So now that the Conan movie has flopped...

How did you find the experience of running a swords & sorcery game using Legend? Would you care to elaborate on your experiences? What worked well and what didn't? What would you change to make Legend handle the tropes of that genre better?

Using Legend for sword and sorcery feels like a perfect fit. Why? First, you have to match the genre to the flavor of a game system. Howard's Conan is bloody, brutal, gritty, and terrible; there is little room for heroics or cinematic anything but survival. RQ2/Legend is that way in play. High fantasy, akin to Greyhawk D&D, is very cinematic and heroic. If I want to wade into a fray against countless minions, I can do this easily in a d20 game for the most part; it lends itself to very cinematic play, and with high hit points, characters/players don't fear the death of their characters or battle that much. In Legend, combat is not entered lightly. Using the system made my players think, and I mean think hard, about tactics.

Example- One guy solo played his character for one session before the whole group jumped in. In his solo session, he plays a hillman from a mountain clan, a barbarian, and sees legion soldiers burning his village and herding slaves into wagons. He normally rushes in, but knows Legend combat all too well already, so he tells me he just hides, watches, and waits. This was a huge deal to me, because it showed me that even an impetuous player can change their ways according to the system. He told me he knew he would die quickly if he rushed out there against those odds, so he followed them throughout the day, waited for nightfall, and ambushed a guard on patrol. He took his armor, helmet, and cloak and lured another guard into the darkness and killed him also. He got close enough to unlock some wagons, secretly passing some weapons into the prison wagons furthest from the firelight and guards and ordered them to wait for his signal. He had to make an influence roll and succeeded (otherwise I was having them all bolt right then). So he and a couple npc's he freed took deeper positions closer to the command tents, hid in the woodline far from the wagons and began firing flaming arrows into the command tent, setting them ablaze. Horns sounded, shouts, and chaos ensued. Here is the huge difference in heroic high fantasy and gritty sword and sorcery. As the prisoners fled the prison wagons, my player told me he was running away also. I was amazed but pleased. I asked him if was sure he didn't want to fight just a bit before running and he said "Hell no!" He told me he did what he could and it was on the shoulders of those escaping now. Many were butchered but many made it into the forest and swamps. Now, he is the leader of a group of refugees, many from different clans of barbarians. His goal, he said, is to rally what is left of the various tribes and lead an assault against one of the legion forts.....

As far as the magic, it fits as is. I would like to see Legend flesh out the magic system more though, and make it more customizable. Other than that. It is awesome.
 
Piperdog said:
How did you find the experience of running a swords & sorcery game using Legend? Would you care to elaborate on your experiences? What worked well and what didn't? What would you change to make Legend handle the tropes of that genre better?

Using Legend for sword and sorcery feels like a perfect fit. Why? First, you have to match the genre to the flavor of a game system. Howard's Conan is bloody, brutal, gritty, and terrible; there is little room for heroics or cinematic anything but survival. RQ2/Legend is that way in play. High fantasy, akin to Greyhawk D&D, is very cinematic and heroic. If I want to wade into a fray against countless minions, I can do this easily in a d20 game for the most part; it lends itself to very cinematic play, and with high hit points, characters/players don't fear the death of their characters or battle that much. In Legend, combat is not entered lightly. Using the system made my players think, and I mean think hard, about tactics.

