Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game Kickstarter is live!

The Kickstarter for Magpie Games' Avatar: Legends RPG has launched and is hurtling towards $1M in its opening hours. Set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and The Legend of Korra, this tabletop roleplaying game includes a free quickstart which you can download today.

Update — it hit $1M in the first few hours, making it the fastest ever TTRPG Kickstarter to do so.

Update -- after less than two days, it has made over $2.3M, already making it the biggest TTRPG Kickstarter ever (with nearly a month yet to go!)

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game

An officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra

www.kickstarter.com

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.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Its probably a combo of the show's popularity among 20-somethings in tandem the swell of the tabletop market over the last few years too. Even if they aren't current players, the idea is def percolating around the young and hip.

 

[Gradine]

Also, if you don't even know what a TTRPG is, you could be a lot worse off than trying to figure it out with PbtA mechanics.

 

[Staffan]

The Star Wars RPG is in limbo after FFG more or less abandoned it (to EDGE Studio).

With Star Wars, it's probably that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. They did not just one but three RPGs, each with six splat books covering the classes for that particular incarnation and then did a few adventures and other sourcebooks. They even followed that up with era books for using the different RPGs together but in eras other than the one the main books focus on (between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back), as well as books collecting bits and bobs from all the other books (spaceships, gear, and such). Sure, they could do more, but that would mean investing more money for a lower rate of return.

IME, it's fairly rare for licensed RPGs to be actively supported for a long time, and moreso in the modern day. The One Ring is very much an exception – and even there, Cubicle 7 stepped away from it and/or lost the license. But we're not likely to see anything close to the product lines for 80s Marvel Super Heroes, Middle-Earth Role-Playing, or Star Wars.

The main difference between a licensed game and one you're doing yourself is that you're paying a fee for the licensed game. This would generally be in the form of $X per year (or for N years) plus $Y (or Y% royalties) per product. For a game you own, it can make economic sense to support it with supplements for a long time, both because the supplements are (hopefully) self-sustaining and because they drive core book sales – and core book sales are, after all, like free money. But when you're also paying a license fee, core book sales aren't free money anymore, because the license costs money to keep going and eventually you'll hit the point where you say "Nah, my money's better spent on other things" and cancel the license. That doesn't mean it was a bad license, just that licensed games generally aren't sustainable.

 

[darjr]

Just perused the comments section and no one seems confused about this being a tabletop RPG.
And there are a lot of comments. I might have missed it though, I’ve only browsed the first half or so.

Also there seems to be a lot of folks new to TTRPGs in the comments!!!! Nice!

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Also, if you don't even know what a TTRPG is, you could be a lot worse off than trying to figure it out with PbtA mechanics.

The only possible issue, is that in my experience, most of the people currently sub-25 joining the hobby have REALLY strong Neo-Trad sensibilities, e.g. they want control over their character's emotional development, and what lesson to take from their story.

In our experience it conflicts somewhat with 'play to find out what happens' especially with Magpie's games which have strong narrative and emotional components to the mechanics (e.g. in Masks other people can shift your identities around, in this the playbook insists the characters have a central conflict they can be pressured to one direction or the other on defined by playbook.)

I'm not saying this is a deal breaker, in fact a fair number might be discovering an exciting new way to play, since Magpie always seems to explain the difference in their rulebooks, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

But I've had at least one conversation with someone who had issues when we played Masks about buying into the central conceit and not feeling punished when their character is under pressure, or complications happen because consequences for the actions you take while say, clearing conditions by acting out (in this case stealing your mentor's motorcycle to dirty it on a joyride for petty revenge) aren't casually mitigated (in this case, they brought another player along, who used their powers to jack into the bike, and ended up breaking it, getting player 1 way more in trouble.) Having to mark conditions instead of just delivering a pithy comeback because they didn't think their character would ever be influenced that way also rankled at times.

I've also had to backpedal on someone's playbook because they didn't think playing the scion, would actually lead to comparisons and influence stuff from their villain mother. When said player has mother issues, I guess they chose it to treat it more or less as a backstory-- which obviously, would be easy and a non-problem in a game that wasn't Masks, since that tension is enforced with mechanics.

So this time I'm talking to everyone about buy in about the kind of game this is, and what kinds of events the mechanics enforce. Which we expect to work better, but I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot of people upset if this is their first go around with this kind of game that the mechanics are intruding on their principles and emotional state, or that the mechanics push them into dramatic situations when they're used to avoiding them by playing even-tempered characters more or less never in conflict in DND and stuff.

 

[Ghal Maraz]

Recognition of design by design wonks doesn't mean much in this context.


There's nothing unexplainable in, "a decent game shop got hold of one of the most popular franchises in the geekisphere".

Avatar is hardly more popular than Lord of the Rings. So that's not that.

