What Do I Know About Reviews? Fantasy Age 2nd Edition: Cthulhu Mythos
Green Ronin has adopted a strategy of releasing smaller PDF products to support the various lines they publish. I like this development because some of Green Ronin’s properties have been extremely interesting, but supporting everything they release with physical releases seemed to bottleneck a lot of support. While some of these products in the past have been smaller releases, like single villains or teams for Mutants and Masterminds, many of the AGE system releases have been about half the size of what modern publishing would likely publish in hardcover format.
Today, I’m going to look at a supplement for Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition, Cthulhu Mythos: Cosmic Horror Swords & Sorcery. Some of these supplements adapt material developed for the Modern AGE-powered Cthulhu Awakens. While the two systems are very similar, they aren’t identical. But this isn’t just an adaptation of Cthulhu Awakens material; it also presents fantasy from an angle that resembles some of the more sinister, horror-adjacent Conan stories, and the introduction even mentions the connections between Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
Disclaimer
While I have received review copies from Green Ronin in the past, I purchased my copy of this product to review. I have yet to have the opportunity to play with or run games with material from this supplement, but I am familiar with the AGE system.
Fantasy Age 2nd Edition: Cthulhu Mythos
Writing and Design: Steve Kenson, Jack Norris, and Malcolm Sheppard
Adventure Game Engine (AGE) created by Chris Pramas
Development: Steve Kenson and Malcolm Sheppard
Editing: Steve Kenson
Graphic Design: Hal Mangold
Art Direction: Hal Mangold
Cover Illustrations: Krasen Maximov & Cardin Yanis
Interior Art: Joewie Aderes, Michele Boceda, Carlos Diaz, Danil luzin, Krasen Maximov, Victor leza Moreno, Mirco Paganessi, Julie Sakai, Andrey Vasilchenko, and Cardin Yanis
Publisher: Chris Pramas
The PDF for Cthulhu Mythos is 66 pages long. It includes a front and back cover, a credits page, and a table of contents. Green Ronin’s products have amazing artwork, which continues in this PDF. There are many adventurers fighting mythos creatures, like deep ones and ghouls wearing wizard robes and carrying a staff.
Eldritch Verses
Like most AGE game products, the material in the product is modular, meaning that most of it can be used without using other parts of this supplement. That said, some concepts, like the Dreamlands, require you to adopt some of the rules in one section to use other rules in the supplement. The sections of the PDF include the following:
As mentioned above, the introduction mentions the connection between H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and mentions the elements introduced into the mythos beyond Lovecraft’s stories. It also contains the standard “Lovecraft was Racist” section, which I am all for.
Mythos Characters
This section contains a pair of new ancestries: the Deepblooded and the Dreamghoul. The Deepblooded are people with Deep One ancestry who have manifested some of the traits of the Deep Ones. Dreamghouls are a species of ghoul that often develop their traits later in life and are connected to the metaphysical Dreamlands.
Like other ancestries in the game, there are a handful of traits that all members of that ancestry will have, like movement speed, special senses, and special movement rates (like having a swimming speed). Like other ancestries, there are charts of additional traits that can be chosen or rolled randomly. Each character gets two of these, so if a character wants to reflect a character with parents of different ancestries, one of the two benefits can come from that ancestry.
These have similar benefits to the game’s core ancestries. Both are logical additions to a fantasy campaign that is introducing mythos elements. While the Deepblooded are presented more as “you have elements of surface humanoids as well as Deep One traits,” the Dreamghoul still plays with the Lovecraft trope of “you might pass for some other ancestry until your true bloodline comes out.” They also have to eat intelligent creatures, so a little additional guidance probably wouldn’t be bad.
There are several new talents, some of which are good additions even in a non-mythos Fantasy AGE game. Bookworm and Stalwart Style are good examples. I love Strange Estate, where you inherit a weird location from your family and gain certain benefits from this bizarre inheritance. Some traits interact with the other rules in the products, like gaining access to Eldritch Rituals or having an enhanced ability to interact with the Dreamlands.
The Strange Legacy trait reintroduces some of the “you’re changing into your precursors” flavor that you don’t get in the Deepblooded ancestry, where you have one of many different traits, like gills that let you breathe water, unnaturally armored skin, wings, or natural weapons. I like that this trait mentions that it could come from proximity to Eldritch sources of power, but any “you had ancestors that were different than what you expected” just makes me want to make sure everyone knows you don’t want to engage in Lovecraft’s “isn’t it scary that your bloodline might not be pure” tropes.
