Interviews & Lists

broo minis painted by Richard Bark, octorilla/walktapus mini from when Jonathan and I designed Dreamblade

I've done a few interviews in the last couple weeks, two about 13th Age Glorantha and one about monster design.

JM, Mark, and Nick's Iconic podcast on all things 13th Age-related has started up for a second season! Jonathan Tweet and I were guests for the first episode. We started by discussing the biggest design challenge we faced on 13G: fitting everything into a 190 page book. (Spoiler: we failed!) Our hosts were funny and fun and I'm looking forward to joining them again some time.

Also in the world of radio podcasting, The RevEnFuego interviewed me about 13th Age Glorantha for a BJ Shea's Geek Nation segment. Unlike the Iconic trio, the Rev wasn't familiar with Glorantha before he got hold of 13G, so we started with some of the runic, mythic, and Staffordian basics. As with the Iconic chat, we eventually landed among ducks. Along the way we talked a lot about 13G classes like the trickster that might also be used in 13th Age games that aren't set in Glorantha.

That was also the subject of a column I wrote for the Pelgrane Press website, New 13th Age Classes: A Swordmaster & an Earth Priestess Walk into the Dragon Empire. Originally I was going to write about all the new classes in 13G, but I opted to go in-depth into two (Humakti and earth priestess) as examples of what's possible.

Meanwhile in a text interview that had nothing to do with ducks, but one good question about Glorantha, Phil Pepin of High Level Games asked me questions about monster design, including a question that led back to designing miniatures games at WotC. That ties nicely into the miniature photographed above, a walktapus-by-another-name that Jonathan and I made as part of a Dreamblade set while at WotC.

Another thing we took along with us from WotC was a fondness for the OGL. We used it for 13th Age so that other people could create compatible products with the system and I enjoyed Wade Rockett's recent round-up of notable books compatible with 13th Age published by third-party publishers. There's a lot of great stuff here, and it didn't mention some of the cooler free stuff, like Tim Baker's Escalation fanzine.

The Pristine City

The Pristine City is a fun 57 page 13th Age-compatible adventure for 4th or 5th level characters from Stacey Janssen and David Noonan of Dastow Games.

While reading the adventure and framing my response, I realized that my gaming experience is probably different from most GMs. So far as I remember, and I'm thinking all the way back to Top Secret and Chivalry & Sorcery and Monsters! Monsters! and AD&D  and then Champions and RuneQuest and the days when I bought a LOT of rpg adventures . . . going all the way back and working forward, I have never run a published adventure that was written by someone else. Unless you count:
a) the pieces of published adventures I played as solitaire system-tests when I was a kid; or
b) the co-op/solo micro-dungeons published for The Fantasy Trip, when I was playing as well as flipping the pages; or
c) the adventures in 13th Age in Glorantha that were written by Jonathan.

I think Item C counts. That's a recent development!

So while I've read big chunks of The Pristine City, and skimmed the rest, I haven't run it. The fact that the book got me thinking about how I would run it turns out to be extremely unusual.

Without giving too many spoilers, here are some things I like about this adventure.

• A clever overarching structure that will shape the game alongside the player characters' actions (I must not say more, but this deserves an exclamation point)!
• Amusing reinterpretations of the icons that both dodge the copyright issues, add their own twisty values, and are still clear enough to anyone running a core Dragon Empire game. 
• Interesting reasons why this singular place blends oddities you might find in a living dungeon within themes created by the dwarves. 
• Well-themed magic items that enhance the storyline. 
• Amusing touches in the price lists and great material for dwarf-oriented player characters in the list of Real Books in the Pristine City
• Vignettes that could be dropped into other dwarven areas if you're not going to run the whole thing. 
• Far more playable material than you'd expect to find in a 57 page book, because they didn't reprint monster stats from the core 13th Age rulebook or the 13th Age Bestiary. Page references suffice and the focus of the text stays on exploring the city instead of reprinted monster stat blocks. 
• A couple new monsters I'll be using the next time I need [REDACTED].

