Fifth Season Preview: When Are We?

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The Fifth Season Roleplaying GameReaders already familiar with the Broken Earth trilogy may wonder: When during the context of the novels is the Fifth Season RPG set?

As readers already know, the Broken Earth novels tell an in-depth story of their main characters and their story has significant effects on the world and its future. Therefore, the decision was made to set the Fifth Season RPG sometime prior to the key events of the first novel, The Fifth Season, although it’s entirely possible to set your Fifth Season campaign during the events of the novels, looking at how your comm deals with all that unfolds during them, if you wish.

The RPG looks at things on a much more local level than the novels, although you can decide to take the future of the world in an entirely different direction, if you want. One of the great things about roleplaying games is they place imaginary worlds into the hands of your game group, to spin out your own stories however you want. They also allow us to explore different aspects of a fictional setting in ways the source fiction did not, or only touched upon.

Deadciv Ruins are very mysterious

Wait… is that a Freeway?

Deadciv Ruins

One aspect of this for Fifth Season is the concept of “deadcivs,” long-dead civilizations and the ruins they have left behind. The history of the Stillness is tens of thousands of years, significantly longer than the entirety of recorded human history in our modern world. There have been many Seasons over that time, and untold numbers of comms and entire civilizations have come and gone, to say nothing of what may have existed in the time before stonelore was first recorded, in the lost annals of human history.

While most deadciv ruins have been buried, crushed, or otherwise destroyed by the churning, shaking, and thrashing of Father Earth, the potential for artifacts, remnants, or even some surviving locations of those lost civilizations is a rich field for Fifth Season Game Moderators. They can offer unusual places for characters to explore, filled with their own hazards. Unique items may intrigue and fascinate Innovators in the comm, while deadciv artifacts can be treasures to make a comm thrive — or lead other comms to covet what they have. With “sufficiently advanced technology” most deadciv artifacts can serve as the equivalent of “magic items” in a Fifth Season setting, although far more rare and more easily misunderstood than their fantasy RPG equivalents.

Fifth Season Preview: Game Play

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The Fifth Season Roleplaying GameGame play in the Fifth Season RPG proceeds on two distinct scales. The story of the comm unfolds in seasons, each of which is a “turn” of part of the year, and features an event, a check of the comm’s prosperity, and an opportunity for the comm to work together on an activity to achieve a particular goal. Within the unfolding of the seasons are stories focusing on the individual characters from the comm. These adventures are often tied to the events of the season, but not necessarily, and the encounters the characters have during them may have impact on the comm as a whole. In some cases an adventure is meant to address a misfortune suffered by the comm during a seasonal event, and may be able to mitigate that misfortune or eliminate it altogether.

Comm Turns: Seasons

A comm “turn” is a “season.” Ordinarily there are four seasons in a year. During each season, the GM rolls for a seasonal event, the comm makes a prosperity test, and can initiate a comm activity.

Seasonal Events

Seasonal events represent the random fortunes of a comm surviving in the Stillness. They are not the only things to happen in the entire season, just particularly noteworthy events. The Game Master rolls on the Seasonal Events Table to determine what the key event will be for that season and integrates the event into the narrative of the campaign as desired.

Many seasonal events are misfortunes that can befall a comm. These are similar to hazards encountered by characters but on a comm-wide scale. Misfortunes can weaken a comm, reducing its Stability and, if severe enough, even bring about the comm’s eventual dissolution. Also like hazards, many misfortunes can be mitigated or avoided altogether. This usually involves a test using one of the comm’s traits, although in some cases the Game Moderator may substitute an adventure for the test if characters intervene in the event.

Everything changes in a Fifth Season

“Everything changes in a Fifth Season”

Intervention

The tests and outcomes for seasonal events assume the comm is bringing what resources it can to bear, but that the player’s characters are not doing anything in particular apart from assisting like any other members of the comm. However, in some cases, the GM may wish to set up an adventure either based on the season’s event, or in place of it. In these cases, the player characters are said to be intervening in the seasonal event, and their intervention may affect its outcome. Essentially, the adventure takes the place of the usual test or tests involving the event and the characters’ actions decide its outcome.

Comm Prosperity

Once the event of the season is determined, the comm’s prosperity is tested. This is a measure of the comm’s overall success and survivability. Failure means the comm suffers misfortune and loses Stability. If the test succeeds, the comm continues to do well, at least meeting its essential needs, perhaps even succeeding well enough to apply an advancement to the comm’s Cache score.

Comm Activity

Each season, a comm can also initiate an activity, similar to a character’s action, such as Conflict with another comm or group, Growth to build up the comm, Improvement of one of the comm’s traits, Innovation to add a new focus to a trait, Preparation to add a bonus to the comm’s next prosperity test, or Recovery to restore lost Stability to the comm.

Comm Conditions

Comms can take on certain conditions to deal with a loss of Stability, like characters do to mitigate damage. The comm then needs to recover from the condition using the recovery activity. Conditions are not as necessary for comms to avoid Stability loss, as they tend to be more resilient than individual characters.

