13th Age Pirates of Atlantis Available Now!
A full 13th Age campaign, from 1st to 10th level. Sail to far off lands and planes, have wild adventures, and stop the Scurvy Sea Dog Fangos from becoming a god of the sea. Pirates, Atlantis (they’re in the title), Fungus Folk, Vampire art collectors, the Mother of Mysteries, Three-Faced NPCs (way better than two!), so much fun.
Hail Atlantis!
John Marvin Interviewed on New, Old, and Planned Games
Listen to the wonderful folks on the Iconic podcast ask me to talking games. Although their focus is on 13th Age games, we also got into 5E and Numenera. Listen in!
Travel the Planes with Ash Law
Good News Everyone!
Ash Law is going to write a group of related 13th Age Roleplaying game adventures that include planar travel! This is going to Epic.
You probably know Ash from the Midgard Bestiary (13th Age Compatible), Deep Magic (13th Age Compatible), 13th Age: The Archmage's Orrery, 13th Age Bestiary, Lions & Tigers & Owlbears: The 13th Age Bestiary 2, and so many more.
It's early days yet (we don't even have a name!), but this be will at least 25,000 words of breathtaking adventure. It will be one book with at least two different adventures (one champion, one epic). There will be a new area to set your own adventures in.
We're going to do all that. But wouldn't more be better? We thought so too, so in April 2018, we'll do a Kickstarter to see if we can add more adventure, more art, more monsters, and more excitement.
And take your players to another plane.
Gelatinous Dragon
Gelatinous Dragon
Here's some art from the Gods and Icons Upgrade Pack, for the 13th Age Roleplaying Game. I was going to add a gelatinous owlbear, which seems so 13th Age, but I worried the fine folks at Fire Opal might do the same and then think of the confusion. ;)
This is obviously the huge version of the gelatinous dragon, but don't worry, we have the stats for a large one as well.
21 new monsters make the Gods and Icons Upgrade pack the mini-bestiary you need now!
Art by Daniell and Garret Reeser
The Dread Unicorn Speaks
The Gods Have Spoken ships, The Gods and Icons Player's Companion goes on sale, and a look at games to come.
The Gods Have Spoken
We've shipped The Gods Have Spoken, a supplement for 5th Edition D&D full of new gods, new domains, new character customizations, new creatures, new magic items, a holy weapon creation system, and a brand new set of rules for using factions in your games that let your players decide what factions come into play.
What's Next?
5E
Factions and Conditions Cards Cards to track how factions feel about the PCs, plus cards that track conditions such as Blinded on PCs and NPCs. Less looking up rules, more fighting dragons! (in design)
The Gray World An introductory 5E adventure that showcases The Gods Have Spoken. Comes with pregens, and serves as an example of how to use the new faction system. (in editorial and playtest)
13th Age
Brightvarna Red
Flash fiction and epic poetry from the world of Gods and Icons. The last deliverable from the Gods and Icons Kickstarter. (in editorial)
The Gods and Icons Upgrade Pack
This supplement will include new artwork of the three pantheons, a list of saints to use in your games, and new 13th Age creatures that have ties to the gods and the icons from Gods and Icons. (in development)
Numenera
The Sun Below: That's How the Light Gets In
A transdimensional adventure focusing who, or what, is draining the power of The Sun Below. When PCs come up against adversaries that can't be hurt, and won't listen to reason, the PCs just might have to run a con game with transdimensional stakes! (in design)
On Sale Now!
The Gods and Icons Player's Companion. On sale at DriveThruRPG
Icons and Conditions Review
Icons and Conditions cards for the 13th Age Roleplaying Game has been reviewed by The Redacted Files.
"I really like using cards to track conditions... focus can stay on combat and not looking up rules."
"Icon cards are a clever addition to 13th Age game play... These cards make it easy to track who you have a relationship with and what the roll was at a glance."
Icons and Conditions
While I'm waiting on our editor to do a pass through The Gods Have Spoken, I've started designing the first Gods and Icons card deck: Icons and Conditions.
