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Patreon TTRPG Halloween Collaboration “All Treats, No Tricks” – Free TTRPG Downloads!

October 11, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Troy Hewitt

Hello fiends!

It’s only the 11th day of Halloween, and we’ve really amplified the creepy for you! As many of you know, we are coordinating two Patreons, the Twilight Accord and Mutants & Masterminds! This spooky collaboration comes as a result of my role as a Captain of the Patreon TTRPG Creators A. Club (The A stands for Accountability). Originally intended as a short-term gathering of TTRPG creators on Patreon, the idea was to gather fresh perspectives from fellow creators, our group hit it off so well that we expanded our meeting time to 90 minutes and we’re still at it 6 months later.

Now, it’s a lot like a weekly gathering of friends, each offering their expertise, coaching, counseling, and creative problem-solving! So you can imagine, when I mentioned the high-level concept of a terrifying TTRPG Creators A. Club collaboration, this crew of RPG enthusiasts were next-level excited!

No Tricks, Only Treats TTRPG Creator’s Ring!

Here’s how it works: Every creator in this group has a free digital treat, and all you need to do is visit, and click! It’s a great way to catch up with some incredible TTRPG talent, some who have been doing this for some time, and some who are just beginning to focus on showcasing their work through Patreon — well, you will see for yourself!

Patreon Collaboration No Tricks, Only Treats!

I really wanted to show off each individual contributor to our collaboration – so as you click through to each Patreon for your free treat, take a moment to say hello, check out their work – and did you know you could follow their Patreon content for free?

You should do it! Oh look, here they all are now!

Conflux Creatures
Terror Unto Madness: The Book of Aberrations
Over 100 pages of improved monsters and new spells for 5e D&D

Everhearth Inn
A spooky fantasy-inspired recipe to cook for your next DnD session!

Worlds of Parodia
The Mischief Festival of Yielding

LeRoiDeCarreau
DnD 5e Spooky Compendium

Oixxo Art
Autumn Queen

ARTventuring Guild
Spooky PC/NPC portrait

Nerdsmith
“Welcome to the Estate” adventure module

The Twilight Accord:
THE NIGHT ROAD PROCESSION

Angela Maps
5 Animated Battle Maps & Foundry VTT mod

Epic Levels
Mad Dungeon 20: Song of the Shriekfrapp w/Erol Otus

Deep Breadth RPG
Miser Hag, the Literal Wolf on Wall Street

Dizzy The Bard
Song: Warlord What if Spinal from Killer Instinct… was a rapper?

BonusActionRainbow
Rotten Roots – a Space Fantasy oneshot

Domille’s Wondrous Works
Changing Maze Phased Battle Map
It is a maze that changes!

Mutants & Masterminds
The Nightmare Rider Stablock!

Beyond the Screen
To Mistheart: a 5E one-shot adventure

Author’s Note: I pilfered this part from my weekly agenda email to the 72 person of the group

I volunteered to be an Accountability Club captain because I desperately needed to connect with people who understood what a unique proposition it was to operate a Patreon supporting a TTRPG project. More than just “another meeting”, the TTRPG Creators A. Club has quickly become the highlight of my week. The group consists of people from all experience levels across multiple disciplines – and the conversations always lead to interesting insights, as well as practical, material things people can do to take their respective Patreons to the next level.

So a huge shout-out to my A. Club Comrades. You are incredibly talented, wise beyond your years, joyful collaborators, with top tier spoopy content!

Bite-Sized Siege of Starhaven

September 20, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Alex Thomas

Editor’s Note: This Ronin Roundtable is intended as advice for GM’s of Mutants & Masterminds, and it contains a few spoilers for would-be heroes in the Siege of Starhaven adventure.

Hello heroes! It’s great to be chatting with you all again after the spectacular extravaganza that was Gen Con. It was my first time attending and I am happy to confirm that the legends of its grandness were not overstated. I had such a great time being amongst so many gamers and just seeing everyone truly happy to be immersed in this grand hobby of ours. There just isn’t anything quite like a con to help reignite the passion for gaming. Thank you to all of the players who participated in my events and to everyone who stopped by the Green Ronin booth.

It was great getting to run Siege of Starhaven from the new Guide to Starhaven sourcebook for players, but one thing I learned quickly in my con prep was that this adventure is definitely not a four-hour experience. This probably isn’t shocking as it was written by the person who is often accused of running 1.5 shots so often that we’ve started calling my 1 shots “special limited series” over at the Untold Stories Project. I have a habit of overwriting, which can be useful for GMs at home, but not so much for a convention experience. Not to worry though I embarrassed myself running out of time so you don’t have to.

