Category: 13th Age

13th Age: Display Superior Guile and Awesome Trickery with Your Rogue

Always Keep A Knife In Your Boot And A Trick Up Your Sleeve
Gouge your foes’ eyes and bring the pain down on them! Get the drop on your enemies before they can reach your allies! Supplement your suave with a little spellcraft! Hurl knives with deadly accuracy! Rogues are the wily utility support that every party needs, moving with grace and panache and striking when no one expects it. Now you can go beyond the core book and expand your character’s unique suite of skills to complement any adventuring style.

13 Rogue Talents and Powers is the latest in our 13 Class Options series for the 13th Age Roleplaying Game. Inside this 10-page PDF, you will find:

  • 3 New Rogue Talents for making an arcane dabbler, a purveyor of illicit magical goods, or a knife-throwing expert
  • 3 New 1st Level Powers to bolster you against groups of monsters, halt an enemy in their tracks, or hurt a foe worse than they’ve hurt you when you’re staggered
  • 2 New 3rd Level Powers for escaping pesky restraints or finding an unfair advantage in a fight
  • 2 New 5th Level Powers that add a sly flourish to your strikes or enhance your dual wielding abilities
  • 2 New 7th Level Powers to execute a defensive plan or bring the pain late in the game
  • 1 New 9th Level Power for getting an ally out of any tight spot

Sneak, Steal, and Swashbuckle To Your Heart’s Content in the 13th Age.

Download 13 Rogue Talents and Powers today at JonBrazer.com, DriveThruRPG, and the Open Gaming Store.

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13th Age: The Vicious Rogue

Some rogues simply must win, even when it costs them their own health or possibly their life. These rogues hit harder when the situation is not going their way, not caring how much it hurts them. The idea of hitting your enemy, even if it hurts you is one of the ideas behind vicious strike, the new 1st level rogue power that we are showing off today. Be sure to also check out the new rogue talent magical savant that we showed off last week.

You can find this new rogue power and more in our latest release for the 13th Age Roleplaying Game: 13 Rogue Talents and Powers. Download it at the JBE Shop, DriveThruRPG, and the Open Gaming Store.

Vicious Strike

Special: Usable only when staggered
Melee attack
At-Will
Target: One enemy
Attack: Strength + Dexterity + Level vs. AC
Hit: WEAPON + Strength + Dexterity damage, and ongoing damage equal to the escalation die value; normal save (11+) ends. However, you also suffer damage equal to your Strength modifier + the escalation die value.
Miss: Damage equal to your level + the escalation die value. However, you also suffer damage equal to the escalation die value.
Adventurer Feat: The save to end the ongoing damage is now hard (16+).
Champion Feat: You may now use vicious strike when you are not staggered, but doing so doubles the escalation die value when calculating the damage you take.
Epic Feat: Double the escalation die value to all damage dealt to enemies by vicious strike (including miss damage). When you hit with a vicious strike, enemies nearby your target must make a normal save (11+) or suffer from fear until the end of your next turn.

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13th Age: The Talented Rogue

The best way to describe a stereotypical rogue is simply not possible. Rogues always have a wide assortment of tricks up their sleeves that they area easy to mistake for a fighter or a wizard. While it is true that they get themselves out of bad situations as quick as they get themselves into them, know the best routes of escape, are aware of which guards are not paying attention, and can tell you how many coins were in that merchant’s purse, the way they go about all this is unique to the individual rogue. That is as true in 13th Age as it is in any other fantasy roleplaying game, and our latest release for 13th Age helps rogues to find their own unique style.

13 Rogue Talents and Powers gives your rogue new ways to show some flare. The rogues at Jon Brazer Enterprises managed to steal this little tidbit and are sharing it with you letting you see what is inside this bag of goodies. To see what else is inside, be sure to come back to the JBE Blog next week as we share more.

Of course, what rogue can wait? Instead, download it now at the JBE Shop, DriveThruRPG, and the Open Gaming Store.

Magical Savant

Choose a number of wizard cantrips equal to the highest of your Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma modifier; you can cast them like a wizard who lacks the Cantrip Mastery talent.
Adventurer Feat: Choose one wizard spell of your level or lower. Regardless of the spell’s usual frequency of use, it is a daily power for you. When you cast this spell, it has an effective level equal to the current escalation die, up to a maximum of your own level.
Champion Feat: If you have momentum, your Sneak Attack feature works when you cast this spell on an enemy that would normally be subjected to it, even at range.
Epic Feat: You no longer need momentum in order for your Sneak Attack feature to work with your chosen spell. Additionally, your chosen spell becomes recharge 11+ after battle rather than a daily power.

