Today, I played a game with Legend head honcho Jake Kurzer, one of the editors and playtesters Hank West, and none other than Brian Clevinger (of 8Bit Theater and Atomic Robo fame) and Rob Balder (of Erfworld fame). We turned into Miniature Macross Missile Machines and blew up an evil research facility. Oh, and I guess there might have been some story behind this too, but it was hard to hear it over the sound of how awesome we were.
I promise that not all of my articles will be based around Legend, but today’s events bear special mention. Today, Jake, Hank and I got together and played an alpha test (that’s right, alpha testing, it happens) with Brian Clevinger and Rob Balder, in an event to bring the nerd community as a greater entity in on the game by maybe having some celebrity endorsement. The game we ended up playing is one I mentioned at the end of my last post: Comfortably Grim, the cyberpunk genre best described by its creator as “Tengen Toppa Ghosten Shellen: Firepower is Magic.” It is, in all reality, what its name suggests – the setting (such as it is) is really fairly grim – you and your friends are Operatives, the military arms of an alphabet soup megacorporation that despite all of the corporate corruption in the world, despite all of the horrors of this reality, have managed to stay human. And by human, I mean that this is far enough in the future where your memories can be downloaded and uploaded into a cloned body upon your death. And you WILL die – oh yes, death is a very real part of this game. It actually functions very similarly to a videogame – each chunk of time in Comfortably Grim is denoted as an Encounter, much like in D&D. Your character starts out with between seven and nine clones (your “extra lives”, so to speak), which in the likely event that you die in an Encounter, a clone will be teleported in at the end of that Encounter, with a few bonuses: Generally, if something horrible kills you, you get bonuses against that thing when your new clone body appears. And oh, there ARE horrible things out there – Comfortably Grim currently has no setting truth, meaning there’s no hard and fast explanations behind what’s going on. It could be Lovecraftian horrors from the Far Realms invading Earth and you and the other Operatives need to go purge them with fire. It could be some sort of advanced technology another country has developed that your corporation wants you to take out. But whatever “it” is, “it” is bad, and “it” does not like you.
The actual gameplay here is quite wonderful – it’s an ultra streamlined version of the core Legend rules. It is, effectively, E6 for Legend. E6 is a variant in D&D where instead of the normal 20 levels, your character gets six. It’s supposed to be lower power, but just as fun, and it is. CG actually extends to seven levels instead of six, but since every single Track (the chunks of character options) take place as seven Circles of ability tiers, it works out perfectly. The characters you make are a little different – most of your characters stats are predetermined by their level, and you only get one Track instead of three and only a few Feats, but you also get some extra bonus abilities – like the ability to shoot globs of acid at an enemy, or the ability to fly, or summon a barrier for one round. This game is stupid easy – Jake’s girlfriend, who had never played a tabletop RPG before was with us, and she picked it up very easily. In fact, let’s detail some of these characters:
-The Three Sentai: Myself, Jake’s girlfriend Chel, and Brian all played Vigilantes, which are basically Super Sentai heroes. Chel and Brian played more sneaky types, but Brian and I both effectively made miniature Gundams, given that one of the cool upgrades you can get is a swarm of missiles that shoot out of you and hit every enemy within a short distance. You can do that every round. It is glorious.
-Rob actually played a healer, which was because he wanted to play a character rife with existential dilemma -when you’re playing a healer in a world where everyone is a cyborg clone, your life starts to feel pretty futile. However, he ALSO was the most secretly badass character, having taken an ability which let him turn himself into a miniature nuke, not unlike the Vanguard ability from Mass Effect 3.
-Hank actually ended up playing an odd sort of sneaky caster character.
Without spoiling too much (since this game might get used as a real game for the setting), our Operatives basically made it across a wartorn part of NYC, only to run into a building that was apparently being cloaked by an advanced device. Upon entering the building, serious things went down, which ultimately ended in everyone murdering everyone in the building as well as actually blowing it up as well, with Hank’s character running off back to base to deliver a sample of something we found there. (His character did not, of course, look at the explosion.)
It was hellabombheckadoodle fun (a cookie to someone who gets THAT obscure reference without Googling it), and we’ll be doing it again next week. Good times should ensue.
-Super Jew, AWAAAAAAAAAAY!
PS: If you’re not familiar with who these people are, check out Brian’s myriad websites, as well as Rob’s.
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