The trouble with using any published adventure is that they’re usually written with an idea of what the beginning, middle, and end are going to be, and trying to find smaller story arcs within the plot can lead to a hollow story. Finding the right places to trim is a GM skill that doesn’t usually get enough practice, as, if you’re anything like me, the big worry at the table is “do I have enough content for the next four hours?” Siege of Starhaven has a set number of beats in its original outline that give the story pace and momentum. It has an “in media res” intro scene, an investigation that can go basically three directions, a first encounter with the villain that ends in defeat for the heroes, an escape, a rallying of resources, and then a triumphant final combat with the forces of the Stellar Imperium. It’s all very exciting and I intended for it to be the first two or three sessions of a brand new Starhaven campaign.

I used to be pretty good at estimating how much adventure fits into four hours of play, but I’ve been spoiled running an ongoing series for the last few years. I haven’t HAD to shorten things so I’ve let that part of my GM brain atrophy. I ran Siege of Starhaven at Origins this year, and admittedly I didn’t find the right place to make the end of the adventure feel like a satisfying payoff. I wasn’t prepared for how abruptly I was going to run out of time. The players all still had a great time and left with a smile on their face, but it didn’t feel like my best work to myself. I promised I would take the time to better condense the story before Gen Con.

I did not keep that promise.

Between work and my stream games, I didn’t do as much Gen Con prep as I would have liked, so I was worried that once again the adventure wouldn’t be as satisfying as I wanted it to be. As I was flipping through the sourcebook in the thirty minutes before the event was scheduled to run, I had an epiphany about the plot. I wrote down a few notes, which I’m going to share here. This is how I shortened the adventure to fit in one four hour slot:

I started by cutting the adventure down to four scenes. The new story outline was thus: introductory scene to establish stakes/teach people how the rules works, investigation with multiple paths

Prime Consul Tamira-Van

to reward player agency, big fight with the villain at the end.

Scene One: Instead of beginning in media res, I added a roleplaying scene to provide more context as to what the heroes were looking for in the warehouse and who they were working for. They met with Prime Consul Tamira-Van who explained that the Children of Chrysalis were stealing artifacts from the Draffsnarl and that she had a tip about where they would strike next. She explained that this was a tryout for Starhaven’s new defenders and if they prove themselves she would be willing to appoint them as the Guardians of Starhaven. From there the fight with Pupil and the Imperium troopers went as scripted in the adventure.

Scene 2: This works pretty much as written. The heroes search the warehouse and find leads that point them towards Tamira-Van and MamaKaiger. The person they choose to follow up with then determines next steps, either towards the missing Daedalus and the Robot Forge or the elusive hacker Bran Cardon. The only slight modification needed is to eliminate any mentions of Cardon’s interest in Daedalus/the Facetwild.

I had time for a ten minute intermission here.

Scene 3: Again pretty much as scripted, either the conflict in the Robot Forge or the skill challenge to break into Cardon’s warehouse. The only modification to Cardon’s warehouse is that the body is actually his body and not a decoy. The building still explodes and leads to…

Scene 4: The various challenges in the Fait Accompli scene. Helping the burning building, rescuing the pilots at the starport, etc. The only difference is that instead of providing the minor bonuses for other scenes in the adventure, any successes in these challenges reduces the amount of enemies in the final fight with Ko-Nan (similar to the resistance assets in the current adventure.) Pull a benefit from that table and assign it to the Fait Accompli challenges: rescuing the pilots removes one of the Hounds for example. The other small modification is that Ko-Nan doesn’t mention that she has control of the Propylaea so the heroes are able to confidently confront her.

Scene 5: Big fight with Ko-Nan and her crew!

There you have it, a beginning, middle, and end that offers a wide variety of scenes and a pretty well-paced story for four hours. And there’s even time for a bathroom break if you want it. I’ll be going over the topic of shortening adventures (and lengthening them if you’re long-winded like me) more generally in some of the material I’m working up for Astonishing Adventures Assembled but this is how I would modify Siege of Starhaven for a nice one and done. Thank you for taking the time to read today and happy gaming!

And if you’d like a print copy of the Guide to Starhaven, a Print On Demand option is now available at DrivethruRPG!

