We’re wrapping up our 2016 Year in Review guest blog series with a last minute entry from Rachel Ventura and Jason Nelson from Legendary Games. Legendary has been extremely busy this past year and it doesn’t look like they have any plans to slow down for the new year…but let’s let them tell you all about it.

A Legendary 2016

^[1]This was an exciting year for the Legendary Games team, as we continued to broaden our reach and our product offerings. We published a total of 135 products, including 39 for 5th Edition and the remainder for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Some of these products were short PDFs and free supplements, but we still created over 100 full-size supplements, offering most in print as well as PDF, with a growing selection of our products available on virtual tabletops like d20Pro and Fantasy Grounds as well as on HeroLab! Legendary Games has published a huge array of products in the past year, including adventures, bestiaries, magic items, class supplements, setting material, and more, from 3-page Mythic Minis to the 300+ page Trail of the Apprentice Adventure Saga for Pathfinder and 5E.

The Trail of the Apprentice project is an adventure series aimed specifically at new and younger players, taking them from 1st to 5th level in a series of five adventures of growing complexity, helping them to learn not just the rules of the game but also the way to play a tabletop RPG. We launched this project with the aid of Kickstarter, funding at well over triple our initial goal and delivering the entire project in less than six months, including deluxe books, customized character sheets and swag, and character and creature cards. We have also used the Trail of the Apprentice saga and the growing Legendary Beginnings product line to host our first 5th Edition Summer Camp and to run mini-adventure delves at conventions. We are delighted to be part of growing the hobby and passing down the best games around to the next generation of gamers.

Legendary Games is an independent RPG publisher based in Seattle, Washington, but we are actively involved in the convention circuit, hosting booths and events at PaizoCon (including our second-annual massive multi-table Legendary Planet team event), GenCon, WolfCon, Gamehole Con, and the online AetherCon. We love getting in touch with fans directly and introducing them to our products, as well as sitting down and throwing dice with them! We are proud to offer support for many local conventions even when we cannot physically attend, and this year we provided prize support to 72 local cons ^[2], as well as for RPG contests like Iron GM, the Four Horsemen Open at GenCon, and Here Be Monsters!

^[3]In 2016 we were able to finish up several long-running projects, including finalizing the HeroLab additions to our massive three-hardback expansion to the Pathfinder mythic rules ^[4], which we continue to support in our ongoing Mythic Monsters, Mythic Minis, and Mythic Magic product lines. We also delivered the cyberpunk/supers Hypercorps 2099 setting and companion adventures, including our first novella, An Undying Contract, and launched and funded the Hypercorps 2099 Wasteland expansion late this year.

Our last big project still in progress is the epic star-spanning Legendary Planet adventure saga, a sword-and-planet campaign for Pathfinder and 5E, featuring 100+ page adventures with bestiaries of new monsters, gazetteers of new worlds, new magic items, bonus articles, and an ongoing fiction saga to help flesh out the world. This ambitious project has gone more slowly than we would like, but with new additions to the development team we’ve managed to break through some logjams and are getting back on schedule, with an aim firmly in view of having the final hardback compilation available for GenCon 2017!

Legendary Games has a history of providing focused support on different campaign themes, with entire product lines devoted to Gothic Horror, Far East, Egyptian, Righteous Crusade, Metal Gods (sci-fi/fantasy), Pirate, Occult, Red Throne (urban intrigue), River Kings (and faerie forests), Mythos, and Winter-themed campaigns. These products are ideal supplements for the similarly themed official Adventure Paths from Paizo, Inc., but work equally well in any campaign that touches on the same genres. Our first Kickstarter project back in 2013 was the Gothic Campaign Compendium ^[5], taking 17 separate products combining them into a beautiful hardback. We are nearing completion on several more product lines, and we are definitely looking at running one or more similar projects to create hardback compilations for some of our other product lines in the new year.

^[6]We also are greatly expanding our offering of class-focused supplements for both heroes and villains. In addition to past heroic products focused on rogues, paladins, and swashbucklers, and villainous books dealing with antipaladins, evil clerics, and dark druids, 2016 brought us Legendary Kineticists and Legendary Vigilantes, plus Legendary Villains: Vigilantes. It also saw our first two hybrid classes, with the Kinetic Shinobi and Deadeye Hexer. We’ll continue offering amazing class support in the new year, with Legendary Monks and Legendary Hybrids: Yakuza already in layout and Legendary Fighters, Legendary Gunslingers, Legendary Villains: Wicked Witches, and Legendary Hybrids: Doomguard coming soon thereafter. This is in addition to thematic class-focused products like Asian Archetypes: Martial and Asian Archetypes: Magical!

Adventures aplenty await as well, from The Hero’s Ritual to On the Siberian Line, along with bestiaries like Mythic Monsters: Greek, Mythic Monsters: Middle East, and Mythic Monsters: Celtic, along with Beasts of Legend: Medium Monsters for when you want powerful monsters that aren’t just high-level NPCs but also aren’t titanic terrors twenty feet tall! Magic will also be found in plenty with terrific supplements like Treasury of the City and the Asian Spell Compendium!

A life of adventure doesn’t begin and end in the dungeon, however, and we’ve long been huge fans of supporting the kingdom-building and mass combat system for Pathfinder. This year, we brought that same system to 5th Edition with Kingdoms (5E), and we have created 5E versions of our hit Ultimate Rulership, Ultimate Battle, and Ultimate War books. Of course, we’re still expanding the system for Pathfinder as well, with Ultimate Factions in layout now and Ultimate Armies still on the docket for completion this year.

^[7]For gamers who enjoy a wide variety of systems, we are also pleased to announce that in 2017 we will be offering products for the Savage Worlds game system, starting with our series of pirate adventures. We’ve been looking forward to making our adventures available for this system.

To sum up, 2016 has been a tremendously productive year for Legendary Games. Even at that, we didn’t complete everything we wanted to get done, but we are pleased with our progress and always keep our goals and our standards at the highest level. It’s part of our core values as a company: Rule #1: We write what we want, how we want, when we want. Rule #2: Always Be Awesome. We’ve got a long history of working with incredibly talented and experienced writers, but this year we’ve also brought in some new contributors whose talents make up for a lack of experience. There is great diversity out there in the gaming world, and Legendary Games is happy to be a part of making sure that diversity shows up in the game industry as well, with authors and artists from all walks of life and all over the world.

Thanks to every one of our team for all their hard work in making our products Legendary, and to all of our customers for supporting us in the work we do. Happy gaming to all, and to all a great 2017!

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