Flameo, Hotman! Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, Magpie Games’ tabletop role-playing sport set within the Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra universe, is formally accessible for pre-order. It initially launched through Kickstarter, assembly its funding targets in simply 16 minutes. Now anybody can personal a duplicate.

If you’re a fan of Avatar and Korra however not as acquainted, and even utterly unfamiliar, with TTRPGs, don’t fret. Avatar Legends is designed to be welcoming to newcomers, whereas providing depth that will probably be satisfying to those that have tons of expertise across the desk. Players have freedom to specific their creativity — from bending or weapon type to time interval and goal — all inside the fantastic world and themes of Avatar.

Image: Nickelodeon Animation Studio

Playing a session of Avatar Legends ought to really feel like creating your individual episode of Avatar or Korra.

The sport makes use of Powered by the Apocalypse, a framework designed by Meguey Baker and Vincent Baker, that places group storytelling entrance and middle. The cube roll doesn’t decide whether or not one thing will occur, however how it should occur. Maybe you’re making an attempt to cover from Dai Li brokers, or maybe lob a rock at an airship. There are numerous methods your makes an attempt may shake out — and destructive outcomes have penalties. Maybe the rock fails to make contact, or hits in a spot you weren’t anticipating; the benders on board can see you now and are throwing projectiles your means. How will you react? Think of it like a protracted sport of “yes, and” the place you’re all the time considering in your ft.

The Avatar universe spans a long time, and gamers can run a marketing campaign in one in every of 5 eras: Kyoshi, Roku, Hundred Year War, Aang, or Korra. The period dictates the facility battle, and the canon characters (known as Legends within the sport) you’ll meet alongside the best way. Do you wish to lend a serving to hand in a world marred by imperialist domination, or tenderly navigate an period of reconstruction and technological development? (As little is thought concerning the Roku period, Magpie labored with Avatar creators Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko to write down never-before-released canon materials.) Stories may be lighthearted or critical — or native or regional in scope, or on a world scale.

Image: Magpie Games

Finally, gamers agree on a “focus” — fertile floor for producing a narrative set within the Avatarverse. Will you launch a rescue, like when Zuko and Sokka break Suki out of Boiling Rock or when Tenzin, Kya, and Bumi looked for Ikki? Will you try to study, like when Team Avatar wrested secrets and techniques from Wan Shi Tong’s Spirit Library? Or maybe you’d slightly take down an intimidating foe, like when Korra and associates fought Kuvira’s huge metal-bent mecha.

Can I make my favourite Avatar or Korra characters?

Image: Magpie Games

In Avatar Legends, you’ll make your individual new characters, with the assistance of playbooks. This means play can begin pretty shortly, in comparison with a standard Dungeons & Dragons marketing campaign. Playbooks give attention to archetypes — for instance, the Prodigy has prolific mastery of method, a transparent nod to Toph, the Blind Bandit whose superhuman Earthbending made her a tough rival. These playbooks give characters a story compass guiding their emotional arc, serving to the group decide the forms of tales they’d like to inform.

“By choosing the Successor, you’re not just saying, ‘Hey, I have this powerful family,’” mentioned Mark Truman, co-founder and CEO at Magpie, and core designer for Avatar Legends. “You’re also saying, ‘These are the kinds of things I want our game to be about.’ And now the [game master] can say, ‘Cool, your powerful family is going to show up all the time, and it’s going to be a huge part of the story that your powerful family matters.’”

Avatar Legends lessons, known as Trainings, imply you may create a personality with any of the 4 bending kinds, or focus them on weapons or know-how. It’s all combine and match. You may construct a Guardian archetype who fights with know-how like Asami’s electrical glove, intent on defending one other participant on the desk, or a trusty boomerang Prodigy. This ensures benders aren’t simply given delight of place. “Sokka’s journey is as important as anybody else’s,” Truman mentioned.

Each playbook additionally features a stability meter, which guides a participant’s beliefs, evolving because the character’s ideology shifts. The present is premised on the significance of stability — stability between the bending nations, stability between private extremes. The Successor, for instance (consider Zuko or Mai), is torn between custom and progress; a Moment of Balance will play like a climactic level in an episode, like Zuko selecting to defy the Fire Nation to affix the Avatar Gaang. Under particular circumstances, gamers may also change playbooks, including much more customizability.

