13A:Rules

THIS PAGE IS NOT COMPLETE, AND PARTS MAY CHANGE, BUT FEEL FREE TO BEGIN READING.

Links

Official 13th Age site

http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/category/products/13th-age/

Sadly, not very good. Official forums are terrible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/13thage/

Reasonably used, for a not-very-widespread system.

Official SRD

http://site.pelgranepress.com/index.php/the-archmage-engine-13th-age-srd/

(I recommend you just get Single PDF File).

As a d20 derivative, 13th Age rules are wholely open source. It can take them a while (if ever) to add it to the 'official SRD' though. Jonathan Reyst's unofficial web presense for it (http://www.13thagesrd.com) isn't so great (as ugly as unfriendly as d20pfsrd, but not complete like it is). The SRD contains the Core Rulebook, 13 True Ways, and the Bestiary, with a few items from the adventures. It notably does not include the Book of Loot yet.

Now, the books are BEAUTIFULLY written with a very strong authorial voice, with plenty of designer sidebars. All of that is missing from the SRD. But sufficient is there for you to work with.

Books available

I own, at this time, all of the currently-published official 13th Age RPG material in dead-tree format (and most in PDF). The list of products that exist are:

Rulebooks

• 13th Age Core Rulebook
• 13 True Ways
• 13th Age Bestiary
• The Book of Loot
• GM Screen & Resource Book

Adventures

• Eyes of the Stone Thief
• High Magic & Low Cunning (+maps)
• Shadows of Eldolan
• The Strangling Sea
• (Organzed play material.)

Random Splat

• 13th Age Monthly (both years, thus far) -- this product mixes tons of stuff magazine style, and I haven't begin to more-than-skim it
• 13th Age Soundtrack
• Campaign Coins Icon Tokens

Material Availability

How does this affect what material is available for you to use as a player? Well, 13th Age isn't an "Where's Waldo" of option finding like 3e/Pathfinder became. Basically all player options are in Core Rulebook and 13 True Ways. Nearly all feats are class-specific and listed with the class (feats generally improving class features). The classes are split between those two books. The Book of Loot has a few consumables in it. (Note: nearly all "loot" in 13th Age is just gold pieces, and consumables. True Magic Items are pretty much "not available for purchase".) [nb: fitting, for those of you who know me as a GM!]

As a note, there's currently one large 3rd party publication (Nocturne) out, and a few more forthcoming (Glorantha, Midgard, Primeval Thule). While I plan to purchase these, and, after doing so, may mine from them for myself, they will not, for this game, be added as player material.

Again, less prosaically

• Anyhing from the "rulebooks" is available. Also, since the SRD doesn't mark sources, anything that is in the SRD from the adventures is also available, but may need to be pointed out to me since I've yet to read the adventures. (But please don't go hunting for it; that defeats one of the "points" of 13th Age as a system.)
  • But I strongly encourage the party to restrict class composition to majority-core, as those contained in 13 True Ways are more "niche" or "complicated" classes.
• I reserve the right to use and alter anything anything from anywhere, including 3rd Party and custom content. Which doesn't mean it's canon. (That is, giving you a "Potion of Foo" doesn't mean "Potion of Foo" is readily available always.)
• The multiclassing rules will not be used.

Learning

None of us have played this before. Not even me. (I tried to find locals to try first, but there were none.) So it's a learning experience before. While you can largely learn from the SRD, I will be providing everyone a PDF of a few key chapters from the Core book to read, so they can get the author's voice.

Icon Relationship Dice

• There are many uses for the Icon Relationship Dice. I will be trying different ones as we go to see what works best, and what's most fun. The authors themselves admit (Core Book, and GM Resource) they weren't sure what the community would come up with, that we should try them out to find which one(s) we prefer.

Reading List

• Core:
  • Introduction: required. Sets some tones.
  • Icons: required. Mostly fluff and not in the SRD.
  • Character Rules: required. Twice. (Notice: there are a few 'general' feats here.)
  • Races: optional. I included this so the flavor came in over the SRD.
  • Running the Game: required. The parts I left here are important. Incremental advances will be used to some degree. This expands upon the icon use rules from Character Rules chapter. See "Screen" for more of that. Rituals are an important rule. Then there's some optional setting fluff.
  • Monsters: optional. Give syou some general knowledge of a couple recurring mechanics.
  • The Dragon Empire: optional. This chapter's entirely fluff (and not part of the SRD).
  • Magic Items: optional. Describes one-shot magic items and the True Magic Item chakra and quirk concepts. (tl;dr: all magic items are "intelligent").
  • Appendices: optional. But useful.
• True: required. Just a couple pages of rules clarifications over the Core Rulebook.
• Screen: required. Montages will be used.
• Screen: optional. The other portions are insight into the game.
• Loot: optional. The consumables part (2 pages) is here to quell your curiousity.
• The following chapters from the SRD, or books if you have them:
  • Combat Rules: required.

Setting

Though one of the common selling points of 13th Age is "It's a RPG world toolkit!", we'll be using the standard Dragon Empire from the book. Fortunately, the way they carefully write everything (much like Planescape was written) means it's wide-open to a lot of interpretation.

One of the first things that always screams, "customize me!" is the set of icons. The book icon set will be used. It has a ton of playtesting behind it, a good chunk of class features written for it, and so on. It's a pretty big thing to change, and we don't have intimiate-enough knowledge of the system to tweak it lightly.

Expectations/Policies

We will discuss these.

Wiki

As a lot of the story will evolve as we play it, it's quite important to maintain the campaign log on the wiki. While I will not make wiki participation mandatory via a stick, here's a pretty hefty carrot: satisfactory participation in the wiki will open up the Incremental Advance rules to you, allowing you to level-up your character in stages. Eventually non-participants will catch up at the next level-up point, but you'll get there more smoothly.

"Satisfactory" participation includes regularly writing session recaps and maintaining your character sheet. Endeavors with other pages (such as NPC pages) may yield additional boons, such as icon relationship results, consumables, or even just rerolls.

Unlike in previous/other games, I do not want wiki rewards to be large or get out of hand. Wiki participation is expected (and was an important part of our choosing you as a player).

Questions

During group worldbuilding and character creation (some of which may occur "offline" before the first meet-up), the following questions need to be answered:

• Races available: Include Dragonic/Holy One/Forgeborn/Tieflings?

Char Gen

Statistics

Select and use one of the Stat Arrays from page 309 of the Core Rulebook (PDFp91 in the extract). No hand-tweaking of point buy, nor rolling.