More play from the Happening which I should have written about ages ago, where I ran Legendary Lives (as the quote from one of the players in the title suggests). More specifically I kept forcing people to roll up Legendary Lives characters until there were enough of them in one place and enthused enough to make them actually play. I’m sad about some of the characters we did get to see in play, the Draconian Wizard wearing a fake beard so they looked properly wizardly for example looked like lots of fun.

Which isn’t to say the characters we played with weren’t great, as the random character creation process worked its mysterious magic. I’ve misplaced my notes from play so if anyone who played wants to fill in more details about the Goblin Assassin, Hob Mercenary and Easterling Illusionist that would be great.

After taking a few minutes to sketch a quick map and pick out some foes from the book that they might encounter I set the characters the challenge of rescuing the Goblin Assassin’s girlfriend Cobweb – kidnapped by gangsters because of his debts. We agreed / assumed he had employed the other two characters to help.

After establishing they had successfully bribed a guard to leave the back gate to the Serpentine gangsters compound open play went in some interesting directions as the players threw themselves into their characters idiosyncrasies and the mission. Subsequent events included battling a giant guard snake, magically disguising as a giant guard snake to cover this up, devouring the child serpentine owner of the guard snake whole as punishment for owning a dangerous animal, and a miraculous intervention by the Easterling god Sing Po which spared the Illusionist from a grisly fate when he turned back into human form with an entire serpentine inside.

Once they managed to locate the missing Goblin girlfriend things went a bit downhill. Various interaction rolls determined that she wasn’t entirely happy about a rescue, especially after some evasive answers about what had happened to the serpentine child and even more so, after it having emerged that she was helping care for the dying serpentine matriarch, when the Goblin Assassin beheaded a defenseless old woman having decided she / the serpentines generally had clearly bewitched his girlfriend. Further confusion followed including several catastrophic failures, including a potions roll to create a love potion, intended to win back the goblin girlfriend, which turned out to be a potion of hate. During a subsequent battle with Easterling guards the enchanter shapeshifted the terrifying samurai warrior into the shape of the girlfriend, the Hob slaughtering the thus weakend warrior and the Goblin Assassin arriving just in time to see this, having lost track of the really girlfriend, now hiding from her hated and murderous (ex) boyfriend.

At this point we got to use the sanity rules, and found the sight caused the Goblin to breakdown and lose his memory of this event for 2 days. The PCs were then assailed by more Easterling guards and Serpentine gangsters, and while the Illusionist managed to escape, aided by some last minute magic, the others were captured. We ended with the sounds from the city gaol as two days later the Goblin suddenly remembers seeing the Hob mercenary murder his girlfriend.

During play, as this catalogue of disasters unfolded, I did wonder if I had perhaps given the players a skewed idea of the game leading them to make deliberately fiasco-esque poor choices. Maybe I had over-emphasised this in resolution system? But my feeling is that the players were actually really picking up on and honouring the personalities of their characters as they came out of the creation process. For example the Illusionist valued law (i think) hence many of that players decisions. Probably I just need to relax and enjoy the chaos that sometimes comes from playing this games resolution system honestly. I certainly had a good time and the players seemed to too.

Legendary Lives is a game from the Early 90’s published by Haunted Attic www,hauntedattic.org but sadly difficult to get a copy of at the moment, though there are noises that this is because the writers might be workingon a new edition.