Tag Archive for: Ronin Round Table

Out Now: Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition!

/in /by

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

/in /by

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

/in /by

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)

Orktoberfest: Ork’s System!

/in , , /by

Naturally, one of the biggest chapters in Ork! The Roleplaying Game is combat. We’re not going to pretend otherwise. Ork! is a game that unflinchingly tells you the truth: Combat is the most important system in roleplaying games! ARRRRRGH!

Accurate representation of Ork!’s game system in action.

Accurate representation of Ork!’s game system in action.

Ahem. Yet we understand you might want to identify stupid plants or sneak up on people (hopefully, to beat them up, leading to combat) or even—and this is not a good idea if you’re an ork—use magic. So, this week we’ll look at Ork!’s core rules.

The Core Rules: You Am Fight Krom!

For the lowly ork, each day is a struggle against other orks, squishy men, and, in a larger sense, Krom—wrathful, easily bored god of the orks—himself. This constant state of conflict is reflected in the following golden rule:

All dice checks in Ork! are opposed!

Many roleplaying games use what’s called a “target number” system where the benevolent game master decides the objective difficulty of a given task, and the player only needs to meet or exceed this target number to complete the task. Such sys­tems are for the weak. In Ork!, the Orkmaster represents Krom himself, and even the simplest task requires the player to dice off with Krom to get his way!

Orks roll a number of dice equal to their skill rating, which is usually between 1 (ork sucks) and 5 (ork rocks!). The better the attribute linked to the skill (attributes are Meat, Bones, Twitch, and Mojo) the bigger the dice (d4 to d12). So, a strong but callow young ork might roll 1d10 (skill 1, Meat d10) to whack somebody, while his smaller but more experienced counterpart rolls 3d8 (skill 3, Meat d8).

If the ork is going against a live opponent—somebody to beat up or outrun—that roll is opposed by the enemy’s roll. Against environmental and other stuff, the enemy is the world—and the god who made it, Krom! The number of dice you roll for Krom depends on how much he approves of what the ork is about to do, or how much failure would amuse him, and therefore the Orkmaster. This difficulty rating is Krom’s Favor, rated in the accompanying table.

Krom’s Favor
Krom’s Attitude Type of Action Krom Dice
Krom Am Resting His Eye Very Easy 1d6
Krom Approves Easy 2d6
Krom Am Not Care Average 3d6
Krom Am Annoyed Difficult 4d6
Krom Dislikes You Very Difficult 5d6
Krom Am Want You Dead! Extremely Difficult 6d6 and up!

We recommend d6 for Krom dice, though you can change the die type if Krom is feeling particularly nasty or uninterested. A mean Orkmaster might use d10s, while a complete weakling who smells like flowers after a spring rain would use d4s.

In the event of a tie, the aggressor wins! You always want to be the one acting in Ork!, not the wimpy defender! If you’re not sure who that is, the Orkmaster decides.

Beyond Stupid Basics!

Beyond the framing (ork versus Krom!), Ork!’s core system favors intuitive ease over showing off our game design chops. Yet, we do have an assortment of the stupid game system tricks you, the discerning consumer, have come to expect from modern roleplaying games. These include:

Cheats: When Krom isn’t paying attention, you can steal dice from him and add them to your own! Unfortunately, Krom is a god, and eventually figures it out, punishing you accordingly.

Ork Points: You get these when you act in an especially orky way, such as eating a face or engaging in axe-based art criticism. These give you ork points, which you can use for a bunch of benefits, from healing to cool tricks in combat.

Combat: Ork’s Combat chapter is the most important thing in the book! It has extra rules for everything from severing limbs to impromptu combat-oriented dinosaur taming. Lots to talk about, so we’ll get to it next week.

You Am Buy Ork When?

Ork! The Roleplaying Game, Second Edition is currently doing the warehouse to warehouse dance and gets into stores this month. You can still pre-order here and get the PDF right away as a $5 add on (or just get the PDF—see the link in the link above). See you next week!

Ronin Roundtable: Cool Dads

/in , /by

Hey folks, Jack here. Warning, this is going to be kind of a down Ronin Round Table, but I think it’s an important one.

A couple weeks ago, my father, James Norris, died. He was too young to die, despite being 70. It wasn’t a heroic death or a quick easy demise. In fact, it basically just sucked.

