Digital Launch for 13th Age 2E!

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

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

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

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

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

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

(art by Aaron McConnell & Lee Moyer)

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

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

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

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

13th Age 2E: Chapter 1 Example of Play

(art by Lee Moyer and Aaron McConnell)

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

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

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

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

See you soon with the opening of Chapter 2!

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.

13th Age Interview List, Annotated, with a Bit of 4E

Blue Dragon in Battle, 2E art by Simone Bannach

The interview list comes first. At the end there's a note about this weekend's 4E interview and streaming game on the GenCon channel!

I’ve been busy with interviews the past few weeks. Mostly about 13th Age, often about the 2E Kickstarter that’s about to end on Thursday morning, sometimes about D&D 4e and other games. Here’s a slightly annotated list of recent interviews, starting from the most recent to appear and going back to the earliest in this cycle, more or less!

The interview with Tim Linward at Wargamer.com was the best interview because he homed in on one of 13th Age’s two strongest pitches. As Wade Rockett puts it, “13th Age is what happens when dnd designers, not suits, have creative control over dnd.” Tim also turned so many good phrases himself that I was writing them down. We also covered inspiration from Frostgrave’s business style and a refusal to emulate Warhammer, and a bit on the creative/slash/destructive nature of the playtest games in the group Jonathan and I play in.

Of course J-M DeFoggi’s streaming/video interview with both me and Jonathan for Beyond the Table was the best interview because Jonathan and I teased each other as we roamed through many aspects of game design, from using everyday speech in our rules (as a continuity with the hobbyist nature of early roleplaying) to creating characters with art cards in Everway (which also has a beautiful new 2nd edition) to the new structure of the ranger class that has kept it out of the current packet. (It will show up in the Gamma Playtest Packet and an update that will come a bit after the Kickstarter). I also learned that one of my cardgame designs is Heinsoonian and I hadn’t realized it.

Just before that, Mildra the Monk’s interview of just-me was the best interview because he systematically grilled me about 2E’s treatment of eight of its nine character classes. He gave me a pass on the fighter, probably because I’d discussed that in a Discord call after the impromptu 13th Age 2E Launch Party. (There will be a similar event/Q&A session on the 13th Age Discord channel at the end of the Kickstarter on the morning of Thursday the 6th, starting around 10 am Pacific Time.)

I’ve been pestering my friend Matt Miller to launch his gaming podcast “From the Depths” and he finally soft-launched to put the interview out on Bandcamp. It’s the best of the interviews because Matt has a Radio-God-Voice and because he edited down nearly two hours of conversation and we talked about so many things, including 4e.

Ben Riggs & Scott Bruner invited me to an episode of Reading D&D Aloud. The text I chose was the Arduin Grimoire by Dave Hargrave. That probably makes it the best interview for people who love echoes of the early days of rpgs. We didn’t get much deeper in the Grimoire than the top and bottom of the experience point rewards chart (What's Worth More XP? Nuclear Weapons or Satan's Pitchfork?) and some of the entries on the special ability charts for each of the classes, which led discussion of One Unique Things. (Jonathan’s interview showed up a couple days later: Do We Play RPGs Better Now Than in the Past?)

Teos Abadia had me on Mastering Dungeons while Shawn Merwin was away. I can’t believe we covered such a diverse list of topics in under an hour, Teos keeps things moving while asking great questions. You can see the list on the Youtube page, and skip around to what interest you. We nodded to a bunch of games I worked on or designed, the OGL, working on teams, 4E’s goals, 13th Age’s innovations, and plans for 2E beyond the Kickstarter. He had a longer list of questions we didn’t get to that I was looking forward to answering, so maybe this will happen again.

There was another text interview that may have been the best because Andrew Girdwood of Geek Native wasn’t convinced by my attempt to evade answering questions about the future of the industry. I talked a bit about how solitaire rpg gaming used to mainly consist of reading game books, and now includes watching people play. And I got to talk about the whole 2E creative team for a minute.

