What I’ve Been Playing: Tabletop A Through F

Here are notes on games I’ve played in the past couple months, with game design comments where appropriate. Covering four games at a time means there’ll be a follow-up or two.

I didn't intend to begin with two of my own games but such are the gifts of alphabetical order.

13th Age

We’re getting close to the end of epic tier in the Teachers from the Court campaign that’s mentioned several times in 13th Age 2e. We started the campaign to test the living dungeon Jonathan wrote as the intro adventure at the back of the Gamemaster’s Guide. We liked our characters and wanted to keep playing so Paul Hughes transformed the dungeon run into a full campaign. Early in adventure tier, we posed as instructors from the Court of Stars sent to educate the half-elf children of our primary contact. We needed a cover-story because we’d entered a contested zone where the forces of the evil Diabolist/Archmage visited the town for supplies. ‘The Teachers from the Court’ became our nom de guerre, even after we’d qualified for several other higher ranking titles in the Elf Queen’s service.

When we don’t have a full crew, I’ve been running my deviant Arduin game, 13th Arduin, aka Arduin, Blessed Arduin.

And I’ve run a couple one-shots lately for diverse groups, one of them using the two-hour freeform adventure you can find here.

Armello: The Board Game

This gloriously beautiful board game from King of the Castle games shipped to all its kickstarter backers a couple months ago. It’s based on a digital game I like to call ‘the national game of Australia.’ With the help of an excellent development/playtest team, I reshaped the original digital game’s mix of quest movement and funny-but-serious-animal combat into a deckbuilding quest and combat game. Each of the four heroes has its own starting deck and powerful experience cards. Your hero gets more powerful by buying action and combat cards from the marketplace and winning treasures by finishing quests that send you criss-crossing the board. Unlike some deckbuilding games, that pretty much let people play their own solitaire games side-by-side, Armello: the Board Game rewards players who mix it up with their opponents.

One of my biggest reasons for designing the analog version of the game as a deckbuilder is that I dislike the way Armello’s beautiful cards are used in the video game. Some cards get played for their full effect, but a whole lot of cards in the video game are discarded to use the symbol that’s on the card in combat. In other words, you read the card, you decide it’s not something you need to play, and you discard it to get a hit or a shield or a save. When a game has beautiful and evocative cards, I like to try to make those cards matter. In this case, deckbuilding mechanics that bring cards through your hand multiple times did the trick, and opened a huge amount of design space. You’ll see my attitude towards cards that should matter surfacing again, below, in comments on Finspan.

I’m answering rules questions on BoardgameGeek, helped by savvy players. I’m not sure when there will copies for sale on line or going through distribution.

Dead Man’s Hand

My Desperadoes faced off against Chris Pramas’ Lawmen a few weeks ago. It was an appropriately desperate tie and a very fun skirmish miniatures game. I love minis games but neither paint minis nor invest in terrain, so it was good that Chris came prepared. We also used a couple buildings from a paper Belgian village that I used as terrain all through my childhood. Chris has now invested in a proper Dead Man’s Hand box, and we’ll definitely play again, probably with different factions.

Finspan

I quite love Wingspan. So does my wife Lisa. So do our ornithologist friends!

Lisa also loves Finspan so I’m going to need to relax my critical spirit and just-enjoy the good parts.

My disagreement with this iteration of the system is that you pay for most fish by discarding other fish from your hand. Yes, it’s that problem again, the same type of objection I have with the digital Armello cards. I’m looking through all my beautiful cards and constantly grading them, only a couple deserve to be played, the others will be discarded . . . and possibly returned to my hand if I get that type of engine working.

Discard-to-buy annoys me. Maybe it doesn’t annoy other people. I'll give it another try and whine less.

13th Age 2e: A Two-Hour Freeform Adventure

If you’re looking for a fun adventure to run as a one-shot at a convention, or for new players, or to jump-start a campaign when you don’t have anything planned ahead of time, check out the 2-Hour Freeform Adventure on the Adventures tab of the Pelgrane Press 13th Age Resources page. (It's now updated with typos fixed and better layout.)

It’s set up as a 2nd level adventure for a GM who knows the rules and between three and six players who don’t necessarily know the rules ahead of time. Characters sheets are available on the Pre-Generated Characters tab of the Resources page handle character spells and talents and feats, but not the fun stuff; the first hour is for players to make up a One Unique Thing and their hero’s backgrounds. The mini-adventure includes advice to help the GM tie the characters’ storylines into a plotline that will help focus the battle to come.

