Avatar Legends RPG physical release date delayed to summer 2022
Publisher Magpie Games cites paper and cardboard shortages on top of game’s record Kickstarter success.
Avatar Legends has seen its physical release date delayed to next summer as the result of ongoing material shortages and the game’s record Kickstarter success.
Magpie Games’ tabletop RPG adaptation of animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra was crowdfunded earlier this year, raising over $9.5m to become the highest-funded tabletop RPG to date on Kickstarter in its first week.
In a December 8th update to the game’s Kickstarter campaign page, Magpie announced the expected release date for Avatar Legends’ physical books had been pushed back from February 2022 to next summer.
The publisher cited the ongoing shortage of cardboard and paper affecting production across the tabletop industry, as well as the sheer number of books required to fulfil the project’s more than 81,000 backers.
“It turns out that printing over 200,000 books - plus hundreds of thousands of journals, cards, and dice - will take much longer than usual due to cardboard and paper shortages,” Magpie said. “But even without those shortages, it’s just a very very high volume of books! Even if our printers manufacture ten thousand or more books a week… it would still take months to print all these books!”
Magpie confirmed that the digital release of Avatar Legends’ PDF remains on track for early 2022; it will only be the game’s physical tomes that take longer to arrive. A physical release date will be specified in the “next few months”, the publisher added.
Based on the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon centred on the adventures of airbender Aang, along with its standalone sequel featuring waterbender Korra, Avatar Legends allows players’ characters to harness the bending abilities of the world’s inhabitants, manipulating elements including fire, water, air and earth.
The upcoming RPG utilises the popular Powered by the Apocalypse gameplay system, with players rolling two six-sided dice to determine the outcome of skill tests and moves. Avatar Legends introduces a new Balance mechanic to the basic framework, reflecting the opposing forces at play in characters’ personalities and behaviour.
Players can play in one of several different time periods, including eras before, during and after The Hundred Year War that precedes the original Avatar: The Last Airbender series, as well as timespans that overlap with Aang and Korra’s respective storylines.
As part of Avatar Legends' initial announcement in the spring, Magpie said that it planned to release a sourcebook focused on The Legend of Korra’s Republic City setting in August 2022, followed by a book dedicated to The Spirit World in February 2023. Neither sourcebook was offered as part of the game’s Kickstarter campaign; whether the delayed launch of the RPG’s core rulebook will affect subsequent releases remains unclear.