Avatar Legends: The RPG

Avatar Legends Core BookThe core book is an 8.5" x 11" hardcover book featuring beautiful full-color art, all the core rules of the game, additional rules for playing your game in one of five different eras, examples for quick & easy play, and ten playbook architypes.StoryMagpie Games is excited to bring you Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, the officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra! With over a decade of roleplaying design and publishing expertise, Magpie Games has created an innovative system that brings the world of the Four Nations to life in a tabletop roleplaying game that captures the heart of the Avatar franchise: balance, heroism, and the power of friendship.Avatar Legends: The RPG includes setting information seeded with plot hooks for your game, numerous playbooks representing the archetypes of heroes fans love from the television shows, a full set of custom mechanics for adventuring across the Four Nations, an adventure to get you started on your journey, and much more. Delve into the Four Nations like never before in an immersive role play experience that challenges you to find balance in a world in desperate need of heroes. Yip yip!Avatar Legends: The RPG is a heroic fantasy game set in the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra in which you and your friends take on the role of young heroes from across the Four Nations who have joined together to make the world a better place. It’s a game for people of all ages who want to look at the world beyond the scope of the existing stories and explore the meaningful actions heroes take for the good of others.Above all, however, it’s a game about balance. Your hero fights for balance in the world, but also wrestles with maintaining balance within while trying to achieve the goals they’ve set for themselves. The villains of Avatar Legends: The RPG are never simply monsters, never mere antagonists who must be struck down by blasts of fire; they are instead people with their own desires, personal struggles, and goals, no matter how misguided.Thus, achieving true balance isn’t easy. Whether you play a bender, martial artist, merchant, or craftsperson, you’re constantly being pulled between two important principles in your life as you face problems in the world. If you delve too deeply into one or the other—forgiveness over action, force over care, tradition over progress—it throws you off-balance, and you must work to regain your composure and sense of self.Luckily, you’re not alone in this journey. Together with your fellow heroes, you’ll soar on the backs of flying bison, defeat devious foes, and discover the true meaning of balance...perhaps even help to save the world!In Avatar Legends: The RPG you play one of the many heroes of the Four Nations—or perhaps Republic City or the Fire Nation colonies—a young hero who has sworn to protect the world from harmful threats and stand up for those without the power to stand up for themselves. You fight on the side of what is right, even if that is the most difficult path to take, and you understand that to achieve peace there must be balance.No matter what type of character you decide to play—a bender, martial artist, or technological savant—your character is integral to the story you’re playing. Each character has strengths that complement the others and everyone has something valuable to add each session. For example, you might play:Just as Aang, Katara, Toph, and Sokka all brought something different to Team Avatar, each of your characters will bring different strengths and stories to your team as your adventures take you all over the world in search of justice and balance!Each game of Avatar Legends: The RPG begins with your group picking an era as the backdrop for your game. Each era is tied to the span of an Avatar’s life—except for the Hundred Year War era during which Avatar Aang was frozen—and focuses on distinct themes which define your game. The full core book chronicles these eras more deeply, but here’s a quick list that describes the rough focus and details of each era:The Avatar Legends: The RPG core book includes a setting chapter with 50+ pages of information about the eras, including important characters and plot hooks for each. In addition to never-before-released canon material on Avatar Roku’s era, the setting chapter provides enough material for anyone to pick up and play the game, even if you don’t know the original stories by heart!The life of an Avatar Legends hero is never easy. There’s always someone who needs to be smuggled out of Republic City, a stolen artifact that must be recovered for the Southern Water Tribe, or a new warlord terrorizing the good people of the Earth Kingdom. Every adventure is a new story waiting to happen, and the stories of Avatar Legends: The RPG need heroes just like you!But most problems you’ll encounter in the Four Nations can’t be fixed by a simple fight—the Avatarverse and the people who live there are too complex for that. You might have to investigate the problem, speak to people about their needs, and strive to understand the nuances of the situation at hand. Embracing the diversity of the Four Nations and learning to accept others who may not share your world views are all part of the heroism central to the game.But if it does come down to a fight—when you’ve tried every possibility and the villain you're facing refuses to let go of their tyrannical ways—you’ll be ready. Armed with a customized mech suit you’ve built, a skillfully forged spear, or powerful firebending, your heroes will utilize their training to win the day. And if you don’t win… then you and your friends will have to pull yourselves together, recover from your defeat, learn new skills and techniques, and come back stronger than you were before! Avatar Legends: The RPG uses the Powered by the Apocalypse framework (made famous by Monster of the Week, Masks: A New Generation, and Root: The RPG) to resolve interesting moments of uncertainty through moves, bits of mechanics that say: “When you do [x], [y] happens.” Each move trigger—the “When you do [x]” part—is designed to help point at moments of uncertainty, when neither the players nor the GM know exactly what happens next.Some examples of such moments include:When you bend a jet of water at a Fire Nation guard who is about to strike your friendWhen you try to negotiate your way into an elite masquerade ball in Capital CityWhen you’re hiding from corrupt Dai Li agents in a Ba Sing Se teahouseWhen you’re comforting a companion who failed to live up to their mentor’s demandsWhen you trigger a move—when you perform the action described in the move’s trigger—then the rest of the mechanics kick into effect, often requiring a die roll. You roll 2d6 (two six-sided dice) and add in one of your stats to find out what happens.Each stat is ranked from -3 to +3. You add your stat to some rolls when you trigger certain moves. For example, when you push your luck, you roll 2d6 + Passion. When you rely on your skills and training to firebend or create technological marvels, you roll 2d6 + Focus.On most moves, if you