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Modern AGE, Four Years On: Our Modern Worlds

July 13, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

In my last article, I talked about the state of the Modern AGE line as we move into its fifth year. I started out by dividing the line into two loose categories and exploring the first, of “core” book releases. While Modern AGE is completely playable with the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook, the other releases I placed into the core category assemble numerous tools and ideas to customize the system generally, and to suit the worlds you invent.

But Modern AGE has worlds of its own which you can use as-is, or to influence settings of your own creation. In fact, we have various degrees of setting material, ranging from loose outlines to entire setting books.

Core Inspiration

In Modern AGE, we try to provide concrete examples so that you have something to work from. The Modern AGE Basic Rulebook talks about settings and genres in general terms, but subsequent books get more detailed.

Chapter 9 of the Modern AGE Companion offers firmer outlines of the possible settings associated with various genres, including the age of sail, 1800s gothic horror tales, 1950s UFO sci-fi, 1960s spy-fi, and modern or near future cyberthrillers. These treatments include recommended rules, sketches of settings, and possible NPCs of interest. The rest of the book provides ways to customize the game for these and other settings.

Chapter 7 of the upcoming Modern AGE Powers book also features outlines for supernatural and other power-filled worlds, from the mystic martial arts of “Immortal Ring,” the modern sorcery of “Phoenix Band,” and more, all in a book that gives you the “crunch” of powers as well, and strong guidance on how to use them in your own worlds. I can’t wait to share it with you.

In addition, Modern AGE has two full-on setting books. Each requires nothing more than the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook.

World of Lazarus

Created by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark, the Lazarus comic (with follow-ups including Lazarus X + 66 and Lazarus: Risen), World of Lazarus introduces the world after Year X, when governments have collapsed and the families behind the world’s mightiest corporations and political influence blocs take over, effectively reinstituting feudalism. These ruling families use various forms of human enhancement, from cybernetics to gene alteration, to create the Lazari, champions who settle disputes on their families’ behalf.

The World of Lazarus setting book isn’t just about Lazari, however, though the book provides in-depth rules for playing them. You can play wasteland renegades, desperate serfs, or privileged members of the Families, navigating a world with notes of cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic fiction, near-future military technothrillers, and feudal intrigue.

In addition to the setting book, individual issues of the Lazarus: Risen comic include expansions to the new rules in World of Lazarus, written by World of Lazarus developer Crystal Frasier.

Threefold

Intended to be the “flagship,” or exemplar setting for Modern AGE, Threefold is a vast setting designed to make use of the game’s full potential. Threefold contains notes of cyberpunk, cosmic horror, and portal fantasy, as it reveals Earth is one of many inhabited worlds in the Metacosm, an array of universes primarily linked by gates.

Threefold’s stories center on the exploits of the Sodality, explorers, diplomats, and agents of utopian democracy that spans multiple planes of existence, as well as the operations of Aethon, cybernetically enhanced operatives who shape alternate universes to, perhaps, produce a transcendental AI. These aren’t our only options, however. You might want to play a renegade psychic, defending their guild from families who treat psychic powers as a divine right. Maybe you want to be a plane-crossing mercenary, or a disoriented, semi-human wizard, stuck in our modern world. Threefold provides the greatest possible scope for characters in Modern AGE, including rules for cybernetics, the supernatural, and strange ancestries.

Characters explore Earths with alternate histories, Otherworlds, where magic reigns, and the Netherworlds, ruled by demonic forces. The planes are countless, and Threefold uses them to allow virtually any adventure and genre, but unlike many multiverse settings, there are strong core factions and influences that drive stories, such as the rebel hell-conquering soldiers of the Nighthost, or the tyrannical demigods of the Divine Empire. If you want a taste (and an introduction to Modern AGE generally), try the Threefold Quickstart for free!

In addition to the setting book, Threefold gains an adventure collection this summer, as the combined and expanded Five and Infinity adventure series is due to premiere at or around Gencon. Five adventures take characters through multiple worlds, and levels 1 to 16. A capstone chapter includes table-based tools to outline further adventures, and even generate new planes of existence in the Threefold Metacosm.

