How long has it been since I last discussed my idea for an Exalted campaign? Checks the last post. Nearly two years ago, almost to the month. I often say I run very rarely; it’s always been the case, and this is exactly why. I engage with gaming in a sort of serendipitous, random way; not all of it is intended to make it to the table, and some of it gets solved creatively in ways that don’t require it to arrive at the table.
But asking if my interpretation of Exalted is a rustic game obviously makes no sense, so what am I going on about?
This isn’t a review of Legend in the Mist, so it will mention system concepts and explain them with just enough information to make my point, hopefully.
Legend in the Mist
In the last week, I’ve become obsessed with a game called Legend in the Mist. It came from nowhere, which doesn’t say much for me since I’ve been out of the new game ferment across traditional releases and Kickstarters for quite a while.
Even if I had heard of it, I’d have discounted it, as the last thing I want is a rustic game of people concerned with small things and where cooking a stew for your grandmother is a major character moment in the fiction. That’s how I see rustic fantasy. Now I’ve started reading the game, and it’s changing my mind for two reasons.
- Legend of the Mist pitches Lord of the Rings as a rustic fantasy, and it even has a fellowship frame for setting up your campaign.
- It’s a glorious intersection of Powered by the Apocalypse and a take on tags as Fate-like aspects that is, at least on paper, glorious to behold.
It literally strips out the bits of Powered by the Apocalypse that I tend to find mildly triggering and replaces them with Fate-like stuff I’m inclined to like, while keeping a Powered by the Apocalypse play loop. There are numerous other reasons around how the game works, and we may encounter some of those later. The important thing is it focuses on the exact things we like our games to focus on.
I haven’t answered yet how this game, a rustic fantasy, is remotely appropriate to a game of fantasy Avengers as it was originally pitched? Well, in the Lord of the Rings fellowship you have Gandalf, a divine and immortal spirit, literally an angel.
If that’s not an Exalted, what is?
Themes, tags and scale
Legend of the Mist characters are comprised of four themes which provide:-
- Power tags and a weakness tag, those sort of Fate-like things
- A quest, which is baked in a narrative purpose
- It all links to advancement, narrative change and growth
A character can have four of these, and each of them can be at a different scale: Origin, Adventure and Greatness. The game has two levels of simple scale rules. How exactly they work isn’t really important. It’s just important they exist and work quite well on paper.
If we take the fellowship, it might broadly look like this: –
- A hobbit: Four origin themes (edge case of an adventure theme)
- Aragon: An origin and three adventure themes (edge case of a greatness)
- Gandalf: An origin, adventure and two greatness themes
What does that look like? Well, it occurs to me we could replace hobbit with a normal human, Aragorn with a Dragon-Blooded and Gandalf with an Exalted. You instantly have a way to represent the setting’s core fictional scales in ways that feel right by distributing origin, adventure and greatness themes.
It also seems to do it elegantly while keeping the game in the conversation, the Powered by the Apocalypse bit, and not bogging things down in dice pool assemblies and interpreting them, which we’d face with Cortex.
It’s a rustic fantasy game? This can’t be true? I think it is, since the game literally covers the Gandalf example and the same setup models epic creatures, so it’s all the same because you’re constructing in the fiction, so it’s all interpretation within enough control (the scale).
Why it’s been two years
Discounting my usual propensity to find thinking about this stuff enough, the concept has struggled to get to the table for two reasons.
There is literally no table to bring it to, not until recently. The gaming group that was is over; no other group formed. All done. We have started looking for games and ideas that can meet the standards of the gaming group that was, but work in a 1-1 setup.
This has made me keep the idea in the back of my mind and speculate a bit about the system. I was probably speculating because none of them felt 100% right, though Cortex is like 95% correct until you consider running it 1-1. It can do that, but ideally you want something that layers into an unfolding conversation rather than introducing dice-pool interpretations.
We already know what happens when the system seems to be at odds with the unfolding conversation from trying to play the latest edition of Werewolf 1-1. We find the 1-1 model is good; the system is not.
It’s possible that, as I read Legend in the Mist, the system, along with the existence of a 1-1 table, provides a next level of impetus.
The system impetus
Legend of the Mist opens up options and injects a level of excitement over the fictional structures that could exist in an Exalted campaign, as the system is flexible enough to handle it with little effort.
- The game would be a fluid 1-1 conversation using the Powered by the Apocalypse rolling method with tags for the fictional oomph to resolve things relatively quickly.
- The Exalted character would feel impactful due to the scaling while keeping a level of consistency and grounding due to an origin theme
- You could run individual trade paperbacks of the character pre-Exaltation to bring depth
- Hell, you could run flashbacks to a previous incarnation of the Exalted soul in the previous Age
- The divide between just superlatively skilled and superpowers just solves itself
At the moment, I really like the idea of having those stories from the pre-Exalted period. The system does something none of the other systems has done. Cortex is great for representing a superhero in a fantasy setting and for being narratively focused, but Legend in the Mist feels richer, more emotional, and more in the moment.
The language feels better, and if I wanted this campaign to be about anything, it was in the language of it and the intimacy and meaning of it even at the bigger scale.
And, Finally…
What Legend in the Mist has done is not make me think this Exalted interpretation should be like Lord of the Rings, or even like the assumed setting or setting book for Legend of the Mist. What it has done is make me evaluate the texture of the experience, as I now feel like there might be a system that can deliver on it.
The personal, the epic, the tragic and, yes, when required, the intimate and the intimate elements of a rustic or JRPG setting that exists in the vastness of Creation that a lot of normal people live in.
I’ll have October to think about this more, but it feels good.