Man (Robot) Fights Dog

There they were, the heroes of the 13th Age, on the top floor of a rickety wooden tower in the middle of a town that was literally alive, in a stand-off with a fireball-chucking wizard and his angry-looking dog, and all Amras had on his mind was that the wizard about to immolate them all seemed very familiar.

The party inched around the room in an attempt to surround the wizard Hallas without provoking him and as a distraction Amras attempted to engage him in conversation. The party discovered that Hallas had odd gaps in his story; he didn't remember arriving in Shadow Port and while he did remember the box -- in which they had assumed the item they had been sent to retrieve had been kept -- he had no memory of its contents. This was all very suspicious and odd and then the dog said "Get out of here now and you may live", which was something of a surprise.

Ne-0n pointed at the talking dog and asked Hallas what was going on. Hallas indicated that he heard nothing but a bark. The dog bit Ne-0n on the leg, crumpling the robotic sorcerer's metallic skin. Then there was a big fight.

Hallas' spells either failed or were countered by Amras' own magical abilities and the dog was hacked and blasted into bits. Literal bits, as it exploded into rainbow coloured light when they got it to zero hit points; they began to suspect that it was not a normal dog. Meanwhile Hallas was beaten into unconsciousness and the party was just about to tie him up and loot his study when the tower shook as something huge approached. Poking their heads out the window they saw a gigantic shadow thing -- perhaps some sort of amalgamation of the smaller creatures they had fought earlier -- half-stomping and half-slithering towards them.

GIANT BLOBBY SHADOW THING THAT CRIES

Huge 6th level spoiler
Initiative + 11
Vulnerability: light (yes, I know there is no light damage type in 13th Age, so what?)

Inky black tentacles +11 vs PD (3 attacks) - 21 negative energy damage.
Natural roll is above target's Constitution: the target loses a recovery as they feel their life force draining away.

C: Shadow Wail + 11 vs MD (2d4 nearby enemies) - targets are stunned (save ends) as each of the thing's masks lets out an agonised moan.

AC 22    PD 20    MD 20    HP 270

Ooh! A boss monster! Ooh! A boss monster that couldn't roll above a five and so missed with each and every attack except for the wail and that was no good if it couldn't follow up with any other attacks. Never mind then.

At some point during the one-sided mugging of the Giant Blobby Shadow Thing Hallas woke up and tried to crawl into a corner to hide from the enormous monster smashing holes in his house, but Amras executed him with a ray of frost, an act that seemed a little disproportionate.

As the wounded and helpless wizard froze to death a strange magical burst erupted from his body and shattered the windows of the tower; Sartheen the Red was occupied chopping the Giant Blobby Shadow Thing to bits but did feel the weight of the Blue's geas lift as Hallas expired. Was the geas that bound the Blue to the Emperor's service somehow contained, not in the wooden box Sartheen had seen, but in the human being Sartheen had seen carrying the box?

(Spoiler: Yes.)

Then came the looting and as the party ransacked Hallas' study they uncovered a strange and lifelike statue of an armoured half-orc, with a silver vial on a cord hanging around its neck. They opened the vial and poured the contents into the statue's mouth, and to the great surprise of no one the statue transformed into a real little boy a confused half-orc paladin. Before anyone could ask the half-orc who he was or why he had been petrified and stood in the corner of a wizard's study, the whole tower began shaking as the sentient town took control of it and tried to crush the party inside.

They escaped the tower just as it shaped itself into an enormous fist and tried to squash them, then they legged it to the edge of town -- Amras' keen intelligence helping him to plot a course through the shifting streets -- where a group of shadow things blocked their path. Amras teleported past the mob and ran into the woods while the rest of the party hacked their way through the shadows.

Once in the relative safety of the hills above Shadow Port, the party -- and their new addition, Gothrog Thickskull, paladin of, er, Communism -- discussed their next move. Some wanted to return to the cave with the magic portal but others pointed out that this would take them straight back to the Blue. Shadow Port was on an island so the only other way off -- given their current resources -- was to steal a boat, but that would have required returning to town and they were about as keen to do that as they were to face the Blue again.

