Want better games? Make better heroes.

0:00 You know how in a movie an entire city gets wiped out and you just think, yikes. But if one dog dies, suddenly you're trying not to ugly cry at the movie theater? I'm looking at you, I Am Legend. Jail for Warner Brothers. Jail for 1000 years. Epic stories can be a lot of fun, but it turns out it's hard to stay emotionally available for the apocalypse. It's the smaller stories, the ones that feel personal and relatable, that can really pack a punch. That's exactly what drew me to a fantasy tabletop game called Legend in the Mist. I'm mostly a D&D girl, but halfway through this game's tutorial - which, by the way, takes the form of a choose your own adventure comic - I realized I was already writing this video in my head. This game is built from the ground up to support intimate, emotional stories and real character growth, and all with a surprisingly simple core mechanic. In this video, we're gonna make a Legend in the Mist "hero"

0:45 together so you can see the system in action and decide if you are the target audience for a game where you can get a bonus for being an optimist and a penalty for being in the middle of a messy divorce. Seriously, that is not a joke. This video is sponsored by Son of Oak, the studio behind Legend in the Mist. That's how I found the game, but I only decided to make a full video after spending a couple of hours with it and realizing that a 60 second ad was not enough time to show you guys what's special here. Even if you never play it, the ideas in this game are worth thinking about for your own table. It's a great reminder that choosing smaller, more personal stories can sometimes hit way harder than the ones where you have to kill God before he eats the sun or whatever. Legend in the Mist takes the already sleek system from Son of Oak's City of Mist, an urban fantasy detective game, and streamlines it even further for rustic fantasy. Think: everyday heroes

1:32 who leave their cozy villages and are changed by their adventures. You can play it solo, with a group, or co-op, no Game Master Required. You're welcome, Forever DMs. It was a smash hit on Kickstarter last year, and I can absolutely see why. Characters don't have stats or pages of features and rules. They just have tags. That's it. That's the game mechanic that everything is built on. It took me a little to wrap my head around, but once I did, I couldn't believe how much this simple system can do. You can download and play the free Legend in the Mist comic book adventure at the link in the description for a quick introduction to the gameplay, and if you decide that you want the whole game, you can buy the core rule book PDF now at sonofoak.com or get it instantly when you pre-order the hardcover book. Okay, let's build a character. You know what that means: Time to shake things up and move four feet to my left. That's what passes for excitement when you work in the same

2:19 tiny room in the basement every day. Let's go! In Legend in the Mist, you aren't just a player character. No, no. You are... a hero. At least, that's what the book calls you. Really, you're an unlikely hero. Someone from an out of the way place, a regular Joe now being dragged towards something bigger. That's the heart of what the game calls Rustic Fantasy: stories about humble nobodies who get caught up in adventures that change them. Think Bilbo Baggins from the Hobbit leaving his cozy hobbit hole, Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke trying to cure his curse. Or Shrek! From Shrek. I'm not kidding, that fits the brief. I've printed the hero cards from the back of the book - basically our character sheet. I wanted the pretty colors and my printer only does grayscale, so I made a heroic pilgrimage to Office Depot. Please clap. There are three different

3:05 methods for character creation. You can choose from pre-made options, you can just make up whatever feels right, or you can dig into detailed questionnaires. You can also mix and match to suit your needs. So we're gonna try a little of each so you can see the whole range of how intense you can get about character creation, from 'I forgot I was supposed to create a character' all the way to 'I was avoiding going to the DMV.' In D&D, you would pick species, class, background, stuff like that. But here, it's all about tags: short descriptors of whatever might help or hinder you on your adventure. A tag could be a skill like fishermen, a trait like youngest sibling or an item like stylish hat. This one would obviously give you a plus one bonus to looking cool and fun. I don't wanna read you the whole rulebook here, but in short, everything is tags and tags can be anything. Legend in the Mist heroes are made up of four theme tags recorded on these theme cards.

