I had my first chance to play 13th Age yesterday. The session was quite abbreviated – by the time we’d started and created characters, it was close to 9pm, and so we only had about two hours of actual play. I can’t say I’m really that familiar with the system yet, so I’m sure a lot of 4e-isms made their way into my running of the session. I ran the introductory adventure in the core rulebook, Blood & Lightning, so if you plan to play in that adventure, look away now!
We had four players in the group: Sarah, Nash, Jesse and Josh. Josh had only every played one session of D&D Encounters before, so he was still a complete newbie to role-playing games. The other players are old-hands, with Sarah being the most experienced and the best role-player of the group. Sarah and Nash generated their characters first whilst I was getting dinner, and then Sarah helped Jesse and Josh create their characters as, by now, she was more familiar with the character generation system than I was!
What I can remember of their characters. The One Unique Things each of the characters have might be quite inaccurate.
Sarah played Andreax, a wood elf paladin, whose One Unique Thing was that her ancestors had sold her soul to demons. She had a positive relationship with the Crusader (+1), a conflicted relationship with the Elf Queen (±1) and a negative relationship with the Diabolist (-1).
Nash played Watcher 1, a forgeborn ranger, whose One Unique Thing was that he thought he was a dragon. He had a conflicted relationship with the Great Gold Wyrm (±1) and with The Three (±2).
Jesse played Bray, a human fighter – I can’t remember his One Unique Thing, but he was on the run from the Emperor, with whom he had a very conflicted relationship (±3). One of his backgrounds was “On the Run +3”. Fun!
Josh played Jayden, a Halfling cleric. Originally he said his One Unique Thing was that he was blind in one eye. This didn’t seem so unique to me. Once we said his eye was replaced with a mystical crystal that allowed him to see magical auras, it was a lot more unique! He took the Lore domain, so had a lot of background points: Village Healer 5 and Combat Medic 5 being two of them! He had a positive relationship with the Priestess (+1) and a negative relationship with the Orc Lord (-2). Guess whose army took his eye?
The adventure allows for different Icons to be involved depending on what the Icons were chosen by the players. Looking over their relationships, I determined that Sarah and Nash had been sent by the Elf Queen to protect Boltstrike Pillar from an upcoming attack by agents of the Three (evil dragons). Nash wasn’t so sure the attack was a bad idea. Jesse had received a mission from the Lord of the Iron Cliff, a servant of the Emperor, to deliver a weapon to the elves there, and Josh was being sent along by the Priestess to see that they all arrived safely.
At the beginning of the session of 13th Age, the players make die-rolls for each of their relationships to guide the DM in providing links and benefits during the session. A “6” indicates a positive result, a “5” indicates a positive result with some complication. Watcher One rolled nothing, but Andreax picked up a “6” for the Elf-Queen, Jayden got a “5” for the Orc Lord and a “6” for the Priestess, and Bray rolled “566” for the Emperor! The rolls helped me in determining the start of the adventure as detailed above.
The session proper began with me calling for an initiative roll; the group were only an hour or so from Boltstrike Pillar, but goblins had come out of the trees and attacked them. The group weren’t very surprised. In all, there were six goblins: one shaman, two grunts and three scum, the last of which were “mooks” – a term I’m not particularly familiar with, but is similar in application to the minions of 4E. Watcher One took the initiative and opened fire on the grunts, and the battle was soon underway. Bray charged into the mooks and dropped two of them with one attack (every five damage drops one mook), and then took advantage of his Cleave ability to take down the third. They didn’t last long! The shaman was more difficult, inflicting a “curse of shaking” on the players, although the goblins weren’t able to engage and disengage quickly enough to really trigger its extra damage. All in all, the group didn’t take all that much damage before the goblins were dead. The combat took four rounds to resolve, and about 20 minutes of gameplay. We didn’t use miniatures, and it played fast and furious, even with the players not really familiar with their characters’ abilities.
If I’d been more familiar with the adventure, I would have brought out that the goblins served the Orc Lord, which would have linked in with Bray better, and have slightly changed their stats. However, I was running this mostly with very little preparation.
Soon the group reached the Pillar, which Jayden could see through his crystal eye was highly magical – a true place of power. They were met by the commander of the elven guard here. Nash made a comment about the elves arriving being like in Lord of the Rings, and so gave me the idea for the elf leader and his second-in-command: Haldir and Tauriel. Yes, playing a brand-new game does not mean the sessions will reduce their silliness quota!
Haldir was a wizard, and you could see lightning in his eyes if you gazed into them too long – something that was very unsettling (a very nice touch in the adventure). Haldir and Tauriel were very worried when informed of the goblin attack; their divination spells had not detected the goblins at all. This was very worrying – how was it possible? As they got their wizards to look into the matter, Tauriel informed Bray that the sword he had to pick up – Gläzentorg – needed to be deattuned to the Tower and they’d have that done in a few hours.