Icons and Conditions
I love Adobe InDesign. This is design mode, the real cards won't have all those guide lines.
Icon Cards
The icon cards are for when a player gets a 5 or a 6 on an icon relationship roll. You give them the card, and they put it 5 or 6 up, depending on what they rolled. If they got a 5 and a 6, they put it sidewards, and once a relationship roll is used up, they turn the card with the remaining roll up.
Even if you use different icons, it's easy to map those from Gods and Icons to your own icons.
Condition Cards
Condition cards will contain text describing the nine conditions found in the 13th Age Roleplaying Game. You can pass these out to players who get stunned or whatnot, or put them in front of you to remind yourself how these conditions work.
Lots of Cards
Their will be multiples of cards so you can give out the same icon or condition to different players.
Coming Soon
We'll be using Drive Thru Cards for printing these, and we'll have print-and-play as well.
When a Big Scene Becomes Small, Part I
Sometimes when you are GMing, scenes end quicker than you expect. The PCs enter the scene, and immediately trigger the exit. In most cases this isn't a problem. You find out what scene they want to do next and make it happen. Ripping through an adventure at warp speed can be fun.
Sometimes it is a problem.
Sometimes a big action scene turns into a yawn.
Maybe the PCs got lucky. Or the players were just that good. Which is wonderful most of the time, but this was the boss you been foreshadowing for four sessions. And the players don't look pumped, they look sad because they were expecting an exciting challenge, and found a marshmallow.
Extending Combat
A major fight that ends in one round feels anti-climatic. Some players won't mind, but many will.
There's a few tricks to keep an important fight going. The trick is to not negate the players' victory, just keep the fun going a while longer.
Reinforcements You already have the stats for your opponents, and as they are mowed down, have more of the same show up. To preserve the player's victory, use less of them, and/or have them show up at some disadvantage.
- The PCs hear the reinforcements coming, allowing them time (1 round!) to prepare.
- The reinforcements have to climb up a ladder to get to the PCs.
- The reinforcements are second stringers, and have less hit points.
- The reinforcements are quick to flee if the PCs are obviously winning. This lets you keep the fight going, but not turn it into a slog.
Fake Boss! The boss you planned for just went down, and then you have the *real* boss you just made up step in to continue the fight. To give the PCs their victory, the first boss drops an important item, something that has "made to fight the next-boss" written all over it. The anti-undead sword-cane of doom, the reveal-invisible dust of St. Silverius, the armor shattering bolt of victory...
Or the victory can be tactical. They have the "real-boss" at a disadvantage, and you give them a bonus to show them that. For example, you could give them advantage in 5E, increment the escalation die in 13th Age, or lower the difficulty for the PCs by 1 in Numenera.
Great, but what is this new boss? Who can make up a boss on the fly? Not me; even in a rules light game like Numenera, a boss should offer unique challenges.
Your choices are to find one quickly or make one quickly.
Find one from an adventure, bestiary, or other game supplement. That could work, but might take a while. What's the next boss you planned on using? Bring them on now? Or a weaker version of the next boss, just add a few weaknesses? This could be good foreshadowing. It helps if the two bosses are thematically related to each other. Cultists to the same dark god, dragons working for the same queen, and so on.
Jack in the Box This is easy and can be a lot of fun for the players. They bring down the demon, and they look at each other. "That was easy." Too easy.
Make one or more creatures get back up after they fall dead. If they are not undead, have them rise as undead. Drop their offensive and defensive powers a notch, give them typical undead features, and resume the battle.
If they are undead, you could make it obvious that a "dark ray came from the unholy altar and when it touched the creature, it jumped up, ready to continue the battle." Now the PCs know they will have to stop the altar from doing that or this could go on and on. Since you just made this up, let whatever crazy idea they come up with work.
I built a Jack in the Box into my 13th Age adventure The Tower in the Mist: Too Easy? Consider Fulvos coming back as a zombie mutant dragon the round after he goes down, with half hit points and -1 on all attacks, defenses, and damage.
