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13th Age Bestiary Sighting: Couatl

October 23, 2013, 12:08 pm
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When the 13th Age Bestiary updated *today* for people who purchase the Hatchling Edition pre-order, there was a special treat. Yes, this time the 220+ pages of the Bestiary includes all 52 of the intended entries instead of accidentally leaving out the couatl. Special!

The couatl dodged the first Hatchling Edition because I'd created the monster outside the book's standard process. I wrote the couatl in the middle of the project when we needed a replacement creature. I sent it along to the editor instead of sticking it in the pool with the other submissions and only noticed after our Hatchling broke out that we were one couatl shy of a full nest.

It wasn't that long ago that I asked Robin Laws for a new story for D&D's couatl when I was leading the design of the 4e book WotC called The Plane Above: Secrets of the Astral Sea. Robin's couatl were all about status competition and serving as patrons for adventurers and would-be-heroes who they pushed on to greater heights or deeper dangers. And also: brilliant cloud-palace ziggurats.

My new take on the rainbow flying snake could incorporate Robin's couatl story if you choose that route for your campaign. But most of what I've written hinges on elements unique to 13th Age, such as the icons. There are probably also traces inspired by my recent re-exposure to the mysteries of Shadowrun's dragons. In the words of the opening flavor text: Some monsters exist to fight, to feed, to dominate, or to destroy. Couatls exist to remind the icons that reality may be more complex than what they’ve made of it. If your 13th Age campaign is getting anywhere near epic tier, or if you enjoy monsters that shake up what everyone else considers reality, you're going to want to check out this couatl.

 Below, Rich Longmore's take on what a couatl looks like on first glimpse, when it's flying traditional rainbows instead of iconic colors.


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Many Trumpets: this week in 13th Age

October 25, 2013, 4:45 pm
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A wonderfully eventful week that opens several doors.

Early in the week, Pelgrane sent out an update of the 13th Age Bestiary's Hatchling Edition to those of you who have pre-ordered it. If you haven't pre-ordered it, now may be a good time, because Simon's note about possibly increasing the price later isn't getting any less likely with me dropping the couatl into the book and adding at least three new monsters (one fungaloid, two jorogumo). 

A day or so later, ASH LAW sent a short seasonal adventure out to the 600+ groups participating in 13th Age Organized Play.  600 groups!  ASH did some cunning work here that I'm planning to adapt into an-entirely-different campaign. 



Yesterday the new Page XX from Pelgrane announced the release of our Archmage Engine SRD. Thanks to Chad Long and Cal Moore, it turned out very well. Apparently some people worried that it would be a fakey-SRD, but the point of doing 13th Age as an OGL game was to get people playing it and using the system. Yes, it's a real SRD, and it should prove useful to people looking to overlap with our game engine. 

On 13 True Ways, Jonathan and I are running our Daily Workplace Simulator experiment at my place. Playtesting of the commander went well and I'm processing feedback for the commander and the monk to get new versions of these two classes ready for external testing. Discussion of all the other new character classes has led Jonathan to dig into work on the occultist. He has surprised me with an entirely new type of spellcaster. I'm not using the words 'new type ' lightly, I don't think these mechanics have been tried before. I'm simultaneously excited to have Jonathan working directly on character class design and scared because I'm the GM in the group these days and this occultist is going to spring occasional reality-wrenching ambushes on whoever wears the GM-cap. 

We'll update again on 13 True Ways next week.
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One sorcerer blog, two voices

October 29, 2013, 3:29 pm
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After a couple months away, Jonathan recently returned to our 13th Age table playing a halfling sorcerer named Samlael. Well, the halfling is sort of half of the character. Samlael's One Unique Thing is that he learned sorcery from his familiar, a small green snake named Winder. Winder does all the talking for Samlael, who only speaks in his normal halfling voice when he is casting spells. In other words, Jonathan has stepped out from his usual pattern of playing small spellcasters with funny voices. This time he's got a small spellcaster whose familiar has a funny voice. You play what you love.

All the other PCs knew Samlael back when he was a skilled courier in the Elf Queen's service, back before he met Winder and learned magic. Samlael's reintroduction to the PCs was one, no, two of the freakier roleplaying sessions I've GMed. Not because of anything I set up. Just because of Jonathan's absolutely faithful maintenance of Winder's creepy snake voice, speaking of Samlael in the third person: "He's really happy to see you guys too," Jonathan hissed while Samlael bounced up and down gleefully and gave his old wood elf comrades big knee-hugs. The combination of apparently normal halfling personality and creepy snake intonation was a freaky gift that kept on freaking.

So much so that before the next session, Jonathan took the time to clarify that although he was weirding the table out with his roleplay, the key to the story was that Samlael and Winder are not scaring everyone in the world. They have so much charisma and magical mojo that people just go along with the arrangement, it seems unique-interesting instead of unique-freaky. We've gotten better at playing it this way, so much so that while the wood elf PCs are busy putting their kingdom together, Samlael has wound up presenting himself as an Agent of Distinction (Jonathan's wonderful choice of official title) and the main spokesperson for the ever-so-busy elves.

So that's the story side. On the mechanical side, Jonathan has written this this guest blog on sorcerer mechanics as they relate to the history of DnD spellcasting.