A Haven in the Stars

August 2, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Steve Kenson

It’s all Alex Thomas’s fault. We said so on Mutants & Masterminds Monday. Alex wanted to run a streaming game for Team M&M and asked “so what else do we know about this Starhaven place mentioned in The Cosmic Handbook?” To which Crystal Fraiser and I said, “Nothing.” The paragraph or so of info about the alien settlement on Jupiter’s moon Europa was just that, a kind of throwaway description intended to inspire Gamemasters.

I guess it worked, because Alex took it upon himself to spin out a whole adventure which he ran on-stream for us. It certainly got Mutants & Masterminds fans wondering, too, and asking “So when do we get to find out more about Starhaven?” If you are a part of the Mutants & Masterminds Patreon you already know the answer to that (and, if you’re not, honestly, you’re missing out). Last summer, we launched a “Summer of Starhaven!” series to design more material about the setting and how to use it in an M&M game.

Now, this summer, we can announce that The Guide to Starhaven is now available for purchase! The 76-page, full-color product goes into detail about the alien settlement of Starhaven, repurposing an ancient, ruined city located on the Jovian moon Europa. Built by the mysterious and powerful Preservers, the domed city has lain abandoned for millennia. Now, a mix of alien refugees fleeing the fall of the Lor Republic and the rise of the Stellar Imperium have been resettled there by Earth’s superheroes.

The Guide to Starhaven looks at the city and all of its various districts, the Green Zone “nature preserve” surrounding it (including all manner of prehistoric Earth animals brought here as specimens) and the unexplored areas of the ruins and what they contain. It also details the inhabitants of Starhaven, their newly established government (voted on by our patrons!), political and social factions, and three main antagonists Starhaven heroes might face.

It goes beyond the bounds of Starhaven to look at survival on the icy surface of Europa and other locations on the frozen moon such as the fascinating Facetwild, with its random energy storms and crystalline creatures. It even dives beneath the surface, into the endless dark ocean under Europa’s ice, and the mysterious life dwelling there, which even the people of Starhaven aren’t aware of … yet.

The Guide also looks at creating your own Starhaven heroes, adventures, and campaigns, including four campaign concepts and nearly a dozen different adventure ideas. All of this, plus a developed, full-length version of “Seige of Starhaven,” Alex’s exciting adventure, where a team of power level 10 heroes take on smugglers, alien cultists, a murder mystery, the dangers of the Facetwild, and an all-out invasion of the city! It’s a great inspiration for a Starhaven series of your own. (As the Untold Stories Project demonstrates with Guardians of Haven.)

The Guide to Starhaven is available now on the Green Ronin Store and DriveThruRPG as a downloadable PDF, and now print-on-demand via DriveThruRPG. For those who will be at Gen Con this August, we hope to have a limited number of print copies there for sale!

If you do decide to reach for the stars and visit the alien frontier of Starhaven, remember to thank Alex. After all, he started it!

Gen Con Events!

July 26, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Alex Thomas

Hello heroes! We are running some events at Gen Con this year! We are so excited for the chance to play with all of you. To help you find us, I have compiled this rough schedule of our events so you can come play with us at the con. I know our events are sold out, but you can still add them to your wishlist in case of cancellations, and I usually keep a secret seventh slot for my events if you show up with generics. I’ve laid our schedule out chronologically and have included event descriptions/GM as well. We hope to see you there!

Wednesday

8pm

Event Title: Freedom League: All in the Family
- Synopsis: All isn’t as it seems when Zeus requests the Freedom League’s assistance in foiling his brother’s latest scheme to take over Earth-Prime.
- System: Mutants & Masterminds
- GM: Alex

Thursday

8am

Event Title: A Familiar Quest
- Synopsis: After years of planning, the foul sorcerer Soulban has returned, springing his trap, & capturing the brave heroes of Crestwall. Now it is up to their animal allies to save them & all of Crestwall.
- System: Fantasy AGE
- GM: Jonesy
Event Title: The Mummy: The Lost Library
- Synopsis: Rick O’Connell & crew dive into danger seeking the ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria.
- System: Mutants & Masterminds
- GM: Alex

Friday

9am and 4pm

Event Title: Secrets of Renwick Manor
- Synopsis: As members of Beckmen & Hall’s “special handling” department, you are trusted to complete jobs of a more esoteric nature. The job: recover some dangerous items from the estate of August Renwick.
- System: Modern AGE
- GM: Jonesy