3:53 These describe the most important things about the character. But unlike D&D, you decide what features actually matter to the story you're telling. You can skip the 'elf' tag if you think your elf's passion for amateur taxidermy is more relevant. Theme tags fall into three categories: origins, which is background, adventure, which is heroic traits, and greatness, which is world-shaping power. These categories signify your hero's 'might.' If you have a lot of greatness themes, you are mighty. For rustic fantasy, most or all of your themes at the beginning of the game will be origin themes. Remember, who are you? No one of consequence. At least, not yet. So let's set aside adventure and greatness and focus on our hero's origin. Now, if we were really in a rush, we would use something called 'tropes.' Basically pre-made characters that give you a set of ready-made themes and tags.

4:38 Tropes can be everything from 'wide-eyed apprentice' to 'grizzled hunter' to 'river beauty.' That's a river spirit or drowned soul who lures unwitting villagers to their watery graves, which is of course my jam. But we're not gonna do that because that would make this video very short, and I know you need a little more time to finish folding your laundry. So instead, we will pick just one of these ready-made theme tags and use it to understand how a theme tag works, and then we'll invent the other three from scratch. I know it's only August, but content creator life means being displaced from time because I have to be working on fall projects right now in order to have them done for fall, which is why I, unlike Target, must be forgiven for playing Christmas carols in September. Anyway, that's why I am in the mood to make my hero a cute little village witch. I'm gonna name her Tamsin as both a movie reference and a nod to my favorite author. Witches do magic, so let's flip to the magic page.

5:25 Magic themes can belong to any might category. So you'll see examples of origin tags, adventure tags, and greatness tags on this page. Our little village witch is capable of nothing so mighty as 'grand necromancy,' so we're gonna give her the 'rudimentary magic' tag. Most tags in this game stand alone and are pretty self-explanatory. If your hero has the 'walking stick' item tag, then that means they have a walking stick. No further information required. But since theme tags are what define your character and shape your arc, they're a little bit more complex. Each theme tag contains three other tags, like a little Russian nesting doll of tags. Two of those tags are power tags and one is a weakness tag. The rudimentary magic theme kit suggests a bunch of possible tags to choose from. For my first power tag, I will choose 'beginner's wand,' which means when I cast a spell, I can add plus one to my roll.

6:12 This isn't written down anywhere. It's not like the book says "beginner's wand, magic item, plus one to spell casting." It's more like, "well, what is a wand for? It's for magic." So when I do magic, this tag is helpful. But depending on what happens, this tag could be useful for other things, too. Like... fishing the last pickle out of a jar or conducting an orchestra. I'll also choose 'deflect spell,' which could be a really helpful defensive option. Now we have to choose a weakness tag. I'm going to pick 'needs to concentrate.' So if Tamsin is trying to cast a spell while something distracting is going on, like while falling out of a window or in the middle of a busy tavern on karaoke night, this tag would give me a minus one to my roll. Whenever your weakness tag gets involved in a roll, you mark one 'improve.' When you hit three, you get to improve your theme in various ways, like adding or updating a tag.

6:58 So the more your weakness comes up during your adventures, the more you'll grow and improve. Despite the words power and weakness, any tag can be a help or a hindrance depending on the circumstance. If you have a tag like 'made of muscle,' that would help you when trying to lift a heavy rock, but may be less helpful if you're trying to tiptoe across a fragile rope bridge. It's all contextual. Like I said before, these tags do stack. So if I'm trying to cast a small, simple spell, I could add plus two because I can apply both my rudimentary magic tag and my beginner's wand tag. But if that's not enough, I have one last option: I can burn a tag for power. This means I would choose one of my power tags and 'scratch' it, making it temporarily unavailable, and I would get a plus three to this specific roll instead of a plus one. Scratched tags can be recovered when you rest. So if I wanted to make sure my spell succeeded, I might burn

7:43 my beginner's wand tag for power and the narrator might say that I have demanded so much from this item that its power has been drained and it won't be useful again until it's had time to recharge. Much like me after small talking with strangers. The narrator can also scratch my tags. So let's say that I use my deflect spell tag, but my roll is too low to succeed. Not only do I fail to deflect the spell, but the attempt could damage my beginner's wand as a consequence, and that tag might be scratched. Now I can't use it until it's been recovered. Theme tags have one last important feature: quests. This may or may not be a literal quest, like "recover the lost sword of Mitochondria." Don't look at me like that, the kingdom of Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the nation, but it doesn't have to be that quest-y of a quest. It's more like a personal journey or a belief related to the tag.