Example- One guy solo played his character for one session before the whole group jumped in. In his solo session, he plays a hillman from a mountain clan, a barbarian, and sees legion soldiers burning his village and herding slaves into wagons. He normally rushes in, but knows Legend combat all too well already, so he tells me he just hides, watches, and waits. This was a huge deal to me, because it showed me that even an impetuous player can change their ways according to the system. He told me he knew he would die quickly if he rushed out there against those odds, so he followed them throughout the day, waited for nightfall, and ambushed a guard on patrol. He took his armor, helmet, and cloak and lured another guard into the darkness and killed him also. He got close enough to unlock some wagons, secretly passing some weapons into the prison wagons furthest from the firelight and guards and ordered them to wait for his signal. He had to make an influence roll and succeeded (otherwise I was having them all bolt right then). So he and a couple npc's he freed took deeper positions closer to the command tents, hid in the woodline far from the wagons and began firing flaming arrows into the command tent, setting them ablaze. Horns sounded, shouts, and chaos ensued. Here is the huge difference in heroic high fantasy and gritty sword and sorcery. As the prisoners fled the prison wagons, my player told me he was running away also. I was amazed but pleased. I asked him if was sure he didn't want to fight just a bit before running and he said "Hell no!" He told me he did what he could and it was on the shoulders of those escaping now. Many were butchered but many made it into the forest and swamps. Now, he is the leader of a group of refugees, many from different clans of barbarians. His goal, he said, is to rally what is left of the various tribes and lead an assault against one of the legion forts.....

As far as the magic, it fits as is. I would like to see Legend flesh out the magic system more though, and make it more customizable. Other than that. It is awesome.

Basically, your play report sounds like a story straight out of Howard.
 
Thanks! It really has that feel, but of course, it's intentional I suppose, since I have been rereading all the Conan stories lately. That being said, me and a buddy have shared a campaign world for about 15 years, using Gurps as our system. It has taken place in a very Renaissance flavored pseudo-European setting. I recently wanted to deepen the history and flavor of our campaign world by not only writing the past, but having players live the past....so we went back in time 1700 years. We went from magic and shamanism, as well as powers of cults, went from almost non-existent to something nearly common in most areas, and extinct mythical beasts still roam freely....
So to really change up the flavor, I changed our game system too, to Legend. It is not totally unfamiliar to the group, as Gurps is a "roll under skill" type of system, but different enough to give a different feel to the setting. I have also borrowed from Age of Treason, as I was inspired by the cover alone. One of the greatest civilizations is now ruled by a Golden Goddess, a golden statue of a beautiful woman. The statue is possessed of the spirit of an ancient dead queen who was Pharoah in her time, but has been summoned back through powerful sorcery. She killed the sorcerers who brought her back, who thought to control her, and now she rules the throne, pushing her legions aggressively outward....There is so much more than that, but I don't want to bore you further. It is really fun for us. We look forward to returning to the original campaign and having characters run into ruins and tombs and artifacts that the players remember from the "ancient campaign". It will really feel like history at that point.
 
I like the sound of your game! It does seem to capture the right mood. Out of curiosity, how common were supernatural creatures (monsters) in your campaign? In Robert E. Howard's works, most opponents seem to be human and the supernatural entities tend to be the climactic encounters of the story. I get the feeling that Legend could be used to emulate this approach.
 
I like the sound of your game! It does seem to capture the right mood. Out of curiosity, how common were supernatural creatures (monsters) in your campaign? In Robert E. Howard's works, most opponents seem to be human and the supernatural entities tend to be the climactic encounters of the story. I get the feeling that Legend could be used to emulate this approach.

In our "modern" campaign setting, there were really no monsters per se; there might be a winged serpent guardian at an ancient ruin for example, which might drive most npc's into slavering madness, but overall, all adversaries were human. Magic only existed in the hands of an underground organization called the Nexus, a council of evil sorcerers out to rule the world. In this new "ancient" campaign setting we have going, magic is a bit more prevalent, but is rare and feared still. Monsters are rare as well, but exist. For example, a cannibalistic yeti race in the mountains, or tentacled Things in the swamp.....I have the barbarian characters dealing with great mountain bears that are every bit as scary as a mythical monster, and dangerous forest drakes that are basically small pony sized dragons of animal intelligence that hunt in groups, like raptors, typically using trees as cover. I have undead as a special treat at the right moment, like a wight in a tomb for example. Again, nothing high fantasy, but still an element of the supernatural.

And by the way, I am loving RQII/Legend as a rules set.
 
That sounds ideal. I'm interested to know how you find Legend as a rule system for swords & sorcery in comparison to GURPS - I'm a big fan of GURPS for modern supernatural games, but I've never felt the urge to run a traditional medieval fantasy game using the system.
 
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