101 Not So Simple Monster Templates

I like this recent 13thAge-compatible DIY monster tool from Rite Publishing. The book has a not so simple origin story. It first came out in 2011 as a Pathfinder sourcebook written by Steven D. Russell. Step forward a few years and Patryk Adamski approached Steven and Rite Publishing with a reworked 13^th Age compatible version. The mechanics are new, the art is new. Like Kobold Press’ and ASH LAW’s Deep Magic volume that's compatible with 13^th Age, 101 Not So Simple Monster Templates is a book that is inspired by the previous Pathfinder RPG edition rather than a straight conversion which is confined to the original mechanics.

What you get from this Rite Publishing book is an alphabetical list of 101 conversion templates for customizing monsters on the fly. Many of the templates add a level to the monster, so that the impact of the template’s new abilities and powers get offset by lower stats. A few of the templates, like Burned Out Creature or Unhinged Creature, go the other way and reduce the creature’s effective level.

There are a couple niggling problems. A few of the templates use language that’s different from standard 13^th Age terminology, but not so different that it’s difficult to figure out. A few other templates almost certainly err on the side of being too nasty. Resilient, for example, has got to be missing its level adjustment.

But balance issues are minor, particularly in a system that advises GMs to regularly make battles unfair! If you’ve been running 13^th Age, you’re going to be able to recognize the few too-nasty templates easily, they’re not subtle.

I’m especially happy with 101 Not So Simple Monster Templates because its text is all published under the OGL. As a designer, I’m not likely to borrow a full template and the template approach, but there are several creative mechanics here that I’ve already borrowed or revised as elements in new monsters headed into 13^th Age in Glorantha and future installments of the 13^th Age Monthly. So I’ll be adding this to the list of OGL books in the licensing section of an upcoming product or three. 

13th Age, 3e, and Two Bestiaries

Last week, Jonathan wrote a neat essay on how 13th Age design relates to his work on 3e. It's a cogent account of how we wove threads from earlier editions of F20 into something new-ish in 13th Age. Jonathan has a gift for cutting to the core and the essay explains design decisions we haven't said that much about elsewhere.

Jonathan's essay appears on the Kobold Press website as a guide to 13th Age for interested 3.5 and Pathfinder fans, and to help our friend Wolfgang Baur promote the new 13th Age compatible Midgard Bestiary. This third-party 13th Age work is a collaboration by the adventuring team of LAW & Rockett. 

That's designer/developer ASH LAW who runs 13th Age OP and designed many of the bug-whack monsters in the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary from Pelgrane; you will thank him later when your party's cleric insists on donning a chuul-antenna helmet, or when a hag's death curse twists your PC's social life around her dead bony finger. ASH is joined by the evil twin of Wade Rockett, who runs community relations for Fire Opal and who wrote the splendid Midgard icons that appear at the back of the Midgard Bestiary, just after the nine new 13th Age-compatible player character races, many of them monstrous.

That brings me to one of the wonderful things about the two upcoming Bestiaries. I ended up running the Pelgrane book, and there were a bunch of design approaches ASH suggested using throughout it that I only wanted to use just a little. So instead, ASH ran with them at full speed in the Midgard book. To name three examples:

• Things You Might Find On on a Monster's Corpse (loot instructions!)
• Magic items made of monster parts (or their powers)
• Monsters as races

The Kobold Press book does a lot with these concepts. Our Pelgrane book does just a little bit while spending most of its effort in other directions, particularly in story hooks and powers related to the icons. The result is a pair of monster books that will complement each other well.

The 100+ page Midgard Bestiary is out now. The 240-page 13th Age Bestiary from Pelgrane is due in May, but if you pre-order it now you can download the full text. As Jonathan's essay suggests, you may even be interested if you're not playing 13th Age yet.

