Style Guide
Legacy has been designed with several key things in mind that will influence the game style. Understanding the thinking behind these ideas will make everybody’s game better.
The game is built around a principle of working with your fellow players to achieve your goals. There is still going to be scope for rivalry and working against other players and, dare I say it, devious underhanded schemes designed to make your rival's best laid plans fall to ruin. However, the game is designed with less overt conflict than recent society games.
In designing the game, the GMs worked from an initial idea of "no character death". This has lead to one very important technology in the game called "Preservation". Preservation is poorly understood by the PCs, but what they do understand is how to use the basic function which is to allow somebody who has been killed to be bought back from the dead.
In brief, an individual enters the machine and the Chirurgeons (doctors) activate the process. From then on, when that character dies unnaturally, they will appear in the nearest Preservation device, fully intact except for a loss of memory from the last 24 hours or so. This, in practice, means that death happens but is not a huge drawback for a character.
For those already racing through the possibilities, I should say now that the GM team have considered the possibility of locking people away at the top of a tall tower where they cannot interact with the game. The spirit of the preservation device is to prevent a character being taken out of play and we have devised IC reasons for the tall tower plan and similar things not to work. You are welcome to try such things, but be aware that chances are your rival will not remain trapped in your tower.
For those who like the risk of character death, you can opt out of being preserved by buying the appropriate quirk in the character generation process.
In an attempt to make sure that your characters would not want to do such nasty things anyway, we have made a society with a strong belief in the concept of honour. The full details of honour can be found on their own page but the GM team want to make the importance of honour clear. We cannot control other PCs reaction to your honour levels, but NPCs will react well to the honourable amongst you and will be less willing to co-operate with the dishonourble.
Honour is based on perceptions though, and for those who like to play the devious or evil character you can be very dishonourable. However, great care must be taken not to be overt about this. Great dishonour is the one way that a character can be taken out of the game, if you start to get a reputation for being too dishonourable then your family will disown you and there will be no possibility of being invited to the court meetings which are the game's setting.
In return for asking you not to kill each other, the GM team are going to endeavour to make sure you have plenty of GM provided plot to keep you happy. This will likely include House rivalries as well. Houses do work for the best of the Empire, but want the best for themselves too, which will likely bring them into conflict. The way such conflicts between Houses are resolved should be within the honourable system. Seeking advantages over your enemies and trying to cripple their efforts is fine, so long as you do it in such a way that it is considered honourable...
The GM driven plots in Legacy will be run on the principle that anybody can opt out. We hope that no player will ever feel that they have to get involved in a plot they come across from an out of character point of view. If you wish to leave politics to the politicians then you can, likewise let the military commanders worry about the wars. That having been said, the GM team are dedicated to ensuring that your quirks, particularly those of negative points cost, mean something. If you take Preservation Incompatibility thinking that you are just a paperpusher who isn't going to get into deadly situations then you may be surprised. We consider quirks to be something that will be relevant to your game, so please only take things that you are happy to be relevant.
You may also think that there are gaps in the quirk list. The GM team have taken a deliberate decision not to include certain classes of quirk in the system. These include such quirks as true love, fear, and such like. You are welcome to incorporate these things into your character, but the GM team felt that they are part of how you roleplay your character and therefore shouldn't be limited by the system. Similarly, such quirks as beautiful or ugly are easy for players to forget and thus become irrelevant to the interactions and a waste of points or free points. We are more than happy for you to take as many "0 point quirks" as you wish, the GMs are always happy to have more hooks into your character.
This is also why the GMs would encourage everybody to write at least a brief background for their characters, even if it is just a few sentence linking together the skills they have bought. The GMs want to make this game about the characters, and the better we understand your characters then the better we should be able to make the game for each other.