[Legendary Lives] Three games to talk about
Trevis Martin:
This is a terribly interesting thread Ron, thanks for sharing it. I went to the website, downloaded and read both Legendary Lives and Khaotic!
Quote
There was perhaps too much fun with the Sanity and madness rules, which are pretty devastating. Emil was basically stone crazy by the end of the session. The spirit guide rules are really cool.
I couldn't find anything for spirit guiding or Sanity aside from a chart in the lifepaths section of the game. Maybe it's something not included in PDF he has posted that was in an earlier published edition of the game. What are the spirit guide rules like? What was it you liked about them?
Reading Khaotic, the color of the game really hit me in just the right spot. It's like a combo of Bliss Stage, Quantam Leap, Cyberpunk, and a few other things for good measure. I notice that the author changed his method from the ART table/percentile to a 6 sider roll under where you roll your total Attribute + Skill and only add up ones twos and threes which then corrosponds to the success scale. Since Khaotic! was the last game produced I don't know if he was just trying to streamline the Legendary Lives or just trying a variation for it's own sake. Do you have an opinion on one vs the other given that you've used the Legendary Lives system?
-Trevis
Trevis Martin:
Sorry didn't quite complete my thought there. I mean it looks like he switched from a flat system to a curve between the two games even though he had made the flat mechanic work well in LL.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Trevis!
The Sanity rules are included in the description of the skill Sanity, on page 136 of the PDF. I followed that text very specifically during the game with Tim, Tim, and Chris, including circumstances and modifiers for the rolls. My conclusion was that if you don't get Sanity through your race and Type, then bloody well use a free slot to buy it.
I didn't use those rules in our game at Forge Midwest. That was an oversight on my part, probably because I had been shaken from my "this will be a straight-up adventure" plans into the "whacked characters doing orthogonal whacked things" mode. Considering that Ben's character was a demonologist already, I should have called for a Sanity check when his vampire girlfriend showed up but given him a bonus. Plus Ctine should have had to make a check when the phantom snakes attacked her, or maybe when they all disappeared. I don't think Gootch encountered anything a veteran assassin wouldn't have seen all the time anyway, though.
The spirit guide rules aren't a special rules-set, but if you know the game and then read the Magic section for each of the character's magic skills, then cross-reference with the character's race and religion material, then there's a hell of a lot of second-order rules-application waiting to be discovered for any spell-using character.
In the case of the Gypsy character, the rules for the Spiritualist say the player rolls for many features of a developed NPC, including race and Type, and in fact, all those various detailed personality and lifepath features as well. This has potential for some wild contrasts, especially since the character and the guide are mandated to be very, very close emotionally and to be utterly devoted to one another. In Tim's case, his rather mild, victimized, and moony-eyed character had a bad-ass Entomolian Warrior for a spirit guide, which allowed me a metric ton of fun role-playing, and also allowed for the character's magic to butch up his otherwise feeble combat potential.
I pleasurably shudder to think of a spiritualist character who, through the luck of the dice, ends up with someone like Gootch for his spirit guide. If "guide" could even be considered an appropriate term, in that case.
I'd like to play Khaotic, one of these days. It seems to me to have a lot of potential for Cold War fallout thematic content, given the internationalism of the player-characters - I remember reading the mandate in Cold City for the characters to represent the various post-WWII power-player nationalities and saying, "Cool, this is like Khaotic." As far as the system goes, I'll reserve judgment until I see it in action, especially since now I know that a Williams game exhibits a lot of interconnectedness among its parts.
Best, Ron
Larry L.:
Ron,
Whew. That was my understanding of the whole "Ssseth" thing, too.
Now that I'm clear about how things actually went down, here are some observations.
Techniques
From my perspective, the story was a dark comedy of errors. I'll recall it here (in a very me-centric way!) because it illustrates certain GM techniques Ron was using. This is mostly stuff he lays out in the various Sorcerer books, but it might be helpful to someone to see how they're used in a non-abstract way.