La Taberna del Rol introduces itself in Spanish, and then in a couple minutes starts an interview in English with Spanish subtitles. Sin duda fue el mejor. We introduced our plans for 13th Age 2E and our desire to build a tool kit that other games could borrow from. I demonstrated my occasional inability to make an elevator pitch. We talked a lot about 4e and whether it was ahead of its time, and what the heck was going on with the OGL.

And speaking of 4e…. here’s a teaser link to a 4e interview and game session that hasn’t happened yet! Peter Adkison is celebrating D&D’s 50th Anniversary with interviews and games by as many of the designers as possible. I’ll be running a 4E game for Andy Collins, Liz Argall, Wade Rockett, and Derek Guder on Saturday, June 8th, two days after the 13th Age KS ends! It will be on https://www.twitch.tv/gencontv, Saturday, June 8th, at 10am pacific time. We'll talk about the game first, then play.

Update on the Ranger and the 13th Age 2E Gamma Playtest Doc

The 13th Age Second Edition Kickstarter is rolling strong! I’m working on finishing two pieces that weren’t in the document while Jonathan is refining monsters, cleaning up rules, and going through our long list of desired improvements.

Last night in my Spearpoint Dwarfoids playtest campaign, Jonathan played a 5th level ‘wood dwarf’ ranger. (That's not a wood-dwarf ranger above, that's a gnome ranger and her badger, a 2E illustration by Simone Bannach!) This new version of the ranger class had a great first playtest, no rules hassles and it held its own. I think the ranger’s major design issues are solved. Now I need to finish all the math and paragraphs that make a class fully playable.

When that’s done, and when we’ve finished revising the intro adventure, we’re going to release another version of the Playtest Packet. I believe that will happen shortly after the Kickstarter ends. Call it the Gamma Packet. Pelgrane will also update the current-draft that people who back the Kickstarter are getting.

The Gamma Packet will also have many corrections fixing typos, redundancies, errors, pratfalls, and ideas swiftly revealed as bad. We’ll put out a playtest questionnaire along with some pregen characters after the Gamma Packet when the draft has less static for people to cut through.

In other news, I've been getting interviewed by good people lately. Here's an interview by Teos Abadia from a couple days ago.

A Live 13th Age 2E Kickstarter and a Correction to Ongoing Damage!

The 13th Age Second Edition Kickstarter kicked off yesterday and it's rolling. Blowing through stretch goals is a high-class problem! You can find the page here.

What do you do when a multi-year project hits the crowdfunding stage? We played! Last night Jonathan and I played a celebratory 13th Age game with our Wednesday night group pushed forward to Tuesday. I thought I would GM, but we had quorum for Paul's "Teachers of the Court" campaign, so I got to play my half-elf cleric, Esh.

It was nearly Esh's last dance. Both Esh and Sala, the high-elf bard, ended up with 4 Skulls. If you haven't been playing 13th Age 2E yet, that's one Skull from death, get knocked to 0 hit points again and it's curtains, time to start a new character. It was the closest-run battle we've ever had. I select the monstrous opponents for Paul's game, and if you want a tough synergistic group to throw against four third level heroes as part of a 3-battle arc, here's the roster: one troll, one orc berserker, one wight, one demon-touched ranger dropped a level to 4th.

Of course we also discovered several things we'd left out of the draft, and one of those things matters way more than the others. It's about what happens when an attack that deals ongoing damage scores a critical hit. Here's the text that should have been in the Critical Hits section and in the ongoing damage notes on page 278, and isn't. We tested what's currently in the book and it was too evil, these are the actual rules:

Ongoing damage is also doubled when you crit, but only for the first turn. For example, an attack that deals 5 ongoing damage scores a crit. At the end of the target’s next turn, they’ll take 10 ongoing damage, but if they fail the save, that ongoing damage drops back to 5. Ongoing damage is scary, and even Jonathan thinks that doubling it indefinitely is too much.

As a rule, other conditions and effects of damage are not doubled. GMs are free to break this rule for their favored monsters and make non-damage effects worse on a crit.

Collected Works of Richard Tucholka

Here's another fundraiser from Jonathan Tweet, who is cutting down on stuff while supporting Planned Parenthood.

