A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition by Minerva McJanda and Douglas Santana Mota is a role playing game supplement published by UFO Press and is the core rulebook for the system, which is based on the Apocalypse World Engine.

The supplement is available from DriveThruRPG in digital form for $20.45 and is also available in printed form from sites such as Amazon. The digital content is the one reviewed although it was purchased at a reduced price during a sale. There are three PDFs and an ePub in the digital version. The primary PDF has 305 pages with one being the front cover, two the front matter, one the Foreword, four the Contents, two the Kickstarter backers, three the General Index and Move Index and two the Glossary. The ePub is another version of this. There are also two handout PDFs.

Chapter 01: Endings and Beginnings explains that Legacy is a game about what happens after the apocalypse, a cooperative storytelling game for 3-6 players. Fiction, media and role playing game inspirations are listed. Each player controls a family, a group of survivors bound together by something, whether that be blood, ideology or practicality. The family playbook covers how the group was changed by the Fall and what they used to survive. The game is divided into different ages, starting with the first after the apocalypse, and the story moves between the actions of the families and the actions of specific characters in those families. A sidebar explains what this game does differently to other Powered by the Apocalypse games.

The game uses moves, which are activated by events and which guide the story based on dice rolls, player choices or established fictional circumstances. Every move has a trigger and how to determine the degree of success or failure of a move is covered, with an example move and an example of play.

How to begin a game is covered, which starts by having the GM and players discuss the game’s tone. There are three modes; Ruins, which is far removed from the wonders of the world Before, Echoes, where advanced and bizarre technology is commonplace and Mirrors, where anything goes. Each mode has fictional examples. Everyone involved needs to be on the same page for tone and content to make the game fun for all. Families are created, the world is defined in broad strokes and Characters are created.

Finally, the section has advice for players and GM, as well as determining the geography of the homeland, the relatively safe zone, and how to put together settlements.

Chapter 02: Families looks at these, which are the collectives of survivors and where the individual Characters come from. They have three stats; Reach is the Family’s influence, Grasp is their ability to project force and control its assets and Sleight is their ability to hide their actions and misdirect others. Families have three resource tracks; Mood is the family’s overall wellbeing, Tech is advanced technology and lore and Data is knowledge about the world. Following this are details on creating a Family, which is done by first choosing a Family Playbook (there are examples in Chapter 07) and the process of converting this playbook into a family. This is followed by an example of Family creation.

The player who owns the Family controls what actions the Family takes, not the GM; their character is assumed to have enough influence to decide what the Family does. A sidebar explains that Families are groups bound together by something, which doesn’t have to be blood. There are options a player can do with a family, which includes creating quick characters, supporting characters that are less detailed and which are covered in Chapter 05.

Following this are the basic Family moves, showing how families trigger them; as they are not characters, these are more amorphous. Each move also comes with an example of it being used in-game.

Surplus and Need explains that in Legacy a family is generally assumed to have enough of any commodity to get by. However, sometimes a family has more than they require, a Surplus, which can be used to activate specific moves and having one Surplus increases the quality of gear characters can have. A Need is not having enough, and a family with a Need is less able to handle adversity. If a Surplus could meet a Need, both are erased. Following this are example resources with Needs and Surpluses for each.

Mood is a Family’s overall health, and is Surpluses minus Needs. If Mood goes above +3, a Surplus is erased and there are several positive options to choose from. If Mood goes below -3, a Need is erased and a negative option is chosen. Again, there are in-game examples.

Treaties are the soft power one Family holds over another, and with them a Family can help others or call in a debt.

Expendable Resources are Tech and Data, which can be spent and traded with other families. Again, there are examples.

Wonders, covered in more detail in Chapter 09 (though here it says Chapter 10), are massive projects to create a permanent impact on the world.