The Fifth Season

“Everything changes in a Fifth Season” according to stonelore, and that is true of Seasonal play and events as well. The Game Moderator ultimately decides when a Fifth Season occurs in the context of the game, although there is a guideline for a Fifth Season to begin as a Seasonal Event. During a Fifth Season, the difficulty of a comm’s tests increase, seasonal events differ, and the comm relies upon its Cache for prosperity tests rather than its other traits, and Cache slowly diminishes over the course of the Season. A Fifth Season makes it more difficult for a comm to survive, and to recover from its misfortunes. A comm with a strong Cache score can last through a Fifth Season … if it is not too long.

An Interview with N.K. Jemisin

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We wanted something special for the last three days of the crowdfunder and here it is: an interview with N.K. Jemisin herself!

Check out the Fifth Season RPG on Backerkit now!

Crowdfunding campaign ends this Thursday! Signed Bookplate Bundles still available!


Q: Roleplaying games and speculative fiction are close cousins. What did you find most intriguing about bringing The Stillness to tabletop RPGs? Do you have any experience with RPGs yourself?

I played a little tabletop back in college — Marvel Superheroes, if I recall, and just a little D&D (back then it was AD&D). My group back then was mostly into adventure with a lot of fighting, which I wasn’t much into, but they were my friends. I had fun with them no matter what or how we were playing. Since then, I’ve been invited to join a couple of groups, but just didn’t have time — juggling two careers doesn’t leave a lot of room for leisure. But since I’ve ratcheted down to just one career, things are better, and I’m gearing up to join a new D&D group now. Also playing around with world concepts for if I decide to try GMing for the first time.

As for bringing the Stillness to tabletop, honestly, I’m still just fascinated by the idea of other people wanting to go to this place where the apocalypse happens every Tuesday! For fun!  LOL. But I can’t wait to see people play it.

Q: You incorporated a lot of real-world orogeny, geology, volcanology, and plain physics into your novels. What was the most interesting thing you learned in your research for the Broken Earth?

Mount Rainier. This probably isn’t super interesting to other people, but I constantly see character in concepts and natural forces, maybe because I partially grew up along the Gulf Coast where hurricanes have names, and we speak of them like they’re people… or maybe just because I think like a fantasy writer. I’d been to Seattle before and just thought, “Ooh, such a pretty mountain.” Then I read up on it and realized it’s a Decade Volcano — one of the most potentially destructive mountains in the world. It could wipe out Seattle and Tacoma like that, in a variety of absolutely horrific ways. There are worse volcanic threats out there (there’s a chance the Yellowstone supervolcano could wipe out humanity), but the specific danger of Rainier is its beauty. People want to live near it, and I can’t blame them. I would love to wake up to the sight of that mountain every day — but a population that size in the vicinity of a mountain that terrible is a horror movie waiting to happen.

Nothing but respect for people who choose to live in such places. I get that the ephemerality of it is part of the appeal. I just prefer for my own natural disasters to be slower-moving, and not so apocalyptic.

Green Ronin is based in Seattle so we’re in the blast zone. Lucky us! Nicole, our COO, grew up in Oregon and she remembers the Mount St. Helens eruption vividly.
Q: The Broken Earth Trilogy tells a specific story, but game groups will create their own. What ideas do you think they could explore in the Stillness?

The Stillness is a pretty big world, and there’s lore throughout it that got alluded-to but not shown in the Broken Earth books. I’d love to see people play around with all that hinted-at stuff.  What other secrets do the lorists keep behind their black-painted lips, and why must they stay secret? Were there ever expeditions that tried to sail around the great empty ocean that covers half the world, and did they find anything (maybe like an ancient city full of stone eaters) when they did it?  You’ve seen some of the ways that terrestrial animals and insects change during a Season, but what about the plants or marine life? If a quiet farming comm discovers a huge and dangerous ancient ruin lurking underneath it, how do they deal with that?  How do people have fun in a world that’s constantly on the brink of extinction? There’s lots to explore.

