EvilDwarf
Explorer
I ran our first 13th Age Friday night, and thought I’d do a write up in case anyone is interested. I’m actually adapting Caves of Chaos from DND Next for the adventure—we’d been playtesting since packet 1, but a lot of players in our group didn’t care for the last packet, and we were getting some packet burn-out anyway. We’d talked about what to play, and then my pre-order of 13th Age arrived. It was an easy sell—our group got excited fast as I showed them the book and told them about the rules, etc. and so I volunteered to DM, since I’m 1 of 3 of us who DM, and I’m kind of an RPG system geek who likes to read, deconstruct, and tinker with lots of systems.
My group ran our first session of 13th Age Friday night, and I’d thought I’d share some of what happened and some thoughts on the session. First, here’s some background.
Our group has been playtesting Next since the first packet. We’d been getting to a bit of packet burnout, and several players didn’t like the last packet, and my pre-order of 13th Age came at just the right time. Everyone got really excited about trying it out as I passed around the book and I explained some of the system, etc.
We have our own setting called the Mirror Isles that we’ve been playing in since the late 70s, so it’s seen a lot of development, had more than it’s fair share of great heroes and campaigns, and generated lots of good gaming tales. We’ve not had much luck anytime we’ve tried other settings, mostly because we like our own stuff and we’re so familiar with it by now. So, we decided to adapt it for 13th Age. Coincidentally, the Mirror Isles has its own history of Ages—six of them, starting with the first, The Age of Legends (that’s when we played our white-box basic characters!!) through the Age of Wonders, which used 3 and 3.5 DND. So the different Ages idea was easy to map, and coincidentally, the second age, the Age of Heroes, ended in its own Great Cataclysm (interesting how certain tropes show up in RPGs) when a human wizard went poking around in the Codex of Infinite Planes and blew up the world (my character, btw). As Monte Python would say, the world “got better” and we continued with new characters, campaigns, and greatly altered land masses (ala World of Warcraft and its Cataclysm, which ours predated by about 20 years—tropes again). So, overlaying the idea of ages, etc. was pretty easy.
The challenge was, of course, the Icons, which our setting had nothing like, save for our deities, and we wanted to follow the suggestions in 13th Age and not make the Icons deities. In some cases, adding Icons wasn’t hard—we decided, for instance, that the human wizard who had blown up the world at the end of our Age of Heroes was The Archmage, and his experiments were his efforts to right his wrong (more on that later). We also had a prominent character from the past whose goal was to become a lich, so that became our Lich King, etc. For some Icons, there’s no direct match, but we’re ok so far without the one to one mapping of Icons to our setting’s past characters or even villains. What IS looking like its going to be a challenge is the very idea that there ARE such Icons in our setting, when before there was nothing like that. It’s no secret that setting determines the scope of adventures and which work and which don’t, and I’m getting the sense that the introduction of the Icons is throwing us off a bit in terms of setting, and therefore in terms of adventures.
Since the Mirror Isles has always been a DND setting, I decided to add a quirk to the 13th Age Mirror Isles so as not to disrupt our own history, timelines, etc. and set up the 13th Age world in a kind of quantum bubble—the 13th Age of the Mirror Isles takes place in the moment immediately following the Cataclysm and its aftermath. As I describe in our player guide: “The 13th Age of the Mirror Isles exists in the moment between heartbeats, the space between drops of sand through the hourglass, the trice between the beats of the hummingbird’s wings. Those who inhabit the 13th Age find themselves in an equilibrium immediately following the Great Cataclysm and its aftermath, whatever that may be. Some common folk describe it simply as the effect one feels when, facing great peril, their life flashes before their eyes in an instant that seems inexplicably slow and drawn out. Scholars and philosophers offer more complicated explanations involving the mechanics of time and space and the consequences of the Great Cataclysm’s unraveling of the World.
At any rate, most all the inhabitants of the 13th Age are aware of the Cataclysm—though some dispute its cause—and some recall a time they call the World Before—their lives, the world, its history, and its places. Some even claim to remember the World After; these few are considered by some as prophets, by some as charlatans, and by most as insane.” There are some other oddities implied by this idea, like the idea of people having a sense of time passing but no instruments that try to measure time work, etc. Our world’s moon hangs fixed at about 60’ on the horizon; the sun rises in the east, then begins to pass behind the moon causing twilight, then night falls as the sun is in eclipse, and then about “8 hours” later the sun rises in the east again. Since the sun never reaches zenith or sets in the west, the Isle to the west is now in perpetual twilight, which will make for some interesting adventures.
