Tag Archive for: fantasy age

Now Available: Condition Cards for Fantasy AGE and Cthulhu Awakens

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Fantasy AGE Condition Cards

 

Cthulhu Awakens Condition Cards

We added condition rules to Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition and Cthulhu Awakens to simplify the various strange and alarming things that can happen to Player Characters, their friends, and their enemies. Slowed by magic? Confused by a psychic attack? Frightened by gore—or cosmic horror? These now have set rules to drop on the affected character. Now we have an even easier way to keep track of conditions: Condition Cards!

Since complicated encounters can impose conditions and distract players, the cards serve as a quick visual aid for keeping track of them. Each card provides the name and game mechanics of its corresponding condition.

We’re releasing separate sets of Condition Card Decks for Cthulhu Awakens and Fantasy AGE, each in two formats: print on demand through DrivethruRPG, and as digital assets for Roll20.

The Fantasy AGE Condition Deck contains 84 poker-sized cards: 4 of each condition from the Fantasy AGE RPG, and 4 blank cards you can customize for your own.

The Cthulhu Awakens Condition Deck contains 64 poker-sized cards: 4 of each condition from the Cthulhu Awakens RPG, and 4 blank cards you can customize for your own.

Return to the Valley of the Whispering Titans for Fantasy AGE!

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Return to the Valley of the Whispering Titans for Fantasy AGE!

Available Now!

Diehard Fantasy AGE fans remember the first edition book Fantasy AGE Lairs, a book that provided a group of unique locations and scenarios for Game Masters to introduce heroes to. Now that we’ve transitioned to the second edition of the game and the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook, we’ve decided to return to a classic location from that book to commence a new stream of support for the game: Fantasy Age Journeys.

A Fantasy AGE Journeys supplement doesn’t just upgrade a prior location for the current edition of the game, however. In addition to that, and any tweaks and corrections, each Journeys book will expand its original location. And thus, we present to you…

Return to the Valley of the Whispering Titans

Long ago, sinister godlike beings, giants in the land, converged for unspeakable, dark business, combining their sorcery for some forgotten purpose. Centuries later, their skulls gaze over the valley their magic has corrupted. Now, evil whispers in the hearts of beasts, and would be hunters, foresters, and guardians of nature have become enraptured by the auras of the so-called titans. Some have become servants of the titans without knowing it, as their love for the valley becomes a compulsion to unleash horrors upon visitors. Others know the evil they obey, but they are skilled at pretending to be victims of the dark, or allies against it. When the master of the valley calls upon the powers of the skulls, what will the heroes do?

Return to the Valley of the Whispering Titans presents a supernatural wilderness location for Fantasy AGE, along with major adversaries, possible rewards, and two adventures—one where characters confront the Dark Druid who claims to be the master of the valley, and another where the forces of the valley rise, and risk resurrecting an ancient evil with the heroes’ own unwitting cooperation! A new adventure, treasure, and creatures expand the Valley of the Whispering Titans beyond its original first edition treatment.

A Grave Adventure Indeed

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Fantasy AGE Dungeon: Menace of the Grave Warrens

Available Now!

While the new edition of Fantasy AGE has some great initial adventure support with “Set Sail for Breakwater Bay!” in the core rulebook, “The Breakwater Curse” in the Game Master’s Toolkit, and “Terror of the Ghost Ship” in the Fantasy AGE Quickstart, with more on the way, it doesn’t have a lot of “dungeon” style adventures as yet, something we look to remedy with the release of “Menace of the Grave Warrens”!

The adventure takes the heroes into an old goblin grave warren that has been invaded by a malevolent force, offering plenty of delving and navigating through dark tunnels and spaces. It is intended for 5th level characters, slightly higher-level than our starter adventures, for groups who have been playing Fantasy AGE for a while now or prefer to start at a higher level. It can follow up for groups who have played through the initial available adventures, especially if you choose to set it on Kassa, the island where Breakwater Bay is found.

