Begin at the Beginning

Every hero needs an exciting origin story. They also need an antagonist that holds a dark mirror up to their defining qualities, to better highlight the heroic nature of their choices and sacrifices, but one step at a time. Origin stories define a hero’s abilities, challenges, and boundaries, and just like a superhero, every gamer needs an origin story that introduces them to the hobby. And introducing your friends to Mutants and Masterminds is about to get a lot easier, because later this year we’ll be releasing the Basic Hero’s Handbook!

 

Targeted for release later in 2017, the Basic Hero’s Handbook is especially designed to be an easy introduction to Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition, giving players everything they need to pick up the rules, make their own characters, and run games.

 

 

Is this a revised rules system?

 

Nope, this is the same 3rd edition rule set you know and love, cleaned up and organized. Some of the more complicated rules are set aside for the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook. The Basic Hero’s Handbook focuses on getting to the action as a soon as possible, with streamlined character creation that only calls for a handful of player choices before you have a complete superhero ready to play! At its core, the BHH uses the same rules you’re used to, and your table can include players using the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook and the Basic Hero’s Handbook without any conversions or adjustments.

 

Is there anything in this for deluxe players?

 

If you’re a veteran to Mutants & Masterminds who already has a copy of the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, there’s still plenty for you in the Basic Hero’s Handbook. We’re working on organizing all the rules a player needs at the table, making the book an inexpensive player’s reference for maneuvers, conditions, and other rules for easy perusal at the table. The Basic Hero’s Handbook is also a handy gamemaster training tool, with several pregenerated villains and four ready-to- play adventures. If you want to get your mom into M&M, or just want an inexpensive extra rulebook, the Basic Hero’s Handbook should have you covered!

Press Release: Green Ronin To Publish Lost Citadel Roleplaying Game

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

GREEN RONIN TO PUBLISH LOST CITADEL ROLEPLAYING GAME

COMPANY ACQUIRES EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS, WILL BEGIN WITH 5E ADAPTATION

 

SEATTLE, WA (01/24/17): Green Ronin Publishing announced today that it has signed a licensing agreement to release a tabletop roleplaying game sourcebook based on The Lost Citadel, a transmedia shared world. The dark fantasy RPG will draw players into the setting of Zileksa, a land ravaged by death and undeath, where all that’s left of civilization has gathered behind the walls of the last remaining city of the living. The announcement was made by Chris Pramas, president of Green Ronin, and C.A. Suleiman, editor of The Lost Citadel.

“We are eager to bring a new dark fantasy setting to roleplayers and to offer Fifth Edition gamers a world they haven’t seen before,” said Green Ronin President Chris Pramas, “Lost Citadel is a perfect follow up to our work on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Dragon Age.”

“I came to know The Lost Citadel as a backer of the fiction anthology,” added Green Ronin General Manager Nicole Lindroos. “As soon as I saw it I recognized the potential inherent in the setting. I couldn’t be more pleased not only to bring Lost Citadel to roleplaying, but to have C.A. Suleiman himself on board as developer.”

“Since the Lost Citadel project went live, people have been asking about when it would come to gaming, and I’m excited to tell them that the moment has arrived,” said Suleiman. “As both a dark fantasy setting and a concept that’s expressly inclusive of women, I can’t think of a better fit for The Lost Citadel than Green Ronin, publisher of A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying and the Blue Rose roleplaying game. If their track record is any indicator, this could be the start of something big.”

Work is now underway on the first book, Lost Citadel Roleplaying, which introduces the setting and establishes its core rules and themes. It is scheduled for release in Winter 2018. All books in the series will use the Fifth Edition rules, but plans are in the works to offer fans of other popular RPG systems the means to play Lost Citadel games using those systems, too.

About Green Ronin Publishing

Green Ronin Publishing is a Seattle-based company dedicated to the art of great games. Since the year 2000 Green Ronin has established a reputation for quality and innovation that is second to none, publishing such roleplaying game hits as Dragon Age, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, and Mutants & Masterminds, and winning over 40 awards for excellence. For an unprecedented three years running, Green Ronin won the prestigious GenCon & ENWorld Award for Best Publisher.

