Tabletop Tales: ‘Legacy: War Of Ages’
RPG’s based on TV and movies are nothing new, with more famed series having received better and better adaptations by saner and saner designers. Normally a good sequel is met with a cash-in RPG, or in Highlander‘s case, a good third party RPG, The Quickening and later… The Source. Legacy: War of Ages can most simply be described as a labour of love for their favorite movie; taking every (good) part of the first two films and injecting their own creativity into the project to create an “Alternate Version” of the Highlander franchise with all of the buzzwords replaced with more generic titles. For instance, The Quickening became The Rapture, and The Gathering became The Conclave. Zeist of course, is never mentioned or even suggested to possibly exist.
The beginning of Legacy very quickly explains the various periods of Immortal History, along with the basic rules of Immortal protocol, such as “one must never do combat on holy ground”. It turns out that over this history, many important names have in fact been Immortals including Gustavus Adolphus, Gilgamesh, and Jesus. Not Hitler though, he was mortal. This history goes up until the 1890’s which is known as “The Age of Madness” by the Immortals. Oddly, directly after this history lesson is a section devoted to pointing out that this is in fact a Cyberpunk setting, complete with Neural Interfaces and a 3D version of the Internet called…. The Winternet. The reason I call this “Odd” is because the game points out quite quickly that Immortals are not able to use cybertech due to how their regeneration works, leaving me with many questions such as “Why is this important?” Answer? It’s not. As Neural Cybertech is THE method of reliably hacking anything, or even getting a decent experience out of the Winternet, it makes me wonder why they felt that they needed to explain a part of the setting, and immediately tell you that Immortals have little to no reason to care about it. They also cannot decide upon calling hacking countermeasures “ICE” or “EIC” (Supposedly pronounced “ICE”).
Character creation is simplified and offers a point buy system à la World of Darkness, with a few notable deviations. Such similarities include scaling costs for points, ranks 1-5, karma/experience system, and a constant “Crawling in my skin” tone towards how much it sucks to be Immortal. Anyone familiar with the storytelling system will be able to pick the game up rather quickly, making it a rather good alternative to those seeking a less complicated form of the World of Darkness. The key difference: rather than use a truckload of D10’s, Legacy only uses a single one, but with the same general idea. The Statistic, Modifier, and Skill values are attached and if this number is rolled at or under on a D10 the roll is considered a success, combat rolls being slightly different from this. The resulting system can be as lethal as any other hard realism game, which poses an interesting idea considering the general difficulty in killing that which cannot die.
The only way to put down an Immortal for good is to sever the spine between the heart and brain, most popularly the neck. The book makes it quite clear that The True Death should never happen casually or randomly, as Immortals are expected to be “killed” often but never truly fall until their luck runs out. The reason for this is called The Rapture. When an Immortal’s neck is severed, energy forcefully pours from the corpse into the surrounding area, other Immortals in this area can collect this energy for extra experience, in the process causing thousands of dollars of property damage as the surrounding area bursts into flames and explodes from the amazing energy of Immortal life.
As any Highlander fan knows, Immortals can sense other Immortals based on their strength; in Legacy this is known as The Foreboding and is dubbed a psychic power alongside a choice of several other such abilities available to said psychics. Foreboding however, is always available to Immortals, and innately roll when another Immortal gets too close, which I like more than Vampires take on such a mechanic. Psychic powers are designed to be rather broad in order to be utilized in different ways, such as to denote psychics and vampires.
The combat mechanics are presented in a “use the rules you like” fashion and suggest that in combat the players make up moves and maneuvers to use for slight benefits such as a thrust doing more damage while sacrificing accuracy or vice versa. Legacy sports a large armory filled to the brim with all the weapons and armor one could ever need, from swords to assault cannons and all the way to plasma rifles. Armor includes the traditional Immortal garb of armored trenchcoats (Dishwasher safe!) with modern styled ballistic and heavy armors. Behind this of course is a load of Cyberwear that most characters can’t use. The rules do suggest a character may be mortal, and rulings do exist that specifically target mortals with the trade off of being able to use Cybernetics and the Winternet. Could you imagine having to choose living forever or being able to turn your car on with your mind?
Legacy was given a tough break due to the time of it’s conception, a mere two years after the very complicated Old World of Darkness began its run, and predating the New World Rules by nearly a decade. The setting and jargon heavily dates the game and really shows the paranoia people had towards gamers at the time. So much so that a very large disclaimer exists in the first few pages, and the game outright demands that this disclaimer be read before and after every single session of Legacy: War of Ages. With the added fact that Legacy‘s setting is Highlander with a coat of paint and the obvious influences of Highlander II: The Quickening can leave a sour taste in the mouths of some fans. The original book’s “art” is a series of black on grey polaroids of the Blackmoors with their friends running around with swords and trenchcoats, usually drained out by some annoying aftereffect. Every section begins with a loosely relevant quote from a movie or song (Including a mangled version of Pink Floyd lyrics).
There was a remake of Legacy published in 2010, I hear that this revision is vastly different from the original Paperback version that I own, which you can get in hardcopy from Amazon for just $5, half the price of the 2010 Legacy Revision PDF from Drivethrurpg. If you even loosely like collecting RPG’s I would suggest adding this title to your collection, as while its inspirations are painfully obvious, it still beats within it the Blood of Kings and deserves praise for doing so before its time, in an age where many games fell into obscurity. I would hurry on your decision between which copy you desire as much like the Immortals there will be one day where THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE! I’d love to see the look on the poor bastards face that tries to burn THIS book! KABOOM!
-Necroscourge 2/8/13
