Writing Challenges for Legend in the Mist

April 2, 2026

If you are one of the players in my Legend in the Mist game, turn back now! There's nothing here for you!

Have they left? Okay good, now I can talk shit about them behind their backs...

Kidding. My players are the best. And this game suits them really well. They are very creative, engaged, inventive, and flexible people and Legend in the Mist seems like such a good fit for those attributes. We've only played one session, but it got rave reviews, and I, as the Narrator (GM) enjoyed it thoroughly.

One thing I really love about the game is how open the design space is. Because the entire system runs on tags, with no stats or stat blocks or initiatives or anything of that nature, a challenge to the group can be anything, take any form, have any objective, and be accomplished in any way. It's that true promise of the TTRPG hobby distilled to its simplest essence. And I do mean distilled - the entire core of the system basically boils down to picking out some words, lending them a little more weight, and call it a day.

My goal with this post is two-fold. One, to demonstrate it and show you how cool it is, why I love it. And second, to hone my own skills at writing these challenges. I'd love to be able to improvise these challenges and still feel like I'm getting my money's worth. But improvisation is hard, and I believe in practice and pedagogy, so this post will be an exercise in these. For my own benefit. And yours if you want, but that's not the point.

Also I wanted to work on the cool highlighty thing I added to my website.

What do Challenges look like?

Okay, I'm gonna show you an example out of the book!

FOREBODING APPROACH

You catch the first sight of the ruin, a once-impressive architecture now razed by decay or divine wrath. This is your last chance to prepare before entering this wretched place.

• The view of the ruin gives you or a Companion goosebumps (apprehensive-2).
• Your preparation takes too long (time-passes-1) and conditions worsen (rain, fog, darkness, daylight).
• Your gear is not quite suitable for such an expedition (add a negative story tag).
• The prospect of finding treasure here is palpable. You all either share in the excitement (hopeful-2) or leave the matter unspoken (distrustful-2).
• A figure suddenly skulks away from you and into the ruins. Someone has been watching you (Exposure).

---

Okay so what do we see here? It's mostly just fiction. The first line is a description, the bullet points are potential threats and consequences.

What's the highlighted stuff? That's tags and statuses. (there are also limits which we will get into later.)

Tags are descriptors, but they also become modifiers to your rolls. If you're rolling to climb a wall and the wall has the slippery tag, you'll get a -1 penatly to the roll. If it's also guarded, you accumulate a -2. If you have climb gear, it'll go back up to a -1, and if you've got frog hands, that +1 brings you back to zero.

Then there are statuses. If you're tired-1, you subtract 1 from the roll. If you're wounded-2, you subtract 2. But only the best beneficial status and the worst detrimental status applies - they don't stack up a bunch. So in this case you'd only subtract 2 for the wounded-2. If you also had... amphetamines-3, you'd also get that +3 to your roll. For, y'know... drugs.

So all of the tags in a situation are summed up to create the fiction and the mechanics at the same time. I love this. I love that I don't have to reach for ability scores or skill definitions or feats or character sheets. Just have the conversation about what the situation is, and conclude what that situation implies about what you're trying to do. Dead simple. Talk about mechanics getting out of the way of storytelling!

How do we write these then? Here's another example from the book that talks about the formulation of these challenges.

The prince is beguiled-4 and won’t listen to any ill talk about the wizard. (Quick outcome)
The hefty oak door is barricaded-2; it will not be easy to break-down-4.
The people of the village are upset-3 and carrying pitchforks. If the situation boils-over-5, they will attack and injure the imp and anyone protecting them (wounded-2).

This is Challenge Shorthand. Just write the fiction as you think of it, then highlight the relevant words, add some numbers to statuses and limits, and you've got a challenge. The fiction IS the mechanics.

But there's also the long form, fleshed out version the book shows, which I also quite like.

The layout here is great. Name, type, and description, with tags highlighted in the description. On the left, limits, tags and statuses, and ... I actually don't know what the "Faerie Impersonator" thing is here. I'll have to look into that. [Editor's note! (that's me, I'm the editor.) It's might! I haven't gotten into Might in my games, so I'm ignoring it for now in the challenge.] Doesn't matter. And special features. All driven by tags.