As I've said, there are many factors.

 

[Gradine]

In my experience with brand new players, they don't know a single thing about what "neo-trad" is and are highly adaptable to whatever the conceit of the game is, provided they're willing to buy-in at all in the first place. New players don't enter the hobby in however many neatly pigeon-holed boxes this or that RPG philosopher has decided upon. Sensibilities are developed over time, and they can be remarkably flexible, provided your players are buying what you're selling.

Masks is designed to tell a very specific type of story with very deliberate connections between gameplay and thematic elements, and if players aren't interested in pursuing that type of story then of course they will chafe against its mechanics. A player with the Scion playbook who did not expect their villainous parent to play a major role in their character development, emotionally and mechanically, is someone who has not been sufficiently explained the point of the game they're playing, or at least weren't paying any attention.

That tight focus between mechanics and theme is what makes Masks such a well-designed game (well, some of the playbooks were definitely less well-thought out (or too overthought) than others), but it also makes it incredibly niche. This is true of most PbtA hacks I've seen... hell, even Apocalypse World is only really great with its particularly style of post-apocalypse. You find very few genre-generic PbtA games and fewer still that work particularly well (Monster of the Week being the exemplar of that particular field)

I think what makes Magpie games such a good fit for this property is that they are, once again, dealing with young heroes. While the context is quite a bit different, it hits a lot of the same thematic notes as Masks. Characters in the world of Avatar have complicated relationships with their families, their companions, their nations, and ultimately, their own destiny. The genre is different, and the stories you can tell with the setting are quite a bit more varied, but the foundation I expect to be very similar. My only concern is that with all the different eras of play they might be spreading their focus a bit too thin.

 

[Feepdake]

With Star Wars, it's probably that the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. They did not just one but three RPGs, each with six splat books covering the classes for that particular incarnation and then did a few adventures and other sourcebooks. They even followed that up with era books for using the different RPGs together but in eras other than the one the main books focus on (between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back), as well as books collecting bits and bobs from all the other books (spaceships, gear, and such). Sure, they could do more, but that would mean investing more money for a lower rate of return.

IME, it's fairly rare for licensed RPGs to be actively supported for a long time, and moreso in the modern day. The One Ring is very much an exception – and even there, Cubicle 7 stepped away from it and/or lost the license. But we're not likely to see anything close to the product lines for 80s Marvel Super Heroes, Middle-Earth Role-Playing, or Star Wars.

The main difference between a licensed game and one you're doing yourself is that you're paying a fee for the licensed game. This would generally be in the form of $X per year (or for N years) plus $Y (or Y% royalties) per product. For a game you own, it can make economic sense to support it with supplements for a long time, both because the supplements are (hopefully) self-sustaining and because they drive core book sales – and core book sales are, after all, like free money. But when you're also paying a license fee, core book sales aren't free money anymore, because the license costs money to keep going and eventually you'll hit the point where you say "Nah, my money's better spent on other things" and cancel the license. That doesn't mean it was a bad license, just that licensed games generally aren't sustainable.

The FFGSW line did indeed do pretty well, judging from the number of times it appeared in the ICv2 charts, especially in its earlier years. But yeah, it also did taper off, judging from unmet expectations and fan sentiment, especially it its later years. It's still doing ok in the Roll20 charts though, compared to other licensed IPs.

[A Cthulhu RPG comes the closest to still having legs. But none so far has been funded anywhere near Avatar Legends. It's also not a licensed IP (CoC only holds the trademark for a very specific title), so maybe it doesn't count in this comparison]

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that yes, FFGSW is a well-known and beloved franchise (albeit with some detractors, presumably of their unhappiness with some of the recent films) but I was just making an argument that the Avatar RPG has exceeded the wildest of expectations, which will be very tough for any other RPG with a licensed IP to match. This is, of course, an educated guess, which can always be proven wrong when new barriers are broken, which Avatar Legends itself has done.

 

[Feepdake]

Avatar is hardly more popular than Lord of the Rings. So that's not that.

As I've said, there are many factors.

It'd be interesting to parse out what these are. The PbtA philosophy and the Magpie Games company are kind of popular, but not that popular. The Root RPG, itself a licensed IP, garnered a mere 602k (mere only in comparison to AL, of course).

My guesses are Avatar having massive untapped potential, kind of an unmet nostalgia, if you will. There hasn't been a video game or card game in more than a decade. And a board game was just released this year. Other major IPs, in contrast, have been saturating the gaming and hobby market. Also, heavy social media marketing like I've never seen before. And lots and lots of opportunities for fans to try out the game via Magpie's play program even before the Kickstarter was launched. This presumably built word of mouth. I think their marketing and publicity efforts are paying off handsomely.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Forget I brought it up, insisting that players don't bring their own expectations about about such matters in when they're new is a non-starter.