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The Big Meeting

There have been quite a good many decisions that needed to be made concerning the direction of JBE for the next few months. Yesterday, I decided that we needed a company-wide meeting to resolve them. That happened this morning. Here are the results:

  1. Focus on Fifth Edition, Traveller, and 13th Age for the next few months. This is to clear out the backlog of stuff we wanted to publish last year but didn’t because official Pathfinder support is ending. We have plans to continue supporting these games after the backlog is complete. We discussed adventures for Traveller and 5e, ships and monsters for Traveller, subclasses and more for 5e, and a PHB2-like print book for 13th Age.
  2. No final decision on Pathfinder 2e support. We are waiting to see the final rules and license before making a determination on that front.
  3. Continued support of Pathfinder 1e. That is right, JBE will continue with PFRPG 1e. We do not have anything ready to go immediately so do not expect to see anything from us before summer, but we love this game and will continue to support it and its fans. How this will interact with possible PF2 support is yet to be determined.

We are really excited about all of this and hope that you are on board as well. Tell us your thoughts and what you want to see from us in the comments below.

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State of the Enterprise 2018

Hey everyone. It is that time of year again where I look back at the year coming to a close and forward to the year ahead. 2018 was a big year for the company and for the world at large. In many ways it was the year I expected even hoped for and many others it was not the year I expected at all.

Personal Life

Incase you hadn’t heard, I moved half way across the USA this year. I use to live in New Jersey and now I live in Missouri. My wife got a job that she has been working towards for some time now. We’re thrilled about this, but it has impacted my writing schedule.

What we hoped would happen but didn’t really expect was us buying a house. So in the past 4 months, we moved twice. Even right now, I’m still moving boxes that we never had the chance to unpack after the first move. So my writing schedule has been impacted again. If you want to know why we have not produced much since GenCon, that’s the primary reason (more on other reasons in a bit).

Pathfinder

Another wrench in the schedule is the announcement of Pathfinder Second Edition. I guessed this was coming a while back, but it still took me by surprise. We were just starting to get a solid stream of high level adventures under us when the announcement came. So we made our Pathfinder adventures a priority and we got almost all of them published before the release of the 2e playtest. I’m sad for the ones we cut from the schedule but it is entirely possible they will be seen in the future, either as Pathfinder 2e adventures, Fifth Edition adventures, possibly even 13th Age, or dare I say it Pathfinder 1e adventures.

As my own recent poll revealed, PF2e is not as popular as I (and many others) expected it to be. There still may be people playing PF1e for quite some time. We will keep monitoring the situation as things develop. Frankly, I don’t expect us to make a final decision on as to whether we are going to 2e or staying 1e (or even doing both) until we see the final rules and the compatible license. However, if you had asked me about it six months ago, I would have just assumed we’re going 2e and that is that. The fact that we’re considering other options should give you an indication of the situation.

Fifth Edition

The current push we are on is to make all of our Pathfinder adventures and other supplements available for 5e. We want to have just as much if diverse library of material for 5e as we do Pathfinder.

One thing we are doing with 5e we have not done in years with Pathfinder is get our books into distribution. Deadly Delves: Temple of Luminescence will be our first adventure making it’s way into game stores for this game. Shortly thereafter will follow Along Came a Spider. The latter was first released when 5e was still young, and our experience with the game was rather low (as was everyone’s). Since then we’ve leveled up our 5e game and we have plans for 5e supplements both print and PDF well into the new year. These include conversations of existing Pathfinder material as well as brand new supplements that are never seen before.

That was what a decent amount of my time has gone to as of late. When I said above that the move was the primary eater of my time, well working through the logistics to get this set up has another major time investment. It will be well worth it when all is ready to go.

Traveller

“Look for that in 2018.” That is what we said concerning several projects for Traveller in the State of the Enterprise 2017. So it is fair to say that things have not gone according to plan this year. We released our first single ships last month… and that is all we published this year for Traveller. Needless to say that was not the plan this time last year. We still have the last two parts of the Prelude to War adventure path. We have a number of monsters and vehicles that we want to turn into their own books. And we want to publish a number of small settings that you can integrate into the Foreven Worlds, elsewhere in the Third Imperium, or somewhere in a different setting. So we have our hands full for the year ahead.

13th Age


We continued our 13 Class Options series with 13 Wizard Cantrips and Spells and 13 Cleric Domains and Spells. The still not yet named 13 Rogue Options has fallen victim to the same time crunch we’ve described above from the moves and the Pathfinder schedule reschuffeling. Plus, we want to take the time to make each one that much more awesome. When we are satisfied with it, you’ll be the first to know.