I was DM, since I’ve been DMing since the 70s and I owned the book, and we had four players for the first session; I thought they came up with some pretty good One Unique Things.
Zienna, a wood elf ranger. Her OUT is that she has no memory of the last 35 years of her life and has a positive 3 relationship with the Elf Queen.
Arcanus, a dark elf sorcerer, OUT was once a living magic item in the court of the Lich King until he was given human form and sent forth to adventure on the King’s behalf. Positive 2 Lich King and 1 conflicted with the Elf Queen.
Quarian, a dark elf paladin, OUT who has the soul of an angel but the heart of a demon, and sometimes his sword arm can’t tell the difference. Positive Crusader and 1 conflicted for Elf Queen.
Me, a dwarf fighter (yeah, the name got lots of laughs that night). OUT is she’s the smartest dwarf in the world because she can count to 2 (so the name works out, right?). Positive 2 Dwarf King and 1 conflicted for Elf Queen.
Adventure: I decided to run the Caves of Chaos from Next, for a few reasons. One, I had started it with the first packet and had done a LOT of extra work to add role playing options in the Keep, etc. Since a lot happened in the Keep as well as the Caves, we never finished the caves because the second packet dropped and everyone wanted to create their own characters instead of using the first packet’s pregens. Two, since I knew we weren’t going to finish what I put lots of prep into, I essentially had the priests in the Caves put a necromantic poison in the Keep’s water supply (as pay back for what the characters had done thus far), turning its inhabitants into “zombies,” and the Keep ended up being all but burned down (long story) as the players ran for their lives. So, they left behind the unfinished Caves with an intact Cult, a hoard of zombies, and a burning Keep. Third, I wanted to see how well 13th Age would map onto a DND adventure.
I wanted the party to meet, bond, and have a common goal for adventuring together, so I checked their Icon Relationships and OUT to give each a goal. This is where I had some questions about the Icons and how to use them and how they actually interact with the players, but I think I might have pulled it off. Arcanus received a white raven (yeah, I know) from the Night Raven’s guild, the Lich King’s organization. Turns out the Lich King caught wind that someone was making zombies with a some kind of necromantic poison, and he wants the formula. So, Arcanus has a reason to go to the Keep and then the Caves. Quarian had a vision that the Diabolist (the rebranded cult of chaos in the Caves) was trying to establish a foothold in a strategic spot in the Empire—so he needs to travel to the Keep and Caves. The player who is playing Zienna played a rogue in the first-packet outing, and she got to know the owner of the Keep’s pawn shop very well with that pregen from before. So, since her new character Zienna has forgotten the past 35 years of her life, I had her find an old pawn ticket in a backpack she seldom uses for something she had pawned there. Finally, Me the dwarf fighter is on the trail of a lost dwarven weapon that was lost in the Caves complex during an ancient battle with orcs. The tie-in with our tweaked setting is that dwarves love magic so much because the Dwarf King is laying up magic, especially weapons, so the dwarves will be in good shape when our 13th Age ends and they come out the other side of the Cataclysm. That seemed to get everyone to want to travel to the adventure sites of the Keep and the Caves.
Ok, so now, roll for Icon Relationships, right? Now, this is where things didn’t go so well, I thought. Take my word that I’m a good improve DM, but I still can’t really wrap my brain around how the Icons really interact in a way that’s not to meta-gamey and how the Relationship rolls work, but hey, we were all game to try. Zienna rolled and got two 5s and a 6 for the Elf Queen. I did NOT want to see that, as I had no idea whatsoever to work in the Elf Queen (I guess I should have kept the surrounding woods from the Caves of Chaos, but I had already shifted the focus to the Keep and Caves or I could have something like, the Elf Queen is concerned about the woods surrounding the Caves so…she sends you a bird carrying a magic sword or something??) Me rolled a 6 for the Dwarf King, and again I had no idea what to do. She was already being sent to get a magic weapon, and she had already learned that there even WAS a lost magic weapon, so…hummmmm. Arcanus didn’t get any 5s or 6s, so the one character who arguably had the most direct connection involving the zombie poison wasn’t a factor. Quarian then rolled a 6 for the Crusader (and I have no idea what his shtick is, really) and a 6 for the Elf Queen, so the Elf Queen is going to be really prominent, except there’s nothing for her in this setup, and little room that I could see to add her, etc. I decided to let play unfold, then, and look for opportunities.
