Three Strikes Lightning

Cleaning my desk I uncovered an envelope with two stories scrawled on its back, stories I heard in two of the rare moments I wasn't carrying a notebook.

The top of the envelope is a list of curious but ultimately non-remarkable attributes pertaining to a friend's cousins. They add up to a compelling clan in a Hillfolk game set on the 7 hills of Seattle.

But the bottom of the envelope is where things get interesting. We were hiking a ridge trail near Hurricane Ridge with ominous clouds in the distance. The conversation turned to lightning strikes and the woman passing us on the trail entered the conversation.

     "My grandfather got hit by lightning three times."
     "What? Three times?" I said. "Um, clearly he survived at least..."
     
Yes, he had survived all three lightning strikes. I believe she told me that he was still alive but not up to hiking any more, so they'd come up the Ridge without him.

Of course I wanted the details so the full story came out in about ninety seconds while she waited for the rest of her family to catch up.

Strike #1 was when her grandfather was in school. He was sitting at a desk just looking out the window and lightning came through the window and blasted him out of his chair. Didn't hurt him much though.

Strike #2 was worse. He was in the Air Force during WWII and he and two friends wanted to get back to the barracks quickly from the mess hall. Reconstructing my notes, the situation was complicated by the fact that the grandfather had suffered some sort of leg injury, he was on crutches. His two friends decided to rig up some carrying arrangement and then instead of going the long way around they cut through a drainage culvert. And that's where the lightning hit them and both his friends who were carrying him died.

Strike #3 came when his B-17 was hit. I didn't write down whether he was a pilot or a bombardier or a navigator or a gunner, but I did write down that the hit when he was in the B-17 left him blind for 6 months. But he recovered and ended up flying 25 missions for the USAF and 27 more for the RAF maybe not in that order.

     "Wow. OK. Thank you so much for that story."

     There was no sign of thunder in the clouds but if I was him I'd avoid hiking Hurricane Ridge even if my knees could handle it.

Good news, bad news

The good news is that no one got hurt. As good news goes, that's pretty much the absence of truly terrible news.

Chris Huth's apartment building in Toronto burnt down, making Chris and his girlfriend temporarily homeless.

The link above details part of Pelgrane Press' response to Chris' problem, a fire sale until tomorrow that gives Chris all proceeds. Simon's post also covers details like 13th Age's most likely new publishing date.

Chris has been doing great work on 13th Age. You can see most of the laid out final book (8 of 9 chapters) if you are one of the many people who have pre-ordered the game from Pelgrane Press. Cal Moore and I had sent comments on six of the nine classes in chapter 4 back to Chris and were waiting to comment on the remaining three classes after Chris caught up with the earlier work.

I have more to say about restarting the layout (a job that should go much faster the second time through) and working on 13 True Ways (finishing monk second-draft today, working on battle captain). But I'm going to wait until Monday to give a full assessment. I confess that my personal reaction to this type of setback is to communicate in private and spend time working harder instead of communicating widely. I'll get over my old-fashioned approach next week.

If there are any Pelgrane books you've been waiting to pick up until the right moment, the moment is here.

More next week.

--Rob

The Final Mantis

This is the first completed piece of Monster Art +13 from the 13 True Ways book. As you can see, Aaron McConnell had a lot more in mind than the striking parallel lines of the original Mantis vs. Mantis sketch. Aaron expanded the piece and did the initial colors and true to our team-up plans, Lee finished the composition.

Our backer, the Dormouse, is thrilled, and she's buying a second copy of the print to have for herself since the first will be a gift. If you'd like to buy a copy of the print yourself, email Aaron at aranmcconnell@gmail.com, he will eventually have a store operating but for now it's on a talk-to-him basis. You could also talk with him at Emerald City ComicCon this weekend, he'll be one of the Fire Opal people at the show. Me? Not as much. I'm spending the weekend helping with the final steps of the core book layout and working on monk forms that include the Deadly Mantis Fist.

Feathered Crown!

There are three Alchemist-tier 13 True Ways Kickstarter backers who gave us magic items to illustrate.

The first item is the Feathered Crown from Jered Heeschen. Look at the art from Aaron McConnell (with a touch of radiant feathering from Lee Moyer)!

Jered very much wanted the item's quirk to play as follows: Quirk: Not only do you compulsively eavesdrop, you also tend to misinterpret insults as compliments and bad news as good news. 

I decided that it sounded like just the thing for a dragon-rider to wear. "Ah, they're saying wonderful things about me. They do know what's good for them."

I like the item and the art so much that it has changed our plan about how we are going to stat up these specially illustrated treasures: we're going to provide several different versions of the mechanics to fit into the panoply of different characters and campaigns!