After the “core four” classes, we plan to get to the others published. Let us know which you would like us to tackle sooner than others. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

2019 and Beyond

The next few months, JBE is focusing on 5e, Traveller, and hopefully some 13th Age as well because they received so little love last year. That will be our plan for the next four-to-six months. Beyond that, we have a number of ideas but nothing concrete. One thing is for sure, 2019 is going to see some big changes from us. We have all the printing logistics worked out, and I will be working on the company full time in the new year. This means we finally have both the means and opportunity to do things we have been dreaming about for a decade. I can’t say for sure yet which way we will be going, but expect big things from us this year.

By big things, I do mean sizable books or possibly our own system or our own setting. The last time we tried something like this was with Shadowsfall back in 2012 (almost 7 years ago!). Back then, we had the means (being in game stores then as well) but really lacked the opportunity to do it at the level we wanted. Having the experience from publishing so many more rules supplements and adventures since then, we are more prepared to embark on this dramatic step.

The road ahead is exciting, and we are ready for this adventure. We hope you will join us on our epic quest.

That pretty much wraps up our look back of the year and the look ahead. So from all of us, we hope you enjoy your time with family and friends this season, and we will see you in the new year.

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What is Your Favorite Kind of Fantasy Monsters to Fight?

Today, I thought I would make a nice fun poll to end the week. What is your favorite kind of fantasy monster to fight? No matter if you play Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, 13th Age, Swords and Wizardry or some other fantasy game that we don’t support, you can still tell us your thoughts.

So what team are you on? Team Fiends? Team Sparkle Vampires? Team Venus Fly Trap? Vote in our poll and share it with your friends. We would love to hear your thoughts.

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Holidays in Gaming

Are you using holidays in your game? If you were like me when starting out as a game master, no you’re not. Yet holidays mark various places on the calendar, help recognize important persons and groups in your setting’s history, and much more. They give your game life where it otherwise feels flat, like there’s nothing going on in the world besides what the players are doing.

In the United States there are 10 major holidays and a near infinite number of lesser holidays. To break them down the major ones into more generic terms that are easier to use in your game, they are (in calendar year order):

  1. Start of the calendar year
  2. Recognizing the birth of a civil rights leader
  3. Celebrating nation’s leaders
  4. Remembering soldiers that fell on the battlefield
  5. Marking the birth of our nation
  6. Recognizing the common laborer
  7. Remembering someone that discovered this continent
  8. Remembering living soldiers
  9. Harvest
  10. Holiday for the nation’s largest religion

So how can you use these in your game? Some of these are quite obvious and able to be used without exactly as is: harvest, remembering living and fallen soldiers, start of the calendar year, etc.

How about celebrating a civil rights leader? Well considering that the most discriminated against races (uh, ancestries) of the game are half-orcs or tieflings, how about a day where their contributions to the nation’s society are recognized. Or turn it on its head. Make it human-rights day because the elven rulers are keeping the humans from having a voice in their government. Is the day marked with celebrations or protests? Are the town’s guards brought out to prevent pick pocketing or riots?

The way you name a holiday says quite a bit about the leaders. If you call Labor Day Peasants Day that shows the rulers as looking down upon their subjects. Peasants Day would have a much different feel than Labor Day.

If you want to make you location anything but generic, come up with some quirky holidays. Something like Groundhog’s Day, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Teacher’s Day, or Secretary’s Day. Try using something like National Health Day, a day where everyone goes down to the river and washes all the filth and grime off their bodies, which is perfect after a long winter of being inside. Or how about Hug a Gnome Day, the one day a year where gnomes are willing to sell in human markets, and the mayor wants them to come back more often so they are trying to spread good feelings among he gnomes. For the brutish types, how about Woodcutter’s Day. This day before the start of winter, all manner of trees that are unfit for being made into buildings or furniture are cut into firewood and sold to the people to help them last the winter. Naturally there would be lots of beer and other pleasures sold at such events, which can be a good cause for the reasons for the players to come together in the first place.

An important thing to remember is that while we all take the weekend (or some regular set of days off, no matter where in the week it resides) for granted today, the Five-Day Work week did not begin as a concept in the US until 1908. Europe was no better. For proof, Dame Maggie Smith in her role as the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey once asked “What is a week end?” Before that, the only days off for the average person were on holidays. This is why the holidays we now consider minor were not so minor a hundred to a thousand years ago. Not overworking your people is important so holidays were frequent.

