Ronin Roundtable: Playtesting and Origins!

The past few months have been focused on the design and playtesting of the decks of Sentinels of Earth-Prime and I’m happy to report that it’s going great. The fourth version of the playtest decks are currently having their tires kicked and everything is coming together nicely.

Christopher’s playtest set.

Earlier this month, both Green Ronin and Greater Than Games were at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio and this gave us a chance to get together to talk about the business side of things and do a playtest together.

Christopher Badell has ideas!

This was the first time we’ve actually had the whole team in one place so we were able to cover a lot of ground and make sure everything was on track for the next stage of development. In addition to the boss Ronins (Nicole, Hal, and myself), we had Steve Kenson (designer of Mutants & Masterminds and creator of Earth-Prime), James Dawsey (art director for this project), and Christopher Badell (Greater Than Games, designer of the Sentinels games).

The following day Christopher, James, and I met up for a playtest of Sentinels of Earth-Prime.

Playtest at the Big Bar on 2!

I played Lady Liberty, James played Dr. Metropolis, and Christopher played Lantern Jack in a battle against Argo the Ultimate Android in the heart of Freedom City! Argo has powers that mimic those of members of the Freedom League, so this was a challenging fight, particularly with none of our characters being big damage dealers. Nonetheless, we prevailed, saving Freedom City once again!

Lady Liberty, beacon of freedom!

 

As Christopher designed literally every card of Sentinels of the Multiverse, I knew his new decks would be good. My primary concern was that they capture the right feel for the Earth-Prime characters. Back in April we had Steve go over the decks and give Christopher some notes on story and character. That and the continued playtesting have honed the characters so they provide a fun Sentinels experience and a great Earth-Prime experience as well.

At this point the major design work for the game is done, so it’s a matter of nips and tucks to ensure the decks are just right. We said previously that you could expect the game early next year and that is still the case. Right now we are in the lead up to GenCon, our biggest convention of the year, so things are in overdrive at GRHQ. Among other new releases, you’ll be able to get the Basic Hero’s Handbook for Mutants & Masterminds (check out Crystal Frasier’s recent Ronin Round Table to find out more about it).

 

[Charitable Giving] Origins Pride Sale

Origins Pride SaleWe are pleased to have three books nominated for Origins Awards. Atlas of Earth-Prime, Blue Rose Narrator’s Kit, and Blue Rose: The AGE RPG of Romantic Fantasy are all in the running this year. To celebrate, we’ve put all three books, along with the Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, on sale at 20% off, in both print and PDF formats, in our Green Ronin Online Store. These prices will also be in effect at Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio later this week. If you’re there, stop by and see us in booth #649.

This weekend is also Columbus Pride, and June is Pride Month, so we’ve decided to donate 20% of the proceeds from this sale to the Pride Foundation.

Shop our Origins Pride Sale today.

Modern Monday: Modern AGE is Out! What’s It About?

Yes, Modern AGE is available for print pre-order! This means you can also order the PDF immediately, either on its own, or with your book as part of Green Ronin Pre-Order Plus program. Tell your friends! Post on websites! Don’t believe every placeholder date you see posted in Amazon and vendor sites! Even as we speak, the game is in the queue to go to press.

It’s been a trip, from turning the slate of ideas (modern and classless, with some character creation structure provided by Chris Pramas) into a testable, then finished game. I didn’t want to just add guns and technology to Fantasy AGE. To produce an implementation of the Adventure Game Engine that fits the period, we developed some basic design principles. I’ve talked about these before, but since the game is out, I don’t mind going over them again. After that, I’ll talk about where we go from here.

Action, Exploration, Social

Modern AGE structures play around three areas. The Action area includes combat, chases and physical danger. Exploration covers literal exploration along with investigations and breaking into guarded locations.  Social interactions are essential to modern games, which usually take place in highly organized societies where politics are stronger than physical force.

Consequently, we developed new systems and stunts to support the three areas. Chase rules expand what’s possible in an action scene and can apply to chases on foot or horseback as well as in vehicles. Breaching and investigations support capers and procedural stories. For social interaction, we made relationships and memberships, first introduced in early AGE games, core parts of Modern AGE.