Sartheen suggested a third option. He knew -- via an Icon relationship roll -- of a small gang of smugglers who had tried to circumvent the established order of things in Shadow Port and while the smugglers themselves had been forced into early retirement by the thieves' guild it was possible that their hideout -- and their boats -- would be intact. The dragonspawn's hunch paid off and the party escaped the island in a sloop with Rarity falling back on her skills as a former pearl diver to guide them to a safe port. Alas, those skills were a bit rusty and by the time they slouched into Glitterhaegen the party was battered, bruised and half-drowned.

They knew that they had burned their bridges with some Icons and made enemies of others, so they booked into an obscure inn far from the main thoroughfares of the city and kept their heads down. As the party convalesced, Ne-0n meditated and when he emerged from his trance, days later, the robot announced that he was tired of being manipulated by powerful beings and that it was time to take the Icons on.

With the summer holidays upon us and regular attendance due to become sporadic as a result we decided that we'd arrived at a good point to pause the campaign. The characters have reached fifth level and so a new tier of play has opened up; when we return to the 13th Age in the autumn we'll see how the player-characters intend to oppose the Icons. Until then it's board games for us and we may even have a go at this new Dungeons and Dragons thing everyone's talking about.

Street Fighter

The party were in Shadow Port -- the 13th Age's generic hive of scum and villainy -- searching for a box that they believed to contain some sort of focus for the geas that kept the Blue -- the sorcerous dragon overlord -- on the side of civilisation and decency. After battling some ruffians -- and seeing Jordan Young beheaded -- they had found the box but they had found it empty.

They found this a bit puzzling. Ne-0n attempted to interface with the fabric of reality around him in order to glean some clues about the box but was soon assaulted by an overwhelming presence that threatened to drown his psyche. No closer to having an answer, the party decided to head back to the portal through which they'd been sent by the Blue; as they left the temple they spotted a gloopy shadowy thing following them at a short distance.

This shady -- ho ho -- fellow seemed to be some sort of scout and didn't put up much resistance when the group assaulted it. Moving on, they got lost again and this time noticed that the streets were reshaping around them and seemed to be herding them towards the centre of the town; Amras floated up to the rooftops to get a better look and was attacked as more of the dark blobby things pulled themselves from the shadows.

SHADOW THINGS NOT AT ALL LIKE THAT ONE FROM SPIRITED AWAY

6th level spoiler
Initiative + 11
Vulnerability: light (yes, I know there is no light damage type in 13th Age, so what?)

Inky black tentacle +10 vs PD - 18 negative energy damage.
Natural roll is above target's Constitution: the target loses a recovery as they feel their life force draining away.

AC 21    PD 19    MD 19    HP 72

The creatures proved to be a bit more effective in a group, until Amras dropped a fireball on them. One hundred points of damage will tend to discourage resistance from even the most tenacious of opponents.

After the battle the party was beckoned into a house by a portly fellow; they were of course suspicious but the alternative was a series of running battles with energy-draining shadows through streets that were always changing. A spot of tea and cake with a rotund stranger seemed like the lesser evil.

As the party ducked inside the man's cottage he introduced himself as Robul the Holy -- or Robul the Wet -- a priest of "the sea god"; Ne-0n spotted a small shrine in one corner of the living room devoted to a vaguely anthropoid deity with an octopus-like head and a mass of feelers for a face, and knew right away what kind of sea god Robul worshipped. This revelation didn't make anyone feel any safer.

The interior of the house was covered in all sorts of charms and symbols; Robul explained that these were intended to keep him hidden from agents of the Prince of Shadows. As the priest shared his dinner with the party -- glancing at Amras' burning third eye with considerable suspicion -- he explained that he had been sent by the Priestess to keep an eye on Shadow Port but that he also had a personal goal; to reconsecrate the temple from which the party had fled.

