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 […]
Author Archives: Rob Heinsoo
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, […]
by Rob Heinsoo Today’s column introduces a critter that was originally going to be part of the High Druid’s World issue of 13th Age Monthly. But High Druid’s World is full of stats for powerful druids and druidic dragons and the dire raccoon kinda rolled out of contention. Unlike most of our monster stats, these […]
by Rob Heinsoo The true magic items of 13th Age are meant to be quirky. But if you’ve played several times with the same magic item, its originally-funny quirk may not seem that special anymore. A good magic item quirk is a license to roleplay, and if you or someone else in the group has […]
by Rob Heinsoo We started a new 13th Age campaign a couple weeks ago with me in the GM-seat. Jonathan lobbied to start at 8th level. I turned down the petition, writing faux-earnest advice text as if lifting from some book that’s not quite 13A: Although it’s not an evolutionary process, the metaphor of progress, […]