Jonathan says. . . .

Richard Tucholka’s games taught me to write game rules with humor and concision, and now you can have them yourself. Tucholka passed away recently, but I had the good fortune of meeting him once at Gen Con and telling him how much I had learned from him. Bureau 13 is one of the first non-D&D RPGs I ever played.

Bureau 13 is like X Files but published 10 years before X Files. You play a version of yourself, which is a popular trope in Tucholka’s games. The monster descriptions are punchy and often funny. The hit-location system must be seen to be believed.

FTL: 2448 is a sprawling space opera with an ambitiously large array of playable alien species, and most of them are quite alien. Tucholka’s ability to capture the feel of a species with sparse notes was inspiring, and I have put this style to good use in my own game writing.

Fringeworthy sends you along newly discovered, abandoned pathways that connect alternate realities to each other. The civilization that built the pathways was destroyed by a terrible threat that still lurks somewhere among the many worlds. This setting serves as a way to connect to other Tri Tac games, such as Bureau 13.

Incursion has you piloting a captured starship from one random world to another—you don’t have a map to get back to Earth. It’s sort of like the off-beat sci-fi series Lexx, but five years earlier.

You can read more about Richard Tucholka on the Tri Tac website.

Looks like these games would cost over $100 to buy used, with Bureau 13 going for $50 or so. Fans of Tucholka sell PDFs and reprints of these games, but the reprints are from scans and are lower quality than these old originals. I’d be happy for my collection to go to someone who’s not already a fan, so I’ll part with them for $50 to Planned Parenthood plus shipping. If interested, DM me from my Facebook author’s page.

Armello: The Board Game

It’s March 29, 2024, and I’m in the kinda unique position of reporting that a game I had a blast designing has already made a treasure-trove on Kickstarter and still has about a week to roll. It’s Armello: The Board Game, a deckbuilding adventure board game of furry animal heroes with swords questing to take the throne from their corrupt King . . . over each other’s (temporarily) dead bodies!

Armello: The Board Game is being published by friends at King of the Castle, aka the wonderful creators of Campaign Coins. I’ve been writing occasional design notes you can find in the Kickstarter page’s updates and the game has just hit a stretch goal where I’ll loop back into the game to design two fistfuls of magic Amulets. It’s time I stepped away from an all-out push to finish 13th Age Second Edition’s next playtest packet to talk about the game that’s already being crowdfunded!

This board game version of Armello inherited a huge trove of goodness from the earlier digital game from League of Geeks. The digital game originally featured on Kickstarter and was supported with new cards and hero clans and game expansions for many years. Hundreds of beautiful cards, cool custom dice with magical symbols, and cutthroat anthropomorphic animal heroes on a quest to usurp a Corrupt king has translated into a competitive deckbuilding quest-and-combat boardgame . . . though ‘translated’ isn’t the right word. I aimed to create a game in a new medium that captured the spirit and evoked the feel of the original.

Digital games can do a lot of things that aren’t repeatable on tabletop. Then midway through the design, I turned the digital game’s more traditional style of cardplay into a deckbuilding experience. Partly that’s because I love deckbuilding games. And partly it’s because deckbuilding felt like a great metaphor for character growth and experience. Each hero has their own unique starter and experience decks as well as cards they can buy from the market or win as treasure.

There are six days to go for the Kickstarter, plus some time in the post-crowdfunding phase. I’m not sure I’ll be designing for more stretch goals, but I do know that the design note I just wrote talks about a possible expansion.

If you do nothing else, check out the cool Kickstarter video! When you play the digital game, you’ll recognize the narrator as the voice of the King.

Jonathan Sells Tekumel

We're still working on the Beta Playtest Packet for 2E, as well as arranging art and helping set up the 13th Age Second Edition Kickstarter. . . details to arrive soon!

But in the meantime, Jonathan Tweet has a simpler fund-raising effort in progress, and it involves Tekumel. And Planned Parenthood. So I'm giving his effort a space to live in blog world. He's including notes on the Tekumel campaign he ran a few years ago, about 6 years before we began working on 13th Age.

