This started out as another 13th Age post, but I ended up tabling it as a bigger issue came up in discussion which, I think, crystallized a few thoughts about games, how they’re run and how they’re played. Now, here’s the caveat up front: I’m speaking in broad generalizations here, not making assertions about anyone’s […]
So, here are a few specific tricks you might want to consider to build an interesting Icon set: The Icon DeckOne interesting thing about the existing 13 Icons is that they’re not hard to map to half of the greater arcana of the Tarot deck. Some of that is probably intentional, but it’s also almost […]
So, one fun thing to do with the Icons system from 13th Age is to start mapping it onto fiction and game settings you like. I’ve done it several times, and I encounter an interesting pattern – the first few Icons of any setting tend to be very easy to come up with, but somewhere […]
Ok, so now that you’ve got the idea of icons, what can you do? First and foremost, you can use them. The 13 in the rules are rock solid, and the text provides lots of interesting guidelines on customizing them. As is the nature of iconic characters, you have a lot of leeway around the […]
So, please take it as a given that 13th Age is going to be a great game. It’s got some great minds behind it, and it really feels like it takes d20, combines a few of the good lessons from 4e, and makes a “good parts version” of d20. The last d20 game that made […]
One essential part of storytelling is that the teller knows the story. This seems self evident, but it’s worth calling out because of what it means to the process – because the tell knows what’s going to happen, she knows *how* to tell the story. She knwo when to lower her voice, when to pause […]
Over the Edge was probably one of the most important games in my personal gaming history. It was the first really light game I came across that was actually powerful enough to handle a real range of gameplay. Pervious exposure to things like TWERPS were more jokes or one-trick ponies, but OtE offered a game that could […]
This idea came to my while considering how to use 4e to run a Magic: the Gathering inspired game, and was refined some in discussion with Gamefiend (Quinn Murphy). The problem, of course, is that 4e is not open enough to allow something like this, and there is prettymuch no likliehood of a M:tG RPG […]
The 5 minute workday[1] in the dungeon rotated back into discussion again recently. I’m not sure if the context was 5e, Dragon Age or what, but this is one of those things that pops up from time to time in discussion. I’m not going to delve too deep into this issue itself for one simple […]
Jared von Hindeman dropped a phrase in twitter today which struck me as a very good way to describe an idea that’s been running through my mind a lot lately – “Rules Blind.” Running a game rules blind means that the players need not know any of the rules to play. Jared proposes it in […]