13th Age: Our first session report

[Jhaelen]

That's totally fair. Personally, if/when I run it (I'm going to be playing it next; I ran a playtest very briefly) I'll be having relationship rolls at the end of sessions and I'll probably pre-think in angles for ways I can use all of the ones the PCs select (I have a group of 4, so it's probably not even that many of them).

That's what I'm planning to do, as well.

I agree that the icons (and the relationship rolls) are one of the hardest aspects of 13th age to grok. But I'm definitely prepared to meet the challenge!
I have a feeling that 13th age works best if the majority of stories revolve around the PCs motivations and history, which may make it harder to use published adventure modules, but I'm used to heavily modding these anyway, if I use any at all.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I played in a series of games at a local convention run during the 13A playtest, and the GMs got a little creative with icons, replacing world-shaking archetypal icons with just, like the local big shots in the city (or even village) the game was set in.

As long as you come up with icons that work for your campiagn, it's a nifty mechanic, but just skipping it is a perfectly viable option, too...

 

[Jhaelen]

Yup. If you're using a published setting, it should be pretty easy to identify some alternative icons by looking at high-level npcs and important organizations. E.g. if I were to use Eberron, there's Lady Vol, the Lord of Blades, etc. or you could just base them on the Dragonmarked Houses.

I haven't decided yet, if I should go for a 10 session campaign - in which case I'd probably simply use 13th Age's default setting, or if I should try to adapt an adventure path or megadungeon for 13th Age instead.
The former appeals to me because it would give me a quicker idea how the game plays at different power levels. The latter would be nice because I have a collection of so many cool adventures that I've been wanting to play for ages...