Indra and Jeff perform a classic adventure task with new tools. That’s one way of looking at Modern AGE.

Stunts

Modern AGE goes all-in with stunts. Stunts are a distinctive feature of AGE. They perform tasks other games often handle with dedicated subsystems. Grappling and other special combat maneuvers are dealt with here. Instead of using Health points, vehicles get damaged through a special slate of stunts.

The emphasis on stunts requires a change in how players should approach them. Stunts are organized into focused lists, and we’ve expanded how many are available. While any character can use any appropriate stunt, we recommend picking your favorites, including stunts modified and improved by talents and specializations.

Game Modes

The three game modes—Gritty, Pulpy and Cinematic—let you modify rules to fit the genre which best suits your campaign. I’ve talked about this in prior Modern Mondays, including last week. Mode most notably affects how characters resist damage with Health and Toughness, but also influences stunts, chases and even Resources.

Getting into the Game

The Modern AGE Basic Rulebook includes everything you need to play the game, including an introductory adventure designed with fantasy and science fiction options, should you wish those to be part of any subsequent campaign. In addition, Freebooter Game Masters at Origins and Gen Con will both be running “Warflower,” an adventure with similar variation.

Want a taste of Modern AGE before you get the core book? The Modern AGE Quickstart features a cut down Cinematic mode rules set, pregenerated characters, and a modern fantasy adventure.

What’s Next?

We’ve announced three upcoming releases. World of Lazarus adapts Greg Rucka’s dystopian feudal future comic for Modern AGE. It’s currently going through finishing touches in layout. The Modern AGE Game Master’s Kit includes a GM’s screen and reference cards. It’s at press.

Further along the line, we have several other books at various stages of completion. The one we’ve announced is the Modern AGE Companion, which has just finished editing. This book presents many, many new systems you can use to adjust the game for the genre or feel you prefer.

See You in a Bit

With the core book out, it’s time for me to give Modern Mondays a rest for a little while. I’ll be back from time to time, to talk about upcoming releases and other projects. I’ve talked your ear off about Modern AGE, but I’ve got another game coming: Ork! The Roleplaying Game, Second Edition. See you around!

Ronin Roundtable: LET’S GET BACK TO BASICS

As we put the finishing touches on the Rogue’s Gallery, the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook was slowly percolating in the background. Now that it is nearly ready to ship to the printers as well, I’m happy to show the results of several months of work and writing!

Mutants & Masterminds is a great game with a robust ruleset built over 16 years and three different editions. It’s flexible enough to handle almost any genre of comic book adventure, from traditional tights-and-fights books to street-level vigilantes to cosmic weirdness to mundane human agents facing off against the unknowable. But that flexibility brings a certain amount of jargon and a learning curve that can be off-putting for new players. Among the first challenges we decided to tackle to make a newbie-friendly rulebook was character creation. The Deluxe Hero’s Handbook offers a wealth of choices for fine-tuning your character to build exactly what you want to play, but for brand new players that freedom can be intimidating. Option paralysis is one of the most commonly cited problems players new to M&M report, followed closely by the amount of number crunching character generation required. The Quickstart Character generator is a perfectly solution for intermediary players, but we wanted a solution for those picking up Mutants & Masterminds for the first time.

Our solution is the Basic Archetype, which boils character generation down to a handful of choices about your character’s theme, personality, and history. With one of the book’s eight basic archetypes and a character sheet, even brand new players can be game-ready in ten minutes!

Each Basic Archetype starts with a brief overview of the concept. Each Archetype has a base suite of Ability ranks and Defense ranks, which you can tweak by selecting a character type. Most come with a few basic skills, but ask you to decide who your character is to determine the rest. Likewise, selecting Advantages is rolled into deciding a few personality traits that help define your hero. Finally, each Basic Archetype lets you select one of three Power Suites that define what exactly puts the “super” in your super hero.

