Legends is the one (and likely only) “lo-fi hi-fantasy” entry in the 2400 series, an unabashed homage to D&D that might actually fit into a unified 2400 setting (if you squint hard enough). This probably looks like quite a departure for a “lo-fi sci-fi” series, so I’d like to take some time here to talk about how it came to be, and how to integrate it into a sci-fi setting if you’re so inclined.

We’ve seen a number of really well done 24XX fantasy games, including the 1400 lo-fi hi-fantasy series, Wardens, Dungeon Soul, Keen, Planar Punk, a 1420 Beasts & Barrows, 74/00, and more. But I figure that if the world can support eleventy million D&D clones, it can fit some more minimalist takes on the genre too. 

Characters

I wrote Legends a few times before ending up on this approach. I’ve done character creation so many different ways in 2400 that I could see more than one way to do D&Dish fantasy. Did I want a list of skills like hand-to-hand and climbing, like in Inner System Blues? Skills based on D&D ability scores, like Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence? Or should it have traits based on those concepts, like Strong and Dextrous, which might affect rolls with skills?

Ultimately, I had to remind myself of my design goals: I mean for 2400 to only prompt you to roll 1-2 dice most of the time, and for character sheets to be short and sweet (at least enough that you don’t get mad at me that I haven’t made an official paper character sheet). 

I like detailed skill lists for modern and sci-fi games where characters’ abilities are defined primarily by those skills and their equipment, like in Inner System Blues. I feel it gets a little overwhelming for me when you start throwing in talents and other upgrade options, though. (If I ever revise Eos, it’ll end up with fewer skills for this reason.) I could’ve left out talents entirely, and just had a big skill list, but I wanted Legends to have Eos-style talents, to evoke what I enjoy best about D&Dish “classes” — not just niche protection and quick starting packages, but evocative powers and permissions that encourage you to play towards fun, familiar archetypes. 

So, I collapsed it down to only a few skills: a familiar D&Dish set of ability scores. Reading over it, though, I feared that array might not really work with the way I personally run 2400. I couldn’t imagine rolling “Wisdom” much in a game that encourages radical information-sharing, nor “Constitution” in a game that conceptualizes rolls as based on player characters’ actions more than their reactions. 

Again, I collapsed the skills down to an even smaller number, akin to the ones used in Data Loss — Strength, Speed, Reason, and Presence — each corresponding to a class archetype. Data Loss’s “Will” skill seemed out of place as the star skill for clergy, who might describe their abiity more in terms of deliberate humility than willfullness. I still wanted it to be a social stat, though, and thought “Presence” could cover a range of demeanors.

Earlier drafts had more classes — including rangers, bards, and wizard school specialty options — but I decided to focus on a core set with more talent options apiece. I think these illustrate how to make your own classes and talents, so it shouldn’t be too bad to make your own if you wanted to go with this format.

Oh, and finally, D&D fans may raise an eyebrow at the lack of “races” (a term I’m generally leery of when I see it used in fantasy games). I did want to make it easy to have fantastical traits, though, so I adapted a shortened version of Xenolith’s species traits. You should be able to use them to make folk resembling elves, halflings, dragonborn, or other options as it pleases you. It’s up to you whether they have their own names as widely known cultures, or if those are just the kinds of traits some folks have in your fantasy world, where seeing in the dark or naturally conjuring fire might be as common as having reddish hair.

Magic

Like a lot of 2400 subsystems, my magic rules are highly open to interpretation. Mages and clerics alike can learn and cast from the same shared list of “incantations,” but with a subtle difference in addition to which skill they use to cast: casting spells puts a mage and their allies at risk of “side effects,” while working miracles puts only cleric themself at risk of hindrance from the exertion required to channel divine forces. 

I leave the specifics of this up to you. When I run it myself, this will mean pulling out my favorite “magical mishaps” tables from games like Troika and Aetherway when we’ve got a mage in the group. On a 3–4 roll, the mage’s player gets to decide whether it’s their own character or an ally’s whose eyeballs fall out. 

Also, I suspect I might have phrased something better, but I struggled to figure out how to do so succinctly: “Artifacts” (a.k.a. magic items) in Legends that contain spells might require you to roll Reason to use them, or might have an “always-on” effect if it makes sense to. Casting a magic bolt might require you to roll in combat, while wearing bracers enchanted with a boon may grant a help die to all Strength rolls, all the time.

Encounters

My goal in designing 2400 was to make a system that’s so rules-light, so guided by common sense and open to interpretation, that it would be trivial to “convert” material to it. I can’t say for sure how well that works for others, but for what it’s worth, I plan on using Legends for a bunch of adventures originally written for D&D and OSR games. “Converting” stuff basically comes down to the first sentence of the GM rules:

Describe characters in terms of behaviors, risks, and obstacles, not skill dice.

You do not need to record a creature’s hit points or armor class or what have you. As the GM, you just need to think of the following:

Behavior. What does it want, and how would it pursue that? When players look to you to gather information on the creature, this is what will help you improvise.

Risks. How it can hurt others if threatened? If there’s a conflict with that creature, this is what you will telegraph to the players about what they’re risking by rolling.

Obstacles. What, if anything, might make it impossible to overcome this creature in a single roll? If the answer is “nothing,” then the thing can be defeated in a single roll, albeit at some risk. If the answer is “a thick hide, akin to heavy armor,” then advise the players that they’ll need heavy weapons or clever tactics to hurt the thing. 

(That last bit about armor is an addition that other 2400 games don’t specify; I welcome you to take or leave it. I just thought it would more explicitly signal why you’d use one item over another, since that’s a bigger deal in D&Dish fantasy games than in my usual sci-fi games.)

Also, every sapient being on the “encounter” table — that is, everything that you could actually converse with, that isn’t just a magical construct or the equivalent of a wild animal — has a name. They aren’t stand-ins for every being in the setting that looks like them; I imagine there are a lot of different dragons (but in my setting, their names will all have palindromic names). I just wanted to make it really clear that even bandits and monsters can be people too, so maybe don’t just stab everybody you meet.

Integrating into a 2400 setting

You can run Legends as its own setting, completely divorced from the rest of 2400. But you don’t have to.

Maybe it’s an alternate timeline brought about by the events of Tempus Diducit. 

Maybe it’s an experimental iteration of The Simulation in Codebreakers.

Maybe it’s an isolated planet of settlers who forgot how to fly, like in Xot.

Maybe it’s a parallel dimension where magic is real, not just misunderstood psi or nanotech.

Or maybe there’s a reason “The Lord, DEUS” is named like a metamind in Data Loss. And maybe there’s a reason DEUS forbids offworld travel.

Up to you. After all, these are all in the same setting — unless they’re not.

Update v1.1: Minor textual corrections and clarifications, including to the wording of the warrior talent "close protection" (now "overwatch," specifies that either you or ally can be the one who rolls the 1–4) and the mage talent "rote" (just to clarify that it doesn't eliminate all risks, just the risk of side effects built into Spell Casting and Miracle Working).

Update v1.4: Some terminology changes for clarity, including "incantations" to "spells" (we were all calling them that anyway, right? And it's shorter, and less confusing if you're playing Elden Ring), "charms" to "concoctions" (no longer overlapping with the name of a spell), "spell casting" to "wizardry" (they're all "spells" now, after all), and "miracle working" to "theurgy" (mostly for conciseness). Also makes the "potency" talent a rule any mage/cleric can use, gives mages a new "alchemy" talent to create their own concoctions, and lays out the magic rules a bit more clearly.