LegendQuest ReForged

Pick a race. Pick a class. Earn levels, learn skills, and live with the consequences. LegendQuest turns Minecraft into a character-driven RPG — six rolled stats, classes that gate what you can wield, skills you buy with points you earn, and a karma score that quietly opens some doors and closes others.

It began as a Bukkit plugin years ago. This is that design rebuilt from nothing for NeoForge — and built for Minecraft 1.21.11, 26.1.2, 26.2 and 26.3. Each download names the version it is for, and refuses to load on the wrong one rather than misbehaving quietly.

It runs on the server, and that is the whole point

LegendQuest is server-authoritative. Install it on the server and you are done. Vanilla clients can join and play the entire game through chat and the action bar — no client install, no version negotiation, no "you must install this modpack to play here".

Players who do install it get the extras on top: an in-game handbook, a character panel on the inventory screen, a skill HUD and keybinds.

The content is data, not code

Races, classes, skills and feats are datapack registries. Write a JSON file, and the content exists — no Java, no compiling, no waiting on an update.

Prefer YAML? There is a front door for that too: drop the same content into config/legendquest/ and the mod converts it for you. Malformed files are logged loudly and skipped rather than taking your world down.

A pack can also replace the built-in content instead of merely adding to it, so you are never stuck with elves and wizards in a setting that has no room for them.

Two complete settings are included

Not samples — finished, playable content sets, each a drop-in datapack.

The Wasteland — 8 Archetypes, 20 Roles, 62 skills, 10 Perks. Post- apocalyptic survival. Start as a Drifter and earn your way into a specialisation: Scavenger, Enforcer, Doc, Scout, Labourer, and the harder roles behind them.

Cold Frontier — 8 Species, 16 Professions, 56 skills, 10 Augments. A cold, hard sci-fi frontier. Deliberately setting-neutral: retune the vocabulary and the same data plays as space-western, fleet-opera or salvage-horror.

Both are datapacks rather than mods, and CurseForge only hosts .jar files on a mod project, so they are downloaded from the GitHub release:

Download the genre packs — legendquest-apocalypse.zip and legendquest-scifi.zip, attached to every release alongside the mod.

Re-theme every word in the game

Roughly 280 player-facing strings live in one config file. Races become "Archetypes". Mana becomes "Stamina". Karma becomes "Humanity". Parties become "Crews".

The handbook, the HUD, the commands, the error messages — all of it follows. Modded clients receive the server's vocabulary when they log in, so the interface speaks your server's language rather than the mod's. Each genre pack ships its vocabulary ready to paste in.

Other mods can add skills

A skill-pack is a small jar that registers its own skill effect types and ships its own content, without touching LegendQuest. SkillEffectTypes.register() in your mod constructor is the entire API surface.

A worked example is attached to the files page as examplepack-<version>+mc<minecraft>.jar — one per Minecraft version, same as the mod. Install it beside LegendQuest to see custom effects in action, or read it as a template for your own. Two of its three effects declare themselves hostile and one deliberately does not, which is the part worth copying.

