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!

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.

Calling the Ancestors & Faring Forward Bravely

Laura Galli's painting above, from 13th Age 2E, illustrates the icon connection example when a half-orc with a connection to a High Druid averts bloodshed at a harvest festival invaded by (evil) elves by reaching back into the decades and centuries when humans and dwarves and elves lived together in the valley peacefully. The spirits of the ancestors come dancing out together in the swirling leaves, and for the rest of the festival day elves and the valley folk dance in peace.

It's nice when it works out!

Towards the end of his life my father's favorite saying was ole tuubli--Estonian for 'fare forward bravely.'

When I need reminders to fare forward bravely, and to keep track of the people doing wonderful things, a couple of my favorite resources this year have been the political and social commentary of Heather Cox Richardson and the social grab-bag of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast.

You can find Heather Cox Richardson here on Substack. Her unpaid subscription is excellent. I don't know what her paid subscription is like yet, but I'll find out now that I've subscribed. I owe her sanity points, and if you're looking for a brilliant voice with a grasp of history and progressive possibilities, you might find some too.

I'm not always a podcast listener, but even when I'm reading partial transcripts, I also get a lot out of Plain English. It's useful about election polling and results at the moment, and a lot of the time it's touching on politics. Other episodes are on science, history, sports, and other human activities, as you'd expect from a podcast that's part of the Ringer network.

Speaking of networks, the Gamers4Harris website has a list of a whole bunch of something like 1111+ good people it is an honor to work alongside. It has resources for donations and suggestions for last minute volunteering that could turn into ongoing efforts.

Ole tuubli!

Link to a Flames Rising Interview and Notes on 13th Age 2E Art

Monica Valentinelli asked some fun questions about 13th Age 2E and I wrote a few long answers. You can find the interview on Flames Rising here.

An interview question about how design philosophy might have changed in the new edition led to a discussion of Second Edition art: how it shows many different versions of the classic characters and creatures and how it approaches player character heroes who obviously have One Unique Things!

There's another big change in the art of 13th Age Second Edition that I didn't mention in the interview: there's so much of it! We're getting ready to turn the Gamemaster's Guide over to layout, and the monster chapter alone has around 70 full illustrations. Most of the monster entries have at least one illustration, a couple like dragons and demons have five or ten. In a handful of spots where the text suggested that we could fit alphabetically adjacent monsters into the same spread, we've got illustrations that show two different types of monsters as each other's allies, or as enemies.

That's where the Lizardfolk vs. Manticore image above comes from. Rich Longmore created the black and white pencils, and Lee Moyer spread the warriors out a bit, painted the image, and added the wonderful watery-battlefield effect. I love how the lizardfolk appear to be keeping a close eye on the manticore's tail! Maybe the warrior in the middle is being extra-careful because they've already lost part of their own tail.

Vault of Mini Things!

Last week before our 13th Age 2E playtest, Jonathan handed me a big plastic bag full of Cardboard Heroes. They were mine, the bag I used as D&D minis and Earthdawn minis and The Fantasy Trip minis back before I mostly switched over to the pre-painted plastic figures we were making for D&D at WotC. I’d loaned the cardboard heroes bag to Jonathan ages ago when he needed more baddies for the 3e Elysombra game and the bag had been forgotten in a box of game supplies.

I spent a couple minutes rummaging through the cardboard zombies and lizardfolk and dragons, wondering which I might use. And then Sean noticed the rummage and told me about the all-grown-up version of flat-hero minis that’s being funded on BackerKit right now. It’s the Vault of Mini Things from TinkerHouse Games.

I love this project! I currently use prepainted plastic minis, and I sometimes use painted metal when it matters and I’ve got the right figure handy. I’ll be supplementing and occasionally replacing those minis with the figure in this set.

Marshall Short’s art on these figures and the various terrain settings is fantastic, and he also has a PrintableHeroes Patreon that includes VTT figures.

The Vault’s organization and storage system is clever and will pack a huge number of options into a relatively compact box.