Haldir returned with news – they’d detected a large force of goblins massing at a nearby set of ruins, the Greenstand. However, the elves were prepared: they’d trapped those ruins as many attackers had come up with the “original” idea of using them as staging point. All they needed was someone to activate the runes. Haldir asked if the party would oblige, because they were still searching for a reason why the divination spells had failed. Jayden and Andreax swiftly agreed, and Haldir provided the group with some magic items before they headed out to the Greenstand.
Magic items in 13th Age are meant to be special. One-shot items (such as potions of healing) are relatively common, but true magic items link to the user and have special abilities and quirks beyond just the “+1 to hit and damage” of normal d20 system rpgs. For instance, I gave Jesse a suit of armour that allowed him to reduce one attack’s damage by half once every combat, but had the quirk of making him more stubborn. Another factor here is that a character may only have permanent magic items up to their level; any more and there are some rather serious side-effects. I remembered that rule immediately after giving Jesse his second item. Oops. Luckily, the group were due a second incremental advancement, so Jesse was able to lift the number of items he could safely use by one.
Dealing with the infiltration of Greenstand should have required several skill checks, but by this stage I was pushing the adventure along and I wasn’t entirely sure of how to handle them. In any case, the group discovered that the goblins in Greenstand were already dead – killed, it seemed, by a blue dragon attack! The traps had already been set off – well, except for one that Andreax walked into and another that Watcher One found before it could blast him. The group didn’t find all the clues that awaited, but Jayden could see that a great magical conflict had suddenly started around Boltstrike Pillar. Sarah and Nash were not surprised; they’d been lured away, they thought.
Racing back to the tower, they saw a great blue dragon attacking it with many lizardmen fighting the defenders. Haldir summoned magic to blast a wing off the dragon, causing it to fall near the tower, only for the heroic elf to be stabbed in the back by Tauriel wielding Gläzentorg.
13th Age possesses the idea of incremental advances: after every session, the characters can choose one benefit they’d gain from a new level and immediately apply it to their character. The introductory adventure allows these advances in a quickened version, with an advance after each encounter. They’d had two by this point. The adventure suggests the group actually gain a full level at this point, but just apart from the time it would take (given we really didn’t have long to play), I only had one copy of the book! So, I just kept the characters at first level and adjusted the remaining encounters appropriately.
Seeing that the elves on the tower were shooting at the crippled blue dragon, Watcher One decided to protect it. Sigh. The blue dragon, half-blind and hurting, attacked Watcher One, but the forgeborn just ignored it and started shooting the elves. Meanwhile, Andreax, Bray and Jayden took on the dragon. Things could have gone very badly, but Andreax managed to critically hit the dragon with a Smite attack for almost 50 damage. Wow.
This was a big combat. Nash’s decision to play a character that turned against the party was typically frustrating, but thankfully it didn’t impact the game too much. The dragon got some good hits in, keeping Jayden usefully employed healing the group, but Bray, Andreax and Jayden managed to deal a lot of damage. One interesting aspect of this combat was that the escalation die really managed to speed up the combat. The idea behind the escalation die is that it increments at the end of each round – so it’s “1” after the first round of combat and “6” after the sixth round. That die adds to the attack rolls of the heroes (and some tough enemies, like the dragon), and can also trigger other effects. Andreax was able to get an additional attack in if she rolled a die under the current escalation die value, and so got in several extra attacks during the session – which they badly needed.
Making their way up the tower, they fought three lizardmen, slaying them all in quick succession. At the top of the tower (and considered to be the same battle as the fight against the lizardmen, so the escalation die remained on its current value), they faced Tauriel. She actually fell pretty easily to their attacks, but as she fell, she transformed into some mutant dragon-creature, rose and attacked again. Andreax smote her (another critical), only to have her sword caught between the monster’s claws – the attack having no effect. The monster shoved Andreax back, and started to carve up Bray. However, Bray’s defences, especially with Jayden’s spells protecting him, were enough so that the monster wasn’t able to slay him. The monster jumped over everyone and attacked Watcher One for much greater effect, but still wasn’t able to kill him before it was slain.
Andreax may have then pushed Watcher One off the tower. This seems possible, as I don’t think anyone would have trusted him after this session.
With the traitor dead as well as the dragon, the attack was foiled and the session was over. We hadn’t really seen that much of 13th Age, except for the combat. Sarah found character generation fantastic, but I know she wants to explore the role-playing and story-building aspects of the game a lot more. I’m hoping we’ll get a chance in a couple of weeks. (Next week is my regular AD&D game, which was bumped last week for the Murder in Baldur’s Gate Launch event). I’m sure that a lot more can be done with the introductory adventure than we did with it, but the time pressures and lack of rulebooks did have an effect.
In any case, I’ve got the first season of Organised Play for 13th Age, so I’ll try running that in a couple of weeks if I still have interested players, and we’ll see how that goes. I think that Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo have made a very good game; now to see how it plays now we’re familiar with the basics!