What your players actually get

• Six rolled stats — STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHR — feeding derived HP and mana, modified by race and class.
• Sub-classes alongside a main class, each with its own XP bank, so switching class never throws away what you earned elsewhere.
• Real class requirements — prerequisite classes, mastery gates, either/or alternatives, and group restrictions.
• A skill-point economy — earn points per level, spend them on skills or stat boosts, respec when you change your mind.
• A five-slot loadout bar with drag-and-drop, cooldown readouts and cast feedback, plus binding a skill to a held item so right-click casts it.
• Passives you can switch off — night vision is a gift until you install a shader pack. /skill toggle silences any always-on skill and brings it back, and the game reminds you on login which ones you have switched off, so a setting never gets mistaken for a bug. Content authors can mark a skill unswitchable where it is meant to be a drawback.
• Track your quarry — scouts, rangers and recon can mark a creature so it glows and cannot despawn mid-hunt, for five minutes, without ever counting against the world's mob cap.
• Tabletop dice — /roll takes what a table actually says: /roll 6, /roll 2d6+3, /roll d%, /roll adv, /roll str for a d20 plus your Strength modifier, in any combination. Advantage shows both dice.
• A dice tray on the character panel, for players with the mod installed: pick a stat, an extra bonus or penalty, and advantage or disadvantage, then click or drag a die to roll it. The whole server sees the roll, just as with /roll.
• Item proficiency per class — wield what your class cannot use and you fumble.
• Your race is your size. A hobbit stands just over half as tall as a human, and a dwarf is two-thirds height. It is vanilla's own scale attribute, so unmodded clients see it too, and small folk are harder to hit in a fight while big ones are easier. Both can be switched off.
• Karma as a real mechanic, with good and evil paths that lock each other out.
• Parties — invite, rename, teleport to members, and party-wide skills.
• Party chat — /pc for a line, or /pc alone to send everything you type to your party until you switch it off. Operators can listen in only if the server grants it and they turn it on.
• A party is a voice channel, where Simple Voice Chat is installed. Join a party and you are in its channel; leave and you are out. Members hear each other at any distance and still hear whoever is standing next to them, so the room a player is in does not go silent on them. The channel is hidden and locked so strangers cannot wander into a private conversation, and /party voice is the door back in. Without the mod, nothing changes and nothing is said about it.
• Nameplates cast no shadow under shader packs. With Iris and a pack such as Complementary, the plate over each player stays visible but stays out of the shadow pass.
• CrawlSpace dungeons use your character, where CrawlSpace is installed. A trap's pressure plate or tripwire stays hidden until a Wisdom check spots it, harder the deeper you are, and disarming one is a Dexterity check, with dwarves at an advantage. You see your roll when you spot something and nothing when you don't, so a failed roll never gives away that something was there. Without CrawlSpace, nothing changes.
• Its own advancements tab, 19 of them — the character line, karma both ways, and parties, with hidden and challenge entries for mastering every class, playing every race, and a party who are all online and all at the cap. They are plain vanilla advancements, so an unmodded client sees them, and progress earned before they arrived is granted at your next login rather than asking anyone to start again.
• Nameplates — race, class and level above each player's head, worded from your own vocabulary file. It is a display entity, so unmodded clients see it, and it does not touch chat, the tab list, or the scoreboard team slot every other prefix mod wants. It knows when to get out of the way: no plate in spectator or creative, none on a corpse, none floating where a hidden player used to be, and none over an NPC that another mod is standing a fake player in for.
• Class ranks and karma epithets — a Fighter climbs Squire, Man-at-Arms, Knight, Champion, Lord; karma earns you "the good" or "the diabolic". Both genre packs have their own ranks throughout.
• XP from kills, mining and smelting, tag-based so modded ores count.
• An in-game Players Handbook that explains every race, class, skill and feat, including what each skill actually does.
• Admin commands and permission nodes for every race and class, for LuckPerms and friends.

Required: Standards

Install Standards alongside it and LegendQuest reports things nothing else can see. A missed attack counts as combat, so nobody teleports away the instant they dodge you. Hostile skills mark the caster, and a blind or a curse marks the victim — even though neither deals damage. And LegendQuest asks permission before landing a hostile skill, so a peaceful faction or a safe zone can refuse it.

Standards' vanish is honoured too: hide a player and their nameplate goes with them, instead of hovering over empty air announcing exactly where they are.

Standards 1.8.0 or newer is required, and has been since 2.5.0 — the character sheet and skills panel are built on its inventory-panel system, which is what lets several mods put a panel beside your inventory without two of them fighting over the same space. Install it alongside LegendQuest; both are on CurseForge and both are free.

Installing

1. Put the LegendQuest jar in your server's mods/ folder.
2. Start the server. That is genuinely it — the built-in fantasy content works out of the box.
3. Want a different setting? Grab legendquest-apocalypse.zip or legendquest-scifi.zip from the GitHub release, drop it into <world>/datapacks/ and restart, then paste that pack's vocabulary snippet into config/legendquest/messages.yml.

Pick the download matching your server:

Any build within the series will do. On 26.3, where NeoForge is still in beta and has changed its API along the way, LegendQuest 2.9.1 and later need 26.3.0.58-beta or newer, with Standards 1.10.2 or newer. Your settings carry over unchanged. For 26.3.0.33-beta to 26.3.0.36-beta, stay on LegendQuest 2.9.0. Updating NeoForge otherwise never means waiting for a LegendQuest release that changes nothing else.

Content is read when the world loads, matching how vanilla handles data-driven registries — edit your JSON or YAML and restart the server; /reload will not apply it.

Source, issues, licence

MIT licensed and developed in the open at GitHub. Bug reports and content-pack contributions are welcome on the issue tracker.