The following specializations are also included:
As with the talents, several of these work fine for Fantasy AGE games that don’t focus on the mythos, either. I also appreciate that this product presents an Alienst as someone who assesses another person’s mental state. I’m looking at you, D&D 3e. You know what you did.
Exploring the Mythos
This section includes expanded rules for Fear Tests. In the core rules, spells and creatures might cause the character to gain the Frightened Condition, but this adds more instances of how to include Fear Tests in other aspects of the campaign. It includes examples of what would trigger a fear test and what the Target Number would be to resist fear in that instance.
There is a section that expands on Relationships and Bonds. It’s meant to reframe these in light of how they can be used for a game where cult entanglements or ties to organizations can affect the character, but I’ll be honest. For some reason, reading through these examples, I understood Relationships and Bonds better than I did reading the core rulebooks.
Cthulhu Awakens introduces the concept of Alienation. Instead of framing the stress of learning the reality-warping truths of the mythos as causing mental illness, Alienation introduces the idea that the more you are exposed to the mythos, the more your thought process tries to make sense of the rules of the mythos, making it harder to focus on the physics of day to day life.
Alienation is tracked by establishing a bond to the element causing the adventurer’s mental stress, creating a bond to Terror and a bond to Enlightenment. Eventually, a character with enough Alienation gains a Distortion, a trait that your character adopts to process mythos truths that may hinder your day-to-day life. Some of these resemble what other games would present as sanity effects. One key difference is that these don’t involve diagnosing a character with real-world mental illnesses or randomly assigning an actual mental illness to someone based on stimuli that may make no sense for the person’s history and the event witnessed.
There are two new Stunt tables, the Enlightenment Stunts Table and the Terror Stunts Table. Once you have bonds to an Enlightenment that has occurred to you due to supernatural mental stress, you can spend your stunt points for new stunts, like temporarily being skilled at something your character has not trained in or gaining a clue about something going on. Terror Stunts are adverse modifications that the GM can spend stunt points to trigger, giving you an additional challenge, like second-guessing your actions and forcing you to reroll in future tests.
The Dreamlands
This chapter lays out rules for the Dreamlands, including how to enter the Dreamlands and what statistics change when you are in the Dreamlands. Because this supplement references mythos stories, the Dreamlands have specific trappings, like the Cavern of Flame and the White Ship. To get this out of the way, if you die in the dream, you just react badly to the experience until some healing can be applied to you.
Waking up before your dream ends forces you to make an Alienation test, potentially giving you a Melancholy bond (which makes it harder for reality to be more attractive to the Dreamlands), or, if you roll poorly, something makes its way out of the Dreamlands when you wake up.
Mythos Magic
This section introduces several new rules to Fantasy AGE 2e. The first is the concept of Eldritch spells. Eldritch spells don’t use magic points; they use a Price Test, a check that shows what toll the spell takes on your character. This exists alongside the standard version of a spell, so you can know an Eldritch version of any spell. If you know the Eldritch and non-Eldritch versions, you can cast the spell as an Eldritch spell, but you may end up paying the points and making an Eldritch Price Test for the same casting. Every Eldritch version of a spell manifests disturbingly compared to its typical manifestation. Since every spell can be learned as an Eldritch Spell, there isn’t a list of these spells, and you’re on your own to make up your disturbing manifestations.
Eldritch spells become progressively more dangerous, adding to the difficulty of Price Tests. You can rest to lower the threat that is building up, and when you suffer Alienation, you reduce the difficulty that’s been building up because you’re seeing the reality where those Eldritch spells make more sense. Failing a Price Test has many potential dangers, from an ongoing penalty to spellcasting, fatigue, injury, or uncontrolled spells.
Eldritch Spells have their own Stunt Table, which allows you to change what abilities the target uses to resist the spell, frighten everyone witnessing your spell, or enable you to manifest the Elder Sign in addition to the spell you cast.
This section also introduces the Astral, Draining, Radiant, and Spacial Arcana, with eight new spells for each Arcana. While these are grouped under the heading of Eldritch Arcana, these spells aren’t automatically Eldritch spells, but all of them can be learned as Eldritch spells. This is probably one of the best examples of material that would be useful outside a mythos-themed campaign. The most overt mythos element is the Radiant spell Color out of Space.