Jonathan says: 
My 13th Age sorcerer casts empowered spells, which are a new way to embody the original approach to spellcasting. In D&D in 1974, a magic-user’s spells were special. They were more powerful than a fighting-man’s attacks, but the magic-user cast fewer spells than the fighter made sword attacks. This original formulation—spellcasters with one-use spells and fighters with infinite-use attacks—survived all the way through 3rd Edition and on into Pathfinder. The problem is that high-level spellcasters not only get more spells but the average power level of their spells also goes up, creating a multiplier effect. High-level spellcasters deal more damage than the fighter, round after round after round. Fourth Edition solved this problem by normalizing all the classes, so that they all have comparable access to limited-use, high-power attacks. For the first time ever, D&D classes were really balanced, but they were also too similar to each other. The dichotomy from 1974 was gone. Fighters had limited-use, high-power attacks just like the wizards did. Magic wasn’t special any more. Rob and I brought this dichotomy back in 13th Age, where spellcasters have more limited-use, high-power attacks than fighters do. If we did our work right, the classes are still balanced even though their power profiles are different. The sorcerer in particular embodies this dichotomy with its “Gather Power” class feature. A sorcerer can spend one turn “powering up,” and then cast a double-strength spell next turn. It means that my sorcerer casts two or three bigs spells per battle, while the ranger makes five to ten attacks in the same number of rounds. The classes are balanced, but magic is still special. 
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Scatterlings of Fire Opal

November 1, 2013, 5:21 pm
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In a start-up, everyone has other projects going.

Here are three of the projects people in Fire Opal have created in recent months. Two are published. One is pushing towards the printer on Indiegogo. 

Wade's Ravens
Wade Rockett handles community relations for Fire Opal, notably on 13th Age. How pleasant that is to say. Working with Wade has been wonderful. Now he has published a Pathfinder booklet for Open Design called Advanced Races 5: Ravenfolk, a supplement for the new world of Midgard that's being put out by Wolf Baur and Companions. Ravenfolk started as Wotan's spies among the mortal races. They have a reputation as thieves but what they're really about is stealing secrets. Yeah, that's a race with Prince of Shadows stamped all over it. So Wade took a first swing at the 13th Age-compatible conversion notes and we'll probably nudge those notes a bit in the future. 


Lee's Pin-Ups
I've loved Lee Moyer's literary and science fiction calendars the past couple years. This year's calendar is a benefit for the Clarion Foundation, the people who put on the extraordinary science fiction and fantasy writing workshops. It's a great cause, Lee's art is a delight as always, and you can obtain the calendar by contributing to the Indiegogo campaign that's running another three weeks. The video has a couple cute moments, I'd say. With the calendar done, we're going to get Lee back for a few more pieces for 13 True Ways, and the better the Indiegogo goes the better mood he'll be in. 

Brandon's Quingo
Brandon Bozzi produced our 13 True Ways Kickstarter video and will surely work on other Fire Opal projects in the future. His current project is a socially responsible gaming company called Game It Forward. Their first game is Quingo, available for free on iPhone and iPad. It's a savvy quiz game with well-implemented time pressure mechanics, pop-culture awareness and wonderful side-jokes. And that's just the fun side. The serious side is that you earn cash rewards for a charity of your choice as you play. My wife Lisa loves it and lucky for us it works extremely well as a two-player team-up on iPad, two people stabbing or nudging the screen depending on their spheres of knowledge. We do OK with Revolutionary war battles and animals that are invertebrates, but the 80's pop songs are killing us. 
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For inspiration: Archaeology magazine

November 5, 2013, 12:12 pm
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The most recent issue of Archaeology magazine, November/December 2013, has four pieces I found inspirational.

An Imperial Underworld details the network of roads that cavers have been uncovering underneath Hadrian's Villa, 15 miles east of Rome. There was an upstairs/downstairs dynamic in play here, where upstairs was a world of palaces, libraries, baths, and gardens, while downstairs was a network of tunnels that kept things running smoothly and silently. The cavers recently found underground roads 19 feet wide, wide enough for ox-carts traveling both ways. I'm planning to use these ideas in Axis somewhere and I loved the hint of interplay between the enthusiastic cavers and the stuffier people running the site.

Later there's an examination of how at least one ancient Roman glass workshop mastered a type of nanoartistry, suspending gold particles in glass so that an apparently opaque cup changes color based on what light or liquid is in or behind it. Then there's a Bronze Age Mystery in which perfectly useful boats (and a couple old ones) are sunk in boggy East England rivers. Along with a few other excellent articles there's a look at ten ancient tattooing traditions. And finally, on the last page, a wonderful look at what appears to be a ceremonial shield from the Moche culture of Peru, constructed like warriors' shields but made of reeds and yellow feathers!

Definitely an issue worth looking at . . . . unless you lack the willpower to resist the magazine's bizarre medley of golden oldie and odd collectible advertisements, highlighted this month by "The only Cuckoo Clock inspired by the Wonders of Ancient Egypt."
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13th Age update: Commander, Monk, Playtest Files, Dragon Kings

November 8, 2013, 6:04 pm
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This week's playtest of the new commander and the half-revised monk went well.

Commander
In the commander's case I didn't make any changes after the playtest. Partly that's because the design is in OK shape for now. Partly it's because Thorinn, the 5th level dwarf commander who used to be a bard, was hapless. He had no hap. When you're rolling d20s, playtesting every so often devolves into "Wow, so this is what the character class looks like when you suck." The dybbuks who had possessed the party's erstwhile paladin friend turned out to have Mental Defenses that deviated from the monstrous norm and even the commander's last-ditch outmaneuver attempt came to naught. The class design mission is to somehow make even these sucky moments potentially worthwhile.

