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.