Let’s take a look at one of my favorite hero concepts: the Energy Controller:

 

This is Solar Ray, or just Ray to his teammates. He appears—alongside his friends Anansi, Ultra, and Pinnacle—in the Basic Hero Handbook’s tutorial comics. The Energy Controller’s Ability ranks focus mostly on being tough and fast, with the cocksure attitude and powerful presence that usually accompanies the ability to throw fireballs. Their skills options give you some classic comic book staples for energy-wielders, letting you help personalize you hero as say, a lothario test-pilot or a watchful commander. Because Energy Controllers are more defined by their powers, they don’t receive as many Advantages as most heroes, but you still get some flexibility in deciding if your hero is a wisecracking brawler, a cool-as-a-cucumber tactician, or a terrifying force of nature. Finally, their Power Suite choices give you choice of what kind of comic book exploits you want to embody: The Avatar is your classic Human Torch, able to transform into a living incarnation of your element; the Blaster, on the other hand, is a classic one-trick pony who can only do one thing, but does it very, very well (and gets some extra Skills and Advantages, since they’re not out there hotshotting all the time); the Elementalist splits the difference as a master of energy, able to control and wield their element with extraordinary skill, but not transforming into it.

The Basic Archetypes are fast, easy, and flexible enough to make each hero feel personal, obfuscating the math and overwhelming choices while still giving players a standard 150 power point, Power Level 10 starting character they can bring to the table alongside veteran players who create their characters using the rules found in the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook!

The full basic Hero’s Handbook will be available in print later this summer at GenCon. Hope to see you all there!

Now Pre-Ordering: Modern AGE Basic Rulebook

Modern AGE Basic RulebookThe Modern AGE Basic Rulebook is now available for pre-ordering in our Green Ronin Online Store and through participating brick-and-mortar retailers! And, when you pre-order the physical book, you can get the PDF version right away for just $5! (If your favorite local game or book retailer doesn’t know about the pre-order deal, please point them at our Retailer Support page for details.)

Enter the Modern AGE!

Leap into exciting adventure in any era from the Industrial Revolution to the modern day and beyond. The Modern AGE roleplaying game allows you to shape the setting to suit your style—whether it’s gritty action or high adventure, urban fantasy or a dystopian future. With a new, classless character-building system, twenty levels of advancement, and optional rules for psychic and magic powers, you can create the heroes your world needs. Along with an innovative stunt system, rules for thrilling chases, and an introductory adventure, you’ll find all the action you’re after inside the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook.

The Modern AGE RPG features:

  • A classless implementation of the Adventure Game Engine. Develop characters based on their backgrounds and experiences across 20 levels of advancement.
  • Focuses, talents, and specializations like Investigator, Hacker, and Martial Artist let you customize your character.
  • Fast-paced combat featuring modern weapons and high-octane vehicle chases.
  • A game based around action, exploration, and social stunts. Roll doubles on three six-sided dice and something cool happens!
  • Arcane magic and psychic powers for modern era games.
  • Advice for first time and veteran Game Masters, including ways to customize the system for gritty stories, two-fisted pulp, and cinematic high adventure.
  • Sample antagonists and other non-player characters, and an introductory adventure: everything you need to start playing right away.

Use Modern AGE in the campaign setting of your choice, including the upcoming World of Lazarus, based on Greg Rucka’s creator-owned comic series of near-future feudalism, or use it to run adventures in the world you create. Grab three six-sided dice, and you’re ready to play in the Modern AGE!

Pre-Order Modern AGE Basic Rulebook today!

Modern Monday: Genres

Modern AGE is currently undergoing final touches before the advance PDF and preorders start, so this Modern Monday’s going to be a short one talking about genres, modes and the reason we give them special emphasis.

The Modern Conundrum

Dungeons and Dragons invented its own genre. Yes, it grabbed elements from numerous sources in fantasy fiction and medieval wargames, but its peculiar history mixed those up in a distinct fashion. Over the next 44 years, other games added new elements to the mix, reacted to the curious construction of “dungeon fantasy.” Writers, producers and game developers brought it into new media, adding their own sensibilities and practical insights—and then roleplaying games brought that expanded melange back. At this point, we have a very broad but definite idea of what a classic fantasy RPG looks like. It’s got elves, magic, a team of heroes, high adventure. You can introduce significant variation (and Fantasy AGE does this well—look at Titansgrave!) but there’s always a core experience to refer to and design around.

