Tag Archive for: freeport

Return to Freeport

Twenty years ago, at Gen Con in August of 2000, Green Ronin Publishing released one of the very first adventures for the brand-new third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, also one of the first published under the new Open Game License. Death in Freeport was the first experience many had in playing the new edition, both that weekend and in the months and even years that followed. As part of celebrating Green Ronin’s 20th anniversary this year, we’re pleased to offer players both old and new the opportunity to return to the swashbuckling “City of Adventure” with a re-release of Death in Freeport, updated for the fifth edition of the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game!

Death in Freeport for 5th edition!Of course, along with editions, a number of things have changed in the past twenty years, not the least of which is a worldwide pandemic that has placed some limits on printing, publication, and distribution. That means this new edition of the adventure will be available only in electronic (PDF) and print-on-demand (Coming Soon!) formats. On the other hand, we’ve come a long way from producing black-and-white saddle-stitched booklets with line art: The new edition of Death in Freeport is in full color, with plenty of color illustrations, the style of our other 5e products like Book of the Righteous and Book of Fiends.

What about the adventure itself? Here, we largely stick to tradition and the original work of Freeport creator Chris Pramas. Death in Freeport introduces the player characters to the free city and pirate haven known as Freeport, and entangles them in the mystery of a scholar who has gone missing, leading them to a much deeper threat, both figuratively and literally!

Of course, all of the adventure’s mechanics, encounters, and characters have been updated for Fifth Edition, and that includes the four pre-generated player characters who were a part of the original Death in Freeport: Rollo (gnome fighter), Malevir (half-elf sorcerer), Alaina (human rogue), and Thorgrim (dwarf cleric). As an added bonus, we’ve created three unique backgrounds and four original sub-classes for these characters, included in an appendix in the adventure. They feature the backgrounds of Privateer, Historian, and Street Knife, and the sub-classes of:

  • Valor Domain: A cleric domain to stoke bravery, cast off fear, and serve as a beacon of courage to your allies.
  • Buccaneer: A martial archetype for sea-faring fighters who rely on striking fear into the hearts of their foes, and using that fear to make themselves all the more deadly!
  • Alley-rat: A rogue archetype that rules the streets and alleyways, turning terrain into deadly traps and even developing Lair Actions for your turf!
  • Serpentkin: A sorcerous origin drawing upon the ophidian power well known to long-time fans of Freeport, summoning spirits and forces with a serpentine bite.

So whether you are looking for a fun 1st-level adventure to introduce players to the City of Adventure (or to Fifth Edition or even tabletop gaming) or just some characters, encounters, ideas, and traits you can loot and plunder for your own 5e games, join us for our return to Freeport!

Now available in the Green Ronin Online Store

or check it out on DrivethruRPG

A Series of Tubes (Green Ronin on YouTube)

“Or we can just dive-in, do it, and see what happens.”

That was Green Ronin Community Director Troy Hewitt, one of our resident extroverts, encouraging us to pivot in the time of covid-19 toward our community, using the means at-hand, including video streaming. Troy has a great way of getting those of us who would want to study the situation for, well, ever out of our heads and into action. That next week, the first “Mutants & Masterminds Monday” live-streamed with me and M&M Developer Crystal Frasier, with Troy acting as host, moderator, and on-the-fly tech guru.

It’s now almost three months later and we have eleven (soon to be twelve) M&M Mondays under our belts. It’s still very much a “see what happens” learning process, but we’ve had guests on the stream, fielded questions from our audience, and Troy has come up with a few fun activities for us to do. We’ve even developed in-jokes (as gamers interacting are wont to do) from Crystal’s “journal of dreams” to our tendency to come up with new projects for ourselves while on the stream.

Green Ronin on Youtube!

All of which is a long introduction to announcing that, as things are progressing, some of our “M&M Mondays” episodes are available on Green Ronin Publishing’s YouTube channel. We’re putting more up as we go and the eventual plan is for us to start streaming live on YouTube and Twitch as well as on Facebook, so there will be even more places where you can see and hear from us and we can tell you everything that’s going on with Mutants & Masterminds and Green Ronin Publishing.

