As is often the case, I am working too much and playing too little. I'm doing my best to dig my nails in and get back on the horse and whatever other struggle metaphor you prefer. I'm having an okay time doing it.
A buddy in a discord server gushes about a game I have not heard much about, it's called Legend in the Mist. And it's doing exactly what I've been trying to work out for the past two years. Almost.
Fuck right off (lovingly, I don't know the devs)
It is such a specific emotion coming across a game that's doing what you are trying to do, so exciting and so crushing. And for the same reasons I've been having trouble getting my own game to table it will likely be a while before I can get a group together to play LitM. So I am stuck with reading it!
The tag system seems absolutely fantastic. Clear and character defining, easy to hack and to fix at the table. My first and biggest concern is the floating modifier problem. Because you are picking through what is often a list of 10-20 choices, some of which will change every roll. This is the price of complexity, but having played and ran quite a bit of The Wildsea I know the difficulties players have when choosing from even a short list of potential options.
What I end up wanting (looking at the character sheet especially) is a place to write tags grouped by action, so "Trusty Broadsword" and "Light on Your Feet" which might come from different themes can be bucketed under "Fighty" tags. This is a reminder for myself to make sure that is an option on my own character sheets.
The same goes for statuses and field tags. They a so juicy, in a way that really reminds me of Ryuutama which I absolutely love. But again they're floating modifiers! Is there a way to keep that complexity without them being that way? I'm sure they would have done so if they could, and I certainly can't think of a way. And I really do love that it incentivizes meals and rest in a way that would otherwise be handwaved, and mechanizes things like injuries or terrain that would otherwise be nebulous. It's more visually complex, but it's also easier for the player to keep a picture of the scene in front of them. I like that a lot.
It reads really good, the upgrade system feels overblown but in a way that could be really fun at the table. It has a bit of a GURPS vibe of the math scaling the same so if you don't match your position and effect properly you get odd outsized scaling issues, but that loops back around to being very mythic and fun, when a Dragons "Scaly Hide" is beaten by "Determination" and a "Father's Yew Longbow".
It's so so close to what I want! And that makes we want to freak out! It's really really hard to get excited about your own work when you see something like this. I have to remind myself that it's missing things that I want, it's missing the play structure I am looking for, and the kind of magical world I want to capture. It's missing some of the OSR danger I still want in a fantasy game.
It's so close, and I'm really excited to get it to the table and see just how close! But it's not my game
Two cakes goddammit, two cakes.
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