Then an opportunity arose—I was having the characters meet in an important port city in its most popular tavern (cliché, yes I know, but it’s the Dead Elf tavern, and there’s a rich history surrounding this tavern in Mirror Isles lore, plus I wanted to emphasize that in this quantum bubble of the 13th Age that places and people from all Ages just might pop in—or even out). So, just to get things started, I narrated that the characters had traveled first to this port city to seek passage to the Keep. Then Zienna informs me that her character 1) avoids cities and so would not have been in a city to start with and 2) would not set foot in a tavern named the Dead Elf. Now, I thought the player was being a bit contrary since I was just affording narrative to get things going quickly (there is also some lore about the port city that makes it important but this post is getting long), but, that’s her character, a good DM learns to say Yes to such things, so I respected her position on the matter, and then used one of her 5s with the Elf Queen to have a bird lead her to the city and this particular tavern (was more complicated than that but that’s the idea). So, strike off one 5. The player seemed pleased that I had respected her character, I was glad I could say Yes, and was also relieved to take care of a Relationship roll.
Long story here, but the characters managed to learn about a caravan to the Keep, managed to get its guards fired, and then got the caravan master to hire them. I had worked things out so the characters could learn about caravans, decided that none would take passengers, and then left the players to their own solutions to get to the Keep, remaining flexible enough so that any reasonable solution to this puzzle would work out for them, and they did a good job I thought. I noted, though, that the whole getting-onto-the-caravan scenario was pretty much system neutral and didn’t really have any 13th Age system elements to it—just some good role playing.
Fast forward, there’s the obligatory attack on the caravan. As night fell, the players asked me about how well their characters could see in the dark, since they were all elves of one sort or another and a dwarf. We checked the book and couldn’t find anything about low light vision, etc—did we miss something? Not wanting to waste a lot of time on the matter, I decided for that evening the dark elves could see better than the dwarf could see better than the wood elf, and let it go at that. I’m still looking for this info. I think that for next time, I’ll let them know that no race has such vision—keeping track of light, who can see and who can’t, has actually been a hassle in the past with DND, so if everyone needs light, then I think it won’t be such a problem. (My experience with DND is that if there’s one human in the dungeon, your night vision is worthless anyway since the human is carrying around a torch everywhere.)
I used the goblin attack scenario from Blood and Lightening in the 13th Age book because I didn’t feel familiar enough with 13th Age math and encounter balance to try my own hand yet and wanted to get a feel for the balance in the system. The combat pacing went ok. We used figures for characters and goblins, but used the range system, which worked quite well. Zienna’s player was weaned on grid combat, and is usually a stickler for chess-boarding her movement, but everyone handled the range system very well. Everyone was VERY excited to see the Escalation Die come out, but I am foreseeing some problems in challenging players in the future, but we’ll see. Just the excitement of the Die and checking about when abilities activate, etc. was a lot of fun for the players. Myself? I was DND mode still. I had the goblins and the shaman sort of hold back, trying to draw out the characters away from the caravan wagon and get them separated, but I think what I need to do with monsters who do not benefit from the Escalation Die is to hit hard fast. Another thing that I had trouble with—both practically and in theory—is the Mook rule. Again probably in DND mode, I had the Mooks attack from different sides of the caravan, which then made them not a mob. So it didn’t make sense that if you did 10 damage on one side of the caravan that a Mook would die on the other. In my mind, Mook mobs are like Walking Dead zombies that you slash through as they, well, mob you. So Mooks, I guess, have to stick together. The other problem, though, is with the connotation of mob, or being mobbed. If you check the encounter info, I needed 3 goblin scum (Mooks). Um…is it me, or is 3 NOT a mob? I’ll have to think about that one.
Given that the players were using a new system and new characters, combat went quickly, but not as smoothly or quickly as I had expected, given the system hype for faster combats. But, we’re learning, so we’ll wait and see.
