13th Age: Third Party Products Worth A Look

As an OGL product, 13th Age is available for third-party publishers to create compatible supplements, adventures, settings and more. They can also create their own games using its Archmage Engine.

Recently, Simon Rogers asked the 13th Age community which third party products they’d recommend. Here are their top favorites:

 

Amethyst: Apotheosis (Dias Ex Machina Games)

Which side will you choose? Which weapons will you wield? Earth is torn between the order of science and the chaos of fantasy. These two worlds cannot mix. Venture into lands once claimed by skyscrapers and factories, now overrun by elves, goblins, and dragons. Choose your path and commit to the quest. Monsters will hunt you; machines will track you. No gods will help you; no prophecies will choose you. The fate of the world rests with you. This rulebook includes:

  • Eleven playable species, twenty-one icon-like affiliations, over forty backgrounds.
  • Eight new classes, over 270 feats.
  • Players can now select legends to expand their characters at high levels.
  • High-tech equipment from revolvers to railcannons, pickup trucks to powered armor.
  • Over thirty new monsters.
  • New rules including vehicles and ranged combat which can be added to any game.

Book of Icons (Rite Publishing)

Icons are the mysterious and powerful figures that shape the world of the 13th Age Role-Playing Game. The Book of Icons takes a fresh look at the game’s icon rules and offers a cornucopia of new stuff to throw at your players.

Need a new twist for your campaign? Six new icons—each presented with themes, agents, gifts, and events that will set your creativity afire—all based on the Tarot Major Arcana will spice up your game:

  • The Adventurer
  • The Revolutionary
  • The Order
  • The Cult of One
  • The Monster
  • The Tempter

In addition, find sly characters, scheming organizations, and brain-twisting secret agendas that you can use as a toolkit to flesh out the world around your icons.

Dark Pacts & Ancient Secrets (Kinoko Games)

Dark Pacts & Ancient Secrets introduces six new classes that are compatible with the 13th Age Roleplaying Game: the monstrous Abomination, the destiny-shaping Fateweaver, the mind-bending Psion, the berserking Savage, the dashing Swordmage and the dark-souled Warlock.

Deep Magic (Kobold Press)

Deep Magic: 13th Age Compatible Edition is for 13th Age players who want new options that allow them to bend reality to their wills and perform spectacular feats of sword and sorcery. Designer ASH LAW brings an astounding variety of new magic options to the game, including:

  • 555 wizard spells ranging from clever tricks to summoning the World Serpent itself to wreak havoc
  • 4 new class talents that put wizard spells within the grasp of every class—play an arcane ranger, a spirit-calling barbarian, a time-warping commander or face-stealing trickster druid
  • 30 new schools of magic including the Cult of Ouroboros, the Red Inquisition and the Scholars of Dust, with guidelines for creating your own magical tradition
  • 5 magical campaign options: post-apocalyptic vril magic, the mysteries of the ley lines, a class-warfare arcanopunk campaign option, and more!

For GMs looking for new material, or players looking for character customization options, this massive tome is the book you’ve been dreaming of.

Gods and Icons (Dread Unicorn Games, LLC)

Never again find yourself stuck for a good Icon Relationship result. Pick from the tables or let the dice decide.

  • Hundreds of Icon Relationship results.
  • GM advice on tailoring the Icon Relationship result to the character.
  • Gods with suggested backgrounds for followers, paladins, clerics, and druids.
  • Three pantheons: the Bright Gods, the Thirsty Gods, and the Old Gods. Add these gods to your campaign or map their effects to your own gods.
  • Thirteen new icons. Use them or steal aspects and apply them to your own icons.
  • 58 new magic items, including bardic instruments and rules for designing your own holy swords. Not to mention a dozen new potions and more.
  • Dhampir: A new playable race for a new icon of the undead. And seven other player races.

You can use this book with the core icons, as the new icons are similar enough for you to just use the boons and complications from Gods and Icons without changing your existing campaign. Yet different enough to feel fresh, and give a new spin to a 13th Age Campaign that uses them. A perfect set of icons for a campaign rich in intrigue and mystery.

Icons of Parsantium (Ondine Publishing)

Parsantium is a melting pot, a cosmopolitan city where trade routes meet and great cultures collide. Inspired by real-life Byzantium with its rich Greco-Roman heritage, the setting is packed with characters, monsters and magic from the Tales of the Arabian Nights, ancient India and the Far East, alongside traditional medieval fantasy elements.

The influential NPCs described in depth throughout the book include the rulers of kingdoms, powerful priests, arcane and martial orders and their leaders, and monstrous beings, both malevolent and benign, including:

  • The wise Maharani of Sampur, daughter of a sun god and ruler of six kingdoms
  • The bloodthirsty Gnoll Khan of the Great Grass Sea
  • The devious Witch of Flotsam, fortune-teller to the nobility and priestess of a sinister cult
  • The vanara Grand Master of the Blue Lotus, enigmatic leader of the world’s greatest arcanists’ guild.
  • The rakshasa Rajah, frozen in ice at the peak of the Pillar of Heaven Mountains and plotting his return to rule the city once more.