The potential doesn't always get realized. Thorinn has had a slightly rocky road since he transitioned out of being a bard. Weird things happen when your story-oriented 13th Age campaign is also the campaign that's being used to test all the new classes. Thorinn who was once a bard became a bardmander and is now a full-on commander who is likely to shift even more when we adjust for results of public playtesting.

Monk
There will be a new playtest document some time next week. The talent half of the monk is revised, the forms half is still underway. Some of the early monk talents worked so well that the rest of the talents were somewhat irrelevant. The monk could vary from hugely powerful to utterly feeble because the talents and forms were so uneven. That's not entirely surprising, given that the class hasn't had an official development pass, but I'm trying to avoid it on this pass. The next version of the monk design aims to make all the talents worthwhile, eliminates one of the pieces of the class that wasn't working (daily options for finishing attacks), makes ki powers a more integral part of the class (instead of only appearing as feats), and opens up some of the unnecessary restrictions on icon relationships and weapon choice and flavor that were getting in the way of character design. Those of you who sent playtest comments? Your comments helped a lot.

Playtest Distribution Plan
As before, we'll be sharing the monk & commander playtest files with people who bought the 13th Age Escalation Edition and people who supported 13 True Ways. We're also planning to go one step further. The publication of 13th Age has brought in many new players and GMs. People are writing us every week asking to help playtest, particularly people who seem to be converting over from other systems and want to know how we're handling classes that aren't in the core book. We've settled on a cunning plan that seems fair. People who pre-order the 13th Age Bestiary by ordering the Hatchling Edition will also get the 13 True Ways playtest files. If you've supported us by buying the Bestiary in advance, you'll see the playtest versions of the new classes and whatever else we decide to send out for wide playtesting on 13 True Ways.

A Different Kickstarter
There's another Kickstarter with 13th Age connections surging towards the finish line this week. Timothy Brown's Dragon Kings project is a campaign world and rock and roll project in the spirit of Dark Sun. The project is funded and is presently a few thousand dollars away from a stretch goal that would create a 13th Age-compatible rules PDF as part of the package. Darren Pearce is the designer slated to tackle the 13th Age aspect of the project and I'd love to see what he comes up with. Give the project a push if you can.

And elsewhere in video
Mike Shea interviewed me about 13th Age for Critical Hits earlier this week. The first half hour or forty minutes is a discussion of icon relationship rolls, including verbal notes on advice Jonathan and I will be formalizing in the GM chapter of 13 True Ways. The video amounts to working notes on the topic. Other topics include the formats of upcoming adventures and Heisenberg's Monster, Mike's wonderful term for the sense in which 13th Age frees GMs up by allowing them to be surprised by what comes out of the box.
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Kicking the Strange

November 19, 2013, 3:44 pm
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Roger Zelazny's Amber series and side-doors in Moorcock's Elric books started my love of reality-shifting adventures. John Ostrander's Grimjack comic book series made good on the genre's promise. Years later I started serious work in the roleplaying game industry as a writer and editor on Nexus: the Infinite City, the genre-scrambling predecessor of Feng Shui. 

So I'm tickled that my friends Bruce Cordell and Monte Cook are teaming up on The Strange, a multiversal project that cleverly promises to portray the characters' world-hopping through character sheet power-set transformations  based on my favorite part of the Numenera system, the character statements. But never mind tickling my personal fancy, Monte's Kickstarter projects define how successful Kickstarters should be run . . . and at how extremely successful Kickstarters end up offering almost-but-not-quite-too-much value to backers. 

The Strange is in its last three days on Kickstarter. The pile of alternate-world loot that's headed to backers is growing hour by hour. Today's updates include The Paradox Room, a nifty introductory short story that I've been looking forward to seeing in final form since Bruce brought it to our writing circle. 

Professionally, I'm looking forward to the new game. Personally I'm so happy knowing that Bruce is going to be spending his next year working on something this much fun.
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The Face in the Frost, the gang from the tube

November 27, 2013, 10:36 am
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I finally read John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost last week after owning and ignoring the book for decades. Why did it take me so long? Maybe glancing at the book's cartoons as a youth turned me off for no good reason other than being tired of reading about friars and monks. Not much of a reason, but that could have been it, and when you have a book forever it's easy to forget that you could get around to reading it instead of finding something new.

John Rateliff reminded me of the book's existence a couple years ago when we were talking about the history of fantasy for the permanent Fantasy exhibit at the EMP. Then a couple weeks ago, reading John's review of an Ursula Le Guin talk he attended in Seattle, I was reminded of The Face in the Frost again, a connection that made sense when I pulled the book out of a downstairs shelf and found Le Guin's admiring quote on the cover.

The Face in the Frost reads quickly and still feels substantial. The story has held up remarkably well for a fantasy written in the 60s. It's quirky, it's charming, it's dead-scary serious. I liked it a lot.

As I was reading the book last weekend, pressed to the glass of a door on Seattle's light rail train, there was a moment when reality and The Face in the Frost darted past each other. In the book there's a confrontation with a shouting wizard during a crossover between worlds of fantasy and the world we know as real. On the Seattle light rail a heavyset Filipino man burst out of his seat and shouted down an older African American man who had been talking quietly to someone else in a seat a couple rows back. "Hey! F*** you man! I'm a member of the Sons of Anarchy! I'm sick of people disrespecting us!"

