Why fantasy tabletop gamers should be paying attention to Legend in the Mist, a stat-free rustic fantasy game due out this year

With the world’s most widely-marketed tabletop RPG having a decidedly light product release schedule in 2025 (only three books and a weirdly-delayed starter set, plus a D&D-themed slot machine and AI content no one asked for), tabletop gamers might be wondering what exactly will be coming out this year to hold their interest or spark exciting new game ideas. Spring 2025 brings us Darrington Press’ Daggerheart, and lots of folks have already been testing out systems like Shadowdark. However, one release for 2025 is one that gamers should definitely keep their eyes on, as it made Polygon’s list of the best games they played in 2024 and topped long-time tabletop site EN World’s list of their community’s most-anticipated games of 2025, is Legend in the Mist. This new game is from from designer Amit Moshe and their studio Son of Oak (most widely known for the stellar urban fantasy neo-noir TTRPG City of Mist and fantasy-cyberpunk TTRPG :Otherscape).

Legend in the Mist aims to replicate a subgenre of fantasy seen in many popular fantasy standbys like The Hobbit, Princess Mononoke, and The Wheel of Time, which they refer to as “rustic fantasy” — a story of ordinary people from a quiet and sheltered place taking a journey into the wider, more dangerous, more fantastic world and becoming legends in their own right. These stories often feature people with hidden potential and unlikely heroes who go above and beyond to protect their homes and, maybe eventually, the entire world. But there’s a whole quest of trials and tribulations ahead of them, and that’s the kind of story that Legend in the Mist wants to tell. It also includes a setting, Hearts of Ravendale, designed to specifically tell these kinds of tales while also combating “goblin fatigue,” where the whole game is reduced to numbers and stat blocks — but Legend in the Mist can be used for any kind of fantasy setting your imagination can dream up.

How Legend in the Mist creates a stat-free system

Your character and their journey are represented by a changing character sheet that isn’t just one physical sheet, but is made up of four smaller sheets called Themes. These are, appropriately, a theme for your character — anything from their class or background to an important skill or powerful magical relic — which can all change as your character grows and advances. For example, the pregenerated character from the free demo called the Apple Picker has the origin themes “Rascal,” “Ravenhome-Raised,” “Scrappy,” and “Bushel of Apples” (that last one’s a possession — but it’s more useful than you think, as you’ll see in a minute) along with a backpack of items. Each theme (and backpack item) provides a set of Tags, which are the core of Legend in the Mist‘s gameplay.

Uniquely among a lot of TTRPGs, Legend in the Mist is completely statless. Instead, much like other Son of Oak games, your character’s ability is represented by your tags, which represent permanent things your character is, has, or can do (like “Prankster” or “Run of the Place,” but also negative things like “Can’t Sit Still” and “Belongs Nowhere” in the above image), and statuses, which represent temporary conditions such as “wounded” or “blessed” and have a numerical value to represent how much the status affects you — “wounded-1” might be a distracting cut, while “wounded-4” might be a broken arm. When you need to make a roll, you figure out your character’s Power by adding the relevant tags that help you do the what you’re trying to do as well as the value of the best relevant status, subtracting relevant weakness tags that impede you and the value of the worst relevant status, then rolling two six-sided dice and adding your Power to the result. If the total is a 10 or higher, you succeed without consequences; on a 7-9, you succeed but there are consequences; and on a 6 or less, it’s all consequences with no success. That’s it! There’s an additional bit about spending Power on effects if how much you succeed is as important as knowing if you succeed at all, but this is how Legend in the Mist manages to create statless gameplay and still have dice rolls to shake things up.

Themes aren’t just mechanical, they’re narrative; they represent how your character grows and changes. Each Theme comes with a motivation, which acts as a sort of story arc for your character and leads you into difficult choices. Having one of your weakness tags invoked in a roll, or choosing to make an important sacrifice in the name of your motivation, can lead to Experience with that theme; filling in the Experience track gets you additional tags from that theme or an improvement, which is something unique to you. If you act against that motivation, you instead fill in the Decay track as that part of your character’s arc becomes less important to you; if that fills up, you replace that Theme with a different Theme, which can dramatically change the tags available to you as your characters enters a new part of their story. This can even represent something as simple as growing from their simple origin to something greater, with themes divided up into Origin (who you are in your roots), Adventure (who you are as you learn to shape the world), and Greatness (who you are once you master some aspect of the world), and characters can move back and forth between these as they grow.

In this way, even normally innocuous parts of your character can be brought to the forefront of their story. A magic sword isn’t just a +1 item to be added to your character sheet and forgotten about; it’s a new theme that becomes part of your character’s adventure, a part of them. After all, the Apple Picker isn’t going to want to throw those apples at bad guys forever, even if it is good for a laugh.

How to play Legend in the Mist

If you’re interested in Legend in the Mist, the great news is that you don’t have to wait for its release later this year to check it out. You can download a free “Tinderbox Demo” on DriveThruRPG right now for the low, low price of zero dollars! This demo comes with the rules to play the game, adventures, tracking cards for statuses, and three pregenerated characters, so grab yourself three players who’ve always wanted to play in a rustic fantasy world and check it out.

And if you decide you want to keep playing, you can pre-order the game now. It’s set to ship later this year.