Games I've Got at GenCon & Scheduled Panels

I'll be seeing some of you at GenCon in the next few days!

Mostly I'll be at the Pelgrane booth, booth #423, talking with people about the news for what's coming for 13th Age, and the wonderful Drakkenhall book that's out at this show:

Here are some panels I'll be involved in for Pelgrane or with Pelgranistas. . . .

Friday August 5th, 12:00-1:00 p.m. [Hyatt Studio 1] Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff. Robin has to stay in Toronto, so Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and I are joining Ken to talk about roleplaying, conspiracies, writing, and conspiracies about roleplaying writing.

Saturday August 6th, 4:00-5:30 p.m. [The Stadium: Meeting Room 8] Swords, Spies, & Shoggoths: The Pelgrane Press Panel. There are a lot of fun projects surfacing soon that I didn't know about until the pre-con planning session, so I know panel attendees will be pleasantly surprised.

Sunday, August 7, 11:00 a.m.-12 noon. [Hyatt Studio 1] 13th Age Monster Workshop. Attend the panel and make suggestions. Or heckle. Our rogues gallery of 13th Age designers and developers and a publisher will spin the suggestions into a publishable baddie. I slated this madness for Sunday since it tends to leave us punch drunk.

Other fun.... All con long, Dara Studios at Booth 2400 will be running demos of the Storybook Brawl board game I wrote about last week. I'll be there when I can, or you can ask me about the game when you find me nearer Pelgrane.

And Wiz-Kids at booth 1715 will have copies of Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War to show off, but I don't believe they'll have enough copies to have them on sale. It was close, so that means the game should be out in retail soon.

13th Age Monster Design Workshop at GenCon Online

 

art by Rich Longmore

It’s that time of year when we get together to design a 13^th Age monster!

Saturday, September 12, at 11 a.m. PT, 2:00 p.m ET, join 13^th Age writers Liz Argall, J-M DeFoggi, Wade Rockett, and me as we juggle your brainstorms to create a memorable 13^th Age monster.

Register now . . .  for How To Design a Monster in 13th Age. 

Previously in Our Workshop

The last time we ran the workshop in person, the crowd whooped through a giddy gauntlet of drinking puns towards the monster we ended up calling a booze ooze! The full write-up is slated to appear in the Dwarf King chapter of the Icon Followers book I’ve been working on. Here’s a piece of the text along with the lower-level version of the booze ooze wrecker. There’s also a spoiler version that's loaded with puns and a couple varieties of mooks.

Origin Stories

Ale flows freely in dwarven taverns, drinking holes, and residential areas!  Most of it flows where it should, down dwarven gullets or weaker non-dwarven throats. But accidents happen. Despite the dwarves’ absurd fondness for ale, a certain portion of the booze gets disposed of, sometimes precipitously. Bad barrels are fine for human drinkers, but dwarves have standards. If there’s something wrong with a cask, it’s going down whatever passes for a sewer.

Sometimes, what’s wrong is a side-effect of magic spells that shouldn’t have been fired off near the brewery. Other times no one knows what went wrong, underworld hazards, so much harder to cope with than the problems faced by the weakling human brewers on the surface.

So hi ho, oh no, to the underworld we go, where bits and batches of ale-that’s-off is disposed of sloppily and with no thought for what it’s been poured upon. Down grates and dwarven pour-holes and into pits where things live and drink. Things like oozes!

Affectionate Booze Ooze

It’s not fighting you. It’s celebrating.

Large 5^th level wrecker [ooze]

Initiative: +7

Double-fisted approval +10 vs. AC (2 attacks)—16 damage

Lurch’n’hug’em +10 vs. PD—40 damage, and target is stuck until the end of its next turn

Special targeting: To use this attack, the booze ooze must be able to move. Pick a random nearby enemy the booze ooze appears able to reach with a move. The booze ooze uses its move action to engage that target, then makes this attack.

Flows where it likes: The ooze is immune to opportunity attacks.

Ooze: The ooze is immune to effects. When an attack or other ability applies a condition to an ooze (dazed, hampered, weakened, ongoing damage, etc.), that condition doesn’t affect it.

Resist acid 16+, resist poison 16+: Acid or poison attacks that roll less than a natural 16 deal half damage to the booze ooze.

Whoozy: A non-ooze that starts its turn engaged with the affectionate booze ooze takes 5 ongoing poison damage.

