This is the second part of my 13 True Ways overview. For part 1, which includes the first two chapters (new classes and multiclassing), click here.
Chapter 3: Cities and Courts
This chapter has in-depth descriptions for Axis, the Court of Stars, Drakkenhall, Horizon, and Santa Cora. These are really flavorful descriptions and like most of the fluff in 13th Age, meant to be taken as suggestions rather than gospel. There are multiple "takes" on many elements of these places, and each section (minus the Santa Cora write-up, which is brief) has descriptions of important places, themes, NPCs, everyday details, and a list of 13 rumors about the city/court. In addition, Horizon and Drakkenhall go even further with descriptions of how each Icon is connected to the city. The best part is that there are several examples for each Icon of how a relationship die result could be used in those cities. I find these examples to be really useful for gauging how the designers intended Icon results to be used. The description in the Core Rulebook is fine and all, but using Icons is consistently something discussed in forums and on the Google+ group as being difficult for a lot of GMs and players to grasp. This chapter adds a lot of additional examples which can be used as-is, or to spark inspiration and/or serve to calibrate the effects of ideas that GMs might come up with.
This chapter and obviously the chapter with all of the new classes were my favorites. I love having so much new setting information, and it's all the more pertinent since both Drakkenhall and Axis have featured prominently in both of my campaigns. Interestingly, nothing in these descriptions outright contradicted what my group has established before, but it offers a ton of new ideas that will keep these cities interesting for a long time. And while my group hasn't explored the Queen's Wood at all yet, the Court of Stars has a very "dangerous fey," fairy tale inspired feel to it which is exactly how I would run it.
Chapter 4: Monsters
The monster chapter is a good chunk of the page count and offers a lot of new foes for GMs to throw at their players. The entries follow the example from the 13th Age core rulebook as opposed to the detailed, narrative entries from the Bestiary. That's ok though, because that's a bit outside the scope of the book. The stat blocks themselves are excellent and some really fun monsters are included. Besides that, a lot of space is devoted to devils, and they get their own Bestiary-style fluff chapter so it's actually a mix of the two presentations. Most devils get a very thematic power called Devil's Due. It works a bit differently for each type of devil, but the gist is that you basically have to give the devil its due if you want to use the Escalation Die. If you decide to make the deal, using the Escalation Die carries a nasty negative consequence.
In addition to devils, there are higher level dire animals (boar, tiger, and giant praying mantis), azers, cloud giants, metallic dragons, elementals (which serve as both foes and summoning options for Druids), flowers of unlife (these have a nifty new resurrection mechanic), gnolls (new, nasty, high level gnolls!), mummies (there's an awesome story behind them), pixies, soul flensers (they're mind-flayer levels of nasty), specters, treants, werebeasts, and zombies (including the awesome headless zombies that break the tradition of the normal insta-death headshot crit rules for zombies).
Chapter 5: Deviltry
This chapter describes many ways in which devils can fit into your campaign. There's a unique, campaign-defining story associated with each one of the Icons. Each entry includes a section on Origins and Agenda (this is the meaty part that describes what role devils will play), Hierarchy (which details the role(s) that each unique type of devil plays in this story, usually with Lemures at the bottom of the barrel and Pit Fiends ruling over everything else), and how Other Icons fit into this particular story. Finally, there's 16 more Icon-neutral (mostly) ideas for using devils. I found this chapter a bit dull to read straight through, but that's not necessarily the point. The best way to use this chapter is to pick Icons that play a prominent role in your campaign and brainstorm how devils might fit into that story. Each description isn't simultaneously true in any given campaign, but rather you'll pick one of the entries or use ideas from two or three of them. And if you want to focus on devils again in a future campaign, you'll have plenty of ideas at the ready for telling a completely different story.
Chapter 6: Gamemaster's Grimoire
Whereas the other chapters each have a specific focus, this one is basically a grab bag of miscellaneous stuff. It starts out by introducing artifacts, which are unsurprisingly just really powerful true magic items. They work more or less like other magic items, except that they have multiple powers that they can unlock over time. Honestly, I've already implemented a few multi-power magic items and have also had individual items gain power over time instead of being replaced with more powerful items, so there's nothing really new here for me. They do list three example artifacts: the feathered crown, the fist wrought of blood, and the gloves of the dark path.
Next we get three lists of 13 things. There are dungeons/ruins, flying realms, and inns/taverns. Each one gets about a paragraph of description and they seem to be great for GMs who need a quick idea in a pinch, either because they didn't have much time to prepare, are having a creative block, or when the PCs go off the rails. I'm not a huge fan of flying realms that the designers seem to enjoy, but I'll admit that the entry for Big Dumb Rock was pretty awesome. The taverns in particular will be great for adding some color to what otherwise usually ends up being a generic inn just like every other inn that the PCs inevitably end up staying at. I'll admit that I don't usually think of embellishing on inns aside from a clever/funny name every now and then, but this list should change that, making inns interesting for their own sake.
Next there's more magic items, including some cursed items. I'm honestly not thrilled with most of the magic items in here or in the core rulebook. They feel a little too much like 4E D&D magic items, except they're not baked into the game's math and the quirk mechanic makes them more intrinsically interesting. More than half of the items I've passed out to my players have been custom ones that fit the story, the character, or are just a weird thing I thought of at the time. In my first campaign I passed out 3 magical daggers that all did different things. One provided a bonus to rituals, one was able to cut through stone but had a certain number of charges, and the third launched its wielder into the air like a catapult when slashed through the air a certain way (this one had charges too). I prefer weird powers that PCs can use in creative ways as opposed to having just another combat bonus.
Finally, there's a section on 3 monastic tournaments (which I didn't find particularly inspiring, but hey this is the book with the monk in it), 4 NPC descriptions provided by high-level kickstarter backers, and 2 living dungeons, also provided by kickstarter backers. The NPC entries don't include stat blocks, but rather advice on how they might fit into your campaign with multiple options provided (including as allies or adversaries). Each NPC also has a list of 13 rumors about them, which may or may not be true.
The living dungeons include Underkrakens (tied to the Soul Flensers in the monster chapter) and the Wild Garden (tied to the Flowers of Unlife, also in the monster chapter). There are multiple options for what Underkrakens might be (vehicles, cities, monsters, or living dungeons), most of which have a Cthulu-like flavor. There's even an optional rule for "sanity" called Terrible Enlightenment, and Call of Cthulu is straight-up referenced as an inspiration. The Wild Garden entry is a little more detailed, with a background story for where it came from and then a quick walkthrough of an adventure. The adventure is pretty bare-bones with a couple of paragraphs for each level of the dungeon and suggestions for what monsters to include (with page number references, but without repeating stat blocks). Honestly, this is probably more useful to me than a traditionally-written published adventure. I tend to be pretty bad at running prefab adventures, not least because I hate having to read a long adventure multiple times in preparation for running it, and because referencing them is usually a pain because there's so much text to wade through. I could see myself running this, though. A quick description to set the stage and provide a spark of inspiration that I can then expand and improvise upon as we play. And since it has such a small word count it can be tacked into a "grab-bag" chapter like this without taking up too much space. Too few adventures are presented this way, and while I'm sure a lot of GMs prefer the more detailed, traditional published adventures something like this works better for more improvisational GMs who like to do a lot of their own world-building and/or collaborative world-building with the players.
So that's 13 True Ways in a nutshell. It's been a long wait, but it was worth it!
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