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the smell of dragonfire in the morning

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For this all-out push to finish 13 True Ways design, I've been channeling the man pictured above, a ruthless paladin/commander named Roland Abendroth. Roland is the creation of Davideogame, one of our high-level backers on 13 True Ways. Lee Moyer suggested creating portraits of the backer-created NPCs as full page art and Lee's portrait of Roland opens Chapter 1: Classes.

This week, Jonathan is busy with the full write-ups of Roland and the other NPCs, crafting a format that blends useful story with player torment and eventual resolution.The NPC write-ups will appear in chapter 6, the Gamemasters' Grimoire, where we indulge our ancient affection for grab-bag books like Arduin by including a bit of anything and everything wonderful that's not long enough to merit a full chapter.

Before starting on the NPCs, Jonathan created a dozen or so truly twisted monsters, including specters that outright steal the escalation die and pixies that ensure that player characters who choose fights with pixies are going to regret it, even when the PCs win. I want to say it's 'high comedy' but I'm pretty sure that's just me being ironic and it's actually low comedy.

My work lately has focused on the first two chapters, Classes and Play Character Options, notably the first draft of the necromancer. Comments from internal Fire Opal critique have been helpful and when revisions are complete and satisfactory the class will go out to wider testing. For those tracking earlier updates, I changed the initial design in which the necromancer was a multiclass. The necromancer is now a full class with summoning spells, skeletal minions, death priest options, and cackling soliloquies.

In other news, art for 13 True Ways is finished (unless I talk Lee into one more illustration that was his good idea but that falls outside the scope of his responsibilities). We haven't been sharing huge amounts of the art yet but it's in the wings. Just as Jonathan and I tried new things with game design in 13TW, Lee and Aaron pulled some stunts I did not expect and would never have demanded.

let the cackling soliloquies begin

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ASH LAW and I are both going to be running quick 13th Age games at the new AFK Tavern in Renton tomorrow, April 5th, as part of International Tabletop Day.

ASH is showing up around 11 am, I'll be there around 12:30 to run a couple two hour games before I return to my regularly scheduled work weekend.

I'll be running demo style games, the usual pregen character sheets that the players get to add the interesting stuff to, backgrounds and icon relationships and the One Unique Thing.

But not all the pregen sheets will be the usual sheets. Tomorrow I'm going to bring pregen sheets for characters like the woman pictured above in art by Aaron McConnell and Lee Moyer: the necromancer. I know that class hasn't gone out to wider playtesting yet but it went a round within Fire Opal and it will be fun to bring it into the game tomorrow. What type of fun? Well, here's one of the popular talents from the necromancer in its pre-edited form. Not everyone wants to play this way, but for those who do . . . .

Cackling Soliloquist

If you spend your move action, your quick action and your standard action casting a daily spell that ordinarily only requires a standard action—while screaming grandeloquently, cackling maniacally, or megalomaniacally describing the grandeur of your plans and the futility of your enemies’ resistance—the daily spell you are casting becomes a recharge 18+ spell (roll after the battle) and you can invent a slight improvement to the spell, especially if it’s at least partly story-oriented.

Adventurer Feat: The sound of your own voice invigorates you and you gain 1d6 + your level + Charisma temporary hit points when you use Cackling Soliloquist.  


We may or may not play with the chaos mage's special brand of crazy tomorrow. I'm working on the first revision for that class today and if works out we'll probably use it, if I'm not happy yet it will have to wait outside the tavern.

Looking forward to tomorrow and seeing friends I haven't seen for awhile as well as new souls and necromancers.

Rock Paper Reamde

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Rock Paper Tiger is a novel about China, people with connections in the intelligence world, electronic gaming, and an American woman trying to survive despite the power struggles of larger forces moving around her. Also art.

Reamde is a novel partly set in China, people with connections in the intelligence world, people with even stronger connections with digital gaming, and at least in part about a woman fighting to survive while being used as a pawn in a terrorist plot.  Also guns. 

I love both these books. Lisa Brackmann's Rock Paper Tiger may be psychologically more true. Its heroine and the people who surround her generally can't fight their way out of screwed situations, they live and die in the fog of sudden events and if they survive they do so in part because of bonds and confidences they only partly understand. I found it funny, moving, and memorable. 

Neal Stephenson's Reamde is a romp. Or several romps run together, playing out in a world in which the protagonists created the next big game phenomenon after World of Warcraft but that isn't necessarily going to keep them alive when terrorists are the ones doing the questing. Despite rounding itself out as a near-perfect comedy, it left me with a lingering mistrust of large RVs with Canadian plates. 

Rock Paper Tiger is the yin to Reamde's yang. Read both. 

This is the Doom you've been looking for

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Thanks to Cryptozoic, the story of The Doom that Came to Atlantic City has turned from a Kickstarter cautionary tale to a full-blown beautiful boardgame success. Cryptozoic has sent a copy of the new boardgame to everyone who backed the original Kickstarter, despite the fact that none of that money went to Cryptozoic.

I'm happy for my friends designer/writer Keith Baker and conceiver/artist Lee Moyer. I'm happy for all the Call of & Trail of Cthulhu and D&D games that can use Paul Komoda's wonderful elder god sculpts as minis for creatures the PCs should hope to never encounter. I'm happy for casual game tables everywhere that land the game through original Kickstarter support or pick it up now.