Robul told them that the town was alive -- 13th Age has living dungeons, so why not? -- and had taken a disliking to the party for some reason, and that while they would be safe under the protection of his charms, he wouldn't be able to help them escape. He did recognise the description of the albino man who Sartheen had seen carrying the pyramidic box; this was a wizard named Hallas, who was not associated with the Shadow Port thieves' guild but dwelled unmolested by both the guild and the living settlement in a ramshackle wooden tower towards the centre of the town.

After a night's rest under the many watchful eyes of Cthulhu the party decided to further investigate the box. Sartheen thought the best way to test if it was indeed the object of their quest was to smash it -- if it was the focus of a geas, the dragonspawn surmised, it would resist destruction -- but Ne-0n argued that tampering with a geas would be dangerous and Amras made up some guff that demonstrated that he hadn't paid any attention during geas lessons at wizard school.

The box was smashed to bits and nothing happened. Sartheen felt that the geas the Blue had placed on him was still active and so the party decided that they would visit the wizard Hallas, hoping he would know more, but were in no mood to venture out into the malevolent streets. Sartheen used his helm of communication to check in with Drakkenhall and request aid, asking first for a dragon -- a bold opening gambit -- but he was told by a black, assassiny-looking dragonspawn that there was a squad of assassins hiding out in the same cave that contained the portal through which the party travelled, and that they were ready to help.

Having realised that they had murdered their own extraction team the day before, the party decided to sneak towards Hallas' tower to see if the town reacted against them. They left Jordan Young's body with Robul for a proper burial, but Sartheen kept some of Jordan's toes, according to the custom of his tribe; he planned to have them with a honey mustard sauce when the party stopped for lunch.

Shadow Port seemed to unaware of their exit from Robul's safehouse -- or its attention was elsewhere -- so the party made good progress towards Halls' home, but were interrupted as a fiery mass fell screaming from the sky, shattering a nearby building. As they picked themselves up the party watched a figure stride from the smoking crater. It seemed to be a suit of black armour topped by a black skull wreathed in bright green flame; the blazing skull turned to Ne-0n and cackled.

Amras tossed a spiky seed pellet he'd found in a previous adventure and thorny roots, er, rooted the skull-thing to the spot. It stopped cackling.

The party then blasted the creature to bits. The armour survived the onslaught, a sure sign that it was enchanted; it seemed to be a good fit for Ne-0n but when it was identified as being made of halfling skin, the robot sorcerer declined the opportunity to wear it. He did keep the garment though, because player-characters never turn down loot, even on moral grounds.

After the briefest of rests the party staggered at last to the base of Hallas' tower without any interference from the sentient settlement -- eat your heart out, Stan Lee! -- and rang the door bell. No answer came and so the player-characters spent a few minutes discussing whether to break in before realising that yes, they were player-characters in a Dungeons and Dragons variant so of course they were going to break into the wizard's tower.

The building was of unusual construction, in that all the rooms were stuffed into the top two floors and the five storeys below that were empty save for a rickety wooden staircase looping around the inside walls. The stairs were trapped, of course, and the party suspected as much and so were careful about checking for traps as they went. Although Rarity spotted the traps, their magical nature meant that Sartheen could not disarm them and so instead I asked the players to roll a single d20 each as they stepped over the glyphs; on a one, they would slip and set off the trap.

Stuart has appalling luck -- although I would challenge him in the next session -- and seems to roll at least three or four ones each session; these had been saved up for the stair climbing and so by the time the party reached the top, Sartheen the Red was more Sartheen the Crispy Fried. After passing through some living quarters the party reached the top floor of the tower and a wizard's study, complete with a wizard cooking up a fireball in each hand and demanding to know why they were in his house.