AC   20

PD    19                 HP 120

MD  14

New 3DA ability and archetypes for tournament play

WizKids is running Three-Dragon Ante tournaments on Friday and Saturday of PAX Unplugged in Pennsylvania, December 6th and 7th. They had the fun idea of having people play in-character using the roleplaying rules for meshing 3DA with D&E 5e!

I thought a bit about how the current roleplaying rules would work in a casual-but-still-competitive tournament. My feeling is that the Ante Manipulation abilities (page 26 of the rulebook) aren't right for tournament play. They're OK in a home setting where players are accustomed to picking on each other week after week, but they're both vindictive and distinct from the way the game usually takes players' money, so no Ante Manipulation abilities in this tournament.

To help the fighter/barbarian types who are most likely to have the Threats & Promises ability we just ruled out of the tournament, here's a new Card Draw ability that's for characters with muscles. Like the other Card Draw abilities, Getting Angry Now lets you draw two cards when it triggers.

Getting Angry Now

Pre-requisite: Strength 16+

Trigger: You just lost a gambit with the second-strongest flight, or tied for second.

I'd say it makes perfect sense to let it be used if you're the second weakest when the Druid has awarded the gambit to the weakest. You're gonna be angry. 

If you bring your own character, the folks running the tournament will help you you select abilities that are right for the tournament. If you're showing up to play and you don't have a character ready, here's the short list of possible character archetypes I put together for WizKids to work from. These archetypes use the abilities as printed in the rulebook, with one exception: the Desperation ability is fine, but could get irritating if used too many times in a game, so for tournament play I'm suggesting that each player with the ability can only use Desperation once per game. Since it's therefore one of the weaker abilities, characters with Desperation will also have another ability that's on the weaker side, so they'll never be entirely out of options. 

3DA Archetypes

Drow Rogue

Card Draw: Versatile Trickster

Dragonborn Fighter

(Player chooses their color!)

Card Draw: Draconic Ancestry

Card Draw: Desperation [[but only usable once per game]]

Gnome Bard

Card Denial: Cutting Words

Card Draw: Fast Hands

Half-elf Paladin

Card Draw: Inspiring Leader

Half-Orc Barbarian

Card Draw: Getting Angry Now

Card Draw: Desperation [[but only usable once per game]]

Halfling Rogue

Card Draw: Gambling Background

Human Cleric

Card Draw: Blessing of the Trickster

High Elf Wizard

Card Denial: Mystic Discouragement

Card Draw: Practice Counts

Wood Elf Ranger

Card Draw: Desperation

Card Draw: Practice Counts

Other heroes…

The halfling rogue’s ability is fine for any player character who has a lot of experience gambling.

The half-orc barbarian’s abilities work for any strong fighter-type.

The wood elf ranger’s abilities work for any character who otherwise doesn’t belong at these tables!

My GenCon Schedule

I'm going to be simpler to find this year. Many years I orbit the Pelgrane booth, but in the past it's been a loose orbit. This year the orbit tightens and I'll be working the Pelgrane booth most of the show. Find me and the rest of the Pelgranistas at booth #1417, where we'll have a couple new products for Night's Black Agents and one new sandbox adventure book for 13th Age: Shards of the Broken Sky.

13th Age Monster Workshop 
Friday, 11:00 am to noon. Stadium Meeting Room 12
This panel is a team-up between 13th Age designers and audience members who end up as 13th Age designers! Previous workshops' creatures that we polished and published include three entries in Bestiary 2: the shadow mongoose, the salamander (originally designed as the lava moth), and the Koruku, the avatar of the Iron Sea's hatred for the Dragon Empire. That's Rich Longmore's illustration of the Koruku above. Its brainstorm melted my brain cells. Bring your brain and help distribute the meltage.

13th Age Glorantha Signing
Friday, 3-4 p.m. Chaosium booth #829
Jonathan Tweet and I will be scribing runes into books. Also autographs.

BGG Interview about Shards
Saturday 1:30
Digital discussion for on-line viewing.

Swords, Spies, & Shoggoths: the Pelgrane Press Panel
Saturday, 2-3 p.m., Crowne Plaza: Pennsylvania Station A
This is one of our Ken & Others Talk About Stuff panels. Happily the stuff includes some mostly-unannounced 13th Age books!

Guest Post: Jonathan Tweet's GenCon Schedule

In 1978, I went to Gen Con as a 12-year old and bought Cosmic Encounter. Nine years later, I returned as a vendor selling Whimsy Cards, and I’ve been back most years since. This year at Gen Con, I’ll mostly be promoting Over the Edge, the all-new rewrite of my influential 1992 RPG. Here’s my schedule of public events.  