Rituals are long-form magical workings that include the following steps:
Some example rituals show you what spells are needed for them, the total score you need to accumulate from your stunt dice, what some of the standard elements are (which may affect the difficulty if they aren’t present), and what applications are used. In addition to the example rituals, spells can be boosted by adding applications to the spell, letting you affect additional targets, cast the spell at range, and other modified effects. Each one of the applications adds points to the Potential of the spell, which is the total of the stunt dice needed to activate the ritual.
This section wraps up with Eldritch Items, in this case defining the traits of Eldritch Grimoires. These usually allow someone to learn the Eldritch version of spells included in the book, as well as detailing some rituals, granting bonuses to someone using the book to repeat the ritual. Examples of grimoires include The Book of Dead Names and The Rule of Yith.
Mythos Gamemastering
For a shorter supplement, there is some solid advice on running mythos or fantasy campaigns featuring unknowable supernatural elements. I like easily digestible advice, and I appreciate that after a few paragraphs on each topic being addressed, there are a handful of bullet-pointed examples.
The section on running campaigns includes three different ways to include mythos elements:
Each section explains the difference between using the mythos sparingly, as one of many recurring themes, or as the primary theme of the campaign and provides an example of what that looks like in a campaign.
The monster section includes some of the monstrous qualities from the core rules that are especially suited to mythos-themed games and discusses how these qualities may appear in a mythos setting. There are eleven brand-new qualities in the PDF, as well as the following templates:
The following new stat blocks appear in the supplement:
A sidebar also talks about what monsters from the core rules work as mythos-adjacent campaign elements.
Elder Sign
This is a packed supplement for standard Fantasy AGE 2e and mythos-themed campaigns. The talents, specializations, and arcana are accessible introductions into a campaign that doesn’t require too much modification to the standard Fantasy AGE 2e assumptions. There is very effective advice on gamemaster advice for mythos-themed campaigns.
Unspeakable Knowledge
The core Fantasy Age 2e book does a good job of explaining the importance of not overgeneralizing typical members of an ancestry, but I think we could have used a more focused discussion on some of Lovecraft’s “tainted bloodline” themes. I like Alienation and Rituals, but both are very involved sets of rules that may complicate the standard level of complexity in Fantasy Age 2e.
Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.
I continue to enjoy these Green Ronin supplements for various games, especially for the AGE system. This is a very good supplement, but to get maximum value from it, you and your table may need to be willing to embrace rules that are a little more involved. Some great inclusions work with just the core game, but it helps to want mythos material that brings in its own additional rules for maximum effect.
#Cthulhu #CthulhuMythos #FantasyAGE #FantasyAGE2e #ffcc00 #GreenRonin #rpgs #ttrpgs
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Sorry, everybody, I’m slowly able to process nerdy content. However, I’m still not in my proper game discussion/analysis mindset, so I hope you appreciate another rumination of Marvel superhero media. Yesterday, I wanted Lindsey Ellis’s video on the timeline of the Fox X-Men movies, and she expressed an opinion that I’d not seen before. I wanted to explain why I vehemently disagree. By the way, I disagree with a few parts of the video, but I think it’s worth watching.
Stryker hated his mutant son so much he weaponized torturing him – I wonder if that’s relevant later in this post?
Ellis says that the X-Men, as a concept, works better in a world where no other superheroes exist. The logic is that in a world where people love Captain America and Iron Man, people are comfortable with the idea of superpowered individuals, so the marginalization of mutants for their particular origin doesn’t make any sense. I think this is wrong, because the argument only takes into account the X-Men and other mutants that become superheroes, not mutants as a population, including those that never put on a costume or get anywhere near Xavier’s school. I also want to add this disclaimer: I’m about to talk about some of the worst human behavior.
The MCU as it Stands
I’ll talk about the “softer” side of the argument first. People love Captain America and Iron Man, probably Thor. They know aliens exist because of the Chitauri invasion and perhaps because most people categorize Thor and Loki as “aliens.” We haven’t spent much time in the MCU examining this, and that’s what I’m mainly focused on because we’re talking about integrating mutants into the MCU. But we know that at least in various parts of their lives, people feared Hulk and Spider-Man, and Hulk was hunted as a fugitive.
Tony Stark was a celebrity with a public presence before he became Iron Man, and his superpowers, such as they are, are an extension of his money and intelligence. The public will eat that up. Captain America was sold to the American people as an icon of all that was right in America during World War II. For our discussion here, yeah, it’s kind of relevant that the perfect American soldier looked a lot like an Aryan ubermench. Of course, people are going to love them. We get the feeling from Hawkeye and other sources that the people aren’t all that clear on who the “other ones” even are on the Avengers unless you’re a die-hard superhero news follower.