Many Trumpets: this week in 13th Age

A wonderfully eventful week that opens several doors.

Early in the week, Pelgrane sent out an update of the 13th Age Bestiary's Hatchling Edition to those of you who have pre-ordered it. If you haven't pre-ordered it, now may be a good time, because Simon's note about possibly increasing the price later isn't getting any less likely with me dropping the couatl into the book and adding at least three new monsters (one fungaloid, two jorogumo). 

A day or so later, ASH LAW sent a short seasonal adventure out to the 600+ groups participating in 13th Age Organized Play.  600 groups!  ASH did some cunning work here that I'm planning to adapt into an-entirely-different campaign. 

Yesterday the new Page XX from Pelgrane announced the release of our Archmage Engine SRD. Thanks to Chad Long and Cal Moore, it turned out very well. Apparently some people worried that it would be a fakey-SRD, but the point of doing 13th Age as an OGL game was to get people playing it and using the system. Yes, it's a real SRD, and it should prove useful to people looking to overlap with our game engine. 

On 13 True Ways, Jonathan and I are running our Daily Workplace Simulator experiment at my place. Playtesting of the commander went well and I'm processing feedback for the commander and the monk to get new versions of these two classes ready for external testing. Discussion of all the other new character classes has led Jonathan to dig into work on the occultist. He has surprised me with an entirely new type of spellcaster. I'm not using the words 'new type ' lightly, I don't think these mechanics have been tried before. I'm simultaneously excited to have Jonathan working directly on character class design and scared because I'm the GM in the group these days and this occultist is going to spring occasional reality-wrenching ambushes on whoever wears the GM-cap. 

We'll update again on 13 True Ways next week.

Flame & Ice

We're extremely happy that 13th Age core books are now shipping to people who pre-ordered as part of the Escalation Edition, to other Pelgrane pre-orders, and to those of you who asked for the core book as part of your 13 True Ways Kickstarter rewards. For people who didn't pre-order, the game should be in stores the first week of August. I believe the official street date is August 5th.

FLAME:  Here's a look at the t-shirt design that's exclusively for 13 True Ways backers who signed on for the shirt. We promised that it would be exclusive when we did the Kickstarter, so much as I'd like the shirt to be a more-distributed thing now that I can see how cool it is, it's not.

The slogan, in case it's not entirely clear, speaks in the voice of the Great Gold Wyrm, holding the barricades against the Abyss: I am the Shield, you are the Sword, we are the Flame. They shall not pass. 

The mix of art and t-shirt color is the full design, we're not doing other colors for this one. And in case you were wondering where the logo was hiding.....

ICE: Our friends at Sasquatch Game Studio are producing a sword and sorcery d20-mechanic sourcebook where the defenders are more like Conan and the ultimate villains are more like Cthulhu. I'm curious to see what Primeval Thule ends up doing with icons in a world touched by Lovecraft, Merritt, and Clark Ashton-Smith, since a 13th Age-compatible version is part of the Sasquatch plan. They have 7 days left on their Kickstarter, check them out here. 

Three Surprises

I'm working on the 13th Age Bestiary today with 13th Age's developer, Rob Watkins. Whenever the two of us say "Yes yes yes!" while working on monsters you can be sure it's going to be entertaining trouble for PCs. Or maybe just trouble, given that we're working on mechanics for red dragons and rust monsters. 

I haven't been blogging lately and want that to change, but for the moment I'm just going to mention three recent 13th Age-related surprises. 

1. The EN World poll for most anticipated RPG of 2013

I've rarely experienced the cliche of having my jaw drop. But that's what happened as I watched the results of the poll. We're in great company and this has been splendid motivation in the weeks before the game releases into print. 