Wednesday during the day, no plans, maybe I should make some. 

Wednesday night, Diana Jones Award party at the Slippery Noodle, game professionals welcome. Eager to see who wins from among the four worthy nominees.

Thursday, 11–1, Atlas Games booth, #1421. Talk to me about Over the Edge, Clades/Clades Prehistoric, Ars Magica, On the Edge, or anything. Yes, I’ll also sign whatever books of mine you bring.

Thursday, 2–3, Crowne Plaza: Pennsylvania Stn A. Basics of finding players, getting a campaign started, and taking the gamemaster role. With Darcy Ross, Robin Laws, and Justin Alexander. Crowne Plaza is the place with the creepy white statues, so that’s good. https://www.gencon.com/events/149629

Friday, 3–4, Chaosium booth, #829, signing 13th Age Glorantha, or anything. With Rob Heinsoo. 

Friday, 7pm or so until much later, ENnies reception & silent auction (6pm) and awards (8pm). Union Station Grand Hall. Last year I had a fun time bidding at the silent auction and losing all my bids. 

Saturday, 11–4, Atlas Games booth, #1421. 

Sunday, 11–2, Atlas Games booth, #1421. 

Sunday, 3, http://twitch.tv/genconstudio, live interview. 

Then 24 hours until my flight out on Monday.

Twenty-sided rune dice for 13th Age Glorantha

I love that both 13th Age Glorantha and RuneQuest are up for awards at the UK Games Expo later this week.

So here's a note on on a product that people may not have realized works for both games: the set of RuneQuest expansion dice from Q-Workshop.



The hit location die and the twelve-sided strike-rank die aren't going to do much for 13th Age Glorantha players, but the runes on the 20-sided die are the runes used by 13G in exactly the right order to replace a glance at the random rune table.

Guesting at the Rose City Comic Con Sept 7-9!

Along with the fun people listed at the bottom of this blog, I'm a gaming guest at the upcoming Rose City Comic Con in Portland, Oregon. I lived in Portland for years during and after college, so it's going to be great to see old friends as well as new people.

Friday the 7th at 3 p.m. in Room 8, Paul Peterson and Tim Eisner and I are on a panel called Ask a Game Designer. Despite the ongoing example of the Onion, I'm pretty sure we won't be dispensing relationship advice.

Friday at 6 p.m., and again on Saturday at 5 p.m., I'll be at the Rainy Day Games booth signing things, talking about games, and running a demo or two for a couple hours.

The last time I was at Rose City Comic Con I ended up running a 7+ player demo of 13th Age for people who had never played rpgs before and who immediately turned the game into the only fully Player vs. Player deathmatch I've ever GMed! Speaking of deathmatches, this show I'll be demoing the Wrestlenomicon card game that I designed along with Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller for Arc Dream Publishing, coming to Kickstarter soon.

Here's the full gallery of wizards & rogues:

Keith Baker

Tim Eisner

Tyler Tinsley

Steve Ellis

TS Luikart

Paul Peterson

Rob Heinsoo

Ari Yarwood

Where I'll Be at GenCon

In pictures, my week looks like this...

Here's the text version!

Thursday, August 2

13^th Age Adventure Design Seminar.

11 a.m. to noon. . .

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 1

We run these as audience-participation workshops, so y’all will brainstorm a 13^th Age adventure with Jonathan Tweet and Wade Rockett and I functioning as multiclass ringleader/muses!

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

3:30 to 5:00 PM

Booth #1317

I’m likely to be around the Pelgrane booth other hours also, but if you want to be sure to catch me, these are the times.

Wrestlenomicon Playtest/Demos

5:30 to 8:00 PM

First Exposure Playtest Room,  convention room109 near the bottom of the Westin escalators

I’ll be running games of Wrestlenomicon in the First Exposure Playtest  Room. It’s a two or three-player card game of apocalyptic professional wrestling between elder gods, launching on Kickstarter later in August!! 

My co-designers Shane Ivey & Dennis Detwiller of Arc Dream will be running Wrestlenomicon in First Exposure starting at noon. The later shift goes to Fire Opal Games CEO Marie Poole and me, Marie will start at 4:00 while I’m in the Pelgrane booth.

Friday, August 3

13^th Age Monster Design Seminar.

11 a.m. to noon. . .