On the right, threats and consequences. More tags and statuses. All of this is so simple and easy to digest. It's easy to see a pathway from the shorthand example above to something more fleshed out and laid out like this. But of course, in your home games, you don't have to aim for the same standard as published material. Keep the shorthand, or just do a little bit more, and call it good.

Writing Our Own Challenges

It's always been so much harder for me to write scenarios for games than... well, harder than other people make it look like. Others make it look so simple. They can improvise, they're fast on their feet, it's jazz, baby. I felt like a plodding buffoon in comparison. It's easy when I can just run stuff out of the book, and to be fair, I do that when I can. I've cribbed a bunch of challenges for my current campaign right out of the source material, and that doesn't bother me one bit. But I know that in order to deliver the experience that I want to deliver, in order to convert my vision of the world and the fiction to the table, I'm going to have to build that muscle. In other games, that's a daunting prospect. Writing a stat block for His Majesty the Worm or even Shadowdark feels like a calculus problem wrapped in a grammar class. (I'm being mostly facetious - these are my favorite games and they have plenty of merit.) So the idea that I can just write the fiction, the vignette, the short story, and then highlight a couple of words and call that a scene? Incredible.

Let's write some of our own. I have a few scenes coming up in my game that I'd like to have some preconceptions of before we begin.

Challenge: The Bridge Ruin

The colossal stonework bridge reaches up to the low cloud layer. Skittish wildlife nests in the various cracks and crevices of the crumbling stonework. A glance back to the earth is enough to terrify-1 even the most seasoned adventurer.

It will take some time to surmount-4 the bridge. Weather may change, bringing heavy fog or rain, which may make the already perilous climb even more treacherous.

Progress itself can be challenging, as once you reach certain heights, the cold, windy air causes climbers to become exhausted-1, and falling is not an option. Even with climbing gear, falling against the stone pillars guarantees severe wounds (wounded-3). But dallying may cause climbing gear to break (scratch a related resource.)

Okay what we've got here is a fairly basic climbing challenge on a colossal stone bridge. I just wrote it out like fiction, but then went back and highlighted what makes sense as tags, statuses, and limits. The aim here, as with any well designed RPG scenario, is not to constrict the players to your own solutions or to presuppose exactly what's going to happen, but rather to get into the mindset of converting the truth of the world into mechanics and facets that can be engaged with. This shorthand does that perfectly. This challenge isn't important enough for me to flesh out into a bigger, more laid out challenge - it will be one or two scenes of the story, and probably not take too long in the game.

What if it's more?

Challenge: The Burning Irryx

The dread dragon Irryx descends upon the town, breathing fire over its walls and defenses. Panicked townsfolk run screaming from burning homes. The watch commander calls out orders, but the dragon's preternatural aura strikes fear in the hearts of anyone who cannot resist it (terrified-4). On the ground, it spreads its vast wings and casts dark shadows contrasted by the fire light.

Whew! Okay so we've got a firebreathing, mind-dominating dragon. Classic. And it didn't take me long, although I did steal some words from the core book. And my next thought is to make a second version of Irryx for when they take flight. In that challenge, they might have different limits - Bait-4, Repel-5, because in the fiction, you'd want to bait the dragon into landing or drive it off with ranged attacks. But it's ability to be traditionally wounded would be gone, so it's harm limit would become Harm- (which indicates there is no amount of harm you can do to achieve the limit.)

I did have some difficulty writing this, though. Coming up with threats and consequences in the way the book does is not easy, because I have such a narrow view of what's going to happen and what's possible. That friction is actively encouraging me to open up my creative mind and try different things, and while it's frustrating immediately, I think it will pay dividends in the long run if I lean into that friction and find more.

Also, these threats and consequences are not the dragon's entire set of capabilities - those always come from the fiction first, so if the situation changes, so too do the threats and consequences. Preparing this way just gets you thinking about the situation ahead of time, writing down some of the obvious or more common ideas, so that you have something to lean on in the moment.

Okay, that's all for now, but as I write more challenges, I'll have more to say, I'm sure. And I have a lot of other thoughts about the system. About character creation, about Might, about the Mountain campaign structure... I think this game has a ton of great ideas and a lot of merit, and I'm eager to explore it more and write about it.