If you are interested in this treasure trove, contact Jonathan through his Facebook author-page: https://www.facebook.com/JonathanMTweet

LATE MARCH: IT SOLD!

Jonathan says . . .

Here’s my third game collection that I’m selling off to raise money for Planned Parenthood ($150 raised so far).

TSR’s Empire of the Petal Throne by M A R Barker was the first culture-based, world-centric RPG. In 1977, when my dad took me to the college where he taught so I could see the students playing RPGs, they were playing Empire of the Petal Throne. Over the decades, this setting has reappeared repeatedly with different treatments and rules sets. It’s like nothing else: an ancient, stratified culture with malevolent gods whose worship includes orgies & human sacrifice; an oppressive empire with traditional clans of various status; haunted ruins of the world’s ancient past; and a planet where most of the sentient beings, animals, and monsters are decidedly alien. Humans on Tekumel are descended from space-faring earthlings, but science collapsed long ago after a cosmic catastrophe separated the planet from the rest of the universe. There are no stars in the Tekumel’s sky because its star system is alone. Now humans are stuck here with the alien inhabitants of this world, plus numerous bizarre sentient being that likewise descend from space-faring species. Some ancient tech remains, but it’s treated like magic. Many sorts of beings, including humans, cast spells through psychic power.

As a teen, I played a little Empire of the Petal Throne, then I collected Tekumel works over the years, and finally around 2005 I ran several sessions using my own custom rule set. My rules used the d20 system for combat but an all-new system for character generation and powers. These rules were the first time I had spellcasters casting spells so powerful that they took 2 rounds to cast. The super-simple rules were inspired by the virtually unknown RPG Conrad’s Fantasy, by “Red” Rahm. (Conrad’s Fantasy and Rahm’s other inimitable RPGs are another collection slated for a later charity sale.) My rules, campaign notes, and character sheets are part of this package. You can also see more at https://www.jonathantweet.com/ept_topics.html.

Raymond Feist’s Riftwar books are based on his alt-D&D campaign, which featured an invasion (through interdimensional rifts) from Tekumel. Feist changed the invading planet’s name, but his “Kelewan” is clearly Tekumel with the serial numbers filed off.

This set ranges from a reprint of the original game rules to the most recent game sets that I know of. The Tekumel hardback in this set sells for over $100 these days, and the Mitlanyal volumes go for $200 to $300 each. This collection includes a bunch of great resources that I would have loved to have had back in the day when my teen game group played in this intricate and highly alien setting. The art, for one thing, is far better than it was in the ’70s! Included in this collection are dozens of official Tekumel miniatures, as Tekumel is a setting for minis battles as well as roleplaying. This collection is for someone who loves Tekumel or for someone who loves Planned Parenthood, and I’m asking for a $500 donation plus shipping. If you know any Tekumel fans, please let them know. You might also want to acquire this material on behalf of a good game library.

13th Age 2E Beta Playtest Packet is coming in a few weeks

I’m thrilled to say that we are now weeks away from sending out the 13th Age 2E Beta Playtest packet! Highlights of this second draft include:

• A thorough revision of the Monsters chapter to better support monster roles and to make every monster juicy.

• A bard class that’s magical, musical, and surprising.

• Far more attention on the icon connection rules, with many examples so GMs and players can see how we use them in play.

• A magic item update so that all items are worthwhile regardless of the hero’s level, including adventurer-tier items in the hands of epic-tier characters.

• Significant changes to every class based on Alpha feedback.

Our ambitions for this second edition grew in the last couple years. Even so, we’ve kept 2E fully compatible with 13th Age books published for the first edition. You wanna run Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s Eyes of the Stone Thief using 2E? With some party-size tweaks to the numbers of monsters you’re facing, that won’t be a problem. (In fact, you may be more likely to survive!)

Playtesters, you won’t have to check your inboxes for a few weeks yet. I’ll speak up here when the Beta playtest packet goes out so that the mass mailing has less of a chance in getting lost in spam folders.

Greg Stafford & the First Copy of D&D

(Young Greg painted for King of Dragon Pass by Stefano Gaudiano)

Before you read my story, read the story in Greg's words from the Chaosium blog, February of last year.