And terrain is often the weakness of my games, and I’m excited about using this Vault’s selection of terrain either alone or supplementing maps.

The official BackerKit campaign lasts another week.

It’s worth browsing the site to see all the great minis and terrain that’s included. Here are three snippets that caught my eye: a pair of side-by-side heroes that I’d like to play as a team (frog guy! sorcerer gal!), some of the dungeon terrain, and a few of the magic items/spell effects that I definitely don’t have miniatures of anywhere else!

Badger Badger Skunk, aka Badgery!

Two years ago on my birthday, I ran a 13th Age game centered on a game-within-a-game, a sport played underground that the gnomes involved called badgerbadgerskunk. It was the 31st session of the Adventurers’ Lament campaign. Gherophy, the gnome bard who glows golden when rocks are placed against his skin—who still manages to walk in shadows like a rogue thanks to blessings from the Prince of Shadows—was celebrating his birthday in Axis and the local gnomish community put together a special game of badgerbadgerskunk in his honor.

Campaign Background: What you need to know about gnomes in this campaign:

a) They are frequently scoundrels, bandits, edge-workers, masters of the grey areas whose culture heroes are people like the Dread Pirate Fishstick;

b) They’re natives of Glorantha, emigrants to the Dragon Empire, and whenever there’s something weird going on with the gnomes, the players (who are the ones who decided on this) wave their hands and say “Well that’s Glorantha for you,” and

c) They talk with animals, especially underground critters like badgers and bulettes.

Maybe it was the Glorantha connection that got me thinking about a sport the gnomes would play. I’ve always loved Gloranthan trollball, where the ‘ball’ is an expendable trollkin that scampers when fumbled and is definitely going to need to be replaced several times each game.

Gnomeball: For the gnome version, I decided that the ball was gonna be a badger. You’ve gotta sweet talk the ball into going along with you or it’s gonna tear your ear off. Unlike the troll game, the gnome game makes seriously hurting the ball an unthinkable faux pas sure to get you ostracized . . . after the badgers have had their fill of you.

Of course it’s not just badgers. My starting mechanic for the game was that 1 in 6 balls are a skunk instead of a badger. The new ball gets hurled up out of a hole in the center of the underground playing burrow, a central zone with various tunnels and levels of chambers and corridors and slides, with teams attempting to carry the ball across the other team’s goal line at the far ends of the burrow. In long games, you’d expect that the ‘new ball’ might be a badger or skunk that has already been in play earlier in the game, so you’d better make friends with the ball or you’ll pay for it all game long.

The Birthday Game: Gherophy’s team started with threee NPC gnomes: Gimplenappe, Rusty, and Pumpkin-who-wants-to-be-known-as-Grimkin. These ne’er-do-wells had been introduced as members of a quickly-defeated gang of gnomish bandits. They were childhood friends/tormentors of Gherophy, and the PCs spared them instead of treating them like other bandits. (Good thing: later they become our low-level PCs for all-gnome sessions!) Getting the badgerbadgerskunk game organized was the low-gnomes’ moment of glory.

Gherophy’s team was allowed to have two dwarves, the central combat-ready characters in the Adventurer’s Lament PC group. This was viewed as a handicap by the opposing team, because although dwarves are pretty close to being able to stand up straight in most of the chambers of the badgerbadgerskunk burrow, they’re also likely to get chewed on and sprayed whenever they attempt to advance the ball. Dwarves have no communication skillz, not in gnome-terms. This held true for Bromach, the group’s dwarven barbarian, who got clawed, sprayed, and sprayed again. Eventually he realized that there weren’t many rules about illegal blocking and so he took out his frustrations on the other team.

But Dhomnin, who the group always speaks of as a paladin (thanks to his earnest domination of high-Moradin ground and his golden-spiral GGW helmet), is actually a dwarf ranger who puts a lot of effort into his relationship with his monitor lizard animal companion. Dhomnin hit very difficult skill rolls skunk-after-skunk. He couldn’t quite talk with the beasties, but they came to an understanding involving treats and I-no-longer-remember-what, so even when Gherophy wasn’t grabbing the ’ball’ and spinning through shadows, the group’s offense kept humming.