This is running way longer than it should, so I’ll skip to an Icon roll complication. Recall that Zienna has another 5 and 6 for Elf Queen for the evening. When she reclaimed her pawned item, I tried to use the rules and decided it was an elven cloak from the book, Adventurer tier with Elven qualities. Aha! I thought. That takes care of her 6, so maybe this is working after all. DM to player, since we were learning the system and everyone was curious about the Relationship roll mechanic, I told her DM to player, There’s your 6, and we all laughed.
Later though, for reasons I’ll skip, an assassin who was also present in the previous foray into the Keep from the first Next packet returned and attempted a kill on Me (it was actually quite fun to watch the players reinter a rebuilt Keep—by the chaos cult—when they knew it had been burnt and zombified from before, but they had to play as if their characters didn’t know any of this).
As it turns out, the assassin from the first foray was a hooded female elf (this assassin is actually in the original Keep on the Borderlands module, and I just fleshed it out a little bit). Well….Me escaped the assassin, roused the others, and told them that a hooded cloaked someone of the size and stature of Zienna had just tried to kill her. Suspicion went to Zienna, who claimed (rightful) innocence, but then she had to reveal that she had just that afternoon picked up a hooded cloak and hadn’t told anyone else, so suspicion REALLY grew at that point. So, the player looks at me and says, That should have been my 5! A benefit but with a complication! And she was right. What had happened was the perfect Relationship Roll 5—benefit but with a complication.
So, I’m not getting this whole Icon thing with the Relationship rolls and how they are supposed to help with the story. I think this is one big problem with 13th Age—they got too much setting in their mechanics. Remember, too, that poor Quarian got a 6 for both Crusader and Elf Queen, but neither got resolved or addressed before the evening was over, and I felt bad because I felt like he had gotten slighted, especially after he found out that Zienna got a magic item because of her 6. Just so I’m not completely negative about the Icon thing, though I do think it’s a big problem with the system, I will say that Me was able to survive being poisoned by the assassin by calling on her 6 with the Dwarf King and getting some dwarf resistance to poison, which reduced the difficulty of saving throw to Easy. But that’s also because 13th Age dwarves don’t apparently get resistance to poison (do they??), and we’ve played DND and Pathfinder our whole lives. So we expected that, couldn’t find that anywhere in the book, so it seemed a good way to use that 6.
TMI, I know, but I hope you find some interesting elements and I’m grateful for any feedback or ideas. Or questions!!
Thanks for reading all this!
My group ran our first session of 13th Age Friday night, and I’d thought I’d share some of what happened and some thoughts on the session. First, here’s some background.
Our group has been playtesting Next since the first packet. We’d been getting to a bit of packet burnout, and several players didn’t like the last packet, and my pre-order of 13th Age came at just the right time. Everyone got really excited about trying it out as I passed around the book and I explained some of the system, etc.
We have our own setting called the Mirror Isles that we’ve been playing in since the late 70s, so it’s seen a lot of development, had more than it’s fair share of great heroes and campaigns, and generated lots of good gaming tales. We’ve not had much luck anytime we’ve tried other settings, mostly because we like our own stuff and we’re so familiar with it by now. So, we decided to adapt it for 13th Age. Coincidentally, the Mirror Isles has its own history of Ages—six of them, starting with the first, The Age of Legends (that’s when we played our white-box basic characters!!) through the Age of Wonders, which used 3 and 3.5 DND. So the different Ages idea was easy to map, and coincidentally, the second age, the Age of Heroes, ended in its own Great Cataclysm (interesting how certain tropes show up in RPGs) when a human wizard went poking around in the Codex of Infinite Planes and blew up the world (my character, btw). As Monte Python would say, the world “got better” and we continued with new characters, campaigns, and greatly altered land masses (ala World of Warcraft and its Cataclysm, which ours predated by about 20 years—tropes again). So, overlaying the idea of ages, etc. was pretty easy.
