The Archmage Engine! Or, How to Publish 13th Age Compatible Stuff

A creative flame.

Arcane mastery.

A hint of guile.

We’re creating 13^th Age under the Open Game License because we think the OGL is the right way to play well with others.  

We are working out the interactions between Fire Opal Media, Pelgrane Press, and people who want to publish things related to 13^th Age using the OGL. As a result, some of what I’m about to say in this post may change, but in broad outlines, here’s what’s going on. Those of you who care less about technical details may find your eyes glazing over the deeper you go, so I’ve tried to put the good stuff on top.

Right now, people who want to use our game mechanics can use them so long as they comply with the OGL. It’s sweet to ask us permission and tell us what you are up to, the way the folks using using 13^th Age mechanics in the Last Stand and The Bestiary of the Curiously Odd Kickstarter projects did; but you technically don’t have to ask us permission to use the mechanics.  

So if you want to publish your setting and your original icons with our mechanics? Go for it, and use the Archmage Engine logo above (thank you, Lee Moyer!) to identify your work as being compatible with 13^th Age.  You can also say “Compatible with 13^th Age” on the cover of your book. However, the 13^th Age logo itself is part of our product identity, and therefore not available to use without our permission.

People who want to publish professional material that makes use of our product identity material in 13^th Age will need to ask Pelgrane Press for permission. Email Simonwork@profantasy.com until Simon tells us a different address he’d like used. This permission applies to both initial permission to do the work and final approval of the text. Magazine articles, for example, fall under this category, and are likely to be published with a line saying something like

13^th Age and the Icons [plus other elements that might be in the article] are trademarks of Fire Opal Media. This article published by agreement with Pelgrane Press Ltd.

Using our artwork with permission might also be possible, and if used would include a notice like so:

Artwork copyright ©2012 Fire Opal Media Ltd

Shortly after 13th Age is fully published we will publish a System Resource Document to help people sort out which parts of 13^th Age are open game mechanics, and which parts are product identity that can’t be used without written permission.

The SRD will sort through what are open game mechanics and what is our product identity. A starting point is in the notice at the front of the Escalation Edition of the game, which presently identifies our product identity as: All trademarks, registered trademarks, proper names (characters, icons, place names, new deities, etc.), dialogue, banter and comments from Jonathan and Rob, plots, story elements, locations, characters, artwork, and trade dress.

We’ll also come out with some form of friendly policy statement to allow fans to talk about and use our world and setting details on blog posts and fanzines, without having to worry about asking permission. I don’t know exactly what that statement looks like, but picture something terrible and restrictive and then imagine the opposite. We’ll do the opposite.

If there are aspects of the situation this blog post didn’t cover, wiser heads will deal with them shortly.

…and for the souls who perceive the oddities of OGL interaction with product identity, yes, it is a tiny bit odd that we’re using the symbol of the Archmage, which is otherwise part of our product identity, to anchor the logo for the game’s engine. But what the heck. The symbol looks good, it should communicate to players of 13^th Age, and given the enthusiasm we’ve seen from Team Archmage we’re happy to share the symbol in this respect. 

Fire Opal Media & 13th Age

June 22, 2012

Dear gamers, 13th Age playtesters, and friends, 

Last week, Simon Rogers and Pelgrane Press started selling pre-orders for 13th Age through the Pelgrane store. It’s time I wrote a note about the business side of the creation of 13th Age. 

If you are only concerned with game design and gameplay issues, you'll want to skip this note. Its final point will be to explain what I know about the possible trajectories of 13th Age, including, of all things, a Facebook game. But first I'm going to explain those possibilities by introducing the company that has created the project, Fire Opal Media.

How We Started Fire Opal Media

Jay Schneider and I didn’t work together at Wizards of the Coast but we knew each other’s work. I’d designed roleplaying games, card games, and miniatures games while at WotC. Jay had worked as a designer leading the team that put Duels of the Planeswalkers on Xbox. When we found ourselves as free agents in the middle of 2010, Jay and I decided to collaborate on a new electronic game design.

My first concept for a game convinced Jay he wanted to work with me. Then Jay came up with a much better idea. We recruited two other friends as founders: a business guy, Gerald Linn, and our technical director, Louis Towles. 

Our next decision set us on an unusual path. We didn't have the money to fund an electronic game. We didn't like the way game companies were usually set up, with rewards flowing mainly to investors and people who handled money rather than the people who did the work. Instead of looking for investment money, we decided to set ourselves up as a game design co-operative. 