It's a great story and I was extremely amused to read it. But my amusement may not have been the same as your amusement, because I was comparing it to the story as Greg had told it to me, back when I worked at Chaosium!

Greg was a storyteller supreme. The best. I can see why he might have been more circumspect in the codex than he was with me. I'm not certain which version shades more towards truth. That doesn't really matter to the story . . .

When Greg told the tale, we weren't talking about Dungeons & Dragons. We were talking about White Bear & Red Moon, specifically about how Greg had tried to work out a publishing deal with various companies, shopping it around. I think it was after the first printing had sold out, he wondered if there was a way to publish the boardgame with a bigger company.

And he went to see Gary Gygax at TSR. As Greg told the story, Gygax was doing well at that time, he received Greg in a nice office. But it did not go well for Greg and WB&RM. Early in the conversation, Greg told Gygax that he thought he had owned one of the earliest copies of D&D . . . and here we diverge!

The way Greg told it, most of the copies of D&D had been stuck at the printer because the bill hadn't been paid yet. They weren't releasing the games to Gygax. And Greg's brother-in-law worked at the printer, or had business there, and saw the game, and thought it looked like something that Greg would like. One way or another he got a copy and sent it to Greg at a time when Gygax was being prevented from getting copies out to anyone else.

Maybe Gygax was amused later, but according to this telling, he wasn't happy with Greg at that moment. The attempt to publish WB&RM through the resurgent TSR went nowhere, and in this telling, Greg turned the story into a sort of fable about waiting until after the deal is done to tell funny stories that will only be funny to you.

(Greg the storyteller, again painted by Stefano Gaudiano for King of Dragon Pass)

The Bard, an intro adventure, and two playtest campaigns: 13th Age 2E progress

It has been a busy month!

Kin powers on the Pelgrane website: I’ve been running some of the new kin powers on the Pelgrane Press website. These are powers that may change in the design process. They’re not guaranteed to be what shows up in the Beta packet, but they’re what we’re using now.

Humans are here. Dwarves are here. And the silver elves, aka drow, are here.

Jonathan’s work: We played through the first playtest of the new introductory adventure Jonathan wrote for the back of the book. It went great and it covered territory not explored in Blood & Lightning, our original intro adventure. Jonathan helped Paul, a new 13th Age GM, with GM-support material while Paul was running the intro. Jonathan has also been working on the monster chapter and analyzing the current state of several revised 2E classes, with results feeding into the playtest.

Teachers from the Court: Our second-level playtest spun out of the intro-adventure is now called “The Teachers from the Court,” since that became our PC group’s cover story. The campaign has spawned notable shifts in the barbarian, and seems likely to create some things for the ranger.

Bards among us: And since last week, the playtest includes the actual 2E bard! The high-elf dance-bard that Sean had been using with was entirely playable but had little to do with the direction the bard class is headed. I’d handed Sean a playable pseudo-bard that I’d mocked up to play in J-M DeFoggi’s Rumble in the Stacks adventure that’s being serialized on the Iconic podcast.

My main job last month was to create a bard with a structure that hasn’t been seen in other F20 games. Given that bards have generally not entirely lived up to their potential, I’m happy to experiment with something new. I’ve got the class playable up to 5th level and later this week I’ll be tackling higher level spells.

The Dwarfoids Campaign: For nights when we don’t have a full quorum for Teachers from the Court, I’ve restarted the third level campaign I was running before we started designing 2E. The initial concept: Suicide Squad for dwarven deviants looking to prove themselves to the Dwarf King. I call it Spearpoint, the players call it Dwarfoids, and their irreverence is winning. You’ll find the original outline of the campaign here.

Now that we’re testing 2E, several characters experienced personal transformations.

Tuli, the lava dwarf chaos mage, has kept his back story but is now a cleric. To differentiate him from the cleric in the Teachers campaign, Tuli is the most random and worst cleric possible. By which I mean, healing is not his thing, and all his talent/domain choices have been chosen as the things we think players are least likely to embrace. Testing by setting oneself on fire. Tuli can take it. He’s a lava dwarf.