13th Age is a high hit points game, so I cut the zombie Fulvos' hit points in half. He's up and undead, just long enough to scare the players and make the encounter fun. And who doesn't like a zombie mutant dragon?
Extending a Chase
Say a big exciting chase is over because your PCs caught the vampire with the horse/Mercedes/hover-bike in the first block, and you wanted it to drag the party to a major plot point that has to be outside town?
You can make the chase continue, but you need to do so in a way you don't negate their victory.
If it's not the vampire itself that's the goal, you could have the creature throw the magic item/deed/holo-chip to a confederate who carries it away. The party still has a high value prisoner, who may have other valuables, and they can follow the confederate.
If the vampire is the goal, you could have it escape at great cost. The PCs might be annoyed they haven't caught it yet, but they've wounded it terribly, and made it drop something valuable. It's keeping its distance, but the PCs know they are winning.
Part II: When Social Scenes End Too Quickly
Surprise!
Almost every roleplaying game that supports combat scenes has a rule for surprise. The surprised side gets some disadvantage, usually for the first round. Today I’m talking about when the player characters get surprised by the GM’s characters (NPCs or GMCs depending on your system), not the other way around.
Why bother with surprise? How does it translate into fun at your table?
- The default kind of fun is a more challenging combat. This is a great way to stress the PCs, and is particularly fun if the players are getting just a little too cocky. How long has it been since the players sweated the outcome of a combat? Standing there with targets on their faces while the opposition gets free shots is sure to get their attention.
- Surprise can help in world building. Maybe here in drow territory, drow have ambush points set up all over the place. You can tilt the odds of whatever surprise mechanics your system has to make it favor the drow in these encounters. As the players venture deep underground, drow ambushes become part of their world. “We go north, we need to be extra careful for drow surprises.”
- Surprise can help in shared world building. If the dice dictate the PCs are surprised, you can ask the players “Why are you surprised?” They can come up with all sorts of explanations you would never think of: “I’m so tired. Henrik’s ghost stories didn’t let me sleep last night.”
- Surprise can help build story. An antagonist might run ahead of the PCs, helping potential adversaries set up ambushes. Maybe it’s because they feel the PCs have cheated them. The GM can leave clues such as “this is the third ambush in a row that has the hallmarks of a Dr. Wild setup. The doctor sure seems to have it in for you.”
- Avoiding surprise by roleplaying can be rewarding. The players may meet someone who knows about the ambush ahead. If the players make friends, they find out about it. If the players are all murder-hobos, they’ll never learn that information.
- Avoiding surprise can be a good use of resources. Maybe use of a magic spell can reveal the ambush ahead. In a game like 13th Age, spending an icon boon could have icon send a message about the ambush. In a 5E type of game, a PC that is part of a faction may get the info as a faction favore. In a GUMSHOE game, players can spend their Sense Trouble points. The players can feel very good that they avoided walking into that trap, by spending a resource wisely to avoid it.
- In some systems, surprising the PCs can end up giving them resources. In Numenera and other Cypher System games, the GM can just declare the party is surprised as part of a group-wide GM Intrusion. Each PC then gets an experience point.
How have you used combat surprises to make your game more fun?
Pregenerated Characters for Tower in the Mist
We've added a link to download the pre-gens for Tower in the Mist. What's different? These are for double sided printing, they all have the icons on the back. Enjoy!
Intriguing Play
My home group recently finished a campaign. I asked for comments, and everyone agreed, I liked the previous campaign, but this was better. Well, that’s great, it must be I just keep getting awesomer. Or not.
People had many reasons, but a big thing for all the players is they felt more connected to the world. Like what they did mattered. Specifically, they connected to the world through intrigue.
At the end of the Numenera campaign (which people liked), I asked what they wanted more of next campaign. “Intrigue,” they said. (And more visual props, but that’s another post.)
Intrigue. How do I do that? It really helped that the 13th Age RPG has leaders of factions ready to intrigue against each other, the icons. I use the icons from Gods and Icons, but you can intrigue among any group of icons.
