Welcome to Legacies


What Is Legacies?

Hello and welcome to Legacies! Legacies is a live action role-playing adventure game based in Washington State. For those of you who are new to the idea of role-playing, allow us to explain to you exactly what Legacies is all about. Firstly, role-playing is the art of pretending that you are someone that you are not, in many ways a role-player can be considered an actor. You are acting out the life of a character that does not really exist. There is no stage in Legacies, but rather an interactive world that has been created for you. In Legacies, you have the freedom to create your own character, play that character, and determine the future of your character by the actions you take in game.

The world of Legacies takes place in a fantasy/medieval/renaissance setting. It is a place of knights, wizards, monsters, and treasure. Suit up in your armor and grab your sword, for this is fantasy role-playing at its absolute best. Become a fearless warrior, a mystical wizard, a mysterious rogue, a benevolent priest, an alchemist creating concoctions in a dim laboratory, or almost anything else your imagination can inspire. We create an entire world for you to explore, complete with adventures and an ever-evolving plot. Imagine yourself acting out the part of a hero or heroine in a good fantasy novel, except it’s not a novel, you are experiencing it to a much closer degree.

Your normal table-top role-playing games are played around table with paper and dice. It's time to put down the dice and get up from the table, because role-playing games just got a thousand times more interesting! With Live Action Role-Playing (LARPing) you experience the fun, first hand. You actually wear a costume and take on your persona as you explore a physical world that we have created. Combat is perfectly safe and is performed with boffer weapons. Magic is simulated by little beanbags called spell packets. You stay in game as your character from Friday night until Sunday afternoon, living the whole weekend in this wonderful fantasy world. There is plenty of adventuring, combat, and political intrigue to keep you busy for the entire event.

So few people have ever heard of this valued form of entertainment and we want to change that. We want to ultimately bring live role-playing to a higher plateau, a goal that can only be made possible by the players support. We are going to work hard to earn that support. We will spare no expense to achieve this goal and perhaps some day we will play Legacies and similar games in actual castles and reconstructed medieval towns and lands. These are our goals and we feel that it is important to share them with you. Welcome! We hope that you find your experience at Legacies to be an exciting one.



The Legacies Experience

Legacies is a Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) game that offers its players an intensely challenging environment of excitement, intrigue, and fun. Perhaps you are familiar with the world of role-playing games (RPG's), or perhaps not. Simply put, a role-paying game is a game where you, the player, take on a character's personality and persona. A LARP, like Legacies, takes this idea and thrives off of it. When playing a weekend of Legacies you are offered an opportunity to bring a character of your own design to life, taking on the role for yourself. The Legacies community gathers roughly once a month to don our costumes and makeup to live out the trials and adventures of the people of the town of Scarborough in the mythical Kingdom of Alba.

Legacies is set in a medieval/renaissance world of high fantasy. Characters range from local blacksmiths and heroic knights, to orc thieves, dwarven bakers and all things in between and far beyond. Players wear period costuming and various make-ups ranging from your everyday to pointed Elf ears, body paint, and full prosthetic facial applications. We strive, through costuming and makeup, as well as atmosphere, to create an environment at the game such that cell phones, classes and work on Monday all fade away and are replaced with the thrill of finding adventure and danger in the least likely of places.

Legacies encourages an environment that fosters individual creativity and stimulates the senses. Our owners, staff, and volunteers are continually adding props, decorations, and story lines that cause our players to develop memorable and entertaining characters. We provide an intense experience each weekend that can prove to be the ultimate stress reliever. From the opening of the game Friday evening, until the game ends on Sunday afternoon, the game never stops.

The story of a character is whatever a player chooses to make of it. Each month we gather as a community to play out the lives of these characters we have created. There is no script that a character has to follow; your words and choices are your own and carry with them the same consequences as they would if they were real people.

When coming to your first Legacies event, be ready for drama, adventure and a whole lot of exercise. The clashing of swords and running towards and away from monsters can be fun and rewarding, but also incredibly tiring. When these elements of physicality, props, and imagination are combined they form to create the total Legacies experience.

Legacies is a very social experience. Not only are the players united in their love of the game, they are friends. LARPing is a very social endeavor. The very essence of LARPing is that the players must interact with the other players in order to maximize the experience.



Using the Website

The Legacies website is a very valuable resource for new and established players alike. The basic navigation of the website is handled by drop down menus located on the top of each page: game, logistics, plot, and player. Under these menus visitors can find information about the time and location of upcoming events , download the rule book and players guide, pre-register for events to save $5 on the entry fee , and a slew of other useful or entertaining pages. Players are highly encouraged to thoroughly explore the website to get a feel for everything there.

Also hosted on the website are forums where the players can socialize online between events, get questions about the game answered, and continue to interact with other characters online between events. Please take a moment to review the below before making your first post to the Forums. In particular, there are some rules to follow:

•	All posts must be signed with your real name. When creating a forum profile, we need your real first and last name in the real name field. Any posts that are not made from a profile with a real name attached, or with the real name attached to the post, will be deleted.
•	You may not post in game (IG) in the In Game Conversations Forum until your character has been played at an event.
•	You may not ask for IG information (or for information about someone) out of game (OOG). For example, you may not say, 'Would all casters PM me,' or 'Would everyone under 100 skill points post here so I know who you are.' That is metagaming, which is a form of cheating. Occasionally Plot may make OOG posts to the IG forums.
•	Please read the website, Rulebook, and Players Guide before asking questions about the game. If you have already read them, we would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
•	Be respectful to your fellow players when making posts to the OOG forums. Your characters can be as rude as they like to other characters, but player to player we expect all posts to be reasonably free of antagonism and hostility. Failure to comply may result in being banned from the forums and/or ref warnings.
•	All posts to the IG forums should be either things that the character is saying, or things that other people can see the character doing. The character’s thoughts and emotions are not things other characters can see, please do not post them.