I had rolled up a guy who a) was an assassin, b) valued love above all else, and c) had recently gotten back together with a former lover. So Ron frames a scene where I'm hanging out with my sweetie, and she mentions that her Serpentine master is cruel to her. I figure this situation has a pretty obvious solution for this particular character. So I endeavor to murder this Asp guy.
Ron cuts to a scene with Willow, and she's having a conspiratorial conversation with her Serpentine boss guy. Wait, what did you say his name was? Asp? Oh! I see. Fun moment of character knowledge vs. player knowledge. This is going to be interesting.
I head off the the forest to gather some poison -- Legendary Lives has an absolutely wonderful list of semi-realistic poisons, all with interesting effects -- but I get a crappy roll, so I decide to move forward with good old-fashioned stabbing. There's a pretty amusing encounter with me using my charm power just a little too well on a Hob (see racial stereotypes, above) who helps me get into Asp's house.
I'm sneaking around in Asp's house looking for anybody, but I get a bad sneaking roll, so Ron declares I trip over what he describes as some kind of intricate model. I decide I better try to fix it, but roll a little low on my repair skill, so Ron decides that means I manage to put it back together... the wrong way.
There's another scene with Willow, where they're discussing how Asp in in possession of this war machine she's supposed to acquire. And I'm like, wait, would this war machine look anything like the "model" I tripped over? And Ron grins and says yes, it does. Oops!
Asp comes home, and is angry that his Hob let a brownie into the house. I flee to under his bed, and Asp follows like he's chasing a stray kitten. "Come here little brownie..." Then I decide to leap out and stab him. It's right about this point where I realize this was strategically about the dumbest thing for me to do, because by sword skill is a whopping 3, really terrible. Oh hell, I'll roll for it anyway.
I rolled a 100. This turned out to be, literally, "awesome." I'll break this down a little later. For now, we figure out this means Asp is killed instantly.
Then Ctine and Ra'ed show up to grab the war machine, and I'm acting all sweet and innocent. Ra'ed wants to do this ritual to bind a spirit into the war. It binds the last victim of a weapon, so Ra'ed asks his trusted brownie for his blade, which Gootch offers up. We roll to see if Ra'ed gets suspicious about the blood and all. Nope! He takes my lame alibi at face value. So he summons up the spirit of a Serpentine, which all the players realize is actually Asp, but Ra'ed and Ctine are completely oblivious to. Funny stuff. The captive spirit possesses the war machine, and starts wheeling it off to do destruction.
I had kind of been looking forward to developing the misanthropic buddy relationship between Ra'ed and Gootch. But this was just a con game, so I decide to go for a punchier ending. I check with Ben about dicking his character over. "What did I ever do to you?" Nothing of course, I just need a patsy. So Gootch emerges from the crime scene, finds the nearest Hob -- who turns out to be the same Hob from earlier -- and proceeds to make up a total lie about how I was just sneaking around trying to find a treat and witnessed some Nomad murdering the Serpentine!
Before the angry Serpentines catch up with Ra'ed, I stop by and ask him to spot me some cash. We make some rolls, and while Ra'ed is convinced the war machine will make him rich beyond measure, he's not going to give me any cash. So instead I convince him to let me run back to the tent and use his money to stock up on provisions. I steal all of this money, and use it to run away with my girlfriend. What a little bastard Gootch is!
Not portrayed in this game, but left for an implied epilogue, is Ctine bringing forth the war machine, willing to destroy the brownie village as collateral damage, but finding it doesn't work for some reason.
I sort of felt like the spirit of In A Wicked Age was watching over our game. The way the character interaction drove the game forward reminded me of that game for some reason. This was undoubtedly actually just Ron's mad GM skillz at work, but it probably speaks to something that IaWA does by design to create this sort of play.
Mechanics
As mentioned, the resolution system creates some interesting opportunities for the GM. There's a chart with skill levels running up to about 25, which are cross-referenced with a percentile roll to determine a category of success or failure. Somebody compared it to the old Marvel Superheroes RPG. This also makes having a character sheet, with this resolution table printed on it, more or less essential for smooth play.