7pm

Event Title: The Siege of Starhaven
- Synopsis: Eyes from across the galaxy are focused on Starhaven, eager to make use of its citizens, its ancient Preserver technology, and its close proximity to Earth. It is a city in need of heroes…
- System: Mutants & Masterminds
- GM: Alex

Saturday

9am

Event Title: Secrets of Renwick Manor
- Synopsis: As members of Beckmen & Hall’s “special handling” department, you are trusted to complete jobs of a more esoteric nature. The job: recover some dangerous items from the estate of August Renwick.
- System: Modern AGE
- GM: Jonesy

2pm

Event Title: Titan City Chronicles: Blood Run
- Synopsis: Vampires are roaring through 1920s Titan City, and it’s up to a ragtag band of noir heroes to stop them.
- System: Mutants & Masterminds
- GM: Alex

Sunday

10am

Event Title: A Familiar Quest
- Synopsis: After years of planning, the foul sorcerer Soulban has returned, springing his trap, & capturing the brave heroes of Crestwall. Now it is up to their animal allies to save them & all of Crestwall.
- System: Fantasy AGE
- GM: Jonesy

And don’t forget to drop by Booth 101, and come check out all the new things Green Ronin has available for Gen Con this year!

Modern AGE, Four Years On: Modern Adventures

July 19, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

In my last two articles I talked about where the Modern AGE line currently stands with its core, setting-agnostic books, used to customize the game as you please, and its published settings, from sketches to two full-blown game settings: The World of Lazarus and Threefold. However, I ran long on the second article and didn’t have a chance to talk about the adventures we have—and that’s what this one is for.

Two Versions of the Quickstart

One weird thing that happened during Modern AGE line development is that we ended up with two quickstarts.

Original Quickstart (Burning Bright): Back in 2018, Modern AGE’s quickstart included an adventure about going to another dimension, Tannebrim. To inform you anew or refresh your memory, a “quickstart” contains cut down rules, pre-made characters, and an adventure to run them through, so you can get a taste of what the full game is like.

Expanded Threefold Quickstart (Burning Brighter): Fast forward a year, to when the Threefold game setting was on the cusp of release, and we wanted to participate in Free RPG Day. Well, Threefold was one of the inspirations for the original quickstart adventure anyway, so we produced an expanded, updated version with additional content and pregenerated characters that were fully integrated with the Threefold setting. We made that available in print for Free RPG Day, but you can still get it for free electronically.

Both versions are still available for download, but be aware that the latter version, with the adventure “Burning Brighter,” is an expansion of the original and its adventure, “Burning Bright.” You’ll have to run one or the other in any given campaign.

Backs of the Books

The Modern AGE Basic Rulebook comes with an adventure called “A Speculative Venture,” about bad things happening at a fancy party…and special options to let the Game Master decide what the central secrets of the adventure really are, to make it work with as wide a range of published or homebrew settings as possible. It’s for Level 1 characters.

Both setting books also include adventures for new characters, though these don’t have a choose-your-own premise option.

The World of Lazarus scenario “Taking the Stone,” is firmly set during the rule of the families, decades after Year X, but can be adjusted based on which of the setting’s campaign models you employ—and whether you’re a serf or one of the elite.

Threefold’s included adventure, “Identity,” takes characters across multiple planes of existence to deal with transdimensional political intrigue, bound in the question of what it means to have a soul.

Modern AGE Missions

The Modern AGE Missions series presents a variety of adventures, some of which might appear in any modern setting, and some of which are more specific. These adventures are not necessarily connected, and can be dropped into your game, or used as the anchor for a campaign if you expand them. The first two were developed by me, while the rest come courtesy of Meghan Fitzgerald.

Warflower: Sudden, strange violence at an auction leads to the disappearance of a late medieval book on warfare and alchemy. Who took the Warflower, and why? And who gets killed with a sword nowadays? Like “A Speculative Venture,” Warflower lets the GM choose the ultimate secret behind it all. For characters levels 1 to 4.

Feral Hogs: A pop-culture infused apocalyptic ATV-riding, meshback-wearing fever dream. The end came with mutagenic chemicals, abundant energy drinks, pyramids of cardboard boxes, and of course, 30-50 mutant feral hogs, running into your yard. And what will you do when they come? Huh? HUH? For characters levels 1 to 4.

Flight 1701: A routine flight turns into humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial life—and first trip to an alien biosphere. The passengers and crew must work together to discover what happened, communicate with an alien species, and figure out a way to get back home. The decisions they make may alter the course of human civilization forever—and like Warflower, its central secrets are up to the GM. For characters levels 5 to 8.

