Author Archives: Rob Heinsoo

Book of the Underworld Cover Story

In a perfect world, I’d work up to revealing the final cover for Book of the Underworld, telling the step-by-step story of how it came to be and finally whipping the sheet off the easel. But that’s now how the internet works. So here’s the cover as painted by Lee Moyer using some original pencil […]

13th Sage: Day of the Black Pudding

Shards of the Broken Sky has more oozes than you can hold in just one dungeon. Stirring the ooze-pot, I realized that the original black pudding from page 240 of the 13th Age core rulebook is one of the worst-designed monsters in the game. Not if you’ve been playing 13th Age. No, if you’ve been […]

13th Sage: Escalate the Drama!

Want to heighten dramatic tension or foreshadow a huge battle far beyond what the PCs are accustomed to? Here are a couple of tricks you can do with the escalation die to achieve that. (For a change, I haven’t used either of these tricks yet—I’ve been playing lately instead of GMing. Maybe I can talk […]

13th Sage: Three-Part Disharmony

Wanna bend the rules a little and play a character who has the ultimate in conflicted relationships? Choose one icon that suits your character’s story best. Spend your three icon relationship points like so: take one relationship point that’s positive, one that’s conflicted, and one that’s negative. Yes, all with the same icon. What interwoven […]

13th Sage: Two Do’s & a Don’t

A funny thing happens over time with an RPG that you’ve designed: your opinions can change. As you play it, and as new designers bring fresh perspectives and approaches to the table, you discover some unexpected things that work really well, and some things that…could be better. With that in mind, here are  two do’s […]

13th Sage: Alternative Ability Scores & Very Interesting Things

Many 13th Sage columns come from moments when I realize that I’m playing the game slightly differently than I was playing it before. Today’s column features two small wrinkles that have been working well in our games. New Alternative Array Ability Scores: The first bit comes more from Jonathan than me. It’s something we put […]

13th Sage: Bad Wine, New Campaign

I’ve started running a new 13th Age campaign for my Fire Opal Games comrades and their families. The PCs are (apparently) questing to recover a goddess who most of the world has forgotten. The Elf Queen has several statues of the missing goddess in one of the halls she devotes to her friends, and she […]

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