Indie RPG Spotlight: The ‘Avatar Legends’ RPG Lets You Be a Bender
In 2021 the Avatar Legends Kickstarted the entire game in under twenty minutes. Now the system is up for awards, and there’s a reason.
The Avatar series has been huge since it premiered in 2005. After a three year run of the original series Avatar: The Last Airbender, we were welcomed back into the world of benders with The Legend of Korra, and are now looking forward to a movie following up on the (now slightly older) original characters as well as a possibly untitled Earth-Avatar series, both scheduled for 2025.
And this isn’t even counting the comics, novels, art books, and video games. We love Avatar and this is in no small part due to good writing that didn’t speak down to its relatively-young audience while tackling mature themes and goofy nonsense alike.
So when the Avatar Legends tabletop RPG crowdfunding campaign opened up on Kickstarter, it wasn’t a surprise to see the game fully funded to its $50,000 goal in sixteen minutes. By the time the Kickstarter had concluded they had 81,567 unique supporters, and had raised $9.53 million dollars, reaching all of their planned goals and making a few more along the way.
Avatar Legends
Produced by Magpie Games and designed by Brendan Conway and James Mendez Hodes, Avatar Legends aimed to bring the world of Avatar to life as faithfully and authentically as possible. This meant balancing the big political questions and issues with acts of magic bending and social issues. Some episodes of Avatar were solved with nothing but the power of friendship.
The team also wanted to focus on some of the themes that made Avatar work. Big themes like colonization, war, and oppression were all very prevalent throughout the series. Even when they just came through as undercurrents. Plus smaller individual-human issues like failure, inadequacy, and depression. And while Avatar tackled all of these things, they did it while making sure that the show always stayed generally upbeat, positive, and sometimes downright goofy. It was a thin tightrope to walk, but Avatar did it. And the designers of Avatar Legends wanted to match that energy.
Gameplay & Character Creation
In order to balance all of this, they decided to make Avatar Legends a Powered by the Apocalypse style game, similar to MASKS. This is a very simple gaming system where players need nothing but a three-to-four-page character sheet and a couple of d6.
Players are asked to choose from one of a collection of ‘playbooks’ that describe their character’s basic goals and personality, and as a result define their moves, stats, and how they can grow or get more powerful. They also lay out a guide for your history and personal connections. In a more crunchy game, you choose to play a Fire Bender and work from there. In Avatar Legends, you pick your character’s personality, goals, and principles and then get to building. Of course, you can still make a bender… or a non-bender. But it’s not the defining core feature of who you are.
These are the playbooks in the Core Book.
To play a PbtA game, decide what move you want to make and roll two d6. Then, either add or subtract your pre-determined stats based on your playbook. Anything totaling a seven or more is a hit and a ten+ gives you a fun boost or an especially hard hit. Anything six or below is a miss. This same basic idea works for combat or bending. The same goes for social things like trying to get information, pleading, intimidating, comforting, or calling somebody out. And arguably, these social things can be more important.
Did We Mention the Illustration?
All in all, this is a great system. There’s a reason it was funded in record time. And there’s a reason Avatar Legends up for ENNIEs for Best Family Game and Best Rules.
Did you help fund Avatar Legends? Have you played the game yet? What kind of bender would you be… if you were a bender at all? Let us know in the comments!
Happy adventuring!