Pyramid-Shaped Box

This session happened two weeks ago but I didn't think enough happened to merit a discrete post, so I was going to combine it with the next summary; as it turns out my waffling got a bit out of hand and the combined post was far too long, so here's that session from two weeks ago anyway.

Having stepped through the portal in Drakkenhall a somewhat dazed party appeared in a dark and damp cave. Behind them was a vast carving of a skull, its mouth wide open in a scream, or perhaps a Skeletor-like chortle; a few specks of magic sparkled in the mouth of the skull as the portal's energy dissipated. As the adventurers recovered from teleportation sickness they spotted a cloaked figure watching them from the opposite side of the cave. They pursued the figure and ran into his friends, a group of black dragonspawn, all of whom were slaughtered without mercy, for some reason.

Emerging from the cave onto a wooded hill, the party looked down to see the lights of Shadow Port below. Sartheen the Red had been to the town many times before and it was on one of these occasions that the dragonspawn had seen an albino man with bright red hair carrying a pyramidic box to a temple; Sartheen's understanding was that the box contained the focus for the geas that bound the Blue -- one of the powerful dragon lords of the 13th Age -- to the service of the Empire.

The group scrambled down the hillside, sneaked into town, and soon got lost. Sartheen remembered that Shadow Port had some sort of mystical protection against raids by hostile powers and assured his fellows that his inability to find the old temple building was a result of this power, and not his poor memory or even worse perception rolls.

The group approached an old washer woman for directions and Jordan Young the bard-brawler-pirate offered her a gold piece for information. The woman explained that she had a husband to feed, so Jordan produced another coin. She also had children who were hungry, so Jordan flicked another gold piece her way, and another when she mentioned the starving dog she had taken in just the other day. Jordan started to get suspicious around the time the woman mentioned the peckish cousin of the dog's children, but in a rare moment of restraint for this group, they allowed the shrewd old woman to go on her way rather than eviscerate her and take back their money.

Amras took over negotiations as they collared a filthy street urchin and offered him one coin to take them to the temple and another if he'd wait for them outside. This proved to be a more effective approach as the blatant Victorian stereotype led them to an empty and overgrown square at the centre of which was a murky pool and a grey stone building spotted with moss and grime.

The great bronze doors of the building screeched like a krenshar in heat as they were pushed open -- stealth is not this party's strong point -- and inside the group encountered a trio of untrustworthy bandit types. It was no surprise that a fight broke out, but rather more surprising was Rarity -- the tiefling barbarian and the party's meat shield -- being blasted into unconsciousness by a wizard wearing those circular sunglasses that were all the rage in the 1990's, and most surprising of all was the beefy swordsman with whom Jordan was duelling rolling a triple critical, lopping off the bard's head, and sending it bouncing around the room.

Jordan had acquired an enchanted orcish helm that gave him a sort of second wind when suffering a fatal wound but we all agreed that it wouldn't work if it was worn on a head that wasn't attached to a body.

Mister Sunglasses rifled through Rarity's pockets and stole one of her magic items before vanishing with a smirk, while the rest of the party chopped his friends into bits. Victorious but battered, the adventurers mourned the passing of Jordan Young for about fifteen seconds before looting the temple. The upper floor of seemed to be some sort of store room for artefacts, and among the treasures Amras spotted a circlet emblazoned with the symbol of the Diabolist -- one of the bad guys and an Icon who had taken an interest in the elven mage in a previous adventure -- and so of course he picked it up and tried it on. The circlet vanished but the elf felt a boost to his magical abilities; also, a fiery third eye appeared in the centre of his forehead but he considered that to be a fair trade.

Meanwhile the rest of the party -- sans Jordan -- pocketed a few bits of jewellery and after a while found the object of their quest, the strange -- and not at all like the Lament Configuration, no way Jose -- wooden box Sartheen had seen on his prior visit to Shadow Port. The box was locked but after a bit of trial-and-error and pass-the-parcel the mechanism was bested and the lid flipped open, releasing a puff of toxic green gas into Sartheen's face. As the dragonspawn coughed and spluttered the rest of the party peered into the box, only to find that it was empty.