 

Not going to lie, for an introvert like myself, being on-camera isn’t easy, and I have been on-camera more in these past three months than I think I have been in the past three years, and then some. But at the same time, it has been wonderful getting to talk on a weekly basis with Crystal and Troy and our guests and to hear the questions and feedback from our community, many of you from week to week. It hasn’t been easy for Green Ronin (or many small businesses) with the initial loss of distribution and with many game stores still closed or doing only limited business. So every purchase of Green Ronin’s games helps, whether it is from the GR Online Store or supporting your favorite local game retailer.

We’re about two weeks from experiencing Gen Con Online for the first time (another “dive-in and see what happens” experience) and Green Ronin Publishing will be there with our games, our staff of wonderful and creative people, and with you, our community, and I’ll be there, in front of my camera, just as I plan to be next Monday. I don’t know for how many Mondays, to be honest, because things are changing fast and often these days but, I can tell you this: We’ll see what happens.

Hope you can join us sometime.

Ronin Army forums update: All Good Things…

Hello Green Ronin fans,

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


Ronin Army Gamer Badge

Green Ronin Gamer Badge

Greetings!

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

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

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

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

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

The Year 2000: Green Ronin Begins!

Last time I wrote about the pre-history of Green Ronin, basically covering my start in the industry and how I navigated the 90s. When I left off the story, I was working at Wizards of the Coast. The first 18 months or so I was at WotC, I was working in what was still called the TSR Product Group (this later changed to Roleplaying R&D), writing various books for D&D and one for Alternity. During that period, WotC decided to spin up a miniatures division. They were looking to compete with Games Workshop, publishing both games and miniatures to support them. D&D miniatures, which had a long history back into the 70s, were also an important part of the plan. If you follow me on social media (I’m @Pramas on Twitter) you know I’m a huge miniatures fan, so it’s no surprise that I determined to join this effort. It took some doing, but I eventually landed a spot on the miniatures team and spent the rest of my time at Wizards working on the game that was eventually released as Dungeons & Dragons: Chainmail.

Chainmail is a huge story in and of itself, but I’ll leave that for another time and place. What’s important for our tale is that after some months working on the miniatures team, I found I missed doing roleplaying work. This brought my punk DIY instincts to the fore again, and I thought, “Well, why not start my own side company and keep a finger in the RPG pie?” In February of 2000, I decided to take this from idle thought to actual thing. I set up the company, got a bank account, and began to make plans. The first thing I wanted to publish was Ork! The Roleplaying. This was a lighthearted beer & pretzels RPG (now in it’s second edition!). It was based on some fun campaigns my friend Todd Miller had run back in NYC. I had Todd write up “The World of Orkness” while I designed the rules system. I slated it for a July release at the Origins game convention.

Meanwhile, back at Wizards, the Open Game License and d20 System Trademark License were first being proposed. The idea was to provide other companies a way to publish D&D compatible material. The fact that it was a free license created a lot of skepticism within WotC. I remember sitting in a big meeting with folks from R&D and thinking about the possibilities this could offer though. One point made was that WotC had difficulty making money off adventures, and this was something smaller companies might take up more profitable. Another point was that WotC was a big company and turning the ship to react to trends was a slow process. I thought, “Well, my company is small and agile! I should give this a shot.”

When the OGL and d20 STL were announced publicly, there was also a lot of skepticism from established RPG companies. Some saw it way to kill competition to D&D. Green Ronin, of course, had no established game lines to worry about, as Ork hadn’t even been published yet. I knew that the Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition Player’s Handbook would launch at Gen Con 2000 (along with some D&D minis my group was doing), so I decided to release a 32-page adventure that same day.

Working at Wizards by day did grant me some advantages. As a part of R&D, I had been involved in the playtesting and debates of Third Edition so I had a good grasp of the new system. I also knew WotC was taking a “back to the dungeon” approach for adventures. I decided, therefore, to offer something different: a city adventure. This would have the added bonus of creating a setting that could be expanded upon later. Now I didn’t want to do Generic Fantasy City #57, so I pulled some other influences into it. So what do you get when you mix D&D with pirates and Lovecraftian horror? Freeport: The City of Adventure!