I’m a little sad that it took me this long to process that this shot shows two Black men who will be bound by rules that one White man is trying to get another White man to agree with, without handing them their own copies.
We also know that the love for superheroes isn’t absolute. The public was so scared that a powerful woman failed to save people that they were more afraid of her than the suicide bomber she couldn’t stop. Once that powerful woman publicly failed, they remembered that Tony Stark built a killer robot that could control the internet, devastated an entire country, and nearly dropped a city back onto the Earth as a giant vibranium-loaded bomb. The public wanted governments to step in and put a leash on people with superpowers then.
The public forgave super-powered people after they managed to restore the 50% of the population that had been erased and turned aside a second alien invasion. But again, in the real world, we know that opinions toward identifiable populations can wax and wane depending on how safe the population feels.
I don’t expect the movie to frame the resistance to Sam Wilson as Captain America as a racial issue because I think Disney runs a different calculus for major movie releases than they do for Disney+ shows. But in the Disney+ show, it’s clear that some people resist Sam being Cap because he’s black. So even the symbol of Captain America, sold to the American people during World War II, can lose its luster if the person in the uniform doesn’t have the expected skin color.
From the Ms. Marvel series, we also know that while Kamala’s neighborhood may support a girl with Pakistani heritage as a superhero, the government does not. We have seen politicians tell you that “the other” is scary and that defining the other works. It’s a horrible truth, but it works.
A World Without Heroes
We’ve established the current state of the MCU. Now, let’s do the hard work of looking at how the real world informs us that mutants could still be marginalized in a world with established, popular superheroes. I think that the real problem that the analysis misses is that mutants are born. Sometimes, mutants are born to parents who are not mutants.
We know humans react horribly to anyone different from them. Mutants aren’t superheroes. They show up, usually as teenagers, and have their powers start to manifest. They don’t show up in costumes, fighting supervillains. They don’t show up with a PR department. They’re scared kids who don’t know what’s happening to them and do things that confuse and upset their parents.
That’s looking at parents and their fear of what their kids might become, but we have an additional model to look at. Some people might be okay with mutants existing, but they would get agitated if their daughter dated a mutant. They would be even more upset if their daughter had a child with a mutant.
I’ve made this argument before but left those analogies hanging in previous arguments because they seem pretty obvious. Since I’m revisiting this in November 2024, after our election, I want to be a little more blunt.
Drawing Bold Lines
A significant portion of the American population, over 50% of a large representative sample, are so afraid of anyone different from them that they need assurances that someone like them will protect them or want to assert authority over people who are not like them. Despite the crime rate for immigrants being significantly lower than it is for American citizens because they are an identifiable population, politicians can point to them and say that you need to be protected from them. People react as if that identifiable population is dangerous. We know in the modern political landscape, even politicians who claim to be progressive jump on the bandwagon of demonizing immigrants.
There are parents terrified that their children will have children in their class who are trans. They assume every trans teacher will “recruit” their children. They think if their child questions their gender identity, it’s because society or bad influences have confused them. The parent will be comfortable if their child completely internalizes their doubts and fears and never shares them. We have a presidential candidate who successfully ran on telling people that, at the very least, if you make it impossible for people to acknowledge that trans people exist, they effectively don’t.
These same people are afraid of immigrants who want to see them hauled out of the country. These same people are terrified of gender identities they don’t understand and a child that has a life experience they cannot reconcile. Those people don’t have a problem with immigrant entertainers or sports figures. If they see Laverne Cox in a show where she never mentions that she’s trans, she’s just a pretty woman whose acting they can enjoy. They can turn their hatred off at a distance if filtered through a lens of what those people can do for them.
This isn’t just true of immigrants and trans people, but because that’s the hate campaign we just saw succeed, they are the most straightforward examples. But this is true of LGBTQIA+ people, people of color, people with disabilities, or people who practice religion that deviates too far from the accepted norm of Evangelical Christianity. If they are distant and can provide value, their existence can be tolerated, but if they get too close, and ask for anything at all, those groups become the enemy. We’ve known for decades that if a marginalized person does exactly what the people in power want them to do, they can be granted the title of “one of the good ones.”
