Tag Archive for: pdf

The Fifth Season RPG on Backerkit is Live!

The Fifth Season RPG now crowdfunding on Backerkit!

Join us for a special livestream with the developers and designers of The Fifth Season RPG!

 

The Fifth Season Roleplaying Game, now crowdfunding on Backerkit, is designed for you to play out adventures and stories set in the world described in the Broken Earth trilogy of novels by N.K. Jemisin—a world where constant and unstable tectonic and volcanic activity threaten all life; a world whose peoples have learned to adapt in order to survive. It is a world where everyone learns that Father Earth hates his children and is always trying to kill them, where metal rusts and even stone crumbles, and the best you can do is be prepared for the next disaster. In the world of the Broken Earth, community—the comm—is everything, because in community there is support and a chance to persevere.

You and your fellow players take the roles of members of such a community, working to overcome internal difficulties and external threats, in order to be ready when that inevitable Fifth Season comes. Are you a lifelong native of this place, someone everyone has recognized from childhood? Maybe you’re a more recent addition to the comm, someone who’s come from a distance, contributing something to the comm that makes the possibility of your secrets and past catching up to you worth it. Or perhaps you are an orogene, one who was born to sess the movements of the tectonic plates, gifted with a forbidden power to still the shaking earth and bleed heat in your environs away until frost coats everything in a perfect circle around you.

These may be times of peace and plenty, but strife and lean times are ahead, with the next Season of Death looming like a dark thunderhead on the horizon.

Welcome to the Stillness.
Download the Free Quickstart right here
Come check out the campaign, and if you pledge in the first 48 hours, you get a free printed copy of the game’s Quickstart (normally $10) if your chosen pledge level includes printed books (the Standard Edition and/or the Special Edition). The printed Quickstart will also be available as an add-on after the first 48 hours.And our top pledge level is the N.K. Jemisin Bookplate Bundle. This gets you the SpecialStandard, and PDF Editions of The Fifth Season RPG in addition to the signed bookplate. This pledge level is strictly limited to 500 backers.

Be sure to head over to The Fifth Season RPG on Backerkit and pledge early, before they run out!

Four versions available for the Fifth Season RPG

With four versions available, including Roll20!

Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition Coming in February

Fantasy AGE 2nd edition Core Rulebook

If you are looking for a new fantasy roleplaying game, your timing couldn’t be better because the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook is almost here! It will be available as a PDF and go up for print pre-order next month. With our Pre-Order Plus Program, you can add the PDF for only $5 more when you pre-order the printed book, so you can start reading the game as soon as your order is in.

 

 

 

 


What does Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition have to offer? Glad you asked!

  • Fantasy AGE is easy to learn and fun to play. You can make a character in less than 30 minutes, and you only need three 6-sided dice to play.
  • Fantasy AGE is a class and level game so it’s easy to transition to from similar RPGs. The core classes are Envoy, Mage, Rogue, and Warrior (social, magic, sneaky, fighty). You can customize your character with specializations starting at level 1. Choose from duelist, diplomat, elementalist, mystic navigator, pirate, skald, sword mage, and many more.
  • The heart of the game is the stunt system, which brings dynamism and drama to the table. Roll doubles on 3d6 to pull off heroic maneuvers in combat, cast mightier spells, perform amazing feats of physical and mental prowess, or even cut a rival down to size with a few clever words.
  • Fantasy AGE is a toolkit you can use with the setting of your choice. Game Masters have many options to customize the rules for their campaigns. For example, the mage class represents all spellcasters and the game has no de facto stance on the nature of magic. In one campaign, all magic might come from ancestral spirits. In another, there might be a strict difference between arcane and divine magic with rules to reflect it.
  • Fantasy AGE features optional rules systems for Peril, which ramps up the challenges heroes face, and Daring, which allows those same heroes to pull off even more impressive feats.
  • The Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook is a complete game, with player and Game Master info and advice, an array of magical arcana and enchanted items, a selection of monsters and other adversaries, and an adventure so you can start right away.
  • The game is built with the Adventure Game Engine (AGE), which powers many other Green Ronin RPGs: Blue Rose, The Expanse, Modern AGE, and this year brings Cthulhu Awakens and The Fifth Season as well. Each game has some bespoke mechanics to reflect genre and setting (Blue Rose has psychic powers, Modern AGE has modes of play and forgoes classes, and The Expanse has rules for advanced weaponry and spaceship combat, for example) but they all share a common core of rules. If you play any AGE RPG, you already know the basics of the others.