The Kassa Warren

The goblin warren described in the adventure is quite self-contained: The whole adventure takes place within it, so you can place it pretty much anywhere you’d like in your setting. All that’s really required is a settlement nearby. The adventure assumes it’s a mostly-goblin settlement, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Perhaps the goblin warren is old and the settlement is new, built after the goblins who once lived in the area were gone, for example.

If placing “Menace of the Grave Warren” on Kassa Isle in the Stranger Shores setting, the warren could be near Tall Pines or Weston on the western side of the island, particularly if you decide there’s a substantial goblin community there. It could also be near the abandoned settlement of Sundown, perhaps connected in some fashion with why Sundown became abandoned. You can even set the warren not far from Breakwater itself, either in the North Woods or southwards towards Mount Kassa. It may be a venerated burial site for the goblin community of the town, now threatened. This lets you tie-in goblin NPCs from the setting like Thistle and Gont (from “The Breakwater Curse”) if you want.

You can also add a small goblin settlement on Kassa to be near the grave warren. There’s plenty of room along the Western Hills as well as Nordmarsh, the North Woods, or along Long Lake. Adventurers might be traveling through the area on some other business when news about the trouble in the warren reaches them, or they might go there specifically to investigate, especially if they’ve made a name for themselves on Kassa for dealing with supernatural trouble.

Wherever you choose to place the “Menace of the Grave Warrens” we hope it will be an opportunity for your Fantasy AGE heroes to delve deep into an ol’ fashioned dungeon adventure!

Menace of the Grave Warrens is available now in the Green Ronin Online Store, and on DriveThruRPG!

Starting the Engine! Introducing the Official AGE System Magazine

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Engine: The AGE Roleplaying Game Magazine

Available Now!

Right now, fans of the Adventure Game Engine tend to be scattered amongst its various games. After premiering the system with the Dragon Age roleplaying game, we evolved it into Fantasy AGE, Blue Rose, Modern AGE, The Expanse, Cthulhu Awakens, and the upcoming Fifth Season (preorders available!) roleplaying game. Historically fans have either stuck to single games or done some hacking with Modern AGE and Fantasy AGE.

Well, we want to change that a bit, and help build a pan-AGE community. One of the initiatives for this? Engine magazine, a source for articles about AGE games, with new rules, ideas, and commentary for all AGE System gamers. Issue #1 drops now!

In our premiere issue:

  • Apprehension: Rules for fear and dread for Blue Rose and Fantasy AGE, with notes for other games.
  • Enemies & Allies—The Nyx: A marine monster for Fantasy AGE or any other AGE game.
  • Frolic in the Vale: A boisterous faerie folk encounter for Fantasy AGE.
  • Masons & Mystics: The Architecture Arcana for Fantasy AGE and Modern AGE.
  • Taking the Scepter: Talents for rulers in Fantasy AGE.
  • The Thistle Cup: A fully detailed Aldis tavern for Blue Rose.

Use them as-is or use AGE’s hackable rules to fit them into your story, campaign, or world. We give you the fuel, but you start the Engine!

Pick up Engine #1 on our website, or at DrivethruRPG:

Dare the Lair of the Horned Giant, and Enter the First Fantasy AGE Dungeon

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Lair of the Horned Giant for Fantasy AGE 2nd edition!

Available Now!

 

As the new Fantasy AGE developer, I’m pleased to share something from the roots of the AGE system, updated for the 2nd edition of Fantasy AGE: a new adventure called Lair of the Horned Giant!

Long ago, a hero confronted a fierce challenge on the sacred fields of Kreyatos, and what transpired became the origin of a thousand legends—of sacred bulls slain, of a curse that fused victims with beasts, and of the Horned Giant and its cult. Now your heroes have come to investigate the legends at the fields themselves, where the cattle of the gods once roamed, and where the servants—or jailers—of a fallen hero, now given horns and an urge for bestial violence, dwell. But is there more to the Horned Giant? Beyond the rumored bull-man, what of the rumors of konotaurs and other beast-people?

