Ah, LA.
It's too bad you missed on out Gary's presence. He was on the Internet since 1996-1997, although he didn't have much of a message board presence until the early 2000s. A lot of fans missed the Marcray's Keep days, when Gary actually had a (for the time) web site and had test drafts of these games available.
Outside of a few confusing terms, LA was a lot easier to get into and write for than DJ. (I loved DJ but creating a monster was a beast because of the whole armor table/stat block system), and because of the lawsuit and capital problems we never got a real comprehensive list of classic fantasy monsters).
Interestingly enough, the whole Action Block/ Action Block Count terms and terms like "real time/game time" came because this was originally meant to be a computer game system.
I would suggest looking for the Three Core Hekaforge books first, Lejendary Adventure, Lejend Masters Lore, and Beasts of Lejend. If you like old-school D&D you'll probably like reading this stuff, even if you don't play the game.
Lejendary Earth is okay, not as good IMO as Epic of Aerth for DJ.
Sadly, this wasn't as successful as D&D, and it ended up with a cult following. If you're looking for more information, you might want to check out sections on Dragonsfoot for Gary's feedback. There used to be a dedicated web site called Lejendary.com, but it disappeared. (It was basically a volunteer who worked on it). The only other site dedicated to LA is called lejendarylands.org, but activity has been dead and I also think it's been dominated by just a few people with some bad attitudes who ironically don't care about Gary and I heard it was formed because of dislike of the official sources. (Even for a minor game, gamer politics take over).
There was a small 'zine called Lejends published with Gary's input for a few years but it stopped because of low subs. I doubt you'll be able to find those however.
This was Gary's preferred system, and pretty much everything he worked on other than CZ in the latter years were all done using that system. Even stuff allegedly for d20, like Hall of Many Panes, was just an LA adventure he had otherwise had others (including myself) convert to d20 rules. He actually wanted to do CZ in LA, but he felt in CZ's case, a level based system worked best--and he was actually trying to adapt LA to handle a level-based paradigm to handle it.
After Gary's death, Gail ended the contract with Hekaforge and was intending to republish the core rules through Mongoose, but due to various factors plans changed and now things are on an extended hiatus. I hope things change but it'll probably be at least a few years before this is seen again.
Most of Gary's unpublished work fit to print involves LA--there's still a large sourcebook called the Key of Sand that Gary talked about several times, and an "Unearthed Arcana" like collection of expansions to the rules.
