Inside these pages you’ll find wonderful work from many of the artists who’ve depicted and defined the 13th Age:

Aaron McConnell * Agatha Pitié * Ania Kryczkowska
Cristiana Leone * Dagmara Matuszak * Frankie Smith
Jessica Chung Ti Lee * Joshua Calloway * Juha Makkonen
Laura Galli * Lee Moyer * Naomi VanDoren
Pascal Quidault * Pat Loboyko * Paul Tobin
Rich Longmore * Roena I. Rosenberger * Simone Bannach

Featuring a foreword by Rob Heinsoo, and an introduction to the elements of illustration by Lee Moyer.

“Our goal with 13^th Age is to recapture the free-wheeling style of old-school gaming by creating a game with more soul and fewer technical details. …13^th Age makes the play group’s campaign the center of attention, with a toolkit of rules that you can pick and choose from based on the kind of game you want to play. The mechanics draw from classic games as well as newer, story-based games.”

– Jonathan Tweet, co-designer

Wide Open Stories

• An evocative setting that’s deliberately half-designed so that you and your players can customize it for your campaign.
• Each player character is connected to one or more icons, high-fantasy archetypes such as the Archmage, Lich King, or Prince of Shadows, which gives them a place in the world’s story, even at 1st level.

Crunchier Crunch

• Streamlined combat rules harness the good bits of crunchy tactical combat without ticky-tacky measurements.
• Innovations like the escalation die ensure that battles crescendo instead of getting bogged down.
• Each character class has its own unique features, advantages, and play style.

In this Gamemaster’s Guide, you’ll find:

• The Dragon Empire, ready to embellish and reimagine for your campaign.
• Guidelines to help you set up memorable campaigns, perilous adventures, and challenging battles.
• Hundreds of monsters, newly revised to highlight each creature’s unique place in the ecology of heroic fantasy battles.
• Hundreds of redesigned magic items for when the heroes earn loot that matters…or when you want to equip monsters with magic weapons!
• An introductory adventure that shows how to work with heroes’ backstories, develop icon connections, and run a living dungeon filled with surprising encounters.

You’ll also want the 13th Age Heroes’ Handbook for the nine different character classes, info about each of the icons, and other core rules a GM has gotta know, or buy both together with a GM Screen in a boxed set!

This new second edition is fully compatible with earlier 13^th Age adventures, sourcebooks, and bestiaries.

The world won’t save itself!

Living dungeons rip up from the depths, flying realms crash to earth, dark overlords seize ancient thrones, and the Empire’s protectors stumble.

It’s time for your heroes to answer the call!

13th Age is a new, improved edition of the d20-rolling fantasy game of unique heroes, gripping combat, group storytelling, and high adventure.

• Each of the nine different character classes has its own advantages and play style. Some are simpler—ideal for newcomers—while others have many more options for play.
• Your character’s One Unique Thing ensures no one else in the Empire is quite like them.
• Alliances and enmities with icons such as the Archmage, Lich King, and Prince of Shadows give your hero a place in the world’s story from the first session.

Changes worth mentioning in this 350-page second edition include:

• An extended example of play—including campaign set-up, character creation, and the first adventure.
• Multiple powers to choose from for each of the kin—dwarves, humans, halflings, elves, and dragonics are no longer limited to just one kin power.
• Revised spells so that spellcasters cast all spells as their own level instead of only having spells that improve at odd levels.
• An entirely new bard, a substantially improved fighter, an entirely upgraded ranger, and fun new improvements for all the classes we haven’t mentioned.
• Clearly written icon connection rules with fifteen pages of storytelling examples.

For details on the campaign setting, all-new magic treasure, and the GM rules you’ll also want the 13th Age Gamemaster’s Guide, or buy both together with a GM Screen in a boxed set!

This new edition is fully compatible with earlier 13th Age adventures, sourcebooks, and bestiaries.

13th Age:

Forge heroes.

Shape the world.

Be legendary.

Story and Crunch!

13th Age combines the best parts of crunchy d20-rolling fantasy gaming with story-focused rules that help the gamemaster and players collaborate to create unique campaigns.

Storytelling

• Every character has One Unique Thing that sets them apart from all others and provides the raw materials for adventures and plotlines focused on that hero.
• Each character’s backgrounds provide bonuses to relevant skill checks so that every skill roll can reveal new details of that hero’s backstory.
• Connections with the icons—high fantasy archetypes such as the Archmage, Lich King, or Prince of Shadows—give even 1^st level heroes an introduction to the conflicts that shape the world.
• The evocative but deliberately non-canonical setting helps each campaign surprise itself with new twists! We don’t tell the story—each of your campaigns tells new stories.

Crunch

• Streamlined combat rules harness the good bits of crunchy tactical combat without ticky-tacky measurements.
• Innovations like the escalation die ensure that battles crescendo instead of getting bogged down.
• Each of the nine character classes has unique features, advantages, and play styles; the flexible fighter is nothing like the wild sorcerer or the elegant bard.
• In this second edition of the game, thirteen years of experience with the system and hundreds of playtest reports helped us revise the game’s class features, talents, spells, kin powers, and monsters (!) so that there are only interesting choices.

Splendid Art

• Fantastic art from the artists listed at left, coordinated and in some cases highlighted and illuminated by paints from Lee Moyer.

