Happy Holidays from Green Ronin Publishing!

Everyone at Green Ronin would like to wish you the very best this Holiday Season, and we’ll see you soon in the new year!

Green Ronin Publishing will be closed from today, December 22nd and will return on January 6th.

Abzu’s Bounty Pre-Order and PDF

Abzu's Bounty, an adventure path for The Expanse RPGYou can now pre-order Abzu’s Bounty, an adventure path for The Expanse RPG, though our Green Ronin Online Store. When you do, the store software will offer you the PDF version for just $5, so make sure to click the Add To Cart button in the pop-up window. If print books aren’t your thing, you can order just the PDF.

Note: If you’d rather buy our products from your local game store or bookstore, please make sure they know about our Pre-Order Plus program! If you pre-order from a participating retailer, they can give you a code to download the PDF version for just $5.

Abzu’s Bounty

Readers of The Expanse novels have thrilled to the adventures of the crew of the Rocinante. Now it’s your turn to make your mark! Abzu’s Bounty presents six full-length scenarios designed for a new crew of characters in The Expanse Roleplaying Game. They embark on a series of adventures, from a fateful discovery in the rings of Saturn to acquiring their own ship to a deadly confrontation that could change the course of history for the entire solar system.

Abzu’s Bounty is the perfect way to kick off a new campaign. Get ready for launch!

Roadtrip to Ruin: a new Mutants & Masterminds novel (Ronin Roundtable)

I love working on book covers. It’s not my primary skill set, but I’ve done enough now to feel vaguely competent, and I’ve gotten to work with some incredible artists, so I’ve learned a lot.

But this is the first time I’ve written “The Pomeranian is the wrong shade of green. We need him to look more radioactive.”

Thankfully, the artist, Dale Ray Deforest, took it in stride and did, indeed, make the Pomeranian a more radioactive green.

 

This book has been quite a lot of fun to work on in general. I first met Skyler in Austin, Texas, during one of the most memorable weekends of my life – I was at World Horror Convention, got the worst food poisoning of my life, was breaking up with a boyfriend, and had my first book signing for my first anthology (I did that signing half a bottle of Jack Daniels in, because it turns out whiskey can help calm food poisoning). I loved her work, and when I needed an author to write a Mutants & Masterminds novel for Nisaba, she was an immediate choice.

She had a strong concept almost immediately, and turned over a draft that had me laughing as I read it. The basic premise is a familiar one: a girl entering adulthood, trying to find her way into her new responsibilities.

In Roadtrip to Ruin, there’s nothing normal about Hannah’s life. Going to school with a rich social media celebrity, breaking people out of the hospital, trying to make friends with a demon, and embarking on a road trip to find out where she came from, that’s all just Monday for Hannah.

And yes, the dog is green.

Pick up Roadtrip to Ruin¸ a Mutants & Masterminds novel by Skyler Graye, from Nisaba Press/Green Ronin Publishing soon!

Orbit and Green Ronin Partner Up For The Expanse Drawing

Orbit and Green Ronin are partnering up to present a drawing for fans of The Expanse. (Open to US residents only. Ends 1/2/2020.)

Enter The Expanse Sweepstakes

One lucky winner will get the chance to win a boxed set of the first three books in hardcover that has been signed by the cast of The Expanse show, The Expanse RPG core rulebook and Game Master’s Kit from Green Ronin Publishing, plus a set of four pins and a lanyard!

Enter The Expanse

Now if you’ll excuse us, we have Season 4 of The Expanse to binge…

Fantasy AGE: Campaign Builder’s Guide – More Than a GM Guide (Ronin Roundtable)

One of the fascinating things about jumping in as a game line developer after the game is pretty well established is that you have to go from a casual fan of the game (and it’s various products) to a real expert. That process takes time – I’m still not as expert as I’d like to be with Fantasy AGE just yet – but it can also be a really useful journey of discovery. When you are just reading up on RPG material as you need them for your own games you can miss some really neat, important, or clever bits of game design just because you don’t think they sound like something that appeals to you.

Art by Claudia Ianniciello

This brings me to the Fantasy AGE Campaign Builder’s Guide.

Now, this book has been out for a while, and my predecessor Jack Norris did a really great job talking about the book’s role, why it’s a crucial tome that should not be overlooked, and previewing some of the excellent material in it. Back in July.

Which I did not read at all. And, as a result, I hadn’t taken a look at this book despite owning it and being a fan of the game system, until it became part of my job.

And, I suspect I’m not the only Fantasy AGE fan who just skipped over this. And that’s a shame.

So, in a combination mea culpa and apologia, I present:

The Top Ten Cool Things I Didn’t Know Were In The Fantasy AGE Campaign Builder’s Guide.

  1. Probability Charts.

I played a LOT of Champions back in the 1980s, which used a 3d6 roll low resolution system, so i have some instinctive feel for what the odds are I’ll roll a 9 or less on 3d6. But I am much less apt to know there’s a 44.44% chance to roll doubles on any given 3d6 roll, which is crucial knowledge when coming up with new stunts and wondering how often they’ll come into play. Some GMs will have no use for this, and that’s fine, but it saves the rest of us a LOT of math.

