New Setting for Legend: Sheoloth - The Sprawling City

[The Wolf]

All Legend core books are and will remain Open Content. Settings such as Deus Vult and Sheoloth are not.

Thank you for your answer, that's clear this way !

Anyways is there any possibility to have just the professions and new skills and such things given (or sold that's fine with me) as OGC, for example "Dark elves of legend" pages 3-9 and "Drow Magic" pages 63-67, that's 12 pages out of 160+ in the book and it would be great in my opinion as it could be used easily in any other supplement designed for, or compatible with Legend ?

Bruno

There may well be a generic Legend dark elf book, it all depends how the pdfs do, because you're talking to the guy who actually develops/writes this stuff at the moment for Mongoose along with Damon.

The more sales the pdfs get, since I don't get paid a single thing for print, the more inclined I am to work on things like this.

 

[Prime_Evil]

There may well be a generic Legend dark elf book, it all depends how the pdfs do, because you're talking to the guy who actually develops/writes this stuff at the moment for Mongoose along with Damon.

It was a smart move to open with Sheoloth first as this gives gamers a ready-made setting to use with any future Dark Elf material. There's just enough information in that book to get you started with Dark Elf PCs, although if you want to run an extended campaign you might want more detail later on.

The more sales the pdfs get, since I don't get paid a single thing for print, the more inclined I am to work on things like this.

Legend still seems to be doing quite well - it is still regularly appearing in the top 20 products at RPGNow after almost 2 years. Hopefully there will be some ongoing interest in supporting products too.

 

[The Wolf]

Oh yeah, definitely has steam as a system. I think Matt has plans to make Sheoloth a strong Legend setting and build on it. I know I have a few ideas and taking each Sheoloth Cult and expanding on them into about a 32 page or so supplement was one of them.

This would give me scope to build on those cults and expand on them, showing day to day cult life and offering new expanded cult magic.

 

[Prime_Evil]

Oh yeah, definitely has steam as a system. I think Matt has plans to make Sheoloth a strong Legend setting and build on it. I know I have a few ideas and taking each Sheoloth Cult and expanding on them into about a 32 page or so supplement was one of them.

I suspect that the success of Sheoloth as a game line will depend upon the next few releases. Mongoose needs to demonstrate that the city can be used as a location that it is possible to build a campaign around. This means that there is a need to explore aspects of the place that gamers are likely to be interested in (such as the major cults . However, it also means that an adventure or two might be useful - especially if they demonstrate how to use the setting in play. These wouldn't need to be very long to be effective, but they need to make GMs keen to run a game in the setting. The biggest issue that Sheoloth needs to overcome is the "just another Dark Elf city" phenomenon that comes from overuse of Drow as bad guys in D&D. The trick here might be to play up some of the differences between Legend and the d20 system to show casual readers how it is different to what they are familiar with and why they should care about the setting at all...

 

[The Wolf]

Yep Prime_Evil. That's always my biggest worry about dark elves in general, overuse in the past has left a lot of people with a bad taste in their mouths. I think any adventure needs to be set up in such a way that it's sandbox and draws on the strengths of Sheoloth's setting...rather than just a dungeon crawl, which of course isn't the way of Legend anyways.

Sheoloth is a pretty dark/nasty place and I think products need to reflect that, though I really do want to take dark elves away from spiders (I wasn't able to completely since ovarisites were baked into the book too heavily) and into the realm of darkness/shadows.

 

[Prime_Evil]

Keep in mind that the rules of Legend are also lighter than the d20 system but can support a grittier style of play. I was reading the intrigue rules from the Tome of Drow Lore and thinking how much easier they would be to use with the Legend ruleset.

 

[The Wolf]

The only d20 that can hold a candle to Legend in that regard now, is really 13th Age where they made it highly modular and extremely fluid/easy to run. Yeah, I might do a Legend conversion of those rules down the line for the Sheoloth setting.

See, I'm very much into systems that let me evoke atmosphere and story, I love story.

 

[Prime_Evil]

A key strength of the d100 games is that they support storytelling - the rules fade into the background but still having enough meat to keep players engaged for the long haul. The core mechanics are simple, but not simplistic.

 

[Carew]

That's always my biggest worry about dark elves in general, overuse in the past has left a lot of people with a bad taste in their mouths.

This is me. Drow/dark eleves have been used so often that they're kinda laughable these days. I'm sure that The Wolf has done a great job on converting some old Mongoose D20 book into Legend but I feel sorta sad that there isn't more original material coming out for the line. We got conversions of past glories coming out our ears, but nothing new or inspiring. Now I know that there's a lot of hard-pressed GMs out there who don't got the time to convert stuff and so what Wolf's doing is good, but I really really want to see some new stuff that isnt a conversion or a Legend version of a race that's been done to death like those two orc supplements - the Scar city and The Bloody Path.

Sorry to be negative but just sad that there's nothing really original happening for Legend.

 

[The Wolf]

Convince Matt then that he needs to let me/my imagination loose on some of the things I've done for myself in the past.

For example: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/111518/Location-Guide-2-The-Pirate-Haven-of-Blackrock

System Agnostic, but it was great fun to write.

 

[Prime_Evil]

We've just had a number of new Deus Vult releases written specifically for Legend and before that we had the three Xoth books. We know that there's new material on the way, but it takes longer to create, edit, and approve brand new content than it does to convert existing content from one game system to another. I understand the desire of Mongoose to convert the best content from their extensive d20 back catalogue to their own game system and think that this is partly being done to keep releases flowing while new content is being written. Also, some of the upcoming releases - such as those in the Arcania of Legend line - look like they will be fairly generic.