And I did say, skunk after skunk, not skunk after badger. Because dice are my friends and when I’m rolling a d6, a 1 in 6 chance of a skunk instead of a badger turns into a single badger mixed in with 4 skunks. Whahahahahaah! You’re all getting sprayed!

Most of the rest of the dice rolling I left to the PCs, treating skunk-talking, badger-carrying, skunk-tracking, gnome-tackling, and tricky goal line hand-offs as skill checks of various types, some easy, most normal or hard. Everything was harder for the two dwarves but that didn’t faze Dhomnin.

I did a bit of dice rolling myself for a couple skunk and badger attacks when it was dramatically suitable. Poor Rusty, good thing he has a left ear. But it wasn’t a game about running out of hit points—for the real heroes, getting damaged applied penalties to your next skill checks and made it more likely your team would get scored on.

The PCs won in high highlight style with moments of glory evenly distributed and a barrel of Klinkhammer’s finest Black Dog ale to soothe the barbarian’s cuts!

Post-game Show & the Wider World: Yesterday I talked with Lee Moyer about badgerbadgerskunk. By the end of the day, after phoning me a couple times to ask questions about where the game might be played, Lee came up with his preferred name for the game, Badgery. And then he designed the logo that’s painted on a signboard outside the arena-burrow of the Badgery HQ in Concord, the Dragon Empire city where gnomes feel most at home. The Badgery Concord League!

So yeah, I’ll have to do more with this, won’t I? Thanks, Lee!

If you use badgerbadgerskunk in one of your 13th Age games, let me know at 13thAgePlaytest@gmail.com.

Storybook Brawling onto a Tabletop

The art above is called Flights by Moonlight. It’s the first storybook image we got from our amazing artist, Ekaterina Chesalova, for the Storybook Brawl boardgame I’ve been working on the past year with designers from my company, Fire Opal Media, and other designers from Good Luck Games.

One of the coolest things about designing games is that sometimes the games you play turn into games you’re working on. In 2021, I was playing a lot of Storybook Brawl, the digital auto-battler-style game of twisted fairy tales on Steam. I knew some of the designers. I loved the game. My business partner Jay Schneider and I got in touch and we ended up signing on to design a board game version of Storybook Brawl!

If you’ve played the digital version, you’re probably aware that most of the mechanics that make the digital version tick don’t translate into a board game. The truth is that it can be liberating when mechanics are so untranslatable. We had to evoke the feel of the digital game, and the fun of its brawls, in a board and card game environment that would stay fun for players of many ages instead of gradually eliminating people until only one winner was left.

I love this type of challenge!

Sometimes my early designs are reasonably close to the final design. This was not one of those times. Jay and the rest of the development team did so much work and redesign, and along the way we realized that the way to set up the brawls at the heart of the game was with a storybook that would double as a scenario guide!

The Flights by Moonlight picture above? That’s one of the early scenes from Act II: Home Realms, showing the moment Mrs. Claus and Pan’s Shadow meet after their stories have been shuffled together. The storybook’s opposite page gives each player a choice between three Plot Twists before that round’s brawl: Workshopping (just some gold to buy better cards); From Up Here, Everybody Else Looks Tiny (the right to buy cards from your shop for a tiny price this round); and Moonlit Reconnaissance (banishing a random card and acquiring two new cards).

Yes, it’s a deckbuilding game of sorts. And each brawl leads to another story later on in the storybook, until the grand finale. I’m thrilled with the game and in love with writing storybooks for it! It’s one of those games I’m going to struggle to keep a copy of because my wife Lisa is gonna be giving it away as a gift. (Seriously: I’ve had to borrow copies of Three-Dragon Ante and Epic Spell Wars from friends because all of our copies had been gifted!)

The Storybook Brawl board game is going to be published by Dara Studios. It will go on Kickstarter later this fall. Come by booth 2400 at GenCon next week to see a prototype, check out the storybook, and to play a demo for between 2 and 4 players.