"Alright, man, alright," said the older guy, slipping out of his seat and out the train's door, which had luckily just opened at a stop in a south Seattle tunnel.

I took a few seconds to watch as the ranting gang-man stalked back to his seat. I turned back to the war of magic in my book. Then I tried to connect the dots in the real world scene I'd just half-witnessed. I thought the Sons of Anarchy was a TV show about a fictitious biker gang? Who, if anything, really piss off the Hell's Angels? So this would have made a lot more sense if he had been yelling that he was a Hell's Angel. Which he didn't. Which means this guy a few seats down identifies himself as a member of a television biker gang? Oh. He's really crazy.

Or have the Sons of Anarchy crawled out of the tube and turned into a real gang in Seattle? Which is also crazy, but it's socio-cultural crazy involving the blurred line between tv-shows and and tv-reality-shows instead of just personal batshit crazy. No answers, unless I wanted to move up a few rows and ask the Son of Anarchy about his gang affiliation. So I went back to my fantasy book about blurring lines across malleable realities.
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Games Games Games

November 27, 2013, 1:16 pm
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RPGs, 13th Age: 
I had a lot of fun finishing the new drafts of the monk and the commander classes for 13 True Ways. They're going out to the Kickstarter backers and the Escalation Edition purchasers and people who bought the 13th Age Bestiary pre-order. I believe they'll go out before the end of the week as part of the Pelgrane Press Page XX process.

Both classes will benefit from playtesting, especially the commander since this is its first iteration. Playtest notes definitely count. My last step with the monk was to reread all the playtest email we received at 13thAgePlaytest@gmail.com and check off each item as accounted for or at least considered.

Meanwhile in our Wednesday night campaign, the players have started calling me "Agemaster." It appears to be especially amusing to them when they're being helpful, or seeking favor, or sincerely trying to get my attention through the tumult of the room. They're also doing it because it irritates me a little. Perhaps because I'm the oldest human in the room. Perhaps because I'm not that fond of inventing new names for well-understood terms. It's not like I actually want this term to catch on. But it has gone on long enough that they're now shortening it to AM. I can't very well escape it and I suppose it also works if you're playing Dragon Age. So if amuses you, you're welcome. Yeargh.

RPGs, Thornwatch: 
We played one session of the in-development fantasy rpg created by Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade. A delightful experience. I don't speak any French but there's a French word I love, bricolage, which may or not mean what I think it means: putting together pieces of everything to assemble something new. Thornwatch is a bricolage game, assembling elements of rpgs, card games, and deckbuilding games into something unique. It's not trying to be a do-everything rpg, it's trying to be a specific game experience you'll play when the time is right and when there are new things you want to try. The initial design is excellent. I'm a sucker for the-world-is-forest narratives. I love the Thornwatch/Lookouts stories and art. This should be really good.

Digital, Dwarven Delve: 
Down below where only fungus grows, my gaming group comrades have mounted another assault on their Dwarven Delve Kickstarter game. They've got an excellent playable demo to show where they are headed and they're getting extremely close to Kicking, a couple days left and not much farther to dig. When they Kick I'm definitely going to thank them for calling me Agemaster by introducing them to 13th Age versions of their own monsters in our Wednesday night games.
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Night Eternal

December 3, 2013, 2:49 pm
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Reading early reviews for my new card game, Night Eternal: the Game, has been amusing and educational.

The game is from the backstory of the True Blood HBO series. When I say backstory, I mean way back, back to the late Middle Ages when the vampires' world was split between two factions, the ruling Authority and the Monarchy, former rulers who clung to older and more overly violent ways. This isn't a game about Sookie Stackhouse and vampire lover quadrangles. It's a game of cutthroat Medieval-vampire politics.

Several reviews have noted that the game has similarities to Three-Dragon Ante (3DA). True. Also, apparently to Richard James' Lords of Scotland, which came as a surprise to me since I'd missed that Lords of Scotland from Z-Man is a game with mechanics partially inspired by 3DA.

I originally designed Three-Dragon Ante (3DA) to be a sort of anti-poker, a quasi-gambling game that used micro-rewards and kept everyone playing instead of encouraging constant folding. 3DA lacked wagering dynamics and didn't do much with bluffing. Night Eternal starts with mechanics similar to 3DA but structures them around a contest for two separate pools of blood each battle, one from the Monarchy and one from the Authority. You can only win one of the two blood pools and one of the two starts double the size of the other. Consequently, bluffing about which prize you're aiming at is a big part of the game's strategy. Micro-rewards compete with temptations to go for the two macro-rewards.

Corey Jones of Cryptozoic wanted this game to be something that the vampires of the world of True Blood played to stay in touch with the past. In the old days they probably played it using humans as currency. So another design theme is that the game is a bit nasty, especially the abilities of the Immortals cards, unique vampires that come out of a deck that's separate from the normal Agent cards. Get hold of a few Immortals cards and you've got a shot at springing a nasty surprise on the opposition, but to obtain the Immortal you either had to play low or play smart. The one friend who I won't recommend the game to recently told me that her three children had finally learned how to play games together without fighting. Night Eternal is the wrong game for that family until they have a couple more years of gaming-without-conflict under their belt.