So far at our gaming table I'm happiest with two and three player games. The four-player game is *whacky*, so much stuff going on, so many gates. So for your first game, I'd suggest two or three players.

You can decide for yourself how the game awards luck or skill. It may be one of those games that has so much luck that the luck evens out, shifting the balance towards skill.

Mob of Seven

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The new orc mook I posted on the Pelgrane Press website as a 13th Sage column today, the Orc Spear Grunt, has a max mob size of 7, for reasons you'll understand if you read the piece.

Could be especially useful for people running current and upcoming OP seasons with orc battles galore.

One day, two books

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This morning we sent out PDF copies of 13 True Ways to our Kickstarter backers.

If you weren't a Kickstarter backer, you can pre-order a copy of 13 True Ways here. Pelgrane plans to start delivering the PDF portion of the pre-orders on the 30th.

This afternoon, my Fire Opal business partner, Jay Schneider, received a case of printed copies of another book, pictured below.


The Bestiary? The same day? Amazing. Copies are on their way out, though I don't know when they are reaching pre-orders and stores. I believe we'll all know soon.


Jeff Grubb's worlds from A to Z, and then sticking at G!

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Back in April, Jeff Grubb participated in the A to Z challenge with an alphabetical jaunt through fantasy worlds, with a focus on game worlds. Jeff's short summaries, occasionally with anecdotes, are well worth reading. I learned a lot, partly because if I had the gumption to attempt the same alphabetical sally, my worlds could only have overlapped with Jeff's by six or seven letters.

I particularly liked Z is for Zothique (because I sometimes forget about Clark Ashton Smith and wish I didn't), U is for Underdark (I'd forgotten that Jeff helped name it), S is for Stormfront (which is one of those moments of alternate world wot-the-hell history, I had no idea TSR almost had a game partially inspired by Winsor McCay drawings), M is for Minaria (again, I didn't know anything about the Divine Right world), A is for Amber (because I completely agree about the re-readability of the original five-volume series, and have been sharing it with new readers), and G is for Glorantha (because, yes, Greg Stafford's Glorantha is my favorite game world, and also where the rest of this post is headed!).

Jeff's take on Glorantha is concise and personal and perfectly captures the world's core conflict, the Hero Wars confrontation between worshipers of the Red Moon goddess (urbane sophisticates, but allied with ultimate Chaos) and worshipers of the air god Orlanth (resolutely free and recklessly violent).

Personally, I owe a lot to Glorantha. It's not only my favorite example of applied mythology, it also gifted me with formative moments in youth and adulthood. Youth: the RQ bibliography that first got me reading anthropology. Adulthood: several years of employment working at Chaosium and then at A# working on King of Dragon Pass.

While working at A#, I got to play in a sense-of-wonderful Glorantha Heroquest campaign run by Jeff Richard, alongside David Dunham and Neil Robinson and seven other thanes.

Fast-forward about fifteen years, and the second-Jeff-mentioned, Jeff Richard, has co-authored a magnificent monolith of a book called The Guide to Glorantha along with Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen. Actually it's a twin monolith of a book. It's one of those Kickstarter projects that started sane and blossomed into something flagrantly unlikely when it got funded beyond wild dreams. The Guide is being sold at a special pre-order price until July 7th, and they're running all manner of art and text previews.

The Guide isn't a game book. It's a world and mythology book, good for thinking, and if you like it also comes with a book of maps. But if you scroll a little farther down the www.glorantha.com site, you'll see that the Heroquest Glorantha book is due at GenCon, an updating of Robin D. Laws Heroquest that will be good for thinking and playing.

ISS2005v1-front-coverISS2005v2-front-cover

13 True Ways follow-up plans

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The text below is from a 13 True Ways Kickstarter update I just posted. Since it talks about material that will also interest everyone buying 13 True Ways on pre-order or ordering it from their hobby shop, I'm posting the update here as well.

Hey, 13 True Wayssupporters!
By now most of you will have seen the 13 True Ways PDF, except for those old-fashioned souls who want to wait for the printed book. I know there are some of you because Jonathan is one! Yes, Jonathan Tweet doesn’t want to spoil the surprise by looking at the PDF. Since I handle art and layout and editing communication, Jonathan still doesn’t know what the final book is going to look like, apart from the text, so if you are waiting for the printed book later this summer you have some good company.

Along with the final printed books there are other backer rewards in the works, such as dice and t-shirts and postcards. Those are all at various stages in the production queue, and I can’t predict when they all will be ready.

For now I want to talk about another aspect of 13 True Waysdelivery: the other PDFs that are going to show up on your computer in coming months.

We ended the Kickstarter promising a 180-page book. Once we got into the design phase, our labor-of-love approach pushed us up to 256 pages. And because it was a labor of love, Jonathan and I prioritized the things we thought would be the most fun, and held our work to a very high standard. If we felt meh about something, and believed that you would feel meh about it too, it didn’t go in. We ended up delivering on all the stretch goals in the Kickstarter along with all the backer rewards, but some of our ideas in the original 13 True Ways Kickstarter plan didn’t make it into the book.