Assault on the Aerie: A skilled strike team must find a way to breach the defenses of a nigh-impenetrable mountain fortress, rescue the hostages inside, stop a threat to humanity, and get out alive. That alone would be hard enough, but the mystical wards and magical creatures standing in their way makes the mission all the more dangerous. Assault on the Aerie is designed to be suitable for characters between levels 13-15, showcasing Modern AGE in the urban fantasy genre. It provides multiple paths for the Game Master to follow, allowing it to stand on its own or fit into a larger campaign.

Infinity and More

We’re expecting at least one more Modern AGE Missions adventure. Beyond that, we have the Five & Infinity adventure series for the Threefold setting. We’ve presented the individual adventures before, but at Gen Con we’ll be premiering the collected series alongside special tools to generate stories and even planes of existence. I’ll talk about that another time. If you’re headed to Gen Con, check it and the rest of Modern AGE out at Booth 101.

Six of Cups for Blue Rose AGE: The Storm of the Century and Other Stories

July 1, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Joseph D. Carriker

Six of Cups is Blue Rose’s second anthology of adventures (the first was, of course, Six of Swords). Of course, at center, this book is about providing a set of interesting, self-contained adventures for Blue Rose campaigns. Perhaps your group will play Sovereign’s Finest, traveling the lands, playing through all of these. Or, one or two might form the basis for a new campaign, or at least an arc within one. But that’s not all Six of Cups has to offer. This anthology does a couple of things – and some of them were even intentional.

Themes: The Suit of Cups

From the get-go, I wanted the stories in Six of Cups to be about emotions and relationships. In the minor arcana of the Tarot, the suit of Cups focuses on the connections between people and the emotions that both inspire and come about as a result of those. It’s the “emotions that run deep” suit (in comparison to the “emotions that burn bright” of Wands).

Above everything else, Blue Rose and the genre of romantic fantasy are about those ties, and I wanted a set of adventures that expressed that. From the connections between orphans in Witching Weather to the desire for redemption in Out from Exile to the questions about compassion and mercy at the heart of Hemlock’s Bane, the tales in Six of Cups all center on the themes central to this suit.

Gazetteers: Around the Kingdom

The Blue Rose AGE core rulebook is a whole lot of book. Even so, we had to paint with some fairly broad strokes while describing the Kingdom of Aldis in that book. Now, we had the chance to get a slightly more zoomed-in look in Aldis: Kingdom of the Blue Rose, and we decided we weren’t quite finished doing so.

One of the guidelines given to the authors of Six of Cups was to include a gazetteer section that described the place in the kingdom where that story takes place. The intention, of course, is to help make the book useful even beyond the adventures it includes. Find in these pages the major cities of Elsport, Garnet, and Lysana’s Crossing, as well as Khaldessa in the central Aldin valleys, Hemlock in the northern Pavin Weald, and the Scatterstar Archipelago!

Happy Accidents: The Storm of the Century

One of the things I asked of our authors was to send me proposals for their adventures and gazetteers. In short order, it became apparent that (perhaps inspired by the elemental association of Cups with water) no less than three of the stories feature a massive coastal storm. Rather than require some of the authors to change their ideas, I thought I could include them all to highlight one of the interesting ways to use generally unrelated adventures.

Finding a common thread to run between adventures is an awesome way of building a sort of “accidental” campaign. The tumultuous weather plays a role in all three of the stories, and they are not written as being interrelated. An enterprising Narrator might, however, come up with some connecting concepts to help tie them together. Perhaps these are all part of a single, major storm system of some kind, a sort of terrifying storm of the century to strike the southern coast of Aldis? Or, perhaps there is something (or someone…) nefarious at work, hurling storm after storm into the world.

Conclusion

There is a lot that might be done with the contents of Six of Cups. And that’s not even including the new Specializations (Storm Rider and Marsh Shaper), or even the devastating Arcane Lightning arcana knack for those who wield the Weather Shaping arcana! Join us, with an open heart and a sense of courage – we’ve got a lot more stories to tell.

Six of Cups is available now for pre-order here, and don’t miss out on that $5 PDF add-on! As well as on DrivethruRPG!

Location, Location, Location

June 29, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Steve Kenson

Danger Zones: Tons of locations for M&M adventures!

Available to Pre-Order now!