We also took the ambitious position that we could finish our first electronic game in 14 weeks. We called ourselves 14WeekHobby. Oh utopian dreams. 

So we ended up with around 30 freelancers in various parts of the country working for sweat equity on an electronic game that struck each of those people as a worthwhile risk. 

The good news is that this 14Week game is still ticking slowly along, closer to reality every month, still being labored on via a bizarre sweat equity coding team that is making it work. The bad news, if you do the math, is that 14 weeks was a nutso deadline and 14 months didn't work either, and so on. Our 14Week game should come to fruition some day but I don't know when. Normally you have to be a somewhat big/or-at-least-funded company to successfully publish an electronic game of any ambition, but the excitement of working together on something that could be big has carried us this far. We say that those of us still working on these projects for Fire Opal in their off-hours and in late-night team sessions have 'the pajama gene.' 

Of course 14WeekHobby was never our real name. Especially not 28 weeks later. So we teamed up with my friend Lee Moyer and put together a name and logo and identity as Fire Opal Media. 

Then we determined that it was nigh impossible to set ourselves up as a true cooperative because the laws for co-ops are mainly set up for agricultural products, not game design. So instead of taking a turn into dairy-farming, we've restructured ourselves as a game design corporation where nearly everyone is working for sweat equity. All of us working on Fire Opal projects end up as part-owners of what we create.

13th Age

While our developers and computer programmers were working on the 14Week game, there wasn’t much point in doing more ambitious electronic game design. I turned to non-electronic designs. One of those projects turned into Epic Spell Wars, a freelance gig for Cryptozoic. But what I most wanted was to take advantage of the fact that Jonathan Tweet and I played D&D together every Wednesday night. Jonathan and I could work together to design the game we would most want to play together.

Jonathan and I have been friends for years. Working together again was natural. Since Fire Opal Media isn't interested in being a tabletop rpg publisher, we were looking at teaming up with Pelgrane as the publisher from the start. 

What Fire Opal was interested in was an IP that it could use for games on other platforms. Most of the Fire Opal coders were busy working on 14Weeks, but we had a great new programmer named John Hodgson who needed something to work on. We all had enjoyed the Tiny Adventures game that WotC made for Facebook and then shut down. We decided to try making our own simple Facebook game for 13th Age. It doesn’t have its official name yet, so for now let’s call it 13FBG.

13FBG is a low-impact text-based adventure game for Facebook using a version of the 13th Age IP. Jonathan originally ran the project, then he got hired by Amazon and had to stop working on 13FBG, so I took over while working on 13th Age. I believe in making individual games fit their medium instead of trying to represent precisely the same reality, so this Facebook game uses 13th Age icons and classes as a framework, but really, the background story and world are most of what the games have in common. The game has some cool new ideas. But the reasons Jonathan and I are passionate about making 13th Age as a tabletop game that inspires every player and GM to go wild with their campaign? None of that translates over to this electronic Facebook game. 

I originally viewed the 13th Age rpg as art I wanted to accomplish, a labor of love. I thought it might be good business, but I wasn't sure. I thought that the 14Weeks game or maybe 13FBG would surface as the stronger business push of the company. 

Fast-forward to now, where I find that 13th Age, the labor of love project that we *attempted* to create as self-encapsulated seems likely to spawn at least a bit of a game line. And 13th Age is being published soon while the electronic games that Fire Opal started long ago are still coding their way toward reality. 

Plans & Possibilities

So here's the probable future as I know it. 

First, we are going to publish 13th Age through Pelgrane as soon as it's well-finished. I have 690+ pages of playtest feedback I'm digging through and accounting for. Y’all took the time to point out the problems. We owe it to you to think about them and improve what needs improving before we publish. We're working on it. We wanted to publish the game by GenCon but no, that’s not going to happen. The first priority has to be making the book great. Schedule will slip instead of quality.

Second, at some point we are going to figure out how to make an expansion book for 13th Age using the same team, me and Jonathan (design) and Lee Moyer and Aaron McConnell (art). The finances of our present sweat-equity reality may well push us toward Kickstarter for that, especially since we have an idea or two for how Kickstarter could interact with the book marvelously.

Third, I know that Pelgrane wants to publish other books for the line including adventures and.... well I shouldn't speak Simon's mind. I am going to be as involved with these books as I can be, in one case I believe I'll be the main designer. The Pelgrane-initiated books aren't likely to have art from Lee and Aaron; other artists will be getting in on the act. 

Fourth, we are figuring out how to participate in the OGL while holding on to the story elements of the game as our intellectual property. 