So here’s what we plan to do about it.

We’re going to finish those pieces properly as part of the upcoming subscription-based 13th Age annual (name to be determined), along the lines of the excellent Ken Writes About Stuff from Pelgrane Press. I should be clear that the we I’m mentioning includes me, but not always the other members of the original 13TW team. Sometimes I’ll be the designer, other times I’ll act as developer with other talented contributors handling the design work. Sometimes we’ll be completing work that I started on 13 True Ways but didn’t finish to my satisfaction.

As a 13TW Kickstarter backer, you’ll have two options when the annual goes live:
1.       You can choose to get only the issues that contain 13 True Ways follow-up content, for free
2.       You can choose to purchase the entire first 13th Age annual at a discount which covers all of the free content to which you’re entitled, plus a bit extra

Not every month’s installment will contain 13 True Ways follow-up content, and there’s no set schedule about when a particular piece of 13 True Ways follow-up content will be completed. This may stretch out for quite some time, because during the design phase of 13 True Ways we unexpectedly hit on a few things that could serve as the basis for larger books. If they do get turned into books, when those surprises get unveiled we’ll send a related freebie to 13TW backers. Think of this operation as a purchase that keeps on providing surprising micro-rewards.

With that in mind, I’m going to go ahead and list the things that didn’t make it into 13 True Ways and my current thoughts on how they’ll be part of the 13th Age annual subscription, or not.

Appearing in the annual at some point
Details on forests & woods to make them distinct: This grew into something a bit different than I thought originally.
More on gladiatorial games: Yeah, there’s some more we can explore here.
Rules for dragon-riding: I know that a lot of you were really looking forward to this—I was, too—and some of you even backed the project because of it. So I’ll be blunt: so far all the systems we’ve come up with have been worse than no system at all in terms of their impact on the game. I'm not interested in publishing bad systems, and I’m pretty sure you’re not interested in getting them. ASH and I are continuing to work on these rules, and we’ll do everything we can to ensure they get included in the first annual. I can promise that we’re not going to shrug our shoulders and send you something that we think isn’t worth using, just so we can check off a box on our to-do list. We'll get it to work because I know ASH will kill me if we don't.
Illustrated comparisons of the adventurer, champion, and epic tier: We’ll do these, but probably not by Aaron and Lee.
Some fantastic maps of the overworld and portions of the underworld: Ditto.
A cutaway map of a typical elven wood: Same.

Partially appearing in the annual after their actual potential is realized in future books
Racial feats: because they do appear to have a place in the game, but that place may come as a surprise.
Feats associated with the icons: same story. The obvious mechanics weren’t so good, but there is something interesting hidden behind the idea.
Stats for the 13 icons themselves: As the game evolved and matured through further development and play, we became increasingly convinced that this was an idea we didn’t want to pursue half-cocked. You can see the care we took detailing the 4 backer-created NPCs in the Gamemasters’ Grimoire chapter of 13TW. In a sense, those NPCs function a bit like mini-icons, and our final approach to this topic may bear some resemblance to the multi-option approach used for the NPCs. But when I say ‘final approach,’ I’m acknowledging that this isn’t something we intend to pursue soon. When we do finally take this path, it’s almost certainly going to be the basis for a book rather than a slice of a different book. In the near-ish future, we will be doing monster-style stats for various servants and followers of the icons. Some of the high-level lieutenants of the icons will find their way into a 13TW-backers update to provide touches of the high-level play people might have been looking for from actual icon stats.

There are also going to be surprise backer freebies along the way, some of which expand on ideas that made it into 13TW.

That’s all I’ve got for now. We’ll be in touch about the annual’s start date and other details once we’ve built the plan out further, probably before or around GenCon.

Yours in the whirl,


Rob Heinsoo
Lead Designer, Fire Opal Media



Tweet's Beginner RPG

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Part of my job as Jonathan's friend is to make sure his good jokes don't get wasted.

Talking about his Grandmother Fish book the other day, Jonathan said, "Y'know, I could say that this is my most accessible beginner roleplaying game yet! But I'm not going to say that. Only to friends."

At which point I step in.

If you visit the Grandmother Fish Kickstarter page and download a preliminary draft of this child's-first-book-of-evolution, you'll see that describing the book as a beginner roleplaying game is amusingly true. Kids play animals that squeak and wiggle and chomp!

RPG-talk isn't precisely on target for a Kickstarter page that's primarily aimed at science enthusiasts, parents, and humanists. But for this blog that handles games more often than not? Yeah, I'll happily spread the joke that Jonathan was a notch too tight-laced to use.

And if you like what you read and decide to sponsor the Kickstarter, please use your pledge to support our triceratops allies against the fanged aggression of T-Rex!

Please click to download a preliminary draft PDF copy of the book (approx 4 MB)

Authors leveling up

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I read two good books in the last couple weeks, both by authors who started their careers along different tracks.


ARI: Let's say that Ari Marmell started out writing D&D sourcebooks. That's probably almost true, at least in a publishing sense.