That spring I wrote the adventure Death in Freeport. I wanted a cracking cover for it, and I thought it’d be great if I could get something by Brom, as he’d done the cover art for my AD&D book Guide to Hell. This was all done on a shoestring so I could hardly afford a new Brom cover, but I talked to him about it and we worked out something else. He had done a bunch of art for a collectible card game a few years before and I was able to license a piece from that for only $400. Later, I made a flier I taped up around Gen Con promoting this new adventure “from the writer-artist team that brought you the AD&D Guide to Hell.”

Need An Adventure for that New Edition?

I worked my contacts for the rest of the production of Death in Freeport. Nicole Lindroos, who had done the graphic design on the original edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, did the interior layout. Hal Mangold, who I had met when he was working on Deadlands at Pinnacle, did the cover design. The three of us would become partners in the company just a couple of years later. For interior art I tapped Toren Atkinson and Chris Keefe, who I had worked with at my first company. WotC friends Jennifer Clarke Wilkes and Todd Gamble did editing and cartography respectively. The whole thing came together very quickly because we had a hard deadline. We got the files to a Chicago printer in time to have it done for Gen Con. I took a huge gamble and printed 10,000 copies (pro-tip to small publishers: don’t do this in 99% of circumstances!). The printer actually drove copies up to Milwaukee for us and dropped them my hotel so we’d have them in time.

In July we released Ork as planned at Origins. It was modestly successful, pretty much what you’d expect from a new small publisher and their debut game. A month later we released Death in Freeport and that was something else entirely. It was an instant hit. D&D Third Edition was, of course, the big news of that GenCon and there were only two adventures you could get to go with it there: Death in Freeport and Three Days to Kill by Atlas Games. Just walking around the convention and nearby hotels, I ran across groups (sometimes just sitting on the floor) playing Death in Freeport with their new Player’s Handbooks. When distributor orders came in, it just confirmed what I’d already seen at Gen Con: the gamble had paid off!

By the fall of 2000, it was clear that Green Ronin had the potential to become more than a side project. More on that next time!

Green Ronin 20 For 20 Sale

Green Ronin 20 For 20 Sale

20 For 20 Sale

2020 is Green Ronin’s 20th anniversary, and to celebrate we’re having a site wide sale of all our games and accessories. Everything in the Green Ronin Online Store is for sale for 20% off through April 20, 2020, except for active pre-orders like Lairs for Fantasy AGE and Enemies & Allies for Modern AGE. We really appreciate all the support you’ve given us over the years, so please enjoy some great games at a great price!

20 Years of Green Ronin! (Ronin Roundtable 2020 preview)

This time every January I write a message about our plans for the coming year. This is a special occasion though because 2020 is Green Ronin’s 20th year in business! We’ll be talking a lot more about that all year, looking back at our history and how we got here. I can say that when I started the company, it was a side project to my day job as a Creative Director at Wizards of the Coast. I couldn’t have imagined Green Ronin would still be around in 2020! So what do we have cooking for our big year? Let’s take a look!

20 Years of Green Ronin! 2020 is Green Ronin's 20th year in business.


Green Ronin’s very first release was a beer and pretzels RPG called Ork! in July, 2000. That game got a new edition worthy of Krom last year if you want to check it out. A month later, at GenCon 2000, we released Death in Freeport, the book that really put us on the map. It was an adventure for the just released third edition of Dungeons & Dragons and it introduced the world to Freeport: The City of Adventure, a setting that mixed classic fantasy elements with pirates and Lovecraftian horror. Since this year is also Freeport’s 20th anniversary, you know we had to do something to celebrate. And what brings people together like a marriage? This year we will finally wed Freeport and Fantasy AGE! Freeport is a setting I created, and Fantasy AGE is a game I designed, so it’s long past due that these two get hitched. This will begin at GenCon with the release of the Fantasy AGE Starter Set, a boxed introduction to both the game and Freeport. After that we’ll publish the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook, a bigger, better rulebook for the game that features Freeport as its example setting. Further books exploring the city and the larger world of Freeport will follow. In the shorter term, the Lairs sourcebook for Fantasy AGE is almost ready to go to print, just waiting on a few pieces of art, so look for a PDF release and the beginning of the pre-order soon.