The challenge was, of course, the Icons, which our setting had nothing like, save for our deities, and we wanted to follow the suggestions in 13th Age and not make the Icons deities. In some cases, adding Icons wasn’t hard—we decided, for instance, that the human wizard who had blown up the world at the end of our Age of Heroes was The Archmage, and his experiments were his efforts to right his wrong (more on that later). We also had a prominent character from the past whose goal was to become a lich, so that became our Lich King, etc. For some Icons, there’s no direct match, but we’re ok so far without the one to one mapping of Icons to our setting’s past characters or even villains. What IS looking like its going to be a challenge is the very idea that there ARE such Icons in our setting, when before there was nothing like that. It’s no secret that setting determines the scope of adventures and which work and which don’t, and I’m getting the sense that the introduction of the Icons is throwing us off a bit in terms of setting, and therefore in terms of adventures.
Since the Mirror Isles has always been a DND setting, I decided to add a quirk to the 13th Age Mirror Isles so as not to disrupt our own history, timelines, etc. and set up the 13th Age world in a kind of quantum bubble—the 13th Age of the Mirror Isles takes place in the moment immediately following the Cataclysm and its aftermath. As I describe in our player guide: “The 13th Age of the Mirror Isles exists in the moment between heartbeats, the space between drops of sand through the hourglass, the trice between the beats of the hummingbird’s wings. Those who inhabit the 13th Age find themselves in an equilibrium immediately following the Great Cataclysm and its aftermath, whatever that may be. Some common folk describe it simply as the effect one feels when, facing great peril, their life flashes before their eyes in an instant that seems inexplicably slow and drawn out. Scholars and philosophers offer more complicated explanations involving the mechanics of time and space and the consequences of the Great Cataclysm’s unraveling of the World.
At any rate, most all the inhabitants of the 13th Age are aware of the Cataclysm—though some dispute its cause—and some recall a time they call the World Before—their lives, the world, its history, and its places. Some even claim to remember the World After; these few are considered by some as prophets, by some as charlatans, and by most as insane.” There are some other oddities implied by this idea, like the idea of people having a sense of time passing but no instruments that try to measure time work, etc. Our world’s moon hangs fixed at about 60’ on the horizon; the sun rises in the east, then begins to pass behind the moon causing twilight, then night falls as the sun is in eclipse, and then about “8 hours” later the sun rises in the east again. Since the sun never reaches zenith or sets in the west, the Isle to the west is now in perpetual twilight, which will make for some interesting adventures.
I was DM, since I’ve been DMing since the 70s and I owned the book, and we had four players for the first session; I thought they came up with some pretty good One Unique Things.
Zienna, a wood elf ranger. Her OUT is that she has no memory of the last 35 years of her life and has a positive 3 relationship with the Elf Queen.
Arcanus, a dark elf sorcerer, OUT was once a living magic item in the court of the Lich King until he was given human form and sent forth to adventure on the King’s behalf. Positive 2 Lich King and 1 conflicted with the Elf Queen.
Quarian, a dark elf paladin, OUT who has the soul of an angel but the heart of a demon, and sometimes his sword arm can’t tell the difference. Positive Crusader and 1 conflicted for Elf Queen.
Me, a dwarf fighter (yeah, the name got lots of laughs that night). OUT is she’s the smartest dwarf in the world because she can count to 2 (so the name works out, right?). Positive 2 Dwarf King and 1 conflicted for Elf Queen.
Adventure: I decided to run the Caves of Chaos from Next, for a few reasons. One, I had started it with the first packet and had done a LOT of extra work to add role playing options in the Keep, etc. Since a lot happened in the Keep as well as the Caves, we never finished the caves because the second packet dropped and everyone wanted to create their own characters instead of using the first packet’s pregens. Two, since I knew we weren’t going to finish what I put lots of prep into, I essentially had the priests in the Caves put a necromantic poison in the Keep’s water supply (as pay back for what the characters had done thus far), turning its inhabitants into “zombies,” and the Keep ended up being all but burned down (long story) as the players ran for their lives. So, they left behind the unfinished Caves with an intact Cult, a hoard of zombies, and a burning Keep. Third, I wanted to see how well 13th Age would map onto a DND adventure.