The Game of Icons
One thing we know is that in 13th Age, when one age ends and the next begins, some icons survive into the next, and some get replaced. That struggle for iconic survival turned out be the axis around which we spun the campaign. To keep everyone guessing I made morally ambiguous versions of some heroic and villainous icons. More gray--less black and white.
While I took advantage of a 13th Age feature, I’m sure most 13th Age campaigns don’t focus on intrigue. You don’t need a system with icons to do this. In pretty much every rpg setting you can find organizations or factions. Find out which ones would be fun for your players to defend or attack, and set them off against each other.
You can bring in agents of one faction who bad-mouth other factions, and drop hints such as, “as the age ends, all bets are off.” I used 13th Age icon agents for this.
I stole some conspiracy ideas from Night’s Black Agents, even coming up with a conspiracy pyramid (they call it the “conspyramid”) of a drow house controlled by Demogorgon who wanted to replace the current icon of hell. (Those of you who subscribe to the Dread Unicorn Games newsletter already have our version of Demogorgon, 13th Age style.)
Lower level nodes in the pyramid don’t know much, but (mostly) follow orders from above. The top of the pyramid was Demogorgon, trying to replace the current icon of hell. The PCs engage the bottom levels first, and climb up the pyramid. The final showdown with the big D was in the abyss, as traditional.
Intrigue games have a lot of NPCs, and I’m too lazy to make up tons of NPCs that never get used.
I stole a trick from some GUMSHOE improv campaigns (The Armitage Files and the Dracula Dossier). I came up with a bunch of NPCs, but did not decide if they were allies, enemies, or interested neutrals until the players met them. Instead of making 10 allies, 10 antagonists, and 10 neutrals, I made up names, descriptions, and quirks for 10 NPCs, and made 1 – 3 bullet points for each about how they would be played if they were self-interested, a house loyalist unaware of the demons pulling the strings, or knowingly working for Demogorgon.
For example:
Jandril: Female Drow Knight
- White scar on left side of face over dark blue skin
- Wears a red cape
Self-Interested
- One day I’ll be captain. Can I use the PCs to further my goal?
- Some sort of deadly political infighting going on among the other knights. Best to keep out of it.
House Loyalist
- All these demons and devils should make our house invincible. Time to move on the other houses!
Working for Demogorgon
- Honor guard for the demonic dragons when they hatch.
When the players were investigating the drow house, trying to stop Demogorgon's plan, they met Jandril. On the spot, I chose Self Interested and she became a possible ally and source of information for the PCs.
I’m not the only 13th Age GM thinking this way. Check out the Heavy Metal GM’s take on this.
PS
Our current campaign is the Dracula Dossier. Great fun for an intrigue loving group.
Gods and Icons Review by the Redacted Files
"Overall, if you’re looking to make your campaign of 13th Age a little more expansive, I would highly recommend picking up Gods and Icons." "The gods aspect of Gods and Icons is particularly useful for me."
"This supplement lists new items to give to your players based on Icon rolls. What’s really cool is they include tables that are divided up by class..."
This is a very in depth review by someone who knows 13th Age well. Read the whole review here.
Gods and Icons Now In Print
The print versions of Gods and Icons and the Gods and Icons Player's Companion are now available. We hope you enjoy them!
Tower in the Mist Fan Art!
We've got some great fan art that came out of the Tower in the Mist playtest. Check it out!
The layout of Tower in the Mist is done, and it's in final edit now.
Heavy Metal GM Review of Gods and Icons
Moving on to the actual content, all I can immediately say is , “Wow.” Gods and Icons is a very relevant supplement...the flavor and overall setting of it is invaluable.
Let me just begin with saying that this is a MASSIVE supplement. There is so much information and so many resources that can be pulled from this, it’s incredible. The page count is 162 pages …
Read Sean Clark's full review at the Heavy Metal GM: Review of Gods and Icons
For Players and GMs: Coming Soon!