Because, in the words of Star Lord? I had a pretty cool dad.

But relevant to gaming and the gaming industry? I also had a supportive dad. My dad was my first player. I didn’t know what I was doing with my old D&D Basic set but he thought this rpg thing was a cool idea too and helped me figure it out. We never played again after those early days, but it was in no small part thanks to him that I got into gaming.

But it wasn’t just that one time that mattered. While much of 80s America was buying into that idiotic “Satanic Panic” of the time and burning kids’ gaming books and shaming them for playing games with their friends? My dad stood up for me. He likened my loved of games with the “baseball statistics” games and toy soldiers he loved as a kid. That’s right folks, despite never carrying the label or playing beyond those first few games? My dad was a real OG…original gamer.

When he explained the analogies between his childhood interests and mine to my grandparents? They supported me too. When a relative or neighbor tried to give me shit about gaming? He told them to back off and told me to not be bothered by them being ignorant. He bought me gaming books and even D&D toys (remember those?) when he could afford to and along with my mom they supported me first as a gamer, then as a game writer. He took me to all sorts of fantasy, pulp, and sci-fi films when he could and when he couldn’t my grandparents obliged. We saw Star Wars, Highlander, Krull, Dark Crystal, and many others in the theaters and later on video. We saw Raiders of the Lost Ark seventeen times in the theater. So much of the pop culture pedigree many of us gamers possess I experienced alongside my dad and other supportive family members.

I doubt dad ever read a single game book I wrote, but he would proudly tell others that his son was a writer, did game design, and would often talk with me about the cultural and historical elements I was including in my work.

Even when it was all short car trip “yearly vacations” to a relative’s barbeque and hand-me downs and so on? You can’t buy that sort of support. I knew families who had far more with whom every gaming diversion was a fight. To these folks gaming was “the devil’s work” or just “weird and stupid.”

I was never told to play sports instead, though I did. I was never told to go outside and stop gaming, though I did that too. The only thing that concerned dad and the other family and friends who supported me as a gamer and creator were that I didn’t JUST game. That I learned and grew in other ways. Which is a good thing to do.

By not stigmatizing my gaming and yet quietly encouraging me to have a life outside of it? My dad helped me become a far more well-adjusted person than I might have otherwise. He taught me it’s okay to be myself and more importantly it was vital to let others be themselves. This resulted not only in me gaming but gaming better—it was always about me having fun with friends and not about winning or looking cool or showing up others with how “legit” I was. To this day when I roll my eyes at the various edition wars and pointless conflicts of game design theory I can hear my dad saying “What’s the point of that? If it’s not affecting what you’re doing, why not just let people play what they want and have fun?”

A pretty cool dad, indeed.

I buried my dad a little over a week ago. That’s not a euphemism. With the help of my lovely and supportive wife, herself a gamer whose always supported my work, I dug a grave for my father’s urn in the small cemetery where he now rests and filled in the hole. Then I gave a distracted and inadequate eulogy and cried by his graveside after everyone had left.  And that kinda sucks, I’ll admit. However, what doesn’t suck at all is all the support my father gave me as a gamer and game creator. That’s the lesson I hope people reading this take:

Support gaming and the people who do it. Support your kids, relatives, and friends. Don’t sneer at them and tell them its weird. Don’t buy into whatever society is telling you about it. Don’t push others out of it either or waste time trying to keep them out of it. Be confident in your fun and let others have theirs. Really? Just game, make games of you’re so inclined, and let other people do the same.

All the people—well, okay not Nazis. Dad wouldn’t have expected that of me or anyone else. He hated Nazis (Raiders of the Lost Ark 17 times! folks).

He was cool like that too.

Ronin Roundtable: Freeport in Space

/in , , , /by

While Freeport City of Adventure was written specifically to work with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Freeport has a history with class- & level-based RPGs with a core d20 mechanic that predates Pathfinder. Freeport has always been a location that’s easily adapted to new game systems and settings, with much of the core information it provides (such as maps, factions, politics, and adventure seeds) are useful to a GM building a campaign or adventure regardless of the game system used.

Thus with the recent release of the Starfinder Core Rulebook, a new game and new setting built off the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and advancing its campaign world thousands of years in the future, it seems a perfect time to discuss how Freeport City of Adventure (and the Freeport Bestiary) can be adapted to spacefaring campaigns!