From Worlds to Stories

This article was originally going to talk about Modern AGE’s adventures as well, but as things are already running a little long, I’ll save it for next time. Until then? I’m going to recommend you check out Threefold in play (YouTube playlist) by the Fresh Out the Box (Twitch.tv) crew. Cheers!

Modern AGE, Four Years On: The Creative Core

July 5, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

Modern AGE is four years old! It was released back in June 2018, ahead of its formal debut at Gencon of that year. Building on the ideas of Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE was designed to work within the 200+ year span of the “modern era,” up to the near future. This was a bigger challenge than you might think. Especially in gaming, the fantasy genre has a lot of standard conventions and default assumptions. But there’s no “modern genre,” but several, from urban fantasy, and pulp adventure, to Noir, and espionage thrillers.

The multiplicity of possible games shaped Modern AGE into the most customizable manifestation of the Adventure Game Engine, where we provide the most options to adjust fundamentals. Once you understand Modern AGE is this kind of creative platform, it should, I hope, make you feel bold enough to tweak it until it’s just right for your table—but if you want a more straightforward experience, we don’t demand you do it. Don’t worry, it still works straight from the store.

These features have driven the line’s development ever since. We can roughly split Modern AGE into “core” releases, designed as creative toolkits, and supplements that provide a more specific play experience in the form of settings and adventures. This time around, let’s talk about core Modern AGE.

Core Modern AGE

Modern AGE Basic Rulebook: This is the essential rulebook for the game and despite being in the “core” category, doesn’t require anything else except for your campaign ideas.

Modern AGE Game Master’s Kit: Screen and reference materials to accompany the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook

Modern AGE Companion: Expanded tools and options covering new character options, custom systems for numerous situations such as inventions and duels, campaign events, extraordinary powers—this should be your first pick when you want to tailor Modern AGE into a bespoke rules set. “Sibling” of the Modern AGE Mastery Guide.

Modern AGE Enemies & Allies: Friends and foes separated by genre, along with genre supporting systems, for modern fantasy, horror, action and espionage, crime dramas, and near future science fiction.

Modern AGE Mastery Guide: A guide for Game Masters and players, too, featuring advice for both sides of the GM’s screen before presenting a host of new rules options as a “sibling” to the Modern AGE Companion. This includes updates to rules from the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook that we developed after a few years of additional play.

Modern AGE Cyberpunk Slice: A distillation of reworked and new rules covering numerous aspects of the cyberpunk genre, from classic 80s stories to the latest takes on it. Artificial life, cybernetic enhancements, AI, automation, corporate branding, drones, powered armor—it’s here, in a compact, settingless rules supplement.

Did you see this preview of the upcoming Modern AGE Powers cover!?

UPCOMING—Modern AGE Powers: This book has been written, and it is currently waiting its turn for release. While the Modern AGE Companion provides new options for extraordinary powers, Modern AGE Powers collects and expands that previous material, and adds new options for magic, psychic disciplines, inherent extraordinary powers, rituals, gifts from unusual ancestries, freeform thaumaturgy, and an enormous catalog of extraordinary items with supernatural, scientific, or just plain weird origins.

Beyond the Core

Next time, we’ll talk about the setting and adventure focused releases for Modern AGE, covering two settings and multiple adventures. But while we’re still talking about the core, let me ask you this: What would you like to see released as the next creative toolkit? A new genre done in the style of Cyberpunk Slice? A full-fledged hardcover on how to design a modern city to play in? I keep an eye on social media and will read what you have to say. For now, though, I hope you’re getting inspired and playing. Cheers!

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!

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>

Neon Shadows

May 3, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Steve Kenson

Available NOW!

TL;DR – So can I use Cyberpunk Slice with Modern AGE to (ahem) run an urban fantasy cyberpunk game? YES! Grab both books (and maybe Modern AGE Companion while you’re at it) and you’ll rock it!