Some mutants look radically different than baseline humans or have powers that are more like afflictions. We know that human beings can respond with cruelty as well as compassion when it comes to physical change that is potentially harmful. During the AIDS crisis, people wanted to isolate it as a problem only for gay men. Early into the spread of COVID-19, people wanted to blame the Chinese, either for having morally questionable eating practices or practicing reckless scientific experiments.
If someone in the MCU even knows the origins of various superheroes, nobody worries that their child will grow up and volunteer for a super soldier program. They don’t worry that they’ll become a billionaire and invent a suit that lets them have superpowers when they want them and can set them aside when they don’t. No one worries about their daughter bringing home a random scientist who turns into a raging gamma beast. All of those origins are specific and, even if accidental, require a set of circumstances that most people will never picture themselves or their children experiencing.
Mutants are different. To parents who are afraid to acknowledge that they aren’t the default American family, mutants represent something that forces them outside of the norm. Something that can appear out of nowhere, making them question where that mutant trait came from. Anyone who provides a cure or convinces you that they can teach your child to ignore their mutant ability lets them retain their illusion that they are the default, and anyone not like them is a deviation. They don’t need to understand everyone not like them is wrong for not being like them.
The fact that mutants are born, that they aren’t the result of accidents, experiments, or intentionally created technology, is part of the fear. The comment in X2: X-Men United from Bobby’s mother, asking if he tried not being a mutant, remains relevant in a world where Captain America is a hero created by the government to fight for the American Way, and Iron Man is a billionaire that uses his resources to make himself into a superhero. X2 is also where we’re introduced to Nightcrawler, the perfect character to illustrate why mutants remain relevant in the MCU. His mutation was evident from birth, and he was abandoned because of it.
Entertainment Ragnarok
I have no idea how well Disney will work with any of the material they have in the X-Men franchise. Shows like X-Men ‘97 (a universe, by the way, that includes the Avengers, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four) justify their existence because people turn out to watch them in enough numbers to show future installments are a safe bet, as long as nobody breaks the budget. Entertainment corporations know that a lot of PoC and LGBTQIA+ people have money to spend, and they want that money.
“The only people that get to survive the destruction of Earth-10005 are those that have provided value. This is not a meta-commentary on what members of a marginalized community are allowed to exist outside of their defined spaces.”
We also know that media companies are risk-averse. They may want that money from marginalized groups. Still, they want to curry the favor of the people in power because those people might enact laws and regulations that make them more money and enshrine the business practices that they’ve always wanted to adopt. What I’m saying is that we’re probably heading into an era of black best friends and outrageous gay supporting characters who don’t date, given that the incoming administration wants to change the laws to make even mentioning trans people illegal. Populations that don’t present as a spending block, like disabled people, are likely either to fade from view or become victims and motivations for abled characters.
Maybe this won’t be the case, but whatever the case is, existing heroes in the MCU, even existing heroes that are adored by the public, don’t erase the ability of the American population to hate anyone that they can identify as evil, especially when someone like William Stryker or Donald Trump paints a target on them.
A Note on Perspective
You may notice that this post refers to how Americans would react to mutants without addressing other places worldwide. This is for two reasons. I am thinking about this a lot in light of what our 2024 elections say about how the public reacts to marginalized people, and I am not familiar enough with any other country to make these statements. This isn’t meant to center America as the only culture that matters.
I also use the construction of a family reacting to someone their daughter is dating or who has a child. This is not meant to dismiss people who are not women who can have children or children of other gender identities that might introduce someone they are in a relationship with to their family. This is meant to frame this from the viewpoint of the people being discussed, people who likely only see a gender binary and who worry more about their daughter’s activities and treat their daughter as someone who needs to be adequately controlled. It’s an intentional construction, but not one meant to be reductive.
I’m pulling together some thoughts I was moved to post on social media regarding the standard D&D spellcasting classes. I don’t know if any of this is incredibly profound, but I’ve also learned that I can’t trust social media as a storage format for my thoughts, so here’s hoping you don’t mind me sharing.
Over the years, I’ve posted many articles about the philosophical differences between different spell casters in D&D, yet I’m still moved to take another run at it occasionally. Perhaps someday I’ll have as many posts about this as alignment or how to make traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws work better (which I guess I can retire now that D&D 2024 and Tales of the Valiant both jettisoned the concepts).
Spellcaster Emphasis
This time, I was going for a very simple, very quickly summarized way to express how each class approaches spellcasting. I’m also only looking at spellcasters that derive their power from an outside source, which they had to take some action to access.