Oiling the Bone Sword

Last time the player-characters made a daring raid on the Archmage's floating prison Highrock in order to rescue the famed pirate captain Morgan -- oh dear -- who turned out to be a medusa. Still, a legendary sailor is a legendary sailor whether or not they have snakes for hair and can turn you to stone with a glance, so the team started planning their voyage into the uncharted east to search for Jordan Young's great treasure. Before they could set out there was the small matter of a brewing conflict between the Elf Queen and the Three, dragon overlords of ultimate evil.

The party were asked to investigate an abandoned abbey thought to be a nesting site used by the dragons and destroy any eggs found there, in an attempt to dissuade the Three from further attacks against the elves. Amras the elf wizard, always more of a politician than a warrior, decided that instead they would capture the eggs and hold them as insurance, which seemed to everyone to be a much more sensible idea.

Why were the dragons hiding out in an abbey? Well, because it tied into the players' relationship dice rolls from the previous session but as they made no attempt to research the place -- this lot would be terrible at Shadowrun -- and sneaked in by a secret entrance they didn't really engage with any of it.

As an aside, there's an interesting tension here. The Icon relationship rolls are supposed to drive story and to tell the GM what sort of elements will come up in a session, but if the players wander off and don't interact with the rolls, is it better to let them miss out if that's their choice or have the rolls impact the game anyway? I'm inclined toward the former and that's how I played it -- so among other things they never met the travelling cleric who was looking for a saint's bones -- but the game itself seems to suggest that the Icon rolls are treated as a sort of Quantum Ogre, and so the cleric -- or someone else associated with the Priestess -- should have popped up anyway. This is part of the game that's worth further thought I, er, think.

The abbey, its grounds, and the saint's remains were borrowed stolen from "A Box of Old Bones" from White Dwarf #71. I stuck it on the little island to the east of the Spider Wood on the 13th Age map as that seemed like a nice place close to both the Elf Queen's wood and the Three's headquarters in Drakkenhall, and it gave the player-characters an excuse to use their brand new sailing vessel. Along the way there was a brief argument between the party and their new captain over who was in charge of the ship and as a result they demoted Morgan to first mate. Attentive readers will remember that Morgan was the only one who could take them to the island on which the precious treasure was hidden, and was also a medusa, so that's not going to come back and bite them at all.

They spotted an obscured cave at the base of the island and decided to investigate it as a potential entry point to the abbey. Leaving "first mate" Morgan in charge they rowed over to the island -- in broad daylight! -- and then chucked a couple of light spells into the cave, alerting the guards to their presence and setting off all the alarms. If you're thinking "well gosh, this doesn't seem to be a very stealthy approach" then you would be correct. I'm still not sure what the plan was but so be it; it allowed me to have some fun with kobolds.

Kobolds in 13th Age are a great laugh. They're the same low-level humanoid sword fodder of other D&D variants but they also get a wonderful bonus ability; if a kobold rolls over an opponent's Wisdom score with an attack roll then they also activate a hidden trap -- generated on a random table -- that causes a little bit of extra damage and sometimes a minor negative effect. It's not much but it adds a little bit of fun unpredictability to the little dragon-dog things and guess which set of player-characters chose Wisdom as their dump stat? Yes, there is an element of the Quantum Qobold about all this as the traps don't exist until they're triggered but I was having too much time to care. The resulting battle in the caves beneath the abbey was one part Viet Cong and one part Road Runner and it was ace; I have now fallen in love with kobolds and my players fear them so all is well in the 13th Age.