Add at least two dozen “locations” to that and you start to get the concept and usefulness of Danger Zones for the Mutants & Masterminds Superhero RPG. The sourcebook, a compilation and expansion of our long-running series of PDF products, takes a look at an oft-neglected element of superhero adventure creation. You guessed it: location.

Superhero adventures are often about the “who” (villains and their schemes) and the “what” (whatever the villains are after) and even the “how” (mainly various super-powers, gadgets, or magical weirdness) and not that often about the “where.” Danger Zones addresses that by offering a whole series of locales both common and not-so-common as backdrops and settings for your adventures. Each Danger Zone comes with an overview map, descriptions of the locations’ common features in game terms (including things to break, lift, and throw), sample characters you might encounter there, and adventure hooks featuring that location.

You can use Danger Zones for quick sources of what we might refer to as “backdrops,” locations that aren’t especially essential to the adventure but add color and detail. Does your adventure start out at a nightclub (like Green Thumb, Black Heart for Astonishing Adventures)? Grab the Nightclub write-up and map from the book and make use of them to detail that location without any extra work on your part. Are high school heroes hanging out at a local coffee shop or fast food place when villains attack? Take and use those locations from Danger Zones and you have ready-made maps to show your players and details on what happens when, say, a hero throws an espresso machine or somebody gets knocked into a fryalator.

You can also use Danger Zones to inspire and create adventures focusing on particular locations. Each one comes with 2–3 adventure hooks, multiplied by over 30 locations, making Danger Zones a sourcebook for a hundred or more different adventure ideas for your Mutants & Masterminds games! They may, for example, inspire you to throw a parade for the heroes (or have them participate in an event like your city’s long-standing Pride parade. In fact Danger Zones: Parade Route is free as a fantastic sample PDF download!), run into trouble at City Hall, get involved in politics, stage a daring high-speed chase scene on the local highways, or delve into the city’s history, possibly complete with literal ghosts from the past!

Because the locations in Danger Zones are sufficiently “generic” you can use them with any modern urban or suburban setting, real or imagined, and re-use them over and over. You’ll quickly find Danger Zones an indispensable Gamemaster resource you’ll turn to again and again. The sourcebook pairs especially well with the Emerald City and Freedom City setting sourcebooks, providing the street- and building-level detail to go with the sourcebooks’ broader overview of those cities, helping to bring them to life in your game.

Danger Zones is available to Pre-Order now in the Green Ronin Online Store, with the $5 PDF add-on (which is also available at your friendly local participating retail game store!) as well as on DrivethruRPG!

If you haven’t checked out Danger Zones before, be sure to take a look at the brand new Historic District for free! And if you’ve already purchased a few of the individual Danger Zones locations, you’re sure to find even more new surprises if you choose to pick up this collected version in print or PDF.

Join us for the Green Ronin Livestream, Mutants & Masterminds Monday #MuMaMo on Monday, July 11th on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and Facebook Live for the Developer’s review of Dangers Zones, 2p Pacific/5p Eastern (The #MuMaMo team is off on July 4th!)

The Twilight Accord Patreon: Paying It Forward for Pride

June 21, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Troy Hewitt

In May, Green Ronin Publishing launched its Patreon for Twilight Accord: The Fallen City, a 5e fantasy setting and campaign that centers the experiences of LGBTQ+ heroes and community in that setting. A collaboration between tabletop industry veterans Steve Kenson and Joseph D Carriker Jr., the Patreon is intended to build a collaborative community of supportive patrons with input into the creation and details of this exciting new product.

In celebration of Pride month, Green Ronin Publishing has announced that all funds raised by the Patreon, during the launch and continuing over the course of Pride Month, will be used to hire additional queer creators to infuse Twilight Accord with their creativity and experience. In keeping with the collaborative intent of the project, Green Ronin Publishing will be working with patrons of Twilight Accord to understand their top priorities for additional content: writing, concept art, or concept cartography, and their choices will help guide the allocation of resources towards the hiring of interested creators.

Creators that would like to be involved can email twilightaccord@greenronin.com with their published credits and sample work. LGBTQ+ creators, including LGBTQ+ creators of color, are strongly encouraged to apply and are asked to include details on the aspects of the queer experience they would like to help include in the setting, its culture, and its characters.

Steve Kenson shares: “Everyone playing a fantasy RPG deserves the opportunity to be the hero of their own story. We want to create a setting and series of adventures where queer people of all kinds can do just that.”

Joe Carriker adds: “We’re really excited about this project. In the years I’ve been gaming, we’ve seen more and more games make a point of including queer people. It’s high time that we see some games that don’t just include us, but that are actively about us.”