The most challenging summary was probably the Ranger because it’s easy to assume “like druids, but less.” What led me to this idea that a Ranger has something in their soul that makes them restless to chase the feeling of being “in” the right spot with nature is that Rangers move. They roam. They hunt. All of that suggests chasing after a feeling, and the supernatural manifestation of chasing that feeling is their various powers.
To develop this concept, I also considered the philosophy of spellcasting and the idea that different editions have had means of shifting what spellcasting statistic classes use. I wanted to consider what having more than one spellcasting stat would mean and what additional one makes the most sense for each class.
I also added this disclaimer online–I’m not saying this is what you should do. I’m playing around with a thought process to see what it would mean if this were true. I’m sure some issues could arise from this, and I know this won’t “feel” right for some players.
Alternate Spellcasting Statistics by Class
It’s my blog, and I can’t help myself, so let’s look at each of the classes, and I’ll explain my logic for the additional spellcasting stat.
Artificer
The standard spellcasting stat for Artificers is Intelligence, which makes sense because they are effectively magical engineers. My logic for adding Wisdom of a secondary casting stat is that I can see Artificers that create things by rote. In other words, they don’t draw up their own plans, and they don’t vary the plans they use. They just adhere to what they have internalized and practiced over time.
Bard
I was very tempted to use Intelligence as the Bard’s secondary statistic. I could probably still be persuaded to do so. Still, I felt like there is a natural dichotomy between relating a story or an artistic piece with enough energy and emotion for people to internalize it or knowing the most important aspects of a story to emphasize and convey meaning to a specific audience. With all of that said, if you wanted to convince me that Bards would be the one class that could pick any stat from Int/Cha/Wis, thematically, I would have a hard time arguing against it.
Cleric
I added Intelligence as an alternate for Clerics based on the concept of religious scholars. I can picture Clerics versing themselves in scholarly works to reinforce the history of the religion and details of all of the church’s practices. You could argue for the Charismatic evangelist, but Paladins have the primary Charisma Divine caster role in the 5e SRD classes.
Druid
I can see Druids having Charisma as their secondary spellcasting statistic option because I can picture Druids that don’t contemplate their place in nature so much as they are imposing the will of “nature” on the world, assuming they are already right with the balance of nature. In some ways, it also dovetails with the roots of Bards and Druids and how, conceptually, they are essentially the same thing in some stories.
Paladin
It makes sense that Paladins can manifest their powers by Charisma, because they have a deeply held feeling that something must be done to effect a specific change in the world. They are a force of personality. Even with that understanding of the Paladin, though, I can picture the Paladin that still deeply feels what needs to be done. They are very proactive but may be introspective enough to want to contextualize their actions and choose between potential outcomes quickly.
Ranger
Wisdom represents the Ranger’s awareness of and perhaps even subconscious preparation for everything happening around them, especially in the environments they are most comfortable traversing. I don’t picture Charisma doing much to allow for an understanding and assessment of a situation. Still, I can see a more formalized approach to information gathering and threat assessment being something some Rangers may lean toward.
Sorcerer
I think the primary story of the Sorcerer is that they don’t learn their magic through scholarly study. They have a natural connection to the power they wield. While the default may be that Sorcerers can use the power they are connected to by force of personality, willing the world to change in accordance with their powers, I can also see Sorcerers having a deeper understanding and feeling for the depths of their power. They would still be using intrinsic power, but potentially with more intentionality.
Warlock
I picture Warlocks using Charisma to impose the power they have bargained for on the rules of reality. That’s looking at how Warlocks use their powers from the point of view of already having the power and then using it. I can also see Intelligence being a spellcasting statistic because the Warlock learns the forms and ways to communicate with otherworldly powers and measures the limits of different sources of power. Additionally, I just think the story of the Warlock leans away from assuming Wisdom, carefully considering repercussions, and avoiding unseen threats, so Wisdom isn’t the best fit for them, even with an expanded range of spellcasting statistics.
Gathering Information
I would love to get feedback on this post. I would love to know if those quick summaries of spellcaster approaches are helpful to people and if you have your own summaries that you think would work.When my “narrative” brain is going, it often pushes out my “rules” brain. I would also love to see if there is any issue with how the 5e SRD works compared to swapping out some of the spellcasting statistics, as I have conjectured above.
