Ronin Report, July 10th, 2020

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It’s been a couple of months since our last Ronin Ronin Report: new serialized adventures!Report so I thought I’d update you all on how the company is faring during the ongoing COVID crisis. In March and April things were dicey. When our warehouse shut down and we could not ship physical books anymore, that put us a bad situation and severely impacted our ability to bring in revenue. Team Ronin really pulled together though, and we were able to roll with the punches and make some contingency plans that helped us weather the roughest patch.

Thankfully, Alliance—the game distributor who warehouses our books—re-opened with new safety procedures in place in May. This meant we could begin shipping books again, both to customers of our online store and the distributors who serve game retailers. This was a big help. A couple of print jobs that had been put on pause were also able to get going again. Lairs for Fantasy AGE and the reprint of the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide for Mutants & Masterminds both arrived and are available now. We also ran a successful crowdfunding campaign for the Book of Fiends on Game On Tabletop.

All of this means that things are more stable now than they were a couple of months ago. Does it mean everything is back to normal? Well, no, unfortunately not. Pretty much every convention in 2020 has been cancelled at this point, game stores are still struggling, and orders did not magically go back to their pre-COVID levels. We had to make some big adjustments to our schedule and have to be much more strategic about what gets printed and in what quantities. And yes, M&M fans, we will print the Time Traveler’s Codex! We just need to find the right time for it.

The hardest decisions we had to make regarding our schedule were pushing the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook and Fifth Season RPG into next year. 2020 just Ronin Report: new serialized adventures!isn’t the right time for big launches like that, so we reluctantly made that call. On the upside, it does give us more development time on both projects and we are putting that to good use.

Overall, we are getting by but it’s not an easy time. If you’d like to support us, pick up some Green Ronin books from your local store or our online store. We also have some exciting stuff being serialized in electronic format: Five and Infinity for Modern AGE, the NetherWar adventure series for Mutants & Masterminds, and new Blue Rose Adventures. Nisaba Press, our fiction imprint, has released two new short story collections (For Hart and Queen for Blue Rose and Powered Up for M&M), and the superhero novel Sacred Band is also up for pre-order.

And there’s more fun stuff coming up. In August we’ll be launching Sword Chronicle, a full fantasy RPG built on the rules from our Song of Ice and Fire RPG. Ships of The Expanse will bring all the sexy spaceships to your Expanse games. Danger Zones will provide lots of interesting adventure locales for Mutants & Masterminds. And we’ve got a 20th anniversary surprise to boot!

We hope you are all staying safe out there. Remember to wear a mask when you go out and maintain social distancing. We know it’s hard for gamers used to sitting around the table together, but we want to see all your faces when this is all over.

Ronin Report: new releases from Nisaba Press!

 

 

Now Available: Five and Infinity Chapter 1 – Hunting Night

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The call goes out: Giant spiders stalk the city. Bystanders have seen their leader in the form of an enormous arachnid or a strange woman. Warriors hardened by assaults on Hell itself hunt her on a mission of vengeance. The Metacosm-spanning criminal conspiracy called the Krypteia seek her too, to profit from her powers—or whatever secrets they can steal from her corpse. But why is the spider-goddess Vabhis on Earth, and how can you stop her from revealing the existence of many worlds to the public—or keep the public safe when her children get hungry? 

Five and Infinity: Part 1 Hunting Night

Hungry Spiders and Fallen Demigods 

Hunting Night is an adventure for Modern AGE characters levels 1 to 4 in the Threefold setting, though with some adaptation it can be used for other Modern AGE campaigns. For full use of the adventure, the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook and Threefold campaign book are required.  

This adventure can stand alone, but it’s also the first part of Five and Infinity adventure series, which takes your Modern AGE Threefold characters from levels 1 to 16. 

Get Five and Infinity Chapter 1: Hunting Night 

…and generate your own adventures with Chapter 0 

Ronin Army forums update: All Good Things…

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Hello Green Ronin fans,

Today we have guest post from our stalwart forum moderator Fildrigar, on the status of the Ronin Army forums that have been down for the last week.

Ronin Army Gamer Badge

Green Ronin Gamer Badge

Greetings!

I’m Barry Wilson. You might remember me from such internet places as That One Wargaming With Miniatures Forum and Esoteric Prog Rock Fans Online.

I have a long history with, and a deep and abiding love of internet forums. Since I first discovered them in the Nineties, I have whiled away many an hour reading and posting on them. I never had the patience for IRC, far preferring the slower, more thoughtful discourse (and formatting options) forums usually provided. I’ve been moderating Green Ronin’s forums for around eight years now. 

