Honorable Combat in 13th Age

Here's part of the first draft of a section of the upcoming Icon Followers book that details a rules variant I've been using in my campaigns. It's an important part of a book of NPCs who tend to be associated with the same icons as the PCs. I'm curious to hear from people who try it.

HONORABLE COMBAT

13th Age combat mechanics handle deadly fights against monsters, but we’ve largely ignored a style of combat that could create a variety of interesting stories. What happens when a group of paladins devoted to the Great Gold Wyrm disagree with the player characters about who should take responsibility for a captured evil sorcerer who has information that the PCs need? What happens when a rival adventuring party claims first dibs on a soon-to-surface living dungeon full of phat loot, saying that they’re better prepared to deal with this particular dungeon, and that the PCs should hang around as backups? What happens when a circle of druids insists that the adventurers leave their section of the Blood Wood when it’s not at all in the PCs’ interests but also not a matter of life and death, especially given that the PCs know that these are the druids who will soon be defending the woods against monsters from the Iron Sea?

Instead of fights to the death, all the way down to 0 hit points, I’ve been playing this type of fight between semi-respectful enemies as fights to the fall, down to 33% of each combatant’s normal hit points.

You fall at one-third hp: When both sides have agreed to honorable combat, combatants drop out of the fight at 33% or less of their standard hp. They can heal themselves, and heal fallen allies (or even fallen enemies . . .) but they take no further action in the fight. Play them as crawling or limping to get out of the center of the battle, or lying still and applying pressure to their wounds. Anyone targeting them with further attacks has broken the rules of honorable combat, and forfeits.

Deaths still occur. Mighty blows—especially against determined resistance from rivals who are about to fall but don’t want to give in—can score crits and take out foes. But killing the enemy isn’t the point. You can hammer this home when rivals who have been knocked out of the fight use healing potions or healing magic to help restore fallen PCs.

Combat pacing: Use the escalation die as normal, but remember that fights generally start slightly favoring the PC’s enemies. There’s a risk of an early loss if things go very badly for the PCs, but if any of them can hang on, the escalation die can pip them ahead in the end.

Not good, still honorable: In my campaigns, I’ve used PCs’ icon relationships as a guide to when honorable combat might be possible despite what good-oriented characters might expect of their evil or ambiguous rivals. Negative icon relationships generate fights to the death. But positive and conflicted icon relationships with ambiguous and evil icons ca lead to honorable battles.

For an example from my campaign, a character who had a conflicted relationship with the Three—thanks to a huge favor he had once-upon-a-time done for the Black—accepted a proposal for honorable combat from a flight of black dragons attempting to recover three half-dragon/half-lizardfolk eggs that the PCs had salvaged from a destroyed village. The PCs were attempting to return them to their lizardfolk allies, the dragons thought they took precedence over lizardfolk. Without that icon relationship, and the history it represented, the dragons would surely have attempted an ambush and thievery. As it was, the dragons badly lost the fight to the fall, and afterwards agreed to provide overflight security for the lizardfolk until the younglings hatched and were old enough to decide for themselves if they wanted to come join the Black dragon. It ended up feeling like a fail forward for the NPC iconic followers of the Three, while feeling like a kick-ass win and a good-deal-in-the-circumstances for the PCs.

Here's the aftermath of the honorable battle with the dragons, with lizardfolk rooting for the PCs on the sidelines, skeletons summoned by the necromancer occupying the middle ground, and small upside-down black dragon where the PCs critted it to death despite the 33% guidelines..

13th Age Monster Design Workshop at GenCon Online

 

art by Rich Longmore

It’s that time of year when we get together to design a 13^th Age monster!

Saturday, September 12, at 11 a.m. PT, 2:00 p.m ET, join 13^th Age writers Liz Argall, J-M DeFoggi, Wade Rockett, and me as we juggle your brainstorms to create a memorable 13^th Age monster.

Register now . . .  for How To Design a Monster in 13th Age. 

Previously in Our Workshop

The last time we ran the workshop in person, the crowd whooped through a giddy gauntlet of drinking puns towards the monster we ended up calling a booze ooze! The full write-up is slated to appear in the Dwarf King chapter of the Icon Followers book I’ve been working on. Here’s a piece of the text along with the lower-level version of the booze ooze wrecker. There’s also a spoiler version that's loaded with puns and a couple varieties of mooks.

Origin Stories

Ale flows freely in dwarven taverns, drinking holes, and residential areas!  Most of it flows where it should, down dwarven gullets or weaker non-dwarven throats. But accidents happen. Despite the dwarves’ absurd fondness for ale, a certain portion of the booze gets disposed of, sometimes precipitously. Bad barrels are fine for human drinkers, but dwarves have standards. If there’s something wrong with a cask, it’s going down whatever passes for a sewer.

