Hey, 13 True Ways
supporters!
By now most of you will have
seen the 13 True Ways PDF, except for
those old-fashioned souls who want to wait for the printed book. I know there
are some of you because Jonathan is one! Yes, Jonathan Tweet doesn’t want to
spoil the surprise by looking at the PDF. Since I handle art and layout and
editing communication, Jonathan still doesn’t know what the final book is going
to look like, apart from the text, so if you are waiting for the printed book
later this summer you have some good company.
Along with the final printed
books there are other backer rewards in the works, such as dice and t-shirts
and postcards. Those are all at various stages in the production queue, and I
can’t predict when they all will be ready.
For now I want to talk about
another aspect of 13 True Ways
delivery: the other PDFs that are going to show up on your computer in coming
months.
We ended the Kickstarter
promising a 180-page book. Once we got into the design phase, our labor-of-love
approach pushed us up to 256 pages. And because it was a labor of love,
Jonathan and I prioritized the things we thought would be the most fun, and held
our work to a very high standard. If we felt meh about something, and believed
that you would feel meh about it too, it didn’t go in. We ended up delivering
on all the stretch goals in the Kickstarter along with all the backer rewards,
but some of our ideas in the original 13
True Ways Kickstarter plan didn’t make it into the book.
So here’s what we plan to do
about it.
We’re going to finish those
pieces properly as part of the upcoming subscription-based 13th Age annual
(name to be determined), along the lines of the excellent Ken Writes About Stuff from Pelgrane Press. I should be clear that
the we I’m mentioning includes me,
but not always the other members of the original 13TW team. Sometimes I’ll be
the designer, other times I’ll act as developer with other talented contributors
handling the design work. Sometimes we’ll be completing work that I started on 13 True Ways but didn’t finish to my
satisfaction.
As a 13TW Kickstarter backer,
you’ll have two options when the annual goes live:
1. You
can choose to get only the issues that contain 13 True Ways follow-up content, for free
2. You
can choose to purchase the entire first 13th Age annual at a discount which
covers all of the free content to which you’re entitled, plus a bit extra
Not every month’s installment
will contain 13 True Ways follow-up
content, and there’s no set schedule about when a particular piece of 13 True Ways follow-up content will be
completed. This may stretch out for quite some time, because during the design
phase of 13 True Ways we unexpectedly
hit on a few things that could serve as the basis for larger books. If they do
get turned into books, when those surprises get unveiled we’ll send a related
freebie to 13TW backers. Think of this operation as a purchase that keeps on
providing surprising micro-rewards.
With that in mind, I’m going to
go ahead and list the things that didn’t make it into 13 True Ways and my current
thoughts on how they’ll be part of the 13th Age annual subscription,
or not.
Appearing in the annual at some point
Details on forests & woods to make them distinct: This grew
into something a bit different than I thought originally.
More on gladiatorial games: Yeah, there’s some more we can explore here.
Rules for dragon-riding: I know that a lot of you were really
looking forward to this—I was, too—and some of you even backed the project because
of it. So I’ll be blunt: so far all the systems we’ve come up with have been
worse than no system at all in terms of their impact on the game. I'm not
interested in publishing bad systems, and I’m pretty sure you’re not interested
in getting them. ASH and I are continuing to work on these rules, and we’ll do
everything we can to ensure they get included in the first annual. I can
promise that we’re not going to shrug our shoulders and send you something that
we think isn’t worth using, just so we can check off a box on our to-do list.
We'll get it to work because I know ASH will kill me if we don't.
Illustrated comparisons of the adventurer, champion, and epic tier: We’ll
do these, but probably not by Aaron and Lee.
A cutaway map of a typical elven wood: Same.
Partially appearing in the annual after their actual
potential is realized in future books
Racial feats: because they do appear to have a place in the game,
but that place may come as a surprise.
Feats associated with the icons: same story. The obvious mechanics weren’t
so good, but there is something interesting hidden behind the idea.
Stats for the 13 icons themselves: As the game evolved and matured
through further development and play, we became increasingly convinced that
this was an idea we didn’t want to pursue half-cocked. You can see the care we
took detailing the 4 backer-created NPCs in the Gamemasters’ Grimoire chapter of 13TW. In a sense, those NPCs
function a bit like mini-icons, and our final approach to this topic may bear
some resemblance to the multi-option approach used for the NPCs. But when I say
‘final approach,’ I’m acknowledging that this isn’t something we intend to
pursue soon. When we do finally take this path, it’s almost certainly going to
be the basis for a book rather than a slice of a different book. In the
near-ish future, we will be doing monster-style stats for various servants and
followers of the icons. Some of the high-level lieutenants of the icons will find
their way into a 13TW-backers update to provide touches of the high-level play
people might have been looking for from actual icon stats.
There are also going to be surprise
backer freebies along the way, some of which expand on ideas that made it into
13TW.
That’s all I’ve got for now.
We’ll be in touch about the annual’s start date and other details once we’ve
built the plan out further, probably before or around GenCon.
Yours in the whirl,
Rob Heinsoo
Lead Designer, Fire Opal Media
Let me know when to sign up (and pay), man. I really like how 13TW looks in PDF, I'm looking forward to the physical copy -- I backed at a physical level, international shipping be damned! -- and would love to get more.
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