Entries by Malcolm Sheppard

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Preview: Advancements – and Damage!

Fantasy AGE’s new edition does its best to strike a balance between keeping the game familiar—so familiar that many elements from the old edition work with little to no adjustments—and making improvements in all areas. One of those improvements was giving characters more ways to distinguish themselves from each other right from the beginning of […]

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Preview: Staying Classy

Last time around we chatted about ancestries in the new edition of Fantasy AGE, which is just going through final production tweaking ahead of its PDF and print preorder release—soon! This time, let’s talk about classes Four Classes? We took a long time to get the new edition of Fantasy AGE together, and people wondered […]

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Preview: Ancestries

Fantasy AGE’s new edition is coming soon—and we’ve been remiss when it comes to telling you about it! If you didn’t get involved in playtesting, you may not be aware of some of the revisions in store. One of those is revised and expanded ancestries. Let’s talk about it. Ancestries? In the last edition of […]

The AGE System is a Map

Nothing quite starts off a new year like a cryptic blog post title, so here we go! Seriously though, I’d like to chat about how I feel about what the Adventure Game Engine is as it now powers a wider array of games than ever: Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, Blue Rose, The Expanse, Cthulhu Awakens, […]

The Cthulhu Awakens BackerKit…Awakens. Metaphorically.

Cthulhu awakens literally, of course. In what seems like years ago due to pandemic and post-pandemic time dilation effects, but was actually through this past March, we ran our Kickstarter for Cthulhu Awakens, an AGE system game covering Cthulhu Mythos horror from the early years of the last century to the present: a period we […]

Modern AGE, Four Years On: Modern Adventures

In my last two articles I talked about where the Modern AGE line currently stands with its core, setting-agnostic books, used to customize the game as you please, and its published settings, from sketches to two full-blown game settings: The World of Lazarus and Threefold. However, I ran long on the second article and didn’t […]

Modern AGE, Four Years On: Our Modern Worlds

In my last article, I talked about the state of the Modern AGE line as we move into its fifth year. I started out by dividing the line into two loose categories and exploring the first, of “core” book releases. While Modern AGE is completely playable with the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook, the other releases […]

Modern AGE, Four Years On: The Creative Core

Modern AGE is four years old! It was released back in June 2018, ahead of its formal debut at Gencon of that year. Building on the ideas of Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE was designed to work within the 200+ year span of the “modern era,” up to the near future. This was a bigger challenge […]

A Slice of Cyberpunk Temptation, Coming for Modern AGE

Cyberpunk is one of the most popular genres in roleplaying games. Sitting as it does between the modern era and classic spaceships and aliens SF (though some cyberpunk, such as Schismatrix and Altered Carbon, incorporate those elements too), it’s a natural fit for Modern AGE. I was hesitant to add cyberpunk to Modern AGE because […]

Eldritch Texts in Cthulhu Awakens

  As we noted in our update about powers and eldritch workings, anyone can “cast a spell” in Cthulhu Awakens as long as they have a text to work from that contains the proper instructions rendered in a language they can understand. This of course leads us to the question of what these references are, […]