 

Conceptual Adaptations

While it may seem that a sailing-ship port doesn’t have a lot of relevance to a science-fantasy game, it’s actually not at all difficult to adapt Freeport to a Starfinder Roleplaying Game setting. The simplest way is to leave it on its island, and make it a major starport in a system that is along a significant trade route but far from any major government within your campaign. This allows the layout to be largely unchanged (starships might even dock in the water, as a cheap alternative to expensive high-tech landing pads), and keeps all its internal politics intact. All mentions of ships are simple adapted to starships, and local groups and NPCs are updated to their high-tech equivalents. The city’s factions, history, and even many of its adventures can be easily translated to science-fantasy equivalents.

 

Though it takes more work, Freeport can also be adapted to be an independent spaceport free of any planetary body. It can be placed on an asteroid with an environmental field keeping air in (again allowing the existing map to be used), or even turned into a massive (potentially mobile) space station. For this last option you’d likely need to create a new map (or accept a really oddly-shaped space station), but the scores of shops, temples, homes, and buildings in Freeport can be adapted largely unchanged by simply assuming their technological base (and goods, and NPCs) are updated to appropriate levels.

Obviously rather than flintlock-carrying, peg-leg bearing sea pirates, this updated Freeport is an open base of operations for space pirates. Some may cling to ancient fashions and traditions (eyepatches strapped on even over cybernetic eye enhancements), but in generally their technology and appearance changes to match the campaign setting. However, ship names, rivalries, debts, rumors, and rough parts of town remain conceptually the same whether your pirates and their home sport flintlocks or plasma pistols. Especially given how vast an entire galaxy of adventure is, having a fleshed-out set of goals, organizations, and names is extremely useful, even if you need to update the gear and stat blocks of anyone the PCs decide to fight with.

Finally, although it’s not as useful in most science-fantasy campaigns, Freeport can be dropped into a science-fantasy game largely unchanged. In this case it remains a low-tech sailing ship port, on a world with much less advanced science than a typical Starfinder Roleplaying Game setting. This makes the most sense if you want your high-tech PCs to have at least one low-tech world they interact with. Freeport might be on a planet where advanced technology doesn’t function for some reason, or under a powerful protectorate that ensures its culture isn’t irreparably altered by spacefaring visitors. Or it could be a world that is perfectly well aware of lasers and starships, and happy to trade local materials for such advanced tech, but simply lacks the industrial base to recreate circuit boards and transistors even when such things fall into local hands.

 

Adapting NPC Stat Blocks

While much of the material in Freeport City of Adventure can be updated to a far future setting with nothing more than the flip of a conceptual switch, the numerous named and generic NPCs are more useful if you can use them in your campaign when needed. In general, you can convert an NPC’s stat block using the same process as converting a monster stat block using the guidelines in Chapter 13 of the Starfinder Core Rulebook. This will tell you what skills to change, how to create a target’s EAC and KAC, how to generate Stamina Points, and so on. Most of the conversions are simple enough they take at most a minute or two, and you can actually ignore most of them and just use any appropriate-sounding skill for science-fantasy skill checks (it doesn’t really matter if you use Diplomacy as a Computers check, if you have an NPC you want to be good at computers, and you can simple use half an NPC’s hp as Stamina and half as Hit Points and give them all 3 resolve Points). The end result may not be exactly what a Starfinder Roleplaying Game npc of the same level would have, but it’s close enough.

Equipment is a little trickier—but only a little. You can either just change what an NPC’s equipment looks like (and change reload needs from once per attack to one per 10 attacks) and allow the NPC to attack multiple times based on iterative attacks and two-weapon fighting and similar options, or you can upgrade the NPC to level-appropriate weapons from the Starfinder Core Rulebook, and add the NPC’S CR to the damage.

 

Adapting Monsters

The Freeport Bestiary has a huge number of monsters that players won’t be expecting, making it a great resource for populating strange planets, new worlds, and the drifting hulks of abandoned starships. Altering a monster’s stat block is largely the same process as adapting an NPC stat block. However, a monster may need some additional changes made to make sense in a Star-Freeport setting.