Sometimes, what’s wrong is a side-effect of magic spells that shouldn’t have been fired off near the brewery. Other times no one knows what went wrong, underworld hazards, so much harder to cope with than the problems faced by the weakling human brewers on the surface.

So hi ho, oh no, to the underworld we go, where bits and batches of ale-that’s-off is disposed of sloppily and with no thought for what it’s been poured upon. Down grates and dwarven pour-holes and into pits where things live and drink. Things like oozes!

Affectionate Booze Ooze

It’s not fighting you. It’s celebrating.

Large 5^th level wrecker [ooze]

Initiative: +7

Double-fisted approval +10 vs. AC (2 attacks)—16 damage

Lurch’n’hug’em +10 vs. PD—40 damage, and target is stuck until the end of its next turn

Special targeting: To use this attack, the booze ooze must be able to move. Pick a random nearby enemy the booze ooze appears able to reach with a move. The booze ooze uses its move action to engage that target, then makes this attack.

Flows where it likes: The ooze is immune to opportunity attacks.

Ooze: The ooze is immune to effects. When an attack or other ability applies a condition to an ooze (dazed, hampered, weakened, ongoing damage, etc.), that condition doesn’t affect it.

Resist acid 16+, resist poison 16+: Acid or poison attacks that roll less than a natural 16 deal half damage to the booze ooze.

Whoozy: A non-ooze that starts its turn engaged with the affectionate booze ooze takes 5 ongoing poison damage.

AC   20

PD    19                 HP 120

MD  14

Spearpoint! A 13th Age mini-arc for deviant dwarves

These are the PCs of the new 13th Age mini-arc we started playing last week. 

While writing Icon Followers, I made up an organization ambiguously devoted to the Dwarf King called Spearpoint. As I wrote about azers, derro, and Gold King mutants who are part of a Suicide-Squad style group of potentially salvageable—and definitely DENIABLE—Dwarf King covert assets, I realized it could make a fun story for a group of player characters, not just NPCs. 

People were expecting me to start running a new game none of us had played before. But I liked it less the more I understood it, so instead I switched tracks and began Spearpoint as a not-forever 13th Age arc, starting at 3rd level. 

 From left to right, the PCs are . . . . 

    . . . Tuli, a lava dwarf chaos mage who is new to the Dwarf Kingdom. 

    . . . Thorinn (jokingly referred to as Thorinn Normalshield), a highly disturbed/disturbing derro madness savant ("I am not an occultist; I am the Madness Savant! The onllllly Madness Savant!") who wears the shield on his back because dwarves are supposed to carry shields, and more convincingly wields a huge axe. 

    . . . the world's only half-dwarf, Jak Manblood, determined to prove he's more dwarf than any of these dwarves that fit properly into their dwarven armor. 

    . . . and a truly disturbing "hopping monk," i.e., an undeadish former (?) follower of the Gold King named something like Djkuud, pronounced to sound something like the French j’accuse. 

The players agreed that they wanted to push the icons to fit this dwarf-centric story, and after some discussion, the Madness Savant, aka Jonathan Tweet, came back with this preliminary assessment of the icons for the campaign. It’s going to be fun, and it’s a great example of tweaking your lens when you want to focus on a very specific type of campaign.

Also, there are fourteen. 

    the King (compares with the Dwarf King): Rules "the Kingdom", a subterranean land vaster than the Dragon Empire; most of it is currently in enemy hands. 

    Lady Scratch (entirely herself): Mysterious enemy of the Kingdom. 

    the Silver Queen (the Elf Queen): Surface dwellers interact with the Silver Queen through the so-called "Elf Queen." 

    Prince of Shadows (same): Archenemy of the Kingdom, an interloper who has stolen the treasures that had been held safe for Ages, a worthy foe. 

    the Green (the Three): Wingless and tortured, the Green worms through the Underworld spreading monsters. 

    Grave Lord (Lich King): Vast underground chambers contain undead waiting for some future uprising. 

    the Sun Emperor (Dragon Emperor): Keeps surface dwellers from bothering the Kingdom 

    the Sun Mage (Archmage): A dwarf who serves the Sun Emperor instead of the King, it's fine. 

    the Imperial Priestess (Priestess): Humans eat this shit up, I'm telling you. 

    Orc Lord (same): He sends troops and monsters through the Kingdom, searching for a route to Axis; everyone figures the Silver Queen is manipulating him into it. 