Moving on to the crypts beneath the abbey the player-characters ran into some black dragonspawn who mimicked Sartheen the Red's sneaky backstabbing abilities, and after killing them -- responding to the sound of something pounding on a door nearby -- set free one of the former abbots, who had turned into a ghoul at some point in the preceding decades. They found the bones of a saint and looted the tomb of a famous warrior -- both would have tied into relationship rolls if they had pursued the matter -- coming away with a pair of fancy duelling swords, a set of magic gloves and some magic oil. Even with all his knowledge of magic Amras couldn't discover any particular use for the oil but the party's enchanted items began to cry out to be slathered in the strange glowing liquid, a clamouring that continued until Jordan Young doused his bone blade in the oil, the sword letting out a contented sigh.

A set of narrow spiral stairs led up to an impressive but ruined church and three blue dragons who looked on with much amusement as the player-characters placed all their attention on the ground and never once looked up until it was too late. Not that the element of surprise mattered much as this party seems to have quite the aptitude for killing dragons. After a bit more exploration and some more Tom and Jerry kobolds the player-characters found the central courtyard of the abbey and around thirty dragon eggs, there for the taking; Sartheen, Jordan, and Rarity stepped out into the open and with a loud "POP!" vanished into thin air, leaving the two spellcasters alone with an unknown number of kobolds, dragonkin, and dragons lurking nearby.

Amras and Ne-0n then engaged in some Olympic level faffery as they tried everything they could think of to avoid leaving the relative safety of their building, thinking that the other three had been disintegrated. They did manage to confirm that the dragon eggs were in fact a powerful illusion but that didn't help them solve the more pressing problem of what to do next.

Meanwhile the others had not been turned into a cloud of fizzy atoms but instead had been transported a hundred miles or so south to Drakkenhall where they found themselves in a large hall and face-to-face with an enormous blue dragon. This was of course the Blue herself, who explained that she had come to an agreement with the Elf Queen; if Sartheen was delivered to the Blue, then all hostilities between the two Icons would cease. This was because the Blue was very interested in studying Sartheen -- the only red dragonspawn in the entire world -- although Sartheen got the distinct impression that "studying" in this context meant "dissecting".

The elf and the robot turned up at this point -- having summoned up the courage to step into the teleportation effect -- and Amras attempted to negotiate with the Icon, although his terms seemed to revolve around leaving the red dragonkin behind while the rest of the party returned to the abbey. With things getting desperate Sartheen's player traded in his relationship die with the Prince of Shadows to have Sartheen recall a time when he was in Shadow Port -- hive of scum and villainy, city of thieves, etcetera -- and saw an unusual pyramidic box that contained -- or so he was told -- the geas that bound the Blue to the Emperor's service and kept her off the path of evil. Sartheen could get this box for the Blue, he said, if she let them all go.

Clever little dragonspawn.

The Blue accepted the terms and with the wave of one enormous clawed hand slapped a geas of her own on Sartheen, and with the wave of another opened another portal, this time to Shadow Port.

Highrock, Prison in the Sky

Here is a pdf of my game notes for the flying prison of Highrock; it's written for 13th Age because that's what I've been playing for the past few weeks but the notes are light on mechanics and should be easy to convert to other game systems. In my game the player-characters went there to break out the notorious pirate Captain Morgan -- oh dear -- so that she could help them find a mysterious island to the east, where it was rumoured that a great treasure was hidden.

Through his connection to the Prince of Shadows Sartheen the Red knew that one of the wizard-judges of the city of Horizon was involved in some dubious activity involving an orphanage run by vampires -- that's player-driven storytelling in action! -- and so the party blackmailed said wizard into giving them the amulet they required to access the floating island and bypass the guards upon it.

They didn't explore much of the complex, in part because 13th Age doesn't reward exploration in the same way that older editions of D&D do, in part because they were focussed on the mission, and in part because they got beaten up by a squad of flying robots on the second level and wanted to get away as soon as they could. The latter was the result of robot sorcerer Ne-0n's attempt to interface with the island's local code -- he perceives reality as strings of data and can manipulate that data to a certain extent -- going a little wrong and alerting the guards instead of providing the location of Morgan's cell. Oops.