8:29 It basically just explains why this theme is important to your character. In this case, the provided quest for rudimentary magic is "I'm going to keep practicing until I become a true wizard." Whenever Tamsin does something toward this goal, like finding a mentor or experimenting with spells, mark a milestone. But if she ignores it, like trains with a sword instead or passes up an opportunity to learn, I mark an abandon. When either hits three, the theme evolves or is replaced. So if Tamsin keeps slacking, she'll lose her rudimentary magic tag and get something new. But if she sticks to her guns, that tag may evolve into a stronger form of magic. I'm completely obsessed with this, by the way. It bakes character growth right into gameplay, which is an essential part of a satisfying and meaningful story. In a lot of D&D games, your character might say they care about rescuing their

9:15 kidnapped brother, but then spend six sessions doing a string of side quests to save a failing bakery. In Legend in the Mist, ignoring your goals actually changes your hero. The game basically looks at your character sheet and says, "okay, you're not allowed to call yourself family first anymore, Gordon Ramsay." As themes evolve or are replaced, you'll get to engage with mechanics like promise, quintessences, and special improvements, but those don't come up until later. So we're gonna leave those alone and move on to our other three theme tags. Now that we've tried using one of the pre-made theme kits from the book, let's get a little more creative and make some of our own. We will start by giving Tamsin a people tag to describe her heritage. I'm gonna invent one so we can use the questionnaire designed to help us develop our own people tag. I'm picturing Tamsin as a real cottage core little plant witch. So let's invent a people who are born

10:01 with a natural connection to the earth. We will call them 'greenborn.' Not to be confused with greenbean, which is a people with a natural connection to legumes. The list of power tag questions is designed to help us come up with ideas for tags related to this people. For example, "what skill, technique, or trick is practiced by your people?" Maybe greenborn people are particularly good at growing and working with plants, so we'll make the first power tag 'green thumb.' It's useful for gardening, herbalism, and turning into the kind of person who walks into a bank and says stuff like, "I wonder if they can give me a cutting of that variegated tradescantia?" Not every question may apply to every hero, but this list has 10 questions on it, and we only need three power tags, so we can pick and choose which questions make sense for this particular character. I'm thinking of greenborn as more of a birthright,

10:47 an innate gift, rather than a community or culture. So I'll ignore questions like "when in need, who among your people can you call for aid?" And instead, I'll focus on questions like, "what unique or supernatural ability do your people possess?" For this one, I am creating a tag called 'the earth speaks to me.' One thing I'm trying to keep in mind here is specificity. Green thumb is narrowly about being good with plants, while the earth speaks to me could cover anything from predicting the weather to tracking a lost goat. For broad tags like that, you need to take a separate action to show how the tag is useful. So if I wanna use my greenborn connection to make traveling easier, I can't just add a plus one, but I could, say, perform a weather divination ritual, and then the narrator could give me a tag like 'weather forecast' to add to any rolls concerning travel. That's why it's good to have both specific and broad tags.

11:33 Specific tags are easier to use, but broad ones can apply to more situations. For her weakness tag, there are more questions to guide us. I find this one interesting: "When are you hindered by your cultural ways or inherited traits?" I think somebody who feels connected to the earth could feel very trapped inside a manmade building, cut off from that connection, so I'm adding the weakness tag 'claustrophobic.' Finally, we need a quest. The questionnaire suggests that one quest option might be "the ethos or way of your people." So I've chosen 'as the earth sustains us, so must we sustain it.' There's a neat implication here, too, because if she fails to treat the natural world with respect, she might lose her greenborn tag, and who knows what that might look like? It doesn't mean she was never greenborn, but it does mean that that theme no longer defines her and she can't access those powers anymore.

