So what parts of your world can exist because you are using the OL system? What makes this system better for your world than anything else?
I’m looking for inspiration to make my game more unique from other RPGs, besides the fact that players be anything they want
I’ll start off. Right now I have just started a game set during the “times of trouble, the Arrival, the Godswar, The Avatar Crisis”. With gods walking the lands making chaos everywhere they go. In my world, since the gods have been demoted so much there is left over divine power perpetuating the ehter.
When players roll exploding dice and get rolls higher than X (45, 50, 55, 60? I’m still figuring out the specifics), they tap in this divine power, empowering what they are doing. Meaning that all rolls can have super powered effects. Roll a 60 on Might check to lift a portcullis? You are now lifting the WALL ITSELF.
Furthermore, these really high rolls will have some in game effects, a 60 on a fireball, might tear a rip to the fire realm, pouring magma over the enemy, but also attracting a small fire elemental that really likes this wizard, in effect giving the wizard a fire elemental familiar.
And lastly, if players role in a certain domain high enough for a couple of times (say 3 times a 60+ roll in energy), they might get petitioned to see if the want to go on the way to become the new god of fire, for when the Times of Trouble ever end.
The world of Aenor has been a persistent campaign world for over a decade, and is the place in which all of my campaigns are set.
Historically, I used the industry front runner RPG, or the derivitive “-finder” game, and even dabbled in D10 survival system, trying to find something that mechanically could match the flavor and fluff options of my world. Of course, that requried substantial amounts of homebrewing, because “Caves & Crawdads” did not include magitech, steampunk, gunpowder, alchemy, or the races I had come up with. The gods are undoubtedly real, but aren’t the same gods as in the books. Sometimes a wizard specialized in frost magic in his backstory, but the majority of spells were fire typed, so he was stuffed. Of course, I just homebrewed it all, which I found enjoyable, but then I had to edit and provide campaign supplement booklets to all of my players with the setting specific races/classes/equipment etc. so they had the crucnh to match the fluff.
Open Legend set me free.
Of course I still provide the explanations for the races, and gods, etc so the flavor is there, but I don’t need to make up the crunch. The genre-bending abilties of OL, which are excellently showcased in Amaurea, were a perfect match for omni-genre, silly-serious, melting-pot kitchen-sink setting I had built over a decade.
I find that Open Legend allows me to let my mind run wild, and create things that make my world uniquely mine. For Example, A race that has long existed in my world, the Thaskul or walrus men. My players have actively wanted to play Thaskul, but there were never any stats for them. I also like that a spell caster never has to worry about running out of spells; This makes casters more like the extremely powerful entities they are supposed to be in my world.
In the universe(s) of the Worm web serial, people under stressful or dangerous circumstances occasionally develop super powers. There are “normal” powers, sure, like flight or strength or telekinesis, but what makes Worm so interesting is the characters who make use of the weirder kinds of abilities. Abilities like controlling insects, super-intuition, or the ability to supercharge ordinary dogs into hellhounds.
I’ve tried to run this setting twice before: once in something called the 4 Color System, which has an encyclopedia of powers that is never quite big enough to include everything the players want; and once in FATE, which can narratively handle just about any kind of character, provided you don’t mind all of their abilities being mechanically identical.
OL is the first and only system I’ve come across that can properly allow me to let my players loose. In my current game the PCs consist of: a super-speedy teleporter, a hard-light manipulator who creates defensive walls of burning energy, and an illusionist who can climb sheer walls and augments her powers with firearms. I have a backlog of 20+ NPC capes with powers varying from precognition to the ability to distort proportionality. All of them are unique, wonderful, and mechanically interesting; those of you reading this can probably come up with at least a couple of ways to do each of those characters that I didn’t go with. The only change I had to make was to have them starting at level 3 to give them enough feat points to properly specialise from the start of the game.
The current campaign I am GMing is based on a series of novels written by Simon R. Green. His novels are about a secrect city hidden in the heart of London. In reality this city although connected to London is really set in its own dimension. In this setting, you meet everything from the supernatural (angels and demons) to the fantastical (fairies and sorcerers) to the super tech (rogue AI, time machines). I have wished for many years to use this setting in an RPG game but until Open Legend there was not a system the could encompass all of these genres at the same time and keep them balanced. This setting plus Open Legend has created the oppurtunity for a really unique party. My current players are rocking a Genetically Enhanced Super Soldier, a Fallen Angel, a Nanite Swarm, a Steampunk Sorcerer, and a Traditional Ranger.
I’m still new to OL and loving it as well. Our group was going to do a one-shot through the introductory module. We have now had three sessions and they are having a blast! We will begin session 4 and enter the cave of the troglodytes in the intro module. The ease of the system, although proven over and over by the PC’s, was modeled again when one of the PC’s was turned to stone by the Basilisk. I easily handed him Grik, and told the player to “stat him out at level 2”. With no restrictions on the races… my PC is now finishing the module playing a wahpuny. Although we are only running ‘fantasy’ type characters so far… still loving it.
I also introduced the world’s most popular fantasy RPG to them… they all preferred OL!
Although we are only running ‘fantasy’ type characters so far… still loving it.