Lair of the Horned Giant is an adventure our friend and very cool game designer Will Hindmarch originally created to support fans of the Dragon AGE roleplaying game who wanted to use it to adventure in other settings, but it was never published. I discovered it in our files, loved it, and updated it for Fantasy AGE’s second edition. It features an open-ended presentation like Fantasy AGE Lairs, a book for First Edition Fantasy AGE I really like, but it has a mythic resonance I think would go especially well with Fantasy AGE Trojan War, though it’s designed to slip into the classic fantasy worlds core Fantasy AGE supports.

(As I talk editions, remember that Fantasy AGE editions, and AGE games in general, are easy to convert between.)

This challenging adventure with shades of Greco-Roman and Middle Eastern mythology is best suited to characters of levels 8-10. It includes new creatures and magical treasures for Fantasy AGE suitable for a wide variety of campaigns. The mythology of the Horned Giant is even designed to be easily adapted for your own games, too.

This also inaugurates our series of new adventures called Fantasy AGE Dungeons, though some of these might not be “dungeons” in the usual sense. We’re currently working on another, Menace of the Grave Warrens, and I can’t wait to announce that too. Use them for one shots, side quests—whatever works for your table. Until then, challenge the cursed cult and dare the Bull of Heaven!

The Fantasy AGE Quickstart Arrives!

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Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Quickstart

A neglected ship sales the moonlit seas with no living crew to guide her. Can the heroes unravel the mystery? And more importantly, can they live to tell the tale?

New to AGE games? Looking for more starting adventures for your Fantasy AGE game? That’s the teaser for “Terror of the Ghost Ship,” the adventure included in the new Fantasy AGE Quickstart up above. It’s available today! Get it in PDF at the Green Ronin Online Store and DrivethruRPG —click through to wherever you want it from.

The Fantasy AGE Quickstart also contains streamlined rules and pregenerated characters for Fantasy AGE, the Adventure Game Engine (AGE) game of swords & sorcery adventure. The current, second edition of Fantasy AGE is an evolution of the rules found in Modern AGE, The Expanse Roleplaying Game, Blue Rose: The AGE Roleplaying Game of Romantic Fantasy, and others. The pregenerated characters, rules, and included adventure provide everything you need to run it except at least three six-sided dice, writing materials, and your friends.

AGE is designed to be intuitive and straightforward, while leaning into the swashbuckling side of adventure roleplaying with amazing stunts, cinematic combat, and a loose, four-class system that lets you shape a heroic archetype into a true individual.

After the adventure, move on to the full rules of the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook. The Stranger Shores await—and that’s for starters. Adventures, new settings, and more are on the horizon, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

Tune in today (Thursday, 21 March 2024) at 2p Pacific, 5p Eastern for ThursdAGE, when Malcolm Sheppard and Ian Lemke join your host, Disembodied Troy Hewitt. We will not only take a look at the new quickstart, we’ll be talking about the future of the Adventure Game Engine!

Do you Want the Power in Fantasy AGE? Well, Have It!

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It’s no secret that lots of gamers are, like me, remnants of the Generation cohort who got into it during the 80s roleplaying game trend. Ah, the 80s, an era of many bad things, a few good things, and admittedly morally ambiguous things—like Saturday morning cartoons. And toy-based cartoons. These vehicles to sell toys and sugary cereals represented advertisers preying on children in a low-key fashion, though it wasn’t always so low key for their parents when we kids dutifully screamed for consumer goods—but we’ve still got good memories of them, and even the most commercial pop culture has to be attractive, and therefore interesting. Toy designers recruited comic creators. They looked at inspirations from sword and sorcery fiction. Then they mashed it up to create playsets and dolls (called “action figures” for a gendered flair when they had swords and ray guns). And we pretended to be them, or used them as a playing piece in imaginative games.

Enter the Icon: a way to play such a character in Fantasy AGE, coming soon to an unannounced project.

YOU HAVE THE POWER! As a Fantasy AGE Icon character

New Specialization: Icon

Some say icons were born of experiments conducted in an ancient fortress, whose secrets were used to fuse magic and technology. Others say the icons are an order of spiritual knights who, in communing with the universe, found the discipline to bind science and sorcery behind a single mystical archetype. They might be from a lost world at the center of the universe, or the remnants of angelic beings, who are born again within the icon. Not all icons are heroes, however. In fact, evil icons are sometimes easy to identify, because of the way icon status influences appearance, so skull-tipped staves and blood-red cloaks set them apart.