Djkuud, the disturbingly almost-undead ‘hopping monk’ who’d served the Gold King, is now a spellfist sorcerer, testing the breath weapon approach the sorcerer in the Teachers campaign avoided. Less mobility, more firepower. Same creepiness.

Jak Manblood is still proving that he’s the dwarfiest of all fighters, and now he’s doing it using the new maneuvers and without using the Combat Rhythm talent, because our playtest nerf-hammer seems to have pounded that talent down far enough that it is not necessarily the correct option.

The Occultist, Thorinn Oakenshield, has retired to be the charismatic leader of the derro clan who call themselves The Startouched, now converted—by our heroes—to a way that’s closer to the King’s Forge. And instead, Jonathan is playing Gurski, a half-orc barbarian. In this campaign, half-orcs are derived from dwarf barbarians on the frontiers rather than from humans. Gurski has a secret One Unique Thing that none of the rest of us (including me, the GM) know about. What we do know is that Gurski is testing a promising revision of the rage mechanic.

And finally, a photo taken during the Teachers from the Court game by Rob Dalton. Jonathan added a caption to it, using my nickname, Beto.

Beto: Hmm, these rules are too harsh. Must adjust.

JoT: Hmm, these rules are too forgiving. Must adjust.

13th Age 2E early October Update

In the last couple weeks, I spent a bit of time going over Jonathan’s work on the magic item chapter. It’s one of the chapters I’ve managed to digest all the playtest feedback on, and the version we’re finishing now is quite fun.

Mostly I’ve been working on the revision of the sorcerer class. I’m about one talent, five spells, and a bunch of level-by-level math short of finished.

The core of the original sorcerer class remains but every talent and spell that survives has been revised. The adventurer-tier playtest game we started last week should reveal whether the new twists in the sorcerer’s action economy and turn-by-turn choices will survive and show up in the Beta playtest packet.

Speaking of our at-home playtest, Jonathan’s work the past couple weeks was to finish the first draft of the new introductory adventure that will be in the back of the 2E book. Our friend Paul is GMing and I haven’t read the draft of the adventure because Jonathan wants me to find out what’s-really-going-on organically, along with the rest of the players! Jonathan is playing, but has made it clear that for a change, his low-Intelligence dwarf barbarian (well, he calls himself a fighter, but he’s awfully rage-y for a fighter) will not be offering sound tactical or strategic advice.

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.

13th Age 2E Playtest Update

The 13th Age 2E playtest is rolling, with a lot of feedback coming in already on the first playtest packet. I’m still welcoming in new folks, though I’ve fallen a bit behind on that front and have some more typing and list maintenance to do this week.

On Wednesday nights, we’re midway through our own champion-tier playtest campaign, moving up a level after every 3 battles. Actually, after just two battles at 4th level, where Jonathan pulled out dragons and double-strength fights and gave my troll (think: dwarven half-orc) fighter the unusual experience of spending many recoveries they did not actually possess.

Jonathan has set this campaign in the wilds of the Dragon Wood, a High Druid centered area that's not really part of the Empire, where humans are known as Huggers (as in tree-huggers), the elves are 'witches' and definitely not to be trusted, and sky-dwarves (dwarves crazy enough to like it on the surface) seem a lot more reasonable than the dwarves who live underground. We're troubleshooters sent by allied icons, the Dwarf King and Great Gold Wyrm. We've got two different versions of the fighter, a puissant cleric, and a sentient magic staff who functions as our wizard. Sessions are alternating between desperate combat and cross-culture diplomacy.

Meanwhile, as most everyone reading this knows, WotC's OGL-foofarah has been a rapidly developing show-on-the-side. I found myself heavily distracted for a week, but it now seems clear that good things are going to come of this, and 2E work is proceeding unaffected. We're figuring out which interesting new path we're going to take through the world of license-or-not, and no matter what we decide I’m grateful and happy to see how Paizo has responded to this cluster of events. We'll come to a decision along with Pelgrane before we put out another playtest packet, or perhaps sooner.