    Crusader (same): Glad that the Sun Emperor has this guy so the King doesn't have to get in there. 

    Archmaster Slime (High Druid): A drow ally of the High Druid, leader of the "slime mongers" (subterranean-style druids). 

    Diabolist (same): You know, don't spread this around too much, but she has proven to be the sort of archvillain that you can work with. 

    Great Gold Wyrm (same): The Great Gold Wyrm is the most admirable creature ever constructed and brought to life by dwarven artificers.

Half-Right: a new social game

A few weeks ago, in the brave land of maskless tabletop gaming, Fire Opal ran an eight-person playtest of a fun new card game. Everyone playing was meeting between one and six people for the first time, so as we ate pre-game tacos in my game-garage, introductions sparked in various pieces of the table while esoteric conversations built in others. I noticed that one particular conversation wasn't making sense to anyone else. I can't remember whether the participants were surprised that they were being obscure, or not, but I know I suddenly had the idea for a game we could play as we ate. 

Half-Right: Each player tries to come up with a question that they think half the people in the room will know the answer to, while the other half will have no idea or get it wrong. 

Normally you're counting yourself as one of the people who knows the answer, certainly that's how the two successful halvings played out in our game. I suppose that if you were hardcore you might be able to come up with a question that you don't know the answer to but that you suspect that half the room will know! 

Yes, it works better with an even number of players. I guess with an odd number you score a small win if half-rounded-down players know the answer and a big win with half-rounded-up. Better suggestions?

As the number of players grows, I suspect that getting close to half is worth some glory. In some groups, I imagine it's possible that no one will succeed, meaning getting close will be doing well. Obviously the game changes drastically the more people understand each other. It's not simple.

Our first game of Half-Right featured two successful interpretations of the group, a few near-misses, and a couple hilarious whiffs which no one but the questioner knew the answer to.

Follow-up: Now that I've typed it up, I'm aware that others must have invented/played this game before. It feels like something that could have been part of my social inheritance, but wasn't. Let me know if you have played the game before or if you find peoples who did. 

Also let me know which name you prefer, Half-Right or Half of Us. I've gone back and forth. 

Dice Miner: a three-dwarf variant

I’ve been enjoying the new Dice Miner game from Atlas, designed by Joshua DeBonis and Nikola Risteki.

 

We’ve mostly played great three and four-player games. Our two-player games have also been good, but we haven’t played entirely by the rules. For two-player games, I’ve got a variant.

In two-player games, don’t play with the same dwarf the entire game. Instead, each player draws three random dwarf tiles at the start of the game and shows them to their opponent. Each player secretly chooses which dwarf they’ll play in the first, second, and third rounds, stacking their tiles in order. At the start of each round, before pouring out the mountain dice, players reveal which dwarf they’re playing that round.

You end up playing dwarves that don’t get chosen as often when players can choose from the entire pool. You also get to figure out new strategies, because the order of your characters can influence the dice you want to acquire.

The same rules should work for three and four-player games, though we haven’t tried that yet.

With three or four-players, you could also treat the three tiles you’ve drawn as part of a draft. Everyone chooses a dwarf and passes the remaining tiles to the left. In a three-player game, people could start with 4 tiles, so they’re still making a choice for their third tile.

Our godson's Scout, Treasurer, and Brewer
somehow finessed my Warlock, Alchemist, and Elder Dragon

2nd Book First: The Two Towers

the original tome, battered but intact

As a kid, I read what I could find. Thanks to the vagaries of bookstores and the limitations of libraries, there were at least four great fantasy series that I entered via the second floor, book number two, sometimes without even knowing I'd missed the actual entrance.

Yes, this is a story about olden days. 

The Lord of the Rings was my first missed doorway. My mother had the full unlicensed Ace trilogy. She wouldn't let me read it when I was in second grade, living in Heidelberg Germany, but that probably wouldn't have stopped me for long, except that our teen babysitter smoked cigarettes in our apartment and borrowed The Fellowship of the Ring. Cigarettes? Forgiven.  The Fellowship? Gone with a moving van when the girl's family got shipped off-base a couple months later.

Mom refused to buy a new copy of the book. I suspect that her arguments--the former babysitter's ongoing obligation to return the copy, and money--were screens for the fact that she just didn't want me reading Tolkien as a second or third grader. But it's also possible that we couldn't find a copy. We were in Germany, the Ace books were being outed as unapproved, and we certainly never shopped anywhere that had them for sale. About a year later Mom tried to get me to read The Hobbit, but that wasn't gonna happen, that book was for kids. Said me. 