 

Nisaba Press, our fiction imprint, will also be supporting Freeport with both short story anthologies and novels. The first novel, I Am Gitch by Lucien Soulban, feature’s Freeport’s most famous goblin! Speaking of Nisaba, we are really ramping up our fiction in 2020, exploring the settings of our Mutants & Masterminds, Blue Rose, and Threefold properties in addition to Freeport. Last year we released two novels and one anthology (Aaron Rosenberg’s Mutants & Masterminds novel Height of the Storm, Joseph Carriker’s Blue Rose novel Shadowtide, and the brand new Sovereigns of the Blue Rose anthology). Our next Mutants & Masterminds novel, Roadtrip to Ruin by Skyler Graye, is at print now so look for that release soon. Later in the year you will see new anthologies for all our properties, the first novel for our Threefold setting, and the release of Joseph Carriker’s Sacred Band, which we announced last year. It’s going to be an exciting year for Nisaba Press!

 

Abzu's Bounty: An adventure path for The Expanse RPGOn the topic of awesome fiction, let’s talk about The Expanse! We launched the game, based on James S.A. Corey’s modern scifi classics, last year, releasing both the core rulebook and Game Master’s Kit. We also brought on Ian Lemke as the developer and he’s already putting his stamp on the line. We are kicking off the year with Abzu’s Bounty, the game’s first big adventure. It’s brand new this month so you can grab it right now. We’re following that up later in the year with two more books: Ships of the Expanse and Beyond the Ring. Ships of the Expanse is exactly what it sounds like: a big book about spaceships, with stats, deck plans, and more. Beyond the Ring is the first sourcebook to advance the timeline. The core rulebook was set between the events of the first and second novel. Beyond the Ring takes things through the third and fourth (Abaddon’s Gate and Cibola Burn). With the ring gates open, there are huge numbers of new star systems to explore, many littered with the ancient relics of dead civilizations. Beyond the Ring opens up a whole new style of adventure for The Expanse RPG and gives GMs all the info and tools they need to support it. Something else you will see this year: Expanse dice! We are working with Q Workshop (who did our dice for Dragon Age and Blue Rose) to make three different sets of the dice. Earthers, Martians, and Belters can all represent!

 

Modern AGE, under the stalwart leadership of developer Malcolm Sheppard, is going from strength to strength. Last year we launched Threefold, the first original setting for the game, and it is a stunner. We are starting this year off with Enemies and Allies (at print now), the adversary book for Modern AGE. It details NPCs and creatures, covering genres such as modern fantasy, horror, near future SF, technothrillers, and crime dramas, and provides new mechanics to support them. We’re following that up with Five and Infinity, a collection of adventures for Threefold that cover all levels of play. It also introduces the Infinity Engine, a tool for using random chance and choice to generate both original adventures and new planes of existence to stage them in. Then we have the Mastery Guide, the last of what one might consider the “core books” of Modern AGE (the others being the Basic Rulebook, Companion, and Enemies and Allies). While you might think of the Mastery Guide as a GM’s guide, that’s only half the story. It also provides advice and support for players, so everyone can up their game.

 

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of the Blue Rose continues to thrive under the benevolent rulership of developer Joseph Carriker. The next book in the line is Envoys to the Mount, an epic adventure that spans five years of game time and all four tiers of Blue Rose play. This is a full campaign that will keep your group busy for some time. If you want a smaller commitment, Six of Cups is there for you. It’s an anthology of six shorter adventures, along the lines of Six of Swords from a couple of years back. After that comes Touching the Wild, which is a dual-purpose sourcebook. Half of it is a bestiary about the shadowspawn. The other half is a player’s guide to the rhydan, the psychic animals of the Blue Rose setting. This does include the option of an all rhydan party!

We are keeping Joe very busy this year because he’s also working with co-developer Tanya DePass on Fifth Season Roleplaying, licensed from N.K. Jemisin’s fantastic Broken Earth trilogy. We announced the game at GenCon and it will release towards the end of the year. The game will use a revised and updated version of our Chronicle System, the engine that powered our Song of Ice and Fire RPG. We’ll have a lot more to say about Fifth Season Roleplaying as we get closer to release so stay tuned!

