Helllo, Gen Con!

As photographic evidence reveals, I’m thrilled to be at Gen Con this year! This my first convention-chance to talk with people about 13th Age 2e and to sell the new boxed set.

I’ve also got exciting 13th Age publication news to share with people! If you’re not at the convention, those plans will also be revealed on Pelgrane’s web site soon.

We don’t have seminars scheduled this year. You’ll find me and Ken Hite and the other Pelgranistsas at the booth except for a) Ken’s podcast and panel excursions; and b) my jaunts to demo a new card game to a couple publishers at the show. Oh, and lunch. It wouldn’t be in the spirit of the current Merryshire campaign if I forgot to mention lunch. I’m generally going to be taking lunch at 11 a.m. If you swing by booth #423 at other hours and I’m not there, I’ll be back soon.

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 going through distribution, but for now you can aquire the game by going through the Backerkit page as a 'pre-order.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.