Hello friends. Here’s something pretty exciting. I am contributing a core playbook to Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game. This is an RPG being published by Magpie Games based on the beloved set of animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and Avatar: The Legend of Korra. The shows (and now the game) are about young people with powerful elemental abilities trying to bring balance to a war-torn world. It is currently on Kickstarter and breaking all kinds of records. There are just two days left to pledge if you want to be be part of it!
Played: Avatar Legends
So I thought I would start off this newsletter by discussing the chance I got to play Avatar Legends, through Magpie’s well-run Curated Play Program. Of course, the game is still being developed, so the version I played had some differences from the version available in the current Quickstart, which will presumably also have some differences from the final release. Nonetheless, it was wonderful to get a taste of what Magpie is doing with the game—there’s a big focus on the emotional and philosophical stakes of the elemental battles that rings true to the source material.
Highlights: I had a ton of fun taking the system for a whirl. We were playing a Roku-era game about an unlikely crew of young people trying to stop some wicked Fire Nation plans in the time leading up to the Hundred Year’s War. I was an untrained but enthusiastic Airbender using the Bold playbook. One of my moves granted me a companion animal, and I went with a curious little bunny-moth with a habit of stealing things. The other players latched onto the bunny-moth immediately, and we ended up having our “pilot episode” revolve around trouble we got into when the bunny-moth stole some secret Fire Nation plans.
The Balance system of the game got some interesting play. I tried to live up to my Principle of Confidence to take out some Fire Nation soldiers on my own (“I know I can do this!”) and rolled a big fat miss, which definitely felt like a humbling experience for my character. We learned the Principle of our main antagonist (Victory) and tried to call him out by asking if the Fire Nation’s destructive plans could really be called that: “Is it really victory when all that’s left is ashes?”
Musings: The way the dice fell, the session threatened to end in a bittersweet place. It looked a lot like we’d have to destroy a priceless Air Nomad artifact to keep it out of the Fire Nation’s hands, and that our Firebender friend might end up in the clutches of his evil family. The GM took mercy on us, and sent a deus ex machina in the form of a benevolent Air Dragon that emerged from the artifact. Probably the right choice for a one-shot, given that the source material is a children’s cartoon. But it did make me curious about playing the game with a group of players that had agreed to play through darker moments of setback and defeat for the protagonists. I think the game can support that kind of play as well, and evoke those moments when, say, Aang or Korra run into problems their powers can’t easily solve and have to grow as people through the experience of hardship and loss.
Final Thoughts: If you love the Avatar shows or are intrigued by what you’ve heard here, definitely get onboard to play the new game! Pick the Adamant core playbook to experience my contribution—or grab the Destined from among the PDF playbooks for another taste of my design.
Ran: Mission: Accomplished!
We were hosting a reunion for a gaming group that coalesced around a long, meaningful campaign of Masks. We needed a game that could accommodate all the players, plus new spouses and significant others who had not done much roleplaying before. I polled Twitter for suggestions and got a lot of good ones. We went with Jeff Stormer’s comedic espionage debrief Mission: Accomplished! It very much hit the spot.
Highlights: The game gracefully accommodates a full table of super-spies. The setup is a mission debrief serving to assign credit and blame. Mission Control (the GM role) goes over the ups and downs of a just-concluded mission with the spies that undertook it. Throughout, Mission Control is assigning commendation dice to agents who demonstrate the “7 Habits of Highly Effective Black Ops Agents”—and citation dice to those who fail to live up to those corporate values. Mission Control is encouraged to be capricious. The idea is to sow comedic discord and watch the agents subtly (or not-so-subtly) try to throw each other under the bus. After all, only one agent gets a promotion at the end of all this.
In our game, the mission was about shutting down a villainous organization’s space laser. At setup, we established that the most notable thing that went wrong was the main mad scientist’s mind getting uploaded into the moon base’s computers. Almost every player submitted an anonymous report tattling on someone else for their part in this particular fiasco. It made for a great moment when I, as Mission Control, got say, “As for the matter of Dr. Mond’s uploading…” and then lay down like six index cards on the table in front of me.
Musings: The dice system is brutal—any of your citation dice, and any of Mission Control’s chaos dice, cancel out the rewards you’re hoping for from your commendation dice if their numbers match. And you just get one roll, to establish how your character fares in the final apportioning of perks and punishments. Given the game’s nature as a absurdist parody of office politics, this totally works. It’s interesting that a mechanic which is, by normal metrics, unfair and unbalanced, seems to add to the fun here. A good lesson in the importance of theme and expectations to how a mechanic is received.
Final Thoughts: I think we took a good approach to continuity here. We agreed to set the game loosely in the world of our Masks campaign, but without specifying exactly when. And we agreed that this didn’t imply our agency (F.A.T.E.) was always this absurd behind-the-scenes. It was a little What If…? one-shot about a more comedic version of our superhero world’s resident super-spies, and that worked just fine!
Elsewhere
—The Great Soul Train Robbery has been shipped out to backers! Many thanks to Tony Vasinda and Plus One Exp for their great help in making this happen. Today, Plus One Exp launched their game Down We Go on Gamefound, a new crowdfunding platform geared specifically for tabletop games. The game is a minimalist dungeon crawler with Old School flavor and quick-to-pick-up rules. Support it here!
—One of the most unusual stretch goals from our campaign for Back Again from the Broken Land is now out in the wild. Backers unlocked an original musical commission. I had my friend Micah Walter put the poem that accompanies the game to music. You can listen to the results here, with vocals by Micah’s wife Laurie Tupper:
Till next time, may you find your balance, get the credit you deserve, and have tales sung of your exploits.
Gamefully Yours,
Alexi