Instead of a set plot, the second half of the adventure provides five sets of monster stats, including the outlaws or cultists pictured above (art by Rich Longmore). As GM, you choose the opposition based on the uniques, backgrounds and icon relationships the players have created for their heroes. There’s advice about how to keep the action moving in a game with new players and some simple magic items that won’t add too much to the players’ brain-load.

Of course you don’t have to stick to a two-hour time slot. The four-hour freeform game I ran a couple weeks ago started as a botched library heist and ended as a heroquest-style ‘inquiry’ into resisting undeath fought out in a crypt-shadow spawned from a halfling tavern.

At the moment there are sixteen 2nd level pre-generated heroes on the Pre-generated Characters tab of the resource page. These are heroes put together by Jay Godden and Miguel Friginal as part of a bigger project to cover all the levels. There will be more 2nd level pre-gens added to the resource page soon. The freeform adventure adjusts to the heroes you bring to it, so feel free to bring your own 2nd level character into the adventure instead of using a pre-gen.

New for 13th Age: Monster Stat Descriptors

There’s something new in the way we’re presenting monster stats in 13th Age. Jonathan came up with it. I’m calling it the descriptor approach. After using something similar in Ars Magica and in Over the Edge, Jonathan was working on monster stats for a living dungeon on a spreadsheet. He found himself wanting terms to describe the raw numbers, especially for armor. So he came up with descriptors. It was too late to use them in the Gamemaster’s Guide, but you’ll see descriptors used in everything we’re doing now, including the upcoming starter set, Bestiary 3: Icon Followers, and the 13th Age Freeform Demo.

Each of the monster defenses and the hit point entry gets a word or a phrase that gives the GM something to play off when describing combat with the creature.

For example, here’s one of the descriptor sets that Jonathan originally used to sell the idea, stats for a humanoid-bug creature in a living dungeon:

And here are the stats and descriptors for a weird little messenger demon that plays an unusual role in the starter set adventure:

And a couple more that worked well for me in a demo game this weekend. First is the decayed wight, that made it clear it was not like other creatures by not bothering to dodge.

And finally, descriptors from a ghoul I referred to as ‘the ancient one,’ an NPC that one of the heroes had become acquainted with earlier in life while being raised on a “crypt farm” run by the Lich King. (Ghoul art above by Rich Longmore.)

You'll see more descriptors in the 13th Age 2E Freeform Demo that should be going up on the Pelgrane Press resource page later this week.

The Icons of Arduin, Blessed Arduin

On the nights I GM, I’ve been running a wild dungeon-crawl centered 13th Age game that attempts to live up to Hargrave’s eclectic grimoires. The players and I started the campaign by inventing our current Arduinian icons, the organizations or archetypes that shape the world and give the 1st level characters a stake in its major conflicts.

Jonathan’s Arduin mastery helped guide a couple of the new icons, as well as the name of the campaign, since I hadn’t realized that ‘blessed’ started out meaning ‘sanctified by being splattered with blood.' As you’ll see from the icon roster, this isn’t a campaign full of heroes, more like a game of agents.

Guild of Mundane Omniscience, aka The Deep State: Gnome engineers and sages who claim that they’re the ones who keep Arduin and its capital Talismonde running smoothly. “There is no record of the Guild ever subverting a client.” Represented in the adventuring party by Olvin, a gnome “combat optimizer,” a clever non-musical reskin of the new 2E bard. Olvin is the only left-handed gnome in the world, which started as important when the party started their adventures in a mirror dungeon and could track which type of reality they were in (Inception-style) by checking Olvin’s handedness.

Old Talismonde: Decadent gothic clan, powerful but frayed thin, hanging on to some of their original power via dark secrets. Represented in the adventuring party by Jonathan’s ”magic-user”, Yenzdillian, whose One Unique Thing is that he is the only magic-user in Old Talismonde to have a pseudodragon familiar, giving Jonathan a chance to talk in one of his funny voices.

The Jester: A forgeborn wizard, an optimistic nihilist. Represented in the adventuring party by Seren, a cleric who is the only forgeborn “who is cool.” Cool, you say? This forgeborn is the only forgeborn who can get high. He (as he presents) is a full-on gleaming robot with multiple augmentations that either get him high or function like what other creatures would call ‘spells.’

The Jade Queen: Insectile druid who created phraints to give humans and elves and dwarves someone from her camp that the humanoid kin could relate to; alien but not an enemy. Pure neutral. The Jade Queen doesn’t figure as any ally in the lives of the adventurers so I’ve made frequent use of phraints and other bugs as agents of the (evil?) mirror version of the next iconic organization.