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 5

Another audience participation workshop with experienced 13^th Age monster designers at the mics . . . and one developer, if Paul Fanning can join us.  Two of the monsters created in previous seminars appeared in Lions & Tigers & Owlbears: 13^th Age Bestiary 2 last year!

Worldbuilding from Different Directions Seminar

12 noon to 1:00 PM

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 1

Here’s something you won’t see every year: at least three game designers involved with different games, all inspired by the same world, getting together to compare perspectives and approaches. Of course it’s Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha, and Jeff Richard and Jason Durall and I will be talking about HeroQuest, RuneQuest, and 13^th Age Glorantha.

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

3:00 to 5:00 PM

Booth #1317

Wrestlenomicon Playtest/Demos

8:00 PM to midnight

First Exposure Playtest Room

Saturday, August 4

Swords, Spies, & Shoggoths: The Pelgrane Press Panel

2:00 to 3:00 PM

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 5

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

3:30 to 5:30 PM

Booth #1317

Sunday, August 5

13^th Age Glorantha Seminar

10:00 to 11:00 AM

Lucas Oil Meeting Room 7

Jonathan Tweet, Michael O’Brien (MOB) and I will take a jaunt through the many Gloranthas that helped create our 466-page labor of love and talk about the many possible campaigns it can help create, in and out of Glorantha. 

[[Also Sunday at 10:00 a.m until 2:00 p.m., Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller will be running more Wrestlenomicon demos in the First Exposure room.]] [

13^th Age Glorantha Demo: The Next Valley Over

Noon to 2:00 PM

Chaosium Gaming Room

I put this demo and its pregen characters together last week. It’s in the freeform style you may have experienced playing the 13^th Age convention demo I created a few years back. Other GMs will be running the demo throughout the convention. 

Pelgrane Booth, Signing & Talking

2:30 to 4:30 PM

Booth #1317

…And that’s the plan, aside from business meetings, design meetings, seeing friends, keeping contact with Fire Opal Games comrade Jay Schneider as he helps run Dragonfire and Shadowrun: Crossfire events, and touring the hall to surf the wave of thousands of happy gamers!

Winter update

This weekend: I'll be at Dragonmeet in London on Saturday with the Pelgrane crew. I love visiting London, and Wednesday I got to attend Arsenal's 5-0 tonking of Huddersfield, so all is well.

Work in progress....
The first five books mentioned on this list are Pelgrane projects for 13th Age. After that the list moves to other companies and other games.

[[cover art by Jessica Chung Ti Lee]]

Fire & Faith:  The third of the battlescenes books by Cal Moore, with ready-to-run mini-adventures for the icons who rely at least partly on faith: Diabolist, Crusader, Priestess, Great Gold Wyrm. The book didn't quite make it into print in time for Dragonmeet. Printed copies are showing up later in December, for now you can pre-order at the Pelgrane store and get the PDF.

[[cover art by Melissa Gay]]

Book of Demons: This one is in layout. Among the reasons the book will be notable is that it contains a rarity: a new 13th Age character class, the demonologist, something I put together after initial work by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and another early draft from Paul Fanning. Elsewhere in the book, the six hellholes Gareth created are wild. He'd written art suggestions that I said were not-doable, "tone it down, a lot, this is just too convoluted, no artist is going to want to handle this," I said. And then Cat Tobin went and proved me very wrong, finding an artist named Agathe Pitié who pulled a full Hieronymus Bosch. 

Book of Ages: I'm midway through developing Gareth's wonderful combo of DIY chronicling and sample ages, full of monsters and magic and spells from the ancients. Not sure of publication date yet but it's next in the pipeline.

Shards of the Broken Sky: I've got a bit of final devwork to handle on ASH LAW's big adventure. Art is midway. Maps are still needing to be arranged.

Loot Harder: ASH's new book of treasure, with bits from a few couple other writers. To be published in 2018, either just before or just after Shards I believe.

13th Age Glorantha: It will be a 400+ page book from Moon Design. We recently shared Chapter 3: Playing in Glorantha with KickStarter backers. Six of the book's eight chapters have been laid out by Chris Huth. Layout finishes soon. I'll be handling indexing and other final bits when I'm back from Dragonmeet. I'm amazed by the final layout. Jonathan prefers not to see our books as they're in progress, he likes to wait until they are done--he's in for a treat!