get a 10 or higher (10+), things go your way! If you get a 7-9, you get what you were after, but usually with some cost or complication. If you get a 6 or lower, that’s called a miss, and the GM gets to tell you what happens next as things spiral out of control.Avatar Legends: The RPG has moves for all the kinds of action-adventure featured on the shows—escaping, persuading or tricking other characters, bending, and more—along with special moves for fight scenes and your character’s internal balance!In addition to the main stats, each player character also has a balance track that represents two opposing principles within the character—such as “Progress” vs. “Tradition” or “Freedom” vs. “Role”—that pull the character to act according to one or the other of those ideals. Thus, the actions of the character shift that balance, leading the character to be pulled toward the very principle they’ve prioritized through their decisions. Each principle is linked, such that Progress +3 means you automatically have Tradition -3.Your character begins the game in the middle of your balance track, meaning neither principle pulls you one way or the other. During the game, your balance shifts between the two principles as you act in accordance with them, or other people shift your balance by affirming how they see you. Eventually, these shifts can be dramatic enough to change your character’s center, the “default” position the character would normally return to over time.Characters who are off-balance are powerful, capable of swapping out their weaker stats in favor of stronger balance stats when they follow through on a principle. For example, a character like Prince Zuko might roll with his Progress +3—instead of his Focus +1—when he faces Azula in an Agni Kai, since he’s hoping to move the Fire Nation away from its genocidal past.But if you are all the way at one end of the balance track and something would shift your balance past the end of the track—like Azula mocking Zuko in a way that pushes him away from Tradition and toward Progress—you lose your balance. Characters who lose their balance must give in, lash out, or flee, only returning later when they shift their center toward the principle they overcommitted to during the scene.Where your balance track represents the harmony of your personal beliefs, conditions and fatigue represent your mental and physical wellbeing. Heroes in Avatar Legends: The RPG don’t lose arguments or fights because they run out of “hit points”—the show only occasionally features a serious injury—but because they can’t keep up with the opposition or get worn out by the effort required to stay in the fight!To represent the strong feelings and emotions of the show, each Avatar Legends: The RPG character has five conditions: Angry, Afraid, Foolish, Guilty, and Insecure. Conditions are negative emotional states you mark when something bad happens, like getting knocked down in a fight or suffering a loss in a social conflict.While you have a condition marked, you take -2 to the basic move linked to the condition—if you’re Afraid, for example, you would take a -2 when you try to intimidate an NPC. You can clear conditions by getting another PC to comfort and support you or by acting out in accordance with the condition, like doing something reckless to clear Foolish!In addition to conditions, each character also has a fatigue track that represents your character’s internal reserves of willpower and energy. You mark fatigue when you try to get stuff done, like huge feats of bending, or in a combat when you attempt to strike at someone directly opposing you. Fatigue is cleared when the character has time to rest and recover!If your fatigue track is full—and you are forced to mark another fatigue—you take a condition instead. Characters who have to mark a condition when they have no more conditions to mark are taken out: knocked unconscious, fleeing in fear, or just plain surrendering.Every Avatar Legends: The RPG hero is unique, but someone who fights with a sword is just as valuable to the team as a person who can bend the earth to their will. And while benders summon amazing forces to accomplish great things, even the mightiest Firebender can be felled with a zap from Asami’s electric glove!When you create your character, you pick a training—one of the four elements, martial and weapons training, or technology training. To further customize your skills, you pick a fighting style for your character, describing how that training manifests for your character. For example, you could use metal fans just like Kyoshi to focus your airbending or always have small daggers you throw to pin people to walls!Your training has two main uses in the game: it allows you to rely on your skills and training in key moments—pushing a boat over with waterbending or stealing the most expensive sword with your martial training—and it determines which techniques are available for you to use in combat. While all characters have access to a core set of basic moves like Strike and Retaliate, your training allows you to use special techniques like Earth Sink, Lightning Redirection, or Chi Blocking.In order to learn new techniques for your training, however, you must find yourself a master to teach you. Tracking down a master is a great excuse for an adventure and will push your character to new heights as you seek out someone who can expand your skills and training. And once you’ve found someone, studied under them, and learned the technique, you can only master it by fulfilling a task your master sets out for you and discovering something new about yourself.Avatar Legends: The RPG uses playbooks (The Idealist, The Hammer, etc.) to help players create characters quickly and easily. Each playbook describes a character archetype, complete with motivations, ties to the rest of the group, and different abilities. Yet each playbook is also just a starting point—by the time you choose your background, fighting style, and history, you’ll end up with a unique Avatar Legends character for your story!Characters often acquire abilities and powers from other playbooks and may even change playbooks over the course of play, such as a Successor abandoning their family to become a Guardian. As your character advances, you may also find reasons to retire your character and “leave the show,” giving you a chance to create a new character to continue your group's story.The player characters in Avatar Legends: The RPG are represented by the playbooks, but the heroes of your story might also run into a few old friends on their adventures. In Avatar Legends: The RPG, characters like Avatar Aang, Uncle Iroh, and General Kuvira are called legends, powerful individuals who can act as beloved mentors…or worthy opposition, depending on the situation at hand. The world of Avatar is complicated, and sometimes it is your greatest enemy who teaches you the lessons you need to learn while your friends provide the most difficult and challenging opposition.Each legend has everything you need to introduce the character to your game, including special techniques that legends may be willing to teach young heroes!