Chapter 03: Characters has the character creation process, for the focus character in a Family. A player will only run one of these main characters at a time, but they will end up running several for a game that lasts several ages, and may run more than one in a particular age. The Family is the more important thing, so characters are essentially expendable. It starts with the character stats and what they mean. There are only four. Force is might and vigour, used in fighting. Sway is the ability to forge connections with others. Steel is wits and survival instinct. Lore is knowledge and intuition.

To start with, an array of stats is chosen, then modified by Family. Looks are next, which is just appearance, followed by backstory, which is personal history. Gear is taken from the Family stockpile and role is one of four character types. The chosen playbook then allows the selection of two moves to customise. An example of character creation follows.

After this the core character moves that every character has are described. Each is given a play example. Following the core moves are the peripheral moves, which are also available to every character but are more situational or optional. These are described the same way.

Though a role is picked on character creation, each playbook has specific events when a new role can be taken in, which is worked through the fiction. As new roles are taken, a new move is gained or +1 is added to a stat. When each role is complete, the character retires to safety and a new character is created.

Hostile Grounds are the more dangerous regions where the character rolls with disadvantage and Harm is the damage a character can take; depending on the type of Harm, it can take longer to remove. There are moves to do this. Finally, a character may die, triggering a playbook’s Death Move and the eulogy which has an effect.

Chapter 04: Gear is the resources and technology that can be drawn from a family. As befits the type of game this is, gear is not described in the sort of detail seen in other games. Gear is divided into different categories; armoury is weapons, outfit is armour, environmental protection and fine clothing, vehicles are transportation from mounts to planes, followers are assistants, bodyguards and scouts, intel are briefings and devices are the advanced technology from before the Fall.

Characters first Tool Up with gear depending on their Family’s assets and their character playbook. Each gear category is then described. Armoury, outfit and vehicles have a number of different tags that can be applied to it, with sidebars giving examples of how those tags could translate into an item. Followers have two traits, quality and speciality, and a move. Devices, as befitting pre-Fall technology, are estrange devices that are essentially created individually. Resources then summarises what the resources are that a Family has, and how they are gained and spent.

Chapter 05: Story Moves cover those moves that are used to shift the narrative in scale, as it goes between character-focused action to cross-generational changes. There is also a quick character playbook, for developing a supporting character to the game; they are similar to the main characters, but simpler. There are examples of play and what happens when the clock is moved forward to a new age; families undergo trials and gain fortunes.

Chapter 06: Into the Wasteland is an example of game play. It shows how the rules work in an actual session.

Chapter 07: Family Playbooks opens with a reminder as to what settings there are, as each playbook has an icon showing which they are most suited for. Ruins playbooks work with most settings. There are eleven playbooks for families and each is first given a paragraph overview before being described in more detail. Each playbook is then covered. They start with a paragraph on the family, written in-character, details on how to create a family, moves, their alliance move, inheritance for the characters of that Family and details on how to play the Family.

Chapter 08: Character Playbooks has the playbooks that can be chosen from for the main character that each player gets to control during each age, the Family member they focus on. There are 15 different playbooks and the chapter starts with a brief description of the playbooks. Each playbook is then covered the same way; a paragraph of fluff, the creation process, their gear, their moves, harm boxes, death move and tips on playing them. The playbooks cover a variety of different character types.

Chapter 09: Grand Designs looks at wonders, which when built grant the owner control over the shape of the next age. There are basics on building a wonder, with the full rules being in Chapter 02. When a wonder is built, many resources transfer or share, and there are six example wonders in the book. The principles on what wonders are supposed to do, with fiction being an important consideration; wonders need to serve the story. Wonders can be stopped, which can mean the Family building it loses what they invested.

Chapter 10: Running the Game is essentially the GM’s chapter. It starts with the Agenda, which is the core part of the game. Make the world real, make the characters’ lives historic and play to find out what happens. Much of the material is standard GM fare, though with some alterations for Legacy. Fiction is more important than rules or roles in this game. In addition, the GM reacts to what the players do; they are not proactive and how this is done is covered.

