrand’s:
I’d be interested to know if people think these are too limiting.
These roles have taken the place of Advancement in 1e; when you switch to a particular role, you mark its box, get +1 to its associated stat, and reveal something about the fiction. For example, when the Firebrand marks Agent (by infiltrating a group to bring it down) they get +1 Steel and say one person who trusts them already, while the GM says one person who suspects.
Another thing I’m testing is unlocking new moves: each new role a character takes on marks a box. Once all are marked, you get a new move and clear out marks. You can switch back and forth between two moves, but that won’t mark more boxes. I think this should give players an incentive to give their characters narrative arcs, but it may mean players pinball between roles very unsatisfyingly. Let’s see what playtesting says.
Thanks for reading – in thanks, here’s an example of our new character playbooks!