I wanted the party to meet, bond, and have a common goal for adventuring together, so I checked their Icon Relationships and OUT to give each a goal. This is where I had some questions about the Icons and how to use them and how they actually interact with the players, but I think I might have pulled it off. Arcanus received a white raven (yeah, I know) from the Night Raven’s guild, the Lich King’s organization. Turns out the Lich King caught wind that someone was making zombies with a some kind of necromantic poison, and he wants the formula. So, Arcanus has a reason to go to the Keep and then the Caves. Quarian had a vision that the Diabolist (the rebranded cult of chaos in the Caves) was trying to establish a foothold in a strategic spot in the Empire—so he needs to travel to the Keep and Caves. The player who is playing Zienna played a rogue in the first-packet outing, and she got to know the owner of the Keep’s pawn shop very well with that pregen from before. So, since her new character Zienna has forgotten the past 35 years of her life, I had her find an old pawn ticket in a backpack she seldom uses for something she had pawned there. Finally, Me the dwarf fighter is on the trail of a lost dwarven weapon that was lost in the Caves complex during an ancient battle with orcs. The tie-in with our tweaked setting is that dwarves love magic so much because the Dwarf King is laying up magic, especially weapons, so the dwarves will be in good shape when our 13th Age ends and they come out the other side of the Cataclysm. That seemed to get everyone to want to travel to the adventure sites of the Keep and the Caves.
Ok, so now, roll for Icon Relationships, right? Now, this is where things didn’t go so well, I thought. Take my word that I’m a good improve DM, but I still can’t really wrap my brain around how the Icons really interact in a way that’s not to meta-gamey and how the Relationship rolls work, but hey, we were all game to try. Zienna rolled and got two 5s and a 6 for the Elf Queen. I did NOT want to see that, as I had no idea whatsoever to work in the Elf Queen (I guess I should have kept the surrounding woods from the Caves of Chaos, but I had already shifted the focus to the Keep and Caves or I could have something like, the Elf Queen is concerned about the woods surrounding the Caves so…she sends you a bird carrying a magic sword or something??) Me rolled a 6 for the Dwarf King, and again I had no idea what to do. She was already being sent to get a magic weapon, and she had already learned that there even WAS a lost magic weapon, so…hummmmm. Arcanus didn’t get any 5s or 6s, so the one character who arguably had the most direct connection involving the zombie poison wasn’t a factor. Quarian then rolled a 6 for the Crusader (and I have no idea what his shtick is, really) and a 6 for the Elf Queen, so the Elf Queen is going to be really prominent, except there’s nothing for her in this setup, and little room that I could see to add her, etc. I decided to let play unfold, then, and look for opportunities.
Then an opportunity arose—I was having the characters meet in an important port city in its most popular tavern (cliché, yes I know, but it’s the Dead Elf tavern, and there’s a rich history surrounding this tavern in Mirror Isles lore, plus I wanted to emphasize that in this quantum bubble of the 13th Age that places and people from all Ages just might pop in—or even out). So, just to get things started, I narrated that the characters had traveled first to this port city to seek passage to the Keep. Then Zienna informs me that her character 1) avoids cities and so would not have been in a city to start with and 2) would not set foot in a tavern named the Dead Elf. Now, I thought the player was being a bit contrary since I was just affording narrative to get things going quickly (there is also some lore about the port city that makes it important but this post is getting long), but, that’s her character, a good DM learns to say Yes to such things, so I respected her position on the matter, and then used one of her 5s with the Elf Queen to have a bird lead her to the city and this particular tavern (was more complicated than that but that’s the idea). So, strike off one 5. The player seemed pleased that I had respected her character, I was glad I could say Yes, and was also relieved to take care of a Relationship roll.
Long story here, but the characters managed to learn about a caravan to the Keep, managed to get its guards fired, and then got the caravan master to hire them. I had worked things out so the characters could learn about caravans, decided that none would take passengers, and then left the players to their own solutions to get to the Keep, remaining flexible enough so that any reasonable solution to this puzzle would work out for them, and they did a good job I thought. I noted, though, that the whole getting-onto-the-caravan scenario was pretty much system neutral and didn’t really have any 13th Age system elements to it—just some good role playing.
Fast forward, there’s the obligatory attack on the caravan. As night fell, the players asked me about how well their characters could see in the dark, since they were all elves of one sort or another and a dwarf. We checked the book and couldn’t find anything about low light vision, etc—did we miss something? Not wanting to waste a lot of time on the matter, I decided for that evening the dark elves could see better than the dwarf could see better than the wood elf, and let it go at that. I’m still looking for this info. I think that for next time, I’ll let them know that no race has such vision—keeping track of light, who can see and who can’t, has actually been a hassle in the past with DND, so if everyone needs light, then I think it won’t be such a problem. (My experience with DND is that if there’s one human in the dungeon, your night vision is worthless anyway since the human is carrying around a torch everywhere.)
