The Mushroom Press Design Blog

Big Ramble about my involvement with the Legends of the Gods successor game

I was super excited for Legends of the Wulin. I remember that I had just discovered Weapons of the Gods and gotten my hands on a copy. I was still trying to grok the secret arts when I stumbled on some buzz about the new system.

There was Arik ten Broeke on youtube, talking about his masterful work on the game. His smooth and cultured tones laying out the shortcomings of the previous game, and some clever solutions to them.

Now I’ll waggle my cane a bit here about the landscape of wuxia gaming back then. The game that had hooked me on the medium was Exalted second edition, and I remember it as the 800-pound gorilla of kung fu action RPGs. It’s scale and scope were essentially unrivaled. Do it yourselfers could hack something with Fate, or use a super hero system, but there wasn’t much more. And of course, playing an all-monk party in D&D had about as much appeal then as it does now.

I grabbed the pre-release version as soon as it was available. I remember being bowled over by the size and depth of the game. It felt like I could hack this thing to do anything from DBZ to final fantasy (people with a lot more patience and skill than myself did!). I remember being almost obsessed with it. I thought about it all the time.

It was a long wait to get the physical book, but finally it arrived. I had sworn not to run it until I had a reference handy (my tablet, then as now, was not sufficient for GMing). With absolute relish, I got character sheets and ran.

It’s not uncommon for new games to be a little awkward, especially “fat games” with lots of rules and widgets. I chalked our first session up to new game syndrome and we ran the next. But it didn’t get better. Combats would drag out without results then end in a sudden fit. Consequences vaporized between battles. Non-combat world interaction was clumsy, with the dice offering several answers to binary question. The balance points were all interconnected in a dense, clunky weave and I often felt that I was ruling in the dark.

I tried again, In a successor campaign. Then again, in another. I tried handing it off to someone else to run and playing. Every time, it was the same. The game looked like a ballet and played like a brick. Eventually, EX3 got kickstarted and Legends drifted towards the back of my library.

But I didn’t forget it. Then, while wandering RPG.net (like you do) I saw a post by Wander Blade (David Ramirez) trying to get some fresh talent to do a rules-light rewrite of LotW. I leaped at the chance.

It was exciting to work with him and the team he’d assembled. We were driven and goals-focused in our design work. We drew on the accumulated knowledge and experiences of reviewers and fans of the game. We crunched numbers and assembled lists of the strengths and weaknesses of the system. We started structuring towards a solid first draft, and were poised to playtest.

And then Eos fell apart. I’ll not belabor what we all remember but it was such a distressing time for the team that we had somebody walk away (a big talent, I won’t name names but it broke my heart not to work with him anymore).

We were pretty directionless at that point. We had done so much work that it seemed a shame to let it all go to waste, but without Eos there wasn’t really anything to do with it all. But, as he infallibly does, our team lead David Ramirez had a plan.

David had been polishing his own setting for a few years. He suggested that we take the bulk of our work and adapt it to his setting to make an entirely new game.

Since then we've had over three rules drafts and countless very enlightening playtests. After over a year of independent design, we’re almost ready to showcase our game.

I’m currently polishing up the design documents and making an audience-facing draft. It’s a big job, but immensely satisfying.

Since we're at a nice, elastic point in the writing right now, I'm posting this up to see what suggestions the community has for a successor game. Once we absorb the feedback, it'll be time for the penultimate revision, then the BIG playtest. After that, its all production until the PDF gets released.

It's a good time to be a fan of Wuxia!