13th Age game designers Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, bookended by Forbes reporter and watchful PR person.

“The Kickstarter, which Rob described as ‘dumb’…”

Watch the interview on YouTube and check out the review that Erik Kain wrote.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Pelgrane Press seeks GMs to run Night’s Black Agents, Ashen Stars, Trail of Cthulhu, 13th Age, Hillfolk, Esoterrorists, Dying Earth and other games at Gen Con – short demos and/or adventures. GMs will be compensated with store credit and swag. Interested? Let me know!

Gen Con Indy has posted its lineup of 2013 events. If you’re going, you can add the ones you want to attend to a wishlist and then officially register for them on the 19th.

I’m going to run two games of the 13th Age fantasy roleplaying game at Gen Con, and I hope you’ll join me:

Danger at Deathless Gulch (for Kobold Press)

Description:  Journey to the badlands of Midgard’s magic-blasted Wasted West to recover a magical tome from a crashed dwarven airship. This 13th Age adventure will use icons from the Midgard Campaign Setting.

I ran Danger at Deathless Gulch at Gen Con 2012 using the Old School Hack system, and it was a huge amount of fun. Switching to 13th Age is more than a matter of porting the characters and monsters over — 13th Age has completely different strengths, and I look forward to drawing on them to create a wholly different (but equally madcap) adventure.

Deep Gnome Rising (for Pelgrane Press)

Description: Lord Azbqiplth of the Deep Gnomes sets up court in a city of the Dragon Empire — and brings the Underworld’s madness with him! Choose your PCs’ backgrounds, uniques and icons, and go sort him out.

With this adventure I’m going to use the improv-heavy mode of 13th Age gamemastery, starting with the location: the characters’ icon relationships will determine where the Gnome King decides to set up his court. That’s all I’m ging to say about it for now, because I’m still working on the adventure.

I also hope to take in some panels this year and play a game of Night’s Black Agents, the vampire espionage game by Kenneth Hite. What are you looking forward to at Gen Con 2013?

If one of you wants to break off the fight and go somewhere else — whether to retreat, or to run over and help your buddy, or attack someone else — you have to roll a disengage check on a 20-sided die. A successful roll means you break off combat and move away with no penalty. A failed roll gives you two options. You can stay in combat (with no penalty), or you can disengage anyway, and your enemy gets a free swing at you. This, for those unfamiliar with roleplaying games, is called an “opportunity attack” or “attack of opportunity.”

On an RPGnet thread about 13th Age, someone who hadn’t yet seen the game said that opportunity attacks in the rules were a deal-breaker for him. This prompted someone else to ask how long this rule has been around in D&D. This sort of question puts me into Obsessive Researcher Mode.

I pulled out my  Moldvay Basic and 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books, and went hunting. Sure enough, early versions of opportunity attacks were there under different names.

In Moldvay D&D Basic (1981), page B25 describes two ways of breaking off engagement in melee combat. In a “fighting withdrawal” the defender can back up at half his movement rate without becoming vulnerable. A retreat allows the defender to move backward at more than 1/2 movement, but gives his opponent +2 to hit and the defender can’t make return attacks.

The 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide (1979), page 70 says breaking off from melee “allows the opponent a free attack or attack routine. This attack is calculated as if it were a rear attack upon a stunned opponent. When this attack is completed, the retiring/fleeing party may move away at full movement rate, and unless the opponent pursues and is able to move at a higher rate of speed, the melee is ended and the situation becomes one of encounter avoidance.”

So opportunity attacks go back to at least 1e. If you own 0E or Holmes Basic, I’d love to know if it’s in there as well.

*That joke never gets old.

Gamerati is kindly giving us table space. My shift is on Sunday, but you pretty much can’t go wrong with this lineup, so drop by anytime.

Also! 13th Age artist Aaron McConnell will be selling prints and doing sketches in Artist’s Alley, Table 2617 on Level 4 Show Floor.

Hope to see you there!

Last year I told myself that any amount of money was worth NOT staying way out by the airport, and by gum, I stuck to it. I’ll be at the Marriott, a stone’s throw away from the convention center.

In my experience at least, here’s what happens when you’re at Gen Con on business and you stay out by the airport. You spend your morning in your hotel room, on your laptop, coordinating things by email — because all kinds of crap comes up first thing in the morning, and if you’re not onsite to handle it in person, you have to handle it remotely. You can’t go offline for 45 minutes while you putter along in rush hour traffic.*

Once everything’s settled down for the moment you head out for the con. You eventually make it downtown, where you search for parking. You hike to the convention center. Maybe you stay there. Or maybe something important that you arranged to be shipped to the hotel arrives late, and you have to go all the way back. Because your stuff is being shipped not to the convention center, but a spot miles and miles away. Repeat every day.

And the kicker last year was that all the money I spent on a rental car and parking totaled to as much as, if not more than, what I would have spent if I’d gotten a pricey downtown hotel. Bah.

I’m really looking forward to just sauntering across the street this year, coffee in hand. Good times.

*Oh, also? Don’t launch a Kickstarter campaign the first day of Gen Con. Seriously.

See, in Hillfolk you and your group play characters in an ongoing dramatic series, such as The Sopranos, or Carnivale. The default setting is an Iron Age drama of tribal conflict, but as part of Robin’s recent Kickstarter for the game, he invited people to write “series pitches” for other dramas that gaming groups could choose to play out. For my pitch I imagined a 1960s televisions series that would be a prequel to one of my favorite movies as a kid. (It’s about an orphaned brother and sister with mysterious psychic powers and a map in a metal case. You know the one.)

I don’t want to give away too much about the pitch, so I’ll stop there. Suffice to say that ”Secret of Warlock Mountain” got accepted into the game’s companion book Blood On The Snow, and I responded to Robin’s request for an art brief with a detailed description of the image in my head. I even included a link to a reference photo I found showing “ordinary Joe” type young men circa 1965.

And look! Here it is, in living color by Jonathan Wyke. Very neat.

The other piece of fiction in the book  is by best-selling author and award-winning game designer Jeff Grubb. The credits also include Ben McFarland, who just won a gold ENnie award at Gen Con, and Wolfgang Baur who is…well, he’s Wolfgang Baur. It’s an honor to be included, is what I’m saying.

It also makes me think that “Grubb and Rockett” would be a great name for a business in a steampunk story. Maybe they’d make rocket packs.

Several of my colleagues from Weber Shandwick Seattle were in the audience, and wrote a nice recap on the agency’s blog entitled Gamification: The Next Big Thing. Also, check out BigDoor’s recap of the event.

I used the phrase, “notional author of the experience” during the panel in order to address the question of whether playing a game alone is a social activity. Thankfully nobody punched me.

(Photo by Elaine Norton)

If you’re at BWENY, find me and say hello! And ask me about opportunities for bloggers to engage with the United States Army. Or invite me to play We Didn’t Playtest This at All, a copy of which I have in my cool NokHoo backpack.

*By “cup of joe” I of course mean a soy latte.

I would have posted earlier, but I was out sick for a bit, then had to scramble to catch up pre-flight to Austin. But here I am in sunny (ahem) Texas, going to some great panels, meeting some cool people, and gazing upon some nifty tech. I’m trying out Pinterest this year as a way of chronicling my trip — here’s my SXSW 2012 pinboard,

The agency I work for is aggressively recruiting smart, creative digital people of all stripes right now. If you’d be interested in working for the world’s largest global digital PR agency and are at the conference, let’s you and me talk on Sunday.