You can learn more about the project, and how you can join, by visiting: Twilight Accord: The Fallen City on Patreon.

Secrets of Lemuria

May 6, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Ian Lemke

Available NOW!

<incoming transmission>

<handshake accepted… decryption protocol required>

<decryption completed>

“It’s been a long journey to the Ring gate and your final destination: Medina Station. Some weeks ago, you were all hired by an independent journalist, Sangra Velazquez, to escort him to a meeting on Medina with explorer/scientist Dr. Carly Toor. Sangra has been cagey about the exact details of this meeting, but has hinted that Dr. Toor has made an important discovery on one of the worlds beyond the Rings. Fearing that other parties and possibly even governments might be interested in this discovery, Sangra chose a private means of transportation–your ship.”

Mysteries aplenty lie beyond the Ring Gates. Secrets of Lemuria is the first adventure for The Expanse RPG that begins to explore those mysteries. The adventure is intended for a crew of 4 to 6 1^st to 3^rd level Expanse characters (although it would be easy enough to increase the danger for higher-level characters.) The story begins with a simple passenger transport and escort job. Independent reporter, Sanga Velazquez, has a meeting on Medina station with a scientist who claims to have made an incredible discovery on Lemuria, one of the many planets beyond the ring. Of course, things don’t go exactly as planned, and the PCs find themselves in a cross-fire between an OPA gang and another mysterious (and violent) group…. I don’t want to spoil the story here since some of you, undoubtedly, may end up playing the adventure. Suffice it to say there’s plenty of action and intrigue and stakes that could change the course of human history.

Oh, and did I mention that it comes with a preview of Beyond the Ring? If you haven’t yet ordered a copy, Lemuria gives you a sneak peak at Medina station —a pressure cooker of merchants, explorers, colonists, businesspeople, gangsters, smugglers, and spies from Earth, Mars, and the Belt. You could easily run an entire campaign on Medina alone, and of course, you have the mysteries of Ring space, the hub, and gateways to 1300 worlds right on its doorstep.

Secrets of Lemuria is the first in an upcoming series of PDF-only releases for The Expanse RPG. We have lots of plans, including new adventures and even a new series we may be announcing soon. Stand by for more information about that!

So, keep your eyes open, and your sensors active. Secrets of Lemuria is available now as a PDF in the Green Ronin Online Store and on DrivethruRPG!

<end transmission>

5E Jamboree!

February 22, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Steve Kenson

Mix-and-Match Green Ronin’s 5e Fantasy Offerings

Green Ronin publishes a lot of games. It figures: We’re gamers, and we like a lot of games! We also publish material for a number of different game systems. While the Adventure Gaming Engine (AGE) System sees a lot of use these days, and is as close as we get to having a “house system,” Green Ronin also supports the d20-based Mutants & Masterminds, the Chronicle System of Sword Chronicle, and standalone systems like Ork! The Roleplaying Game.

Among all of those game systems, Green Ronin also publishes material compatible with, or based on, the Fifth Edition of the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game. We have some experience in that area, having worked directly with Wizards of the Coast on the Out of the Abyss campaign and the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide sourcebook, and having worked with Matthew Mercer on the Tal’dorei sourcebook for Critical Role.

Our 5e products include The Lost Citadel, Book of the Righteous, the 20th anniversary edition of the Death in Freeport adventure, and The Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide, bringing the romantic fantasy world of Aldea to 5e. We’ve just finished production on a new 5e edition of The Book of Fiends as well, and wanted to look at some of the ways you can mix-and-match our Fifth Edition offerings and use them in your own games. So, let’s take a look!

Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide

The Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide is primarily a setting book, in the vein of our work on the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. It features material on the world of Aldea, particularly the nation of Aldis, the Sovereignty of the Blue Rose, and its surrounding lands. (You can find out much more about Blue Rose and its setting elsewhere on our website.) The goal of the Blue Rose guide was to introduce the world of Aldea to 5e players and provide an additional, alternative setting, rather than an alternate game system.

That said, the book does contain a wealth of game system material to account for the differences between Aldea and various other 5e fantasy settings. In particular, it offers new character ancestries (and its own take on handling ancestry) for the peoples of Aldea. Each character class has a new subclass suited to the setting, and there are unique backgrounds, specific modifications of the magic rules, magic items, and a Corruption system that reflects the power of Shadow, to name a few.

