NPC followers of icons like the Priestess, Emperor, and Archmage aren’t usually monsters—but that doesn’t stop player characters from wanting to fight them! Icon Followers will focus on playable monster-stats for human and humanoid NPCs of the Dragon Empire. Want stats for a city guard, gladiator, traveling priest, bardic college student, or Imperial Legionnaire? Icon Followers […]
In the latest episode of their unswervingly faithful podcast, Ken and Robin talk game fickleness, Steve Kenson, and this year’s raid on Powell’s Books Portland.
Roleplaying games are fascinatingly mediated. In almost every other storytelling medium, the audience perceives the action directly. They see the actors on the stage or screen, the characters in the computer game, the voices in the radio play. In prose, true, the author can play tricks with an unreliable narrator or writing in a very […]
Late autumn is upon us, and it’s the season to curl up in front of a roaring fire with a good book. New books in autumnal green and brown are the limited edition versions of The Fall of DELTA GREEN and the 13th Age Bestiary 2, available in the webstore this month, alongside a compendium of […]
Hallowe’en is sadly over, but this month, it’s our printers who’ve been largely horrifying me, with tales of a 10% increase in paper prices. This has generated some hair-raising quotes for our upcoming books, specifically impacting the printing of The Yellow King RPG. Kickstarter backers will be unaffected, but it may make the final book collection […]
The 13th Age core book tells us little about the Queen’s Wood, where the Elf Queen rules: it’s a sprawling elven wood, largely empty now, whose trees have leaves that are “a riot of silver and gold and green and indigo.” In the lengthy description of the elven Court of Stars in 13 True Ways, we learn […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws This is the second in a series of four columns demonstrating what a full arc of The Yellow King Roleplaying Game might look like, with events from my own game as an example. In The Wars, the players leave behind the roles of Belle Epoque art students, […]
Chaos Mage By ASH LAW The chaos mage is my second favorite class, right behind the wizard. It is certainly, in my opinion, the most fun class to play. The fun for me with this class is not in being effective in combat, but from being weird in combat and discovering what happens—because that is […]
Chaos Mage by ASH LAW The chaos mage is my second favorite class, right behind the wizard. It is certainly, in my opinion, the most fun class to play. The fun for me with this class is not in being effective in combat, but from being weird in combat and discovering what happens—because that is […]
“Like all decadents he was exquisitely sensitive to the color and atmosphere and names of things …” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Medusa’s Coil” Much of the ironic entertainment of playing in Lovecraft’s universe comes from playing, well, in Lovecraft’s universe, or at least his Earth. Specifically, from playing with his names. And not just the Big […]