Unfortunately, the time has come to shut down the forums. While it wasn’t an easy decision, it was necessary once we discovered a rather serious security vulnerability that made continuing to support the forum software an untenable position. We have reached the tipping point where the security risks involved with maintaining the forums outweigh the benefits. We tried to find a solution that would allow us to maintain the existing forums in read-only mode, but just running the forum software on our servers would pose too great a security risk. 

Forums have in the past provided a place for people to discuss our games. Increasingly, those discussions have moved to places like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord (and many, many others.) Places like these are allowing us to reach more fans than our small forums did. Searching Facebook for the names of our games will direct you to groups available there. There is also a very robust and friendly Discord community called the Green Ronin AGE Appropriate Discord. You’ll find some of your favorite Green Ronin staff regularly hanging out there to talk about the latest Green Ronin happenings.  

In closing, remember that we love you, keep on gaming, and we’ll see you on the internet.

Now Available: Threefold’s Five and Infinity, Chapter 0: The Adventure Generator

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Discover Adventures to Come

The Adventure GeneratorFive and Infinity is an adventure series for Threefold, the Modern AGE setting of planar travel and genre-bending adventure. With some loose connections built in, these adventures can be added to your campaign occasionally, bringing you from level 1 to 16 as you bring peace to a corner of the Earth or some far-flung dimension, or prevent the end of worlds. Chapter 0: The Adventure Generator, available now, isn’t an adventure though: It’s a set of tools to help Game Masters devise scenarios on the fly. Think of it as a “taster” for what’s to come, and as an amuse bouche, it comes for a tasty price—just one dollar!

Here’s what’s on the menu:

  • Launch from a selected or random story Kickoff to send characters up against 36 different Problems—and two or three variations per Problem.
  • Evolve your outline with six different Crises—or make it weird, with six Gonzo Crises with variations for each.
  • Roll or select Stakes, Environments, and Dramatis Personae

Once you’ve finished Chapter 0: The Adventure Generator, stay tuned for other adventures in the series. Read about them here.

Get it Now

Threefold’s Five and Infinity Goes Serial

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So, if you’ve been following Modern AGE, and specifically the Threefold setting, you might be wondering if there’s more to come, given that we called it our “flagship setting.” The answer: Yes! We’re putting together Five and Infinity, a series of adventures and adventure generators for Threefold.

Fine and Infinity, an adventure anthology for the Threefold setting for Modern AGE(What! What’s Threefold? It’s the Modern AGE setting of innumerable planes of existence, each aligned to some combination of high magic, dark forces, and high technology. Heroes typically represent the Sodality, who explore the planes and protect the people they meet, or Aethon, a cabal of posthuman spies working to shape Earth and its alternate timelines. They must contend with strange worlds, interdimensional crime lords, mad scientists, warlocks, and alastors, demon-lords of the Netherworlds. Read more here.)

Five and Infinity was originally slated to be a print release, but this being the era of COVID-19, we’ve had to change that, for reasons discussed here. Instead, we’ll be presenting it as a PDF series with the following parts:

Chapter 0—Adventure Generator: Written by Jesse Heinig, this series of tables outlines adventures for you! This is a taster for the rest of the series, so it’ll cost around a buck, to grab you.

Chapter 1—Hunting Night: Ron Rummell’s adventure takes you after a fallen spider goddess and her brood as they unwittingly invade earth. For Characters of levels 1 to 4.

Chapter 2—The Dreaming Crown: Psychic renegades threaten to wreck diplomatic contact with a new plane. What’s their real agenda? It’s by Steve Kenson, so you know it’s good. For Characters of levels 1 to 4.

Chapter 3—The Soul Trade: Neall Raemonn Price spins an adventure about souls as drugs, multiple dystopias, and pilots who can’t tell which reality they belong to. For characters of levels 5 to 8.

Chapter 4—The Midnight Gold: Visit a demonic casino in a hell of industrial despair, where your debts are literal chains, to free the soul of a foolish gambler and interfere in the politics of Inimicals, the rules of the Netherworlds. Crystal Frasier’s imagination pops in this one. For characters of levels 9 to 12.

Chapter 5—Threshold of Apocalypse: Meghan Fitzgerald is one of the best writer-developers in her cohort so I’m grateful she wrote this adventure, where a time loop beings characters to the literally end of everything, where they must decide if what comes after the end is worth saving. For characters of levels 13 to 16.

These adventures aren’t a campaign per se, but have built-in connections to let you run them that way. In some ways it’s Threefold’s answer to Blue Rose’s Six of Swords (on this page as a collection or individual adventures), which happens to have been my first work for Green Ronin.

There’s some beautiful potential storytelling in Five and Infinity, and Chapter 0 will be available next week. Watch this space!

