Speaking of which, since this is a quickstart how you make characters and how they work is the primary mechanical focus, so let’s get to those crunchy bits! The Heroesįirst you choose your playbook, and there are six options available in the Quickstart: the Bold, the Guardian, the Hammer, the Idealist, and the Successor. It’s not quite as specific or personalized as How The Team Came Together in Masks, but it does a handy job of helping the group playing the game decide what kind of story they’re going to be telling, which is going to be helpful when it comes to making characters.
Finally, you detail in broad strokes the inciting incident which saw the characters meet one another and join forces. Your group might choose to defeat a villain, to protect something, to change a society, or learn history, for a few examples. The Group Focus might also change, and is also definitely a sign of a changing season, as it’s the purpose that brings the characters together. Scope can change, although that’s probably a new season, as it were. Aang’s journey across the world is a good example of the latter, while Korra’s first adventures were somewhere in the middle dealing with Republic City. Once you’ve picked an Era, then you choose your Scope, which could be as focused as a single temple of Fire Sages or span the entire world. Still, there’s that gravity well of canon threatening to stifle your own story, so the default of being after or before canon events is the smart play. Now, it’s a big world – it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility to be playing events running at the same time but parallel to those in canon. Korra’s Era also takes place after its respective show, allowing play in a more modern era while the world deals with the repercussions of imperialism. Aang’s Era takes place after the end of the first show and focuses more on healing and working toward a brighter future. The Hundred Year War Era is set during the time when Avatar Aang vanished from the world and the Fire Nation fought to conquer it, a prime playing field for those who would fight the unjust and the tyrannical in order to protect the weak. Roku’s Era will see heroes struggling to maintain an uneasy peace as tensions rise between nations. Kyoshi’s Era deals with rogues and bandits and corruption as nations dig in. There are five defined eras to choose from, and each very broadly defines what kind of problems your heroes are going to be dealing with. Second, Avatar Legends takes the tack of focusing gameplay slightly to the left or right of canon events in the timeline. The world of Avatar is a pretty busy one, with quite a few heroes on the job, so how exactly do you avoid getting sucked in by the gravity well of canon? Well, first, no, you can’t play as an actual Avatar – probably a good idea for mechanical balance, anyways. Powered by the Apocalypse, yes… but you might call it Powered by Masks: A New Generation as well.īefore we get to those crunchy bits, though, what do you actually do with this game? Your Own Legend The familiar bones are all there, it’s not really a huge leap of straight-from-PbtA innovation, but what’s interesting to me is that there is innovation related to Magpie’s own PbtA work.
#Avatar the legend of aang gameplay plus#
Magpie Games is telling the story this time, and the prologue is the Quickstart for their newest roleplaying game: Avatar Legends !Īvatar Legends is going to be a Powered by the Apocalypse game, so that tells you a few things right off the bat: character playbooks, rolling 2d6 plus a stat, degrees of success from misses to partials to full, narrative storytelling which triggers mechanical moves that then feed back into the narrative, and so on. Seven years passed, with the story continuing in novels and comics, but now we’ve discovered a new window into the Avatar world. But then, as these things go, that journey ended and that world vanished from the screen. Then everything changed when the Legend of Korra brought us the tale of his successor and her many trials and tribulations. Long ago, Avatar: The Last Airbender told the story of a nascent master of all four elements and the group of young heroes that helped him save the world.