This is not a review. A review, in my opinion, requires play-time and some time to sit down and look at your experiences again and see what you thought about the thing, in hindsight. This is not that. I've not played with the book. This is what I think of the product, as I'm sitting down to take an initial look at it. I find it valuable to write First Impressions because it helps me to process what I find initially and see if it lines up later, after actual table time.
You can find the link to Tempered Legacy here!
Anyone remember Weapons of Legacy? Y'know, that 3.5 book that had a really fantastic idea about items leveling up and getting stronger and developing a personality of sorts? What if someone took that idea and scaled it down, just a bit, and then made the ideas a bit easier to implement? While implying an entire gaming system while they were at it?
This book answers all four of those questions.
Yes, this book resembles Weapons of Legacy. But, unlike that tome, this is a 62 page zine, with 10 of those pages being rules and the rest example items. Weapons have special abilities, which are hidden behind locks or conditions. Locks can be regrets, goals, or something else personal to the former wielder that prevents you from getting to the ability that wielder had added to the item in question. Undo the Lock and you get the (good) Ability! And then there are Mutations, which are essentially curses, from which you need to find relief. Each Mutation has a condition for its lifting. If you meet the condition the Mutation ends. Weapons can have almost any number of slots, while armor's slottage is a bit more restricted. I'm not sure what the logic was behind that but we'll see when it hits the table.
There's some rules on how to make sure people can spot the items more easily, as well as the value of said items. A lot of it is simple bookkeeping stuff and helps answer just a few pocket cases that may come up. I certainly won't allow anyone at my table to sell these items, but I suppose there are those who would find that acceptable at their table. I really like the table that tells you how that particular item looks unique. 10 options doesn't look like a lot, but honestly how many do you really need to communicate that the item is special?
Another cool thing about the book is it suggests using the magical items in lieu of class abilities. I could very easily see an OSR game where this is exactly what happens: just generate six ability scores, possibly some light skill tech or what-have-you, and have everyone make up an item they want to use, and then go use this book to generate the slots! The book is very open that this means DIY game design, but given how many sample items are in the book you could get away with not using your own stuff for awhile if you're not comfortable with that sorta thing. One could certainly make an incredible Zelda game with this little booklet.
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Hhhhmm.....
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The interesting thing to me was that, as I began to generate items using the procedures in the zine, a setting began to materialize. History, geography, stuff just started to coalesce. Before I knew it I had a setting that was the beginning of a really good dungeoncrawl. So when I contacted some folks to do a Torchbearer campaign I decided to throw this in, see what happened. I asked them for a wishlist, and began to generate a history for the items using the rules here. I've gotten the wishlist fully generated and the campaign has a lot of potential. Especially when the players began to give me backstories. This whole world just sorta popped into my head, based off of that.
When I actually get to use the items in game I'll let you know how it goes. But so far I'm really impressed. This essentially a game and setting generator, in ten pages of rules.
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