Dawn of Legends, the upcoming character-driven setting of super-heroic adventure, brings several new things to the Savage Worlds license family.  From the new Popularity feature that represents a character’s Public Image, to the new mechanics for building a Super-Team and making it as unique as its members, Dawn of Legends supports a wide variety of super-heroic play-styles.

In the seventh Design Journal, Creative Director Mike Dukes takes us behind the curtain on the new effects-based powers system.

Everyone craves power, whether it is the power of being better at a video game than someone else, the power to hire and fire employees in a business, or the ability to run faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound.  Powers are the bread and butter of comic books.  The same genre tales can be told in comics as in other mediums, but it’s the powers that the protagonists (and antagonists) possess in comics that separate them from everyone else and makes those tales unique.  Powers are obviously a big part of Dawn of Legends, and we have done our best to create a comprehensive system that simulates the comic books we love.

One thing we addressed in the beginning was the need to make the system blend organically with the Savage Worlds system, and not feel tacked on.  The DoL powers system is very much an extension of the main Savage Worlds rules.  We made sure to test our heroes in other Savage settings to make sure we were a part of the Savage family and not some whole other entity when it came to balance issues.  Want to take your hero into a published Savage setting and take on some heavy armored hover tanks?  No problem.

So how exactly does it all work?  The basics are pretty simple.  Ranged attacks generally use the Shooting skill, Melee powers use the Fighting skill, powers that target neither the parry nor range combat numbers use an opposed roll, and each rank in a power equates to a +1 die step that is rolled with a Wild Die when power checks or opposed rolls are necessary .  For example, if you had Mind Control at rank 4, that’s a +1 die step for each rank (1=d4, 2=d6, 3=d8, ect) for a d10.  When rolling Mind Control, you would roll a D10 plus a Wild Die on an Opposed Roll against the target's Smarts.

Damage is a simple matter, determined by your Power Rank.  Each rank in an attack power does a d6 in damage.  So if you had Ranged Attack 5, you would roll 5d6 for damage on a successful hit, with an additional d6 for a Raise, as normal.  This may seem like a lot of damage (and it is), but for a hero, the game plan is the same as it is for a modern day police officer: It’s best not to be hit, but if you are, you had better be prepared.

With so much damage being tossed about, it might seem that combat would be short and deadly.  Fear not, true believer!  There’s already Edges like Dodge and Block to help you avoid being hit, plus the wise action of taking cover when possible.  We’ve added things like Hyper Parry, Super Skills to enhance Fighting, Evasion to avoid ranged attacks, Super Toughness to take hits and edges like Iron Jaw to help with soak rolls plus the big one: Resilience, which gives you a free soak roll without the use of a benny.  My personal goal has been to make sure Dawn of Legends plays like a comic book story, which means battles should last pages, not panels.  I am proud to say that goal has been met.

Believe me, the above are just the very basics.  Being an Effect Based system, you can possess any sort of power imaginable.  We already have over 100 pages of powers already created for you, but we didn’t stop there.  We also offer dozens of Power Enhancements, Power Boosters, and Power Drawbacks that can be applied to just about any power, giving you the exact effect you are looking for.  You’ll also find the exact formula for creating anything we may have forgotten or whatever your heart desires.  The same formula used to create all the powers already contained in the book. 

The great thing about the system is how simple it is and how well it represents all levels of power seen in comics.  You can create Batman at Year One just as well as you can create Superman in the current comics continuity.  Street level to near-gods, we have you covered. 

In the next journal, I’ll discuss Power Networks and Power Spectrums, and how they allow you to possess vast arrays of powers or the ability to mimic any power in the book ala Doctor Strange and Doctor Fate.

Until Next Time,

--Mike Dukes, Creative Director

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