When we first encountered the idea of flat damage, my high school gaming group refused to play that way. This was David Hargrave’s streamlined rules system, The Arduin Adventure, back in 1980. The game was a highly modified version of D&D, and no one rolled damage. Damage was flat. Your war hammer dealt 7 damage, […]
Author Archives: Jonathan Tweet
13 Age, and especially 13 True Ways, owes a surprisingly large amount to Dave Hargrave. In the 70s, Hargrave wrote the Arduin trilogy, three rulebooks that showed you how to run a high-energy D&D campaign filled with brilliant and over-the-top details. In effect, he was publishing d20 source material before it was strictly legit. Rob Heinsoo and […]
For the ancient Hebrews, the most powerful living men virtually ranked among the gods. Thanks to Plato, today we think of God as infinite, something beyond human scope. But ancient people hadn’t been taught about infinity, and they viewed their gods as finite. Their gods were immortal, but they were not all powerful or all […]
D&D 4E caused a lot of controversy with its self-healing rules. Thirteenth Age has its own self-healing rules. Here’s my take on the topic. My first self-healing rules were in 1992, in Over the Edge. It’s a modern-day RPG with no built-in healer class, so the characters needed to be able to heal up some […]
This year at GenCon, my best friend and I are promoting 13th Age, our new fantasy RPG for people who want more story and more open-ended rules. Twelve years ago at GenCon 2000, some new friends and I were promoting D&D 3E, my corporation’s fantasy RPG. At GenCon twelve years before that, in 1988, my […]