Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game is a fantasy

The game is lead designed by Brendan Conway, and is built on the

The game was nominated for 2023 ENNIE Awards for "Best Rules" and "Best Family Game / Product."^[2]

Overview

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game is a fantasy

Players create their own characters with the help of playbooks – templates based on archetypes of characters' life experiences, exemplifying different playstyles[4]^[6] – and choose between playing as benders, martial artists, or technological savants,^[3] all of which are available to any playbook.^[4] Led by a gamemaster (GM),^[7] players role-play as their characters in one of the five time periods, where they fight for balance in the world, while trying to reach goals they have set out for themselves and struggling with inner balance.^[3] This is represented by a balance track, showing a tug-of-war between two opposing ideals a character has, such as confidence versus loyalty. Certain actions and decisions move a counter between the two ideals on the character's track, affecting two related attributes,^[4] and when a character is balanced, they have access to a powerful "moment of balance" ability.^[8] Characters have four basic attributes – creativity, focus, harmony, and passion – and have differing base abilities based on their playbooks, with the potential to acquire new abilities through a growth mechanic connected to answering questions at the end of play sessions, or through being taught by mentor characters.^[9] Storytelling in the game is structured similarly to the television shows, with individual play sessions corresponding to episodes that together form seasons.^[7]

Production

Avatar Legends is produced by Magpie Games, by ten full-time staff and several part-time contributors,^[10] with Brendan Conway serving as lead designer and James Mendez Hodes as core designer;^[6] The team worked together with many other Asian game designers, writers, and consultants to portray the game's setting as authentically as possible.^[6][11] The designers intended the game to be accessible to players of all ages,^[3] and sought to capture what they saw as the core of the Avatar franchise: balance, heroism, the power of friendship,^[12] growing up in wartime, the responsibility of power, the damaging legacy of colonialism, and empathy in relationships.^[6]

The game is designed with the Powered by the Apocalypse framework as a base, which Magpie Games had previously used in games including Masks: A New Generation and Root: The Roleplaying Game;^[12] they chose it as they considered it accessible for those new to role-playing games, while allowing for systems around elemental bending and politics.^[13] They also appreciated Powered by the Apocalypse's character playbooks, which they focused on archetypes of different lived experiences rather than an "innate characteristic like race or heritage", with the intent of exploring life in a world of colonization and systemic oppression, and encouraging players to role-play characters rather than Asian stereotypes.^[6]

In addition to this concern around handling Asian cultural influences on the setting – made somewhat easier by the lack of a direct analogue to white people in the setting, making the Asian characters less othered – one of the production team's major concerns was the portrayal of bending. Magpie Games' CEO Mark Truman thought that although it would have been easy to define bending through a rules-heavy system akin to how magic is handled in Dungeons & Dragons, it would have gone against the ubiquity of bending in the setting. Instead, they chose to let characters have varying competency and training in bending, affecting how well they can manipulate their element, and, taking cues from characters in the television series, let players customize the bending in accordance with their characters' personalities.^[6]

Crowdfunding and release

Magpie Games announced the game in February 2021, after licensing the Avatar franchise from

By August 16, the campaign had reached all planned crowdfunding goals: Magpie Games worked with ViacomCBS to develop further goals for the campaign, but noted that although they were trying to get them approved as quickly as possible, it would take some time,[15] and they wanted to avoid feature creep and adding promises that could take away from the amount of polish they could dedicate to the game.^[10] When the campaign ended, 81,567 supporters had raised a total of $9.53M, making it the tenth highest funded campaign overall on Kickstarter, and the one with the ninth most individual pledges.^[16] Although Magpie Games assumed a certain level of success due to the popularity of the Avatar: The Last Airbender television series, they did not expect to raise more than $3M, and attributed a lot of the success to their online advertising, which targeted people outside of the role-playing game community. In addition to the advertising, a large portion of the budget was put toward printing and shipping, while another significant portion went toward the expenses involved in acquiring the license for the series, such as commissioning lawyers and agents.^[10] Following the campaign, the publisher continued accepting "late pledges".^[17]

A free quickstart e-book with basic rules and a description of the setting was released in July 2021 ahead of the crowdfunding campaign.^[4] The game's core rulebook was originally scheduled to be released digitally in February 2022,^[12] with supplementaty books releasing in late 2022 and early 2023,^[11] but the release schedule was pushed back in part due to a cardboard shortage in the United States.^[18][19] The Digital Edition, Physical Edition, Wan Shi Tong's Adventure Guide expansion book and other items became available for pre-order on October 12, 2022, with the Digital Edition becoming available on October 26 and the other items planned to become available on or after January 25, 2023.^[1]

Books

Reception

Previewing the game,