12:18 Maybe her powers would just fade, or maybe a greenborn who turns their back on the earth becomes something else. A corrupted greenborn - a greenblight who can poison the natural world. There are all kinds of weird paths that might take, and they're all interesting stories. Next up, a personality tag. I'm gonna call this one 'straight shooter' and the power tags will be 'clear communicator' and 'risk taker.' The weakness tag, of course, is 'a little too honest.' This quest is another ideal: Honesty is the best policy. This one makes me a little bit of a glutton for punishment, to be honest, because I'll have to mark an abandon every single time that Tamsin lies, and I can't imagine that's not gonna come up. For the final theme tag, I am giving her a companion, because what's a cute little witch without her familiar? She has a black cat named Widdershins. Her power tags are 'on silent paws' and 'calming influence.'

13:05 Her weakness tag should be obvious to all cat owners: 'answers to no one.' This quest is about their bond. It's "I promise to keep you safe," which is what I'm desperately trying to communicate to my cats whenever they try to slip out the door and roll around on the concrete. Sorry, buddy. I know you're a prisoner, but trust me, it's for your own good. That is all four of our theme tags, so we are most of the way through character creation. Tamsin the village witch has rudimentary magic, she's greenborn, she's a straight shooter, and she has a black cat. These themes will change as she adventures, but this is our starting point. We get one more thing: a single story tag. Story tags are temporary, and despite living in the backpack section of your hero card, they aren't necessarily physical items. Sure, you might have a story tag like 'coil of rope' or 'one day's rations,' but you could also have a story tag like 'cleric's blessing'

13:52 or 'directions to the bridge.' This isn't quite like inventory because you could have plenty of things on you that don't require story tags. Not having a 'sturdy boots' tag in your backpack doesn't mean that you're barefoot, but if you come across a peddler and try to make a trade, you probably can't convince him that your boots are valuable unless you have a story tag that's like, 'dang, these boots are really great.' One of my favorite things about story tags is that they allow you to incorporate things like a hero's emotional experiences into the gameplay in a mechanical way. If something happens that makes your narrator give you the 'hopeful' tag, you might actually be able to add a bonus to your roll because you feel hopeful. This is such a great way to incentivize well-rounded roleplay. Thinking about what your character feels doesn't just improve the narrative, it also benefits the gameplay. Anyway, for her starting story tag, I'm going to give Tamsin a ritual candle.

14:39 Again, this isn't like a thing that exists. There's no 'ritual candle' in the book, but that feels like a reasonable thing for a witch to have on her, and I can think of plenty of applications for it in the game. Since story tags are temporary, at some point, the narrator may say "Your ritual candle is spent," and then I'll have to remove the tag and go find another candle if I wanna replace it. If this is still all feeling very abstract, I get it. As someone who is coming to this game from more traditional RPGs, I needed to see examples in order to really understand how all this stuff works. So let's just talk through an imaginary scene with Tamsin so we can see the tags in action. Let's imagine that Tamsin and Widdershins are traveling through the forest when they encounter a river that has flooded for recent rains, washing out the bridge. Tamsin might decide to sit down on the bank, light her candle, and try to commune with the earth

15:24 to locate the best point to cross. I would roll 2d6 plus one for the ritual candle and plus one for her power tag the earth speaks to me. If that total is 10 or higher, she succeeds, learning that there is a rocky area to the west where she could wade across. The narrator may give her a story tag like 'earth's guidance' to help with her crossing. Of course, the water is still rushing over these rocks, so it's a risky crossing even here. The narrator might give the river crossing a tag like 'slippery rocks,' which imposes a minus one modifier to the hero's roll. Tamsin might get a plus one from being a risk taker and a plus one from the earth's guidance tag, but she might also get a minus one because she needs to carry Widdershins across and that cat answers to no one. Certainly not people who try to carry her into the water. With all those negative modifiers, we might not be able to hit that 10 to succeed.