I’ll usually be at the Pelgrane booth, #423, and though I’m mostly doing 13th Age things there, I’ll be happy to talk about Storybook Brawl and will probably be at booth 2400 running/playing games now and then.

I’ll post in the next couple days about the Pelgrane-and-other-things I’ll be up to at GenCon.

Kor, the Ograkshasa Monk

What does rebellion look like when dad is an ogre mage and mom is a rakshasa?

In Kor’s case, rebellion looks like obtaining magic that makes you look mostly human and studying to be a monk in a monastery run by the Dragon Emperor. Of course, many of Kor’s forms don’t look a lot like styles practiced by Imperial monks. There are limits to how straight you can be when the Black Dragon is an old family friend.

Yeah, Jonathan says this is the most-me character ever.

I used the beastblooded modifiers and the bestial fury ability from Book of Ages (page 77). When Kor (it’s kinda Rak backwards, natch) goes beasty-fury, the spell making him look human drops temporarily and you get a glimpse of the tigrish-ogre beneath. I didn’t realize I could have sung “ograkshasa ograkshasa ogra ogra ograksasa” until now.

I’m using the past tense because we were right there, deep in the Stone Thief (thanks in large part to the activities of Kor’s older sister Kyla), when Paul Hughes gifted me with the certificate that crafted Kor at HeroForge. I decided to keep Kor’s hands facing human-style, instead of trying to show him full-beast. And then my wonderful talented friend Brittany Broyles (@blondeofmystery) painted Kor. Now we know how to make sure campaigns don’t get played again: make a HeroForge mini of your character.

Still, hope remains. If not back inside the Stone Thief, some other game. Maybe I’ll get really old school and blow a character created for one campaign into another version of the Dragon Empire, like a leaf in the wind. A leaf with fangs!

(a much better photo from Brittany, with the other two minis she painted for me accompanying Kor)

Photo Wrapping!

This Christmas I came up with a method of wrapping presents that made me happy. It couldn't possibly be something entirely new, but I've never seen anyone do it. I don't feel like searching the internet for the people who did it first; I'm just gonna write it up!

I was wrapping a final round of presents and I didn't have enough paper or labels. I realized I had a color printer. And lots of great photos of the people we were giving gifts to. So all I had to do was print pictures of a gift's recipient on several sheets of 8.5" by 11" paper, fold and tape the sheets together to cover the key portions of the present, ensure that the face got central position on the packaging, and voila: no need for a label! For extra effect, use pictures the gift's recipient has never seen.

Depending on the size of the gift, you may have to use other bits of contact paper to hide portions of the gift. I feel like this style of 'wrapping' is more about providing the moment of opening-discovery, not trying to wrap the present tightly as if it was being probed by a 7 year-old.

This is a photo of the top of a present to my wife Lisa, two prints used on the top, taped together, featuring the moment we saw that the angel wing mural in northern Oahu had been rendered in the colors of the dress Lisa was wearing!

A Blue Sea Picture for Smoke Sky Days

This is a picture from better times on the West Coast. It's a stained glass masterpiece by our friend Steve Carlyle. Every day is better because we're around it any time we're in our living room. 

Wrestlenomicon Launches in March!

[Sometimes Bad Things Happen to Bad Entities, by Kurt Komoda]

“Sometimes bad things happen to bad entities” is an apt slogan for Wrestlenomicon! The first two gods into the ring are Hastur (picture above, standing) and Cthulhu (picture above, splatted). We’re starting the Kickstarter on March 5^th with the decks for those two gods as the core game.

After initial design and playtesting, I was too excited about this game to let it lie fallow while the production details were being wrangled into place by Arc Dream Publishing. I went ahead and designed the Nyarlathotep deck and am working on Yog-Sothoth. If the Kickstarter community gets behind the game and stretches it into something powerful, we’ll end up with multiplayer rules and a full royal rumble of elder gods!

A few early links . . .