I'll have more to say about the game, here and elsewhere, but at the moment I'm about to get on a plane to fly to London for Dragonmeet. So I'll finish with a couple promo card images from the artist, Kieran Yanner. Yes, if you're an RPG fan you've been seeing Kieran's splendid work in Numenera. I was thrilled to find that he was the artist for Night Eternal.


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Numenera and the History of Plunder

December 10, 2013, 11:14 am
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I had a wonderful time at Dragonmeet and in London with the Pelgrinistas. One of the happy discoveries on returning home is that my 13th Age co-designer has a a guest blog ready to roll. Over to Jonathan.


Now that Bruce Cordell’s and Monte Cook’s Kickstarter campaign for The Strange is over, we can once again pay attention to Numenera, Monte’s new RPG about exploring the mind-boggling world of the far future. Numenera is remarkable for, among other things, its emphasis on loot. The game is explicitly about exploring the mysterious world and recovering wondrous artifacts from ages past. Many of these devices are powerful enough to influence the course of a game session or campaign. They’re game-changers. In some ways, this emphasis is a return to original D&D and a reversal of a general trend in RPGs away from loot. 

In original D&D, there was precious little to differentiate one fighting man from another, other than magic items. Fighters had no skills, powers, or tricks, just stats. But loot found in the dungeon made one fighter different from another. An elven cloak made one character invisible, while a necklace of missiles let you throw fireballs. Magic items dropped randomly, based on big percentile tables, so they could be disruptive. The level of a treasure determined the chance it included a magic item but did not influence which random of magic item you found. If a low-level character randomly found a big magic item, it changed the game’s dynamics. The party could now take down monsters that had outclassed them or avoid obstacles that would otherwise have stymied them. Our campaigns were thrown off-balance, but it sure was fun to cut loose with overpowered magic items. 

With 3rd Ed, Monte, Skip, and I rationalized the random tables, categorizing magic items as mundane, minor, medium, and major. The idea was to reduce the disruptive effects of magic items, making loot less of a factor in differentiating characters. Even so, there were plenty of ways for magic items to have a big impact on play, especially anything that let you go invisible, fly, or otherwise substantially change the fundamentals of combat and dungeoneering. In 2007, Fourth ed took normalization even further. Magic weapon abilities, for example, were all made modest enough that each one was less valuable than an additional +1 on attacks would be. A +2 weapon with no ability is better than a +1 weapon with the best ability. That approach ensures that the weapons’ special abilities can’t disrupt game balance. Thirteenth Age follows this logic as well. Outside of the F20 tradition, loot has generally been even less important. My own RPGs (Ars Magica, Over the Edge, and Everway) have little loot to speak of, and you see much the same in Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, Feng Shui, and other significant RPGs. 

An exception that proves the rule was my slim RPG Omega World, a d20 take on Gamma World. I created that game specifically to recapture some of the disruption that had been balanced out of 3rd Ed. Omega World was meant as a change of pace, without the balance necessary to handle campaigns of indefinite length. Random good luck and random bad luck were built into the game’s DNA. Like Gamma World before it, Omega World was about characters with strange powers exploring a mysterious, fallen world, hoping to find powerful artifacts from ages past. Which brings us back to Numenera.

Numenera takes loot to the next level. The very title of the game refers to the unfathomable technology left over from eight past “worlds.” Here, game-changing loot isn’t a problem to be moderated. It’s the core of the game. How do you get over-the-top loot without knocking the campaign off-balance? Monte squares this circle by giving each item limited uses, often one. Using crazy loot is part of the game, but the action doesn’t spiral out of control. Monte has preserved for us something that most RPG designers have left behind—preserved it and advanced it. It’s exciting to see Monte bucking a nearly universal trend and giving players an experience that’s hard to find elsewhere. Numenera successfully advances classic roleplaying tropes in ways other than loot, such as character identity and dungeon crawling, but discussion of those will have to wait for future posts.

--Jonathan Tweet
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Horizon, Commanders, Mummies: a 13 True Ways Update

January 22, 2014, 1:00 pm
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Given the push we are making to finish design and art on 13 True Ways, it's time for an update. I'm not going to talk about the things we're doing that aren't done yet, those will appear in upcoming updates.

Horizon
Jonathan has written a wonderful take on Horizon, City of Wonders. As Jonathan says in the introduction to the 10,000 word piece:

 The metropolis of Horizon is probably the most daunting of the Dragon Empire’s seven great cities, certainly the most unearthly. Some find it to be a higher order of reality, more rational and perfect than the everyday world. To others, it is an impenetrable labyrinth of riddles and forbiddance. You come to Horizon because you have to, and you often leave under the same circumstances. Here, the skeins of destiny tangle with the Archmage’s ley lines, and reality will never be the same.


Jonathan's Horizon hovers on the constructive edge between inspirational ideas and solid questions for each campaign. I'd show off a piece of the wonderful Horizon city art from Lee and Aaron here, but it might give the wrong impression, because part of Jonathan's approach to our half-designed world is to explain a dozen ways that the art and map of the City of Wonders can be interpreted in each campaign! So we'll let that art wait to be unveiled later!

The Commander
The commander class has been through a fruitful round of playtesting and development and will be sent anew to people who are getting the updates. The designer note I left out of the first iteration of the class was that I'd deliberately designed the commander's weakest possible version. It was an experiment, starting weak in order to be able to increase the power level in later drafts. And yes, all the playtesters who sent us comments noticed that they'd been handed weak beer and several people had great suggestions. The new commander is stronger and more fun. To find the things that have changed, you'll only need to look for the yellow and green highlighting.