Image shows the three novel covers from N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky.

 

All that is great, but don’t you want to get super sometimes? Well, Mutants & Masterminds has got you covered! Superdev Crystal Frasier (who is by the way, doing the graphic design of the whole line in addition to game development) has a lot of comic book goodness coming your way. First up is the Time Traveler’s Codex, a sourcebook that covers the myriad of ways you can use time travel in your campaign and explores some popular eras for such shenanigans. After that is the Vigilante’s Handbook, which is all about running street level campaigns. If you want a break from four-color heroics, this book provides a grittier option for lower level characters. Then there is Danger Zones, a sourcebook that provides 30 different urban backdrops for superheroic action, each of which includes a map, special features, and adventure ideas. This book will be super handy for time-pressed GMs. Pick a danger zone and some villains and you’re ready to rock. Something else we know Mutants & Masterminds GMs have been wanting is more adventures. Last week we started a new PDF series called Astonishing Adventures. This will provide a regular stream of new adventures, which should make things a whole lot easier for M&M GMs.

That ends our whirlwind tour of 2020! There’s even more to come, like The Lost Citadel and the Book of Fiends for 5E, and our Sentinels of Earth-Prime card game, but we will talk about those a little later. Thanks for all your support these past 20 years. It means the world to us that so many of you love and play our games. See you on the convention circuit!

Chris Pramas

Green Ronin Publishing

Fantasy AGE and You – Using Adventures from Other Games

So, here I am the Fantasy AGE developer with tons and tons of d20 adventures sitting on my shelves. A lot of them are really cool concepts, from a tour through the waters around Freeport to more than a hundred Adventure Path volumes from my former employer. I definitely want to run more Fantasy AGE games, but my time is limited and it seems a shame to just chuck all my older gaming products. That makes me wonder, naturally, how hard is it to adapt adventures and settings from other game systems to Fantasy AGE? And, is it worth the effort?

The answers are; not hard at all (though there’s an easy way and a hard way), and, of course, it depends.

Fantasy AGE

Let’s talk about the value of such an idea before we get into some tips on how to do it. The most obvious reason to convert materials for other games to Fantasy AGE is because you like the way Fantasy AGE plays as a game, but need ideas to fill your adventures. Especially for games built around having races, 20-level classes, and fantasy themes. The adaptation work isn’t particularly difficult, so you can easily treat multiple games’ worth of material as idea generators for your Fantasy AGE game.

One potential source for adventures: Freeport: City of Adventure (Pathfinder 1st edition)

One potential source for adventures: Freeport: City of Adventure (Pathfinder 1st edition)

This is especially helpful if you have multiple game editions of material for the same world, or want to mix elements from different system’s game worlds. So if you want to use the core world of one 20-level fantasy game, an adventure that uses a different game system, and a monster from a third, adapting all of these elements to Fantasy AGE may well be easier than picking any one of the three systems you are borrowing from to adjust everything to.

There is, of course, a secret to adapting other games to Fantasy AGE the “easy way,” and it is this: don’t even worry about trying to get it right.

Seriously, Fantasy AGE is not a game where you need to worry about a dozen tiny bonuses or have exactly the right balance of skills and special abilities. Yes, you CAN do things the ‘hard way’ and try to emulate every single special attack, creature type property, and tiny circumstantial bonuses… but mostly that’s not going to produce an end result that is any more fun and satisfying. As long as you use an appropriate equivalent, you can swap out a Fantasy AGE stat block for most things you might encounter in other game systems. If you tell players they are facing a band of 3-foot tall kobolds, they’ll never know you’re actually using the stat block for goblins. Or bandits. Or living dolls.

There are just a few things it’s useful to understand when working on your simple adaptation.

