Legendary: Game of Thrones, Releasing Soon as a Cutthroat Card Game

I love the Legendary deck-building game designed by Devin Low! Lisa and I were in the same city as Devin when he made the original edition, so we got to playtest as the game took shape. Since then Devin has designed something like two dozen sets of various sizes and Upper Deck has adopted the system for a multitude of film and television properties.

I’m still most fond of the freeform Legendary approach, where stories you tell yourself grow out of deckbuilding, instead of the guided storytelling of the Legendary Encounters boxes.

I designed a Legendary set a few years ago, sticking close to the original model but filling the Big Trouble in Little China set with the dynamics Lisa enjoyed—game design as gift. And now I’ve designed Legendary: Game of Thrones, in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products and HBO, coming soon to local game stores!

The challenge posed by Legendary®: Game of Thrones was to turn a competitive co-op game into a cutthroat battle. In Legendary; all players are heroes, competing to be the best at defeating villains. The heroes win together or lose together, but one winner is more equal than others. Well, a lot more equal, but when players take selfish actions that screw the other players, many tables point out that ‘we’re all supposed to be on the same side.’

That doesn’t make sense for Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones needs to be an epic battle where no one blames you for using powers that hurt your opponents. It’s a battle with one House winning.

I’m going to introduce a few of the mechanics that combine into direct battle in a series of blog posts, starting today with a note about each player’s Hero line-up.

Your own Hero line-up: Let’s take the simplest case, a two-player game, Starks vs. Lannisters, using the Full Allegiance starter game so that you’ll each use all four of the Heroes from your House.

If you’re playing the Starks, you want to buy Stark characters for your deck. Playing with Lannisters in your Hero hand would feel all wrong. So, as a rule, you don’t. Instead of a single shared line-up, where all players compete to buy the Hero cards they want from a common pool, each player has their own line-up of five Hero cards. It looks something like this, to switch Houses for a moment and show the King's Landing player board that is part of the game’s initial image releases:

Adding Pressure: If you were the only player able to buy cards from a Legendary line-up, you’d have a low-pressure opportunity to acquire more and more of the cards you want. In other Legendary games, you have to keep track of what opponents are buying and hope they don’t take the cards you want.

Legendary®: Game of Thrones has card interaction that makes you care about what cards your foes buy, but the key dynamic of putting some time pressure on Hero purchases from your own line-up is handled with a new mechanic: Events.

A random assortment of 16 different Event cards (there are 2 copies of each) is shuffled into the single central Allies deck, the deck of antagonists that your Heroes defeat or support, depending on their House. At the start of each player’s turn, they draw a card from the Allies deck, exactly like drawing a card from the Villains deck in the original version of the game.

If you draw an Event, the first thing everyone must do is Cycle a card out of their own line-up. Each Event specifies the space the card is cycled out of.

Here’s an example: Escalation. Before resolving its text, every player has to take the card out of the third space of their line-up, the center-space, put it at the bottom of their personal Hero deck, and replace it with the top card of their Hero deck. It could be the lousy little card you don’t want to see again, or it could be cherished 7-cost rare that you’d already started building your hopes around.

And then you get the fun of the Event text! Escalation shakes things up because it lets everyone interact with their line-up at an unexpected time. Even if the card you really wanted was in your third space, you’re still generally able to improve your deck somehow.

Of course, not all Events are helpful. But playtesting gradually winnowed away the Events that were just hurtful. Your Heroes and your Allies that are in the central Ally deck are going to hurt your opponents plenty; Events are now most often interesting effects that can affect multiple players.

City of Bones: a Wonderful Martha Wells Novel

The success of Martha Wells Murderbot stories has reopened the window for well-supported publication for some of her earlier books!

One of my favorites of her earlier stories is City of Bones. Wells has a different (excellent) book that uses the word necromancer in the title, but City of Bones isn’t part of that series and it’s not about undead. It’s about post-fall archeology, marginalized heroes who scrape by, and forerunner tech that may as well be magic.

I haven’t read the newly revised edition yet. The original version started slowly but right about the spot I wondered if I would keep reading it blossomed into something special, so if you’re a reader like me who sometimes just quits, don’t.

One thing I loved about City of Bones was its evocation of place. I felt I’d been there, in its dry high desert and multi-tiered city, and for a couple years after reading it, while traveling, I would get flashes of thinking “Hey, this place reminds me of City of Bones.” If there’s a good word for this type of memory impression from a place you’ve never been, in whatever language, I’d like to hear it.