Modern AGE in Rough Times (Ronin Roundtable)

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Hello Modern AGE fans. I hope you are your families are doing well. COVID-19 has obviously made gaming tricky for some of you. As for me, I run my game using the Threefold setting most Tuesdays. I use Zoom with a little Discord on the side so I can see and hear my friends, who I miss dearly. I’m glad to have a way for us to share time together.

Five and Infinity

Second, I’m running through the adventures in Five and Infinity, the adventure book for the Threefold setting for Modern AGE. As our flagship setting, Threefold was always intended to get ongoing support. Unfortunately, COVID-19 had made printing and distribution all but impossible, even though the book was very close to print.

Thus, what we’ll be doing is releasing Five and Infinity online, in serialized form. Part 0 introduces a Threefold story generator, which we’ll share with you for the princely sum of… $1. The story generator allows you to roll up a basic outline for Threefold adventures, and the parameters are broad enough that much of it can be used for your own Modern AGE settings as well.

After that, each adventure will be released in turn. These adventures include two covering level 1-4, and one each for levels 5-8, 9-12, and 13-16. Loose connections between them allow you to turn Five and Infinity into a true campaign, but this is entirely optional; each adventure is also fully self-contained. And these adventures pack a wallop, since they include alien spiders, psychic terrorists, soul smuggling, infiltrating Hell and, to top it all off, the destruction of the Earth. Ron Rummell, Steve Kenson, Neall Raemonn Price, Crystal Frasier, Meghan Fitzgerald, and Jesse Heinig will guide you through it all. Watch for it.

Modern AGE Missions

Beyond the Threefold setting (though certainly compatible with it) we launched the Modern AGE Missions adventure series shortly before COVID-19 started to affect our operations. Warflower¸ the first mission by yours truly, is a scenario for starting characters that mixes alchemy, designer drugs, corporate espionage, and medieval swordplay You can pick it up in our store or on DrivethruRPG.

The next mission is due next quarter, and is an official adaptation of the infamous Feral Hogs scenario, originally run by the Dice Priori streaming gang. Members Chase Schneider and Matthew Foreman were kind enough to refine this post-apocalyptic, ham-plentiful scenario about guns, trucks, energy drinks, online retail distribution centers turned fortress towns, and 30-50…well, you know what. Look for it when it arrives in our store and DrivethruRPG.

Big Books

Let’s just say this isn’t an ideal time for hardcover releases. Yet last month we released Enemies & Allies, a full-fledged core sourcebook on creatures and NPCs for Modern AGE covering appropriate friends and foes for both down to earth and fantastic genres. Whether you need a cyborg to hunt the party or a mob doctor, this book has you covered with not only dozens of individual entries, but rules for the genres they exist in, and a section telling you how to build your own NPCs from the ground up. This book was in fact printed and distributed, but nowadays, it might be easier to get electronically from our store or DrivethruRPG.

Waiting in the wings, we have the Modern AGE Mastery Guide, a new book of options and advice for both players and Game Masters. This book is text-complete and edited, but is waiting for a better moment to enter the production cycle.

Modern AGE on Sale as Part of Green Ronin’s 20th Anniversary

One more thing! Be aware that until April 20, Green Ronin’s online store is running a 20% sale on numerous releases to celebrate our 20th anniversary. That includes the following Modern AGE titles (all electronic, because, well COVID-19 has not played well with shipping and distribution):

This is where we’re at, and this is what we’ve got. Be safe, and play well.

Ronin Report, April 15, 2020

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tl;dr: Things in distribution are challenging; Green Ronin is adapting and new releases are on the way. Please buy our PDFs if you’d like to support us during the current crisis.

Read more →

Fantasy AGE Lairs: The Night Market (Ronin Roundtable)

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This week I get to branch out from The Expanse RPG and explore one of the Green Ronin lines I’m less familiar with, Fantasy AGE.  Specifically, I’m looking at Fantasy AGE Lairs (Pre-order and PDF on sale now!).  I’m most familiar with the AGE system from The Expanse and Modern AGE but having read the core book cover to cover I’ve been dying to give Fantasy AGE a try. Since my writing time is precious, I was looking for something that I could pick up and use right away. Skimming through Lairs I saw right away that there was a lot of opportunity here for one shot adventures or side stories that easily be inserted into an existing campaign. Some have enough depth that they could even form the basis for a new campaign. Being a fan of the dark and macabre and both the book and movie Something Wicked This Way Comes I was immediately drawn to The Night Market by Mark Carrol so that’s where my journey into Fantasy AGE Lairs began. I try to avoid major spoilers but if you’re a player in a Fantasy AGE campaign and think your GM might use this book, I suggest stopping here.

The Night Market offers a rich and dark setting that can easily fit into almost any fantasy campaign. The Night Market moves about so it could set up near any village or hamlet. For that matter, with only a little modification, I could see using this lair in a Modern AGE campaign with a supernatural bent. The player characters come across a wandering market filled with curiosities: acrobats, fortune tellers, merchants with strange trinkets, and sideshows abound. Even without an adventure hook this is exactly the type of diversion that most players will immediately be drawn too. I’ve never known a group of PCs who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to explore a mysterious carnival!