Multiversal Trading Company: One of the original Arduinian orgs! Several of the heroes/agents have connections with MTC. One of the players wrote, “The kind of capitalists that Ayn Rand imagined, only they’re real.” It’s now clear that a rival multiverse’s version of MTC is attacking through the mirror dungeon, so MTC is accumulating obligations to the mostly successful heroes. I guess that’s what it looks like to the heroes, anyway.

Brother Harrow/Hero: We originally saw Brother Harrow as the mighty arm of righteous vengeance, with the end largely justifying the means. But that’s not how the player who chose the icon saw the icon, so Brother Harrow has pretty much become Brother Hero, and is definitely the closest thing we have to an icon who aims at the good. Represented in the adventuring party by Jatka, a melee ranger who is the Perfect Hobbit. Picture Michelangelo’s David but Hobbitish, perfectly formed and maybe an inch or two shorter than people who think they’re tall.

Luc-Jourez, the Death Master: Vampires! Fashion! Well-dressed cultists! A trend setter for the young and callow. Jonathan’s Yenzdillian has a conflicted relationship with the death cults because of course he does. So far Luc Jourez followers have only shown up long enough to propose a couple small deals that haven’t cost the heroes anything and seriously don’t appear to have any bad consequences. Huh.

The Lector: An ancient, living, powerful tome of demonology and black magic. It finds mortals to temporarily become its “body”, the great demon known as the Lector. Sadly for Arduin, this chaotic evil demon power is growing stronger after the destruction of the Codex of the Great Gold Wyrm.

Sita Rutu Karu Tuleb

That’s one of two Estonian phrases my father taught me in the last few years of his life. He’d been weirdly reinvigorated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tracing the early war news in Estonian and German. Sita rutu karu tuleb functioned as commentary on that invasion: “Shit faster, the bear is coming.”

For Estonians, like those in Ukraine, the bear is Russia.

With the United State throwing its weight around near Venezuela, Putin’s Russia couldn’t be happier. Russia would like the freedom to take whatever/whenever from its neighbors, all of whom it defines as part of its once and future hegemony. The USA, European Union, and NATO have been in Russia’s way, but Trump has accompanied the attack on Venezuela with movement toward Greenland that could bum-rush the US out of NATO. Trump seems to want the US out of NATO as much as Putin wants that, which should be weird for an American president but if you wait long enough and ignore the head-fakes where he talks like he’s standing up to Russia, Trump tends to provide what Putin wants.

Meanwhile in Minnesota we’re seeing what happens when a government classifies people who protest its policies as domestic terrorists. It's always a bad thing when your government lies to you. When it lies that protesters are domestic terrorists, it sets those protesters up to be killed.

Our bear is here, decimating FEMA, promoting racists, weaponizing the law, sending troops into cities that vote for the opposition, and glorifying the age of robber barons by mandating that the EPA will only consider pollution’s costs to industry instead of its costs to human health.

My father’s other favorite phrase was ole tubli. It looks silly in English, but translates as fare forward bravely. We’re gonna need that.

[[and thanks to Rich Longmore for the snippet of bear borrowed from 13th Age]]

13th Age 2E Round-up: It’s Shipping!

I got both the deluxe versions of the Heroes’ Handbook and Gamemaster’s Guide and The Art of 13th Age in the mail on Wednesday. I took them along to gaming that night and set up the delightful GM screen as the first indication that I had the books on hand! Everything looks wonderful and the GM screen is heavy and better-looking than I could have hoped.

USA shipments are going out and will probably be finishing the first week of December. There’s information on Canadian shipping and on distribution to the rest of the world in this Kickstarter update from last week.

The coffee table-sized art book assembled by Lee Moyer from both 1E and 2E work turned out great. The fear when you’re printing art you really care about is that it will come out too dark. Both the 2E books and The Art of 13th Age seem to have avoided this curse. Good work by Standart Impressa in Lithuania.

Meanwhile on the Gaming Table

My Wednesday night 13th Age campaign is an adventurer-tier dungeon crawling game that I’ve been using to experiment with some new living dungeon tricks. It’s a wild high-magic campaign I call Arduin, Blessed Arduin, so-named because Jonathan pointed out that the original meaning of ‘blessed’ was something like ‘splattered by blood.’

I’ve been a bit distracted with work and other issues. I haven’t given the campaign the attention it deserves, but the players have voted that they want it to continue in an especially contemporary fashion—two players have invested in Hero Forge minis for their player characters! We’ve summoned a two-fold obligation: A) as GM, I’ve been instructed to keep this campaign running. B) as players, they need to be willing to flee if it looks like a session is going to be a TPK.