Q: Can you give aspiring Game Moderators a few things to bear in mind when they are making their own stories in The Stillness?
  • The cultures of the Stillness are different from those of our world in one key way:  They understand that rapid adaptation to change is essential for survival.  A typical comm’s structure is modular, with every resource — food, weapons, labor, knowledge — meant to be shuffled around as needed in the event of a Season. This means that comms which opt for democracy or consensus at ordinary times turn instantly authoritarian once Seasonal Law I declared.  Hoarding or charging money for goods and services within the comm is instantly illegal.  Having more children without permission is instantly illegal. A wealthy merchant becomes neither wealthy nor a merchant once the Season comes, because any resources they possess are confiscated for the community pile, and the merchant’s life becomes governed by their caste and its duties.
  • Every person is trained to expect this modularity from childhood, though some keep the lesson in mind better than others. The formerly-wealthy merchant knows better than to protest if their goods are confiscated — but they might do it anyway, because they’re used to the privilege of wealth.  Too much protest means exile.  Meanwhile, members of the Strongback caste are always aware they can be exiled if they aren’t willing to work and obey others.  The partners of Breeders, if not Breeders themselves, must be prepared to accept non-monogamous behavior and to raise a child which might not be their own.
  • The people of the Stillness are exactly like us, psychologically — especially in being prone to react irrationally under stress. The onset of a Season is a critical time in which a community’s survival depends wholly on if its Leadership can overcome the natural human tendency to freak the hell out during an emergency. If they fail, the people of a comm could revolt against their Leadership, wasting resources and effort that should be spent on survival on infighting. Comms that do this rarely survive Seasons.
  • Good Leadership, therefore, requires a balanced approach, discouraging change resistant behavior while not being too heavy-handed. Too much authoritarianism, or totalitarianism, is inadvisable.
  • Seasonal Law is resource-focused but still explicitly anti-eugenicist. Bigotry, which is known to destroy or weaken communities, is illegal at all times. Disability is not a cause for exile in itself, though a disabled person must find a way to be useful; fortunately there are many necessary tasks that can be done by someone with limited mobility or cognition. Medical care is in a permanent state of emergency triage:  those who can be saved more easily are prioritized over those who will need more resources or whose condition is more precarious.
  • Commless people aren’t all bandits. Many are “free spirits” who can’t or choose not to function within the expected modularity — or who want to develop their own ways to survive a Season. Some of those ways, such as those of the comm of Meov in the books, are viable — though the only way to be sure of viability is to wait for a Season and see.
Q: The Fifth Season RPG will be lavishly illustrated. Will this be the first time (apart from cover art) that readers will get to see visual interpretations of the Broken Earth?

No.  The Subterranean Press special editions of the Broken Earth books feature astounding art by Miranda Meeks, and since the books have been published in many other languages, several of the foreign editions have had unique cover art that’s astounding. I also regularly see fanart from my readers that blows me away! But I always love seeing new depictions by skilled artists, and I’m loving what I’ve seen so far from you guys.

Q: We understand that the Broken Earth trilogy has been optioned for a television or streaming series. Can you tell us anything about the progress of that project?

Just that it’s not going to be a TV series anymore, but a feature-length film series; the rights were bought by Sony Tristar. I turned in the first movie script a few months ago.  Beyond that, I can’t say, sorry!

No worries, a feature film series is exciting stuff! Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. 

Fifth Season Preview: Character Creation

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The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game

Crowdfunding now on Backerkit!

Once a Fifth Season game group has created their comm (detailed in Fifth Season Preview: Comm Creation) they can get down to creating individual characters. Those familiar with Adventure Game Engine character creation know it often involves choosing a character Background, a Class or Profession, Talents or Specializations, and a Drive or Goals. The Fifth Season RPG is similar in many regards, with a few notable differences. Let’s take a look at the steps of character creation:

Step One: Concept

Come up with the sort of character you’re interested in playing. Talk with the GM and the other players in your group about your character concept and how well it will fit into the kind of game the GM is looking to run, the kind of characters the other players want to create, and the comm you have co-created for them.

What About…?

Orogenes and Stone Eaters? Yes, they’re mentioned in Fifth Season. The Orogene talent allows for the creation of feral orogenes, but there’s no provision to play a Fulcrum-trained blackjacket with one or more rings yet. Likewise, there are no rules yet for playing a Guardian, much less a nonhuman like a Stone Eater. The focus in the core game is on the human inhabitants of comms in the Stillness. Further development of character options will appear in later Fifth Season supplements.

Characters in the Fifth Season can have a variety of backgrounds and use-castes

Step Two: Caste

In the society of the Stillness, each person has a role to play in the survival and well-being of their comm. These roles are broadly defined by use-castes, or simply castes: the ways in which people are useful to society. People are generally born into the use-caste of their same-sex parent  by default, although it is not unusual for someone to apply to change castes, or to be encouraged to do so, as particular talents or inclinations emerge as they reach adulthood or even later in life.

Fifth Season focused on five of the seven primary use-castes (the other two being Guardian and Orogene), as follows:

  • Breeders have a bonus to Perception and choose from the Companion, Crafter, and Safeguard specializations.
  • Innovators have a bonus to Intelligence and choose from the Geomest, Geneer, and Lorist specializations.
  • Leadership has a bonus to Communication and chooses from the Diplomat, Organizer, or Trader specializations.
  • Resistants have a bonus to Constitution and choose from the Caregiver, Cultivator, or Stalwart specializations.
  • Strongbacks have a bonus to Strength and choose from the Guard, Hunter, and Laborer specializations.

Step Three: Abilities & Focuses

All AGE system characters are defined by nine abilities. They’re scored on a numeric scale from –2 (quite poor) to 4 (truly outstanding). A score of 0 is considered average or unremarkable. The abilities are:

  • Accuracy measures aim and precision, and your ability to hit targets with lighter and ranged weapons.
  • Communication covers your character’s social skills and ability to deal with others.
  • Constitution is overall health, fortitude, and resistance to harm, illness, and fatigue.
  • Dexterity encompasses your character’s agility, hand-eye coordination, and quickness.
  • Fighting is your character’s ability in close combat with heavier weapons.
  • Intelligence measures reasoning, memory, problem-solving, and overall knowledge.
  • Perception is the ability to pick up on and notice things using any of the character’s senses.
  • Strength is sheer muscle power, from lifting heavy things to feats of athletics.
  • Willpower measures self-control, discipline, mental fortitude, and confidence.