Players can finally make whoever they need and inform a compelling story with them. Just a few qualities maintain regular, within the spirit of the present. Each of you is a hero who has “answered the call willingly” (based on the rulebook), which suggests your good friend group received’t fracture or utterly crumble underneath stress, identical to the Gaang. Because the sport is targeted much less on “fighting” and extra on “heroism, tough choices, and balance,” Truman mentioned, the door is open to potentialities.

“We want players to come to the table and say, ‘OK, I’m an Earthbender, but I don’t bend big chunks of Earth, I always bend crystals,’” Truman mentioned. “That might not be a great fit for a canon story, but within the story you’re telling at your table, we want to embrace that, and be like, Yeah, that’s awesome.”

Cultural competency in an evolving world

Avatar Legends is about in a world impressed by Asian and North American Indigenous cultures, simply as the unique tv exhibits have been.

“One thing Mike [DiMartino] and Bryan [Konietzko] did that was really smart was make it just an Asian and Indigenous world, and treat it the way Lord of the Rings treats English peasantry and English stories as the lingua franca of that world,” Truman mentioned. “It means that everything that happens in the Avatarverse has the potential to be part of that experience. And yet no part of it is supposed to map directly, Oh, these people are Japanese, these people are Korean.”

Independent designers have lengthy been diversifying the tabletop video games house, making it extra inclusive for gamers of shade and queer gamers. At the identical time, legacy TTRPGs like D&D are nonetheless within the strategy of grappling with a Eurocentric legacy, which included racist depictions of races like orcs. (Wizards of the Coast just lately apologized for its depictions of the Hadozee race.)

Avatar Legends is positioned — as an adaptation of a beloved franchise with an current legion of followers — to be a extensively performed, immersive TTPRG set exterior of the European subcontinent. But it additionally presents a problem, because the Avatarverse blended collectively completely different Asian and Indigenous cultures to create its world. (In previous interviews, DiMartino and Konietzko have mentioned that this was largely to stop characterizing any explicit tradition as villainous). In 2022, placing that stability between cultural accuracy and drawing inspiration from such cultures to create a fantastical universe is much more difficult.

“It’s a pan-Asian experience with a lot of rich opportunity,” Truman mentioned. “Some of it doesn’t work. Some of it works great. I think our job as an RPG company is to give you the tools to really make it true to your own experience, and to challenge white players to think about the ways in which this is still not a white world.”

To carry these tales to life, the group at Magpie Games — a minority- and woman-owned firm — labored carefully with plenty of gifted sport designers who had experience within the real-world areas the sport attracts inspiration from. This included bringing on James Mendez Hodes (a sport designer and cultural advisor) as a core designer.

“We ended up with our core four designers — the three of us, Magpie plus Mendez — and then another level of contributing designers who were there, before we put pen to paper, to talk through all the major issues,” Truman mentioned. “We have worked with that community of people for what’s been almost two years now to make this game great.”

The Magpie group labored with Dr. Siu-Leung Lee, who labored as translator and calligrapher on the undertaking, and who was the calligrapher for each Avatar and Korra. “He was telling us these stories about how they came up with the original calligraphy,” Truman mentioned.

Image: Magpie Games

Magpie relies in New Mexico, and the group additionally labored with contributing designer Dr. Lee Francis, founding father of Native Realities and Indigenous Comic Con, on a Water Tribe journey as a part of the Wan Shi Tong sport complement. The story focuses on water rights, mirroring the real-life water rights battles within the state. “We want that Water Tribe sense of Indigeneity to be really strong within the stories,” Truman mentioned.

And to information gamers, the rulebook accommodates a piece in its “Making Characters” chapter devoted to guiding gamers by way of “playing outside your experience,” geared towards gamers who received’t share their character’s ethnic heritage. (Of course, many TTRPGs ask gamers to create characters exterior their race — together with races which might be completely fictitious. But many of those can and do take inspiration from the true world.) The Avatar Legends rulebook advises gamers to verify they “portray a whole person, not just an identity or a label.”

“The Avatarverse is so amazing,” Truman mentioned, noting his pleasure “to get the chance to bring this to RPGs, and to have it never been done before.”

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game was previewed utilizing a digital copy offered by Magpie Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media might earn commissions for merchandise bought through affiliate hyperlinks. You can discover extra details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.