Which came up a few weeks ago when I ran a session while I was so unhealthy that I qualified as an untrustworthy narrator, definitely not competent to be trusted with unstable playtest mechanics. The heroes had to retreat from a baaaaad situation. Now that I have recovered health and can think straight, I know I screwed that session up. I’m not punishing them with a narrative loss. Their current situation may look like a narrative loss, but the truth is that it’s a respite.

I’m enjoying this just-for-fun 13th Arduin riff, and I have also had fun writing part of it up. But I sent that writeup to the Something Completely Different tribute zine for Lee Gold and Alarums & Excursions. I may wait until after the tribute zine surfaces to blog about the campaign. Maybe!

Updating the Resources

Getting back to the topic of your table’s games, rather than mine, we’ve been working on updating the resources pages on the Pelgrane Press website. The new FAQ isn’t up as I type, but it will be turned on shortly. The Quick Links resource page has been updated with resources that apply to 2E, and the character sheets are now attached to the resources pages for download.

The first errata and typos list is also up. The corrections on pages HH: 148 and HH: 192 fix gameplay mistakes. The other corrections all matter, but may not rise to the level of needing to add a sticky note or scratchout to keep track of the proper game mechanics.

We have more character sheets and resources in the works, and we’ll be working to keep all these pages up to date.

Skill & Strategy in Legendary: Game of Thrones

Despite the subject line, today’s blog is not a strategy guide! Instead, it’s a look at a couple of cards from the about-to-release Legendary: Game of Thrones showing how I redefined two Hero classes whose names make sense in superhero games but don't apply as well to GRR Martin's fantasy world.

Legendary uses five card classes, aka colors, to define the heroes of all the various Legendary deckbuilding games. The five colors are Tech (Black), Ranged (Blue), Covert (Red), Strength (Green), and Instinct (White). It’s the first two classes—Black and Blue—that needed to be redefined for Game of Thrones.

Blue is for Skill

Ranged (Blue) is about blasting things, usually with energy beams, lightning, lasers, psychic powers, and so on. Yes, Daenerys’ dragons could muster convincing energy attacks, and there’s at least one flaming sword in the world, but ranged/energy isn’t a rich source of character concepts in GoT. I called Blue “Magic” when I designed Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, but that’s not right for GoT either, where magic is usually hidden and covert instead of showy and explosive.

So I went with a concept that’s extremely important to the great Houses and their warriors: Blue is now Skill. “Skill Heroes (Blue) have prowess with weapons and combat, especially the combat styles practiced by trained warriors and knights.” It’s not about brawn, it’s not about instinct, it’s about skills recognized by other great knights, like the skills possessed by Loras Tyrell, who shows up as a Skill Hero on one of the cards from the Great Warriors hero set.

Two of Jaime Lannister’s cards are Skill cards, including one of his two common cards, Kingslayer.

Jaime’s defining act, earlier in his career, is so infamous that everyone expects him to do his worst. That’s how I think of the part of the card that forces you to choose an enemy to draw a card, Jaime has a bit of a deathwish and he’s a provocateur. In a two-player game you obviously know who’s drawing the card, it’s in multiplayer games that the lobbying becomes interesting, though you’re usually attempting to help the enemy who seems like less of a threat.

Meanwhile, Sword Mastery is the GoT set’s version of the Conqueror ability. If there’s any Ally in the Sword range-space, the space in the middle of the range track, Kingslayer provides another +2 Attack that can only be used against Masterminds. Since Kingslayer is a Common card, you might draw multiples in the same hand. When Sword Mastery triggers, an enemy Mastermind tends to follow the King into oblivion.

Black is for Strategy

The other card I’m showing today is the rare card from Jaime Lannister. It’s a Covert (Red card) that plays on the connection between the Lannister twins. They’re so intertwined that Cersei is showing up on Jaime’s Rare card!

The Strategy trigger on Intertwined is all Cersei. And Strategy is what Black has become instead of Tech in GoT. The series’ opening credits have some wonderful tech, but I wouldn’t say there’s much tech to build Hero cards with. So I went with a quality that sets many of the most deadly characters in GoT apart:: “Strategy Heroes (Black) use big-picture manipulation, grand strategic and master plans.”

Cersei is the poster ‘hero’ for Strategy cards. Intertwined’s Strategy trigger offers an unusual amount of choice in how you’ll use the effect, but the story concept is the same: someone is being removed from the big picture.

As you’d expect, Tyrion is another Lannister with Strategy in mind. The Small Council of the Baratheon House has some Strategy cards, but there aren’t as many in the Stark and Dothraki houses. In fact, one of the Stark Masterminds gets weaker when attacked with Strategy cards; Lord Eddard the Hand wasn’t playing the long game.