As we close on the final version of the commander stats, here's the first draft of a piece of commander art, a dwarven commander whose troops will be carrying the flag of the Emperor. This guy is still fighting under the original name of the class, but Battle Captain is the name of one of my favorite talents from the class, a talent that got a lot better in this draft, so I'm going to shake off the guilt of showing off the old name.



Monsters! Monsters! 
After I worked all-out on 13th Age Bestiary monsters for months, Jonathan has taken the reins for recent batches of monsters that include the werebeasts, the metallic dragons, a heap of undead, and the devils, including four new sometimes-covertly operating devils created by Robin Laws as part of the Kickstarter goals.

As a sample of the writing in the new monsters, here is Jonathan's story-riff on mummies, followed by a beautiful but still rough draft of a piece of art that was one of the Monster Art +13 winners in the Kickstarter.

Mummies: Down through the ages, powerful magicians have endeavored to preserve their own lives, escaping both the mystery of death and the horror of undeath. The secrets by which they preserve themselves at the end of their mortal lives are lost, but someone always finds or recreates those secrets. Ideally, these carefully preserved mummies live on in a sort of passive false life of the mind, dreaming endlessly in their sarcophagi but never passing on into death itself. It’s good work if you can get it. The problem is that the Lich King is dead set against letting anyone enjoy such a happy ending. When his servitors discover mummies, they invariably animate them and turn them into proper undead minions.
As those who have unnaturally extended their lives, mummies make exceptionally dangerous undead. The most powerful mummies reanimate as masterminds who take charge of those around them, while the lesser ones submit to their new masters’ commands. In any event, these unnatural creatures, trapped between life and death, are among the most spine-chilling of the Lich King’s minions. In theory, mummies might have enough humanity left that living souls could appeal to it and perhaps reach some sort of accord. In practice, it’s mummy rot for all those who tamper with the mighty who refuse to die.

The mummy art: Evan Franke originally asked for somewhat South American/Tibetan mummies being called forth by a high priest. I thought that was a good place to bring in a necromancer. This version by Aaron is considerably advanced from the version we showed Evan earlier, but it's still going to get a bunch of finishing work from Lee, including the finished spiral stair that leads to adventurers or a world ripe for conquest.


And Speaking of the Necromancer . . . 
I had an epiphany about this class. It's not a class. It's a multiclass. A multiclass that works especially well as a multiclass option for other spellcasting classes. So the sorcerer, cleric, and wizard are getting detailed multiclass combinations with the necromancer multiclass. Other people can do it but they're not as cool, and that's kind of the way 13th Age multiclassing tends to work: some combinations are deliberately more fun than others.

The Monk
There's a new version of the monk coming as part of the playtest update. It features interesting solutions to the demand for multiple high ability scores, ki powers that matter, and high-graded fun options for monk talents instead of some of the earlier talents that didn't compare well.

See you with another 13 True Ways update later next week.

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Mummy reposted

January 22, 2014, 2:50 pm
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The mummy art that was missing for some viewers in the previous post...


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treizième époque

January 27, 2014, 12:51 pm
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7eme Cercle are just now finishing the layout of the French translation of 13th Age!

They've stuck with most elements of the English design while adding new touches like wax-style seals around the page numbers.

When I first heard of the French translation, people were saying that it would be called treizième époque. I do think that's a bad-ass name for the game. I'm planning to use it as my term for sessions that threaten extravagant consequences. "Look out. Tonight it's not just 13th Age. Tonight I'm running treizième époque." 

But of course 7eme Cercle has stuck with 13th Age as the name of the game. Or at least they're getting as close as they can, because the 'th' part of the word '13th' doesn't translate into French. 7eme Cercle has revised the logo into a just-slightly-different form to make sense in French. Voila!
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customer identification

January 29, 2014, 2:16 pm
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A couple days before Dragonmeet in December, I enjoyed a ramble around the British Museum. I didn't have much time but I still found myself in the wonderful little museum bookstore that's off to the side of the exhibits, down a corridor long enough to give the impression that there must be interesting things happening on either side of the walls.

The only other people in the shop were two attractive young women wearing blazers that were associated with the museum somehow and a sharply dressed twenty-something guy working behind the counter. He had an Italian accent and as I rummaged through Osprey books and read the first few pages of a Norse history called The Hammer and the Cross, he told the two women the story of the coolest thing that had happened to him in the store recently.

A distinguished older man with a beard had spent a good deal of time looking through the books. He'd brought his purchases forward, then paid with a credit card that read UMBERTO ECO.

The bookstore clerk found himself blurting "Are you Umberto Eco?"

"Only metaphorically," he said, leaving no doubt.
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Shadowrun Crossfire Table View

January 30, 2014, 2:50 pm
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Until now, all the card views from the upcoming cooperative deckbuilding game designed by Fire Opal Media and published by Catalyst Games have been of in-progress cards. Last week's update from Randall Bills on Catalyst's Shadowrun website included this near-final image of the example of play from the rulebook which shows off true card layout and art. As far as I know, the only thing that's going to change from the view above are the tokens, which got a small update.