Adversary Threat Level

Fantasy AGE has guidelines covering what level PCs are expected to deal with what degree of adversary threat (Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook, 104), and this is a good general guideline for adapting a Fantasy AGE stat block to represent a foe from another game system. If you have 7th level PCs, and you are running a d20 adventure for 12th level characters, it’s best for most of your adversaries be moderate threats. Yes, that means instead of making a 12th level d20 evil sorcerer a 12th level Fantasy AGE mage you may just want to pick a moderate threat monster with spells, and treat it as a sorcerer. A djinn or shadow person (Fantasy AGE Bestiary) can substitute for a fine spellcaster, and similar you can use any of the elementals from that book as element-themed mages.

Don’t do any more work than you have to. This is supposed to be fun for you too, after all.

Shuffle Special Qualities

Freeport Bestiary (Pathfinder 1st edition)

Anything that isn’t appropriate for your adapted foe? Just ignore. Don’t worry about fine details of balance—if you want a simple air-mage just grab the wind djinn, ignore the flight (or describe it as a spell) and strike out the bound special qualities, and go for it.

If it’s crucial your adapted monster have some special ability to fit the theme of an adventure or to have an encounter make sense, look at the Modifying Monsters rules (Fantasy AGE Bestiary, 133) and pick something close-enough. Again, the idea isn’t to exactly emulate every feature of your adapted adversary, but just to pick a few things that match its theme. If you really need to give a creature a new power to emulate some special ability the bestiary doesn’t give you any options for, consider just giving it a stunt that access a spell from an appropriate arcana.

It’s All Hazards And Tests

Nearly anything that does nasty things to the PCs and isn’t an adversary can be translated into Fantasy AGE as a hazard (Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook, 101). Trapped chest? Hazard you can avoid with a Perception test, and bypass with a Dexterity (Traps) test. Poison cloud? Hazard you can reduce the damage of with a Constitution (Stamina) test. Barrier against good? Hazard you can ignore with a Willpower (Faith) test. Hazards don’t have to be restricted to damage (though it is the simplest option), so you can apply other effects (borrowed from arcana or adversary abilities, or that you make up on the spot). A tar pit can be a hazard that just prevents a character from moving until they pass a Strength (Might) test, a magic blinding rune can require a Willpower (Self-Discipline) test with failure causing the character to be unable to see for 10 minutes, resulting in a -3 to attack rolls and halving their movement rate.

Similarly you can translate most non-combat challenges into basic, opposed, or advanced tests as appropriate. If an adventure has special rules for a chariot race, finding the right book in a partially-flooded library, or building a rebellion within an occupied city, it’s rarely going to be worth it to try to emulate the details of those rules. Just pick the test type that seems closest, tell PCs how often they get to roll based on how long the goal should take, and move on.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

When looking back on enjoyable RPG experiences, most players remember when they pulled off an amazing stunt, discovered the mayor was a vampire, swam across the River of Souls, slayed the dragon, or were the last defender standing at the Gate of Heroes. They don’t generally care as much if they had five +1 bonuses from different sources, managed to master the special rules for winning a senate debate, or got lucky on the 4-part drowning rules. The Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook has all the tools you need to challenge the players and create memorable adventures, as well as advice on how to create new threats and encounters. When adapting material from other games, all you are doing is borrowing names, art, and general plots as blueprints for creating Fantasy AGE adventures.

If you keep things fast and fun, the players will never know if you didn’t give the half-dragon dire rat ghost from a d20 adventure all of its special defenses—they’ll just remember the dang thing kept running through walls and breathing fire on them until they skewered it for good.

Fantasy AGE: Shaking the Pillars of Heaven

Well, it’s been an interesting run, but it’s time to move on.

Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook

Starting in October I’m going to be leaving my position as Fantasy AGE developer and thus my regular position at Green Ronin. This has been awhile in coming—I’ve known for several months I needed to make a change.

Why? Well, it’s complicated. But mostly? I’m tired. After several years of personal tragedy, heavy workloads, financial and health issues, the occasional resurfacing of past harassment, and so on? I feel a bit like Egg Shen at the end of Big Trouble in Little China:

My work is done. Lo-Pan is dead, the evil spell has been lifted, years ago I promised myself a long vacation…and it’s time to collect.

That’s not entirely accurate of course, but metaphorically? It’s appropriate. For the past several years I’ve been keeping everything going as best I can. Maybe not always as well as I could in a perfect world, but keeping things moving forward as best I could.  I’m proud of the work done; I’m especially proud of the talented folks I worked with making the various books in the Fantasy AGE and Dragon Age lines, as well as the Blue Rose core book.

