The final fall was bad. There were a couple beautiful moments after the fall.
Family, friends, and hospice came together to help him die at home, in the same room where he cared for his wife, my mom, when she died fourteen years ago.
I'm going to miss GenCon. I'll be in touch with the 13th Age 2E playtest folks and my other projects some time in August, I expect.
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.
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!
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.
13th Age 2E was voted as one of the most anticipated RPGs of 2023!
So Jessica Hancock of EN World and I will be spending part of our May Day doing a streaming interview about 2E on the Not DnD livestream, one of the podcasts based at enliverpg.com.
That's Monday, May 1st. We'll be on for an hour starting at 10 p.m. BST, which is 5 p.m. EST in the USA, and 2:00 in the PST afternoon here on my West Coast.
The show will be streamed live in the following four places...
Twitch - @enpublishing
Facebook - @enpublishingrpg
Twitter - @enpublishingrpg
Youtube - Link here
If you can't catch it live, you'll also find it available along with 47 earlier Not DnD episodes as a podcast.
The show usually opens with Jessica asking how the interviewee got into gaming. Since I put my first dungeon on graph paper in 1974, we'll find out many stories Jessica wants drawn from that well!
When we get into 2E I'll aim to stay in tune with viewers who are new to 13th Age while providing some news for Alpha draft playtesters who gave us excellent feedback and are now waiting for the Bravo draft!
On Wednesday nights, we’re midway through our own champion-tier playtest campaign, moving up a level after every 3 battles. Actually, after just two battles at 4th level, where Jonathan pulled out dragons and double-strength fights and gave my troll (think: dwarven half-orc) fighter the unusual experience of spending many recoveries they did not actually possess.
Jonathan has set this campaign in the wilds of the Dragon Wood, a High Druid centered area that's not really part of the Empire, where humans are known as Huggers (as in tree-huggers), the elves are 'witches' and definitely not to be trusted, and sky-dwarves (dwarves crazy enough to like it on the surface) seem a lot more reasonable than the dwarves who live underground. We're troubleshooters sent by allied icons, the Dwarf King and Great Gold Wyrm. We've got two different versions of the fighter, a puissant cleric, and a sentient magic staff who functions as our wizard. Sessions are alternating between desperate combat and cross-culture diplomacy.
Speaking of timing, it's clear I’m not getting the second playtest packet out before the end of this month. So I’m now aiming at early February. I’m also taking a glance at some of the feedback, partly to see whether I want to account for obvious changes in the next packet, along with the bard/rogue/sorcerer, or whether we’ll save all feedback revisions for the third packet.
I'm counting up the alphabet a few song titles at a time, adding occasional notes relevant to gaming and travel and stories where they exist. The alphabet prime label at the right will take you to other pieces of the count-up.
The three songs in this installment have two things in common: a) dudes singing; b) many other great songs surrounding them on their albums.
I love this album. I'm not sure whether I like it better than their other albums because it was the first album I heard from them, or because it's the best.
Music, lyrics, a deadpan transition from the humdrum to lethal violence to the final days. The entire We Shall All Be Healed album feels like some sort of Unknown Armies or Over the Edge campaign, which, given subsequent roleplaying developments from the Mountain Goats, wouldn't be out of character.
The friend who I was certain introduced me to Rachid Taha doesn't much like him and says she has never had a mixtape CD that included his songs. So my origin story of how I thought I first heard Rachid Taha while traveling with her in Hawaii is probably mistaken. Apparently many theater-goers first heard Taha on the soundtrack for Blackhawk Down, but in line with my ongoing cinematic illiteracy, I read the book and didn't see the movie. Made in Medina is a great album. I'm not sure it turns up later in the alphabet but I know Taha will.
You need the original 3DA set to play using Giant Wars, because every gambit awards one stake to the strongest dragon cards and the other stake to the strongest giant cards.
Three-Dragon Ante has always played differently with different numbers of players. With two stakes that can be won each gambit, instead of one, Giants War increases the distinctions between three-player, four-player, and larger games.
So far, in my experience, three-player games are the most likely to invoke the variant end game. If no one has won after you’ve run out of cards in the main deck and shuffled in the middle game, score three more gambits and end the game after the third gambit’s toast. To win a three-player game before the toasts, you sometimes need to push the ante heavily instead of giving opponents time to recover. That’s true in all forms of 3DA, and more true when there are three players and two stakes per gambit.
Even if you’re not playing 3DA as a drinking game, I recommend raising beverages as you toast these final three hands. And if you’re making the toasts aloud, the final toast echoes better as “To fools like us!”
If you want to play a straight 3DA game with just one stake, all three of the new dragon suits will work so long as you shuffle the Mortals and Legendary Dragons (including the new Io and Shadow Invader) into a separate Legendary deck at the start of the game. You’ll need to play with either or both of the new Copper Dragon and Gold Dragon or the Legendary deck will be untapped. The new Gold Dragon from Giants War will always get to draw a Legendary card as long as someone else has played a card in the gambit, but if you lead with the Gold Dragon, you’ll only get a regular card.
I haven’t tried this variant. It seems like the Legendary deck will be kind of slim without all the Legendary giants, so I believe you should skip shuffling cards from the Legendary deck into the main deck at the start of the game.
If you’d rather play strictly with dragons and the original 3DA rules, skipping the Legendary deck, the new cards to add to the game are Io, the Shadow Dragon suit, and the Shadow Invader.
Both the new mortals—the Emperor and Ranger—will work in either variant. In fact, they’ll be more powerful than they are in Giants War games.
And speaking of the Emperor, yes, this is a very different version of a card that was at the core of the Emperor’s Gambit expansion for the original version of 3DA.
People often ask if the Emperor’s Gambit set that WotC published in 2010 going to be reprinted or revised. I’m pretty sure the answer is no, because hardly any of the dragons that were the core of Emperor’s Gambit have been brought from 4e forward to D&D 5e. 3DA licenses D&D’s dragons. Even if one or two of the iron, adamantine, mercury, earthquake, etc. dragons that populated 4e show up in 5e, I doubt the rest will appear.
So while we wait for dragons that probably aren’t going to show up, I’ve recruited some of the characters and mechanics from Emperor’s Gambit, including putting the Earthquake Dragon’s heavy-roller power on the new Fire Giant.
The Start-Small Variant
One more variant before I go, which started as an accident when I forgot to shuffle cards from the Legendary deck into the main deck at the start of the game!
Instead of correcting the mistake and re-dealing, I thought about it a second and decided it wasn’t bad to start everyone out with normal cards as their first hand. It feels a little bit like the “no dirt on the first trick” rules that some people use in Hearts. So, the Start-Small variant rules that you shuffle the 6 Legendary cards into the main deck after each player has been dealt their starting 7-card hand. Yes, ‘dirt’ in the form of a Legendary card might show up as you draw cards during the first gambit, so that’s a tiny bonus for people playing to draw.