Ari has been writing novels for a few years now. If you read one of his early books, but nothing since then, I'm happy to say that Ari has gained several levels as a writer. I say this as someone who set aside one of his earliest novels after being jarred out of the story by problematic sentences. But that's no longer a problem. Sentence by sentence, Hot Lead, Cold Iron is smoothly written and great fun. The urban fantasy twist into the world of faeries worked for me, the plot stayed interesting, and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

"ROBERT": You knew that Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for JK Rowling right? Word got out. The Silkworm is a sequel to The Cuckoo's Calling. I eventually liked the Harry Potter books, though I still haven't gotten around to reading the later books in that series. I'm extremely happy that Rowling has moved on to writing adult mysteries. I understand why she wanted to pursue this new direction writing under a pseudonym. This work is excellent and deserves wider readership so I suppose it's not such a horrible thing that the secret leaked.

I liked The Silkworm more than the first book in the series, in part because of its handle on the psychology of the main characters and its accurate assessments of how the same events are different for women and men. That character development started in the first story, and in any case it's well worth reading The Cuckoo's Callingfirst.

Three reviews

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In the last couple days I've seen three great reviews of games I worked on that are about to hit the shelves.

13 True Ways cover

This nicely-angled review of 13 True Ways captures the joy that Jonathan and I got from creating the book. I'd love to say that Lee and Aaron also took joy from the process but Lee was so darn intense when he was working on 13TW. It was a fierce glowing joy, maybe, like dangerous lava radiant beneath the crust.

I'll be doing my best furiously-glowing-Lee impression at the Pelgrane booth at GenCon, and I'm hoping that printing works out so that 13 True Ways will be glowing alongside.



This video review of Shadowrun: Crossfire from the Dice Tower guys is fun and extremely positive. I laughed out loud at the moment that Tom said that he might just be interested in a one-shot Shadowrun rpg session now, though he had not considered that an option before. It was amusing because that was the audience-response that Catalyst hoped for when it hired Fire Opal to design this co-op deckbuilding game--they wanted people who had never played SR to have a way into the world. Greg Marques did a great job as the lead designer on Shadowrun: Crossfire, and the rest of the team was awesome to work with, including people like Cal Moore and Rob Watkins who also work on 13th Age, and folks like Mike Elliot and Jim Lin who I used to work with at WotC.

There's a possibly more informative text review of SR: Crossfire on Boardgame Geek. The review is well-written and much more thorough than I would have expected given the reviewer's brief exposure to the game. For longer exposure, come to the Catalyst Game Labs booth at GenCon. They should have Shadowrun: Crossfire demos rolling and boxes selling.

The ENnie Clan Competes

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It is such a good year for the ENnie awards that games I might ordinarily vote highest are not only competing with each other, they're competing against 13th Age! [[Click here to vote if you'd rather vote than read.]]

It's wonderful that 13th Age is nominated for Best Game, Best Rules, and Product of the Year. From my perspective of not actually enjoying competing against friends and collaborators, it's not so wonderful that we're up up against games including Hillfolk, Numenera, and FATE. As Robin Laws has pointed out, all but one of his competitors in the Best Game category contributed to his excellent Hillfolk or its companion campaign book, Blood on the Snow, which is also nominated for best supplement. Pieces of this awards ceremony are as tight-knit as a clan longhouse electing a chieftain and warleader.

I guess that's a high class problem. However these awards get sliced, I'm reasonably certain that I'm going to get to watch joyful friends accept some awards while still having a shot at accepting an award with possibly less well-disguised glee!

Here's the link to the voting site. Anyone can vote. The system lets you rank games so it's not an all-or-nothing choice unless you want it to be. I hope you'll vote for 13th Age if it's your cup of tea, or even if it's your second or fourth-favorite rpg beverage.If you're shy about voting because you don't know many of the games, the ballot helpfully links to info on each nominee.

Other nominees I haven't mentioned that I have fuzzy-sapiens feelings for are (not surprisingly!) the Midgard Bestiary: 13th Age Roleplaying Game Compatible Version (Best Monster/Adversary), Trail of Cthulhu: Eternal Lies (Best Adventure), and the Complete Eternal Lies Suite soundtrack by James Semple and his party of composers which is up for a Best RPG Related Product award.

Along those same lines, I'd somehow missed the also-nominated soundtrack for Night's Black Agents, Dust & Mirrors. How did that happen? Pelgrane Press is doing a *lot* of good stuff. They belong somewhere on the Fan's Favorite Publisher list, I'm thinking. 


OMG! Trilogy!

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Last Friday, ASH LAW and I were working on our new 13th Age project in my garage studio. (And no, the new project is not announced yet. Soon!) I cursed because I wanted to look at the commander for a moment in a printed copy of 13 True Ways instead of rummaging through the PDF, and of course that wasn't possib. . . . . wait a minute. "I've got a printed copy," I said aloud, atoning for my cursing. There, in the folded cardboard on the gaming table . . . the printer's proof of 13 True Ways.

The approved proof.

So I got to flip through finished pages to see what I needed. It felt great.




And then I stacked the proof beside the 13th Age Bestiary and the core book and had to admit that it looks like we've got a player's book, monster book, and GM's book, a product scheme we originally avoided by presenting 13th Age as a single all-you-need-to-play volume.