And speaking of changing plans about treasure, we've changed one small fact about magic shields during layout. Neither Jonathan nor I were happy with the fact that we had given shields no default magical bonus. That seemed bogus. So I rummaged through our options and changed things around. Magical shields in 13th Age now provide the default hit point boost that magical belts used to. Belts ended up with a default bonus to a character's number of recoveries, which also doesn't suck. A happy last minute correction for a muffed punt.

Our thanks to Jered,
Rob Heinsoo

Mantis vs. Mantis

The art above is the first thumbnail by Aaron McConnell from one of the winners of the Monster Art +13 mini-essay contest we ran for backers of the 13 True Ways Kickstarter. A backer I know only as The Dormouse wrote the following....

My friend has a tendency to capture praying mantids and keep them in small aquariums, hand feeding them crickets with loving care until they reach the end of their insectoid life.  Whenever a cricket is delivered, or the creature otherwise deigns to notice her, the standard reaction is a display of threat and dominance, a graceful pantomime of those scythe-like forearms which conveys:

Hello, human.  If our positions were reversed, I would not keep you in a cage and feed you tasty things.  I would eat you.

You have to admit, this sort of directness is worthy of respect.  What better way to immortalize it than to illustrate it with a praying mantis who is, in fact, large enough to reverse those positions?

Given that 13 True Ways features the true initiation of the monk, I couldn't resist asking Aaron for Mantis vs. Mantis action. And even though this is just the thumbnail, he has delivered. 

We'll be announcing all the winners via a Kickstarter update later today or tomorrow. I'm just sorting out a couple entries that are probably-winners-but-may-have-issues. 

Stay poised. 

new this week

This week the 13th Age campaign I'm running that's testing aspects of Shards of the Broken Sky hit its stride by starting to tell its own unique story. The icons are not all who they seem and the PCs are descended from a former icon whose history and existence has been suppressed for centuries. Pitting the group firmly against an icon they had ambiguous relations with at the start of the campaign has kicked our group into gear. That and getting all the players back, some of us had been too busy to play much, but the picture below is the whole group (minus Jonathan), miming extreme excitement about a single d20 roll. Followed by a more accurate candid shot of the moments following when we all went back to teasing Mike over the result of that d20 roll. (And yes, I'm avoiding naming icons because I'd rather not spoil one angle on Shards of the Broken Sky too much...)

This was also the week when two members of the group reported their first experiments with teaching D&D to the next generation.  Paul's son Silas, 5.5 years, created a wizard. When Paul told him that most D&D characters were part of a group of allies, Silas overcame his disappointment by saying that his friends were ten rangers. Who ride on the backs of ten werewolves. "That makes twenty," says Silas, well on the way to expressing his father's blend of minimaxed storytelling.

Meanwhile Rob D began to pass on the legacy to his boys. In his words,
this past weekend i reffed a marathon d&d meets gamma world session with my boys. aidan beheaded a rampaging ice golem, but the head could not be destroyed — just smashed into smaller and smaller pieces that kept coming. (gave roan a nightmare that night… bad DM/father).

I think it's more like....

GOOD DM.
Bad father.

"T-shirt!" says Paul.

Playtest Impact Registers in the End

I had a fun day digging through the 13th Age playtester reports this week. For a change I wasn't looking for comments or problems, this time I was hunting for playtester names, working to complete the credits.

But along the way I decided to make a last-moment change to the character creation rules in chapter 2.

So many people asked us to give all character classes 8 points of backgrounds instead of our pseudo-traditionalist route of giving the rogue and ranger more backgrounds and the fighter and barbarian less. Reading the playtest feedback again I had to recognize that Jonathan and I were mistaken about our earlier rule. We were wrong telling some classes they weren't as worthy of having rich backgrounds. I talked with Jonathan. He agreed.

The rule is now that every character gets 8 points of backgrounds. The sidebar which formerly explained our separate-and-unequal decision now explains the move to equality while providing the old system as an optional rule for GMs who want to play with varied points.

Chris is at-this-moment finishing the second draft of the layout of Chapter 2: Character Rules, so the change came just in time.

 I have to say "Thank you" to the playtesters who repeated their assessment of the earlier rules and "I'm sorry" since it took us so long to respond.

Oh. I guess I also have to say "I'm sorry" to bards and rogues and rangers in existing campaigns whose GMs might now screw them out of two background points. The bard in our game ditched his two points of "Former target of bullying," but not everyone will have such an easily-erased background. I'd say that characters who have been with us through the playtest process deserve an extra benefit and should have the two extra background points grandmothered in.

And fighters, barbarians, paladins, sorcerers? Happy Two Background Point Awards Day!