Intro

Legend in the Mist, the rustic fantasy RPG, owes its incredible degree of narrative freedom to its use of tags and statuses. In this How To Play video, we’ll be delving deep into what they are, and how to use them.

Tags

First, tags. Tags are short narrative descriptors that define important details in the story. They can describe almost anything: background details, items, beings, attitudes, skills, abilities, qualities, and flaws.

Tags perform two roles: first, they define what’s true in the story. If there’s a tag for it, it’s true. If your Hero has a tag for strong, highborn education, or wooden harp it means they are strong, received a noble’s education, or possess a harp. Second, they add or reduce Power from your Hero’s actions depending on whether they are helpful or hindering. Every tag is worth 1 Power, whether it’s a dagger or a greatsword; the difference is when you can use them and when they are helpful or hindering.

Power and Weakness Tags (Permanent)

There are a few types of tags. Your character’s themes have power tags that are mostly helpful and weakness tags that get in their way. These tags are permanent, and cannot be truly removed, unless when your Hero goes through a personal transformation and replaces a theme.

Story Tags (Temporary)

All other tags are story tags. Story tags can be positive or negative based on the situation. An open field is great for foraging, but not so great when trying to find shelter. Story tags are also temporary and expire with time. Your Hero can create story tags by taking action, which we’ll cover in our Taking Action video.

Scratching Tags

When tags are removed from the story, they are scratched. Tags can be scratched when the Narrator decides they’re no longer relevant, such as when morning comes and it’s no longer dark. They can also be scratched as Consequences, such as when a monster breaks your shield. You can also take action to scratch tags, such as those owned by a foe. Finally, you may choose to voluntarily scratch a tag you possess for a quick boost. If you scratch a tag before you roll for an action, that tag is worth +3 Power instead of +1. This is called burning the tag for Power.

Statuses

Meanwhile, statuses are special tags that represent a character’s condition, like wounded, hungry, or homesick. Statuses come in six tiers. Tier 1 is mild, while tier 6 is deadly or permanently transformative. Statuses are recorded on these handy tracking cards, which you can download for free at sonofoak.com.

Just like tags, statuses can be used in a variety of ways. You can use statuses to track injuries, compel other characters, show mood, represent tactical advantages and disadvantages, track progress, buff your allies, and hinder your foes. Just like story tags, statuses are temporary and usually expire with time.

When it’s time to roll, statuses behave similarly to tags but with one big restriction. All the tags that are relevant to the roll can be stacked to add or reduce Power. But with statuses, only the most helpful and most hindering statuses are counted. If you’re wounded-2 and distracted-1, only the wounded-2 affects your roll when you lift your sword to attack. Likewise, if you’re blessed-1 and hastened-2, only the hastened-2 affects your roll.

When accounting for statuses, you add or subtract the tier of the status from the action’s Power. That means a tier 4 wounded status means -4 Power to all actions hindered by your wounds!

Recording and Stacking Statuses

When you gain a status, you mark the box corresponding to its tier. So if you were to gain wounded-2, you would mark the second box. If you then gain a similar status, say wounded- 4, you mark it on the same card, in the appropriate box. The tier of a status is always the highest tier, so the status is now wounded-4. But note here that the second box stays marked.

If the box corresponding to the tier you are adding is already marked, you mark the next empty box to the right. So if we were to add wounded-2 to this status, we’d see the second box is already marked and mark the third one instead. If we were to add another wounded-2, we’d move from the second, third, and fourth box to the fifth box and now the status is wounded-5.

Reducing Statuses

When you reduce a status, you move all of the marked boxes to the left by the number of tiers you reduced. If we were to find a healing potion that reduces the tier by 4, we would move all of these marks 4 boxes to the left and end up with only wounded-1. 

Limits

It’s real fortunate that potion was ready! Because tier 5 of any status hits the Hero’s Limit, whether it’s wounded-5 or humiliated-5. A Limit is the maximum tier of a status a character can take, whether Hero or Challenge. For your Hero, the Limit is always 5. By hitting this Limit, your Hero becomes incapacitated for the scene, at least in regards to actions related to the status. And at tier 6, your Hero is either dead or permanently changed. In this way, Limits are like hit points, but they can be used for any type of ‘damage’ – from physical to mental to social.

Challenges also have Limits, and you overcome them by giving them statuses until you max these Limits. They can have different Limits for different ways they can be overcome. We’ll go into that more in our video on Challenges.

Outro

Now that you know about tags and statues, you have everything you need to start playing the game. Check out the next video in the How To Play series, and until then, be sure to like and subscribe for more Legend in the Mist videos.

For now, good fortunes on your journey!