However, the Fantasy AGE line needs someone who really wants to work on it. Which, despite my aforementioned pride in the work done? That just isn’t me anymore. I’ve walked this road about as long as I can or want to. Again, that’s not a slam on the work, the people involved, fantasy, gaming, or anything else the line intersects with. It’s just where I am now.

I’ll always be happy I took this gig. It was the right thing to do at the time. I’ll always be proud of the work done. And it’s possible you’ll see me again on various Green Ronin projects, either as a freelance writer or maybe even a developer if the right specific project comes along.

Never can tell with me.

And I’m not going to be a hermit or anything. I have four more books for my wu xia/kung fu game, Tianxia, to finish, there are three more John Carter of Mars books in the pipeline and even

Fantasy AGE Bestiary

some other work past that.

But damn, I am worn out. And since I still have a lot of things I want to design, write, create, and so on in the future? I needed to let something go so I can recharge, rest, repair, and then do those things. After a lot of consideration, this was the thing to let go.

Sometimes it’s that simple.

So, I wanted to end by saying thanks to the fans and customers for their support and enthusiasm. To Green Ronin, I want to say thanks for the opportunities to put my stamp on not one but three of the company’s lines (and that’s not even counting the various Mutants and Masterminds projects I was able to contribute to). To Fantasy AGE’s new developer, Owen K.C. Stephens, I want to express my heartfelt enthusiasm and well wishes. I know you’re going to do great. To my various collaborators I want to give my love and appreciation; literally couldn’t do it without you. In particular, I want to give a shout out to Jamie Wood and Matt Miller, two fine freelancers who started on Dragon Age with me and kept working to the current Fantasy AGE projects. While there were so many great folks on various books, you two were always there when I needed you, and that’s appreciated.

And to my fellow Ronins, while it wasn’t always easy or smooth…we really shook the pillars of heaven, didn’t we?

Later,

Jack.


Fantasy AGE Companion

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Michael Corleone. The Godfather, Part III

Okay, that quote makes it sound like I’m unhappy to be back at Green Ronin, and nothing could be further from the truth! But let’s be honest, how often do I get to use an Al Pacino quote? I may not even be the Gamefather, much less the Godfather, but I know a good quote when I steal one!

Fans of Green Ronin as a company may recognize my name from my time as the Freeport/Pathfinder Developer, or my various freelance contributions to d20 game books Green Ronin has been so kind to include me in over the past two decades, but folks who are primarily fans of Fantasy AGE are likely to have no idea who I am, and I’d like to take a chance to introduce myself.

I have just a couple of small AGE credits, dating back to some GM advice of mine that got used in Dragon Age. But to be entirely up-front, my professional expertise has primarily been in things adjacent to D&D and Pathfinder, so taking the role of Fantasy AGE developer takes me into new territory professionally and I’m extremely excited about that.

Fantasy AGE Campaign Builder’s Guide

I think Fantasy AGE is one of the most dynamic and exciting RPGs to come along in the past decade, and I couldn’t be happier to be involved with its evolution going forward. Jack’s done a tremendous job shepherding from his first involvement with it to this point, and I want to take a moment to thank him for his hard work on the line, which is in great shape as he and I arrange for the hand-off of projects currently underway.

I don’t officially take the reins until October, but Jack and I (and the rest of the awesome Ronins) are already working at making sure things transition smoothly. We’ll have exciting new things to announce eventually, but for now I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself, and give people time to get used to the news.

Owen K.C. Stephens

September 2019

Ronin Roundtable: GAMA Trade Show

Last week Team Ronin made their way to beautiful Reno, Nevada to attend the GAMA Trade Show. GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, puts on this show every year for publishers, retailers, and distributors to get together and talk about their products, policies, and industry news. Publishers put up booths in an exhibit hall where retailers can come chat, check out our wares, and create an environment for feedback and construction.