Fifth, our sweat equity model *seems* capable of pushing the Facebook game 13FBG out into the world sometime later this year; partially because our programmers rock. Partially because Gregory Marques who handled Tiny Adventures once upon a time is now running it. Partially because great writers like Logan Bonner, Greg Stolze, and Tracy Hurley have signed on to help write the adventures. And partially because we will cunningly re-use as much of the art from 13th Age as possible to illustrate the online game. 

So there is a lot going on. 

My first priority is finishing the 13th Age rpg. I love the process of getting this done right. 

For now, other Fire Opal people like Wade Rockett and Jonathan Tweet will probably be speaking more about 13^th Age than me. When 13th Age is done I hope to be more in touch with social media and with the playtesters who have sent wonderful adventures, great graphic treatments, fun write-ups, and pictures of toenail painting sessions occurring mid-combat. 

Yours in the whirl, 

Rob Heinsoo

Lead Designer, Fire Opal Media

Richard Garfield on Epic Spell Wars

While revising the cleric for 13th Age on Friday night I got a mightily surprising text message. Richard Garfield texted to say that he had put up a podcast on Epic Spell Wars and that he hoped I liked it. Umm, yes, I do! The link is here.

The podcast is funny and thoughtful. Richard observes that ESWOTBWDAMS is a game where what you see on the cover is exactly what you get from the art, components and gameplay. From a general game design perspective, Richard talks most about the tension between player interaction and intrusive player politicking. I was happy that Richard zeroed in on the way Epic Spell Wars handles politics, a subtle element of the design that doesn't always get noticed.

Richard describes ESW as a party game, which I think is right. I recently asked people preparing press releases for 13th Age to stop referring to the design of Epic Spell Wars as "critically acclaimed." Critically acclaimed felt wrong to me. Acclaimed by people who like to laugh and have fun, that seems accurate. I'm extremely happy that Richard is one of the people in that camp!

Richard's podcast ends with a children's section where he quizzes his son and another kid on their favorite characters and moments in the game. Very sweet. So I thought I'd sign off by sharing this thank you note I got from two kids, Wayan & Nils, who we gifted with a copy of the game early on.

The New Map

I have a new piece of art by Lee Moyer hanging on the wall above my computer monitor to inspire work on 13th Age. It came in especially handy while working through Chapter 8: THE DRAGON EMPIRE with the editor.

The top-right piece in the photo above is the map for 13th Age, captured during a rare moment of sun in Seattle. I'm  overjoyed to have the map above me. Printing the big version was worth it. It won't be in the book at this size but who can say what the future holds?

As to the rest of the art currently on my work-wall, I suspect many of you will recognize one or two of the other pieces but I'm not sure how many people will recognize all four from what's visible.

+4 Amulet of Mighty Fists

Once upon a time in Elysombra, toward the 2/3rds mark of Jonathan Tweet’s epic 3e campaign, I switched from playing Sigurd, the dwarf fighter who’d taken a level of cleric to better understand Primus’ will, to playing a half-dragon gnome psychic warrior named Dzhay who maintained an illusion of looking like a jailbait Pippi Longstockings until she tore someone’s throat out with her camouflaged silver-dragon teeth.

Dzhay plundered the Psionic Handbook and came out loaded for war. For this, and for abandoning Sigurd, and for somehow talking the notoriously stingy DM into gifting me with a full load of good magic items, I achieved campaign infamy.

Which did not lessen the second time our party got gacked trying to destroy a particular naga-infested Temple of Evil.  We’d been hit by overwhelming barrages of empowered fireballs and lightning bolts, some cast by nagas and some cast by our own frickin’wizard, who’d had  the courtesy to ask whether Dzhay could take a hit from a fireball but did not entirely listen to the answer. The answer had been no, not so much, and especially not with a disintegrate spell on the way from the nagas.

So Dzhay was toasted and Jonathan gleefully turned to determining the fate of the magic items she had been carrying. Old school baby! First I rolled saves for the stuff she used, then I turned to rolling for the items that she kept in her backpack. When I mentioned that it looked my +4 amulet of mighty fists had been destroyed, Mark Jessup, playing the party’s abused but beloved monk, Ta-Wei Shek, nearly spit out his teeth. “You have a +4 amulet of mighty fists? And you keep it in your backpack?”

“Yeah, the enchantment I get from [one-or-the-other-of-the-cheezy-and-near-permanent-psychic-warrior-tricks-I-was-using] is better…Uh-oh.”

“Augh! Augh! +4 amulet of mighty fists! Do you know what Ta-Wei is using? A +2. Augh! Augh!”