In this step, you allocate points to your character’s abilities, modified by their caste. You also choose focuses. An ability focus (or just focus for short) is an area of expertise within the broader ability. For example, while Communication determines in general how effective a communicator your character is, the Persuasion focus describes a particular expertise in convincing other people to agree to the character’s proposals.

Step Four: Drive

Your character’s Drive describes what motivates them to act, to say “yes” to an opportunity. Drive gives you cues for action as a player and provides the GM with “hooks” to encourage your character to take action. While some drives are more common for particular castes than others—Leader for Leadership, for example—any drive can be combined with any caste or specialization as the player sees fit. Interpret your character’s drive based on their other traits.

Your Drive provides you with a quality and a downfall, one ability focus, and one talent.

Step Five: Improvement

In this step, round out your character’s traits by improving two of them. You can choose the same option twice, but the benefits don’t stack. So, while you can choose two Ability Improvements, you cannot apply them both to the same ability score.

  • Ability Improvement: Increase an ability score of your choice by +1. This can increase the ability to a score higher than 3.
  • Ability Focus: Gain a new ability focus of your choice.
  • Talent Improvement: Gain the novice degree in a new talent, or improve an existing talent by one degree.

Step Six: Finalize Abilities

Once you have allocated abilities and chosen caste and drive, along with their associated choices, and made your improvements, now it’s time to finalize your character’s abilities. You can make any tweaks or adjustments, shifting an ability point here or there, or changing around some of your focus or talent choices, to get the final set of your character’s abilities.

You also use this step to calculate your character’s secondary abilities like Speed, Defense, Toughness, and Fortune.

Step Seven: Goals

While a character’s drive moves them forward, the character’s goals are what they move toward. Ideally, goals should help to define what is important to your character, and offer the GM inspiration for stories and ways to involve your character in adventures. You’re asked to come up with at least one short-term and one long-term goal for your character.

Step Eight: Relationships

Comms are made up of people, held together by a complex web of relationships: parents and children, siblings and cousins, lovers and spouses, friends and rivals, and more. All of these various relationships define the comm and the place of the individual characters in it. Certain relationships are especially important to characters, and Fifth Season reflects that by giving those relationships a description (the relationship bond) and a numerical value (the relationship intensity).

Your Fifth Season character starts out with an intensity 1 bond with their comm, defined as they see fit, along with additional relationship intensity ranks equal to the character’s Communication ability score, if it is 1 or higher. Relationship bonds can be spent as bonus Stunt Points for actions related to that relationship.

Step Nine: Challenges

As an optional step of character creation, you can define one or more personal challenges for your character. A personal challenge is similar to the kinds of challenges the characters face and overcome in the course of their adventures, but this challenge is both specific to your character and something they carry with them wherever they go. It can show up in the course of the game, by your choice, to challenge your character. A personal challenge can be a physical disability, a psychological difficulty, or a social challenge, as you define it.

Encountering and dealing with a personal challenge in the context of the game provides a bonus to the character: they gain Fortune. The Fortune gained from overcoming personal challenges is temporary, so it can restore lost Fortune, but if it raises the character’s total over their usual Fortune score it only lasts until it is expended, then it is gone.

The key thing about personal challenges is that they arise as challenges only when the player wants. Otherwise, that aspect of the character still exists, it just doesn’t particularly pose a challenge. This allows players to portray characters who have particular qualities without feeling burdened by them, if they don’t want to be, or when they are not in the mood to deal with that particular challenge in game. We don’t always have the option of consenting to challenges in our real lives, which is why it is important to give players that option when it comes to their characters at the game table.

Step Ten: Description

Finally, you take the opportunity to gather up everything you’ve learned about your character during this process and put together a description of them: their name, what they look like, how old they are, what their personality is like, and some of their likes and dislikes. It doesn’t have to be long, just a paragraph or so to briefly introduce others to who the character is, just like you’re describing a character from a favorite book, movie, or television show. In fact, if you like, you can even “cast” an actor or personality in the role of your character and use that to enhance your description!

Next: With the comm and the characters in place, we look at moving the story forward on two different levels of game play.

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

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Fantasy AGE 2nd edition Core RulebookFantasy 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 play, and one of the ways to make it happen is through level advancements: the benefits characters gain as they level up.

Getting Focused

Most of the game’s focuses are the same, though there are a few tweaks here and there, such as a Slings focus since we added that heretofore missing weapon category to the game. At Level 11, however, two things happen: Your character gains a +1 Bonus to all the focuses they know for free, and they can add the option to double focus by spending an additional focus advancement on a focus they already know. Thus, known focus bonuses increase from +2 to +3, and focuses you choose to concentrate on can increase to +4.

More Talents

In addition to the all-new ancestry talents mentioned earlier in this series, we’ve revised many talents from the prior edition’s Basic Rulebook and Fantasy AGE Companion.

