February 2016: View From the Pelgrane’s Nest

This month I’ve been working on TimeWatch RPG giving editing and layout feedback; wrangling maps for the second Battle Scenes book and undertaking the Excel-heavy-brainwork of royalty calculations and end-of-year accounts, while listening to my majestic spreadsheet music from the 13th Age Soundtrack.

GUMSHOE

This month’s KWAS, Unspeakable Cults: The Starry Wisdom was inspired by a post on the KWAS page by Phobos. We want to create a book of Mythos cults, so this will form a useful exemplar. It features the cultists; their priesthood, structure, and of course investigative hooks and adventure seeds for Trail of other GUMSHOE games.

  • Steve Long has delivered an outline to the Investigator’s Handbook, which we will flesh out over the next month or two.
  • Chris Spivey and Ruth Tillman have delivered the first draft of their Cthulhu Confidential settings and adventures for GUMSHOE One-2-One.
  • The Dubai Reckoning for Night’s Black Agents is in layout and will be released in early March.
  • Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan has delivered the first draft of Fear Itself 2nd Edition.
  • Chris Huth is working on the art and layout for Worldbreaker.

13th Age

  • High Magic and Low Cunning is at the printers, as is the map folio, and you can download the first three Battle Scenes and run them here. Pre-order it here.
  • The Crown Commands: Battle Scenes for Four Icons is underway, featuring themed adventures from the Dwarf King, Elf Queen, Emperor, Lich King. The manuscript is with Rob Heinsoo for development and art direction, and in the meantime I’ve wrangling map-makers.
  • 13th Age Monthly: Rob Heinsoo and ASH LAW have put together Phoenix – the second of this year’s 13th Age Monthly subscription, with incredible artwork from Patricia Smith. Aside from the fabled phoenix egg, the creature makes a terrifying foe, not least because it doesn’t stay dead.
  • Version 3.0 SRD: Chad Dylan Long has added 13 True Ways content to the 13th Age SRD – I’ll update the SRD pages in March..

I’ve been playing a lot of 13th Age with my twelve-year-old son, both as a GM and player; and he’s pretty much memorised every creature, so much so that one of his characters’ unique things is “Knows Every Monster.” I now love playing the monk class; it’s so subtle and flexible, with interesting but not overwhelming choices every turn. He has been running modified encounters from the Stone Thief, and I’m afraid the combination of blood curses, the God Tick and no ranged power meant I took a campaign loss as a result. Then it was elder beasts with stacks of Confusion, so I spent most of the fight beating myself up while he laughed.

Here are a couple of his player tricks. When I ran one of Cal’s Battle Scenes with rakshashas, his characters cut their hands at the beginning of the combat. It was only later when the rakshashas were shapeshifting I realised why he had done it – the real characters were the ones with the cut hands. Another one – I had his paladin/cleric trapped in the grip of a treant ready to be crushed, and his magician did a Shocking Grasp as a quick action and popped him free. His favourite trick is to use Teleport Shield, then diss the biggest foe on the fieled. His current plan is to defeat a bunch of monsters, and, with them, take on the Tarrasque at 10th Level. In the mean time, I’m hoping the higher level encounters in Battle Scenes will present more of a challenge for him.

TimeWatch RPG

TimeWatch RPG is in layout, and it looks lovely. The Book of Changing Years (an in-world book in the style of The Book of the Smoke) and Behind Enemy Times (an adventure collection) are being edited.

update layout

 

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