For example, aquatic creatures you would normally encounter at sea should either be updated to exist in a wide range of environments (including flying in gas giant planets, and even travelling through the void of space), or be set up as creatures that might sneak onto a ship, be transported by PCs (perhaps as part of a space menagerie) so they can escape and cause havoc, or be adjusted to be planar creatures able to travel through realities (and possible be encountered during hyperspace travel). The important part is to make sure PCs don’t have to go to a planetary body of water to encounter them. Similarly monsters tied to specific terrain types, be that jungles or underground caverns, should be liberally re-envisioned to dwell in fungal forests, asteroid interiors, or the crypt-worlds of necromancer robots, as needed to fit the campaign. Constructs may be given the technological subtype to represent various robots, or left as magical creatures powered purely by eldritch forces.

Other monsters can simply be moved to locations the plot sends PCs to. It doesn’t much matter if an ancient ruined temple is a remnant of a long-lost serpent-folk empire on one world, or part of a reptilian civilization that spanned a thousand star systems, if it’s an adventure site it needs demonic traps, undead lurkers, constructed guardians, and inhuman intelligences with their own reasons for breaking in.

 

Exploration is About the Unexpected

The very fact most players won’t think of Freeport material as a natural fit for a science-fantasy game means they won’t see it coming when Mr. Wednesday has a task for them involving tracking down the privateer starship Morgenstern, or offers to vacate their gambling debts if they’ll deal with a bloathsome that’s settled on an asteroid with valuable mining concerns on it.

Ronin Roundtable: Upcoming Releases!

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Well that was a GenCon for the books! Absolute mayhem at our booth, with folks lining up to grab our new releases. The announcement of the Expanse RPG license. New opportunities and incredible partnerships in the offing. It was amazing and we have you to thank for it. 17 years in business and we are stronger than ever before. Seriously, thank you!

We’ll be taking a couple of days to recover but then it’s back to work on our next batch of books. This seems an opportune time to update you on our releases for the next six months. We’ve got a lot going on so let’s get to it!

RPG Releases

Our next book will be the new edition of Freedom City for Mutants & Masterminds. We’ve been working on this for a long time and the hour is finally nigh! This is the original setting for the game, the metropolis that birthed the Earth-Prime setting. And at 320 pages it’s as mighty as Captain Thunder! Look for Freedom City in October.

November is a triple threat. We’ve got another Mutants & Masterminds book, Rogues Gallery. This was a PDF series we did for the last couple of years. The book collects all the villains from that and adds some new ones as well. If you are looking for foes for your PCs to tangle with, Rogue Gallery has you covered. Next up is the Fantasy AGE Companion, the first major rules expansion for the game. It adds new, fun material for almost every aspect of the game. There are new talents, specializations, arcana, and spells, as well as rules for chases, relationships, organizations, mass combat, and more! Finally in November we’ve got the second edition of Ork! The Roleplaying Game. This was Green Ronin’s very first release 17 years ago. Ork is a beer and pretzels RPG, great for one shots or when you want a lighter hearted game. Show those evil Squishymen who’s the boss!

 

We also hope to get Faces of Thedas, the next Dragon Age book, out before Xmas. The final text for that is up with BioWare for approval. Once we get that signed off on, we’ll be able to slot it into a month for release. Watch our social media feed for more on Faces of Thedas in the coming months.

 

As you can see, we’ve got quite a lot planned for the rest of 2017. For this reason we decided to move Modern AGE and the World of Lazarus from their original November release date to January. This gives us more time to develop the books, and lets us start 2018 with a bang. Modern AGE takes the Adventure Game Engine to Earth, letting you run games anytime from the Industrial Revolution to the near future. World of Lazarus, the game’s first support book, lets you play in the setting of Greg Rucka’s awesome comic. If you haven’t read Lazarus before, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s seriously great.

In February we’ve got two more releases: Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook and Return to Freeport. The Basic Hero’s Handbook is both an entry point for those new to Mutants & Masterminds and a useful table reference for anyone playing the game. If you’ve been interested in M&M but looking for an easier way to learn the game, the Basic Hero’s Handbook is for you. Return to Freeport is a six-part adventure for the City of Adventure. It’s the first new adventure content we’ve done for Freeport in some years, and it’s designed for a Pathfinder RPG campaign that’ll take you from levels 1-11. At nearly 200 pages in length, Return to Freeport packs in a lot of adventure!