Speaking of timing, it's clear I’m not getting the second playtest packet out before the end of this month. So I’m now aiming at early February. I’m also taking a glance at some of the feedback, partly to see whether I want to account for obvious changes in the next packet, along with the bard/rogue/sorcerer, or whether we’ll save all feedback revisions for the third packet.

Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War Notes & Variants

Three-Dragon Ante: Giants War is an expansion of Three-Dragon Ante, just out from WizKids. (Earlier blog post here.) The set plays off D&D’s story of an ancient war between dragons and giants. Most of the new cards are based on D&D’s familiar giants: frost, fire, storm, stone, hill, and so on, along with Giant God cards for the bigger-than-I’d-originally-remembered giant pantheon.

You need the original 3DA set to play using Giant Wars, because every gambit awards one stake to the strongest dragon cards and the other stake to the strongest giant cards.

Time & the Endgame

Three-Dragon Ante has always played differently with different numbers of players. With two stakes that can be won each gambit, instead of one, Giants War increases the distinctions between three-player, four-player, and larger games.

So far, in my experience, three-player games are the most likely to invoke the variant end game. If no one has won after you’ve run out of cards in the main deck and shuffled in the middle game, score three more gambits and end the game after the third gambit’s toast. To win a three-player game before the toasts, you sometimes need to push the ante heavily instead of giving opponents time to recover. That’s true in all forms of 3DA, and more true when there are three players and two stakes per gambit.

Even if you’re not playing 3DA as a drinking game, I recommend raising beverages as you toast these final three hands. And if you’re making the toasts aloud, the final toast echoes better as “To fools like us!”

Variants for One-Stake Games

If you want to play a straight 3DA game with just one stake, all three of the new dragon suits will work so long as you shuffle the Mortals and Legendary Dragons (including the new Io and Shadow Invader) into a separate Legendary deck at the start of the game. You’ll need to play with either or both of the new Copper Dragon and Gold Dragon or the Legendary deck will be untapped. The new Gold Dragon from Giants War will always get to draw a Legendary card as long as someone else has played a card in the gambit, but if you lead with the Gold Dragon, you’ll only get a regular card.

I haven’t tried this variant. It seems like the Legendary deck will be kind of slim without all the Legendary giants, so I believe you should skip shuffling cards from the Legendary deck into the main deck at the start of the game.

If you’d rather play strictly with dragons and the original 3DA rules, skipping the Legendary deck, the new cards to add to the game are Io, the Shadow Dragon suit, and the Shadow Invader.

Both the new mortals—the Emperor and Ranger—will work in either variant. In fact, they’ll be more powerful than they are in Giants War games.

No Emperor’s Gambit

And speaking of the Emperor, yes, this is a very different version of a card that was at the core of the Emperor’s Gambit expansion for the original version of 3DA.

People often ask if the Emperor’s Gambit set that WotC published in 2010 going to be reprinted or revised. I’m pretty sure the answer is no, because hardly any of the dragons that were the core of Emperor’s Gambit have been brought from 4e forward to D&D 5e. 3DA licenses D&D’s dragons. Even if one or two of the iron, adamantine, mercury, earthquake, etc. dragons that populated 4e show up in 5e, I doubt the rest will appear.

So while we wait for dragons that probably aren’t going to show up, I’ve recruited some of the characters and mechanics from Emperor’s Gambit, including putting the Earthquake Dragon’s heavy-roller power on the new Fire Giant.

The Start-Small Variant

One more variant before I go, which started as an accident when I forgot to shuffle cards from the Legendary deck into the main deck at the start of the game!

Instead of correcting the mistake and re-dealing, I thought about it a second and decided it wasn’t bad to start everyone out with normal cards as their first hand. It feels a little bit like the “no dirt on the first trick” rules that some people use in Hearts. So, the Start-Small variant rules that you shuffle the 6 Legendary cards into the main deck after each player has been dealt their starting 7-card hand. Yes, ‘dirt’ in the form of a Legendary card might show up as you draw cards during the first gambit, so that’s a tiny bonus for people playing to draw.