Even if you don’t use Aldea as a setting for your 5e adventures, the game system portions of the book are easy to import to other settings. The lands and peoples of the world of Blue Rose could also be places for plane-hopping characters to visit, or part of some distant land on the far side of the world where they currently adventure.

Book of Fiends

The Book of Fiends is a massive tome of the most vile denizens of the lower planes, not just the familiar demons and devils, but also daemons, qlippoth, Fallen celestials, and more. They range from minor low-level threats to godlike rulers of their own infernal realms and everything in-between. The Book of Fiends is a supplementary catalog of foes for a 5e campaign, especially one focused on fighting the forces of corruption and evil, such as Out of the Abyss, or a campaign like Descent into Avernus where the heroes descend into the lower planes themselves to fight their inhabitants! Who can’t use more fiends as foes?

The Book of Fiends dovetails with our Book of the Righteous in that they share the same basic cosmology. The Book of the Righteous works in conjunction with 5e planar cosmology and mentions the Abyss, Gehenna, Hell, and their various fiendish denizens, while the Book of Fiends details them. So the two books form two halves of the same cosmology for a campaign setting: the mythos and religion of the world and all of the forces of evil aligned against it.

The Book of Fiends connects with Blue Rose’s Aldea: The seven Exarchs, the great daemons of Gehenna, are also known as the Exarchs of Shadow on Aldea. The various daemons can serve as further darkfiends for your Blue Rose games, and you can plunder the dark depths of The Book of Fiends for other foes for your Aldean heroes. Fiends also offers its own Corruption system associated with infernal temptation. Use it in place of the Corruption rules from Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide, or for a specific kind of corruption associated with the Exarchs and their minions.

The Book of Fiends also comes with a chapter of character options: subclasses, feats, spells, and backgrounds usable in any 5e setting where the forces of evil are abroad. The Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide specifically points to them as possible options for corrupt and Shadow-aligned characters in that setting.

Book of the Righteous

The Book of the Righteous provides a complete pantheon and cosmology for a 5e fantasy setting, along with numerous interconnected deities, faiths, and religious practices. It’s a fantastic resource to mine for options and inspiration, even if you don’t adopt the entire thing wholesale.

Like Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide and The Book of Fiends, The Book of the Righteous comes with a hefty rules chapter packed with 5e options: at least one new sub-class for every core character class, a dozen new clerical domains, five new paladin oaths, backgrounds, feats, spells, and magic items. It also has celestial and fey creatures associated with the gods and higher planes. The Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide notes that many of these game options fit well into the world of Aldea and are quite useful there.

Death in Freeport

The 20th anniversary edition of the adventure Death in Freeport offers a self-contained, low-level 5e adventure set in the independent pirate city of Freeport. Since it is a tiny island nation, Freeport is easy to include in any setting you may wish, or usable as a jumping-off point to any mainland you want the characters to travel towards. Freeport’s temples and churches may be devoted to the pantheon from The Book of the Righteous (that’s deliberately left open for you to decide) and the eldritch horrors lurking in the setting can make good use of material from The Book of Fiends. As The Blue Rose Adventurer’s Guide notes, Freeport could well exist among the Pirate Isles of that setting, bringing all of its unique character along with it.

What’s more, Death in Freeport is not just adventure: It has an appendix with game information on the sinister Serpent People, two new magic items (the staff of defense and the wand of escape), and four new class archetypes: the Valor domain for clerics, the terrifying Buccaneer archetype for fighters, the cunning Alley-Rat archetype for rogues, and the preternatural Serpentkin sorcerous origin. Any of all of these could find use in any 5e campaign.

The Lost Citadel

The Lost Citadel differs from Green Ronin’s other 5e offerings, which are designed for use with the core rulebooks, whereas Lost Citadel customizes more of the class, background, and magic options to suit the setting, along with adding some new options. Nevertheless, all of these options are compatible with the core 5e rules, so you can import Lost Citadel character options into other campaigns or settings, if you wish. The same is true of the book’s extensive collection of creatures, especially undead, which can certainly inspire new unliving foes for Blue Rose, for example.

What’s more, Lost Citadel offers another system for measuring supernatural corruption (do we sense a theme here?). Called Woe, it deals with the price of magic and supernatural knowledge and of places given over to the powers of death and despair. It would be suitable for use to model the effects of some domains of the foes from The Book of Fiends or places on Blue Rose’s world of Aldea where the power of Shadow has grown deep, indeed.