The Golden Puddle of Tollgate Square - Leaving Room for Icons in 13th Age

By Photo: Myrabella / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

While I ran the Strangling Sea to start my 13th Age campaign, for the second full session, I ran a homebrew adventure. Previously the party had determined that there were three NPCs who might know a secret worth trading to an Ettercap temple in exchange for information about a 2nd Age Sage who studied the Stone Thief. Those three NPCs were

• Elizabeth Clawchoke, Lich Baroness residing in Drakkenhall
• Malaggar Lyme, Dark Elf emissary to the Emperor, currently visiting the court of Drakkenhall.
• Corgak the Bruiser, Half-Orc thief and thug who killed an agent of the Prince of Shadows and stole a magical key.

After some discussion the PCs choose Corgak, and so headed off to Drakkenhall to locate him.
Now, as GM, I had a few objectives, which were:

• Leave room to adapt the adventure based on Icon Rolls.
• Provide a few social interaction encounters.
• Introduce Tollgate Square as a place, with a distinctive feel, locations and NPCs.
• Steal shamelessly from Voltron.

So how did I attempt all that? Why is Manneken Pis the image header? Keep reading to find out... (Minor Voltron Legendary Defenders Season 2 spoilers at the end of the post)

13th Age - The Strangling Sea Review and Recap

(Find it at... Pelgrane Press  / Drivethru RPG / Amazon)

I choose The Strangling Sea to kick off my new Eyes of the Stone Thief campaign, not just because it was a published 1st level adventure that I could run without much prep but because it is an excellent adventure and tailored towards GMs who are new to running 13th Age. While I am not new to running 13th Age, it was still nice to have the extra advice in the adventure to guide me as I gear up to running an ongoing campaign that I hope will cover 1st through 8th levels.

Major spoilers for The Strangling Sea adventure follow, obviously. I'll do the review first and the recap of my players second, so that readers who just want a review of the adventure don't have to stick around for the hi-jinx of my players.

Thought of the Day: NPC Voices

I didn't include it in my list of 2017 Gaming Resolutions, but I've been trying to do more NPC voices for all my games. So, even though I have players who accuse me of killing NPCs off just because I forgot the voice, I keep trying.

Voices and accents don't come naturally to me. I attempted a Space Australian accent for one of my Numenera NPCs but it quickly drifted into something else (though it was a great excuse to watch this delightful clip again and again...) Lately, I've been trying to give NPCs a quick description of their voice or vocal tics and jotting it down in my notes so I can use that to remind myself of how they should sound when I return to that NPC; here are some recent examples of how I've been describing NPC voices.

• Bömbör
• "repeats himself excitedly"
• a Dverge NPC from my Iron Edda game
• Gwenaëlle Décalage
• "a low and sultry voice"
• Recent deceased vampire NPC from the A Red and Pleasant Land actual play podcast
• Enock Whipple
• "Soft and often apologetic"
• Dormouse NPC from aRaPL actual play podcast
• Firgin
• "ah um eh, talks about water colors"
• NPC from the Strangling Sea 13th Age Adventure I ran to start my new 13th Age Stone Thief campaign. About 2/3rds of my players really, really hated him after listening to him speak.

So I've been trying to decide how to voice a kitten NPC for my 13th Age game, as I want it to live up to the "Talkative" trait that the player picked for the Ranger Pet talent. Long story short, the PC, Felix Mittens, used to be a catperson until he was cursed by a witch to become fully human while his twin brother, Boots, became fully kitten. I've been wracking my brains trying to come up with how Boots should talk, since he'll be an ongoing NPC constantly with the party... I think I'm going to come up with some stock phrases I can use for when certain events happen, like maybe Boots doesn't like orcs or comments when someone fumbles... 

But then I was watching some Venture Bros today and I realize I'm tempted to have Boots speak exactly like Augustus Saint Cloud does when he's pretending that Henrietta Pussycat is speaking to him in the episode Maybe No Go. My delight at saying "Eat the pennies, Quizboy" means that I have a decent Augustus Saint Cloud impression (probably the only VB character I can do reliably) and I like the idea of starting and ending each sentence with "mew mew" to just drive home that Boots the kitten is talking... Others might think it's too creepy, but I'm starting to think it's just creepy enough...

Eyes of the Stone Thief - Campaign planning, 13th Age PC Creation Resources & PC Introduction

Got my Sunday group together last Sunday for a rare 5th Sunday Session (we usually play only on the 1st and 3rd Sundays) and did character creation for my 13th Age Eyes of the Stone Thief campaign. Since I intend to run this from 1st level all the way up through 8th level, I plan on writing about this campaign quite a bit. While we did the first part of an intro adventure, the Strangling Sea, after character creation, I'm going to wait to write that up until after we've finished it. But this seems like a good time to go over the bit of campaign planning and introduce the PCs (though I will update this if/when additional PCs are created).

New Year, New Games (and Old too...) - State of the Blog III Part Two

Well... I did not expect my first post for the 2017 New Year State of the Blog to devolve into a 4,000 word screed... Apologies to all who suffered through that...

Game Master bag buttons with my new Over the Garden Wall buttons!

A photo posted by Zack Schwartz (@thatwordyguy) on Jan 1, 2017 at 11:12am PST

So... I ran 11 different games in 2016, got to play in 4, but what are my plans for 2017?