They also had some trouble with the Archmage's quarters, blundering into the fireball trap over and over again, but were rewarded with a fair bit of loot once they staggered past, all blackened and blasted like Warner Brothers cartoon characters; most of the players converted their relationship dice results into items at this point and as a result the Archmage's study held a plethora of magical stuff.

Morgan was freed and the party also let prisoner #666 -- the demon Zeddas -- free while binding him to Amras the elf wizard's service. Or so they think, anyway. They decided not to explore the third level, having been warned by the wizard-judge that death awaited them, and jumped on their waiting air taxi -- another relationship die traded in -- for a quick escape. With their navigator secured the player-characters were ready to go after their treasure, but first the Elf Queen had a job for them: to raid a nesting site used by the Three and destroy the unhatched eggs found there.

They Keep Killing the Dragons

Despite the relative negativity of my previous post about 13th Age my group and I have been playing it each week since then, give or take a couple of breaks due to player absences. The starting adventure is a mess but the central conflict between the Three -- a triumvirate of powerful dragons -- and the Elf Queen -- er, the queen of the elves -- has given us a good spine for the campaign, as the players find themselves embroiled in a cold war between the Icons that may about to tip over into something a bit warmer. This has led to something of a mission-based structure as the player-characters zip about the map on black ops, er, operations for the elves, although the last couple of sessions have seen a bit of a digression as they have been pursuing a plot thread about a treasure buried on a distant island.

The party consists of Jordan Young, a bard and former pirate and the instigator of the treasure quest; Sartheen, knife-chucking rogue and the only red dragonspawn in the world; Rarity, a tiefling barbarian who remembers legends everyone else has forgotten; Ne-0n, a robotic sorcerer who is able to perceive the underlying structure of reality itself; and Amras, an elf wizard who is the reincarnation of the Devil.

The way I've been running the campaign is to use the player-characters' One Unique Things as the ongoing background plots -- Sartheen's background in particular ties in well with the aforementioned cold war -- and in the first few sessions I was using their Icon relationship rolls to give me an idea of what sort of things may occur and which non-player-characters may be involved in each session. I am still doing that but as we've got more used to the game the players are becoming more confident in claiming those Icon rolls themselves and using them to shape the narrative; in our most recent session Sartheen's player Stuart used his Prince of Shadows relationship result to tell us all that Sartheen knew of a smugglers' hideout nearby and that the smugglers there -- being part of the Prince's network -- would be able to assist the party in outfitting a ship with the crew and equipment needed to go sailing after this mysterious treasure.

I don't know if it's necessary to have this kind of thing built into the rules mechanics but it's quite fun being surprised when the players roll their relationship dice and then I have to find a way to involve their Icons in the next session. It's sort of a random encounter roll for the GM and I'm sure it's sharpening my improvisation skills.

Anyway, in the first adventure -- the dodgy one from the rulebook -- the player-characters witnessed an attack on an elven fortress by a blue dragon and other minions of the Three; although the party's cleric was half-eaten during the fight -- and the other half was later consumed by Sartheen as a "sign of respect" -- the party did kill the dragon and they were welcomed into the Elf Queen's court as heroes. A bit of nudging from the Diabolist -- as a result of Amras' relationship roll -- led to the party speaking out in support of retaliation against the Three and so they were sent to a town under the dragons' control to assassinate the mayor, who just happened to be a white dragon.

They laid out an elaborate plan reminiscent of my old Shadowrun days -- and as I don't get to play Shadowrun any more this was quite a welcome piece of nostalgia -- and infiltrated the town, killing the mayor and half of his hobgoblin bodyguards while disguised as undead minions of the Lich King, hoping to implicate Old Boney in the assassination. After that they returned to the elven court and waited around for a bit before deciding to follow up on Jordan's stories of treasure, their first stop a series of elven ruins on the coast and the ships rumoured to be hidden there.

