In September 2019 we presented the Legacy Bundle featuring Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, the SFRPG Powered by the Apocalypse about building a new world in the ruins of the future. Your ancestors survived catastrophe thanks to luck, preparation, or pure grit. Now it’s time to leave the shelters and start rebuilding the world. But the wasteland has other inhabitants: families with different philosophies and abilities, secretive factions with their own agendas, and bizarre monsters. As generations pass and your family evolves into each new epoch, you create lasting changes in the world.
Published by UFO Press and distributed by Modiphius Entertainment, Legacy by Jay Iles is a post-Apocalypse Engine game of survival and rebuilding across generations. Legacy takes inspiration from the wastelands of Fallout, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Mad Max, as well as the centuries-spanning gameplay of Civilization and other 4X computer games.
Each player controls a family, a group of survivors brought together by blood, hardship, or a shared philosophy. Your Family playbook (The Enclave of Bygone Lore, Brotherhood of Gilded Merchants, Tyrant Kings, and more) lets you customize their lifestyle (Nomadic, Dispersed, or Settled), statistics (Reach, Grasp, Tech, and Mood), guiding philosophies, traditions, and special Moves. You also start with Surpluses (such as weaponry or land) that show the family’s particular strengths, and Needs (such as medicine or leadership) that define what they lack. These tag-based resources describe your Family situation and give you clear goals.
With each generation, you create new characters and alter the families. Character stats are Steel, Sway, Force, and Lore, with playbooks including the Hunter, Envoy, Seeker, Sentinel, and many more. The dual-playbook system means it’s easy to switch from guiding a wide-ranging spy network to exploring an ancient ruin with a few allies. Once you’re done telling the story of a particular age, you move the clock as far forward as the group likes — a decade, a generation, even a century. During the time skip, your family can experience great fortunes or suffer trials, the world can change dramatically, and new threats and opportunities emerge.
We presented the 2015 First Edition of Legacy in our first Apocalypse Engine Bundle (September 2015). Legacy‘s 2018 Second Edition, funded in a July 2017 Kickstarter campaign, puts the world map at center stage, adds new character roles and simplified playbooks, and updates the basic Moves. The Kickstarter also funded many inventive “Worlds of Legacy” system hacks, where you rebuild, or retool, civilizations in alternate settings: a starship, a magical land facing the end of time, a distant world just after planetfall, an evil Gothic castle, even a Material dimension frantically trying to evolve new species from Primal Planar energies. This offer presented .PDF ebooks of the complete Legacy 2E rulebook, lots of Worlds, and an art book, plus a soundtrack, all for a bargain price.
There were three titles in our Core Collection (retail value $38), including the full-color 305-page Legacy: Life Among the Ruins Second Edition rulebook (plus three sets of free quickstart rules: Non-Compliant, Titanomachy, and Mysthea: The Bitter March); the beautiful artbook The Art of Legacy; and a soundtrack of ambient audio files, Sounds of the Wasteland, in .MP3 and FLAC formats.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got our entire Worlds Collection with six Worlds of Legacy campaign settings worth an additional $55, including Worlds of Legacy 1: Generation Ship, 2: Primal Pathways, 3: Godsend, 4: Rhapsody of Blood (plus its companion collection of new playbooks, Choir of Souls), and 5: Worldfall.