Modern games never started out with their own mixed-up new genre. The first RPG covering anything like what Modern AGE covers was Boot Hill, and it wasn’t a generalized industrial-age RPG, but a Western game. Unless you go with a full-on alternate universe, a modern era game must deal with the concrete history of the industrial era and beyond, and the fiction found within it: action-adventure, horror, urban fantasy, spy stories and so on. Thus, a game like Modern AGE needs tools you can use to customize it for your campaign’s chosen genre.

Mode and Genre

The front line for customization is game mode: Modern AGE’s Gritty, Pulpy and Cinematic rules variants. These primarily affect how physically resilient a character is, but occasionally foray into other areas. For example, the Cinematic option for Resources (wealth in the game) allow for a steady increase as your character advances. They can move on up to international intrigue and prodigious expense accounts without too much trouble. Note that modes are packages of options, and you can always fine tune rules within a mode.

One of the reasons the modes exist is to give you access to rules which fit your selected genre. The Game Master section of Modern AGE presents several genres—folk horror, conspiracy thrillers and more—with their suggested modes.

In the dystopian SF genre, what’s worse than flesh over a metal endoskeleton? Uh, *metal* over a metal endoskeleton. Art by Alyssa McCarthy

Specialized Rules

Beyond modes, Modern AGE includes a few different optional game systems for elements particular to certain genres. The most notable of these are the rules for magic and psychic powers. Both power sets have similar default systems, but rules options let you customize these to fit your campaign. Brief notes for other powers can be found in the game’s coverage of genres. Finally, the Game Master can decide all characters have access to the power of Conviction, a game system which rewards emotionally resonant, dramatic play. First found in Blue Rose, Conviction is presented as an optional system in Modern AGE.

Beyond powers, chases, breaching tests and other secondary systems exist to support the genres in which they appear. Breaching tests are for capers “where a plan comes together,” and chases are a mainstay of action media. Modern AGE even provides some support for the sorts of movies where, against all common sense, people catch up with cars on foot—but that’s Cinematic mode, applied to the chase rules.

More on Genre: The Modern AGE Companion

Coming next year, the Modern AGE Companion (currently text-complete, and in editing) digs deep into genre. It includes coverage on how to make characters for particular genres, and special rules covering the mainstays of many types of fiction. That means rules for fear and horror, duels and complex martial arts styles, gadgets and extraordinary powers, and more. We didn’t take anything vital out of Modern AGE (and in fact we migrated breaching from World of Lazarus into the core game because Crystal Frasier’s rules just cried out to be core material!) but the Companion opens the next level of customization. I look forward to sharing more with you, when the time comes.

Next Monday?

It’s a surprise.

Ronin Round Table: Using the Fantasy AGE Bestiary in Blue Rose

PART I

One of the tremendous benefits of the Adventure Game Engine (or AGE) system is how quickly we’ve developed a diversity of applications for it. Not only does this give us a bunch of great games to play, but allows us to mix-and-match them to get ourselves a breadth of options beyond that of any single game.

Today, we’re going to start a series that shows this off a little. The Fantasy AGE Bestiary is an excellent book full of great monsters, horrors, and adversaries for your Fantasy AGE heroes. But its utility isn’t limited to Fantasy AGE campaigns – we’re going to talk a little about how these monsters might fit into the romantic fantasy setting of Blue Rose.

This is the first of three articles taking these critters, one at a time, and discussing where they might fit into Blue Rose’s setting, and what (if any) mechanical adjustments need to be made to make room for them.

Afanc: Large, hungry beasts that haunt the icy bodies of water in the Ice-Binder, Bitterfang, and Golgan mountain ranges, they are the reason many mountaineers in the high mountains of Aldea prefer to take their water from run-offs and shallow bodies of water. Blackwater Lake in Kern was home to a small cluster of these things, the results of breeding projects by the old Lich King. No one has seen them in a while.

