Tag, you’re everything! Go from being a fighter to a mage to a thief in Legend in the Mist
It’s been more than 50 years since Dungeons & Dragons was first released, and after all these years everyone could be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing new under the sun in roleplaying games (RPGs), and that whatever comes out will have been seen before. I’m happy to report that I’ve seen similar RPGs to Legend in the Mist, but not something that works exactly like it. The system works on the idea of tags: everything you do, everything you have, all the abilities you possess – they’re all tags. I can already hear someone saying that it’s just a rebrand of either City of Mist or Fate, but it’s really not.
There are three different types of skill check in this game. A Simple check is where the GM just decides what happens. A Quick skill check is a 2d6 roll, all relevant tags for the action can be added, all negative tags take away from the roll, anything above a six is a success, anything above a 10 is a success without complication. Finally, there’s Detailed, which is the same roll as the Quick check, but applies tags to whichever side loses the check. The type of skill check required is decided by the GM before the dice are rolled.
All of the different types of tags are colour coded. Descriptors are highlighted in yellow; Power and Weakness tags are orange; Limits are red; and Status tags are green. Where this differs from other systems like Fate is that each part of the character is continually under revision. When you succeed at something, your skills may change – if you’ve had a particularly difficult failure, you may lose some tags. You may even choose to take tags off your sheet for a big one-time-only bonus, to get through your current predicament, knowing that you’ll be less for it afterwards.
In Legend in the Mist it’s possible to go from being a fighter to a mage to a thief, and at each turn, not have anything of the life you had before. In some ways, this replicates real life, where a skill you’ve never used or a talent that gave you a bad experience may well put you off it for the rest of your days. I really like the idea that you can change things to that extent, while recognising that the amount of tracking and recording you have to do in every session is a lot more than most systems. For those who play this system a lot, this is fascinating, well thought out and extensively tested. They’ll use what they can and discard the other parts without concern. But for those who’ve never played before?
There are a lot of tags, and those tags define what you can and cannot do, which gives the game a fluid feel. There are no rules for weapons doing additional damage or armour soaking damage; spells are created as you want them to be, rather than chosen from a list. This makes the game abstract in a way that RPGs which rely on numbers and maths aren’t. In those games, if you run out of hit points, you’re down. In this game, you have to be worn down on one of your tracking cards or themes until you’re down, and the same applies to any threat or monster you face.
When it comes to running the game, the second Core Rulebook does a good job of explaining what the GM has to do and how the game works. There are around 100 pages of examples, NPC’s, encounters, creatures and locations, with the relevant tags for them, as well as a section on building campaigns that borders on brilliance. GMs set the campaign up visually as a mountain, with the peak being the end-of-campaign boss, moving down the mountain to see the sub-bosses guarding the boss, and the things defending them. It details the way in which dangers should be both proportional and scalable depending on what has happened to the characters on the way up the mountain. As an aid, it’s one of the easiest guides on campaign structure I’ve seen.
The books are beautiful, bright and evocative, and laid out so that following the concepts is easy. This is particularly true for the opening of the first Core Rulebook, which uses a 50-page graphic novel to show how the game plays and how each style of decision making can be used by the GM. In this game, the GM doesn’t roll dice at any point, all the agency is in the hands of the players, which leans towards GMs with experience who know how to weigh the players’ actions and make good decisions.
Overall, like many systems, these books are a toolkit. Legend in the Mist is designed for players and GMs who are looking for a new challenge – a way to play games narratively that evolves with you, rather than providing a basic background and then keeping you on that path till you get to the end of it. It isn’t immediately intuitive for new players and GMs, so those just starting out on the path will have to put in more time and effort to get this to work than simpler systems.
That’s not to say that the additional effort isn’t rewarded, but the balance between being immersive and getting people started can’t be ignored. In the Action Grimoire, which is separate to the main rulebooks, there are lists of actions that can be done, and how to do them, which brings us close to 600 pages of rules to work through (in our review, we looked at the two Core Rulebooks, the Action Grimoire and two creature packs). If you’re using Legend in the Mist as a toolkit, you’ll know which bits you need to use and which to disregard, but to use it as a toolkit, you need to know your way around a roleplaying game in the first place.
This presents itself very much as a game that presumes that those playing have played before. The list of tags is endless and whatever you can think of, you can make a tag of it, which makes this system very open to interpretation. However, that same endless variation may prove to be a negative for those still trying to find their way in the world of RPGs. Given that it comes from the same studio which produced City of Mist, there is the audience out there for it.
Perhaps the best way to look at this game is that it’s something that evolved out of the need to tell a story, rather than something that started as a wargame and added talking and social skills as they were required. If you’re willing to put the time into it, the results can be stunning.
It doesn’t lend itself as well to one-shot games, as its core tenet is that everything changes and evolves, and that’s where the real enjoyment is. But if you’re working up to campaigns where epic deeds and actions are done, this is superb.
Review by John Dodd
YES
A fully immersive game that prioritises story over everything – you’ll have to work to get the best out of it, but isn’t that the point of adventuring?
Designers: Amit Moshe, Eran Aviram, Itamar Karbian, Kelly Blac
Publisher: Son of Oak Game Studio
Pages: 256
Age: 12+
RRP: £80
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