If you are new to Fantasy AGE, you can see the game in just a few weeks. If you’d like to get a sense of the Adventure Game Engine in the meantime, check out the free Quickstart for our Blue Rose RPG.

 

Fantasy AGE: Origins

I designed the Adventure Game Engine in 2008 for our licensed Dragon Age RPG that came out the following year. This was a big hit for us, and it didn’t take long for fans to let us know that they loved the rules but wanted to see a more general version not tied to the world of Thedas. To coincide with Wil Wheaton’s RPG web series Titansgrave, which used the rules, we released the Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook in 2015 to great acclaim. From there the Adventure Game Engine became our house system, with Blue Rose, Modern AGE, and The Expanse following. One reason we began work on the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook was to take some of the cool mechanical innovations of those games and implement them in the game’s next iteration. Like the churn in The Expanse? It forms the basis of the Peril system in Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition, for example.

 

What Does 2nd Edition Mean?

Current Fantasy AGE fans know we’ve been working on the Fantasy AGE Core Rulebook for several years. We have not previously called it 2nd Edition because one of the original design goals was to make it 99% compatible with the existing Fantasy AGE line. Two things happened along the way. First, it proved difficult to communicate that this was going to be a brand-new rulebook with some changes but mostly compatible with the Basic Rulebook. Second, during development and playtesting, we found more things that we wanted to update or expand, so now it’s more like 90% compatible. For these reasons, we decided that just calling it 2nd Edition would be best. Still, most of the 1st Edition line works just fine with 2nd Edition. You can use stat blocks from the Bestiary and adventures with little tweaking required. While much material from the Fantasy AGE Companion has been updated and incorporated into the new Core Rulebook, Lairs and the Campaign Builders Guide remain quite useful for the Game Master.

We know Fantasy AGE fans have been waiting for the Core Rulebook for a long time, but now the hour is nigh! Thanks for all your support over the years. Your patience will soon be rewarded.

 

The 3rd Era Mega – Bundle

3rd Era PDF Mega-Bundle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Terror From The Skies!

Terror From The Skies - A brand new Astonishing Adventure for Mutants & Masterminds!

Available Now!

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Hello fiends!

It’s only the 11th day of Halloween, and we’ve really amplified the creepy for you! As many of you know, we are coordinating two Patreons, the Twilight Accord and Mutants & Masterminds!  This spooky collaboration comes as a result of my role as a Captain of the Patreon TTRPG Creators A. Club (The A stands for Accountability). Originally intended as a short-term gathering  of TTRPG creators on Patreon, the idea was to gather fresh perspectives from fellow creators, our group hit it off so well that we expanded our meeting time to 90 minutes and we’re still at it 6 months later.
Now, it’s a lot like a weekly gathering of friends, each offering their expertise, coaching, counseling, and creative problem-solving! So you can imagine, when I mentioned the high-level concept of a terrifying  TTRPG Creators A. Club collaboration, this crew of RPG enthusiasts were next-level excited!

No Tricks, Only Treats TTRPG Creator’s Ring!