Nisaba Press

A few months ago we announced that we were adding fiction to our lineup and that we had hired Jaym Gates to lead that effort. Our fiction imprint is called Nisaba Press and the Offerings sampler we released at GenCon and online last week gave you the first taste of what we’ve got cooking. We’ll be publishing short fiction monthly and novels and short story collections in print. In November we’ll be publishing Tales of the Lost Citadel, an anthology of stories set in the world of our upcoming Fifth Edition setting that we Kickstarted this summer. Then in January we’ll have our first Blue Rose novel, Shadowtide, by Joseph Carriker. Joe has also become line developer for the Blue Rose RPG, so he’s all up in Aldea!

More to Come

So that’s the overview of what’s coming in the next six months. We have our yearly planning summit next month and we’ll be making plans for the rest of 2018 and beyond. We’ve already got some awesome stuff in the works, like the Sentinels of Earth-Prime card game and the Expanse RPG. I’ll be back early next year to talk about more of our plans. Game on!

Ronin Roundtable: Covering the Modern AGE

/in , , , , , /by

Last time I was here, I introduced Modern AGE, the contemporary era implementation of Green Ronin’s Adventure Game Engine. Look on this very page, and you’ll see the cover. I’m not going to call it the absolute, final article–fine tuning the look is Hal’s business–but this is darn close. I’m going to riff on the cover to tell you a bit more about what to expect.

Who’s on That Rooftop?

Like many games, Modern AGE features iconic characters we use for examples of play, who indicate the kinds of characters you can build and advance. Early in outlining, I designed each iconic with input from a writer, making it their character–you’ll see the writers’ names pop up as example players (Meghan Fitzgerald is our “iconic GM” in these examples). Let’s look at who the characters are, and what they tell you about the game.

They Know What to Say

On the far left, Sean checks their phone. “Played” by Howard Ingham, Sean’s a socially focused character, and even though we don’t have set character sheets for iconics like them, they’re bound to have a high Communication score, along with focuses supporting social interaction. Modern AGE includes social influence and connection rules in its core. First off, we present a selection of attitudes an encountered NPC might have, and rules for gradually shifting an attitude in a direction conducive to a character’s desires. But this is an AGE game, so we’ve also baked in an option to get things done with one roll. If you’re like me, there are times you want to play through developing a relationship, and times where you want to know whether an NPC will help or hinder a hero right away. The rules let you do both.

Sean might also draw on a Relationship with an NPC, or Membership in an organization–we have rules for both, evolved from predecessors in Blue Rose. Sean might have the Intrigue talent to draw information out of connections, and a specialization like Executive or Socialite that makes it easy to draw on social ties.

He Shoots

Crouched in the middle, Brian McLaughlin is an ex-military operative, “played” by yours truly. Brian probably has a character Background or Profession rooted in military affairs, and a Drive that motivates him to stay armed, and ready for action. Modern AGE Drives provide a capstone benefit at character creation, bundled into a reason to say “yes” to engaging with a campaign’s stories. Brian’s focus is on ranged combat, so guns, bullets, and how to deal with them are obviously important to him. That means Brian picked armor with a high rating against ballistic damage. In Modern AGE, we split damage into impact damage, inflicted by melee weapons, ballistic damage, delivered by firearms, and armor-piercing penetrating damage. Ancient armor doesn’t protect against ballistic attacks; modern armor does. Almost nothing resists penetrating damage.

Brian may have the Rifle Style focus, and perhaps a specialization in Sniper or Gunfighter, which can make him a formidable opponent even when his targets have armored up. But much depends on the game’s mode, our term for what rules might be in play to support a genre. All characters have a resistance to damage called Toughness, but in the gritty game mode, it only protects against mild blunt force trauma. In pulpy and cinematic modes, however, one of Brian’s targets might shrug a shot off, and keep in coming.

She Hits Hard

Over to Brian’s right is Amy Wilson, “played” by Matthew Dawkins. She’s trained and motivated to deal with anyone getting too close for comfort. Amy’s a martial artist and melee weapons expert. Matthew wrote the equipment section, and knows the sort of blades, bludgeons and other weapons she might acquire. AGE games aren’t equipment focused, so each weapon represents a general category. Furthermore, note that with no classes, we’ve dropped the penalty for not being trained with a weapon, but since Amy is probably trained in multiple armed and unarmed fighting style talents and the Martial Artist specialization, don’t expect to be on an even footing.

