The Final Mantis

This is the first completed piece of Monster Art +13 from the 13 True Ways book. As you can see, Aaron McConnell had a lot more in mind than the striking parallel lines of the original Mantis vs. Mantis sketch. Aaron expanded the piece and did the initial colors and true to our team-up plans, Lee finished the composition.

Our backer, the Dormouse, is thrilled, and she's buying a second copy of the print to have for herself since the first will be a gift. If you'd like to buy a copy of the print yourself, email Aaron at aranmcconnell@gmail.com, he will eventually have a store operating but for now it's on a talk-to-him basis. You could also talk with him at Emerald City ComicCon this weekend, he'll be one of the Fire Opal people at the show. Me? Not as much. I'm spending the weekend helping with the final steps of the core book layout and working on monk forms that include the Deadly Mantis Fist.

Feathered Crown!

There are three Alchemist-tier 13 True Ways Kickstarter backers who gave us magic items to illustrate.

The first item is the Feathered Crown from Jered Heeschen. Look at the art from Aaron McConnell (with a touch of radiant feathering from Lee Moyer)!

Jered very much wanted the item's quirk to play as follows: Quirk: Not only do you compulsively eavesdrop, you also tend to misinterpret insults as compliments and bad news as good news. 

I decided that it sounded like just the thing for a dragon-rider to wear. "Ah, they're saying wonderful things about me. They do know what's good for them."

I like the item and the art so much that it has changed our plan about how we are going to stat up these specially illustrated treasures: we're going to provide several different versions of the mechanics to fit into the panoply of different characters and campaigns!

And speaking of changing plans about treasure, we've changed one small fact about magic shields during layout. Neither Jonathan nor I were happy with the fact that we had given shields no default magical bonus. That seemed bogus. So I rummaged through our options and changed things around. Magical shields in 13th Age now provide the default hit point boost that magical belts used to. Belts ended up with a default bonus to a character's number of recoveries, which also doesn't suck. A happy last minute correction for a muffed punt.

Our thanks to Jered,
Rob Heinsoo

Mantis vs. Mantis

The art above is the first thumbnail by Aaron McConnell from one of the winners of the Monster Art +13 mini-essay contest we ran for backers of the 13 True Ways Kickstarter. A backer I know only as The Dormouse wrote the following....

My friend has a tendency to capture praying mantids and keep them in small aquariums, hand feeding them crickets with loving care until they reach the end of their insectoid life.  Whenever a cricket is delivered, or the creature otherwise deigns to notice her, the standard reaction is a display of threat and dominance, a graceful pantomime of those scythe-like forearms which conveys:

Hello, human.  If our positions were reversed, I would not keep you in a cage and feed you tasty things.  I would eat you.

You have to admit, this sort of directness is worthy of respect.  What better way to immortalize it than to illustrate it with a praying mantis who is, in fact, large enough to reverse those positions?

Given that 13 True Ways features the true initiation of the monk, I couldn't resist asking Aaron for Mantis vs. Mantis action. And even though this is just the thumbnail, he has delivered. 

We'll be announcing all the winners via a Kickstarter update later today or tomorrow. I'm just sorting out a couple entries that are probably-winners-but-may-have-issues. 

Stay poised. 

new this week

This week the 13th Age campaign I'm running that's testing aspects of Shards of the Broken Sky hit its stride by starting to tell its own unique story. The icons are not all who they seem and the PCs are descended from a former icon whose history and existence has been suppressed for centuries. Pitting the group firmly against an icon they had ambiguous relations with at the start of the campaign has kicked our group into gear. That and getting all the players back, some of us had been too busy to play much, but the picture below is the whole group (minus Jonathan), miming extreme excitement about a single d20 roll. Followed by a more accurate candid shot of the moments following when we all went back to teasing Mike over the result of that d20 roll. (And yes, I'm avoiding naming icons because I'd rather not spoil one angle on Shards of the Broken Sky too much...)

This was also the week when two members of the group reported their first experiments with teaching D&D to the next generation.  Paul's son Silas, 5.5 years, created a wizard. When Paul told him that most D&D characters were part of a group of allies, Silas overcame his disappointment by saying that his friends were ten rangers. Who ride on the backs of ten werewolves. "That makes twenty," says Silas, well on the way to expressing his father's blend of minimaxed storytelling.

Meanwhile Rob D began to pass on the legacy to his boys. In his words,
this past weekend i reffed a marathon d&d meets gamma world session with my boys. aidan beheaded a rampaging ice golem, but the head could not be destroyed — just smashed into smaller and smaller pieces that kept coming. (gave roan a nightmare that night… bad DM/father).

I think it's more like....