It then looks at various elements of the wasteland. Dangers come in several different forms and these are described, and the Harm scale is in a sidebar, explaining how this translates into understandable terms, ranging from a punch to a disintegrating reactor. Other sidebars give examples of dangers. Factions are those groups and organisations not controlled by the players. Fronts are groups of advancing dangers; an army would be one.

After this is advice on play, looking at player versus player, which can happen as their characters represent different families, game pacing, how to introduce new players, how to have one family with each player controlling a character in it, managing resource levels, creating drama and how fighting and danger affect the story.

Chapter 11: Hacking the Game contains guidance on creating new moves that are not covered in the book, for situations that are different, such as different types of games. This is followed by examples on how to create Direct, Fortune and List and Hold moves. After this it looks at how to create new Family and Character playbooks, covering each section of them. Next it looks at how to create new Wonders. Legacy Hacking looks at larger changes to the game, from altering the genre to changing the pacing to changing how character advancement works. Overall, the chapter provides details on doing everything from adding minor things to the game to completely overhauling the setting and changing the mechanics.

Chapter 12: Guide to the Wasteland contains a range of things to stock the standard post-apocalyptic wasteland that the game is played in (additional supplements describe other kinds of settings). This chapter contains Locations, Settlements and Hazards. These are given a name, description and some questions and events for each. Only one has some true game details. Threats, which are divided into Monsters and Horrors, Natural Disasters and Organisations and Gangs, are similar, but include Harm.

Chapter 13: Hordes of the Endless Night is basically a sample campaign setting. The players are the survivors of a society that fell into ruin when the sun went out (though the world went dark, not cold) and strange wraiths appeared in the darkness (it’s rather reminiscent of Vanishing on 7th Street). There are overviews of four families, details on how to get started, a map of the darkened city and important locations and playbooks for the Families including a character for each. A section for the GM has several possible opening scenes as well as a number of Fronts, sources of inspiration from the setting, how the game flows and wrapping up.

There are two PDFs of handouts, one 55 pages long and one 90 pages. These contain playbooks, moves references, gear, Wonders and other material duplicated from the core book. The difference between the two is that one is printer friendly, which is why it’s shorter as it lacks illustrations as well as page backgrounds.

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition in Review

The PDF is bookmarked, with major sections and major subsections linked, though not as thoroughly as it could really be, and the links don’t always point to where they’d be expected to point, especially the chapter links which skip the first two pages of the chapter, which are admittedly mostly images. How the chapter numbers are displayed in the Contents is different to how they are in the chapters. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are a lot of custom colour illustrations but these tend to be large, not filler; two-page spreads at the beginning of chapters and full-page illustrations between playbooks. Presentation is decent.

This is a rules-lite game without that much dice rolling. In fact, it sometimes seems that dice are almost an afterthought. All dice essentially do is determine the broad strokes, which are then elaborated on through descriptions of what happened. Moves are announced, dice are rolled and then players or GM describe what that means. Anyone not capable of coming up with compelling descriptions of events on the fly is going to struggle. Combat and challenges aren’t solved by rolling dice for success; the game doesn’t focus on the minutiae of such. Therefore, many players may find the game a struggle or may simply not enjoy it. It certainly isn’t for everyone.

Also, in Legacy, characters are going to be replaced. They may die, they may retire and if neither of those happen, they will be replaced in a new age. In other words, characters are not the primary focus of the game as a whole, though they may be the focus at a specific point, and players shouldn’t become too attached to them, as they will lose the character eventually, one way or another. Players who get too attached to characters are also going to struggle. This game is just not about the characters but about the overall story.

Legacy is therefore a very rules-lite game based around descriptions of what happens where the fiction is the most important part of it. Whether a character succeeds or fails is of less importance compared to how well the success or failure is told. It is, more so than many RPGs, a cooperative storytelling game and needs to be understood as such before it’s even tried. Not expecting this will result in a game that isn’t enjoyable. Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition can be found by clicking here.