The RPGnet Interview
His latest game is 13th Age, which is currently available for pre-order from Pelgrane Press. We’ve learned that on August 13th Rob’s company Fire Opal Media is launching a Kickstarter to fund the first expansion to the game, and we plied him with questions.
For those who haven't heard of 13th Age, can you give us a quick overview of the game?
13th Age is the new tabletop RPG that Jonathan Tweet and I are working on with artists Lee Moyer and Aaron McConnell. It's scheduled to be published later this year by Pelgrane Press.
Jonathan and I have played in the same gaming group for 14 years. We designed 13th Age to be the d20-rolling, dungeon-crawling fantasy RPG we want to play together. 13th Age has fighters and sorcerers and elves hitting owlbears and orcs, stepping through portals into other worlds, and picking up magic swords with cool powers (and unique personality quirks!). Characters have the traditional six stats that you either roll randomly, or buy with points. It has Armor Class and feats. So in many ways it's very familiar.
But it's also a story-focused indie game. For example, when you create your character, you spend points on backgrounds that embed your character in the setting. You also determine what your relationships are with up to three of the 13 most powerful NPCs in the world. Players use the backgrounds and icon relationships to co-create the world along with the GM. But there are a lot of other things that we don't provide rules for, because they're handled through role-playing. If you want hirelings, you walk up to some tough-looking NPCs and make your pitch to them. If you want to create a magic item, you go on a series of epic adventures to get the necessary components.
On August 13, you're going to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the first expansion book for 13th Age. Can you tell us a bit about what the book will include?
The first expansion for 13th Age will be called 13 True Ways, and we're getting the band back together to do it: myself, Jonathan Tweet, Lee Moyer and Aaron McConnell.
We're approaching the book as a "highlights reel" for 13th Age. For example, we're planning on including rules for riding dragons in 13 True Ways. Note that the original book doesn’t have rules for riding horses. We’ll get to horses because we want rules for what’s really cool: riding dragons!
13 True Ways will include the monk, druid and chaos shaman character classes, as well as multiclassing. Early versions of the monk and multiclassing rules were in the play test draft, and the feedback we got told us that there's potential there, but they need more work.
I have a very specific approach I want to take with the druid, but I'm still figuring out how to make it play as well as it reads. Well, actually we have *two* very specific approaches we’re using for the druid and we’re going to see which wins, or whether they co-exist.
The chaos shaman got a one-line mention in the early playtest drafts before we realized it wasn’t going to make it into the original book. Some playtesters latched onto it, so it’s in demand. And it’s also the first example of us using the system to design a class that hasn’t been done before in d20-style dungeon games.
The expansion will also have new details of the game's default setting of the Dragon Empire. There will be sections describing its monastic traditions, more information about the living dungeons, maps of the overworld and parts of the underworld, and a guide to the world's best, worst and most dangerous taverns. Sort of like a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Dragon Empire.
We're also doing something that's a little controversial. In the core game, the 13 icons who are the most powerful NPCs in the world do not have stats. That's deliberate, because we don't want GMs to be limited by what we think the Lich King and the High Druid are capable of. Some people think that's a great idea. Other people think that's the worst idea ever. Well, in 13 True Ways, the icons will have stats. Probably in more than one way, since the point will be to give people flexibility in how they make the icons interact with their high level games.
Why are you doing a Kickstarter for this project, especially since the game isn't released yet?
It’s all about timing. The core team that designed the game really wants to work on 13 True Ways, and we don't want it to come out too horribly long after the game is released later this year. That means turning away a significant amount of paying work for the duration. A successful Kickstarter means we'll all be free to focus on 13th Age for the time needed to put out the book that we want to make (and which we hope you'll want to see.)
What's funny is that when we announced 13th Age, a lot of people were surprised and even a little disappointed that it wasn't a Kickstarter project.
Will you be doing anything for 13th Age at Gen Con and PAX Prime?
Jonathan Tweet and I will be doing an "Introducing 13th Age" seminar on Saturday at Gen Con, along with our developer Rob Watkins. We'll also be spending a lot of time at the Pelgrane Press Booth answering questions, helping people learn character design, and talking with GMs about their campaigns. Pelgrane will also be selling poster maps of the Dragon Empire. And we’ll be giving away custom 13th Age dice to attendees who pre-order the game or back the Kickstarter.
I’ll have a treasure in my pocket at GenCon: a 12-sided die with the logos of 12 of the icons printed on it! Something like it is going to be one of our Kickstarter perks, but the copy of the die I’ll have will be the only one of its kind since the people putting it together only had an archaic version of the Great Gold Wyrm’s symbol handy. So it’s sort of a relic of a forgotten age.
The 12-sided icons die plays into an optional use of the relationships mechanic. If a player fails a roll to invoke one of the icons with whom they have a relationship, the GM can secretly roll to see which of the other icons is actually involved to complicate the player characters’ lives. If the icon that the player failed to invoke comes up on the 12-sided die, the Prince of Shadows has his dagger in the mix instead.
In PAX news, just this week we got confirmation that we will have a 13th Age table in the Tabletop area of PAX Prime. We're planning to run demos in the indie games room, and I'm going to be on a panel with Logan Bonner and our artist Lee Moyer and the Dungeon World designers to talk about old school games and modern design. It'll be a lot of fun.
