Instead of fighting with your family over unmet emotional needs, try roleplaying them! While you’re celebrating the holidays with non-gaming friends and family, at some point the group will start looking for something fun everyone can do together. This is a perfect opportunity to introduce them to tabletop roleplaying games. They’re like board games, but […]
The section on damage resistance in the core book says, “If there’s an automatic damage effect that feels like it should have a chance of being reduced by resistance, go ahead and fake an attack roll to see if the effect penetrates resistance.” My question is, if the attacker has the shocked condition from the […]
To celebrate Friday the 13th Age, we invited the community of 13th Age GMs and players to send us their questions about the game. We chose 13 of them to answer! Our panel today includes: Rob Heinsoo: 13th Age roleplaying game co-designer and line manager Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan: designer, Eyes of the Stone Thief, Book of […]
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a ghost story, to begin with. It’s part of a long tradition of telling scary stories at Christmastime; and when handled well, the ghosts can provide us with a shiver even as we gleefully watch them terrorize Ebenezer Scrooge in order to turn his heart from wickedness. The other […]
The Combat Modifiers section on page 171 of the core book suggests giving +2 to attacks that have “advantageous circumstances” and -2 to attacks from adverse circumstances. The bonus can come from a particularly clever use of the terrain or a surprising combat maneuver. A bonus might also come from some special circumstance of the […]
The Free RPG Day adventure Make Your Own Luck was the first published 13th Age adventure I ever ran. (Well, not counting The Wreck of Volund’s Glory, which I wrote!) I love how much it does within the confined space of a city under siege, and I come back to it again and again—incorporating it […]
So ye seek the lost treasure of Karrag Voraldo, do ye? There’s a tale about Voraldo told in the taverns of Shadow Port that ye should know, then. They say that during the Age of Corsairs he was a trusted lieutenant of the King of Corsairs himself, until greed overcame him. He began lying to […]
The Free RPG Day adventure Make Your Own Luck (get it here!) begins with an army of trolls and goblins besieging the town of Harrowdale. As written, the siege is a jumping-off point that gives the events in the adventure context. If you want to explore the ongoing tension and danger of defending a town […]
In the 13th Age Facebook group, a new GM asked for good examples of PC backgrounds. I offered some, but couldn’t help also giving advice on what makes a good background. (It’s one of my favorite mechanics in the game.) I said that a good background doesn’t just outline your character’s backstory in three or […]
In part one I described how Crown of Axis began with an invitation to write the next big introductory adventure for 13th Age, and my idea to set it in the Emperor’s city of Axis. I just had to convince Rob Heinsoo this was a good idea! First, I read everything ever written about Axis in […]
