Entries by Malcolm Sheppard

Playing With Stunts

Stunts are one of the pillars of the Adventure Game Engine, the system we use in Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, Blue Rose, The Expanse, and the upcoming Cthulhu Awakens and Fifth Season roleplaying games, all descended from design work on the grandfather of them all, Dragon Age. Heading into the new edition of Fantasy AGE […]

We’ve Been Secretly Making a Game

That’s right, we have. Well, kind of. We mentioned it briefly in 2019, at Gen Con, but the reference was so short and sparse that it didn’t spread. This was a blessing in disguise because of course the very next year COVID-19 spread across the world, forcing us to change our plans. We changed them […]

Modern AGE, Post-Pandemic

One of the challenges of the pandemic was a “logjam” of content we couldn’t publish yet for a number of reasons. Printers were unavailable. Shipping was awful (and hasn’t improved as much as anyone would like, honestly—remember, we don’t set those prices!) and people got sick. Bad times, and we’re still emerging from them. One […]

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Preview: Stunts!

Stunts are a hallmark of the Adventure Game Engine, and something we looked at very carefully for Fantasy AGE’s new edition—one that’s available for preorder (with discount PDF option) and in PDF now, by the way! Look at the PDF and you’ll be able to see all the details for yourself, but this article will […]

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Preview: Magic

Fantasy AGE’s magic system is getting a bit of a polish for the new edition. The fundamental rules are the same, but there are more spells and options for spellcasting characters. This preview is going to be a bit more straightforward, as we’ve made various adjustments across other AGE books, and took those efforts and […]

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 […]