Legends Never Die is a roleplaying game in the Swords & Sorcery tradition. You play swashbucklers, scoundrels, and sorcerers driven to a life of adventure for their own reasons. Maybe you seek vengeance against the murderer of your father, are banished for a crime you didn’t commit (or one you did), believe you are destined to be a great conqueror, or simply seek adventure and new experiences.
Your adventures involve intrigue and romance, bold heroics and sneaky shenanigans, duels of honour and down-and-dirty brawls, exploring by land or sea, and discovering the treasures of cursed ruins. The more death-defying, emotional, and soul-stirring your deeds, the better for your reputation. (Glory is your most important stat!)
You are a competent adventurer when play begins, who has started to make a name for themselves. And with this fame, you have learned a truth about this world: Legends Never Die!
About The Game
The game is in beta, and I hope to get some feedback. The books below are works in progress, and lack art. Each book is 32 half-sized pages (ideal for viewing 2 pages at once on a wide computer screen), with text focussing on the rules you need to play. Evocative fuction can come later.
The Core Books
- Book 1, The Characters Book: This book tells you how to create characters. There are a lot of tables, perfect for creating a character’s lifepath. There is also a companion Roll20 sheet, which makes designing characters extremely easy.
- Book 2, The Player’s Book: This describes how to play the game – how to make rolls, engage in combat, use bound daemons, exploit Loyalty, and so on.
- Book 3, The GM’s Book: This describes how to create a scenario and run a game, how to bring in a PCs Legend through GM Interventions, and contains mechanics to ensure a game is as chaotic as the text suggests it should be. You can view this book as a set of rigid rules, or a set of guidelines you pick and choose from to play more traditionally.
- Booklet of the Land: This smaller book – a preview of a later Book of the Land – is a description of part of the world, and is heavily used by the Character’s Book. GMs will likely refer to it too. It contains brief descriptions of around 30 nations, some of which are starting homelands while others are lands of legend. Each is very different and all contain mysteries.
- Rise of the Lawgiver: A scenario will appear here very soon, inspired by the classic spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars (with a few fantasy extras).
- The Whole Package: All Files above in one zip file. Click here to get everything!
Companion Roll20 Sheet
There’s a Roll20 sheet that accompanies this set of rules. When creating a new campaign in roll20, select it as a character sheet. (Just start typing Legends Never Die). Please use it!
Learn more about the system and the sheet’s hidden functionality here, or at its page at the Roll20 wiki. There’s also a good picture of the character sheet there!
Future Books
There are several future books that demand to be written, and several are partway there.
- Book of the World: An expanded, full-size worldbook with expanded descriptions of each nation, and special rules needed for living there, such as detailed travel and exploration rules which account for the highly changeable nature of the world.
- Book of Sorcery: A much-needed tome describing more about daemons and corruption, and how magic (sorcery) works in this world. It also covers a few metaphysial topics, including what is the Underworld and how to deal with the Mists of Madness.
- Book of Adversaries: A monster manual for the setting. What exactly is a monster?
- Book of Advanced Mayhem: advanced rules for the different topics, including different types of conflict and more things you can do in combat.
- Book of Adventure: A book of prebuilt Scenaries varying in detail, which help define the setting’s unique flavour.
As these books get completed, the descriptions will be updated.
Plans
I plan to take playtest resources and turn the corebooks, and selected parts of the Upcoming Books, into a single product for sale on drivethru.rpg (and probably itch.io), with art and a better layout.
Describing The Game
The posts below tak about specific elements of the game – why things are the way they are. These posts also appear on the blog, but that link will be dominated by Roll20 articles for a while.
- Legends Never Die AnnouncementA brief announcement about the game Legends Never Die!
- PAGES – dice rollsHow rolls work in LND. What is PAGES?
- Legends – What Are They?Why are they called Legends and what is a Lifepath?
- Bound Daemons in LNDWhat are daemons, and what are they for?
- Chaos – what is it for?The role of unpredictability in LND.
- Biology (and Gender and Evolution) in Legends Never Die!Say “woke” and make the sign of the cross.
- Glory – the Heroes are Rock Stars!What is Glory and what does it do?
- Dynamic and Freeform Combat in LNDCombat in LND can look like there’s a lot of rules, but it’s freeform at heart.
- The Roll20 Sheet for Legends Never Die!Learn about the Roll20 sheet for Legends Never Die
- Wealth and Gear in LNDWhat is money? What can you buy in an RPG? That’s trickier to answer than you’d expect.
- Events and Interventions in Starscape and Legends Never DieWhat is an Intervention? Pure chaos!