Ahool: Legends of merchants who’ve traveled to Wyss sometimes speak of the diminutive bat-folk of those deep, dark forests. Of course, many people say many things about those lands, and Wyssan citizens are rarely willing to admit whether or not they actually exist.

Amarok by Mirco Paganessi

Amarok: According to some old legends, in the days when the Light was dim in Aldea, the Exarch Yungo snatched into his power a mighty wolf of the Pavin Weald in the early moments of his Awakening, and corrupted it somehow. Instead of Awakening to psychic awareness and sapience, Yungo invested only his greedy hunger and ravenous nature into the place where that spark of Light normally resides, and that wolf, whose name was Amarok, became bloated and gluttonous, the first of its kind.

 

Bakwanee: Sometimes, the essence of Shadow-tainted locations settles into the simplest of life forms that live there, and warps them. This has happened to both the bloodsucking fireflies of the Veran Marsh, as well as the storm beetles of the Shadow Barrens, which hide beneath the ground, save in storms, when they emerge to harvest the ambient static in the air, sparking on their metallic carapaces. From these two frightening but largely harmless insects bakwanee have risen in great swarms, occasionally growing in number until they rush out of the Barrens or Marsh, ravening across the countryside until they are put down.

Basilisk: One of the many creations of the Sorcerer Kings, the basilisk can now be found in marshlands and rivers, as well as deep subterranean places.

Bouda: Wicked shapeshifters hidden among the often sedate packs of hyenas that can be sometimes found in the souther Rezean Plains, the Rezean witches say that the bouda were taught to envy two-legged folk their forms by a darkfiend in service to Ulasta the Green Flame, sharpening until they rose to walk as men did, so long as the bouda feast on their flesh frequently.

Burrower: These massive worms are all but extinct in lands that are even nominally settled. But some of them still haunt wild lands. In particular, the stinger-tail burrowers can sometimes be found in the wilds of Rezea, quickly bursting forth when they detect the ground-thunder of Rezean herds. The bellowing burrowers can be found in the Golgan Badlands, particularly in the foothills where the mountains above echo with their ferocious roars.

Carnivorous Plants: Any place where Shadow comes to rest among natural plant life can give rise to carnivorous plants, particularly if that contagion remains there for more than a single cycle of the seasons. Shadow-tainted wastes aren’t the only locations where this is true: a sorcerer’s glade where she performs her corrupt workings, a garden at the foot of a tower that houses an ancient artifact of the Sorcerer Kings, and even the lands surrounding the lair of a powerful darkfiend or semi-dormant Shadowgate.

Charnel Knight: It is said that when certain Knights of the Skull served the Lich King well, not even death ended their service to Kern. The exact rites responsible for this transformation are not publicly known, even among the Shadowed Seven. No new charnel knights have risen among the Knights of the Skull since the Lich King’s defeat, so it may be that the undead tyrant too that lore – like so much other – with him to his destruction.

Djinn: Elementals are natural intelligences given bodies of the elements. The djinn are a whole thing else. Though almost never seen today, djinn are elemental intelligences of elsewhere, alien entities whose awareness is snatched from those far off places that birthed them, and given elemental bodies and bound by potent magics beyond the scope of the simple Spirit Summoning arcanum. Give Djinn the Shaping arcanum appropriate to their elemental nature, and remove the Spellpower and Magic Points from their entry.

Eldritch Crown: It is said that the Vizier of Eyes, a notorious shadow adept of the Sorcerer Kings realm created these, through a hideous pact with a darkfiend that fancied itself a jeweler, save that it used mortals’ eyes in place of gems. The Vizier of Eyes sought to control some of the vainest of the Sorcerer Kings and it worked to some extent. Unfortunately, the adept could not control these creatures, and they escaped him, and the darkfiend made a perfectly fetching necklace of the Vizier’s own eyes.

Fire Ogre: Potent fire elementals of terrible power and fury, fire ogres are rarely summoned. Unlike elementals, when fire ogres return to the fiery recesses of the deepest depths, they do not forget what they experienced in the bright world above. Their destruction and their subjugation to the will of adepts both infuriate them, and they wait eagerly to turn that rage into destruction upon their return to the world again.