More Specializations—and Sooner

In the new edition, characters take a specialization starting right at Level 1, to better define who they are right from the start. Characters also gain one specialization slot at each odd-numbered level, with fewer restrictions than there used to be.

Fantasy AGE Advancements and Damage

What About Dawizar—I mean, Damage Scaling?

One long-time observation about Fantasy AGE is that characters and monsters get pretty tough compared to the damage output of various weapons, spells, and other threats as characters go up in level.

We crunched the numbers to get a look at this and determined how a model attack would scale at different levels and monster Threat ranks. We wanted to avoid the “treadmill effect” of advancement becoming meaningless where equally advanced enemies would inflict equivalent damage, so that characters and creatures are actually never any harder to beat in encounters (many games do this with monsters and things like “Level 20 slippery ice,” but Fantasy AGE isn’t one of them). We also wanted class niches to become increasingly present in the equation. Consequently, every class has a version of the following level 6 feature:

  • Damage Bonus: You may add your weapon focus (if you have one) when inflicting damage with a melee or ranged attack.

That’s taken from the Envoy. Mages also gain this for Arcane Blast and spells. This may seem like a piddly benefit, but at Level 11 this +2 bonus increases to +3 and might even be increased to +4.

At Level 16, members of each class gain an additional damage bonus that works out to around 1d6 depending on their class, on an action or in a circumstance appropriate to their class. This stacks with other bonuses. Here’s the one for the Rogue:

  • Stunt Die to Damage: You may add the value of the stunt die of your attack test when you use Pinpoint Attack to inflict damage against a creature.

In addition, members of each class gain various other circumstantial damage bonuses. Compared against the math, they meet our design goals.

Specialization Preview: Skald

Skalds are battlefield poets who sing and write about heroes and war—those of ancient times, and those before them—during the heat of battle. They fulfil a dual role, urging heroes on to greatness, then immortalizing their deeds in verse. These chronicles can feature skalds themselves, who plunge into the thick of the fight to witness bravery and horror, and participate as earnestly as their companions, adding inspirational words to the clash of steel and roars of beasts.

Skald Talent

Classes: Envoy.

Requirements: Communication 2 or higher, the Communication (Performance) focus, and the Intelligence (Military Lore) focus.

You’re a fighting poet who draws upon legends of heroism and tactical brilliance to achieve victory.

Novice: You spout improvised and memorized poetry that guide your friends and intimidate your foes. When using the Coordinate Envoy ability, you can use the stunt attack option as a minor action, but instead of an attack roll you make an opposed Communication (Performance) test vs. your foe’s reaction Willpower (Morale) roll. If you use this and the ordinary Coordinate ability in the same turn, you must pass on the SP you gained from each to a different ally. Your ally must be able to understand you.

In addition, to survive the battles you’ll sing about, you receive training in one additional Weapon Group of your choice.

Expert: Your knowledge of great battles gives you tactical wisdom that supplements your fighting ability. Once per encounter, you may add your Intelligence (Military Lore) focus bonus to your attack roll, as an applicable bit of lore occurs to you. You may instead grant this bonus to an ally (they get your focus bonus, not theirs), who must use it on their next turn. Neither option uses up an additional action, but you can only use one of these options once per encounter. If you affect an ally, they must be able to understand you.

Master: Your lore-backed verses can wound your enemies’ spirits as powerfully as a blade might cut their bodies. As a major action, you can make a Communication (Performance) test vs. your foe’s reaction Willpower (Morale) roll. Your foe must be able to feel fear, understand you, and be within 10 yards. If you succeed, you inflict 1d6 + Willpower penetrating damage, and you can attach combat and Envoy stunts to the result if you have the SP and they’re appropriate to an attack based on frightening and demoralizing a foe. You may not, however, use this attack to perform a coup de grace—no matter how artfully you tell someone they’re going to die, you can’t just kill them that way.

Fifth Season Preview: Comm Creation

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The Fifth Season RPG live now on Backerkit!

While the freely available Fifth Season Quick-start provides a substantial “test-drive” of the Fifth Season RPG (now crowd-funding on Backerkit) the Quick-start necessarily leaves out some things in the interests of space and getting folks up-and-playing the game as quickly as possible. For those interested in the Fifth Season RPG, we’re going to take a tour through some of the features of the full-fledged game that the Quick-start doesn’t touch upon, starting with comm creation.

A Fifth Season campaign also starts with comm creation. As the book itself says:

“The comm is what binds the characters together as a group. Presumably, whatever their personal goals and agendas, the success and survival of their shared comm is foremost in the characters’ minds … In many ways, the comm serves as a kind of “meta-character” within a Fifth Season chronicle, a shared part of the story created and sustained by the entire group. While individual player characters may come and go, survive or perish, prosper or fail, the comm goes on. In a long-running chronicle, the comm may even outlive all of the characters, as future generations come up and take their places and see to the care and growth of the community.”