Wrestlenomicon: A two-player card game from Arc Dream Publishing, presently in open playtesting, aiming to be on Kickstarter sometime in 2018 since its art by Kurt Komoda is complete and we're just getting the mechanics right. (See the previous post in this blog.)

Dragonfire: I didn't work on Catalyst's new Dragonfire game of D&D deckbuilding directly, but my business partner Jay Schneider did, and it's pretty much a second edition of the Shadowrun: Crossfire game our Fire Opal design group created, which is why Mike Elliot and Greg Marques and the rest of us are credited as designers. As a second edition, I think Dragonfire is an improvement over our Crossfire mechanics. I believe Crossfire may be getting an update soon to match some of the improvements, and I'm excited to see Dragonfire's progress in the months to come.

Stuff at GenCon!

It’s not only GenCon’s 50^th birthday this year; it’s my wife Lisa’s 50^th, and they coincide. So I won’t be at GenCon this year. I’m sorry to miss out on seeing friends I only see once or twice a year, but I have no complaints, it’s going to be a great birthday!

There will be several games and things I’ve designed or contributed to showing up at the convention.

First, at booth #1317, Pelgrane Press will have copies of Lions & Tigers & Owlbears: 13^th Age Bestiary 2. I haven’t seen the physical book yet so if you get a copy you’ll be ahead of me. You should be able to find authors like Wade Rockett, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, and Jonathan Tweet at the show and often at the Pelgrane booth. Artist Naomi VanDoren (Purple Dragon, kowha, etc.) will be in the art show.

Speaking of art, Campaign Coins has repackaged the 13th Age icon tokens with a color backing card. They're up for an ENnie and they'll be on sale at booth #842. 

Pelgrane panels will also be discussing the next few 13^th Age books in the pipeline. One of them, the Book of Demons, contains the new demonologist class, which is presently being playtested by former 13^th Age Monthly subscribers and which I’m working on more this week.

And speaking of playtesting, Arc Dream Publishing will have playtest decks of the Wrestlenomicon card game I designed the mechanics for at booth #431! I'm happy with mechanics I’ve never seen anywhere else that capture a wrestling match between gigantic elder gods! It helped to have card art finished by Kurt Komoda and hilarious/devastating card names provided by Dennis Detwiller and Shane Ivey. I got to focus on carving mechanics to live up to the art’n’concepts. The game is going to have a wider public playtest you can sign up for on the Wrestlenomicon site, and then a Kickstarter.

Meanwhile over at the Chaosium booth, #829, they’ll have the first three laid-out chapters of 13^th Age in Glorantha. Chris Huth, the layout artist responsible for this design, is taking a break from layout to attend the show, where he’ll be running games and working at the Pelgrane booth a bit. You can see more samples of the layout in this update on the 13G Kickstarter page.

More coming in a later post . . . .

Gamefest in Denver, April 21-23

I'm spending this weekend wrapping Lions & Tigers & Owlbears: 13th Age Bestiary 2 up for layout.

The weekend after, April 21-23, I'm joining around nine other gaming guests and many many other gamers at Gamefest in Denver, the gaming wing of the bigger Star-Fest convention.

My schedule looks something like this:

• Saturday 10:30am-12pm - Game Designer Panel Q&A - Hosted by Boardgame Corner of Dice Tower (Panel Room)
• Saturday 1pm-5pm - 13th Age (RPG Room)
• Saturday 6pm-10pm - 13th Age Glorantha (RPG Room)
• Sunday 10am-2pm - 13th Age Glorantha (RPG Room)

Convention games are fun for introducing people to experiences they've never been eaten by before. I'll be drafting some of those experiences from Bestiary 2, even for the 13th Age in Glorantha games, since Bestiary 2 includes an appendix about translating many of its monsters to Glorantha.

Thinking ahead and setting up my gaming travel kit, I'm finally retiring my original copy of 13th Age. Not from my desk, it still has some miles left for domestic duty, like a soccer player who is retiring from the national team but will keep on suiting up for the home league. Here's its current condition:

I've been  referring to this copy of 13th Age as 'the broken book' for years, ever since I was running an event at a Gamerati convention. Eric Fell and Derek Guder and some other fun people were in the game, but it was a 7 year-old boy walking by with his dad who nailed me. He looked at the game table and said, "Why is that book broken?"

"Because it's well-loved," I finally get to respond.

Dragonmeet & other Meetings

I'm in London for Dragonmeet alongside the Pelgrane crew!