With the release of Cyberpunk Slice for Modern AGE, AGE System players have a new resource for creating campaigns and finally have an answer to that oft-asked question: “Can I run a cyberpunk urban fantasy campaign using AGE?” To which the answer is very much “Yes! I’m glad you asked.”

Having had some experience with the notion of cyberpunk urban fantasy myself, I’ve given the notion some thought and wanted to share with you the key elements for your Modern AGE cyber-fantasy campaign, what I refer to here as Neon Shadows:

Backgrounds

You’re probably going to want to grab the optional backgrounds from Chapter 1 of the Modern AGE Companion, particularly the Dwarf, Elf, Human, and Orc, if your setting includes various fantasy heritages, or people manifesting the traits of fantasy beings. Feel free to add-on to this as you see fit for your setting: Shapeshifters, Spirit-Bloods…more? Why not? Take particular note of the sidebar in the book about adapting Fantasy AGE backgrounds to Modern AGE before you yank them wholesale out of your Fantasy AGE books, as there are some differences.

The ancestries from Threefold (Arvu, Dreygur, Huldra, and Jana) might be useful inspiration, but keep in mind that ancestries supplement backgrounds rather than replacing them per se: You can mix-and-match ancestry and background traits, and might want to allow the same for backgrounds in your Neon Shadows campaign, allowing for Bohemian Elves, Dwarf Laborers, or Urban Orcs, to name just a few examples.

Professions

You are going to want to augment the options from Modern AGE with the professions in Cyberpunk Slice, particularly Hacker, Operator, Assassin, and Personality for your Neon Shadows game. Ditto the various cyberpunk-specific Drives and ability focuses, depending on the availability of tech in your game. Intelligence (Streetwise) is pretty much a must.

Talents

Cybercombat talent? (That’s combat using various cybernetic augmentations.) Virtual Combat talent? (That’s combat inside of a digital virtual reality.) Yes, please! You’re going to want some (if not all) of the talents in Cyberpunk Slice to go with the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook. There are many of them devoted to making your character badass. In particular, don’t overlook the Kinetic talent, what sometimes gets called a “street soldier” or “street samurai,” just in case you were wondering where that was under Professions previously.

Equipment

Ah, the gear. There’s plenty of stuff in Cyberpunk Slice before you even get to the implants and augmentations: guns (smart and otherwise), ammo, armor, drones, vehicles, grenades, and more. Everything you need to kit-out your characters. Monofilament whips? Of course! Are they dangerous to use? Of course!

Then (of course) there are the actual augmentations. Modern AGE players who have read Threefold have an inkling of what awaits in Chapter 3 of Cyberpunk Slice, but with quite a bit more. A medium augmentation campaign (with a starting capacity of 2) suits Neon Shadows pretty well, as most characters are going to have augmentations of some sort. Breakdown or some type of Complications tend to suit those who go over their capacity for augmentation.

There’s no strict rule in Modern AGE that says tech and magic don’t mix, so you can make the cyber-arcanist of your dreams, if you want. If, on the other hand, you’d prefer that augmentations weaken arcane power, pick one of the following options:

Arcanists add their total slots in augmentations to the Target Numbers of their arcana, to their cost, or both.
Arcanists subtract their total slots in augmentations from their Magic Points, and from the MP they gain each level, with a minimum of 1 or even 0 MP gained!
Augmented arcanists lose 1d6 MP per slot of augmentations per day and have to recover those lost MP normally, in addition to any they expend on their arcana.

Powers

Naturally, it’s not a cyber-fantasy campaign without some magic, so you can include any or all of the various arcana from the Modern AGE Basic Rulebook as well as Modern AGE Companion and Threefold as well, if you’d like. Decide how prevalent you want arcana to be in your campaign: Do lots of people sling spells or is it just a select few? How is the world dealing with these arcanists?

What’s more, decide if there are any other extraordinary powers available in your Neon Shadows campaign. Are there psychic adepts? If not, you can just ignore psychic powers, or else turn them into arcana also available to spell-casters. Perhaps psychics are occultists as described in Threefold, giving them a different flavor of magical power, rather than science-fiction psionics as such.