Digital Launch for 13th Age 2E!

Our several-year labor of love, 13th Age Second Edition, is out! Well, it’s some-of-the-way out! Past the first stage of modern rpg publication. It’s Digitally Launched!

If you backed the Kickstarter or ordered on BackerKit you should have access to the digital files. You can also go to PelgranePress.com and pre-order the printed Heroes' Handbook and Gamemaster's Guide in a slipcase as well as the 13th Age Art Book. You’ll get the PDFs immediately and the printed books in several weeks, as soon as we’ve figured out all the shipping hurdles.

Digital launches are nice, and it’s wonderful to be able to talk and blog about the game knowing that it’s available. Part of the digital plan this time around is to keep the 2E PDFs updated with typo corrections and other errata. We’re not going to update the PDFs frequently, because it takes a fair amount of time and effort to handle the technical transfers, but we will do an update shortly after we’ve finished the Full Print Launch, partly because I neglected to give proper credit to two people who belonged on the credits page. While finishing 2E’s monster design, I took three or four villains that Steven Warzeha had designed as part of the Bestiary 3: Icon Followers project and drafted them into the NPC section. That’s also true of a page of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s work on NPCs. So as soon as we update the PDFs, both Steven and Gareth will get a credit for Some Monster Design.

Meanwhile in analog world, the picture above is what a game table in my living room looked like yesterday as Jonathan finished signing the roughly 500 signature plates that Lee and I signed last week! We’re shipping the plates to Aaron for the fourth and final signature and then they’ll head back to Pelgrane to be inserted into the Limited Editions.

More notes: There are a lot of things I could write as designer notes for 2E. Happily the 13th Age Discord community leapfrogs over waiting for me write such things by hosting Ask Me Anything sessions! The next one is on Friday August 29th at noon PST, 3 PM EST. Show up if you can, or listen later, since the session should be recorded.

13th Age 2E: Chapter 2 Creating Characters, and AMA on Friday the 13th

(art by Aaron McConnell & Lee Moyer)

The High Druid gets the nod as the iconic lead for the short chapter that covers ability score generation, defense math, and the outline of all the character creation steps that will play out in chapters three through five. The default standard array we're suggesting for ability scores is slightly better than the first edition's suggestions, but otherwise I think this is the chapter with the fewest substantive changes.

The most helpful change already appeared a few pages earlier in the Example of Play chapter. When Miguel Friginal designed our new character sheet, he also wrote up a Character Creation example using the sheet. The example is annotated with helpful summaries and appears on pages 10 and 11 of the book.

To answer questions about the release plans, 13th Age 2E's design process, roads joyfullly taken or rules not pursued, I'm doing an AMA on the 13th Age Discord channel at 12 Noon PST on Friday the 13th of June. We say it lasts for an hour but it has a way of rolling on longer!

If you haven't ordered or backed 13th Age 2E yet, it's presently on pre-order on BackerKit. That should soon change to pre-orders on the Pelgrane Press web store.

13th Age 2E: Chapter 1 Example of Play

(art by Lee Moyer and Aaron McConnell)

Today's image is the opening spread from Chapter 1 of the Heroes' Handbook.

When I suggested that we reorganize the book by putting the combat rules ahead of the character creation chapters, Jonathan's counter-offer was to write a detailed example of play, showing everything from the GM's initial campaign concept through character creation, backgrounds and One Unique Things, icon connections, and several battles, all with definitions and references to the pages with more information. It's the type of explanation we pretty much skipped in 1E and I've already heard from one new GM who says it makes them feel much more comfortable starting a campaign.

Every chapter opening in the Heroes' Handbook and in the Gamemaster's Guide uses a full color image of one of the icons. This extended example of play is blessed by the Priestess, usually thought of as the most benevolent of the icons, with compassion and guidance for all. I'm going to run the rest of the opening chapter spreads over the next few weeks to introduce what's new and comment on what's still familiar.

Some of you have already seen an earlier draft. We shared drafts of both PDFs with Kickstarter backers to get help spotting typos and unclear phrasing. It worked! At this moment, layout artist Jen McCleary is handling the final round of found-typos and corrections. The books should be off to the printer this week, and then we'll turn to getting the PDF copies ready to share with both Kickstarter backers and folks who have pre-ordered. At the moment, pre-orders are still being accepted on Backerkit. I believe that will change soon and that pre-orders will move to the Pelgrane online store.

