Feast of Legends – Part 1

Wendy’s Feast of Legends (FoL) is a full, straight-faced roleplaying game and campaign that’s also part of a hamburger shack’s advertising campaign. I’d normally rip it a new one, but this is an odd beast, even for a game tie-in, and requires a nuanced response.

I mean, I am going to rip it a new one, but not for the reasons that you’d expect. I might need more than one post to do it, though, because this one is rough. Click through to start.

FoL’s rules are a hybrid of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition and 5th Edition. And it’s a good hybrid. Whoever wrote this (there are no writing credits, natch) probably has other RPGs on their resume, and they understood that the game’s audience would include RPG newbies. They also had a pretty good idea of what wouldn’t confuse this audience (advantage and disadvantage on d20 rolls, character powers wth different recharge times, short and long rests, etc.) and what would (everything else).

It’s not a deep game. Your character gets five attributes – Strength, Intelligence, Charm, Arcana, and Grace – which provide bonuses to checks and saves. Almost everything else your character gets is provided by class (or “Order”), including a base defense that you can increase with gear, hit point and attribute bonuses, proficiencies, and a fun power or two for each level to break up the monotony. The majority of the book (about 60 pages or so) is taken up by the included campaign, where you – sigh – protect Queen Wendy and her kingdom Freshtovia from the Ice Jester and the United Clown Nations.

In other words, you’ve been drafted into the burger wars between Wendy and McDonald’s, but for real, and suddenly this is turning into a really weird game of Shadowrun.

Personally, I think that the brevity of the rules is a strength instead of a weakness. Each Order has only five levels, so it’s not like you’ll need a big ruleset, and the authors managed to pack those rules into just three pages. The Order powers or “skills” do a lot of heavy lifting in FoL, but even so, all you really need are the basic rules and one or two pages for your PC’s order, and you’re done.

But those Orders, oh gods those Orders. They broke me. I had to stop reading the book because of them. I’ll be back to finish this review later but, for the love of all that’s holy, I need to recover.