You can even use the enhancements from Modern AGE Companion, Threefold, and Cyberpunk Slice for more than just technological augmentations: Some people might be exceptionals with supernatural powers, essentially fantasy or mythic abilities. They might be “advancements” of their ancestry or magical birthrights or blessings or some kind. Perhaps there are “paragons” who focus their magical potential inward and develop the kinds of enhancements otherwise granted by implants and modifications, making them the fantasy equivalents of cybernetic street samurai and biotech stealth assassins, to name a few. There may even be a magical equivalent to capacity—and penalties for exceeding it—in the setting, distinct from the effects of augmentations. Just turn some of the augmentations in Cyberpunnk Slice into magical equivalents, either from focusing inherent magic inwards or even weirder implants using magically-animated materials or grafts of body parts or organs from fantasy creatures.

Modern AGE Cyberpunk Slice is also available on DrivethruRPG!

A Slice of Cyberpunk Temptation, Coming for Modern AGE

April 27, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

COMING VERY SOON!

Cyberpunk is one of the most popular genres in roleplaying games. Sitting as it does between the modern era and classic spaceships and aliens SF (though some cyberpunk, such as Schismatrix and Altered Carbon, incorporate those elements too), it’s a natural fit for Modern AGE. I was hesitant to add cyberpunk to Modern AGE because of its world-influencing history, and its shift from cutting-edge, to cliché, to parts of reality. How do I fit it all in?

I finally satisfied myself by realizing that I don’t have to. Cyberpunk is a pervasive enough genre that I don’t need to dig into all its historical, technological, and personal resonances, because you’re already confronting them yourself.

Therefore, we’re just putting the finishing touches on Modern AGE Cyberpunk Slice, a compressed, 50ish page PDF treatment of the genre’s essentials:

Futuristic technology, from exoskeletons to guided bullets
Cyberspace
Augmentation through cybernetics
Body swapping and consciousness transfer
Options for Player Character androids and other synthetic beings
New backgrounds and professions for a desperate, technology-drenched future
New character options, from the Virtual Combat focus to anti-technology Wrecker fighting style, and the street soldier called the Kinetic

Cyberpunk Slice uses some elements from previous cyberpunk-adjacent work in the Modern AGE Companion and Threefold, but significantly extends and customizes them for the genre. That way it remains interoperable with previous material without being redundant.

Is this all we’ll do in the genre? I don’t know, but I am certain that this supplement is what a vocal segment of Modern AGE gamers have wanted for a while. It’s coming very soon—I submitted proofing notes just recently—and we’ll make some noise when it happens.

Back Into The Expanse: Worlds and Systems

April 12, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Ian Lemke

Some of you may have seen the recent actual play of Cthulhu Awakens that I ran in conjunction with the Kickstarter. I really enjoyed running the game, but after that brief foray into the realms of eldritch horror, I’m excited to say that it’s time for me to get back to The Expanse!

During my first official visit to ThursdAGE last week, we talked a little about the new Expanse sourcebook, Beyond the Ring. (Check it out if you want to see some of the amazing art in this book) We also did a bit of a deep dive into Chapter 5: System & World Creation in Beyond the Ring. If you check out the stream, you’ll get a behind the scenes look as I go through both the system and world creation systems step by step. One of the challenges I have as the developer for The Expanse RPG is where to draw the line between story and science. This chapter, in particular, proved to be quite a balancing act in that arena. After all, this is a game about telling stories, not a science textbook. But on the other hand, The Expanse novels are heavily grounded in real science. Creating your own systems and worlds is an excellent opportunity for bringing a little more science into your games.