Over the next couple of sessions they found and explored the ruins and the secret underground harbours beneath them, fought some banshees and skeletal dragonspawn and a giant psychic crab, discovered a magical helmet that seems to allow communication with a temple in the Three's capital city, and befriended a gang of sahoowagin sawaugin sahuagin, in a scene that I found familiar.



The player-characters now have an ancient elven ship and a somewhat reluctant crew who will only sail with them into the uncharted east if they can find the infamous Captain Morgan -- oh dear -- to lead the expedition. The only problem with that is that Morgan is said to be under lock and key in Highrock, the Archmage's flying prison island. I hope there are no dragons up there.

2nd Impressions of the 13th Age

Long time readers will recall that I was quite impressed by 13th Age and was keen to play it as soon as I could. That turned out to be almost a year later. Oops.

We have played two sessions so far and it is fair to say that after the first my enthusiasm for the game had been dampened somewhat as the players didn't seem to take to it at all; my hopes for a D&D-like game in the middle ground between the complexity of Pathfinder and the simplicity of OSR-type games that everyone could enjoy seemed to have been dashed. Part of this was because it was a new system and we were all getting used to how it worked but part of it was because I started off by running the adventure included in the rule book; this was perhaps my main mistake.

It is quite linear but I see the wisdom of that as you don't want to drop the players into a wild and unrestricted sandbox from the start; it makes sense that you'd want to become familiar with the game mechanics before you start using them to explore the setting. Fair enough.

The problem is that I think a starting adventure should introduce the players to the game's unique concepts and features and "Blood  Lightning" doesn't do that, being more a series of fights. Every player-character in 13th Age has One Unique Thing, some non-mechanical aspect that sets them apart from everyone else in the setting; in our game we have the only red dragonborn, a tiefling who knows legends that no one else remembers, a former pirate who knows the location of a great treasure, and a wizard who is the reincarnation of the Devil but doesn't know it, although the tiefling probably does! There's no way that the authors could tie this kind of thing into an adventure aimed at everyone and it's a more appropriate job for the individual GM, so again the lack of support for the feature in the adventure is understandable if disappointing.

The game's use of relationship dice -- the other key feature of 13th Age to my mind -- would be much easier to include and support and the authors do so to an extent but it's a bit half-hearted and comes up only twice. The main location for the adventure changes its appearance and occupants depending on which of the Icons is in play but this seems a bit of a soft use of the mechanic -- "Because of your relationship to the Druid, the house is green" -- and only three Icons are used. A good GM could expand this to include all thirteen of the Icons and go further into the effects the Icons have on the adventure but that's asking a lot from someone who has not run the game before.

The first fight of the adventure is against some low-level gribblies and there's an attempt to tie them in with the Icons too but here too there's not enough explanation of this game concept and in effect it boils down to the monsters wearing different costumes depending on who sent them; again this could be expanded by an experienced GM but it's supposed to be an introductory adventure and the authors should be helping the players get a grip on the new concepts.

All that said this isn't supposed to be a review of a ten page adventure and it did have its uses; we got to play with the combat system and the adventure -- for all its lack of support for 13th Age's storytelling mechanics -- has set up the central conflict of the campaign. The second session was much more successful from my perspective; Stuart's thoughts as a player are here. It was more improvisational and there was much more use of the Icon relationships; freed from a strict plot the relationships' utility as story and content generators becomes more apparent and I believe will continue to do so if we carry on playing, as I hope we do.

Although 13th Age is in many ways a refinement of D&D4 it is not as focussed on combat as the latter game and an adventure that is a string of combat encounters is a poor exemplar of what the new system has to offer. The story generation tools are powerful and deserve much greater emphasis; I'm toying with writing an alternate introductory adventure of my own that brings them to the fore if I can find time to do so. For now I'll continue to develop a 13th Age campaign for my group; a couple of them have expressed doubt that it can handle a more freeform sandbox style of play but I think the One Unique Thing and relationship mechanics make such an approach easier if anything, so my current challenge is to prove it.