Regardless of their origins, these figures of action are defined by a techno-mystical aspect solidified in the form of mysterious vestments: special clothing and gear laced with technology and sorcery. Only an icon can use the powers of their vestments to perform extraordinary feats. These abilities fit a theme that is usually apparent by appearance of individual vestments. Vestments consisting of a pectoral plate, loincloth and sword suggest an untamed warrior, while robes and an animal headdress might belong to a sorceress who channels the power of a god the animal represents.

Consequently, an icon is often best known by a name that refers to their powers and appearance. A demonic soldier with three horns might be known as “Tri-Horn,” for instance. It may seem to be a simple nickname, but that’s enough to earn the respect and fear of those who know the power of icons.

Class: Any

Requirements: 3 or higher in one of your class’s primary abilities.

You have the power to master the universe when you take on an alternate identity.

Novice: You initiate yourself into the path of the icon. You acquire techno-magical vestments. These only work for you, and while they can be stolen, you always know what direction to find them in, or even if they’ve been taken to another world. You may include up to 100 sp of non-perishable equipment with your vestments, including armor and weapons.

When you wear your vestments, you may use a minor action to prepare a stunt you select when you gain this power that normally costs you 2 SP, so that you can use for 0 SP on your next action (assuming it succeeds) without having to score doubles or spend stunt points, though you gain the normal benefits of both. This stunt must fit the theme and loose capabilities of your vestments, but it can be a basic stunt or class stunt. If the selected stunt proves to be a poor fit, you can swap it for another the next time you gain a level.

Expert: Your icon abilities grow. You may use the Novice benefit, under the same conditions, for another stunt that normally costs you 3 SP. You must use a separate minor action to activate each free stunt, however. You must also select an iconic name. This name acts as an honorific while you wear your vestments. Finally, when you’re wearing your vestments, you can choose to cause them to conceal your identity. As a free action that can only be rescinded by removing your vestments, you can make them a disguise with a TN of 10 + your Willpower to penetrate, allowing you to keep a secret identity.

Master: A lord among icons, your enemies tremble when they see you in your vestments. You may use the Novice benefit, under the same conditions, for an additional stunt that normally costs you 4 SP, though again, activating each free stunt is a separate minor action. Furthermore, you may summon from or dismiss your vestments to another dimension as a minor action. You choose whether to summon your vestments to appear on you, or adjacent to you. If they appear on you, anything that you could not wear with them is shunted to the alternate dimension until you dismiss your vestments again.

 

Robots, in Fantasy AGE? If only the Icon was here to save us!

But Wait, There’s More

Like I said, the icon is one of a number of brand-new specializations coming to an upcoming unannounced Fantasy AGE project—the second in a row I’ve been working on. If you checked out Fantasy AGE Trojan War you’ll have a sense of the probable format, but that’s all I can say for now. Let us know if you like these peeks at what we’re doing. Cheers!

 

Out Now: Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition!

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Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook out now!I am delighted to announce that Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition is here, there, and everywhere! It’s in game stores this week and we will, of course, have it at our Gen Con booth in August. The print edition of Fantasy AGE 2E is, of course, available through our online store, and you can get the PDF there or at DriveThruRPG. Virtual tabletop wise, we’ve got a character sheet, short adventures, and tokens available on Roll20 and we’re hard at work on a full compendium for Fantasy AGE 2E as well. The Fantasy AGE GM’s Toolkit—with a hardback screen, reference cards, and an adventure—is already at print and coming soon.

If, like many people this year, you are looking for an alternate swords & sorcery RPG, check out what Fantasy AGE 2E has to offer. It’s a complete RPG in one book that gives you the tools to run a game in the world of your choice, our new Stranger Shores setting, or one you create yourself. The class and level system gives new players something familiar, but the stunt system and other design innovations set Fantasy AGE apart. If you’d like to read more about it, we’ve got a series of Ronin Round Tables that delve into various aspects of the game.

