Legacy: Life Among the Ruins. I love this game.
I love the art, love that it’s a PBTA game. I love the family and character modes of play. I love the generational mechanics -even though players often resist, even the best of us. I love there’s a Worlds of Legacy SRD.
I love what this game is and wants to be. I’ve ran it thrice and played it once. I participated in a panel of folks talking about Legacy hosted by Lowell Francis of The Gauntlet and that has inspired me.
What is Legacy - Life Among The Ruins?
Created by UFO Press, Legacy is a an epic scale RPG. Set in a player created post-apocalyptic world you play at the Grand Strategy level as the surviving families surviving, maybe creating a better future. At the tactical, character level is where the devil lives, adventures happen and the needle is moved. As time passes and ages turne those characters become heroes, martyrs, villians to time. Powered By The Apocalypse RPG Engine, it’s a 2d6 plus stats game. There are game currencies to manage to get what you need done. There are 11 (IIRC) Family Playbooks and 13 character playbooks. You will design the region of play, and update it through play. This ain’t your poppa’s apocalypse.
The Plan for an Epic Legacy campaign
I’m on The Gauntlet calendar for November to run 12 sessions + session zero for Legacy. I’m doing this open-table I get 12 sessions is a hard commit. I need 12 sessions to get a solid feel for how the game plays out, to experience how families change; How the setting changes.
The focus is on the Order of the Titan family and their role, it’s place among the other survivor families. In Legacy games there are family playbooks that can exert a heavy pull on the game. The Order of the Titan is one of these. If it’s in your game setup, you got Kaiju, Behemoths in the game. One of the setup practices is to remove some of these heavy playbooks from the family options. I’m leaning into The Order of the Titan family this time.
I hope to capture some actual play recording for the Diceology podcast and do AP writes, commentary show my work posts here on Play.Fearless. Maybe even some player interviews.
I’m setup in Foundry VTT using the PBTA plugin for now. It’s a solid plugin, no complaints. Except for, PBTA principles. You know, to do it, you gotta do it. I’ll build a Legacy setup for Foundry VTT (with UFO Press permission) and share that for folks.
The agenda
Legacy has a lot of touchstones with another game I love. Ars Magica. in that panel Lowell Francis hosted we talk briefly about other Legacy settings and hacks, and I was inspired to run this game and research what an Ars Magica-inspired Legacy game might play like. This 12 session run is the start of that work and the start of this series.