The appearance of a trilogy is probably a good thing. But I have to say ours is a bit different than the traditional player/monster/GM scheme. Our approach is a lot more like the old Arduin Grimoire and its follow-ups that started with Welcome to Skull Tower.

The 13th Age core rulebook sort of qualifies as the player's book, but it also has monsters and treasure and a geography chapter and a sample adventure. The explicit goal is to help players contribute to the story of each unique campaign. The hidden goal is to get players excited about the campaigns they might be able to run themselves, slightly increasing the number of GMs in the world . . . .

The 13th Age Bestiary definitely qualifies as a monster book, but we deliberately let each monster tell us how it could accomplish the most for the game instead of forcing the work into a monsters-only-please format. Frost giants have fimbulwinter environmental effects, chuuls spawn usable magic items, and the fungaloids are hiding a flipping playable PC race. (And yeah, those examples were all ASH's way of adding value!) The unique voices of our many contributors came out stronger because we didn't force authors to force monsters into cookie-cutter boxes.

And then there's the newest book, approved but not quite printed. The setting material and deviltry advice and mini-adventures in 13 True Ways help GMs, but six new character classes and the multiclassing rules and other goodies make it a player's book as much as a GM's book. Our goal with 13 True Ways was to do all the coolest things we could think of, so it's an Emperor's Kitchen Sink book instead of a focused GM product.

I'm going to be happy to present new players with these three books together. They make a compelling threesome and the contents round out the play experience. Add in the first two black and white books, Book of Loot and Shadows of Eldolan, also likely to be available at GenCon, and we've got a line!

Publishing Schedule...
So far as we know, 13 True Ways should be available in print at GenCon. We're planning to drop-ship pre-orders and Kickstarter reward copies in early August direct from the printer. Those shipments will be books only, the various KS extras (and the deluxe leather-bound copies that need bookplate signatures) will be another shipment later. The hope is that most KS backers in the USA will have their copies before GenCon. There are going to be other logistic details to sort out but I won't personally be the person doing most of the sorting, so I'll wait until I know more before saying more. I can say that long-waiting Kickstarter backers will certainly also all be getting another small treat, in part because we feel bad that backers outside the USA aren't likely to have their copies before GenCon. Like all printing and distribution plans, this requires things to stay on track. So far the process has been smooth. 


Weblings

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My sprite-like pieces of self that get things done on the internet were busy this week. Here's a short list of surfacings. If you already caught them all, thank you and good night!

I wrote a 13th Sage column for Pelgrane Press about when it might be a good idea to let the monsters use the escalation die in 13th Age. Should be helpful to many GMs. And if you're a player it will give you a couple signs to watch out for!

Pelgrane also helpfully posted the schedule of 13th Age seminars at GenCon. Which turns out to be exactly the same as my seminar schedule at GenCon. One seminar a day, and I'll be using the Pelgrane booth as my main home base during the show. I get to team up with ASH and Gareth for a couple seminars on adventure and monster design, with Ruth Tillman (CthulhuChick) and Mike Shea and Wade for another on GMing, and then there's a Year One seminar with Simon and Wade.

If you're not going to GenCon and you still want to hear me run a game, the Reverend En Fuego's crew at BJ's Geek Nation just started posting the first installment of the game I ran for them using 13 True Ways characters. I admit that the full session didn't get around to including a lot of gaming. The character creation process took me by surprise. I usually run demos freeform and just respond to what the table gives me, but for once I thought, "Hey, I'll have something ready and actually bring minis and monster stats." So I made the mistake of preparing three different battle encounters that I thought I'd be able to choose for an action-packed first session. Of course the players surprised me with something I really wasn't ready for, so we're going to get into the meat of the adventure the next session. Was character creation and story set up fun? Oh yeah. Especially if you'll enjoy learning from my mistakes.

Most all the monsters I had planned to introduce to the BJ's Geek Nation crew were from the 13th Age Bestiary. Which coincidentally had its PDF-only version go on sale at the Pelgrane shop and on DriveThruRPG yesterday.

Meanwhile Catalyst has released the full rules for Shadowrun: Crossfire as a PDF and we have confirmation that there are going to be many boxes of the game for sale at the show! I'm not going to be helping with Crossfire stuff as much as some people in Fire Opal, I'll be more focused on 13th Age, but I will help with a Crossfire event or two and teach a few friends how to play.

Speaking of product that will be at GenCon, 13 True Ways has shipped, apparently just ever-so-slightly behind our friend Bruce Cordell's Kickstarter book, The Strange. But that's OK because Bruce started his book long after.... oh. Right. OK. The point is: 13 True Ways will also reach many people soon and will also be at GenCon!

And even as 13 True Ways is en route, the wonderful secret 13th Age project that Jonathan and ASH and I are working on is going to be announced this Sunday! ASH and I will be able to talk about the early stages of the design at GenCon.

This is us in Glorantha!

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Fire Opal and Moon Design have announced the identity and Kickstarter starting date (August 27!) for our wild new 13th Age book!

13th Age in Gloranthais a supplement that will bring 13th Age's d20-rolling storytelling style to mythic adventures in Greg Stafford's world of Glorantha.