One of the organizational changes we’ve made in Modern AGE will affect how Matthew plays Amy. In other AGE games, we presented one big list of combat stunts; in Modern AGE we have more stunts, but they’re split into smaller lists of stunts linked to specific actions (with some that fit any action, and advice that there is wiggle room). Some stunts are listed as “core,” meaning that as low-cost options that are easy to describe, they can be your first choice, to avoid decision paralysis at the table. We hope that this combined with short, focused stunt lists makes picking stunts easier. We’ve done the same for non-combat stunts as well.

Beyond the Rooftop

So that’s who’s on the cover. What are they doing on that rooftop? What city are they in? (And who are the iconics I haven’t introduced yet, including the one who leads into chatting about the investigation rules?) Modern AGE doesn’t have a default setting, so it’s up to you, though the World of Lazarus, coming out at the same time as a supplement, provides immediate possibilities. If you want to know more, your best bet is to come visit our booth at Gencon–we’re Exhibitor #1321–or visit the “What’s New With Green Ronin Publishing!” panel at noon on Saturday.

Freebooters Ahoy! The Changing of the Guard.

/in , /by

It is a sad announcement for me to make, but I’ve recently flown the coop and am no longer managing the Freebooter Volunteer GM Program, nor the Events coordination for Gen Con and other shows. I resigned a bit ago, but we all felt like it was good to say goodbye to the community and offer a very hale welcome to Veronica Templar, your new Events/Freebooter Manager!

I’ve been very lucky to be working with Team Ronin these years, and it’s been a great pleasure to coordinate events with so many great volunteers. Green Ronin couldn’t be happier with the quality of volunteers, both some of our long standing Freebooters and with so many new folks. You’re what makes all the organizing such a pleasure.

For my team, I will miss you all greatly. You’ve been my biggest supporters, friends, and I love the hell out of you all. Luckily, most of you are in my local area, so I will get to see you for games and shenanigans. I cannot thank you all enough for the opportunities you’ve given me.

Where am I going? Catan Studio! I accepted a position managing the Organized Play program. You’ll still see me at shows, but you’ll need come to the Catan Event Hall to say hello! I’ll be busy running the tournaments and overseeing events, but I am always happy to take a moment to catch up and hear about your games.

I’m also still running OrcaCon, the inclusive tabletop games convention, outside Seattle. It’s the Unofficial Green Ronin Convention, and you’ll find most of the staff there each year. We’d love to see some of you come run games for Green Ronin Publishing.

So, things aren’t all sad around here, I’d like to tell you about Veronica! She is amazing and I am so excited she is on board to organize events and Freebooters. She’ll be growing the Freebooter Program, and we’ll be looking for more Freebooters at shows Green Ronin Publishing will be attending. You can read more information on the Freebooter Volunteer Info Page, and the team will be updating it as they start reaching out per show. So, if you haven’t made it to a Gen Con, maybe you can support Origins, UK Games Expo, Norwescon, OrcaCon, and more!

Veronica is a great organizer and has a very kind heart. I hope you give her the same love and enthusiasm you’ve shown me. And patience, as she learns her new role! If you’re interested in signing up as a Freebooter, hop over to that Info Page and fill out the form. She’ll be getting back to folks as we start booking the shows.

Thanks again for the years of support, not just from our Community, but from the Green Ronin Publishing Team. Go forth and be amazing!

Ronin Roundtable: Walking the Royal Road, Part One: Friends & Loved Ones

/in , , , , /by

Hello and welcome to Walking the Royal Road, what I hope to be an ongoing series on using the Tarot (or Royal Road, in Aldean parlance) in Blue Rose AGE games.

The Tarot has been used in roleplaying games for quite a long time, in a variety of contexts, and with good reason. Reading and deciphering the Tarot is less a matter of divination as it is storytelling—each card carries an intrinsic meaning (and sometimes a second meaning when the card appears inverted) that can serve as a building block for a larger narrative. When multiple cards are laid out, with each card position also having a meaning, it is possible to use them to build a small story of some kind, through the language of symbolism and the very human act of pulling disparate elements into a larger narrative.