Preparing to enter the world of Legacies

What follows is an outline of things a new player should ask themselves when they are getting ready to come to a Legacies event. If you are able to go down this list and answer yes to all of them, then you should be in good shape for your first event and onward. You certainly will not be turned away if you have not done any of the things below; they are suggested purely to promote your first event going as smoothly as possible.

•	Have I familiarized myself with the information in the New Players' orientation?
•	Have I read and do I understand Legacies policies as set down in the Players Guide (and also listed in the next section of the New Players' Orientation)?
•	Have I introduced myself to the community of the game by saying 'Hello' on the forums and/or by sending an e-mail to the Player Representative at playerrep@legacieslarp.org?
•	Have I read the Rulebook that is provided on the website to acclimate myself to the rules and structure of the game?
•	Have I had all of my questions clarified by either sending them to playerrep@legacieslarp.org or by posting them to the forums?
•	Have I planned for the event weekend by packing appropriate layers, changes of clothes, food, money and other needed items like toiletries and medications?
•	Do I know when and where to check in for the event and to receive my character card?
•	If I am coming from another LARP or from the SCA, have I contacted logistics@legacieslarp.org to ask what my starting skill points might be?
•	Have I sent a character write-up to logistics@legacieslarp.org no later than the Friday prior to the first event I intend to attend?
•	Do I have a list of how I want to spend my starting money and any Production Points my character may have?
•	Am I prepared to act out the part of my character and to react to the actions of the characters around me as if I were really the person I am playing without being shy or withdrawn?

Common terms

Throughout this orientation you will see a few terms specific to Legacies or LARPs as a whole. Familiarizing yourself with these terms will make reading this orientation easier and give you a better grasp of what players may be talking about at an event.

LARP	Live Action Role Playing game. A game where players act out the persona of particular characters, performing the actions the characters preform in a safe environment.
LARPing	The act of playing in a LARP
Player	A person participating in a LARP
Character	The made up persona a player acts out while playing a LARP
Out of Game (OOG)	A term to describe things that affect a player but not a character. For example the players' automobiles are considered OOG because, while they are necessary to get the players to events they do not belong in the Fantasy/Medieval setting the game takes place in, so the characters cannot use cars to get from one point to another. A common usage is to say information is OOG. For example, between events if you overhear two other players talking about something their characters did at event when you ran into them at the mall, the character you play doesn't know that their characters did said thing, because your character was not at the mall; you were.
In Game (IG)	A term to describe things that affect a character, that happen in the make believe game setting the players are playing in.
PC	A short hand form of 'Player Character'. A PC is a character that belongs to a specific player; no other players may play that character. A player recieves a character card for each character they have and may only play two PCs per event. They have complete control of the actions of their PCs and in all ways control who their PC is and what their PC does.
Character Card	A half sheet of paper that contains all of a PCs demographic information: Character Name, Player Name, what skills the character has, etc.
Logistics	A team of players responsible for helping other players create and maintain their PCs, print and distribute Character Cards, handle registering players for an event and collect event fees.
Plot	A team of players responsible for creating and maintaining the game world the characters live and interact in. The in game events of Legacies all take place in one town; it is the Plot team's responsibility to create the illusion that there is a greater world outside of the town via storylines (commonly called plotlines at Legacies) that effect the town and its citizens.
NPC	A short hand form of 'Non-Player Character'. The game world is inhabited by more characters than just the PCs that live in the town. To represent this Plot uses NPCs. NPCs are characters created by plot to model the outside world that can interact with the town. NPCs can range from maruading goblins that appear once to attack the players and get killed, to neighboring Lords that appear often over several events. The Plot team will ask players to volunteer to temporarily play an NPC for a couple hours at event in place of their PC, and in return the player will recieve some bribe (described below) as reward. The plot team will describe who the NPC is, and what skills the NPC has, and it is the players' responsibility to abide by this information.
NPCing	Playing an NPC
Racial	Legacies has several different races that a player can choose for their character. Available races can range from humans to Canids (essentially bipedal dogs). Each race has a set of racial abilities, or racials, that are special powers associated with that particular race.
Skills	Characters can do quite a bit in the world of Legacies. Some things, like cooking, all characters are assumed to have at least some minor ability in, and can just do. Other things, like being able to effectively wield a sword or cast magic imply a special level of training in to be able to do, with a large disparity in profficiency between new characters and characters that have been practicing for a while. To model this there are skills that can be purchased for a character, the more skills purchased the better the character is at something. A list of skills can be found in the Legacies Rulebook.
Skill Point (SP)	Skill Points are points that are used to purchase skills, for example One handed edge, the skill necessary to wield the average sword, costs 3 SP. Characters begin play with 10 skill points. Each event a character is played they will accrue additional SP to buy more skills with.
Production Point(PP)	Production Points are points used to build various items in game, for example, weapons, magic scrolls, and armor. Production Points are gained when a character possesses a Production Skill, which is a skill specifically oriented towards building items. The more production skills a character has the more PP they will have to spend building items.
Bribe	Bribe or Bribe Points are a way to reward players for contributions to the game. Players who NPC, join a team (Plot, Logistics, Rules), donate equipment and costuming to Plot, or otherwise contribute to the game will recieve Bribe for their trouble. Bribe can be spent on a variety of rewards such as more skill points for a character.
Scarborough	The name of the town the PCs live and interact in.

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