For players we have Gods and Icons: Player's Companion. This is the subset of Gods and Icons that targets players, read more here!
For GMs we have Tower in the Mists, and introductory 13th Age adventure that highlights all the cool content in Gods and Icons. Read all about it!
Gods and Icons Layout
Layout for Gods and Icons is underway. Alison is editing the final manuscript in word while I layout as much as she's already done. So far I haven't been able to catch up with her.
If you've see our Sun Below adventures for Numenera, the layout will look familiar. But not exactly the same. Different design and font choices for heroic fantasy vs. science fantasy.
And if you haven't, check them out!
The Sun Below: City on the Edge, and The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady.
Ghost Lake Preview
Ghost Lake
Here's a little Gods and Icons preview from Connor Marvin. This and other Unhallowed Places will include sections on using them for both roleplaying and combat settings.
A secluded mountain lake, referred to by locals as “Ghost Lake” due to the number of disappearances, strange lights, and terrifying stories surrounding it, is a day’s hike through rocky mountain terrain. On the surface it appears to be an ordinary lake. Under the lake, however, there is a sunken temple. A spell put on the temple long ago created an invisible bubble surrounding it. Fish still swim through this magic sphere, but once it is entered by air-breathing creatures they fall through to the temple's grounds and are able to breathe as normal.
The temple compound consists of one central building surrounded by statues. The columns of the central temple have spiraling patterns of snake scales carved in them, and the apex of the temple is surmounted by a stylized pinecone. The statues that surround the temple are carved snakes coiled around each-other into double-helixes, with stone bat-wings emerging from the snakes’ backs near the top. Strings of seaweed float from the lake floor as if in water, and sunlight filters from the surface of the lake forty feet above.
13 Rumors About Ghost Lake
- Hell fighter Lord Ikal periodically visits Ghost Lake, and each time, drops in a small, black box.
- Those who sleep in the temple enter the dreams of Aurum Rex, king of the metallic dragons.
- Dwarf King Thorbal's banished daughter, Princess Kori, hides in the temple. She’s been changed.
- A promise made in the temple must be kept, or one's very soul is forfeit.
- Visiting the temple ensures healthy children.
- A ghost dragon guards the lake.
- Infernals cannot enter the blue waters. Or leave them.
- If you swallow even a drop of the lake water, you will be inhabited by ghosts.
- Only the dead can leave the temple.
- Black cats surround the lake during full moons, hissing and spitting at the water.
- The waters heal broken bones.
- Baron Von Vorlatch the vampire necromancer, has cursed the lake.
- Dunking yourself in the lake cures all disorders of the mind.
Art by Sparrow Beurer
You can see more of Sparrow Beurer's art in The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady, on sale now at DriveThruRPG.
Gods and Icons Comes Together
We've got some great playtesting feedback, which really helps. The art is rolling in, the writing is almost done, and editing is underway. Next up: layout!
I wanted to share this lovely picture of Lady Akuma by Jeshields. People say terrible things about the Lady, but they don't know the half of it. Maybe she's just misunderstood. ;)
We were so lucky to find some great artists for Gods and Icons. Since I both love art and fail at the basics, I'm in awe of what people can turn my art specs into.
And let's not forget Supreme Commander Tyrvek! I'm pretty sure he's not misunderstood. ;)
James did a great job on Tyrvek standing alone, but I wanted to show him as leading an army. So James added the background and I love it!
Now that's it's August, our Christmas in July sale is over, but the savings don't stop! We lowered the price for both The Sun Below: City on the Edge to $2.49 and The Sun Below: Sleeping Lady to $6.49.
Keep on gaming!
John
One of these Heads is not like the Other!
Here's a little art preview from Gods and Icons by Jeshields. Why does the dragon queen have an undead head wrapped in silver chains? There must be a story there...
This is Ghiama, whose name was protected by Iconic Namer Jenn of the North. She liked the preliminary name so much she protected it so it wouldn't change. Hats off to Jenn of the North!