But most of all, I just like talking to other people about games.
https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/10/17/grasping-power-playing-with-spellcasting-assumptions/
#00ccff #3366ff #339966 #5eSRD #800000 #800080 #808080 #993300 #99cc00 #Arcane #Artificer #Bard #BlackFlagReferenceDocument #Cleric #Divine #Druid #DungeonsDragons #ff00ff #ff9900 #ffcc00 #Paladin #Primordial #Ranger #Sorcerer #Spellcaster #TalesOfTheValiant #Warlock #Wizard #Wyrd
Today we’re going to look at a scenario where the player characters are working for a government agency investigating clandestine Cthulhu Mythos activity. The scenario isn’t set during the modern era, giving a glimpse into the world in a different era. Wait, no, come back, I didn’t accidentally post the same review two days in a row. It just happened to finish up two adventures that have similar themes.
Today’s review is for Brinkmanship, a scenario for Green Ronin’s AGE system RPG Cthulhu Awakens. This is a scenario set in 1963, in that magical period of time when the CIA and the KGB were trying to one up each other trying to figure out if they could control people’s minds or set up a program of psychics to give them advantage in the Cold War.
Disclaimer
While I have received review copies from Green Ronin in the past, I am not working from a review copy. I was a crowdfunding backer for Cthulhu Awakens, and this adventure is one of the goals. I have not had the opportunity to run or play this adventure. I don’t have a lot of AGE system experience as a GM, but I’ve been a player before.
Cthulhu Awakens: Brinkmanship
Design: Alexander Thomas with Malcolm Sheppard
Development: Malcolm Sheppard
Editing: Michael Matheson
Graphic Design: Hal Mangold & Kara Hamilton
Art Direction: Hal Mangold
Interior Art: Danil Luzon
Cartography: Zach Moeller
Publisher: Chris Pramas
Team Ronin: Kara Hamilton, Troy Hewitt, Steven Jones, Steve Kenson, Ian Lemke, Nicole Lindroos, Hal Mangold, Chris Pramas, Evan Sass, Malcolm Sheppard, Dylan Templar, and Alexander Thomas
Digital Doom
This review is based on the PDF of the adventure. The PDF is 26 pages long. The PDF is in two-column layout and follows the trade dress for the Cthulhu Awakens line, with a parchment like page background, green headers and section dividers, and black “slate” sidebars. In addition to artwork that serves as a snapshot of what is going on in the adventure, there are portraits of all of the main NPCs. There are also several maps of the adventure location.
The pages are broken out as follows:
The Era
As mentioned above, this adventure is set in 1963. The dabbling with psychic phenomenon that was part of real-world history, in the Weird Century setting of Cthulhu Awakens, reaches into the powers of the mythos.
The organizations at play in this adventure are the CIA, which you may have heard of, and the ICG, the Implicit Cartography Group. The Soviet organization at play is the GRU, although they aren’t quite the villain of the piece, but they do contribute to what shaped one of the antagonists.
The adventure mentions the issues surrounding the marginalization of people regarding gender, sexual orientation, and race. There is the standard (and good) disclaimer that you don’t want to include content that makes your table uncomfortable. Because of the remote location where the majority of this adventure takes place, the primary prejudice that the PCs will encounter is the systemic sexism surrounding the CIA, mainly regarding the degree to which the adventure location is not set up to make female agents comfortable in an effort to let them know that they don’t belong in the field.
Outpost 323 is located in Northern Türkiye, a location secured by the CIA with their support of far-right paramilitaries and funding counter-insurgency groups. This outpost is near the USSR and is conducting some research on top of housing members of the ICG, which includes individuals involved in remote seeing (clairvoyant) activities.
Visiting the 60s
The opening of the adventure includes suggestions for how the adventure can be used, beyond a one shot in a 60s era campaign. These include the following suggestions:
What is Going on Here
If you might be a player in this adventure, or if you want to be surprised while reading the adventure for yourself, you should probably perform a ritual that removes you from the current fragment of reality
The PCs will be contacted by the CIA, sent to Outpost 323 in northern Türkiye, to investigate strange events surrounding the outpost. Why the PCs? Because one of the members of the ICG left instructions to recruit them, because that agent has been on some mind and time period swapping adventures due to the Yithians he’s been in contact with, and he knows the PCs are important to resolve the situation, but not why.
The CIA contact recruiting them trusts the ICG agent that left the instructions, so she wants to follow through. She can’t ask him any further questions, because he’s disappeared. As written, many of the government agents that deal with strange topics like remote viewing may understand there are some inexplicable psychic things that happen but aren’t clued into the much wider reality of the cosmic horrors that might threaten the planet. But she understands that all of this is likely related to some kind of psychic phenomenon.