The game group creates the comm before creating their individual characters. This provides a good basis for character ideas and concepts, ensuring they fit in with the comm and the overall direction of the campaign. That said, players may have certain character ideas in mind while creating the comm, and it’s perfectly valid to guide comm creation in the direction of those concepts as well.

The process of creating the comm has four steps:

Comm Creation is an important aspect of the game and your characters

Step One: Concept

First, the players as a  group decide on an overall concept for their comm. Where in the Stillness is it? How big is it? How old? What kind of comm is it? This is influenced by the game’s Session Zero and the type of campaign the group wants to run.

It is best to keep the concept loose at this initial step, subject to changes based on the rest of the process, just enough to offer a basic framework for the group to create the comm around. For example, it’s sufficient to say “A small comm in the Nomidlats, probably north of the Tufa Mountains, possibly near a river.” Even that narrows the field of possibilities considerably and offers some direction to the comm creation process.

The comm’s concept can help to direct further decisions about the comm and its traits, people, and qualities, but those things can also affect and change the comm’s concept as they develop.

Step Two: Traits

Like characters in Fifth Season, comms have traits that define them, describing areas where a comm is strong or weak, fortunate or unfortunate. The primary comm traits are related to five of the primary common use-castes of people in the Stillness:

  • Strength: Strongback caste. A combination of the comm’s ability to perform physical labor and their military might in fielding soldiers.
  • Resistance: Resistant caste. The comm’s ability to withstand disease, starvation, and related challenges, both due to the presence of a strong Resistant caste and their skills in caring for others.
  • Innovation: Innovator caste. The comm’s ability to come up with new solutions and ideas and to practice technical skills.
  • Leadership: Leadership caste. The quality of the comm’s leadership and organization and the comm’s ability to handle matters diplomatically.
  • Resilience: Breeder caste. The comm’s resilience and ability to recover from setbacks and losses.

Comms also have the secondary traits of Size, Cache, and Stability. The players assign values to the comm’s traits as a group, as well as choosing focuses for them, similar to the ability focuses AGE system characters have.

Step Three: Qualities

Traits provide quantitative values for the comm. This step looks at the comm’s qualities. It poses a series of questions to the players (chosen or randomly rolled from a table) wherein each player answers something about the comm: Qualities include Status, Geography, History, Features, Culture, and Secrets. You can use the prompts provided in the game or make up your own using those categories. Each player gets input into what the comm is like, and ideas about the comm may develop and change as different qualities are applied.

Step Four: The Year Before

To complete the comm creation process and move on to the creation of the primary characters the players will portray, the group plays through one year (four seasons) of comm level game play as defined in the rules. This defines the kind of year the comm has had just before the campaign begins.

Some groups might want to play out a longer or shorter time, anywhere from just a season or two to multiple years, but the year before is the minimum recommended time. Play out this time before creating the player characters, as the events in the year before might well spark some ideas for characters and their own stories.

Next: Character creation in Fifth Season, including use castes and specializations, along with talents and some possible secrets…

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Preview: Staying Classy

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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

Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook

Four Classes?

We took a long time to get the new edition of Fantasy AGE together, and people wondered whether we were going to stick with the three classes found in the original game, or go classless, like Modern AGE and The Expanse. Well, the answer is that we now have four character classes:

  • Envoy: Our new character class, a master of influence who rallies hearts and acts as the face of group of heroes.
  • Mage: Spiritualist, sorcerer, sage, theurgist—those who concentrate on magical power, no matter the doctrine.
  • Rogue: Sneaky experts and agile combatants.
  • Warrior: A tough-as-nails expert in direct combat using virtually any weapon.

Class Tune Ups

We’ve changed each individual class as well, to resolve some feedback from playtesting and developer experience, as well as to help you better individualize your character to set them apart from other members of the same class.

Class Stunts: The new edition of Fantasy AGE includes class stunts. These are acquired as characters gain levels. Each class has its own stunt list, consisting of stunts that are slightly more potent than the stunts available to all characters.

Damage Bonuses: Responding to concerns about how damage scales in Fantasy AGE, each class has features allowing them to inflict more damage when they use a class’s special purview.

First Specialization: Characters gain a free degree in a specialization at first level. Instead of being a bonus for perseverance, a specialization in the new edition is a way to make your character distinctive from the start. And best of all, the new edition has revised and entirely new specializations to choose from.

The Envoy is a new option for Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition classes!Introducing the Envoy

An envoy is a master of social situations, building or exploiting relationships and group interactions. The classic envoy is an agent of a ruling court or council who both carries out the orders of their superiors and works to increase their own influence and rank. You can also use the envoy to repre­sent anyone who is primarily concerned with deals, diplo­macy, leading, or deceiving others, from a noble captain of the guard to a scoundrel with a heart of gold or even a con artist.

As an envoy you aren’t the best fighter in combat, and don’t have the stealth and subterfuge a rogue uses to pick off foes from the shadows. You can hold your own in a fight, especially if you can find weaker-willed targets to cow or bamboozle, but you are much more in your element in social encounters. If you are playing an envoy you should expect to do a lot of the talking with patrons, friendly rivals, suspicious officials, and tight-fisted merchants.