The Blue Rose AGE core book already suggests a use of the Royal Road: in the establishment of a character’s Calling, Destiny, and Fate. There are also some suggestions for using tarot in Chapter Ten (p. 313, in the section “Walking the Royal Road,” where the title for this series comes from). This series of articles is going to suggest some additional uses for them.

The cards we use in these articles are the Shadowscapes Tarot, with art by the amazing Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, whose art has graced the covers of Blue Rose books throughout the game’s history.

Friends & Loved Ones

Today’s article is going to offer some additional character building. Romantic fantasy, as a genre, focuses not just on magic and feats of derring-do, but also the relationships formed by the characters. Characters do amazing things for love, for friendship, and for hate, and these kinds of motivators should always play into games of romantic fantasy, to some degree.

In order to have these kinds of motivations, though, player characters need some relationships in place. This system is intended to augment the Relationships mechanics, as found on p. 60 of the Blue Rose core rulebook. Where that system helps define how strongly heroes feel about other characters, this one will help with the brainstorming of figuring out who they are.

 

The Spread

The spread for this method is a simple three-card spread for each character.

The Role Card indicates in what capacity the PC knows the character in question. Take a look at the suit (pentacles, cups, wands, swords, or Major Arcana).

  • Pentacles: The person is someone you know in a professional capacity.
  • Cups: The person is someone who know familially, either a member of your family, or someone you met through a family member.
  • Wands: The person is someone you met in a social capacity, at a party or festival, tavern or theater.
  • Swords: The person is someone you know from a training or learning endeavor: a fellow apprentice, or someone you met in schooling of some kind.
  • Major Arcana: You met this person in some extraordinary capacity. Use the card itself as an inspiration: perhaps you met the Chariot while traveling, or you met the Tower during a terrible disaster of some kind.

The Personality Card indicates what this person is like. Use the tables for Calling, Destiny, and Fate in the Blue Rose core rulebook as a starting place. Note that this card does not indicate this character’s Calling, Destiny, or Fate—it’s simply what their outward-facing personality is like. There are always depths beneath this surface.

The Relationship Card indicates what your relationship with this person is like. The meaning of the card should be applied to this in some capacity. A Six of Wands suggests recognition of success, so perhaps this person looks up to you for your heroism; in contrast, the Page of Swords is about having enthusiasm but needing more information, so this card in the Relationship space suggests that the person looks to you as a source of information, or is themselves such a source for you.

 



Example

In the image, we have laid out some cards in the Friends & Loved Ones Spread.

Role: The Magician. We know this person because of magic, clearly. They might be an adept of some kind, or if we’re playing an adept or other talented character, perhaps we aided them with our own arcane arts.

Personality: The Star. Consulting the Callings table on p. 57 of Blue Rose, we see that this card represents “Artistic Mastery.” This character seems to be an artist to everyone they know, and not just a dabbler, either, but someone who really works to master their craft and achieve their vision.

Relationship: Seven of Wands. One of the typical meanings for the Seven of Wands is both aggression and defiance. In the Relationships space, this suggest someone whose closeness to the player character is either defiance—or, it’s someone who maintains the relationship out of defiance.

Conclusion

Here is just one example of a Narrator character generated using the spread above. It’s far from the only one, to say nothing of the variety possible from other card results entirely!

Godia Tulry: The Wishful Scrivener. We met Godia in the way she tends to meet new people—when she barged right up to us to ask us about our experiences and theories about the arcane. The other adepts roll their eyes and make themselves scarce when she shows up, because she’ll take up every bit of your time, if you let her. Despite their warnings, though, we find her delightful. She’s a dedicated magical chronicler, and we’re good enough friends that she has shyly confided that she wants more than anything to wield magic herself some day, but she just doesn’t have the Talent for it. Still, she is very sweet, loves when we use magic around her, and whipcrack sharp when it comes to arcane theory and history.

In the above example, magic is at the center of the friendship between Godia and the player’s character, per the Role card showing the Magician. Her insistent personality around her craft we derive from the Personality card showing the Star, and we’ve interpreted the defiance in the relationship, per the Relationship card showing the Seven of Wands, as coming from others who don’t understand the friendship.

 

Thanks: To Stephanie Pui-Mun Law for her amazing Shadowscapes tarot, which we use in this article. Her deck can be purchased off of Amazon here.