For a bit more of the game’s art by Kurt, as well as notes from Dennis and Shane, visit Wrestlenomicon.com

For some notes on mechanics that I wrote during an early playtest phase, see this blog.

Here’s Bebo’s GLOWing intro video.

And here’s a look at an early version of the layout for the Sometimes Bad Things . . . card. (Among other things, the symbols will be a bit different in the final.) Layout artist Simeon Cogswell has been wrassling with the Kurt’s art to fit it onto our tarot-sized cards.

13 Years of Color!

It's time to pull on this blog's starter cord. For the fun of it and because a couple people were asking, I'm restarting by rerunning the first blog post I made on LiveJournal, back in 2008. Yes, my thirteenth anniversary of color is tomorrow. I'm grateful every day.

Untitled, by Eric Eschenbach

    Until 2006 I was colorblind. Show me a sunset and I saw shades of green. Hand me a pink shirt and I was sure it was grey. Before my first date with Lisa, my future wife, I gave her my address and described my house as the gray house on the corner. The only gray house on a corner anywhere in the neighborhood belonged to the local drug dealers, which she realized when they opened the door and called inside to see if there was a ‘Rob’ sprawled somewhere in the haze. Lisa said “Uh, sorry, I’ve got the wrong house,” backed up and found me in the blue house on the corner.

    On February 8, 2006, I sat at home typing Dreamblade notes on my laptop computer while Lisa went to hear a National Geographic lecture with her mom. As usual, I had Windows Media Player humming along playing music. I liked having the Alchemy visualizer twirling colors around at the side of the screen while I worked. Suddenly the screen flashed orangecrimsonpinkpurplescarletblueviolet. I’d always thought of the program as a mix of flashing yellows and blues and some greens. Had the visualizer changed? No, it was the same program I always used. But these were actual colors! I sat and watched the full spectrum twisting for almost an hour.

    I knew that I had a conclusive color vision test hanging on the wall across the living room from me. The day before I’d had my nose pressed to a landscape painting by Lisa’s brother, trying to see the pink in the sky that she said was her favorite part. I hadn’t been able to see anything except some dark streaks. I pointed to them and said, “Is this the pink?” but Lisa just shook her head, saying that I might as well not try.

    When I dared to set the computer aside and approach the landscape, I was ecstatic to find that the sky wasn’t just a blue and gray wash. There was the pink. And those dark streaks I’d noticed the day before? They were beautiful orange.

    Lisa came home and found me sitting in a pile of all our art and photo books, spread out on the floor, looking at colors and details I’d never seen. I was bawling. I was overwhelmed by the reality that this was how everyone else saw the world all the time. Lisa had to talk me into going to sleep, I was worried that I was going to wake up and it would all be gone.

    Two [[13!]] years later, I still have color vision. I don’t have a medically verified explanation for how I regained colors, but with a prompt from a neurologist friend of Lee Moyer’s, I have put together a good guess. No one ever accused me of being colorblind until I was in fourth grade. I don’t remember having any trouble recognizing colors when I was younger and I didn’t have any trouble recognizing them when my color vision came back. But when I was in third grade I ran into a metal pole at a full downhill sprint. It was a serious head injury and it left me with symptoms that bothered me into my thirties. Those symptoms have all gradually gotten better or gone away. My guess is that I also lost the world’s colors to that metal pole.

    After decades, something has reconnected. My mind has agreed to show me colors again.

    I’m happy.

Guest Post: Thumbing Through 13th Age Glorantha

Jonathan Tweet gifts my blog with gaming-centered posts, and here he is, finally looking at something we created together! 