Primary Abilities: Communication, Fighting, Intelligence, and Willpower

Secondary Abilities: Accuracy, Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, and Strength

Starting Health: 25 + Constitution + 1d6

Weapon Groups: Any three of the following: Black Powder, Bludgeons, Bows, Brawling, Light Blades, or Spears

Level 1 Class Powers

Coordinate

You create opportunities for your allies. Whenever you generate Stunt Points, you get an extra SP that you can give to another character. Alternately, you can give 2 of your SP from the stunt attack action to an ally (in which case you do not generate an additional extra SP). In either case, the given SP must be used on the character’s next turn, or it is lost.

Dazzle

Whether it is through charming patter, a dour glare, cutting remarks, or the performance of tricks and art you can dazzle a foe, leaving them unable to concentrate on attacking you. As a minor action select one foe, that can hear you, to dazzle. If your Communication is greater than their Will­power, you gain a +1 bonus to Defense against their attacks until the beginning of your next turn.

Social Chameleon

You have two social classes, and two backgrounds. Deter­mine your first social class and background normally. For your second social class and background, you may select any different social class and then select any background appropriate to that social class. You select a focus for each background, as normal (thus gaining one additional focus).

Select one social class and background that represent the circumstances you found yourself in as a child. The other represents a second society you successfully integrated yourself into, gaining a new class and background by the time you were a young adult. For example, you may have been born into the life of a criminal but fought your way up to be seen as a dilettante. Or you might have been raised as a guilder but spent enough time with soldiers to be able to move comfortably among them.

When using backgrounds to determine starting wealth, use the higher of your two backgrounds.

Want to Advance?

Next time we’ll talk about level improvements, including the revised and expanded set of talents and specializations available in the new edition.

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Preview: Ancestries

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Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook 2nd edition

Coming Soon! Pre-order begins in February.

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 Fantasy AGE, we used “race” instead of ancestry, following what was familiar to gamers at the time. However, there was always some internal unease. In the Threefold book for Modern AGE back in 2019 we standardized to “ancestry.” This removes some problematic implications and doesn’t make us drill down on the ultimate nature of these varied fantasy origins.

2nd Edition Ancestries

The original Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook presented a small number of classic fantasy ancestries. The new edition features a much wider set of options—the following ones, to be precise:

  • Draak
  • Dwarf
  • Elf
  • Gnome
  • Goblin
  • Halfling
  • Human
  • Orc
  • Wildfolk

Some of these have been revised from the old Fantasy AGE Companion, but all of them have been reexamined. In addition, guidelines to play characters of mixed ancestry are part of the core rules.

Ancestries in Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition

Ancestry Talents

In addition to the core benefits of an ancestry, characters can deepen their ancestral abilities through Ancestry Talents, a new addition to Fantasy AGE that provide further benefits if you want to epitomize a particular ancestry. Each ancestry has its own talent.

Example Ancestry Talent: Dwarven Secrets

Ancestries: Dwarf Classes: Any

You live for the stone-hearted ways of the dwarves.

Novice: Structures and natural caves tell you their secrets readily. You may use Intelligence (Engineering) tests to determine your direction indoors and underground, including whether you’re going up or down, at a TN determined by the Game Master. If someone without this degree could do the same, you gain a +2 bonus to your test on top of any provided by focuses and other advantages.

Expert: When besieged, a true dwarf takes up the axe. When using a weapon from the Axes group, you gain +1 SP whenever your attack roll scores doubles.

Master: You partake of the endurance of stones against foul magic—or you call upon secret teachings to counter sorcery with the power of certain runes. If you fail any test to resist or reduce the effects of a spell, you may make a second test using Constitution (Tolerance) against the same target for the same benefits if you succeed. In any case, you must keep the results of this second roll.

Next Time: Classes

In the next article in this series, we’ll talk about what character classes are like in the new edition of Fantasy AGE. Until then, be daring!

The Fifth Season RPG on Backerkit is Live!

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The Fifth Season RPG now crowdfunding on Backerkit!

Join us for a special livestream with the developers and designers of The Fifth Season RPG!

 

The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game, now crowdfunding on Backerkit, is designed for you to play out adventures and stories set in the world described in the Broken Earth trilogy of novels by N.K. Jemisin—a world where constant and unstable tectonic and volcanic activity threaten all life; a world whose peoples have learned to adapt in order to survive. It is a world where everyone learns that Father Earth hates his children and is always trying to kill them, where metal rusts and even stone crumbles, and the best you can do is be prepared for the next disaster. In the world of the Broken Earth, community—the comm—is everything, because in community there is support and a chance to persevere.

You and your fellow players take the roles of members of such a community, working to overcome internal difficulties and external threats, in order to be ready when that inevitable Fifth Season comes. Are you a lifelong native of this place, someone everyone has recognized from childhood? Maybe you’re a more recent addition to the comm, someone who’s come from a distance, contributing something to the comm that makes the possibility of your secrets and past catching up to you worth it. Or perhaps you are an orogene, one who was born to sess the movements of the tectonic plates, gifted with a forbidden power to still the shaking earth and bleed heat in your environs away until frost coats everything in a perfect circle around you.

