Rebuilding Civilization After the Apocalypse (Legacy 2E)
Legacy: Life Among the Ruins is a roleplaying game about the survivors of a reality-twisting apocalypse, and how they adapt to and rebuild their new world. Legacy is a cooperative storytelling game where players build the world and tell its stories together.
The world your forebears knew is gone, ravaged by a catastrophe so wideranging that few living even know its origins. The new world is twisted and strange, filled with the distorted remains of the world before and the strange new things created by the Fall. Into this world step the survivors, bound together by blood or ideology or desperation into something new. You play through their stories; as they explore new realms, suffer dark times and celebrate great victories, you craft a new world together. In the menacing and imposing ruins of the Before, your people will not be satisfied simply struggling for survival. Through toil and dedication, you will build new wonders and achieve new heights.
At the heart of these stories will be your characters. Learned or savage, diplomatic or dictatorial, your family’s history is defined by the characters you make. As the ages turn, their actions shape the world. Legacy is a game about what comes after the apocalypse. It’s about different ideologies competing or co-operating to rebuild, evolve and adapt. It’s about building a new world, permanently marked with monuments to the efforts of your ancestors. Write the saga of your family over generations and draw on your ancestor’s powers, even as you face the unexpected consequences of their actions.
You will control a Family. Families are the backbone of Legacy: they're the collective of survivors your Characters hail from, brought together by blood, loyalty or ideology, with their own strange powers hard-earned as they survived the apocalypse. They have their own needs, strengths and doctrine, and you will use their forces to conduct diplomacy, claim resources and use subterfuge on other factions. As a constant presence across the broad sweep of history, Families act and change slowly, taking days or weeks to take action, and growing stronger over generations.
You'll also have a Character. Every age comes with its own challenges, and your Family will have needs that must be addressed if they’re to continue to survive and grow. That’s where Characters come in. Your character is an exceptional member of the Family, tasked with braving the wild and fractured world to find the things the Family needs. They’re in a position to change the course of the Family’s history, whether the Family intended to give them that power or not. They’ll have their own skills and powers, as well as the ability to command the Family’s forces and resources. They’re more flexible than a Family, able to act in a matter of moments and call on their friends from other factions for aid.
Your story starts with the first generation of survivors able to look beyond the next day and their immediate survival. Starting with that first age of discovery, you’ll tell the story of your families building a new world from the old world’s ashes. Each age will present new challenges, and you’ll move between the actions of the family at large to specific heroic characters from their ranks as you tell that age’s story. Sometimes characters from multiple players’ families will work together; other times they'll work alone pursuing their own goals.
When the drama of the current age has been resolved or someone completes a grand project, the ages turn. You move the clock forward a significant chunk of time – maybe a few years, a generation, even a century. Each family goes through trials and fortunes based on their resources, and this determines how they begin the new age. The game moves back to the family and character levels, and the story continues.
I'd like to run a game of Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd Edition. This is narrative-heavy, rules-light system that runs on a modified version of Powered by the Apocalypse. There will be some dice rolling, but Legacy concerns itself first and foremost with the conversation that's happening at the table: a conversation between the players and the GM, working together to build a story and see what happens to the world. Most of the time you’ll be talking without using any rules, so the game will probably have something in common with freeform roleplaying, as the dice take a back seat to the cooperative telling of a compelling narrative.
This game will require creativity, communication between players, and there will be a significant amount of writing involved. A lot of the world building is done by the players themselves as part of the creation of your Families and Characters. You don't have to own the core book to play; the system the game uses can be easily taught.
I will be taking applications for a couple of weeks, or until I find 3-6 players that I like.