At Gen Con, I finally got a copy of 13th Age Glorantha for myself, and when I got home I looked it over page by page. During production, Rob worked with the art and layout to bring the book together, but I kept my eyes off it so I would be able to see the final book with fresh eyes. It was worth the wait! Over the last forty years, various art styles have represented Glorantha to gamers, and 13th Age Glorantha touches on all those styles. From Cults of Terror (1981), there’s a classic, full-color, black-and-white illustration of Thanatar. He’s the severed-head god whose worshipers steal magic from the heads of those they decapitate. There are plenty of stylized images of gods and heroes, which are perfectly suited for a myth-oriented world like Glorantha. Some illustrations are drawn in a comic-book style, which suggests the archetypal quality of the myths and those involved in them. Some illustrations represent a more recent style of Gloranthan imagery, with details inspired by East Asian and South Asian cultures and religious art. Other illustrations are gritty fantasy pieces, reflecting the down-to-earth aspects of roleplaying in Glorantha. It’s fun to see all these styles together, and it’s a cogent reminder that your Glorantha is up to you. 

The Glorantha Sourcebook is a treat to look at, too. It’s a system-free companion to 13th Age Glorantha, and it has lots of art that I would have loved to see when I was running Glorantha campaigns in high school and college. The iconic images of the gods do a great job of connecting the abstract background of Glorantha’s divine beings to the everyday life of characters in the world. 

Here’s a photo of a meaningful illustration from 13th Age Glorantha. This section of the book is about a terrible part of the God Time where your god was defeated, and this is Rich Longmore's depiction of the mighty Orlanth, defeated and broken. The player-characters get to enter the God Time in their god’s place, and then it’s their turn to face the denizens of Fangplace.

You can see I’m bookmarking some pages. These are places where I wrote something particularly harsh. Chaos is on the rise, and there’s plenty of harshness to go around. In one scenario in particular, I almost feel sorry for the players. 

Book of Demons: using symbols from @GameIcons

In the last chapter of Book of Demons, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan wrote some deceptively calm text describing things that can be found in the Citadel of the Diabolist. I loved his understated approach to iconic horrors, and realized that using a traditional illustration style wouldn't fit. Instead, I decided to try understated silhouette-style symbols to maintain the contrast.

I asked layout artist Badger McInnes to play symbol-artist, but before Badger started, ASH LAW pointed me towards the treasure trove of Creative Commons symbols made available by @game-icons/. They're up to over 3300 symbols tailored for gaming, wonderful stuff for both published games and prototypes.

The site is searchable with tags and it was no problem to find ten symbols that worked by Lorc and Delapouite. Badger slightly modified the symbols, we handled the Creative Commons licensing text in the credits, and you can find them on page 103 of Book of Demons. Here's a snippet of the page with Gareth's text and three of the symbols . . . .

My stupid mistake was that I miscounted and only credited them with nine symbols. I left the Cultist icon by Lorc out of my count, the symbol just above. We ended up using ten symbols from game-icons, not nine. I didn't discover the error until I was writing this blog post and realized I wasn't going to be able to simply recommend the game-icons site, I also need to apologize for screwing up the count.

Apology: I apologize. I got confused. Gosh darn demon cultists.

Recommendation: Game-icons is a wonderfully useful site. Follow them on twitter at @gameicons. Design a game about prehistory because they just uploaded wonderful prehistoric icons. Have fun!

Wrestlenomicon!

[Hyades Head Slam, by Kurt Komoda]

Dennis Detwiller & Shane Ivey of Arc Dream Publishing came up with the idea of pitting Cthulhu vs. Hastur in a cosmic cage fight. They came up with dozens of funny card names and Kurt Komoda supplied wonderful illustrations. But the rules they started with didn’t live up to the concept and the art. Dennis & Shane decided they didn’t really have a viable game. And that’s when I got involved, meeting Dennis at a convention, hearing that they had a fully-illustrated game with no mechanics, and jumping at the chance to join the team.

I designed a couple systems that had interesting pieces but weren’t fun. Then I hit on the idea of presenting the fight as a battle between great slow-moving cosmic entities who launch attacks that unfold over time and space, arriving after the enemy has had a chance to see them coming and figure out what they might do in response. If it’s not actually a unique game mechanic, I don’t know other games that used the idea first. I’m sure I’ll hear whether the mechanics have unknown ancestors during this next piece of the process, a wide open-playtest.