I've overjoyed about the project. There is a lot I want to say about the team (Jonathan! ASH! Jeff! Jan!) and our plans and the collaboration with Moon Design. But I'm getting ready to fly to GenCon tomorrow and I've already typed out a lot of what needs to be said at this point in sections of the 13thAgeInGlorantha.com website called WHAT? and DRAFT OUTLINE.

So for now, here's a story about the triptychs below that depict me and my wife Lisa as young adults, middle-aged souls, and clan elders. Stefano Gaudiano painted us as potential members of the clan ring for the Gloranthan computer/iOS game King of Dragon Pass.



Lisa was happy about the inclusion, but then slightly less happy when she turned out to have been included as a priestess of Uralda, the cow goddess, while I got to be an Eurmali trickster!

There were two saving graces. First, Lisa's Gloranthan avatar also appeared as a priestess of the Earth queen, Ernalda, and that was alright. Second, the first time that artist Stefano Gaudiano met Lisa, he jogged across the wide lawn of Olympic Park Institute to catch up with her and said, "Oh! You must be Lisa! I am so sorry I did not meet you before I painted you! You are so much prettier than in the photo I saw, I wish I had met you in person."

Bravo, Stefano.

And bravo for David Dunham and Robin Laws and Greg Stafford, the main architects of King of Dragon Pass, because if you're curious about Glorantha now that we're bringing 13th Age to the world, King of Dragon Pass is a marvelous playable introduction. It worked splendidly for Lisa, who is not ordinarily a roleplaying gamer.

Amusingly, KoDP didn't work quite so well for 13th Age in Glorantha collaborator ASH LAW because he just wanted to go exploring and on heroquests, not take care of his herds and his crops. His clans kept dying of starvation just as he was about to accomplish great things. In ASH's defense, 13th Age in Glorantha IS going to be all about the exploring and the heroquesting, so I may tease him about his lack of clan stewardship, but he's on the right track for our book!

Another place to get an introduction to Glorantha, if you are at GenCon, would be to visit the Moon Design booth or catch the Introduction to Glorantha panel at 6 pm Thursday at Crowne Plaza: Victoria Station C/D. There's also another Glorantha panel that looks like it will be excellent earlier on Thursday, Gaming as Mythic Exploration.

Is the final 13th Age in Glorantha book going to look like the draft outline that's up on the web? To some extent, I think, just as Lisa and I seem to be following trajectories akin to what Stefano traced for us in Glorantha!

If you are dedicated 13th Age player, have no fear, we're going to treat this book with the same love and innovation we put into 13th Age, the Bestiary, and 13 True Ways. If you're a Glorantha fan, I hope you'll come along with us as we play through the myths.

a few of the things I learned at GenCon

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People love runes.

How the hipster burned his mouth. 

Ed Greenwood's helpful aide, whose name I never caught, can most memorably be referred to an Elminion. 

Sandy Petersen's upcoming Gloranthan Gods War game is the answer to many of my childhood prayers. My grown-up self is feeling pretty good about it too, and as an added bonus we could use some of the minis in 13th Age in Glorantha!

E-Bay sagely eliminated the sale of souls on its auction site, ruling that souls are either non-existent or human remains, and in either case, sale of souls doesn't fly. Ken, who frequently writes about stuff, observed, "That's what Etsy is for."

The one thing we can all be grateful to Margaret Thatcher for is Warhammer 40K. 40Kcouldn't have happened without her. Thatcher had to soften up the area first. 

Don't ask Will Hindmarch to fetch your balloon off the ceiling unless you are prepared to run. 

When you ask the only nanny who has ever been admitted to the assassin's guild to take care of the baby, it's best to specify precisely what you mean by that. (Thanks, Cthulhuchick!). 

Feng Shui 2 = More Monkeys with Helix Rippers. Atlas Games Kickstarter in September and I'm there with hells on. 

The Priestess Says Dance!

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The 13th Age in Glorantha Kickstarter is live! 

I'm ecstatic that we're rolling.

And we *are* rolling. Jan Pospisil's dark troll priestess bangs the drum and Kickstarter is dancing! (Jan's art is from the Guide to Glorantha and he'll be doing similarly splendid work for our new book.)

See you on the heroquest.

Adding Uz (aka dark trolls) to 13th Age

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We just announced another stretch goal for the 13th Age in Glorantha Kickstarter and it's a doozy. Looks like this:

$60,000 – New Chapter: Uz Rule Darkness

A full chapter on using Gloranthan trolls as PCs, with playable myths and a new Uz* class that taps into many troll goddesses and gods. (*Also accessible to Darkness-rune humans!)

We started on this path when when the earlier $50,000 Enter Zorak Zoran stretch goal that we're presently scooting towards introduced trolls as an Elder Race.

Heck, we *started* on this path when I wanted the dancing troll priestess who appears in the blog post just below this post to be on the cover of our 13th Age in Glorantha postcards at GenCon! But I didn't want to come out and say it from the start because the treatment of Uz/trolls as a fully playable race unlocks my vision for the book.

The default way to play 13th Age in Glorantha is going to be with an eclectic (let's not call them motley!) band of adventurers from different pantheons who worship different gods with diverse powers. The world is under assault by Chaos. Heroquests that used to be solved by Orlanth's air powers alone now require new allies. Chaos monsters that have stolen portions of each pantheon's power can most easily be defeated by warriors whose powers cover a runic spectrum instead of sticking to only a single clan, a single tribe.