These may be times of peace and plenty, but strife and lean times are ahead, with the next Season of Death looming like a dark thunderhead on the horizon.

Welcome to the Stillness.
Download the Free Quickstart right here
Come check out the campaign, and if you pledge in the first 48 hours, you get a free printed copy of the game’s Quickstart (normally $10) if your chosen pledge level includes printed books (the Standard Edition and/or the Special Edition). The printed Quickstart will also be available as an add-on after the first 48 hours.And our top pledge level is the N.K. Jemisin Bookplate Bundle. This gets you the Special, Standard, and PDF Editions of The Fifth Season RPG in addition to the signed bookplate. This pledge level is strictly limited to 500 backers.

Be sure to head over to The Fifth Season RPG on Backerkit and pledge early, before they run out!

Four versions available for the Fifth Season RPG

With four versions available, including Roll20!

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Coming in February

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Fantasy AGE 2nd edition Core Rulebook

If you are looking for a new fantasy roleplaying game, your timing couldn’t be better because the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook is almost here! It will be available as a PDF and go up for print pre-order next month. With our Pre-Order Plus Program, you can add the PDF for only $5 more when you pre-order the printed book, so you can start reading the game as soon as your order is in.

 

 

 

 

What does Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition have to offer? Glad you asked!

  • Fantasy AGE is easy to learn and fun to play. You can make a character in less than 30 minutes, and you only need three 6-sided dice to play.
  • Fantasy AGE is a class and level game so it’s easy to transition to from similar RPGs. The core classes are Envoy, Mage, Rogue, and Warrior (social, magic, sneaky, fighty). You can customize your character with specializations starting at level 1. Choose from duelist, diplomat, elementalist, mystic navigator, pirate, skald, sword mage, and many more.
  • The heart of the game is the stunt system, which brings dynamism and drama to the table. Roll doubles on 3d6 to pull off heroic maneuvers in combat, cast mightier spells, perform amazing feats of physical and mental prowess, or even cut a rival down to size with a few clever words.
  • Fantasy AGE is a toolkit you can use with the setting of your choice. Game Masters have many options to customize the rules for their campaigns. For example, the mage class represents all spellcasters and the game has no de facto stance on the nature of magic. In one campaign, all magic might come from ancestral spirits. In another, there might be a strict difference between arcane and divine magic with rules to reflect it.
  • Fantasy AGE features optional rules systems for Peril, which ramps up the challenges heroes face, and Daring, which allows those same heroes to pull off even more impressive feats.
  • The Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook is a complete game, with player and Game Master info and advice, an array of magical arcana and enchanted items, a selection of monsters and other adversaries, and an adventure so you can start right away.
  • The game is built with the Adventure Game Engine (AGE), which powers many other Green Ronin RPGs: Blue Rose, The Expanse, Modern AGE, and this year brings Cthulhu Awakens and The Fifth Season as well. Each game has some bespoke mechanics to reflect genre and setting (Blue Rose has psychic powers, Modern AGE has modes of play and forgoes classes, and The Expanse has rules for advanced weaponry and spaceship combat, for example) but they all share a common core of rules. If you play any AGE RPG, you already know the basics of the others.

If you are new to Fantasy AGE, you can see the game in just a few weeks. If you’d like to get a sense of the Adventure Game Engine in the meantime, check out the free Quickstart for our Blue Rose RPG.

 

Fantasy AGE: Origins

I designed the Adventure Game Engine in 2008 for our licensed Dragon Age RPG that came out the following year. This was a big hit for us, and it didn’t take long for fans to let us know that they loved the rules but wanted to see a more general version not tied to the world of Thedas. To coincide with Wil Wheaton’s RPG web series Titansgrave, which used the rules, we released the Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook in 2015 to great acclaim. From there the Adventure Game Engine became our house system, with Blue Rose, Modern AGE, and The Expanse following. One reason we began work on the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook was to take some of the cool mechanical innovations of those games and implement them in the game’s next iteration. Like the churn in The Expanse? It forms the basis of the Peril system in Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition, for example.

 

What Does 2nd Edition Mean?

Current Fantasy AGE fans know we’ve been working on the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook for several years. We have not previously called it 2nd Edition because one of the original design goals was to make it 99% compatible with the existing Fantasy AGE line. Two things happened along the way. First, it proved difficult to communicate that this was going to be a brand-new rulebook with some changes but mostly compatible with the Basic Rulebook. Second, during development and playtesting, we found more things that we wanted to update or expand, so now it’s more like 90% compatible. For these reasons, we decided that just calling it 2nd Edition would be best. Still, most of the 1st Edition line works just fine with 2nd Edition. You can use stat blocks from the Bestiary and adventures with little tweaking required. While much material from the Fantasy AGE Companion has been updated and incorporated into the new Core Rulebook, Lairs and the Campaign Builders Guide remain quite useful for the Game Master.

We know Fantasy AGE fans have been waiting for the Core Rulebook for a long time, but now the hour is nigh! Thanks for all your support over the years. Your patience will soon be rewarded.