If you’d like to be part of the playtest, you can sign up at Wrestlenomicon.com. This first (and perhaps only) playtest is going to run for something like five weeks. Assuming it goes well, the game’s developer, Sean McCarthy, and I will process the playtest feedback and get the game ready to roll. At some point thereafter, when they’ve recovered from other Kickstarter heroics, Arc Dream will run a KS for Wrestlenomicon . . . . since there’s definitely more that can be accomplished in this cosmic ring!

[[Fistful of Cultists, also by Kurt Komoda]]

Dream-Quest, Dreamlands cards

Here’s why I love Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe:

a)     Kij Johnson is one of my favorite writers, and the fact that I haven’t read all her books yet is a symptom of deliberately rationing her work over time—next up: Fudoki.

b)     The Dreamlands are my favorite part of Lovecraft’s mythos.

c)      Vellit Boe’s dreamquest works as mythos journey, perspective-shift social commentary, and a trip into the lives of real people in a surreal world.

d)    Brutal mid-paragraph shifts from normality to deadly violence. They remind me of the non-transitions in the movie version of No Country for Old Men. This is how violence slams into real life, not with musical cues.

Here’s why I love Heather Hudson’s Dreamlands Christmas Cards that are on Kickstarter for the next couple days, and can be found here:

a)     Hilarious use of the mythos' brightest corners.

b)    Cards that translate both in and out of fandom.

c)     Homage to Calvin & Hobbes. 

d)     At least one card that requires a scenario: (Santa Claus vs.) The Black Galley!

Red Base Yellow Base

Walking our dog Roo early this morning in the fog, outside the Rainier Arts Center, I found myself standing on what felt like an art project, or perhaps a section of a game board, one base red, one base yellow.

Alarums & Excursions #500 arrives this Sunday!

[[art by Lee Moyer]]

Lee Gold is putting out the 500^th monthly issue of the Alarums & Excursions roleplaying fanzine on May 21^st.

A&E is an amateur press association. Each issue contains pages from two or three dozen contributors who discuss rpg systems, write-up sessions and entire campaigns, review newly acquired games, share game mechanics ideas, and comment on everyone else’s writing. Yes, it’s a lot like a play-by-mail version of an all-rpg-topics-considered online discussion folder. You can find the details and contribution guidelines here.

Back in high school, I found my clan when I followed a plug from Dave Hargrave in the Arduin Grimoire and sent Lee money to get hold of A&E #67. Over the years the clan has included most all the people who helped me enter the gaming industry and a powerful ring of lifelong friends. If this is the first you've of the fanzine, see A&E's Wikipedia page for a small slice of the past and present contributors.

I haven’t been contributing lately, but in honor of the anniversary, I arranged for a color cover from my comrade Lee Moyer. I’m also going to contribute a zine to the issue, including notes on some of the campaigns played in my 19-years-and-running Wednesday night gaming group.

Former A&E contributors who read this: Lee would love to hear from people with short updates, mentioning how you heard about A&E, when you started reading or contributing to it, and what you are up to now. In fact, Lee would love to hear more than that from former contributors; issue #500 isn’t necessarily a reunion but it could be. You can go the full-fledged contribution route at $1.75 a page, or you can send Lee your update by email at lee.gold@ca.rr.com and she’ll get it into issue #500 as a filler if it reaches her at by 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time on May 21^st.

Home Art Gallery: Tyger Tyger

I loved this painting when I saw Heather Hudson working on it years ago. When Heather sold it as a print several years ago, I jumped at the chance. The print blazes to the left of my desk.

Heather and I met when she was illustrating M:tG cards and then painted some of the most fun cards in Shadowfist. Of course this painting is neither of those things. It's drawn from William Blake's poem The Tyger. If you haven't read it recently, follow the click trail.

I admit that I haven't spent much time with Blake's writing. Maybe I'll get reacquainted after Steve Dempsey unleashes his Gumshoe game on English mysticism, which I hope ends up with the name Fearful Symmetry.

You can find the prints and cards that Heather sells now here.