In Chapter 5: System & World Creation, we do our best to give you all the pertinent information needed to create your own worlds and systems without getting too bogged down. All of the charts and tables might look a little daunting for someone who doesn’t know much about the science of spectral types, orbital zones, or atmospheric compositions, but I promise you don’t need to know any of the science. Just follow the steps, and you can design a system without any difficulty. Truthfully, the luminosity of the star or a planet’s orbital period probably won’t come into play in your story, but being able to provide all of the star system information to your players lends a sense of authenticity that this is a real system with real planets. Your scientifically minded players will love it, and your story-driven players will appreciate the attention to detail.

One question I’ve been asked is whether science 100% accurate all of the time? My simple answer is: I’m sure it’s not. But it’s pretty close and certainly more than enough for telling a good story. Ultimately even The Expanse is about the story and the characters. The science is there to give it a backdrop of realism and authenticity, but in the end, it’s a good story that matters.

So, do you want to know more about Beyond the Ring and how you can use it in your own campaign? Well, you’re in luck! My appearance on ThursdAGE was just a teaser for what’s to come. In the following weeks I’m going to be running an actual play of The Expanse RPG that showcases a lot of the key systems in Beyond the Ring, especially colony creation and advancement. In Session Zero we’re going to build the colony that the PCs are going to be connected to using the rules in the book. Sessions 1 and 2 will be a story that centers around the colony. Finally, Session 3 will be the finale, and we’ll go through colony advancement, including the repercussions of the PC’s action during the adventure. So, keep your eyes peeled for the exact dates.

There will also be opportunities for those of you watching live to ask questions, and maybe even some audience participation. So, if you’re considering purchasing Beyond the Ring and want to know more this will be an excellent opportunity to see what it’s all about.

You can Pre-Order the print version of Beyond the Ring right now and receive the PDF for just an additional $5! But we understand that shipping internationally is a little difficult at the moment, so our overseas fans can also get the $5 PDF add-on by just letting their Friendly Local Game Store know that they would like to Pre-Order the book there. Just ask your store clerk to contact us, or their games distributor, and mention the Pre-Order Plus program, we will take care of the rest!

Beyond the Ring: Available Now

April 7, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Ian Lemke

Available for Pre-Order Now!

The ring gates have opened up opportunities on 1300 worlds for scientists, adventurers, explorers, and colonists. Royal Charter Energy is seeking brave and bold individuals of many diverse backgrounds for colony and mining operations beyond the rings. Be the first to set foot on a new world. Make new discoveries. Explore. RCE is currently hiring scientists with backgrounds in geology, chemistry, as well as those with mining, agriculture, and security experience. Stuck on Basic Assistance? We may have a place for you. Find yourself on a new world.

Applications are being accepted by our offices in Lovell City, Luna, either in person or electronically.

Ever wanted to run an off-world colony? Beyond the Ring presents a whole new way to play The Expanse RPG. Instead of traveling the Sol system, the player characters can be a part of a new colony. They get to make decisions about the colony’s advancement and deal with issues and threats as they arise. Chapter 4: Colonies opens with rules for designing your own colonies. Colonies have abilities just like player characters.

You have three options for creating colonies, freeform (basically make it up), point allocation (you get a number of points to spend) or random (speaks for itself). There are five core abilities for colonies: Economy, Force, Infrastructure, Media, and Science. In addition to these, every colony has three additional statistics: Size, Stability and Resolve, which help determine how resistant the colony is to disasters and setbacks. Colonies also have Focuses that represent things like specialty installations (like greenhouses), extraordinary knowledge (like local ecology), special resources (like lithium), or colonists with specific expertise (like a doctor or security forces). Disasters can have an impact on both these abilities and Focuses.

Once your colony is established, you get to see how your colony grows or fails. The rules for running a colony exist to provide new opportunities for adventure, provide a sense of investment in the protagonist’s community, and help players feel like an important part of the dynamic and ever-growing Expanse universe. The colony rules interact with the rest of a campaign in two ways: growth checks and plot actions.

For a colony to survive, it must endure the harsh realities of an alien world, grow to support itself, and thrive in the face of adversity–growth checks represent this. The frequency of these checks is usually from one to three months and can result in the colony growing or expanding or suffering a mishap. Mishaps can lead to adventure opportunities as players can sometimes take plot actions to mitigate their effects.