This has been a great project. Our entire design/development/editing team loved getting to play in the Shadowrun universe, one of those wish-list projects that came true. Crossfire's gameplay converts the deckbuilding style of Donald X's original Dominion into a fully cooperative fighting game of shadowrunning survival. The blend of gameplay and theme is going to be popular with most of the groups I get to play with. Add in the rpg-style character improvement options available when you earn karma after successful runs (or a tiny bit of karma after a disastrous run) and I know both my casual gaming circle and my serious-core gamer groups will dig it. Designing games your friends will love playing with you? It's one of the best things.
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Claw Claw Call Lightning

February 19, 2014, 6:20 pm
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Assuming the PCs survive tonight's 13th Age session, revelations within the tomb of the Bloody Emperor could lead to major shifts. If not quite every PC survives, or if the shifts involve someone wanting to start a druid as a new character, we're prepared.

Everyone who has been part of the 13 True Ways support network (Escalation Edition, Kickstarter, Bestiary pre-orders) will soon be getting notice of the availability of the new druid and the updated commander and monk. By soon, I mean that notifications are going out tonight and tomorrow morning. For some of you, it's probably already sitting on your order receipt form in the Pelgrane store.

As you'll see, the druid class is a beast. The challenge of embracing elements of traditional druidic roles (wild healer, animal shifter, elemental magician, summoner, warrior of the wild) became huge fun as I took new approaches (talents defining spell lists and abilities, carefully calibrated summoning mechanics, spell lists tied to specific terrain). It's definitely the biggest of all the class design jobs. I hope it turns out to be as much fun to play as it was to design.

Other 13 True Ways progress includes the fully edited and illustrated write-up of Horizon from Jonathan and Lee, and full illustrations and text for Drakkenhall from a combination of Jonathan, Robin D. Laws, and Lee Moyer. The great bear druid piece above is newly competed as well, a sketch from Aaron finished by Lee.

This week Jonathan is working on miscellaneous monsters, including azers, pixies, and cloud giants. I'm working on multiclassing after a morning spent cooling down from the druid work by finishing a list of Thirteen Icon Variations that can shape a campaign. And speaking of campaigns, I'm running the second session within the Tomb in about an hour. By the time you read this it will probably all be over but the screaming. Well, actually that's just GM-smack talk. The night seems unlikely to end in screams. There will be screams along the way, but I'm betting it will end with huzzahs.

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A Thing of Beauté

February 27, 2014, 1:19 pm
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The French translation of 13th Age has been published by 7eme Circle!

Somehow I didn't think seriously about how a French translation of the world map was going to turn out. Now we have it, and it's beautiful and very very cool. It's even online, now, so if you have been looking for a digital copy of the map, well, you get it first in French.

As Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan said on Facebook, "Hey, the French get roads!" Yes, the French version of the map shows the major Imperial roads that link several of the Seven Cities around the Midland Sea. The English-language map in the 13th Age book doesn't show those maps because I failed my visual proofreading check. At some point in the process, a Photoshop layer of Lee Moyer's great big beautiful map design dropped out. I missed that the roads had disappeared and the only person who noticed thought I'd made a decision to leave them out. So yeah, that's the ticket: the version in our book is the High Druid's start of the revised map, no roads required. Yeah!

I think it could be great to use the French map for a 13th Age game played in English. But since that's not to everyone's taste, we will have the English version on-line very soon! I think it's going to have roads.
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13th Age, 3e, and Two Bestiaries

March 4, 2014, 4:03 pm
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Last week, Jonathan wrote a neat essay on how 13th Age design relates to his work on 3e. It's a cogent account of how we wove threads from earlier editions of F20 into something new-ish in 13th Age. Jonathan has a gift for cutting to the core and the essay explains design decisions we haven't said that much about elsewhere.

Jonathan's essay appears on the Kobold Press website as a guide to 13th Age for interested 3.5 and Pathfinder fans, and to help our friend Wolfgang Baur promote the new 13th Age compatible Midgard Bestiary. This third-party 13th Age work is a collaboration by the adventuring team of LAW & Rockett. 

Midgard Bestiary 13th Age cover

That's designer/developer ASH LAW who runs 13th Age OP and designed many of the bug-whack monsters in the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary from Pelgrane; you will thank him later when your party's cleric insists on donning a chuul-antenna helmet, or when a hag's death curse twists your PC's social life around her dead bony finger. ASH is joined by the evil twin of Wade Rockett, who runs community relations for Fire Opal and who wrote the splendid Midgard icons that appear at the back of the Midgard Bestiary, just after the nine new 13th Age-compatible player character races, many of them monstrous.

That brings me to one of the wonderful things about the two upcoming Bestiaries. I ended up running the Pelgrane book, and there were a bunch of design approaches ASH suggested using throughout it that I only wanted to use just a little. So instead, ASH ran with them at full speed in the Midgard book. To name three examples:

  • Things You Might Find On on a Monster's Corpse (loot instructions!)
  • Magic items made of monster parts (or their powers)
  • Monsters as races

The Kobold Press book does a lot with these concepts. Our Pelgrane book does just a little bit while spending most of its effort in other directions, particularly in story hooks and powers related to the icons. The result is a pair of monster books that will complement each other well.