  1. Rules-Free Good GMing Advice

I really expected this book to mostly be rules, and rules about rules. But there’s a lot of solid, system-agnostic tips and techniques for being a fun, memorable GM in this book. The “Saying Yes to your Players” sidebar alone is worth its weight in gold.

  1. A Whole Discussion on Changing Frameworks

Sure, I expected lots of good advice and rules for creating various different campaign frameworks. But tips on when, how and why to change a campaign’s framework? Never considered it, and the utility of this book is greatly increased for its inclusion.

  1. Some Of The Best Advice I Have Ever Read On How To Create Your Own Adventures

Again, this is designed for Fantasy AGE, but transcends just this rule system. I’d happily recommend it to any GM who struggles with feeling comfortable designing adventures for their players, regardless of what RGP system they are using.

  1. Rules for Creating Honorifics and Memberships as Rewards

It’s much more common for a game to mention a player might end up being called a Dragon-Slayer by locals and bards than to go into any kind of detail about how that honorific may game-mechanically aid the character.

  1. A Random magical properties Table for Magic Items

This is really useful for helping GMs figure out what the heroes find in the troll-barrow.

  1. Guidance for Building a Pantheon

Most (though no, not all) RPGs either assume you’ll use their assumed campaign setting’s pre-determined deities (or real-world religious beliefs), or that you’ll largely ignore the divine. Making gods, and delving into questions like is there a difference between a god and an immensely powerful mage or monster, is a fairly specialized skill set that not everyone has much experience with. This is one of the places this book really fulfills its ‘Campaign Builder’ title better than a lot of “GM Guides” I have read, and again I’d encourage GMs building a campaign or any game system to read this.

The Random Religion tables, in particular, are genius.

  1. SubGenre Rules

It’s one thing to discuss potential campaign genres and subgenres. It’s something altogether different to offer subgenre-specific variant rules. Ranging from Cinematic Acrobatics to Investigation Stunts and Supply Ratings, with these rules you don’t just tell the players they are the wuxia police of a mystically-fueled train making a 1-year journey through a zombie-overrun wasteland (during which it must never dare stop or be overrun), the game rules actually change to support that specific concept.

  1. Random Charts of Business Details

Players wanting to know what merchant shops are visited by someone they are following in town is one of the things that can cause me to hem and haw for way too long. Being able to bounce some dice and tell them quickly it’s a Weaponsmith and Bookstore, but most of the staff seem busy preparing for someone’s wedding? That’s a fast and fun way to flesh out those unexpected trips into the merchant quarter.

  1. Location Stunts

I love Fantasy AGE’s stunt system, and to me this is the biggest gem of the book. The idea that in a city rich with magic, stunts that increase magic damage might cost 1 less stunt point? That’s gold, and it opens up a whole new realm of potential encounter and campaign design for Fantasy AGE.

That’s not to say there isn’t a LOT of other material in this book. These are just the things that most caused me to stop and say “huh” out loud! If you haven’t picked it up, give it a look. If you have, but like me have barely cracked the spine yet, I suggest you set some time aside to explore the book in greater depth.

Green Ronin Is At PAX Unplugged

PAX Unplugged logoGreen Ronin is at PAX Unplugged this weekend, exhibiting in booth 3649 in the Expo Hall and running games all weekend (with the able assistance of our Freebooters) in the Tabletop Freeplay hall. We will have copies of Abzu’s Bounty (the soon-to-be-released adventure path for The Expanse RPG), Critical Role: Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting, Threefold, Superteam Handbook, the novels Height of the Storm and Shadowtide, and more!

Incoming transmission….

It’s almost here! Kickstarter backers of The Expanse Roleplaying Game should be on the lookout for the PDF of Abzu’s Bounty this coming week. Pre-orders and PDFs will be available on the Green Ronin website soon after that, and those of you at PAX Unplugged will have a chance to get your hands on physical copies. All of us at Green Ronin want to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who backed The Expanse RPG and made this possible. As my first development project for Green Ronin, bringing Abzu’s Bounty to life has been an exciting ride, and I’m really proud of the work the writers and artists put into making this amazing book.

Art by Andrey Vasilchenko

I’ve discussed many of the details in previous posts, but for those of you who may have missed them, here’s a summary. Abzu’s Bounty is a six-part, system-spanning campaign for The Expanse Roleplaying Game. The campaign can take place during the early Expanse novels (Levianthan’s Wake and Caliban’s War). The story opens with characters onboard an ice hauler collecting ice from the rings of Saturn. The crew discovers a strange silicate in some of the ice. The characters soon find themselves enmeshed in a conspiracy that takes them from Prometheus (one of the moons of Saturn) to the inner planets of Earth and Mars and places like Titan and Luna in-between. The book is full of NPCs and locations that are important to the Abzu’s Bounty campaign but could just as easily show up in your own stories. The campaign is designed in such a way that you can play it straight through or pick and choose the parts you want to add your own stories as the characters untangle the mystery. For a more detailed look at what you’ll find inside, check out my earlier posts.

I wish I could say more, but I can’t give away all of the secrets. I look forward to hearing about the adventures of the crews of the Abzu’s Bounty. I hope you all have as much fun playing it as we’ve had creating it.