While growth checks represent the everyday ebb and flow of life in a community, plot actions represent deliberate efforts by the colony leadership toward specific goals. Often plot actions are made in response to a threat or rival colony, but colonies may also be proactive, attempting to undermine rivals or build new projects to improve conditions. Successful plot actions can hurt rivals, disarm threats, and make headway on projects, while failed plot actions do the opposite. The GM also gets to take plot actions. A group of pirates that the PCs previously tangled with past might become a direct threat to the colony.

Finally, this chapter offers a few sample colony operations that were built using these rules. These can be used as a guide for building your own colonies or plugged directly into an adventure if a GM finds they need a colony. As you can see, an entire campaign could be built around a crew starting and managing a colony in the worlds beyond the rings.
If you’re looking for inspiration for telling your own colony-based stories, Cibola Burn offers a lot of good material on what it’s like to live in a colony under threat from multiple directions. The novella Strange Dogs offers a good look into the early days of Laconia. And I was super excited to see that the final Expanse novella, The Sins of Our Fathers, is set entirely on a colony world. The story presents some of the difficult choices colonists might be forced to make. We can’t wait to hear the stories of the colonies on new worlds that you and your players create!

Tune into ThursdAGE this Thursday, April 7th at 2p Pacific to catch designer Ian Lemke as he walks us through star system creation and world building in Beyond the Ring, with your pals Owen KC Stevens and Troy Hewitt

You can watch us on Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and don’t forget to subscribe to Green Ronin’s official streaming channels to be notified when we go live with The Expanse RPG: Beyond the Ring Actual plays throughout the month!

Eldritch Texts in Cthulhu Awakens

March 23, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

Art by John Anthony DiGiovanni

As we noted in our update about powers and eldritch workings, anyone can “cast a spell” in Cthulhu Awakens as long as they have a text to work from that contains the proper instructions rendered in a language they can understand. This of course leads us to the question of what these references are, and how they’re presented in the game.

Each text’s description passes on the following information.

Content and Effects: A general description of the text’s contents, followed by any special effects they may have.

Decipher: Ability tests and any other conditions required to understand the text.

Praxes and Workings: Eldritch workings—the “spells” of Cthulhu Awakens—are divided into categories called praxes. Each praxis is a bundle of workings with related effects so that, for example, Geometry is the praxis of manipulating spacetime.

Alienation Test: Studying a text deeply is potentially disturbing and may trigger a test to avoid the effects of Alienation: how the Mythos alters minds who witness its phenomena.

The following example lays out this information about itself. Yes, the Necronomicon is covered, though the entry is too long for an update.

Euler Manuscript of Esoteric Mathematics

Beautifully bound in red leather and inked on cotton parchment, this manuscript holds the lesser-known mathematical musings of 18^th Century Swiss polymath Leonhard Euler. The only copy now sits in a forgotten storage room at Miskatonic University’s school of Physics, though MU’s librarians are aware that it was lost somewhere on campus in the 1890s. They have not entirely forgotten to keep an eye out for it. Euler’s contemporaries described its contents as “perverse theology,” and implied it was an attempt to solve physical and metaphysical questions with the same pragmatism Euler devised to his other mathematical work—and that its conclusions were abhorrent to science and faith.

Content and Effects: The Euler Manuscript contains graphs, calculations, and beautiful, full-color illustrations of mathematical theories involving the movement of the universe. Using a series of superficially simple formulae, Euler further claims the nature of the universe must parallel the nature of God—or whatever entity is constructed from first principles, which takes God’s place. Subsequent calculations show that the cosmos is simultaneously moving and unmoving, and in attaining greater self-organization only intensifies its eventual breakdown into chaos. Time only exists as a flaw in human perception designed to ignore these contradictions, and any Creator could only have set things in motion to enjoy their destruction. Nihilism is nothing new, but nihilism backed by rigorous math is another thing entirely.