So in fourth grade, still in Germany, I read The Two Towers. For me, the Lord of the Rings didn't start with Bilbo's 100th birthday party, hooded riders in the Shire, and hapless hobbits having to be rescued from trees and barrow wights. It started with three kickass warriors--an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger--chasing orcs across an endless plain. The orcs' hobbit victims felt less hapless, given that they (spoiler alert) eventually figured out how to cut themselves loose and run away. Riders of Rohan? Keeping score at Helm's Deep! Onward! There are people who dislike The Two Towers because it's a sequence of military encounters and landscapes, punctuated by ents. For me, growing up on Army bases, trying to figure out ways to play with my Airfix Roman and barbarian armies, a book of fantasy military encounters was exactly what I was looking for. I reread The Two Towers as soon as I finished the first pass, since the Frodo stuff at the start of Return of the King made me aware I didn't actually understand what was going on. 

We returned to the USA before I entered fifth grade. Our first week back, Mom went shopping at a big American bookstore and returned with a present: Ballantine's The Fellowship of the Ring. She cared that it was an authorized edition. The picture of the author on the back revealed that Tolkien smoked a pipe like my dad. We were home.

Wrestlenomicon: Cultist Rules

 

(all art from the wild pen of Kurt Komoda)

I’d always hoped to add servitors of the elder gods to the game, cards that would have the same card backs as Cultists. When we started the Kickstarter, I presumed that new Cultists would be a project for the future. But the future arrived during the KS. Shane and Dennis found a way to add The Dead to Hastur’s Cultists and recruited the Deep Ones for Cthulhu. Kurt handled the art, I did some mechanics, and ta-dah, mission accomplished. But maybe I missed a step: I didn’t adjust the Cultists paragraphs on page 13 of the rulebook to account for these KS-exclusive cards. Some people have asked about it.

So here’s a rewording of the rules to account for the new Cultists. I’m going to phrase these rules to reflect the way I use the Cult tile, which is different than how the rulebook recommends using it. I’m also not going to use the terse style that saves space in a rulebook. This will be wordier.

Cultists

Cultist cards are in a separate category from the other cards in the game, distinguished by their own card back to prevent them being mistaken for cards that are part of your normal deck and your normal hand.

Before the game, shuffle your Cultist cards and place them face-down as a separate Cultist deck on your Cult tile. Use as many Cultist cards as you have available for your god. (For Kickstarter backers who bought everything, Cthulhu will have 8 standard Cultists, 5 Willing Sacrifices, and 5 Deep Ones. Hastur will have 8 standard Cultists, 5 Willing Sacrifices, and 5 The Dead. If you’ve ended up with fewer Cultists than that, don’t worry, just use what you’ve got.)

Neither player starts with any Cultists, but some cards can grant them to you. When you gain a Cultist, draw the top card from your Cultist deck and keep it on the edge of your hand of cards so that it doesn’t get mixed up with the rest of your normal hand of cards. Given that there’s not a lot of text on the Cultist cards you’ll need to refer to often, my method is to turn them upside down so I don’t confuse them with the cards that are officially in my hand. You could even just turn them backside up so that all you can see is the Cultist card back. Because a Cultist card doesn’t count as a card in your hand, you’re just holding it with the rest of your cards to keep track of it as an available resource. If you feel like setting it somewhere else, go ahead! There’s no limit to the number of Cultists you can accumulate.

 

(upside-down Cultists on the left of a three-card Cthulhu hand)

When you sacrifice a Cultist, place it face-up into a separate Cultist discard pile. You should have room on your Cult tile for both the Cultist deck and the Cultist discards. If you ever need to gain a Cultist and don’t have any left in your deck, reshuffle your Cultist discard pile.

 

(using the Cult tile as the spot for a Cultists deck and discard)

The full rules for each type of Cultist are printed on that card. In other words, if the Cultist in your hand is one of The Dead or Deep Ones, you won’t be able to use it for the standard Cultist sacrifice.

When you use a standard Cultist or one of The Willing Sacrifice bonus art Cultists, Cultist sacrifice works like this: When you advance an attack on your track (using Momentum), you can sacrifice one or more Cultists you’ve gained earlier to move that card an extra space for each Cultist sacrificed. (If you move multiple cards due to exclamation point momentum, each Cultist sacrificed moves a single card.)

At the moment the Willing Sacrifice cards don’t accomplish any more than the normal Cultists . . . aside from the possibility of making a mid-game sacrifice of a loved one (or the first friend I played D&D with) who strongly supported our Kickstarter! But when the game has expansions down the road, we’ll find a way to add some zing to the Willing Sacrifices.