The thing I liked most about the Night Market is that the setting alone could provide hours of entertainment without ever introducing the adventure that is included. In fact, I could envision the market appearing multiple times in a campaign before the characters uncover its secrets and face off against the villain. The adventure is geared toward higher level characters although the lair itself could be used for characters of any level. Both enemies and possible allies are described in the setting with some of their motivations being left in the hands of the GM.

The adventure is fairly straightforward: people in the vicinity of the market have gone missing and while investigating the PCs meet a ghost (a victim of the main villain) who offers to help them. The powers behind the Night Market are not trivial and could prove to be a powerful and dangerous enemy. As I discussed earlier, this setting is well suited as a reoccurring villain and the Adventure Seeds at the end set this up well. The heroes may rescue the missing villagers and even overcome the villain but he may appear again in a different guise.

The Night Market is definitely one of my favorites and pretty much exactly the kind of entry I look for in a book like Fantasy AGE Lairs and I highly recommend this book for GMs who are looking for individual settings and adventures or just to fuel your imagination. I expect this setting or something close to it will show up in one of my games in the near future!

Check out our previous previews for Fantasy AGE Lairs:
The Battle of the Beleaguered GM
School’s. In. For. EVER!
Getting More than Gothic with the Ghoul Prince

And don’t forget that the Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook is currently FREE to download!

COVID-19 IMPACT ON GREEN RONIN OPERATIONS

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To All Our Community,

As the nation and the world take the vital and necessary steps to slow and limit the spread of Covid-19, Green Ronin Publishing will be suspending shipment of wholesale and online orders of hardcopy products, in order to keep distribution, warehouse, and shipping workers safe. Our distribution partners are doing the same, as are game stores and retailers in many communities, and we appreciate their efforts and sacrifice for the greater good. If you have an outstanding order for print products, they will be filled when the warehouse re-opens (hopefully, sometime in April). 

Why Not Buy Someone a Green Ronin Gift CardIf you’d like to support Green Ronin right now, the best thing you can do is buy some of our electronic products in our online store or DriveThruRPG. We also offer Gift Cards, as a great way to lend your support while waiting for future products or for our warehouse crew to be allowed back to work. If you’re interested in our Blue Rose RPG and fiction, there are still five days for you to get the Blue Rose Bundle of Holding that offers a great deal on both. If you’re in a place to be able to provide direct support, you could toss a coin to your game devs through PayPal.

We are already looking at new and different ways to bring you products for the games you love and are reworking our release schedule to account for these changes. Fortunately, Green Ronin is a “digitally distributed” company spread across the continent and most of us work remotely already, so this does not change our usual work routines in that regard. We’ll continue to provide you with news and updates on all of our plans through our website and our social media.

That said, please be aware that our staff is dealing with new routines at home and in caring for family and loved ones, as are many of you. We ask that you please be patient and kind, knowing that we will do our best to address any questions or concerns you may have.

We’re exploring ways to play and offer our games online in more depth, including more digital releases, the possibilities of online demo games, streams, and partnering with online game and teleconferencing platforms. Members of the team are reaching out to make introductions now, so keep your eye out for our visiting dignitaries. If you are part of a community that plays and enjoys Green Ronin games, we want to know about you! Drop us a line at letsplay@greenronin.com and let’s talk about how we can support your community’s creativity and fun.

For twenty years, Green Ronin has imagined and created, and has given you tools to imagine and create, and we intend to continue to do so. Imagine with us, and there’s nothing we can’t do.

 

Onward,

Chris Pramas and Green Ronin Publishing

Stay Home and Play Fantasy AGE … For Free!

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Free Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook PDFFantasy AGE for free: As many of you already know, we are having a 20th anniversary sale right now that puts almost everything in our online store on sale at 20% off until April 20. We are taking that a step further by making the Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook PDF free for the duration of the sale.

We know a lot of folks are at home now, anxious and looking for a distraction. Please enjoy Fantasy AGE on us. We hope it helps. If you like what you see, we have a bunch of support material that’s part of the sale. We also have Lairs, the latest Fantasy AGE book, up for pre-order right now. It’s super useful for the GM, providing a collection of themed encounters and villains that can easily be turned into full adventures.

If you’d like to explore some of our other games, we have free quickstarts available for most of our RPGs. If you haven’t gotten your kids into gaming yet, this is a good opportunity, and games that use our Adventure Game Engine (Fantasy AGE, Blue Rose, Modern AGE, The Expanse, Dragon Age) are all good choices for that.

Stay safe out there, everyone.