You can start here, with our January announcement.

You can learn about the ancestries available for your characters here.

You can read about classes and specializations here.

You can get in a fight here.

You can learn about magic here.

You can see what’s great about stunts here.

Fantasy AGE 2E is a relaunch of the whole line and you can learn more about what’s coming up for the game here.

We have been working on Fantasy AGE 2E for many years and it’s exciting to see it get into people’s hands. I hope you all have fun with it. There’s still plenty of time to start a summer campaign!

 

Playing With Stunts

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Stunts are one of the pillars of the Adventure Game Engine, the system we use in Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, Blue Rose, The Expanse, and the upcoming Cthulhu Awakens and Fifth Season roleplaying games, all descended from design work on the grandfather of them all, Dragon Age.

Heading into the new edition of Fantasy AGE and Cthulhu Awakens, as well as some proposed and to-be announced projects, I played with how stunt point generation and stunts functioned. Part of game development is exploring ideas that won’t necessarily make it into the final game—and sometimes even ideas that would never have done so, but act as conceptual landmarks.

Relationship Bonds and the newer Stunt Attack option aside, the basic way to generate stunt points is to match any 2 dice on a 3d6 test. This prompts a look at the Stunt Die (Drama Die in some games, or Dragon Die in Dragon Age), which tells you how many stunt points (SP) you get. But what if we did it differently?

Let’s take a look at some of these options.

Creating your own house-rules like stunts is part of what makes AGE so fun!Highest Die is Stunt Die: Instead of having a fixed Stunt Die, it’s always the highest die. Since you get SP on the set of successful tests your SP will always tend toward the higher range in the first place, but this exaggerates the effect even further. I don’t recommend this as a standard practice, but it might work as a special ability provided by a talent or extraordinary effect.

Lowest Die is Stunt Die: Woah, this one is interesting on a few levels, and in fact, is the most mathematically “logical,” but it isn’t fun enough to replace the ordinary Stunt Die. For one thing, that means you need a natural 18 to get 6 SP—and there’s a 0.46% chance of getting that. That’s why it isn’t fun enough, as part of the purpose of the Stunt Die is to add more variable results— “swinginess,” we call it, sometimes—to the regularity provided by the 3d6 curve.

SP and Degrees of Success Are Separate Dice: As we also use the Stunt Die to measure your degree of success, making the highest or lowest rolled die the Stunt Die becomes a problem for things like automatic weapons in Modern AGE, as well as advanced tests and other things that rely on degree of success. So, you might retain a visually distinctive die called the “Success Die” or “Power Die.” Even if you keep the usual Stunt Die you might split it from the Power Die. I looked at this pretty seriously as it opens up a lot of design-level opportunities, but in the end, I didn’t think it was worth it.

Anti-Stunts: Cthulhu Awakens actually has a limited version of this, but the version here is simpler. If you blow a roll but get doubles, you generate SP—for bad things. The simplest application is to hand them over to an opponent who spends them on stunts that are bad for you on their turn, in addition to the SP they might gain. Enemies who do the same naturally give you SP in return, so if you use this option SP ebb and flow from one side to the other. Besides the convolutions necessary outside of straightforward situations like combat, the problems with this one are the sheer number of SP that can concentrate in one place, which can get out of hand.

Degree of Success to SP: One recent idea I had was to award degree of success -5 SP regardless of whether a roll scores doubles or not. This means 1 SP on a 6. It gets really interesting when characters gain the ability to add focus bonuses to degrees of success. In newer AGE games this bonus maxes out at +4, so a roll of 6 with that bonus on the Stunt Die would provide a degree of success of 10, which converts to 5 bonus SP. The tricky bit comes when we score doubles. We could drop that completely, which would be miserable because low level characters could only ever get 1 SP from a roll, but if we keep SP from doubles the range of SP would be (degree of success -5) + Stunt Die, which might award up to 11 SP, which is too much.

