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Fifth Season Preview: Comm Creation

February 9, 2023/in Green Ronin News /by Steve Kenson

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:

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

February 7, 2023/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

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 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.

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

January 31, 2023/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

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.

2^nd 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.

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!

January 24, 2023/in Green Ronin News /by Troy Hewitt

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.

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

January 17, 2023/in Green Ronin News /by Chris Pramas

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.

The AGE System is a Map

January 10, 2023/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

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, and as per our recent announcement, The Fifth Season. And of course, it all goes back to its roots in the Dragon Age roleplaying game and Chris Pramas’s design.

Unfamiliar with the Adventure Game Engine? We’ve got you covered with our handy “What Is AGE?” primer!

I’m the Modern AGE developer, and that means taking an expansive view of the system that has come to be my default. This makes AGE something of a map: The system has “bare metal” mechanical features I can play with in a number of different ways. Very few things about the system are fundamental, but what is there—the fixed points on the map—help me answer questions about how a given instance of the game is supposed to work, and what the play experience should be like.

Are classes essential? Modern AGE proved they weren’t, but that protecting unique niches still mattered. Spending points on spells and other powers? Not essential, but a sign saying power should have some kind of cost.

The core of the AGE experience is something I like to call a “punctuated curve.” The core mechanics are 3d6 + modifiers versus a target number. 3d6 outputs a curve of results, where some numbers on the dice, in the middle of the range, are more likely than others. So, a character’s abilities are fairly reliable. But this sort of thing wouldn’t be especially cool without an additional element. In AGE, this is scoring doubles and generating stunt points. Thus, in the set of successful rolls there’s just under a 50% chance of a more interesting success.

This principle doesn’t tell us what a “more interesting success” is, and of course, that’s up to what stunts the player will pick—and stunts turn out to be something we can greatly customize by a game’s genre and setting. In Fantasy AGE Trojan War, divine stunts can be acquired with the help of the gods. In Cthulhu Awakens, certain stunts represent mind-melting insights won through exposure to the Mythos. The Expanse has stunts related to spacecraft.

But that point on the map can be zoomed in on, divided by area, and customized even further. Stunts represent exceptional results, but we can split them off from doubles. This is how we get the stunt attack mechanic in newer AGE rules sets, and how we use Bonds, where we add an opportunity to do amazing things because of a relationship or belief.

This is the kind of flexibility that lets AGE work for multiple games—we strip it down, see what remains, and it shows us what we can play with to address themes and play experience. While we sometimes do aim for cross-compatibility between games, we usually don’t fret that option A in one game contradicts B in another. You can pick and choose when crossing over. The point is to generate familiarity that lets you make your own crossovers and house rules, while presenting lots of readymade options to choose from.

What do you think is essential to the AGE system? What’s flexible? What should be one, not the other? Feel free to let us know!

Click for Initiative! Roll20 updates

December 13, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Jonesy

Hey folks, Jonesy here with some exciting Roll20 updates!

We are happy to announce there is now an official Fantasy AGE character sheet on Roll20. A few weeks back we did a soft rollout of the sheet to get some initial user feedback. Since then, we have addressed any critical issues, as well as some under the hood updates that were required. To celebrate the official release we are rolling out not one but two Fantasy AGE adventures! These are Fantasy AGE Encounters: The Children’s Crusade, and Death in Freeport AGE edition.

The Children’s Crusade is a side quests for characters level 1-3, which can be used as-is, or expanded into a longer adventure. Fantasy AGE Encounters: The Children’s Crusade will be available for free on 12/15/22. Alongside Children’s Crusade, we are also releasing Death in Freeport Fantasy AGE edition, this AGE update for our classic adventure will also be available on 12/15/22, for $9.99. We will be following the initial releases with some additional Fantasy AGE Encounters rolling out later in December and early January.

On the supers side of the house, we recently released the Mutants & Masterminds Quick-Start. This gives you everything you need to give M&M on Roll20 a try, complete with a super hero slugfest between the Rook, dark-winged detective of Emerald City, and his foe the mutant Pack-Rat! Best of all, it is totally free! So, if you ever wanted to try out M&M on Roll20 here is a perfect opportunity.

Along with the Mutants & Masterminds Quick-Start, we have a number of Astonishing Adventures and Danger Zones which recently made the super leap to Roll20:

Now a sneak peek of what the digital Ronin team has in the works for 2023! We are looking at porting Fantasy AGE Lairs, more M&M Astonishing Adventures, as well as rolling out a M&M Hero Archetype pack. This pack will come with 20 prebuilt Heroes so players can jump in and play right away. Token packs, map packs, and Game Master kits for our various game lines are in the pipeline along with a few other surprises to be announced closer to their release. Last but certainly not least, the team is actively working on Cthulhu Awakens for Roll20, with the official character sheet coming soon. You can even pre-order the Roll20 Edition of Cthulhu Awakens on Backerkit NOW!

The 3rd Era Mega – Bundle

December 7, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Chris Pramas

I started Green Ronin in 2000, so almost 23 years ago now. Our first release was Ork! The Roleplaying Game, a beer and pretzels RPG I designed with Todd Miller (now in its 2nd edition). A month later we debuted our second release at GenCon, an adventure I wrote called Death in Freeport. This was on the same day that Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition came out, and it took advantage of a new licensing scheme that allowed third party companies to publish D&D compatible material. Death in Freeport sold at an amazing rate. It’s the book that put Green Ronin on the map. This was the beginning of the d20 explosion, and we were at the heart of it. From 2000 to 2008 Green Ronin published scores of books and accessories of all sorts. Now you can get the lion’s share of our classic d20 books in the 3rd Era* Mega-Bundle. 71 PDFs for only $30! Sold already? You can get the bundle in our online store or at DriveThruRPG right now.