See you soon with the opening of Chapter 2!

trumpelon Aims to Shoot the Moon

If you play Hearts, you’ll recognize the strategy of the USA’s current White House.

The goal of Hearts is to avoid taking points; 1 point for each of the 13 Hearts, 13 points for taking the Queen of Hearts. A player with an extremely powerful hand can skip the niceties and try to shoot the moon, to win every trick, taking the Queen and all the Hearts. Instead of hurting themselves with 26 points, they give 26 miserable points to every other player.

Shooting the moon is hard. Most of the time, at least one opponent has high Hearts or the ability to control the Queen. You’re taking a big chance, and part of what you’re gambling on is that the opponents who could stop you won’t, that they won’t be willing to take a smaller hit to prevent everyone else from taking a giant hit.

And that’s our situation in 2025 America. The hybrid entity I’m referring to as ‘trumpelon’ doesn’t control everything it needs to avoid honest elections and keep power indefinitely, but with every heavily compromised or unqualified sycophant cabinet-member that gets approved by lawmakers willing to deliberately vote away their own power, trumpelon gets closer to shooting the moon.

An enemy of the free world has taken office, and people who prefer democracy are hoping that judges, governors, military commanders, lawmakers, Republican lawmakers, and others with capacity to resist will choose to take a hit, to suffer some smaller pain resisting so that we aren’t all taking all 26 points of subjugation.

Threats of trumpelon funding campaigns to remove incumbents from office has been enough to keep Senate and House Republicans from objecting to policies they don’t agree with. It’s likely to get worse. As this article from the Guardian reports, Republicans now fear violence against themselves and their families. Pardoning the people who violently attacked the government en masse on trumpelon’s first day surely hammers that point in.

So does confirming an FBI director who seems likely to play as trumpelon’s personal police. (You can’t even say ‘secret police’ because it’s right out there in the open.)

This blog post starts with game mechanics, applies them to politics, and loops back to my own family dynamics. My Estonian refugee father never played cards, but he did study the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. His dissertation, if he had managed to write it, was about how the politicians of the Weimar Republic had capitulated when there was no need, they’d squandered the powers they possessed in hasty surrenders when Hitler’s moves were largely bluff.

So here we are again. It’s not all bluff, but it’s not all actual power, and every capitulation plays into trumpelon’s moon shot.

13th Age 2E Pages: Little Demons

For the next few weeks, I’m going to share two-page spreads from 13th Age 2E. The images are showing up first as Kickstarter updates. Here in my blog, I’ll post notes on game design and mechanics. If it sounds fun and you didn’t get in on the Kickstarter, you can find the game on Backerkit.

This first slice from the Gamemaster’s Guide Monsters chapter is the second spread in the Demons section, with artist Pat Loboyko bringing the stampede that convinced us to hire him for all the demon illustrations.

Dretches: Just because they’re the smallest demons doesn’t mean they’re harmless, and in fact that sentiment changed how we’d handled things in 1E. The first time around, the dretch was a 3rd level mook. Jonathan hated that, observing that demons should be truly scary the first time heroes encounter them. Maybe dretches are pathetic to other demons, but they’re not pathetic to adventurers. So now the dretch is a standard monster, and if they appear in large numbers, the group terror ability will make them scary for nearly any outnumbered and surrounded player character.

Claw demons: The claw demon is imported from Book of Demons. The 2E modification limits the number of possible attacks against a single target, so the claw demon wants to engage multiple foes. That’s especially true if it’s using the new nastier special that deals damage to engaged enemies that miss it with an attack. That’s another element that spreads the damage out instead of potentially focusing it all on one target.

Gloranthan Options: This page is one of the few notes that specifically mentions 13th Age Glorantha. Since 2E is still entirely compatible with 1E, 13G’s monsters and rune blessings and even its classes are compatible with 2E games.

Chatty style: 2E still includes designer sidebars where Jonathan and I express specific opinions, but we ended up with fewer such sidebars in this edition. Not because we have less to say, more because that back-and-forth style now sometimes shows up in rules text. The Random Abyssal Defense paragraph is an example, pointing out in its first sentence that this is one of Jonathan’s preferences. In the last sentence I acknowledge that I usually skip it. Battles I prepare are usually already on the complicated side and I don’t usually need the extra defense to mix things up. Which is the way we want it: 13th Age GMs have options. There are usually a couple reasonable approaches to creating an exciting session.