Last year on the train into London from Heathrow, before Dragonmeet, I was reading Lavie Tidhar's The Violent Century, glancing out of the train at delapidated warehouses as the novel's superbeings negotiated the London fog.

Saturday afternoon at last year's Dragonmeet, the man wanting to talk about roleplaying games over the table at the Pelgrane booth turned out to be Lavie Tidhar! He said that RPGs weren't something he had really tried, though the friend beside him seemed to be more familiar with the genre. I gave Lavie a copy of 13th Age, and when Ken Hite came back to the booth Ken got him a copy of The Dracula Dossier.

This year, on the train ride into London, I was reading Catherynne M. Valente's Six-Gun Snow White, a beautiful strange little book. I'm pretty sure there's no chance of seeing Catherynne M. Valente at this convention, but perhaps something similarly magical will reveal itself.

Looking forward to seeing friends from this Eastern side of the pond in a few days.

PAX Schedule and beyond

We don't have an official booth at PAX this year, and by we I mean my company Fire Opal Media and the two other companies I work with most: Pelgrane and Chaosium. We will be at GeekGirl Con on October 8th and 9th in the same Seattle Convention Center.

I'll be around PAX a bit on at least Friday and Saturday, and definitely between noon and 2:00 on Friday at the table outside the Uncle's Games room, alongside Jonathan Tweet and Wade Rockett.

Here's the full schedule of of game designers who'll be at that table during the weekend. Vlaada Chvatil isn't scheduled to join us, but I'm glad his new version of Codenames is sharing the billing!

GenCon Notes: Lights! Camera! Action!

I had a great GenCon. So did most of my friends, both old and new. I’ll post a couple highlights, now and maybe later.

Lights!

Will Jobst and I left the exhibitors’ hall on Saturday night and went upstairs to watch the 13^th Age and GUMSHOE games in the Pelgrane-focused game room. I admit that I was 13^th Age-focused: where GUMSHOE is concerned, I’m not really a pro.

Early on, we were startled by what looked like impromptu chair dancing at a 13^th Age table. Everyone’s hands went up in the air, the bass started thumping, hands spinning as disco balls. Turned out that the first time the sorcerer had used their dancing lights spell, the table discoed-out; and now it was a thing for the rest of the session! Dancing lights! I thought about filming it but decided to let it fly solo in memory.

The musical ambush left us happy and gave us a story to glide on the rest of the evening as we joined Steve and Paula Dempsey to ramble through the entire convention center.

Camera!

The night before the show, Eric Lang won the Diana Jones Award! I’d talked with him earlier in the day and he said he had zero chance of winning—he expected it to go to Pandemic Legacy by Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock. We agreed that if Eric won, I should yell “Daviau was robbed!” Which I did, utterly happy and knowing no one could hear me, since you can’t hear much of anything at the Diana Jones Award ceremony and certainly not when everyone is roaring for Eric!

Then I got to see Greg Stafford, last year’s winner for The Guide to Glorantha, hand the award over to Eric, and the whole thing made me so happy I *did* get out my phone to take a picture. I knew it would be crappy but I didn’t care, it’s the fact, not the photo. That’s Jeff Richard of Chaosium in the middle, and Luke Peterschmidt all shiny in the foreground.

Action!

I knew that Upper Deck would be releasing the Legendary game I designed, Big Trouble in Little China. It’s a playful take on the Legendary deckbuilding game system designed by Devin Low for the Marvel Legendary games. Big Trouble in Little China was a game I had a huge amount of fun designing but I wasn’t sure how much of a marketing push the game would be getting, given that the film has been out for awhile. I’d heard that there was something going on with the GenCon lanyards, but I didn’t know that everyone wearing a GenCon lanyard would have Big Trouble in Little China art around their necks. And I had no idea that Upper Deck was gonna set up a Big Trouble exhibit with the Pork Chop Express big rig in the dealer’s hall! Right alongside a bit of a Chinatown shrine and a signboard for Egg Foo Yong Tours. That’s some action. 

My GenCon Schedule, 13th Age, & Glorantha

GenCon next week!! I’m going to be spending most of time at the Pelgrane booth, 419. Chaosium is in booth 423, so the two places in the exhibit hall you’re likely to find me are actually a single space with a blue curtain in the middle. I missed last year’s GenCon and I’m looking forward to talking with so many friends as well as a couple hundred people I don’t know yet!