Of course Glorantha savants will be able to run many other flavors of campaign. But for 13th Age players new to the world, the important thing is to outline a few central pillars (Orlanth is Storm King, Ernalda is Earth Queen, Humakt is Death's Champion) and riff from there. When Uz Rule Darkness enters the book as a central pillar, we broaden the adventuring party beyond Orlanthi & Friends--or we redefine who can count as friends.

In Gloranthan terms, Dragon Pass is going through a variation of I Fought We Won, when unlikely allies have to bond together. Adventuring parties look a lot like they did in early RQ when most of us combined heroes from diverse pantheons.

In 13th Age terms, the Uz are the first race that comes with its own class! Talents in the Uz class let you focus on insect-transformation powers (the god Gorakikki) or spirit-summoning (Kyger Litor), battle (Karrg), throwing expendable trollkin at your problems (TBD, but possibly Kyger Litor again) or even healing (Xiola Umbar). Yeah, it's one of those druid-style classes, you could have a whole party of Uz without repeating much. And this class will be fully playable in any 13th Age campaign, in fact just lifting the Uz and dropping them into a 13th Age game is one of the straightforward translations from Glorantha to a version of the Dragon Empire.You wouldn't even necessarily need the dark trolls themselves, if you wanted to make it a human thing. Or maybe a half-orc or dark elf thing . . . .

Uz Rule Darkness isn't our next stretch goal. In fact there's a marvelous goal involving the Chaos demon known as the Crimson Bat that comes first, that I'm going to write about soon. But I'm talking about Uz now because we're in the middle of the Enter Zorak Zoran goal, the first bite of the troll. Just as the Zorak Zoran stretch goal is going to add new playable myths to Glorantha, this new chapter that covers many Uz is likely to spin us into new myth cycles in which the trolls are protagonists. Given the central vision of the Chaos-assault upon the world, even the Uz need some help. Crunchy-tasty surface people end being useful for something other than food. It's gonna be a romp!

Sprinkling touches of Glorantha through all your worlds

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Explaining 13th Age to people was pretty easy. "Jonathan was the lead designer of 3rd Edition D&D. I was the lead designer of 4th Edition. We've gamed together for around 15 years and have always played in each other's campaigns. So with 13th Age, we went ahead and designed the indie-touched d20 rolling fantasy game we want to play together!"

There was more to it than that, but that's the gist. 

13th Age in Gloranthais a little harder to explain. Let's see. "Jonathan and I both loved Glorantha from the moment we met its world of myths and heroes who learn secrets of power from the gods. In fact, the game that originally carried us into Glorantha, RuneQuest, took us both out of D&D for many years. Now that we have 13th Age flying, we've figured out how to take our d20-rolling dungeon-crawling storytelling game and apply it to creating co-created monster slaying, mythcrawling, and world saving campaigns in Glorantha, the types of games we dreamt of playing with RQ but couldn't quite get the system to handle." 

Well, that's all true! But many of the 13th Age players who get hold of the new book aren't going to be using it at first to run Glorantha campaigns. People are going to be looting the book for things to use in their existing or next-in-planning Dragon Empire campaigns, or whatever they're running from their homebrewed campaign batches. 

I'm going to be running some 13th Age in Glorantha games. I'm also going to be running some Dragon Empire 13th Age games. So as another perspective on explaining 13th Age in Glorantha, I'm going to spend the rest of this blog writing about a few of the ways I'm going to use the 13G book when I'm running the Dragon Empire. (And yes, 13G is my preferred acronym for 13th Age in Glorantha.) Of course you can apply these to any campaign world you play 13th Age in. 

Drafting the Earth Priestess Class
Ernalda is the earth goddess, the queen of the pantheon that's headed by the air god, Orlanth. Orlanth gets to rule because Ernalda says he can.The class that's devoted to Ernalda is the earth priestess. Unlike some of the other classes and class variants in 13G, the earth priestess is going to be something entirely new, a class that's all about providing synergies to multiple members of the party depending on the other characters that are in the party. The metaphor for the way in which the earth priestess treat her allies is as family. She provides unique bonuses to characters they can't gain any other way and she also provides more and more synergies when characters from different pantheons mix within her 'Ernaldan family.' As a leader character, she also has a lot of say in how her gifts are used. The goal is a class that's less techy than the commander but just as likely to be telling allies what to do or how to do it.  

I know two players in my Wednesday night game who love this type of synergistic play. And the simple way it's going to be accessible (and sensible!) within 13A games is through an icon you might have heard echoes of in the paragraph above: the Priestess! Treating diverse talents as family? Embracing characters devoted to other icons and providing a common purpose? Yeah, the earth priestess class says Priestess from the start. 

Gloranthan Gods that Effectively Provide Powers Associated with the Icons!
The earth/Priestess highlights one of the contributions 13G is going to make to 13th Age character design and concepts. 

Since the early days of 13th Age playtesting, we've had people asking for powers and feats and spells that are directly dependent on specific icon relationships. Though you'll find traces of the icon-centered approach in places like the sorcerer's talents and the chaos mage, I've avoided this design direction for the most part. 

