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.

Legendary: Game of Thrones, Releasing Soon as a Cutthroat Card Game

I love the Legendary deck-building game designed by Devin Low! Lisa and I were in the same city as Devin when he made the original edition, so we got to playtest as the game took shape. Since then Devin has designed something like two dozen sets of various sizes and Upper Deck has adopted the system for a multitude of film and television properties.

I’m still most fond of the freeform Legendary approach, where stories you tell yourself grow out of deckbuilding, instead of the guided storytelling of the Legendary Encounters boxes.

I designed a Legendary set a few years ago, sticking close to the original model but filling the Big Trouble in Little China set with the dynamics Lisa enjoyed—game design as gift. And now I’ve designed Legendary: Game of Thrones, in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products and HBO, coming soon to local game stores!

The challenge posed by Legendary®: Game of Thrones was to turn a competitive co-op game into a cutthroat battle. In Legendary; all players are heroes, competing to be the best at defeating villains. The heroes win together or lose together, but one winner is more equal than others. Well, a lot more equal, but when players take selfish actions that screw the other players, many tables point out that ‘we’re all supposed to be on the same side.’

That doesn’t make sense for Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones needs to be an epic battle where no one blames you for using powers that hurt your opponents. It’s a battle with one House winning.

I’m going to introduce a few of the mechanics that combine into direct battle in a series of blog posts, starting today with a note about each player’s Hero line-up.

Your own Hero line-up: Let’s take the simplest case, a two-player game, Starks vs. Lannisters, using the Full Allegiance starter game so that you’ll each use all four of the Heroes from your House.

If you’re playing the Starks, you want to buy Stark characters for your deck. Playing with Lannisters in your Hero hand would feel all wrong. So, as a rule, you don’t. Instead of a single shared line-up, where all players compete to buy the Hero cards they want from a common pool, each player has their own line-up of five Hero cards. It looks something like this, to switch Houses for a moment and show the King's Landing player board that is part of the game’s initial image releases:

Adding Pressure: If you were the only player able to buy cards from a Legendary line-up, you’d have a low-pressure opportunity to acquire more and more of the cards you want. In other Legendary games, you have to keep track of what opponents are buying and hope they don’t take the cards you want.

Legendary®: Game of Thrones has card interaction that makes you care about what cards your foes buy, but the key dynamic of putting some time pressure on Hero purchases from your own line-up is handled with a new mechanic: Events.

A random assortment of 16 different Event cards (there are 2 copies of each) is shuffled into the single central Allies deck, the deck of antagonists that your Heroes defeat or support, depending on their House. At the start of each player’s turn, they draw a card from the Allies deck, exactly like drawing a card from the Villains deck in the original version of the game.

If you draw an Event, the first thing everyone must do is Cycle a card out of their own line-up. Each Event specifies the space the card is cycled out of.

Here’s an example: Escalation. Before resolving its text, every player has to take the card out of the third space of their line-up, the center-space, put it at the bottom of their personal Hero deck, and replace it with the top card of their Hero deck. It could be the lousy little card you don’t want to see again, or it could be cherished 7-cost rare that you’d already started building your hopes around.

And then you get the fun of the Event text! Escalation shakes things up because it lets everyone interact with their line-up at an unexpected time. Even if the card you really wanted was in your third space, you’re still generally able to improve your deck somehow.

Of course, not all Events are helpful. But playtesting gradually winnowed away the Events that were just hurtful. Your Heroes and your Allies that are in the central Ally deck are going to hurt your opponents plenty; Events are now most often interesting effects that can affect multiple players.

City of Bones: a Wonderful Martha Wells Novel

The success of Martha Wells Murderbot stories has reopened the window for well-supported publication for some of her earlier books!

One of my favorites of her earlier stories is City of Bones. Wells has a different (excellent) book that uses the word necromancer in the title, but City of Bones isn’t part of that series and it’s not about undead. It’s about post-fall archeology, marginalized heroes who scrape by, and forerunner tech that may as well be magic.

I haven’t read the newly revised edition yet. The original version started slowly but right about the spot I wondered if I would keep reading it blossomed into something special, so if you’re a reader like me who sometimes just quits, don’t.

One thing I loved about City of Bones was its evocation of place. I felt I’d been there, in its dry high desert and multi-tiered city, and for a couple years after reading it, while traveling, I would get flashes of thinking “Hey, this place reminds me of City of Bones.” If there’s a good word for this type of memory impression from a place you’ve never been, in whatever language, I’d like to hear it.