Phew, can you see the cobwebs here …

Time for a broom! Things have been very slow of late on this site, but in the background I’ve been ticking along with a few things. On the role-playing front, as I mentioned a while back, I’ve been slowly prepping for a new 13th Age Roleplaying Game campaign set in the Havenscoast, and called:

Why has this taken so long? Well apart from the fact that I’m slow? 🙂

The first reason is that I wanted to produce a really good player’s guide to the campaign and the region. 13th Age places a lot of emphasis on immersion in the world and story via Icons, the character’s One Unique Thing, and backgrounds, so I wanted to give my players a lot of material to work  into their thoughts. As I mentioned in a previous post, I wanted a particular take on the Icons for my world (and region), and so far that has been working out well, both in terms of how I’m thinking about working them into my campaign, and also how they have resonated with the players. Here’s an example of the main heroic Icon in the campaign:

The second reason is more logistical. I decided that character creation in 13th Age would work best face-to-face … and one of the players in the campaign lives in Thailand! Well finally we got the opportunity last weekend while he was over on a business trip. The night he arrived I gave him and my son (the other player) a copy of the Player’s Guide each for bedtime reading, and the next day we sat down to create characters.

This turned out to be a huge amount of fun. For example, my son has generally been of the ‘when is the next battle’ attitude, but here he was coming up with some great backstory ideas. He announced (rolling up a Chaotic Neutral halfling rogue) his One Unique Thing to be that he was previously an assassin for the Conclave of Dark Amber (one of the campaigns ‘shady’ Icons) and had recently assassinated the father of the Prince of Camlan, but had now fallen out with the Conclave and was looking to build a new identity and life!

Wow! How’s that for some material to work on!! It was extremely rewarding as the GM to be able to collaboratively riff off the players’ ideas to embed them further into the campaign setting: despite the fact that I had no idea the Prince of Camlan’s father had been assassinated … a little while later we had constructed a tale that we were both happy with! After several hours we ended up with a dragonborn ‘Northern Reaver’ barbarian, a halfling rogue (both my son’s characters), a half-elf multi-class druid-commander and a high-elf wizard … and enough potential Icon and background plot ‘complications’ to fill the entire campaign.

The next day, I ran my first ever actual 13th Age RPG session … but I’ll tell you how that went in another post! In the meantime, as this is from now on going to be an online campaign, I’ve decided to run it using Obsidian Portal. Check out the (nascent) campaign site there.

Knights of Watch icon image used directly from game-icons.net under licence CC BY 3.0