EN World Pre-Release Review of 13th Age (Part 1) by Pelgane Press
Happy Hump-Day fellow gamers! I hope that your week is going well and you have some great plans this weekend for gaming! On my gaming front, I have both my D&D 4E games going – the Friday night game here in Michigan and my Saturday night one in Ohio. I am particularly looking forward to the Saturday night game, as we had to take a break for GenCon and we haven’t gathered in over a month. That and we ended on a cliff-hanger, with the characters having reached the Paragon Tier, and riding to a Eladrin city in the Feywild, only to be beset by a Formorian and his band of slavers! This is the first D&D 4E combat of the Paragon Tier for my group, so hopefully everything will go well!
Today I have the honor to be doing a Pre-Release Review on EN World of the new game by Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo called 13th Age. There is a great deal of anticipation in the community about this new OGL game, and there were so many things I needed to cover in the review that it ran so long that I’ve had to split it into two sections! Never had to do that with an En World Review before, but I realized this was worth making it a two parter.
So for more information on this yet-to-be-released game, please click the link below and head over to EN World to read the review in full:
Pre-Release Review of 13th AGE (Part 1) by Pelgrane Press
So far, I am really impressed with what I found for Character Generation in the game, and I will cover the combat system, monster manual, and world setting in next week’s review. I can tell you that there are many aspects of this game which will appeal to 3rd Edition, Pathfinder, and even 4E players, and you can tell there was some serious synergy between Jonathan (3rd Edition) and Rob Heinsoo (4E) when they designed the features of the game.
As far as how it will fare against D&D Next fans, well the jury is still out. I’d say that 13th Age could be a very appealing alternative to Next – at least in its current form – but then we have only a playtest of the Core rules to look at so far. But will 13th Age give Next serious competition once it’s out? Check back next week and read Part 2 of the review and decide for yourself!
So until next blog… I wish you happy gaming!
About The Author
Anything released by Heinsoo is worth of praise. Illbe buying this to support him.
I wasn’t interested in this product at all until I read your review. I can’t wait until I read part 2.
13th age looks pretty good, but I’ll be curious to see how the 4E community receives it. Their knee jerk reaction is that Heinsoo is god, but reading the rules so far, seems like he too is distancing himself from what much of what the 4E community professes as dogma. Gone is the concept that all classes should advance at the same pace and with the same number and type of options. Some classes have talents. Some have manuevers. Some have at will attack powers. Almost none have anything resembling encounter powers. All progression is unique to class now. The razor like attempts at balance of 4E are completely absent. Back is vancian spell casting and a heavy reliance on DM fiat. Gone is the battle grid and heavily tactical combat. These are all pretty important changes that I think most 4E people have said they dislike about Next, so we’ll see how much they dislike them when its coming from Rob. Reading 13th age and Robs uncensored thoughts on game design, it becomes more and more apparent that 4E really was designed to be played more like a video game, most likely on edict from Hasbro. Left to his own devices we see that Rob doesn’t approach the game in that way at all. Personally, I think 13th Age is shaping up to be a fantastic game. I can’t wait to get my group to give it a whirl. I’m already a backer of the 13 true ways, the expansion book. It looks great too and adds the monk and multiclassing.