Everything is Stunts: The answer to too-many-SP variants of course is, “What if it’s all stunts?” In this scheme we would add a Base Effect stunt table and the General Stunts from the Modern AGE Companion, and instead of stunts being an extraordinary result, we use SP as the building blocks to do anything—but no SP, no result. This would produce a really formal set of AGE mechanics which don’t fit the GM-guided goals of the system but might be fun to experiment with, nonetheless.

What do you think of these ideas? Would you try any of them? AGE is house rule and variant-friendly by design, as shown in the optional systems in Fantasy AGE. Modern AGE has two books that are filled with optional and variant game systems: the Modern AGE Companion and perhaps more relevant to this article, the Modern AGE Mastery Guide. Regardless of what we cook up in the lab, so to speak, we like it when you make the games your own.

A Gathering of the AGEs: Consolidated Rules in Fantasy AGE 2e

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Fantasy AGE Core RulebookHey folks, Malcolm here. I’m not the developer of the new edition of Fantasy AGE but I am one of the developers of the core rulebook. While I can’t give you a first-person perspective on the whole game, I can tell you a bit about the parts I helped work on. So, I thought I’d write a couple of pieces about that!

One of the goals of Fantasy AGE’s second edition was to consolidate various rules developments from multiple AGE games and supplements. If you’re an Adventure Game Engine completist you might recognize the following new and updated rules as familiar—with a few exceptions, because they’re from AGE works that haven’t come out yet but influenced development nonetheless! In any event, this is one of the factors that led us to eventually decide the new core rulebook was a true “Second Edition” of Fantasy AGE even though much of 1e remains compatible.

Challenge Tests: Challenge tests are advanced tests with certain special conditions, meant to emulate heists and other forms of dramatic extended tasks where characters need to apply multiple focuses, and fallout from failures can occur mid-test. Originally created by Crystal Frasier (and called “breaching tests”) for Modern AGE’s World of Lazarus supplement, it proved to be such a good idea we moved it to the core rulebook. The Expanse merged challenge tests and Modern AGE’s chase tests, and that final evolution is part of Fantasy AGE now.

Daring: Daring, an optional rule that promotes dramatic reversals in encounters, is an evolution of the rules for Serendipity, originally from the Modern AGE Companion.

Daring is one of the cool new optional rules in Fantasy AGE 2nd edition

Peril and Daring!

Defeat Conditions: Despite making their first appearance in Fantasy AGE 2E, Defeat Conditions were originally invented for Cthulhu Awakens, to provide alternatives to death as the result of dramatic combat.

Fortune: Fortune is an invention of Steve Kenson, originally devised for The Expanse roleplaying game, where escalating Health wasn’t appropriate but “script immunity” was a better fit. It was a great idea in that game, and it’s a cool option in Fantasy AGE, too.

Minor Arcana: These petty spells originally hail from the Threefold setting for Modern AGE.

Peril: Peril, where success lands you in deeper trouble, began as the Churn spiral in The Expanse. Interestingly, in the Modern AGE Companion it’s present and called Complications.

Relationships: Relationships, an optional rule to strengthen character connections in Fantasy AGE, was first introduced in Blue Rose.

Revised Spellcasting: In the new edition of Fantasy AGE spells only fail to be cast when a mage decides to abandon them or doesn’t have the magic points for them, because we determined spending MP on nothing happening wasn’t fun. Instead, if you fail a casting roll, the MP cost goes up. This is another option that was originally piloted in Modern AGE’s Threefold setting.

Simple Tests: A “test that doesn’t use stunts/SP” has existed in an ad hoc fashion since the beginning of the AGE system but the Simple Test concept, introduced in the Modern AGE Mastery Guide, gathers them all together as versions of simple tests and lets the GM use them at their discretion as well.

These nine examples aren’t the only ones, and notably, much of the Fantasy AGE Companion from the game’s first edition has been updated and added to the core of Fantasy AGE 2E.

Works Cited!

Want to know about the games that provided input for the new Fantasy AGE? Check them out:

Blue Rose: The AGE Roleplaying Game of Romantic Fantasy

Cthulhu Awakens

The Expanse Roleplaying Game

Modern AGE

Modern AGE Companion

Threefold (Modern AGE)

World of Lazarus (Modern AGE)