2. A Bestiary preview

Our redcap fits into impossibly small spaces and bursts out by surprise. This morning he showed up exploding from a cupboard in a preview on EN World, art by Rich Longmore. I decided to use this entry by Kevin Kulp because I wanted to preview something funny. Other entries vary widely in tone and style but the redcap serves as a good example of the more detailed treatment that Ken Hite decided we would give monsters in the Bestiary--more details and ideas to inspire GMs and players instead of the just-the-stats approach used in the core book. 

3. Primeval Thule Kickstarter

It's gratifying when friends who are excellent designers decide to use 13th Age as one of the systems they'll support with their swords-and-tentacles RPG sourcebook. Sasquatch Game Studio's' first Kickstarter will include 13th Age-compatible game material set in a different world, a world that's more Conan vs. Cthulhu than the Archmage vs. the Diabolist. I am looking forward to seeing what Rich Baker, Dave Noonan, and Steve Schubert do with icons in a new and very different world. The Kickstarter runs another couple weeks. Check it out, either for 13th Age, for Pathfinder, for 4e, or for all three. 

Shadowrun's Icons

One thing I've loved about helping design the Shadowrun: Crossfire game has been getting back in touch with the Shadowrun universe. SR's mix of orcs and Uzis and Kurosawa-tinged street noir is good for fun. I've enjoyed what I've read of the upcoming Shadowrun Fifth Edition from Catalyst and that got me wondering about what 13th Age and its OGL mechanics, the Archmage Engine, could contribute to a Shadowrun game.

The first answer is the icon relationship system. But in SR, the powerful entities that shape the world aren't icons, they're corporations.

Start with the Big Ten, Ares, Aztechnology, Renaku, Saeder-Krupp and the rest. Add other corps as possibilities if that suits the GM's intentions for the campaign or a players' roleplaying input, provided the GM is comfortable going with it. Heck, add 3 and make me feel all fuzzy with the number 13, but that's a grace note.

You're playing shadowrunners, not wage mages and suits, so the rules on how to handle positive, conflicted and negative relationships get flipped around compared to relationships with icons in 13th Age. In SR, you can only spend 1 point on a positive relationship. Let's rephrase that. You can only spend at most one point on a single positive relationship, the rest of your points have to be spent on conflicted and negative relationships.

Conflicted relationships are still roleplaying hotness. Negative relationships will be more common and are great for temporary alliances against a corp or inside information left over from previous conflicts.

In SR, you'll want to take advantage of the fact that the corporations are huge, with tentacles and limbs twitching everywhere. A relationship point is likely to represent contact with a specific person or net-entity or a sub-grid or a marketing contractor or a freelance assassin who needs to take someone out and maybe you can help. That's important because it's hugely likely that the PCs are going to end up making runs against targets they have a better-than-negative relationship point with. In SR, it's all about deniability and triple-crosses. 13th Age's fantasy plays it much straighter, loyalty is loyalty and a positive relationship might carry weight with a great many people connected to an icon. But SR is never that clean and even people who would prefer to treat you decently may be forced by their day job to call in the attack drones.

Likewise, SR relationship points are going to change. You've got a positive point with Ares and you burn Ares horribly on a run? Maybe the guy you knew in Seattle gets fragged. Turn that positive point with Ares into a negative point, or maybe turn it into a conflicted point with the corp that profited from Ares' pain.

I'll be curious to see whether this makes sense in an actual SR game. I'm not sure whether it integrates or supplants contact/connections mechanics and what's being brought in with SR5. I'm pretty sure that the Archmage Engine rule that rolling a 5 on a relationship roll is good for the character AND good for the GM applies splendidly to interactions between shadowrunners and corporations. Simplicity might suggest trying it as its own mechanic instead of crisscrossing with other systems.

And speaking of criss-crossing, we only had 8 pages that needed revision from the 13th Age proofs today. The printing process is moving. Those who want to pre-order 13th Age game to get the PDF now and the print copy as soon as it's ready can follow this link for details on the Bits'n'Mortar implementation for the game, or order directly from PelgranePress.com.