Following on from my soft-reveal ( see What I did on my Summer Holiday’s Part 2), I’ve been quietly busy working on Legacy, my BRP Fantasy game.

I started an Internatl Playtest back in March. Mainly this has been overwhelmingly fun, gradually introducing the new rules to two players both verterans from the RQ3 days. Much to my surprise bringng back alot of the things I dropped from OpenQuest for Legacy, in redone streamlined way, such as hit locations, tick box experience, specials, and fumble tables has actually works and is fun in play. Legacy is crunchy like honey nut cornflakes – morishly tasty and without the irritating bits.

I decided to redevelop the Magic System, egged on by Adrian Smith, one of my playtesters, who is playing the Magican Joan De Dimeter. This has been a complete upgrade of the BRP Magic system, whose origins lie in the Worlds of Wonder box set first published in the early 80s. The overall goal is to make BRP magic more interesting, flexible and powerful. And I’m happy to say that after a thorough rewrite, it does that. The number of spells has grown from about 30 in BRUGE to 51 in Legacy, with 38 reusable magic powers being the basis of them. No more will the players look at a spell and feel slightly underwhelmed at its power. Now competant Magicians with Magic Casting over 50% have the option to step up their Duration, Range, number of Targets, scale up the effects of the spell, by spending additional magic points. They can even create new spells from the powers they already know from spells in their character’s grimoire (spell book) or research new ones from dusty arcane libraries. Players who feel intimidated by the idea of making up spells and changing properties on the fly, can simply use the Spell List of 50+ spells, and ask other players and the GM to work out how to tweak spells on the odd occasion that they want to do that.

Ritual Magic has its own chapter and Enchant, Summon, Ceremony skills are back, after RQ3, streamlined and self-contained. Perhaps not for the causal player who want to cast spells and forget it, but it opens up whole more considered options for advanced magicans.

Finally, to balance out the powers system and give warrior types something to play with, there’s a whole chapter on…

MARTIAL ARTS

Not just those that take inspiration from Hong Kong action movies, but also inspired by Hollywood films of the 40s-50s like Douglas Fairbanks Jr./Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, and Kirk Douglas’ The Vikings. Seven Martial Arts styles are detailed, each with a set of core benefits that activate when the Martial Arts skill is successfully rolled, and a set of Techniques, which are special moves and attacks that the character selects as they increase their Martial Arts skill.

Did I mention my character has the Axe Throwing Technique?

The idea with Martial Arts was to give veteran fighters a power system all of their own, to advance through as magicians gain more magic. A bunch of fun options to spice up combat and make it more cinematically fast-moving. While we are in the early stages of playtesting, intial signs are good.