With Halloween coming soon, why not download the Deadly Delves: Along Came a Spider adventure for Fifth Edition at the JBE Shop. You can also find it for Pathfinder right here.

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Watchtower Balleron

You would be forgiven if you were not aware that the kingdom’s forced still operated out if Watchtower Balleron long after the hobgoblins took it over. Few in the kingdom did, including the hobgoblins. The lower level had a secret door to a staircase that led to the caves below. The Stone Breakers, the Queen’s elite dwarven commandos, listening (aided by magic) to the hobgoblins plans from below, slipping into the watchtower itself when vital to the mission, and stealing maps and committing various acts of sabotage.

Because of the kingdom’s internal politics, the kingdom could not strike openly against the hobgoblins so the reigning queen took steps to make sure they were ineffective. She let them operate out of Watchtower Balleron as a concession to the local Lord since he was taking bribes from the hobgoblins. However, the queen had her people to think about and detached a small force to serve as an information source. So frequently when the hobgoblins go out on raids, away from the lord’s lands, they mysteriously found the local guards prepared for an attack.

Since the queen cannot act openly against the aggressors, she hopes a group of adventurers show up and handle the problem for her. One of her advisors suggested holding a fighting competition to attract such persons but to do so they need enough advanced warning to advertise the competition so they can attract such seasoned adventurers. As things stand, they fear that only new adventurers will be present and answer the call and will likely die in the fight. She may not have much choice, however, as keeping up current operations costs more than the kingdom’s treasury can afford.

Even then, once the hobgoblins are dealt with, the lord that was backing the hobgoblins will be upset and may have against the royal court or he may run away. To catch the lord, the queen knows she’ll need the help of the adventurers to keep her hands out of it. She may have to have the Stone Breakers leave evidence of the lord’s collusion with hobgoblins and escape before the adventurers show up. But then again, they are elite troops, specializing in information gathering, stealth, and subterfuge over combat. Should the queen’s roll in all of this be made public, there could be considerable complications for her.

Watchtower Balleron

LE large fortification
Government military overlord
Population 1,300 (1,000 hobgoblins; 100 dwarves; 200 other)

Notable NPCs

Captain Teurik Deathaxe, military overlord (LE male hobgoblin fighter 5 [13A: 3rd level leader])
Lieutenant Ooknar Bloodvengence, lead raider (LE female hobgoblin ranger 3 [13A: 2nd level archer])
Iknix Flamecloak, priest of goblinoid god (NE male goblin cleric 2 [13A: 1st level caster])
Lieutenant Harnask Silverheart, leader of the Stone Breakers (LG male dwarf rogue 6 [13A: 3rd level spoiler])

Be sure to also check out Fort Strange and let us know if you want to see more locations like this.

Support our efforts to bring you more awesome material like this by downloading our Pathfinder RPG, D&D 5e, 13th Age, and Swords and Wizardry books directly from the JBE Shop.

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Christmas in July 2018

Its that time of year again everyone.

*Time to brush up on our juggling?*

What?!? No. Well, not only that, but it is time for the Christmas in July Sale. Sure we said last year and the year before and the year before that that it is better than ever. Just like it was true then, it is even more true now. Why? Because we have more on sale than we did last year.

*Isn’t that just because you have more stuff than you did a year ago?*

Yes, thank you very much unhelpful voice in my head, that is true. We are talking over 200 PDFs that are 25% off.

*Wow! 25% off. That’s like … 75% of the regular price.*

Once again unhelpful voice, you are correct. And you can find these deals at DriveThruRPG/RPGNow and the Open Gaming Store. Let’s take a look at some of these awesome deals you can snag right now.

Pathfinder

Book of Beasts: Legendary Foes (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Book of Heroic Races: Advanced Compendium (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Book of Heroic Races Compendium (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Book of the River Nations (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Deadly Delves: The Gilded Gauntlet (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Deadly Delves: To Claw the Surface (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Shadowsfall: Shadow Plane Player’s Companion (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)

Traveller

Creatures of Distant Worlds Compendium (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
d66 Compendium (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Mech Tech ‘n’ bot: Mech Squadrons (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)

Fifth Edition

Book of Beasts: Monsters of the Forbidden Woods (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Deadly Delves: Along Came a Spider (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Deadly Delves: Reign of Ruin (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)

13th Age

Book of Heroic Races: Age of Races 1 (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Book of Heroic Races: Age of Races 2 (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)
Deadly Delves: Reign of Ruin (DriveThruRPG/Open Gaming Store)

See all of our PDFs on sale at DriveThruRPG/RPGNow and the Open Gaming Store and download now before this sale ends.

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