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| Art by Lex Cazimi |
You are a story that is just beginning. A tale that will be told around the fires long after your life has been extinguished. Your deeds and adventures will be recounted by people you will never even dream of meeting in places that you will never even know exist. You will be the subject of poems and songs even when your people have faded into history. You are a Legend and your story has just begun. I'll start by saying that this class is a cut above those presented in the DCCRPG rulebook. I know this. I wrote this class based on an old post that has since disappeared into the internet, a game someone ran a long time ago where the players played a classless D&D game with these rules called things like "A legend never dies" or "The Legend, yet to be Written". I run DCC so i tried a sort of classless DCC, mostly out of curiosity for what it would feel like.
So I ran a game that took place in the early age of my setting and took the events of that game and did my best to look at them from the perspective of thousands of years of retelling the events of that game over and over. fighting off a pack of stone wolves became battling a horde of lycanthropes. Jumping across a small crevice became leaping the span of a canyon (the one the crevice eventually grew into), finding a stone that fell from the sky became hunting a fallen angry god. The sword that became the legendary "Stone Splitter" eventually appeared in a later game and everyone felt what it meant to hold this magic sword who's creation the players had all witnessed.
What this game was really good for, was creating myths in the setting that the players felt attached to in future games in the setting. They had a point of reference and investment in those tales and legends. I really liked this, it got the players even more invested in the setting. It worked in part because I have a really consistent pool of players and I recognize that this wouldn't really work if you run for people who aren't going to be at your table in the next game after this one.
How to use this class:
I make no claim, nor will I pretend, that this class is balanced against the others in the rule book. I'll also openly say that there is zero reason you can't do the same thing with the classes in the core book. There is no reason you can't run a game with the Warrior, Wizard, and Thief as presented and spin their stories into the distant future as legend. The reason for this class is to emulate that heroes of myth often fit into more than one of the classes when you look at their stories, so I made the modular Legend Class. What I don't think you should do with this class is use it as part of a game where you use a funnel.
There are two ways I recommend using this class:
Jason and the Argonauts:
In this story we have a who's who of greek myth showing up here. Jason, Orpheus Admetus, Erytus, Echion, Mopsus, Oileus, Philas, Idmon, Castor, Pollux, & Heracles. Chances are you recognize at least one name on that list. when you look at it closely you see that these people are demi-gods, heroes of their own stories, kings, seers, and princes. These are all people that are a cut above the rest in the world of heroics and adventure. This is how the legend role should be utilized. Everyone is a legend, gathering together and setting out on an impossible task worthy of their titles. This is the most straight forward way to use it, everyone is a legend and the story they tell will shape the myths of the future generations.
The Odyssey:
The Trojan war was, much like The Argo, an assembly of a who's who of the heroes of the era. The journey home, however, was less so. Odysseus, our sole survivor and main character of the story is the focal point. He has strong supporting characters around him, without a doubt, but he's still the focus of the story. In this version of using The Legend we would see everyone roll up a standard character, personally I would give them more heroic stats to back up the idea that they can at least roll with a legend. Then, each player makes their own legend character. Each session a different player puts their normal character aside and plays their legend. This changes each session. The catch is that each person is playing the "same" legend, but much like how myths are conflicting and often interpreted as having different epithets to explain why they are so different in various myths. If someone's legend dies? no, they didn't, because it was just that epithet that died, the others will live on. I particularly like this version because it leaves one character as the focus of the myths you're weaving into the future of the setting but still gets the touch of all the other players, not just in their Legends, but in how they, as the supporting cast, interact with the different aspects of the Legend.
So pick up your sword, your song, and your destiny, and write tales that will be told near the fire long after your dice have crumbled to dust.
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