Partly that's because when you're designing the basics of classes, you don't want to screen interesting pieces off behind a single story/roleplaying element. Partly it's because we've been extremely focused on creating playable mechanics that as many characters as possible can use. When I've had interesting ideas for mechanics that only fit a small number of characters, I've usually set them aside and concentrated on mechanics that will get wider use. Not to mention that when I've let things that were icon-specific slide through into playtest drafts, playtesters have given me hell! 

But Glorantha alters the design dynamic. For Glorantha, we're designing powers and spells that apply only to worshippers of Ernalda the earth queen, or Kyger Litor the terrifying mother of darkness, or Orlanth the storm king. We have to be specific to capture the essential mythical pillars the world is based on. 

What that means for 13th Age in the Dragon Empire campaigns is that you will get to map the Gloranthan gods to your campaign's icons. Ernalda sure sounds like the Priestess, but maybe in your campaign the High Druid is all about unifying disparate forces against the Emperor, so characters with icon relationships with the High Druid will also make sense as earth priestesses. 

Orlanth and the wind lords are a more interesting case. Depending on the 13th Age campaign you're running, you might decide that powers and spells and class variants that relate to Orlanth could be chosen by character with positive or conflicted relationships with the Elf Queen, High Druid, just possibly the Great Gold Wyrm, and also strangely enough the Emperor! We'll map out the campaign dynamics suggested by these choices. All of these choices could make sense, and as a bit of player empowerment there will also be the option for a character connected to the Crusader or the Prince of Shadows making a case for why they have powers connected to the air and the storm. 

The end result is going to be a wide range of interesting talents, powers, spells, and feats designed to be fully compatible with all other 13th Age powers. But for a change, these talents and spells will make sense associated with specific icons. They will tap into Glorantha's deep mythic approach to its gods and goddesses and you get to control the translation of that approach to your campaign's icons. 

dark trolls, meet the Dragon Empire

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The big troll chapter kicked into 13th Age in Glorantha Tuesday!

That sentence could be parsed a few ways, so let's work it out again. The Uz Rule Darkness chapter is going to be a big chapter and it's going to be about trolls, who are also big, though not generally as big as they are in games from the Tolkien and Gygax traditions.

We're going to spend a whole lot of 13th Age in Glorantha making sure our trolls are as awesome as when they erupted into Glorantha in Trollpak. But that's future typing. Today I just wanna mention a couple fun things I might do with Gloranthan trolls when I'm running 13th Age in the Dragon Empire setting of our Pelgrane books instead of running games in Glorantha.

This isn't any type of  'official' design talk. This is me coming up with stuff I'd throw into a campaign. Ah, alternate-world Glorantha variants: this is a gaming homecoming! This first idea riffs on Dragon Empire history. If you end up using it, I'll probably want to hear about it, or about other actual campaign play with your own bring-in-the-Uz notions.

Option A: Levered Up from the Darkness
The story starts centuries ago when the dark elves poisoned the underworld to get at the dwarves. As collateral impact the drow hadn't anticipated, their poison also hit the trolls.

Deep down, down below the roots of the earth, far below the halls and mineshafts of the dwarves, there had been nothing but Darkness and the endless caverns of the trolls. That changed when the drow poison dropped into the troll's perfect Darkness. Escaping deeper failed. Fleeing sideways failed. The trolls moved up through the worst of the poison, past budding living dungeons (tastes like mad drow disease), through the dark elves themselves (tastes great!), through the dwarves that saw them as another insane threat erupting from the underworld (densely filling!), and up to caves and complexes near the surface (yummy treats everywhere!).

Much of the troll mythology we know from Glorantha doesn't apply when the horrible surface world the trolls have had to migrate to is the Dragon Empire. So let's introduce some new Dragon Empire riffs. Elves and dwarves are still obviously the trolls' terrible enemies. Riffing on the 13th Age icon histories opens up an immediate twisted variant that's hard to resist.

The trollkin curse that prevents trolls from reliably birthing trolls and instead curses them with trollkin (tastes like depression) is from the dark elf poison. The drow poison didn't drive trolls crazy the way it affects most everyone else, instead it warped their offspring. How? Well, our Glorantha book is going to have trollkin stats. But in this campaign, what if trollkin count as orcs once they've come to the surface world? And this Orc Lord who has shown up in the 13th Age? What if he's actually an empowered trollkin, or at least trollkin-friendly, and he only failing to conquer everything because he keeps dividing his forces to slay elves, dwarves, trolls, and Dragon Empire humans all at the same time?

I like this path better than putting trolls themselves in the Orc Lord's camp. Dark trolls have too much self-respect and way too much matriarchal dignity to put up with orcish crap. But trollkin? With a bit of a twist they might get behind an Orc Lord. And this lets the trolls maintain their strange status as terrible-people-who-somehow-still-on-the-side-of-order-vs.-chaos.

There are other twists and turns in this plotline, but they'd be connected to campaign events instead of obvious from the start. You'd think that the elves and dwarves and trolls might manage to unite against this version of the Orc Lord, but it's going to be tough. Particularly since the Dwarf King is freaking about the fact that the dark trolls in this particular campaign *love* the taste of true magic items, something they never got back in the deep homeland.

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