The soon-to-arrive 13th Age Glorantha (13G) book from Moon Design is more than 6/8ths of the way through layout. I’ll share some monster conversion notes from Glorantha to the Dragon Empire when the layout is complete and the book is available to order on BackerKit. For now, let’s look at a couple of mechanical elements […]
Author Archives: Rob Heinsoo
by Rob Heinsoo One of the great touches that Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan added to the unique hellholes he created for the upcoming Book of Demons is a customized random demon ability table for each hellhole. While developing the book, I realized that Gareth’s work was pointing to something that has bothered me for a while: I’m […]
by Rob Heinsoo I’ve known editors who agonize over the placement of a comma in a card game rulebook ten years after the game released . . . and other editors who nodded knowingly when I told the stories as what I thought was an example of caring way too much! My own nibbling regrets, […]
In the demonologist playtest I ran a week ago, the non-demonologist character in the party cast turn undead against a mixed group of zombie mooks and ghostly mooks. We were halfway through the attack when we all realized, no, this couldn’t be right, something was wrong with our results. I must have half-remembered an […]
Publishing Lions & Tigers & Owlbears: 13th Age Bestiary 2 feels like a celebration! As part of the fun, we’re offering sample monsters from the book to a few gaming and geek culture sites, and I’m taking a sage moment here to tease out the origin stories. Rakshasa: The rakshasa entry started with art. Lee […]
If you’re like me, you sometimes want the best villains of your campaign to escape a battle in order to become recurring villains. My usual 13th Age group knows that and does what it can to prevent the creation of yet another nemesis! I still get away with it occasionally, but I found myself thinking […]
by Rob Heinsoo Apologies from the garage-sanctum, but I’m pushing on three 13th Age deadlines for the end of the month so today’s column is another scoop from the archives. Before 13th Age was published, Jonathan ran a campaign in which the PCs gained a level between every session. Actually it was a campaign I […]
by Rob Heinsoo When we wrote the 13th Age core book, Jonathan and I traded off writing Chapter 8: The Dragon Empire. I got the chapter rolling with a big rush of ideas I’d always wanted to use in a fantasy campaign. Jonathan added many sections, then I rolled back through to finish the chapter […]
I’ve been busy with monster design and development, pushing to have Lions & Tigers & Owlbears: 13th Age Bestiary 2 headed to layout in the next couple weeks. I’ve got monster design on the brain. So today’s column is about monster design, but it’s not exactly about current monster design. Back when we were finishing […]
Recently, a member of the 13th Age community who’s trying their hand at spell design asked if we had any resources to help with the math. We’ve written a lot about monster design, but haven’t really delved into classes; so for this month’s column, I’ll share the basic math behind figuring out how much damage characters should deal, […]