16:10 If we roll seven to nine, that's a success with consequences, and if it's six or lower, that is just consequences. We might consider burning a tag for power here, maybe scratching risk taker in order to add a plus three, but let's assume that even after all that, we roll poorly here. The obvious consequences are that she slips on the rocks and she and Widdershins are swept downstream. This is now a new challenge and we have to decide what Tamsin does. We might say that she tries to grab hold of a rock or a tree branch to pull herself out of the water, but this isn't just about her safety. One of her quests is to keep Widdershins safe. If she focuses on saving herself, she might need to mark one abandon on that quest. So instead, Tamsin tries to grab hold of Widdershins so they don't get separated. This means they're swept much further down river, but they're still together.

16:55 That might also mean that we mark a milestone for the black cat quest. When the two finally manage to claw their way out of the river, the narrator might give Tamsin the status tag 'waterlogged.' They're also way off course, so the new challenge becomes figuring out how to find their way back to the path. Does this all make sense? We're making up the story as we go. There are no specific rules for what it means to be waterlogged or for the rocks to be slippery, but the tags allow us to quickly and easily apply game mechanics to any situation we can think of. Of course, there is one final hero card that we haven't filled out yet, and that is fellowship. This is your adventuring party, the other players in the game. In case you haven't noticed, it's just me and my tripod around here, so I obviously don't have any party members, but if I did, this would be where we would work together to create a shared fellowship theme card,

17:40 which is just like our hero theme cards, except it applies to the whole group. It has power tags, a weakness tag, and a quest, just like the other theme tags. The big difference is that fellowship power tags are single use and they can't be burnt for power. If you invoke one of these shared power tags, it gets scratched until the whole group can rest and recover it. You also get individual relationship tags with each other hero. In your fellowship, these tags describe how you feel about each other, like 'close friends' or 'sibling rivalry' or 'indebted.' That's why I always carry a sword - in case somebody in my fellowship tags me as 'mortal enemy.' Every time the fellowship rests and spends quality time together, these tags can be updated to reflect how they have changed. Both players need to agree on these relationship tags, although they don't have to be symmetrical. Maybe your tag with another hero is 'secret crush'

18:26 and theirs is 'mild disgust.' Hey, some stories are tragedies. So now we have a character, but honestly, we have barely scratched the surface of all the different ways that this tag system is used to tell a complete story. I mean, we didn't even talk about trackers and they're shaped like cute little leaves, so I'm sure you can imagine how much self-control that took. As someone coming to this game from a much more structured play style, it took a fair amount of explanation and repetition for me to really get that tags are truly the mechanic for everything. Did your hero gain a new item? Great. Here's the item tag. Is that door particularly difficult to get through? Give it the 'reinforced' tag. It's tags on tags. on tags. There's a separate book called the Action Grimoire that's basically just a book of suggestions for anything that you might come across in the game, whether you're a hero or a narrator,

19:13 if you're ever not sure how to approach something like enchanting an item, improvising a weapon, setting a trap, this book has helpful suggestions for what sort of tags to use, what it looks like to succeed or take consequences, and what status tags or trackers might come into play. They're not rules, because you don't have to do things that way. You always have the option to just invent your own path forward. But if, like me, you can get overwhelmed by super open-ended rules, the Action Grimoire is like training wheels for getting used to the tag system. If you wanna learn more about Legend in the Mist, check out the link in the description. There's a 50-page comic that's basically a choose your own adventure, and it teaches you how to apply tags to your rolls, how success and consequences work, and how your themes change over time. It's free to download, so the only reason not to try it is if one of your theme tags is 'grouch'

19:59 and your quest is to avoid all things that are fun. If you enjoyed coming along with me for character building, I have a few other videos where I do that with some other games. What do you think? What game should I create a character for next? Let me know in the comments and maybe I'll check it out. I've been having a lot of fun with these!