GOOD DM.
Bad father.

"T-shirt!" says Paul.

Playtest Impact Registers in the End

I had a fun day digging through the 13th Age playtester reports this week. For a change I wasn't looking for comments or problems, this time I was hunting for playtester names, working to complete the credits.

But along the way I decided to make a last-moment change to the character creation rules in chapter 2.

So many people asked us to give all character classes 8 points of backgrounds instead of our pseudo-traditionalist route of giving the rogue and ranger more backgrounds and the fighter and barbarian less. Reading the playtest feedback again I had to recognize that Jonathan and I were mistaken about our earlier rule. We were wrong telling some classes they weren't as worthy of having rich backgrounds. I talked with Jonathan. He agreed.

The rule is now that every character gets 8 points of backgrounds. The sidebar which formerly explained our separate-and-unequal decision now explains the move to equality while providing the old system as an optional rule for GMs who want to play with varied points.

Chris is at-this-moment finishing the second draft of the layout of Chapter 2: Character Rules, so the change came just in time.

 I have to say "Thank you" to the playtesters who repeated their assessment of the earlier rules and "I'm sorry" since it took us so long to respond.

Oh. I guess I also have to say "I'm sorry" to bards and rogues and rangers in existing campaigns whose GMs might now screw them out of two background points. The bard in our game ditched his two points of "Former target of bullying," but not everyone will have such an easily-erased background. I'd say that characters who have been with us through the playtest process deserve an extra benefit and should have the two extra background points grandmothered in.

And fighters, barbarians, paladins, sorcerers? Happy Two Background Point Awards Day!

Finding Trust: a photography book

Eeya #1

My friend Annie Marie Musselman has a beautiful book of animal rescue photos that will be published by Kehrer Verlag later this year.  She is running a Kickstarter that ends early next week to help get the book published in style. Annie Marie’s work has previously appeared in National Geographic Magazine, Outside, and a host of photography magazines and exhibits you can sift through in her bio. If you're interested in  nature photography, follow the link on the Kickstarter to Annie Marie's web page or go here: http://www.anniemusselman.com/. 

In the old days when your friends and soccer teammates did something fantastic you could eventually show up at the album release concert or the exhibit opening or buy the game. Now we can help a little earlier by funding and mentioning their Kickstarters. A great change.

Annie Marie is skilled, compassionate and quirky. She deserves far better than me writing a closing line about her project having wings or giving the book a hand, but there's an owl with a leather glove up on top of this blog and  I just can't help myself. 

Guide to Glorantha & a signature stone

When Jonathan and I directly address the reader in 13th Age, we mark our comments with signature tiles. Jonathan's tile is in the style of the Archmage. My tile, created by Lee Moyer, is a black stone, the style used by the High Druid. If you are not familiar with the world of Glorantha created by Greg Stafford, you'll miss the fact that this signature stone uses four Gloranthan runes. Here's the stone where it first appears, on our signature page at the start of 13th Age.*

Reading left to right, that's Magic, Moon, and Fertility above Communication. And the god I'm thanking along with Greg Stafford is Orlanth, Glorantha's god of the rushing air.

Glorantha has been one of the constants in my gaming and intellectual world since the day I read about the White Bear & Red Moon boardgame in the pages of the Space Gamer. Reading Greg's bibliography in the original RuneQuest introduced me to anthropology, comparative religion, and the study of mythology. Later I got to work with Greg at Chaosium and on the King of Dragon Pass game.

You can see me talk about Glorantha in a three minute video* towards the bottom of the Kickstarter page for the magnificent Guide to Glorantha book that is running for another ten days. It's going to be a gloriously illustrated system-neutral introduction to the world that hasn't been surpassed as a feat of ongoing mythological creation. A later piece of the video should be about why gamers and fantasy lovers who have never been involved with Glorantha should be interested in this Kickstarter.

Promise yourself this: even if you don't have it in you to help fund the current Guide to Glorantha,, keep it somewhere in the back of your mind. Watch Greg's video on the Kickstarter page when you have the time. Track down a copy of the Guide later on, enter its pages, and keep track of many Gloranthan experiments and creations I expect the Guide to inspire.

*The website referenced in the signature page? Under construction. It will be up by the time 13th Age releases. 

*So, about the music that accompanies my interview's opening and ending titles... Jeff Richard started the filming afternoon by giving me stick about the Christmas sweater I was wearing. Then I gave him crap about the Wagner music he'd used to frame Greg's video. I managed to get the Christmas wreath that half-haloed me on the wall behind my head taken down before we filmed, but singing may have been involved. The moral: don't screw with people who are about to add musical accompaniment to your video.