Heroes’ Handbook

The 350 pages of the 13^th Age Second Edition Heroes’ Handbook include character creation, a chapter on the kin, classes, backgrounds, the combat rules, icon connection rules, and writeups of each of the icons to help players use their connections in fun ways that shape the story. To help people get into the game, the book opens with a 17-page example of play covering campaign planning, character creation, and the first four battles fought by a party of heroes exploring a cemetery overrun by Lich King cultists.

Gamemaster’s Guide

Players will want 13th Age Second Edition Gamemaster’s Guide for treasure and information on the default setting of the Dragon Empire. Gamemasters need the GM book’s 250 pages of rules for running the game, campaign advice, rules for quickly creating exciting and balanced battles, hundreds of monsters, guidelines and tools for designing new monsters, and an introductory adventure in a living dungeon!

13^th Age Second Edition Gamemaster’s Screen

The side of the three-section screen facing the players shows shows the twelve icons. The side facing the GM has all the tables needed to design monsters and battles on the fly, reminders for conditions and actions during battle, and the guidelines for both environmental threats. It’s not all bad for the heroes—the screen also has guidelines for suggested treasure rewards.

A Whole Line of Supporting Books

All the adventures, settings, monsters, magic items, kin, and classes already published for 13^th Age are compatible with this new edition.

In 2013, our game 13^th Age showed fantasy roleplayers a way to combine vibrant storytelling with high-energy combat. Earlier, we had been the lead designers of 3^rd Edition and 4^th Edition of the world’s oldest roleplaying game, and in 13^th Age we wrote for gamers like us, not for corporate shareholders. Our new second edition makes the game better, thanks to years of listening to fans and of testing ideas at our gaming table. The character classes have better options, the monsters are scarier, the magic items offer more choices, and the narrative rules are better defined. We hope you love it.

–Rob Heinsoo & Jonathan Tweet, August 2025

About Rob Heinsoo

Rob Heinsoo has created dozens of role-playing games, card games, miniatures games and board games. He led the design of the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons® and wrote or led the design of many 4e sourcebooks as well as overseeing the 13^th Age line and co-designing 13^th Age Glorantha with Jonathan. Other notable designs include the various incarnations of Three-Dragon Ante, the first two sets of Epic Spell Wars, Wrestlenomicon, the upcoming Armello: The Board Game, and the upcoming Legendary: Game of Thrones.

About Jonathan Tweet

Jonathan Tweet is the perfect collaborator for Rob on 13^th Age. Jonathan was the lead designer of 3rd Ed D&D, and his other game designs changed the way people design and play roleplaying games (see Ars Magica, Over the Edge, and Everway). He’s also worked in card games, miniatures, Facebook games, and fiction. His games have won three Origins Awards, and he is in the Origins Award Hall of Fame. Finally, he’s the author of Grandmother Fish (Macmillan 2016), the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers.

Moving drama.

Hilarious comedy.

And you are the sole protagonist.

Page Turners is the game of personal storytelling for one player and one GM.

Acclaimed tabletop roleplaying designer Robin D. Laws won the coveted Diana Jones Award for his game of dramatic group play, Hillfolk.

Page Turners scales its dynamic down to the intimate scale of a single main character whose fiction you weave on the fly with one other creator.

Shockingly simple rules keep the focus on emotional interaction.

Extensive guidance helps you shape satisfying outcomes.

Writers Sarah Saltiel, Wade Rockett and Ruth Tillman join Robin in presenting 11 scenarios spanning a wealth of genres and tones.

The Beacon: Glamour, money and ambition at the height of the Jazz Age.

Addison’s Shadow: A young girl comes of age, haunted by a shadowy being and visions of her family’s destruction.

Earth Again: Deceit abounds as Earth’s last humans hurtle through space.

Entreaty and Entanglement: A whipsmart young Regency woman’s prospects take an unexpected turn when she accompanies her sister for a season in the socially bubbling spa town of Bath.

Loose Screws: Madcap 30s comedy ensues when Cupid aims his screwball arrow at nervous milquetoast Dennis Cunningham and feisty, unpredictable heiress Mary Sinclair.

Love’s Loyal Laborers: In Elizabethan Verona, clever servants scheme to stop their stubborn young charges from wriggling out of the perfect marriage.

Seekers: The lives of three Americans continue to intersect as they invent and reinvent themselves from the late 60s to the mid 2010s.

True Rock Stories: Lizzie Liar: A 70s punk powerhouse struggles with a hostile music industry, conflicts with her bandmates, and her personal demons in the 80s and 90s.

Way Station: The arrival of a telepath on her space station abruptly shifts a hard-won sense of balance for resourceful mechanic Adi.

Without You: A vampire and his mortal love reckon with secrets, sickness, and immortality.

Inheritance: In a generation-spanning science fiction saga, artificial people complete a migration started by the humans that created them, establishing a new society to memorialize the old.

Whoever you want to be, wherever your imagination takes you, whether your journey leads to union, doom, or something harder to define, Page Turners will unleash your creativity in new and unexpected ways.

Available in a variety of colours, sizes and textile options.

Available in a variety of sizes and textile options.

Available in a variety of sizes and textile options.