Here’s how it works: Every creator in this group has a free digital treat, and all you need to do is visit, and click! It’s a great way to catch up with some incredible TTRPG talent, some who have been doing this for some time, and some who are just beginning to focus on showcasing their work through Patreon — well, you will see for yourself!
Patreon Collaboration No Tricks, Only Treats!
I really wanted to show off each individual contributor to our collaboration – so as you click through to each Patreon for your free treat, take a moment to say hello, check out their work – and did you know you could follow their Patreon content for free?
You should do it! Oh look, here they all are now!

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

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

Worlds of Parodia
The Mischief Festival of Yielding

LeRoiDeCarreau
DnD 5e Spooky Compendium

Oixxo Art
Autumn Queen

ARTventuring Guild
Spooky PC/NPC portrait

Nerdsmith
“Welcome to the Estate” adventure module

The Twilight Accord:
THE NIGHT ROAD PROCESSION

Angela Maps
5 Animated Battle Maps & Foundry VTT mod

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

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

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

BonusActionRainbow
Rotten Roots – a Space Fantasy oneshot

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

Mutants & Masterminds
The Nightmare Rider Stablock!

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

More Treats, still no Tricks

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

 

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

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

Bite-Sized Siege of Starhaven

The Guide to Starhaven for Mutants & Masterminds

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

 

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

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

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

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

I did not keep that promise.

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

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

Prime Consul Tamira-Van of Starhaven

Prime Consul Tamira-Van

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

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

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

I had time for a ten minute intermission here.

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

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

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

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

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

Wanted: Bounty Hunters – The Expanse RPG

Trades of the Expanse: Bounty Hunter

Available Soon!

Coming soon to the Green Ronin Online Store and DrivethruRPG, Bounty Hunters kicks off the new Trades of the Expanse PDF series of short, well, expansions for The Expanse RPG, looking at different trades and professions in the setting: how to create characters practicing that trade, game systems for handling their jobs, and adventure hooks and ideas for them, to name a few. Bounty Hunters starts off with the basic premise “Throughout human history there have been people who posed problems for other people, and those willing and able to deal with such problems—for a price. It may have been someone who needed to be found, apprehended, given a message or a warning, or simply eliminated.”

Makes a certain amount of sense to start with bounty hunters, since The Expanse essentially starts off with a “kidnap job” assigned to StarHelix detective Miller. Coincidentally, bounty hunters are also prominent in other science fiction media of late and might provide some additional inspiration.

The product takes a look at the practice of bounty hunting in the System of The Expanse, including its relative legality, the types of bounties, and the clients offering them. It provides guidelines for bounty hunters looking for work, and the ways in which they find it, from standing bounties to agency assignments. It also looks at the bounty hunting process from start to finish, from getting the job to tracking the target to getting paid.

Bounty Hunters offers AGE game system material as well. It includes handling bounty hunting as an investigative challenge, income rewards, “Tools of the Trade” equipment, a Bounty Hunter specialization, and a couple of ships suited for bounty hunters. It even has special bounty hunting stunts like “The Upper Hand,” “What Makes Them Tick” and my personal favorite, “Saw That Coming,” which lets you spend Stunt Points to retroactively declare that you planned for something that your target ends up doing and you’re prepared for it.

The product also offers resources for Game Masters, including dealing with bounty hunter reputations, some ideas for Churn effects while hunting a bounty, and a “Jobs Board” with some potential bounties you can use as starting points for your own Expanse adventures focused on bounty hunting.

All in all, Trades of the Expanse: Bounty Hunters is a powerful little package, whether you want your crew to try their hand at the trade for a change-of-pace, or you’re interested in a whole series focused on bounty hunting in the System (and even many systems, with the Beyond the Ring sourcebook).

Trades of the Expanse: Bounty Hunters will be available very soon!

A Haven in the Stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern AGE, Four Years On: Modern Adventures

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

Modern Adventures await!

Two Versions of the Quickstart

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

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

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

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

Backs of the Books

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

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

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

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

Modern AGE Missions Modern AGE Missions: Feral Hogs

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

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

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

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

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

Infinity and More

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

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

Six of Cups for Blue Rose!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!