Monk & Thief

There are two great new 13^th Age books in different stages of imminence this week.

Kick!

Greg Stolze’s TheForgotten Monk is the first 13^th Age novel! It’s on Kickstarter to be published by Pelgrane’s Stone Skin Press imprint and it has already made its initial target. Now Greg is strettttching and he has been very generous with his early stretch goals, so if you’re a 13^th Age player, you can sign on now and you’ll already be receiving stats for monsters and situations from the novel.  

Just as each 13^th Age campaign has its own unique plots and interpretations of icons, races, and places, Greg’s novel presents its own reasonable and idiosyncratic interpretations of subjects like elven speech patterns and Imperial law. Unlike fantasy novels connected to some other game worlds, these tropes aren’t part of a canon that other writers now have to use. Each 13^th Age novel gets to make its own decisions about the version of the world it’s going to portray.

I love The Forgotten Monk! It’s simultaneously warm and humane and full of lethal violence. That would be a good recipe for a 13^th Age campaign and it’s a wonderful mix for a novel. I’m not being descriptive of the contents because you should go look at the Kickstarter page and read about it there. 

In Gar Land, Dungeon Hunt You

The second book is just about to hit retail shelves, and you can already pre-order it from the Pelgrane store. It’s Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s Eyes of the Stone Thief.

A couple words you won’t have heard already about the book: I’m jealous!

Living dungeons are one of my favorite parts of 13^th Age and when Gareth pitched the idea of a living dungeon that hunts PCs and their loved ones down instead of waiting to be looted, I not only knew it was going to be special, I also had a strange creator half-remorse feeling that went something like: “That is such the perfect implementation of the idea and now I am never going to come up with it myself.”

Gar started by calling the project Moby Dungeon. It had stronger-Ahab tones early on before it became so seriously its own thing. You can catch an echo of that original starting point from the peg-legged halfling magician on the cover, gathering power as her comrade hefts a harpoon.

All Gar’s ideas were so good that it wasn’t a surprise when the project kept growing and growing and turned into a 360 page book. Calling it a mega-dungeon does it a bit of a disservice. Mega-dungeon is a nice marketing term, I think, but it implies nothing but a claustrophobic delve-and-more-delve underworld experience. Eyes of the Stone Thief takes the time to detail the surface locations that are connected to killing or supporting the dungeon, the cults and warlords who have a stake in the living dungeon’s fate.

The book is one of the most lootable supplements ever (and I’m talking to you, GMs). It’s got quick-and-dirty mass combat rules as part of a slave revolt in an enemy keep. The Cult of the Devourer. Dozens of montsers useful in all piece of the champion tier, things like the swordapus, filth hydras, and a drunken wizard. Glorious 3D maps of each dungeon level which are pure-caffeine for my imagination, even if I’m not using the Stone Thief I’m going to use those locations! And each of those levels could be the basis of its own dungeon. In fact, Gar has already written an article on the Pelgrane web site about how to chop the 13 levels of the dungeon into 13 separate dungeons. 

So Gareth has done something special. I may have started jealous, but now I’m grateful. This is a campaign fun-box brimming with awesomeness. I don’t know that I would ever personally be capable of writing a 360 page adventure. And now that Gareth has written Eyes of the Stone Thief, I know that I absolutely never have to.

Thanks Gar!