I used the goblin attack scenario from Blood and Lightening in the 13th Age book because I didn’t feel familiar enough with 13th Age math and encounter balance to try my own hand yet and wanted to get a feel for the balance in the system. The combat pacing went ok. We used figures for characters and goblins, but used the range system, which worked quite well. Zienna’s player was weaned on grid combat, and is usually a stickler for chess-boarding her movement, but everyone handled the range system very well. Everyone was VERY excited to see the Escalation Die come out, but I am foreseeing some problems in challenging players in the future, but we’ll see. Just the excitement of the Die and checking about when abilities activate, etc. was a lot of fun for the players. Myself? I was DND mode still. I had the goblins and the shaman sort of hold back, trying to draw out the characters away from the caravan wagon and get them separated, but I think what I need to do with monsters who do not benefit from the Escalation Die is to hit hard fast. Another thing that I had trouble with—both practically and in theory—is the Mook rule. Again probably in DND mode, I had the Mooks attack from different sides of the caravan, which then made them not a mob. So it didn’t make sense that if you did 10 damage on one side of the caravan that a Mook would die on the other. In my mind, Mook mobs are like Walking Dead zombies that you slash through as they, well, mob you. So Mooks, I guess, have to stick together. The other problem, though, is with the connotation of mob, or being mobbed. If you check the encounter info, I needed 3 goblin scum (Mooks). Um…is it me, or is 3 NOT a mob? I’ll have to think about that one.
Given that the players were using a new system and new characters, combat went quickly, but not as smoothly or quickly as I had expected, given the system hype for faster combats. But, we’re learning, so we’ll wait and see.
This is running way longer than it should, so I’ll skip to an Icon roll complication. Recall that Zienna has another 5 and 6 for Elf Queen for the evening. When she reclaimed her pawned item, I tried to use the rules and decided it was an elven cloak from the book, Adventurer tier with Elven qualities. Aha! I thought. That takes care of her 6, so maybe this is working after all. DM to player, since we were learning the system and everyone was curious about the Relationship roll mechanic, I told her DM to player, There’s your 6, and we all laughed.
Later though, for reasons I’ll skip, an assassin who was also present in the previous foray into the Keep from the first Next packet returned and attempted a kill on Me (it was actually quite fun to watch the players reinter a rebuilt Keep—by the chaos cult—when they knew it had been burnt and zombified from before, but they had to play as if their characters didn’t know any of this).
As it turns out, the assassin from the first foray was a hooded female elf (this assassin is actually in the original Keep on the Borderlands module, and I just fleshed it out a little bit). Well….Me escaped the assassin, roused the others, and told them that a hooded cloaked someone of the size and stature of Zienna had just tried to kill her. Suspicion went to Zienna, who claimed (rightful) innocence, but then she had to reveal that she had just that afternoon picked up a hooded cloak and hadn’t told anyone else, so suspicion REALLY grew at that point. So, the player looks at me and says, That should have been my 5! A benefit but with a complication! And she was right. What had happened was the perfect Relationship Roll 5—benefit but with a complication.
So, I’m not getting this whole Icon thing with the Relationship rolls and how they are supposed to help with the story. I think this is one big problem with 13th Age—they got too much setting in their mechanics. Remember, too, that poor Quarian got a 6 for both Crusader and Elf Queen, but neither got resolved or addressed before the evening was over, and I felt bad because I felt like he had gotten slighted, especially after he found out that Zienna got a magic item because of her 6. Just so I’m not completely negative about the Icon thing, though I do think it’s a big problem with the system, I will say that Me was able to survive being poisoned by the assassin by calling on her 6 with the Dwarf King and getting some dwarf resistance to poison, which reduced the difficulty of saving throw to Easy. But that’s also because 13th Age dwarves don’t apparently get resistance to poison (do they??), and we’ve played DND and Pathfinder our whole lives. So we expected that, couldn’t find that anywhere in the book, so it seemed a good way to use that 6.
TMI, I know, but I hope you find some interesting elements and I’m grateful for any feedback or ideas. Or questions!!
Thanks for reading all this!
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