About The Lost Citadel

The Lost Citadel™ is a transmedia experiment that harnesses the talents of writers, artists, musicians, and more, in a bid to explore the themes and aesthetics of a shared world. Founded in 2012 by C.A. Suleiman, Ari Marmell, and Jaym Gates, the project launched online and came to Kickstarter soon after, successfully funding the creation of an anthology of short fiction called Tales of the Lost Citadel, which featured the talents of a cast of veteran dark fantasy authors.

Contact Green Ronin Publishing

Nicole Lindroos
General Manager
nicole@greenronin.com
https://greenronin.com/

 

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Download a PDF of this press release

Tales of the Lost Citadel cover image:

GM for Green Ronin at Gen Con!

Happy 50th Anniversary to Gen Con!

Team Ronin is super excited about Gen Con this year, especially with the success of our updated Freebooter GM Program. We decided to focus on our one big event, as we’re kinda small to support events all over the country and beyond. Make with the clicking to read about the program here.

Many folks think Green Ronin is a huge company, but we’re actually very small. The upside to this is that we can work closely with our GMs to grow this program; it wouldn’t be as successful without their spectacular feedback. And since it was our first big push, with setting up GM Badges and hotel reimbursement, it helped us make the 2017 Gen Con program even better.

Last year, we fielded 24 GMs running over 90 games. Some folks ran one or two games, and some ran more. Some folks ran 2-hour games, and some ran 6-hour games. Really, it was great to have so many folks concentrating on Green Ronin games. We were even in our own room in the Convention Center itself, which was WONDERFUL.

For the folks who signed up early, who communicated well with us about their needs and desires, it was super easy to accommodate folks, like subbing out GMs when we had scheduling issues. For folks to get hotel reimbursements, it was super easy! You just had to email me your receipt and we sent you the reimbursement! Almost everyone followed directions well so we were able to take care of just about everyone by the time Gen Con was all finished!

We had a lot of folks GMing for us who had never been to Gen Con before, or GM’d at a convention ever, which meant so much to us. And our experienced Veteran GMs were on hand to help out the new folks. The Freebooters are a small team, but a wonderful team! Heck, a bunch of new folks to our program even got together and split a room together! They held each other together while I was off doing Geek & Sundry and Gen Con Industry Insider stuff!

Many GMs kept things simple, and many of them printed out great color sheets, special hand outs, and whatnot. Some GMs used our published Quick Start adventures, some used their own home brew. Some used adventures which we haven’t yet published, to be the first to run said adventures.

Why am I tell you all this? Because we want you to run our games! Everyone is welcome, no matter your experience, or lack thereof. If you have GM’d a home game, you can GM for us! You can run what you want, when you want. 

And if you want to, we’ll arrange a GM badge for you, so you can get reimbursed by the Gen Con system, and we’ll reimburse you for part of your hotel.

  • For 12-hours of games submitted, we’ll arrange the GM badge.
  • For 16+ hours of games scheduled, we will reimburse your hotel based on ¼ of a regular rate.  As an example, if a room is $200 per night we’ll pick up your part, so $50 per night!
  • Green Ronin must submit your games to count towards the GM Badge reimbursement and hotel room reimbursement.
  • You are still welcome to submit games via your favorite game group or other game companies, but we will only pick up badges/hotel reimburse for our submitted games.

AND! Based on feedback from the 2016 GM Team, we’ll have ribbons and dice for you to give your players, plus a variety of other hand outs. And maybe something cool for YOU, too! We’re still hammering out those details.

If you’re interested in signing up, click here to fill out this quick contact form. Early submissions have started this week, and will run until Feb 19th. Regular Event submissions are due by March 26th, so we want to get your games in the system as soon as possible. I can help!