This 45 page PDF contains:

  • Double page descriptions for each icon
  • New PC races – the gnoll and the vanara
  • Five pages of icon relationship dice results and adventure hooks
  • Secret Knowledge for the GM
  • Lands of Parsantium map by top fantasy cartographer Jared Blando
  • Foreword by 13th Age designer Rob Heinsoo

Written by Richard Green, author of Parsantium: City at the Crossroads and the Midgard Bestiary for 4th Edition D&D (Kobold Press), and featuring cover art by Joe Shawcross.

Midgard Bestiary (Kobold Press)

The Midgard Bestiary sends 100 weird, warped, and unpredictable new monsters your way. ASH LAW has redesigned the greatest monsters from the Midgard Campaign Setting for your 13th Age game. You’ll get:

  • Steam golems, ice maidens, and fellforged warriors
  • Dwarf mercenaries, marauders, and berserkers
  • Elf spellblades, mages, and theurges
  • Wizards, warmages, and alchemists
  • Iron ghouls, imperial ghasts, and spectral wolves
  • Adventure hooks for each monster and lists of things you’re likely to find on them
  • 13 Midgard icons including the all-new Master of Demon Mountain, Illuminated Brotherhood, and the Beloved Imperatrix of the elves
  • 9 new player character races including ghouls, gearforged, kobolds and ravenfolk

Get ready to face deadly foes from every corner of Midgard: the alleys of Zobeck, the empire of the ghouls, the courts of the shadow fey and the magic-blasted Wasted West.

Nocturne (Savage Mojo)

Meet Frankenstein’s monster with a vorpal sword…welcome to the realm of Dark Fantasy, and Gothic Horror for 13th Age! Within a twisted realm shaped by the malignant power of The Nightfall, your adventure comes to life using the Archmage Engine to explore the many lands of the realm. These lands are as varied as the denizens themselves, taking the place of traditional 13th Age Icons: good against evil, order against chaos, tyranny against freedom… but at every stage the lines are blurred.

For players Nocturne provides:

  • New options for adventurers: several custom classes such as the mysterious Bloodshire Slayer.
  • New races: the vampire, werebeast, and sallowfolk.
  • New equipment such as the diving suit for The Churn, so you can explore the mysterious depths of this watery “land”. Alternatively, there’s the fire sword, a non-magical item of ingenious technology which draws fuel from a reservoir in the handle.
  • New magic items such as Daemonic Wings, allowing your hero to fly. However, this is Nocturne and such magic comes with a price!

For GMs Nocturne provides:

  • A complete dark fantasy setting with tones of gothic horror, steampunk, clockpunk, and more. Every land of Nocturne is detailed, with maps, and packed with story hooks to spin adventures galore.
  • A dozen new Icons for your players to discover, twisted beings pulled here by The Nightfall. They rule the lands but battle in opposed pairs for control.
  • A complete campaign, in the style of Savage Mojo’s award-winning Suzerain setting.
  • A whole slew of side quests, short adventures to slot between the main beats of your gaming group’s grand adventure.
  • A sandbox of ideas to use in the Nightfall realm, or to incorporate in your own campaign world.

Welcome to Nocturne. The Nightfall is but a breath behind; if you have the courage and strength, you might just survive for one more day.

Special Mentions

Capsule Content by Aaron Roudabush

An accomplished designer, Aaron heads up online organized play for 13th Age. He also creates crowdfunded content for the Archmage Engine under the banner of Wolf Pack Games, and lately he’s been revealing details of a new setting, Shattered Horizons.

Deadly Delves: Reign of Ruin (Jon Brazer Enterprises)

Few third-party publishers support 13th Age as enthusiastically as Jon Brazer Enterprises. Deadly Delves: Reign of Ruin received 4.5 star rating from Endzeitgeist for its distinctive approach to a dragon-based adventure, and the well-done 13th Age conversion.

New Fighter Maneuvers and Talents (Quasar Knight Enterprises)

The first 13th Age compatible product by designer Ray Chapel got high marks from EZG for its “detailed and well-versed grasp [of] the rule-set”.  New Fighter Maneuvers & Talents  offers martial schools that enable players to customize the fighter class based on classic archetypes: the swashbuckling duelist, keen-eyed ranged combatant, heavy weapons master, and more.

The Escalated Barbarian (Dastow Games)

Whenever there’s an online discussion of third-party player options, the class-focused “Escalated” series from Dastow Games nearly always comes up. What’s interesting is that each one includes NPCs of the class in question, but they’re statted up as PCs, not as monsters. This could be quite useful for GMs who are looking for “mundane” foes based on PC classes, for an adventure that takes place in a city or town.

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