Five Panels

I’ll be on three 13^th Age GenCon panels and one Pelgrane Press panel alongside creators and Pelgrinistas such as Aaron Roudabush, Cat Tobin, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Ken Hite, Kevin Kulp, Lynne Hardy, Robin Laws, Simon Rogers, and Wade Rockett. (ASH LAW, Cal Moore, and Jonathan Tweet aren't attending this year.) 

I’m also on one Glorantha/Dragon Pass panel with Chaosium people including Greg Stafford, Jeff Richard, and Chris Klug. We may also have Sandy Petersen, who is about to launch the incredibly cool Glorantha: The Gods War miniatures game, but I’m not certain Sandy is with us on the Thursday night panel.

13^th Age Adventure Design Workshop

     Thursday 11 a.m.

     Crowne Plaza: Grand Central Ballroom A

Dragon Pass—Mythology, Magic, & Board Games

     Thursday 8 pm

     Crowne Plaza Pennsylvania Station C

13^th Age GM Roundtable

     Friday 11:00 a.m.

     Crowne Plaza: Grand Central Ballroom C

13^th Age Monster Workshop

     Saturday 12 noon

     Crowne Plaza: Grand Central Ballroom B

Swords, Spies, & Shoggoths: Pelgrane Press Panel

     Saturday 1:00 pm

     Crowne Plaza: Grand Central Ballroom B

More Glorantha

There’s also a big RQ and Glorantha celebration at 7:00 pm on Friday night with Greg Stafford, Runequest—50^th Anniversary of Glorantha in Crowne Plaza Pennsylvania Station A. That’s during the ENnies, but the 50^th Anniversary party gets my vote for its scheduled hour.

The other good Glorantha news is from the 13^th Age in Glorantha Kickstarter. Jeff Richard has finished the manuscript of the Glorantha Sourcebook and is sending the augmented 13^th Age in Glorantha manuscript over later this weekend. I have playtest feedback revisions to handle from the past couple months and a few small improvements, nothing that will take me long after GenCon. We’ll have both manuscripts at the convention to show off and we’ll have updates on publication timing after the convention. 

Gamehole Con was fun!

This is an open thank you letter to Gamehole Con, who flew me and many other game designers across the country a couple weeks ago for a sweet and extremely well-organized weekend of gaming.

Personal highlights included. . .

. . . .meeting Tom Wham and watching him demo Feudality, because I’ve played so many hours of his games over the years, and it was wonderful to watch him explain one of his creations.

. . . running a session of 13^th Age in Glorantha that rivalled the 6 Feats Under session for sheer manic energy, particularly when the trickster managed to go airborne via a Life-infused Air spirit he’d caught in his bag of mischief.

. . . running another 13^th Age in Glorantha session that nearly led to a permanent change in the curve of Humakt’s sword, which is a fancy way of saying that the Lunar Empire nearly Illuminated the PCs’ quest.

. . . a panel about 13^th Age and many editions of D&D that Jonathan Tweet and I ran Saturday morning.

The panel centered on a question and answer session. I don’t believe anyone recorded it. I don’t recall all the questions, but I wrote a few of them down. The answers below incorporate some of Jonathan’s answers and most of my own.

Q: Do the icons know they are icons?

A: Jonathan and I assume that the icons know they are icons and that this is a term that means something in the world. Greg Stolze’s The Forgotten Monk novel shows this well, the world and ages of the Dragon Empire make sense when the icons are aware of their own status. It would be possible to run a campaign where the icons weren’t at all certain of their status, but that feels like a different approach than what we’ve chosen as our baseline.

Q: Where do the conversational sidebars come from?

A: Our standard banter. The fact that we don’t always agree, and felt like showing that we sometimes disagree helps free up GMs and tables to play things their own way, since not even the designers entirely agree on all points. And most of all, a desire to use a conversational tone.

Q: Why was the druid missing from the core book?

A: Simply didn’t have a good version of it ready for when the rest of the book was done. Same for the monk, which was on the cover of the core book partly because I was trying to inspire myself to make sure I finished it, but no.

Q: What was the last icon added?

A: I asked the audience to guess. The second guess got it: the Crusader. I realized we needed an icon for evil characters who wanted to be part of the establishment, highly ambiguous heroes.

Q: Were there other icons we did not add?

A: Yes, and I’ll name three. We talked about a Merchant Prince, but went with the Prince of Shadows instead. Jonathan had argued for Tiamat, especially as an evil dragon inspiration of cultists, but I didn’t like that and we gave her stuff to the Diabolist and the Blue of the Three. And finally, I had proposed a Mother of Dungeons, something in the center of the world creating living dungeons and sending them up as eyestalks, and Jonathan shut that down by pointing out that it wasn’t really someone PCs would be able to have a meaningful relationship with, which helped establish our understanding of what it meant to be an icon in the first place. 