If you have general questions, you can email me directly! donna@greenronin.com

Blue Rose Pre-Order and PDF

Blue Rose: The AGE RPG of Romantic Fantasy Core Rulebook pre-orderIf you missed out on backing the Kickstarter campaign for Blue Rose: The AGE RPG of Romantic Fantasy, you can now pre-order the book through BackerKit or our Green Ronin Online Store. When you pre-order the book, we’ll offer you the PDF for just $5, to download and read right away! If you want to support your local retailer, have them ask us about our Green Ronin Pre-Order Plus program, through which they can offer their customers the same $5 PDF deal for pre-ordering through them.

Ronin Roundtable: New Year’s Message 2017

New Year’s Message 2017

Welcome to the new year, my friends and fellow gamers! Here at Green Ronin we have been rousing ourselves from our holiday torpor and getting ramped up for 2017. As long time fans know, I traditionally write a message in January to discuss what we have coming up in the new year. And that is true but I’m going to do it a little differently this year. Today I will talk about what we have coming your way through the Spring, then in June I will do a second one of these that covers the rest of the year. So let’s get to it!

New Faces

In December Crystal Frasier came onboard as our new Mutants & Masterminds developer. She introduced herself in a previous Ronin Round Table, which you can read here if you’d like to learn more about her. We are confident that Mutants & Masterminds is in great hands with Crystal.

Today I’d like to welcome another new Ronin to the ranks: Malcolm Sheppard. He is a 17 year veteran of the game industry who has done a boatload of work for White Wolf and Onyx Path, amongst others. Malcolm will be doing design and development work for us on a variety of lines. You can think of him as a sort of developer-at-large. He’ll be working on Adventure Game Engine (AGE) games for sure, as well as some other projects you’ll hear more about later. Please help me welcome Malcolm to Team Ronin!

Atlas of Earth-Prime: Now Pre-OrderingMutants & Masterminds

We are kicking off the year with a major release for Mutants & Masterminds: the Atlas of Earth-Prime. You’ve seen parts of this setting before in Emerald City, the Cosmic Handbook, Hero High, and many other Mutants & Masterminds books, but now Earth-Prime is getting full campaign setting treatment. The Atlas of Earth-Prime releases in just two weeks. You can still get in on the pre-order now if you are quick about it.

In the Spring we’ll be following that up with Freedom City. This was the original campaign setting for the Mutants & Masterminds RPG going back to 2003. The new book brings Freedom City fully into Third Edition, and creates a triumvirate of super power with Emerald City and the Atlas of Earth-Prime!

AGE Games

Blue Rose the AGE RPG of Romantic FantasyThe big Adventure Game Engine excitement for the first half of the year is the release of Blue Rose, our RPG of Romantic Fantasy, in February. Blue Rose was our most successful Kickstarter to date, and we’re delighted to get this book out to backers and then released to the general public. The BackerKit went live over the weekend. While we typically do pre-orders through our online store, with Blue Rose we’re trying out BackerKit for that. If you didn’t back the Kickstarter, you can pre-order now at this link . You’ll note some follow up releases on the BackerKit page. We’re making Blue Rose dice with Q Workshop, Blue Rose conviction Tokens with Campaign Coins, and then an adventure anthology called Six of Swords. Those should all come out in the Spring.

For Fantasy AGE itself we’ve got Titansgrave: The World of Valkana coming in the Spring. This is a full campaign setting book that greatly expands the information in Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana. A lot of stuff that was only hinted at in the show will be revealed in Titansgrave: The World of Valkana!

In other Fantasy AGE news, we’ll be creating a community content program for the game in conjunction with OneBookShelf (the parent company of RPGNow and DriveThruRPG). People have been asking us if they can publish Fantasy AGE content since the game came out and soon that will be possible. OneBookShelf already runs several of these programs, for games like D&D and the Cypher System. Ours will be similar to these but not identical. For starters the products you can do will be limited to settings and adventures because that is the support Fantasy AGE needs most right now. There will be more info about the program and how it all works when we launch it. That should happen in a couple of months.