The 100+ page Midgard Bestiary is out now. The 240-page 13th Age Bestiary from Pelgrane is due in May, but if you pre-order it now you can download the full text. As Jonathan's essay suggests, you may even be interested if you're not playing 13th Age yet.
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Guest Post: Ritual & Roleplaying Games

March 10, 2014, 11:42 am
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My 13th Age collaborator Jonathan Tweet does most of his social media through G+ these days. When he has a gaming blog he wants to run, I post it here. This time he's responding to requests for a discussion of RPGs and rituals.

Jonathan Says:
Religion, rituals, and roleplaying games all work because people are suggestible. Maybe you’ve heard that being suggestible is a bad thing, as if it means you have weak character. But maybe instead you can think of being suggestible as being not stupid but sensitive. Your brain is whirring along unconsciously, picking up subtle cues from your physical and social environment, and adjusting your perceptions and behavior accordingly. Most of the time this all happens below conscious awareness, but sometimes we take fate into our own hands and manipulate ourselves, and that’s where you get things like religion, ritual, and roleplaying games. While early roleplaying games may have had a ritual quality to them, it’s the array of modern, funky RPGs that are really exploring this territory. 

As children of the enlightenment, we atheists tend to downplay ritual or even deride it as a form of mind control or superstition. Humans, however, did not evolve to be rationalists. We evolved to use rituals, and the anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence Deacon goes so far as to posit that our ability to think symbolically arose out of ritual practice before we had language. Whatever the origins of rituals, human cultures have innovated all sorts of them: dances, hymns, chants, prayers, auguries, sacrifices, salutes, christenings, weddings, funerals, processions, graduations, meditations, mantras, liturgies, prostrations, poses, consecrations, oaths, vows, and initiations. Rituals work on an unconscious level. As C. S. Lewis said, kneeling in prayer is qualitatively different from standing in prayer because humans are animals, and our bodies affect our souls. Lewis knew that our creator has given us instincts for humbling ourselves in front of a greater power; he just failed to identify evolution as our creator. 

It’s easy to see the role and power of rituals in religions, but maybe it’s a stretch to see it in roleplaying games. I think I can see it.

Rituals have this funny way of working even if you know they’re fake, says world-renowned primatologist Franz de Waal. As he points out, a placebo works even if you know it’s a placebo. The conscious part of your brain knows it’s just a placebo, but the unconscious part of your brain gets tricked, and more often than not it’s the unconscious that’s running our lives. A college professor of mine used to attend Roman Catholic services because he was moved by the symbols and the drama. He didn’t believe a lick of the theology, but that didn’t matter to him. Roleplaying games can be like a ritual that we know we’ve made up.

Roleplaying games have built-in ritual elements. They take place among circles of initiates, who share a special reality and use insider terminology. Traditionally, one participant serves as the psychopomp or shaman, guiding the group through the game’s events. The Roman Catholic priest virtually becomes Christ during the Eucharist, and the Dungeon Master becomes “God” during a D&D session. Participants assume special roles, and they refer to each other by secret names. Players cast lots and consult the results to find out their respective fates. If you participate in enough gatherings, you progress along the game’s path, with more and more secrets revealed to you as you go. You level up. You discover the stairs to the 8th level of the dungeon. Outsiders routinely attribute further ritual elements to roleplaying, such as using candles and wearing funny hats. It’s as if the uninitiated can sense the ritual element of our games and expect to see ritual paraphernalia incorporated into them. 

The player-character role resembles the role of a ritual participant in that the everyday self is left behind. In most rituals, such as taking bread and wine in Christian liturgy or the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, the participants leave their public identities to become equals. In other rituals, such as the when the Huichol Indians undertake a spiritual quest to obtain peyote, the various participants assume archetypal or mythic roles. Maybe one of them always has to play the cleric.

A religious ritual often has an explicit, supernatural purpose in terms of the individual, but the natural effect of the ritual is often to improve group cohesion. The Roman Catholic Mass, for example, reportedly infuses the participant with the grace of God, but what it surely does is confirm the individual’s membership in the group. Roleplaying games likewise provide a shared experience that binds the group together, and the teamwork element of RPGs sets them apart from competitive games. When I was at GottaCon last weekend, I met a crew of D&D players who recounted how the game had brought them together as a friendship circle and had given them shared experiences that they treasure. If you’ve been part of a successful roleplaying group, you know what they meant. 

Some roleplaying games have played up the ritual elements of gaming, especially the new crop of indie games. Perhaps as RPGs have moved past simulation, they have sometimes adopted more ritual elements. My game Everway (1995) features a Fortune Deck, like a tarot deck, which is used in place of dice as the random element. The card art features archetypes, symbols for astrologic signs and planets, and deities from across the globe. Polaris (2005) by Ben Lehman uses stock phrases to open and close each game session, as well as to regulate the progress of play. Instead of a GM running a group of players, the players cycle through game roles, sometimes playing their character sort of like normal, and otherwise portraying some aspect of the world while another player plays their PC. These roles have evocative names, such as “Mistaken” and “New Moon.” These esoteric references, like elements in a religious ritual, help player feel as though they are tapping into a cosmic order. More prosaically, games such as Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World (2010) channel player choices and behavior, with formal limits providing a structure that encourages the sort of order and repetition that are also found in rituals.

So even though we know we’re not medieval heroes or post-apocalyptic bad-asses, something happens unconsciously when we put on those roles, especially as part of a group. These ritual elements originally bubbled up organically, but today indie game designers are incorporating ritual elements intentionally. It leaves me wondering whether we might see more elements of ritual incorporated into games, and that that might look like.
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