In the situation above, my roll of 100 still resolved to the best success category, which is called "Awesome." How cool is that? I can actually say I "rolled an Awesome!" The wound system is also described in terms of these success categories, and after a little rules-reading, we determined an Awesome hit scratches out Awesome and all the lower categories. In this case it meant my foe was dead, even though he had the better-than-average defense list of "Passable, Good, Great, Superior, Awesome." (But not in all cases. Some superior monsters have unusual wound lists. Dragons are "Awesome, Awesome, Awesome, Awesome," meaning you actually have to land an awesome attack just to hurt them.)
There's a surprising variety of skills used for social situations, which pairs with the conflict system in really fun ways.
One interesting note is that the game explicitly assigns all dice-rolling to the player side. The GM doesn't roll dice when interacting with the conflict system, he just narrates the outcomes. While this is not as revolutionary a thing as the author seems to think it is, it is an excellent example of game design around a particular set of gamemastering skills.
There's still a little more handling time than I might like. There was one point where Ron got a little flustered trying to look up a particular rule. The starting number of spell points is kind of buried in the text. Having the searchable PDF on my netbook managed to smooth over a few bottlenecks.
Racism
This is about the only thing going on in Legendary Lives that would keep me from making a universally positive recommendation. Looking over the text, it's not quite as in-your-face as we make it sound, but you read between the lines and piece some things together, and it's clearly there. It's a little more directly based on real-world stereotypes than the standard Tolkien or Forgotten Realms type cliches. And in the right hands, there's clearly an opportunity here to tell some powerful stories about race and stereotypes. But I can't help but wonder if this had fallen into my adolescent, not-so-worldly hands years ago if I wouldn't have gotten some funny ideas.
It potentially makes for some uncomfortable situations. In my case, near the end of this game I seized on an opportunity to cover up my romantically-motivated murder. Then I thought through the racial analogies involved. I realized Gootch had framed his buddy as the perpetrator of a racial hate crime, just to cover up his own misdeeds, and thought about just how heinous that situation is when it occurs in the real world, and felt a little pang of nausea deep down inside. I've had a fair number of characters who do really bad, fucked-up things, and it mostly plays for entertainment, but this was genuinely disturbing.
Mostly though, there was a story a how a series of simple misunderstandings played into the context of the larger animosity between Nomads and Serpentines. Despite the comedy involved, it's possible to reflect on how this is like certain real-world cultural conflicts, how individuals acting on limited information are perceived as actors in a larger clash. To this extent, this game contained "the stuff" which makes a role-playing session seem worthwhile to me.
Pants
Ben's character was, for the bulk of this game, wearing either no pants or no shirt. I just wanted to share.
Millsy:
Cool thread - I've had Legendary Lives for years but never played or run it - and it made me dig it out again and look it over.
With reference to your earlier point about it building characters with lots of cool background but no in-built situation, have you seen Lost Souls? It kinda conveys the same thing - you randomly roll up your ghost/spirit/haunting and get lots of detail about your past life, how you died, why you came back, etc, but not a lot of information about what your options are now. If I recall correctly, even the sample adventure in the book required one specific character type of one of the players (these are randomly-rolled character types, remember), so they could solve the problem associated with their death.
At least with Legendary Lives you could always ignore the background and run a 'straight D&D' game while the GM gets up to speed with the characters backgrounds from lifepath - but I filed Lost Souls away in my youthful mind as a game that looked awesome but that would never work. What you've done with Legendary Lives makes it seem more playable - but it's taken a long time to get here, hasn't it? I can't imagine that, when LL was first published, there were that many GMs running it in the style you've described - it's like, whenever I played Cyberpunk in the mid-90s, you'd come up with all this awesome background, and then the GM would be like 'Right, you're all part of a special ops team, hunting Androids in the slums,' and you'd forget about all your background.
What I guess I'm asking about LL is, to what extend do you think that the interaction and depth of background were planned to impact on the game? Or were they just there to provide colour while you went to the dungeon and killed the dragon?
thanks,
Guy
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