GenCon and other news

As a big change of pace, I'm not attending GenCon this year. My family needed me home more than people needed me at GenCon. Given that I experienced the full GenCon prep period but won't have the full GenCon, I'm going to enjoy rounding into my non-GenCon jobs.

Here's a round-up of some of the people from Fire Opal who are attending GenCon, many of whom will frequently be found at the Pelgrane booth among the Pelgranistas.

Cal Moore will be at GenCon, should be on a 13th Age panel or two, and has just had Sharpe Initiatives: Earthgouger come out as this month's installment of 13th Age Monthly. Earthgouger is a tiny taste of the many types of fun that Cal put it into the upcoming Battle Scenes books. I'm developing and writing the art order for the first book in that series, tentatively titled High Magic & Low Cunning: Battle Scenes for Five Icons. Cal has been the editor extraordinaire for all my 13th Age books (including the 13th Age Bestiary that is up for an ENnie) and I'm enjoying turning the developer/editor tables and working on his big books.

ASH ALL FREAKING CAPS ALL THE TIME LAW will be at GenCon, fresh from having put together the final installment of the first season of 13th Age OP, The Battle of Axis, and the first installment of the second season, Race to Starport, that's going to be played often at the con. ASH has been working on other 13th Age things also, those are merely the two adventures I personally developed in the push towards GenCon. He'll be on 13th Age panels. Go, ASH, go!

Wade Rockett will be on every 13th Age panel except the Monster Design Workshop. He will be splitting time between the Pelgrane booth (#609), helping get the 13th Age Alliance started, and the Kobold booth. Which reminds me, I need to arrange a pelgrane vs. kobold deathmatch in the poking-the-Emperor-in-the-eye gladiatorial arena in Drakkenhall, but that probably doesn't have much to do with Wade, who is All About the Owlbears.

Rob Watkins and Jay Schneider will be mostly busy with Shadowrun: Crossfire, the co-op board game we designed for Catalyst that is up for an ENnie in the RPG Related category. Jay is also going to be busy with biz.

Jonathan Tweet is taking a break from 13th Age in Glorantha to attend the con! He will mostly be found at Peter Adkison's Chaldea booth (#2332) running a Chaldea minigame he designed. He'll also be on the 13th Age in Glorantha panel. The two of us recently talked a bit about that game, and many other 13th Age topics on the recently released "The Future of 13th Age" episode of the Iconic podcast.

And speaking of 13th Age in Glorantha, here are a couple photos from our game last Wednesday. The first photo has Neil Robinson of Moon Design (GenCon booth #2535) on the left, playing Vastorlanth, a Moon-touched Lothario of an Orlanthi rebel. I'm in the dragon shirt enjoying the action with the escalation die cranked to 3. And that's special guest star Jeff Richard of Moon Design on the right, lowing as Mel, the former herdman Storm Bull berserker. The second photo is Jonathan's end of the table, with the glowing ball in the center of the battlefield representing the magical Water feature created by Sean's storm sorcerer when he narrated his Water rune to purify the broo-infected corpse of the Bagnot former headman and rolled a complication. Walktapus tentacle just visible at the bottom of the shot . . . .

Monk & Frogfolk Today, GottaCon in Victoria Friday

Greg Stolze’s TheForgotten Monk 13^th Age novel is wrapping up its Kickstarter in a few hours. Jonathan Tweet and I are on deck to write short stories using Greg’s characters and the novel is huge fun for fantasy readers, martial arts fans, and readers who like truly smooth and infuriating villains.

For a different type of villain, check out Temples of the Frogfolk, the second issue of the 13^th Age Monthly, out today to subscribers! Author Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan is also on board to write a short story for The Forgotten Monk. Sign on to the Monthly now and you’ll also get caught up with last month’s installment, Dragon Riding.

A couple days from now, Friday the 27^th, Jonathan Tweet and I are among the guests who will be running and talking about games at GottaCon in Victoria. I’m running 13^th Age in Glorantha Friday night, Shadowrun: Crossfire Saturday afternoon, and also helping with a Saturday workshop on Crafting Hooks (along with Ryan Macklin and Rodney Thompson, to name the workshoppers I already know) and a Sunday workshop on running Kickstarters.