This year we set up our booth and talked with retailers about the upcoming print release of Return to Freeport, which releases in just a few days, and The Expanse which will release to hobby stores on April 23rd, shortly after our backers receive their copies. We also talked about our upcoming slew of releases, which you can read about in Pramas’ posts here, here, and here. Retailers were particularly excited to learn about the plans to support The Expanse, as excitement at the store level is higher than even we expected!

The other major topic of discussion with retailers was our Pre-Order Plus program! With so much going on in the industry, we wanted to take the time to educate our partners about this program in person. Tons of retailers were excited about this but hadn’t heard about it before so we used this opportunity to bring it to light so that our retail partners have all the correct tools and support we can provide them.

We also had quite a few closed-door meetings with our distributors to discuss issues in the supply chain and the growing market. Scott Thorne, the owner of Castle Perilous Books & Games in Carbondale, Illinois, said a few years ago that he estimated well over 200 SKUs a month which has caused some retailers and distributors some issues. All our partners were understanding and will help going forward! If your local game shop carries our books, make sure to thank them on our behalf.

Many of the things at GAMA Trade Show are often behind-the-scenes; the exhibit hall, the meetings, and the seminars are all meant for industry folks – but these things affect our fans as well. Meeting these people and having time to chat makes it easier for us to make our books and get them into stores, which ultimately makes our products more available and more accessible.

Finally, we got to chat with some of our peers and have fun talking about the Pun War we had on Twitter with some of our friends. There’s a lot to be said about our industry being built on fun, and being able to make that fun in a different way that we can still share with our fans is satisfying.

All in all GAMA Trade Show was a success, and we were happy to see our partners and friends from all over the world.  Now we look ahead to The Expanse and beyond – keep your eye on your local game store, and this space, for more of your favorite Green Ronin adventures!

Return to Freeport: A Love Letter to Freeport

I can’t properly express how excited I am to see Return to Freeport in its final, compiled form. This is a project that has been with me for a long time, and I couldn’t be more delighted with the final results. The idea of developing six adventures (by six amazing authors–Crystal Frasier, Jason Keeley, Jody Macgregor, Patrick O’Duffy, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, and David Ross) that each stand alone but also form a single united narrative, seemed daunting when I came on-board in 2013 to help with “Freeport: The City of Adventure for the Pathfinder RPG,” but I never would have guessed the final book would take until 2019 to see print.

Six years, for six adventures. And let me say up front—that’s almost entirely my fault. It is certainly not the fault of the authors, artists, or anyone else at Green Ronin. Mea culpa, and sorry folks.

And while I might be biased, I think the end result here is worth the wait!

The 168 pages, full color, hardback compiles and updates the six adventures we originally released in PDF format into one glorious book. The adventures take characters from 1st to 12th level, and go from hunting down the source of a curse in the streets of the city, to facing ancient terrors and enemy fleets on the high seas, to rooting out traitors and madmen in an even-darker version of the City of Adventure.

As much as possible, this book is a Love Letter to Freeport. I hope we managed to capture the unique blend of fantasy, horror, and swashbuckling action that has been the hallmark of Freeport since it launched almost 20 years ago. The authors have done a tremendous job both highlighting many of the elements introduced in the 544-page “Freeport: The City of Adventure” sourcebook, and in creating new foe and allies to surprise the players. I don’t want to get into spoilers, but there are unhuman gangs, undead crews, love, hate, revenge, and political machinations from other planes of reality… all with a side of grim smiles and sharp cutlasses.

One of the joys of working on a project like this is getting to expand a setting you love with characters, maps, and art to help bring it to life. Cover artist E.M. Gist knocks it out of the park illustrating one of the more dramatic moments of the adventure, and through the book the illustrators have done awesome work bringing the gritty streets of the city to life, and creating the look for new and unique ships, monsters, and locations into glorious detail. Even if I didn’t love the adventures themselves (and I do), I’d delight in the visuals that help expand one of the most veteran d20 locations.

I had a lot of fun visiting Freeport as a player when the first adventures for it came out, and I am thrilled to have been allowed to return as at our guide now, nearly two decades later. This book is a literal Return to Freeport for me, but it’s also a great opportunity to come visit the City of Adventure for the first time.

Just keep your eyes open, and your weapon handy.