As a result, upon first deciphering the Euler Manuscript, the reader must make a TN 13 Willpower (Faith) test or suffer one level of the Fatigued Condition. Furthermore, casting from the text reminds the reader that the cosmos is meaningless, prompting the test each time the Euler Manuscript is used for this purpose.

Decipher: The reader must succeed at a TN 13 Intelligence (Mathematics) test.

Praxes and Workings: Geometry (angular travel, counter geometry, hyperbolic rotation), Outsiders (intrusion, outsider correspondence)

Alienation Test: Phenomena, TN 14, when studying praxes from the text.

Eldritch Workings and the Powers of Cthulhu Awakens

March 22, 2022/in Green Ronin News /by Malcolm Sheppard

Art by Maurice Risulmi

Cthulhu Awakens provides three options for characters seeking extraordinary powers. First, the Inhuman Legacy talent represents individuals who discover they’ve inherited certain strange characteristics. They might be related to ghouls, Deep Ones, or some other weird lineage.

Second, some humans and other entities possess psychic disciplines, giving them the ability to alter other minds or the environment through force of will. Those of you familiar with Modern AGE will find some aspects familiar, but not others. Some powers have been changed, and instead of spending points or rolling for fatigue, psychics make a Power Test and Price Test—and the latter can have unpredictable consequences. Still, it’s an option for characters seeking a straightforward taste of supernatural might.

But the strongest “magic” of all can be found in eldritch workings, though these straddle the boundaries between science, magic, and what might be considered a form of ritual worship, while truly being none of these, as each working represents reaching out into the unknowable for power. All eldritch workings are lengthier actions that utilize challenge tests, but they do not require characters to invest in them as abilities, though they can do so to make casting easier. Anyone can pick up a copy of the Necronomicon and if they can understand it well enough to follow instructions, they can absolutely attempt the workings within. Eldritch workings are, of course, horrendously powerful—balance takes a back seat to ripping apart the laws of nature for story reasons, as you’ll see in the following example, with annotations in italics.

Hyperbolic Rotation (Generic name of the working; it can have other specific names)

Geometry (Praxis, or category it belongs to)

This working envisions local spacetime as a hyperbolic manifold, a curved plane wrapped around itself so that the Unseen Dimensions act as a vessel for perceptible dimensions. Rotating this structure can distort the relationship between two points in space, putting them closer together or further apart.

Rote Test: Intelligence (Physics), Intelligence (Computers), Intelligence (Electronics), TN 15 (rolls for challenge tests)

Alienation Test: Phenomena, TN 16 (Alienation Rest required for casters)

Interval: Medium (one minute) (How long each roll in the challenge tests uses up)

Trappings: 1) Top of the line computer loaded with dedicated software 2) Electrically-powered gyroscope 3) Silver wire that must be placed and anchored around the target area in specific configurations (examples of components and conditions required, which may differ based on text and altered by skilled casters)

Effect: In an area with a radius of up to 50 yards per casting rank, the caster can designate a number of alternate spatial relationships equal to their Intelligence + casting rank, with points of intersection no larger than 4 square yards each, though several can be combined for a larger single intersection. This can cause a stretch of road to wrap around itself, or a door on one floor of a building to open to a room on a different floor—or in mid-air. All points must exist within the working’s radius. Within the duration, the caster can use an Activate minor action to shift one spatial relationship with range of their senses so that, for example, they can walk through a door to one destination, then ensure the next person who passes through it goes somewhere else.

This working’s effects last one hour per casting rank.

Magister Effect: It no longer requires an Activate action to shift a spatial relationship. Furthermore, at this rank the caster can fix one or more spatial relationships within the effect duration so that they become permanent, but they can no longer be shifted at will except by another casting of hyperbolic rotation. (When a character has special expertise in the working, they can accomplish this.)

Doom: The working’s area of effect vanishes from normal spacetime, with plausible environmental features filling in the gap. The area of effect now exists in a time and location of the Game Master’s choosing, such as 100 years ago, Antarctica, or Yuggoth, taking any occupants with it. (The potential result of a miscast working.)