 

[The Wolf]

If there was a +like for this post, I'd be hitting it several times!

 

[Prime_Evil]

Convince Matt then that he needs to let me/my imagination loose on some of the things I've done for myself in the past.

For example: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/111518/Location-Guide-2-The-Pirate-Haven-of-Blackrock

System Agnostic, but it was great fun to write.

Hmmm...I hadn't seen these. Have you considered releasing a version with Legend-compatible stats. A detailed pirate haven could be useful as the home base for a campaign built around nautical adventures...

 

[The Wolf]

I have actually, it's one of the things I was thinking of since Legend is OGC.

 

[Carew]

Convince Matt then that he needs to let me/my imagination loose on some of the things I've done for myself in the past.

Wolf, I don't really know your work tho I think you did some Lone Wolf stuff, right? But, really, its your job to convince Mongoose, not mine. From where I sit it seems to me like Mongoose don't want invest in original material because it takes long time to develop, write, edit etc. Its like a path of least resistance to dip into the vault, yank out a d20 splat book from several year ago and say 'Hey! The next Legend book! Let's get some guy to hack the stats!' Wolf your obviously the Legend guy for the line so you should be doing the convincing that while its ok for a couple of books pretty soon its gonna need something more than more drow or orcs. I mean Mongoose used to crank this stuff out. New book a month. What happened? Where did all the writers go?

We've just had a number of new Deus Vult releases written specifically for Legend and before that we had the three Xoth books. We know that there's new material on the way, but it takes longer to create, edit, and approve brand new content than it does to convert existing content from one game system to another.

That's good if you like your Special Forces Clerics, but Deus Vult doesn't float my boat too much. Looking at the new relases page for Legend I see an Elementalism Book and a book called Stormhaven. Any clue what either is about? Is Stormhaven another d20 convert? How you gonna get a entire book out of elementalism? Well, it is new I guess, but its not getting me all that excited.

Its a great game is Legend and I am stoked on running it but I don't get the same excitement looking at the product line is all. Well said my peace so I go back to my homebrew orld.

 

[The Wolf]

I'm 12 year industry veteran of the RPG business Carew. It isn't my job to convince Matthew at all, it's a team effort. I can tell Matt that we want a new fantasy setting till I'm blue in the face, but if the community doesn't speak up and convince him that it'd be worth it, Matt is going to take a previous back catalog that has 1000s of words already written and use that since there's less effort to convert it.

For what it's worth I spoke to Matt and he was convinced that Sheoloth was the next best step for the Legend line, as for all the writers... Loz and Pete went and did their own thing and numerous other ones moved off as well.

I'm a freelancer, I work for Mongoose whilst I'm doing other things in the RPG industry.

I've worked on Savage Worlds (Suzerain), Lone Wolf, Doctor Who, indie RPG projects and currently I'm the lead designer of Dragon Kings (Dark Sun 2.0) for 13th Age. I've got numerous short stories published in fiction both in print and pdf and I've won a Gold Ennie for my Doctor Who work, along with writing other things.

I'm the guy that people come to in the industry if they want something doing with a quick and accurate turn-around.

Look up Darren W. Pearce on Drivethru.rpg and on Amazon.

So I'm not just some guy who 'hacked' the stats.

I have my own settings that are pretty much tailor made for Legend, with words already written and so forth. It's whether or not it's worth my while converting them to Legend and if they'd sell or not as well, since it's my time/effort that goes into the making of that particular product.

 

[Prime_Evil]

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with converting the best of the d20 material to Legend, but this does need to be balanced against the desire for new material that spotlights the best features of the game system.

I get the feeling that we're in an awkward period at the moment where Legend was more successful than expected and the release schedule originally planned was too conservative. In addition, I suspect that the sudden demise of the Elric game line - whatever the reason - has left an additional hole in the company's plans for Legend.

At the moment Matt is playing it fairly safe by updating material that was successful in the d20 days. He has hard historical sales figures for those products and can run the numbers to work out what the likely sales of a Legend conversion will be.

I think we will still see some original material for Legend over the next six months, but the release schedule is likely to be slower than many people expect - partly because writing high-quality original material is hard work and partly for the pragmatic reason that it is possible to move converted d20 material through the production queue faster.

I don't expect Mongoose to to give the green light to an original campaign setting at the moment as this is a financial risk for the publisher. However, there may be a possibility to develop a "mini-campaign setting" that GMs can drop into their own world - something like a single city-state, a dwarven stronghold, or a frontier outpost at the edge of the wilderlands. All of these could be marketed as part of the Cities of Legend product line, but would give Mongoose a chance to test the waters before committing to something more ambitious. Keep in mind that the market for traditional pen-and-paper RPGs has shrunk dramatically over the past five years and a product now needs to guarantee a solid return before it gets a print run...

 

[The Wolf]

Spot on Prime_Evil, you are as always, utterly correct. I have enough material that I could make various system-agnostic things of mine for Legend. I've got enough love for the system as well, but publishing it on the other hand..

That requires layout and other expenses.

 

[soltakss]

D20 conversions are new to a lot of Legend players. I wouldn't have seen any of the D20 material, not because I don't like D20, but because I only buy material for the games I play, which tends to be D100-style games.

I appreciate that a fair number of people have come to Legend from D20, so they would see the D20 conversions as old material, which might be a problem.

With the number of new supplements being worked on, I am sure that Legend will have a lot more support in the future, either through Mongoose or through third parties.

 

[The Wolf]

Yep soltakss

I tend to lean towards the d-100s, so yeah, working on this stuff is actually new for me as well. I'd never even seen the d20 Samurai book before I converted it. Fell in love with it though, because it was extremely detailed and solid.