Freeport Bestiary for the Pathfinder RPGFreeport and Pathfinder

Our big Pathfinder release this Spring is the Freeport Bestiary. The City of Adventure hasn’t had a monster book since Creatures of Freeport in 2004. The Freeport Bestiary brings together the setting’s many monsters and a bunch of new ones in a beautiful full color hardback. Meanwhile, the Return to Freeport adventure series continues. We’ve released three of these PDFs so far. The remaining three will follow over the next few months and then we’ll collect them all together for a printed book in June.

D&D 5E

You may recall that we worked with Wizards of the Coast to create two D&D books: Out of the Abyss and the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. Now we’re following those up with D&D books of our own. The first is Book of the Righteous, which presents a fully detailed mythology and pantheon you can use in your campaigns. The original edition of Book of the Righteous was our most critically-acclaimed book in the d20 era. We did a Kickstarter for a new 5E version last year and it should be out in May. As with Blue Rose, Book of the Righteous will have a general release after books ship to Kickstarter backers.

I’m going to make an exception and discuss one Summer release because I know I’d get pilloried if I didn’t mention it. Of course I’m talking about Critical Role! We had originally intended to release this in the Spring but we’ve scheduled it for Gen Con instead. This is Gen Con’s 50th anniversary (and my 28th Gen Con!). We wanted a big marquee release for the show and the Critical Role: Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting book is a perfect fit. We want to make this a real event and hope to have the cast out to Gen Con again.

Love 2 Hate

Towards the end of last year we released Love 2 Hate: Politics, the first expansion for the game. We are following that up in April with Love 2 Hate: Comics. Both expansions have 108 cards. You can mix them in with the core game, or play with them on their own for a more themed experience.

Dragon Age and SIFRP

We have Dragon Age and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying books in development but licensed game lines require approvals and how long those take can vary quite a bit. It could be one week or three months depending. So don’t worry, books are coming. We’ve just decided to wait until everything is approved before we make formal announcements about their release.

PDF Support

We have a variety of PDF releases planned to support our various lines. We have more Fantasy AGE Encounters and short Titansgrave adventures coming for Fantasy AGE, as well as the Short Cuts series for Pathfinder. We’ll also be continuing our series of Chronicle System PDFs, which provide non-canon rules support for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. In the past year we’ve released rules for magic (Chronicle of Sorcery) and gunpowder/firearms (Spark to Powder), for example.

Chronicle System: Spark to Powder (PDF)

Chronicle of Sorcery (PDF)

Conventions

As a company Gen Con is, of course, our biggest show. Last year we had a room dedicated to Green Ronin games for the whole convention and that was great. We’re doing it again this year, so if you’d like to run games for us please contact Donna. If you run enough games, we’ll cover your badge and even subsidize your hotel room.

Donna and Barry also run OrcaCon in Everett, WA (just north of Seattle). OrcaCon is happening this coming weekend, so come on out if you’re in the area. It’s the unofficial Green Ronin convention and most of our staff will be there. We’ve got folks running games and giving seminars, though personally I just want to play some games this year!

Green Ronin is once again a sponsor of the JoCo Cruise and Nicole and I will be on onboard. Haven’t heard of the JoCo Cruise? Well, imagine a convention on a ship and you’ve got a pretty good idea, except it also includes music, comedy, and more. If it’s nerdy, it’s probably happening on the ship! There are still cabins available (the cruise is in March) and this year we have the entire ship to ourselves. Should be a great time.

We’ll also be attending various trade shows, like GTS, the Alliance Open House, and the ACD Gamesday. If you are a game retailer, come see us!

More to Come!

So that’s what we have coming the first half of the year. We also have some exciting news to share in the coming months. We’ll be announcing soon a new card game we’re bringing to Kickstarter in April and a new campaign setting for D&D 5E. We’ve licensed a comic book for RPG treatment. We’ve also got another AGE game in development, as well as Ork, Second Edition. Following us on Twitter (we’re @GreenRoninPub) is probably the best way to keep up with our announcements or just bookmark our website.

This is Green Ronin’s 17th year in business. Thank you for your continued support over the years. I started the company as a side project and it’s become so much more than that thanks to you. Come back in June when I reveal our Summer and Winter plans. Until then, game on!

Chris Pramas