13th Age in Glorantha Progress Update: Final Manuscript Changes

By Rob Heinsoo

The pre-layout PDF of 13th Age in Glorantha is now available to Kickstarter backers. Soon it will be live on BackerKit.

Just as we've recently updated the backers about this, this blog post aims to help those of you who have been playing already to track the changes that will affect your game the most. This isn’t an all-inclusive list, we changed and fixed too many pieces for that.

Chapter 1 Initiations & Chapter 2 Creating Characters: 

No big changes aside from a short introduction to the Orlanthi culture alongside the history bits, mostly cribbed from the excellent Sartar book.

Chapter 3 Running Glorantha: 

Many rules changes, enough that we’ll break them out in separate paragraphs.

A number of new rune narration examples, guided by our Name to Remember backers.

The summoning rules were updated in one big way: your summoned creatures now add the current escalation die to their attacks just like you do; and your summoned creatures also get to add the attack bonus from your heroquest gift, if any. More on that in a design note blog to come.

Speaking of heroquest gifts, we went back to that original name. We already use the word ‘rune’ often, so we didn’t need to call these ‘rune gifts.’

We cleaned up problematic text and powers in many heroquest gifts. We also eliminated and replaced a few that were just too obnoxious to fix.

As a player, you’ll probably never want to have to know that the rules for dying on the Hero Plane are a bit different than they were before. As a GM, maybe that opens the throttle a bit!

Also includes some mythic text involving Sir Ethilrist’s heroic return . . . .

Chapter 4 Classes: 

The combo of our own playtesting and playtest comments from afar led to many improvements. Too many to list them, all, but here are a few.

All the classes got a touch of mythic text that will go along with the upcoming art.

The berserker class had a couple significant tweaks in talents and powers for both the storm bull and the Zorak Zorani.

The earth priestess had a lot of work done, including a few new spells to round out the class, as well as new feats to replace earlier feats that had referred to the obsolete model of summoning.

The biggest change in the earth priestess was probably a simplification of her favors of the earth. She doesn’t give away heroquest gifts any more, that was too cumbersome in play. Those got replaced by gifts of d20 rerolls later in the same battle, a gift you have to open yourself. Simpler and well-appreciated.

Hell mother got a few balance corrections and new feats to replace earlier versions that no longer made sense.

We gave the Humakti a fun new talent called Death before Dishonor. You can’t flee when you have this talent, but there are compensations.

Monk and Orlanthi Warrior? Only a couple small changes.

Rebel got a couple new powers.

Storm Voice had small tweaks.

Trickster didn’t change much.

Troll Warrior had one broken talent fixed, I think.

Wind Lord has a couple new exploits to round out that feature of the class.

Chapter 5 Enemies: 

The biggest change was a revision of the Puppeteer Troupe for clarity and playability. Otherwise most of the changes were for clarity or as commentary.

Chapter 6 Campaign World: 

Not many changes.

Chapter 7 Heroquests: 

Many changes. Jeff added a few engaging heroquest stories as mythic text. We overhauled the quest score system and rewrote the DIY advice. Then we went through all the heroquests clarifying how they interacted with our advice. The chapter should make better sense now.

Chapter 8 Adventures: 

More adjustments because of the overhaul of the myths that use quest score. Clarifications and improvements in the heroquest beneath the Upland Marsh.

Yours in the whirl,

Rob Heinsoo

[13th Age Glorantha artwork - Humakti duel by Jan Pospisil]