Guilty. Guilty and oblivious. And in no position to correct the error.

This, and other slights and fiascoes, eventually led Mark to utter the despondent war cry we forever associate with his flamboyant yet strangely ineffective characters: “I’m 76 hit points you don’t have to lose.”

Although to be fair, in the final act of our heroes’ mortal existence, Ta Wei-Shek climbed the head of the world’s greatest red dragon, Vaerm, and punched her in the brain, no +4 amulet required. 

Doom!

When Lee Moyer and Keith Baker started their Kickstarter for the excellent Doom that Came to Atlantic City boardgame, I felt there was something missing. A few things, actually. Despair. Desperation. The mounting pressure of inevitable torment.

But now that the game is meeting and exceeding its stretch goals one-after-another, now the torment arrives. As I seek to work with Lee on the art for 13^th Age, he is called upon again and again to reach deep within his withered septum to scrape another pewter benefit out onto the Kickstarter ladle. Let it be so.

I love this game. In a previous incarnation I no longer clearly recall, I contributed ideas to the game that its creators deemed worthwhile. Don’t let that put you off. It is more fun than capitalism and less destructive to your friendship circles than the OC (Original Cults). Although it appears to be a luck-based move-around-the-board adventure, there’s quite a bit of skill involved in actually winning, as the wins-to-losses ratio of the verdammt Keith Baker has proven in games I have been privileged to lose. 

At the Sign of the Happy Harpy

We had an amazing family vacation for two weeks just as I was turning over the 2^nd playtest draft of 13^th Age. We spent two weeks in Turkey, starting with four days in the carved rock of Cappadocia, where I typed the new echo spell notes for the wizard listening to the night call of the muezzin bouncing off a fortress rock named the Castle of Uchisar. Then we drove south and west along the coast, hiking in ruins and swimming in the Mediterranean before catching aflight to Istanbul for a final four days of museums and bazaars.

In Kalkan, we stayed in a sweet hotel that we thought was named the Harpy Hotel. But half its logos and signs said the Happy Hotel. Which was it? Well it started as the Harpy Hotel. As witnessed by the Harpy Stele at the nearby ruins of Xanthos, the local harpies were conceived as benevolent spirits, winged women who took the souls of dead children to heaven. Huh. Dead children, well, I guess that’s the human condition. Heaven is good, at least.

But every week a hotel guest mentioned that as far as they knew, harpies were monsters. Eventually the hotel acknowledged its PR error. The owner’s name includes a Turkish word for happy, so the new name is a double-entendre that most guests won’t realize.  

As we were checking out I decided to take one last look at email since it seemed likely we wouldn’t have access that night. I had a surprise present, the first 13^th Age monster tile I’d seen from the Diabolist, sent over by Lee Moyer who’d finished the tile from Aaron McConnell’s rough pencils. And yeah, the moment we were checking out from the Happy/Harpy Hotel, Lee sent over the harpy.

I had my laptop in hand as we checked out and showed the art to the concierge, saying “You know all those people who turned the harpy into a monster and made you change the name of your hotel? I make games. I’m part of your problem.”

For those of you reading this entry for information on 13^th Age instead of keeping up with my synchronicity highway vacations, here’s the scoop on our monster tiles. Preparing the art order, I mulled over the fact that our monster selection for the 13^th Age book deliberately sticks close to d20 norms. Therefore most of our monsters have been extremely well-illustrated multiple times. And recently. What were we going to add? Did our audience really need another monster-format illustration of a gnoll? An otyugh, even? There had to be a more interesting approach. So I turned to the strengths of our setting: what if the monsters could be represented by control glyphs created by the Archmage? That way the monster illustrations would be different and say something useful about the world. Maybe I’d put together a card game using the glyphs. Maybe the game would correspond to a game played by wizards. 

I talked the idea over with Lee Moyer. Mr. Value-Added, I call him. Once Lee began experimenting with the glyphs, he suggested that we rank the monsters with icons they might be associated with instead of giving the Archmage all the credit. Of course! Each monster or monster type appears on a form of tile, stone, gem or plaque associated with one of the icons. The Diabolist’s tiles are all shaped like the harpy tile, a shape you'll recognize from the icon's illustration. On the Diabolist’s other tiles, instead of a harpy you’ll get a hezrou or dretch or balor. But the Elf Queen’s tiles look nothing like the Diabolist’s tiles, ditto for the High Druid and each of the other icons associated with a few of the monsters.

Lee nailed this project. We’ll share more monster tiles soon!