Our 3rd Era offerings were so extensive that we created themed sub-lines like Arcana, Master Class, Mythic Vistas, and Races of Renown. Then, of course, we had our signature city setting of Freeport. The 3rd Era Mega-Bundle includes books from these lines. Here are just a few examples:

Advanced Rulebooks: Advanced Bestiary, Advanced Gamemaster’s Guide, and Advanced Player’s Manual.

Arcana: Book of Fiends, Book of the Righteous, and Secret College of Necromancy.

Bleeding Edge: Escape from Ceranir, Mansion of Shadows, and Temple of the Death Goddess.

Freeport: Black Sails Over Freeport, Denizens of Freeport, and the Freeport Trilogy: 5 Year Anniversary Edition.

Master Class: The Assassin’s Handbook, The Shaman’s Handbook, and the Unholy Warriors Handbook.

Mythic Vistas: Skull & Bones, Testament, and Trojan War.

Races of Renown: Aasimar & Tiefling: A Guidebook to the Planetouched, Hammer & Helm: A Guidebook to Dwarves, and Fang & Fury: A Guidebook to Vampires.

While the rules for our 3rd Era books are 3.0 and 3.5, you can use them with any edition of the game. There are NPCs, locations, magic items, monsters, adventures, spells, and complete campaign settings that are easily adapted. The Freeport books alone can fuel a campaign of many years. The bundle also includes some sourcebooks that have no game rules in them at all. Buccaneers of Freeport, Cults of Freeport, and the Pirate’s Guide to Freeport are ready to drop into any edition or any other fantasy RPG.

The Mega-Bundle includes many books that have never been offered in PDF format before. Why? Well, in the early 2000s there was still debate around electronic editions, with many companies concerned about how piracy might affect book sales, and how electronic sales would affect relations with game retailers. We didn’t jump into it right away, so many of our early books just never got done. For this bundle, Hal and Kara went into the archives, dusted off old layout files, and converted them into PDFs. We’re talking about titles like The Assassin’s Handbook, The Avatar’s Handbook, Freeport: The City of Adventure, Secret College of Necromancy, The Witch’s Handbook, and Wrath & Rage: A Guidebook to Orcs & Half-Orcs.

The 3rd Era material not in this bundle is mostly licensed books we no longer have the rights to, like Black Company, The Red Star, and Thieves’ World. Even then though, we can offer True Sorcery, which took the magic system from the Black Company and adapted it for use in other settings.

The 3rd Era Mega-Bundle is your chance to get a huge chunk of Green Ronin’s history for a frankly absurd price: $697.85 worth of PDFs for only $30. It’s the season of giving after all!

* For legal reasons, third party companies had to stop using the d20 logo. We now use the 3rd Era brand logo to identify these titles.

Terror From The Skies!

December 6, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Evan Sass

Available Now!

It’s anything but smooth sailing when a powerful storm strands an Atlantean diplomat on the surface world. With negotiations breaking down and a missing princess, it’s up to our heroes to find the source of this mysterious maelstrom and stop the Terror From the Skies! This is a Freedom City-based adventure for a team of 4-6 heroes of PL 10, with an emphasis on high-flying action, tense diplomacy, and escalating environmental hazards.

Freedom City has endured many catastrophes over the years. So,when reports of a sudden freak storm approaching the city come in, the hardy Freedonians barely pay it any notice. But even the home of heroism must occasionally bend to the whims of Mother Nature, and as the storm rages, it utterly devastates the city. The storm swiftly grounds all conventional air traffic and pushes emergency responders beyond their limit!

Astonishing Adventures brings you exciting, ready-to-run scenarios for Mutants & Masterminds, Third Edition, complete with all the action and villains you need to bring the story to life!

Terror From the Skies! is available now in the Green Ronin Online Store, DrivethruRPG, and on Roll20!

And be sure to check out our other Mutants & Masterminds print and PDF products, on sale now for 20% off

The Cthulhu Awakens BackerKit…Awakens. Metaphorically.

October 18, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

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 call the Weird Century. Cthulhu Awakens evolves the iteration of AGE first seen in Modern AGE, drawing upon innovations from newer and upcoming AGE system books, as well as special rules unique to it. Cthulhu Awakens was developed to cover an epic span of time according to an inclusive ethic, but that isn’t its point of distinction. I think what makes it special is really the broad range of periods and tones, and an interpretation of the Mythos that puts game-centered storytelling before literary homage. Cthulhu Awakens can be about lurking fear or dramatic action—it’s up to you.

Well, the Kickstarter is done…and the BackerKit is live! That’s where we manage pledges to order the game and its related, uh, game stuff. Go to:

Backerkit Pre-order Store!

If you pledged a token amount to get reminded of this, now’s the time to up your pledge. If you want to tweak your pledge, maybe adding on some last-minute books, do it there.

And if this is new to you? Well, go anyway. This is your second chance, like the kind you don’t get unless you’re a Yithian agent consulting future records of yourself to avoid mistakes…but I’ve said too much. Well, except for one thing: If you’re locking in any kind of pledge, thank you!