Because they may be dealing with double agents, the PCs are going to be set up with false clearances to show why they are being assigned to the outpost. The default ID sets up the PCs as airplane mechanics, and they’ll be given a quick training session to let them bluff their way through any questions about their jobs, which is represented as a temporary bonus on checks related to airplane maintenance. If the PCs have some other specialty that might qualify them for a different security clearance, they can ask about it, but the point is to not stand out.
The PCs will be given inoculations, which they are told are related to the location to which they are traveling. The truth is, one of the inoculations they receive is an experimental compound that blocks telepathic intrusion.
Investigating the Site
Much of the bulk of the adventure is about the PCs exploring the outpost, justifying why they may be in the section of the outpost that they are currently investigating, and being scrutinized by Betty Fuller, a radio engineer at the site who has been assigned the job of coordinator for the ICG projects on base.
One interesting element of this scenario is that depending on who finds out that the PCs are here under cover identities, this is a CIA operation, and multiple layers of subterfuge are almost expected. That said, having their cover blown is going to draw eyes on them and make investigation much harder.
There is a strange, ongoing effect where an area near the base is constantly raining ash, and that ash burns through the material it settles on. Neither Fuller, nor the PCs, have clearance to enter the special hanger that is part of the P-VERTICAL project.
There are a number of secrets the PCs can uncover through investigation. If they follow Fuller, they find out that the pilot that flew them into the Outpost doesn’t trust her, and they find out that she’s suspicious of the PCs. The PCs may find out the P-VERTICAL hanger contains an experimental aircraft.
Eventually, the PCs may find a group of agents who know something is wrong with Fuller and have been sequestering themselves until they can secure more of the psionic inoculation that the PCs were given before they were sent here.
What is REALLY Going on Here
The experimental aircraft has been using technology that touches on reality warping powers. In creating the power source for the aircraft, the engineers effectively began an Eldritch Working that was never completed. This damages the prison of an entity that has been trapped below the site’s location since pre-historic times. The burning ash that keeps falling is a side effect of where the plane’s technology damaged reality.
Melvin Bird, the agent that sent the cryptic recommendation to recruit the PCs, has swapped minds with a Yithian, incredibly old aliens that explore other times by inhabiting the bodies of others. The Yithians imprisoned the skotomorphs in ancient times, sometimes in vaults, and others sealed away in underground cities. Melvin knows some of what is going on, and that the Yithians are afraid that the Skotomorphs will escape their prison.
Betty Fuller is actually a Russian double agent, who was also recruited due to her psychic abilities. The skotomorph whose prison was damaged has convinced her that she needs to free it. Fuller, who has trained to use multiple cover identities, is now convinced that she is a double agent, but for who, and why changes in her mind constantly. She just knows she needs to free the skotomorph. She’s also got control of many of the personnel, since none of them knew to use the inoculation to protect against mental intrusion. Fuller is planning on completing the destruction of the skotomorph’s prison.
Because of the outpost’s remote location, once everything comes to a head, the PCs will need to determine how they are going to get back to inhabited settlements. They can travel through the wilderness, which will take a while, as well as requiring food and water. They can attempt to fix the experimental airplane, which can be potentially dangerous, since they need to complete the ritual used to power the aircraft in order to use it. Or, in my favorite bit of irony in this scenario, they can repair the Cessna that is used to fly personnel into and out of the facility.
Endings
The skotomorph escaping its prison is bad, but it’s not “the world is ending immediately” bad. It could still get there, because the skotomorph will be working to break down the barriers to all of the other prisons around the Earth, and then secure control of the planet.
Betty Fuller is a wildcard. Depending on how the PCs approach their final confrontation, she may escape and get picked up by her Russian handlers, or she may surrender and wait for a good time to attempt an escape or find a way to wheedle into someone’s trust.
Defusing the Situation
I’ve said this before, but I like investigative adventures that give the players wide latitude to investigate what they want, how they want. I like how the base is laid out for investigation, and how the different NPCs that the PCs can find or interact with might recontextualize everything they think they know, without invalidating that information that they have gathered. I’m going touch on this below, but when I was thinking of what kind of pop culture “vibes” I get from this adventure, this almost feels like an X-Files or Fringe style scenario. I mentioned it above, but I love the irony of needing to fix a plane after showing up with false credentials as airplane mechanics.
Accidental Dimensional Membrane Damage
I mentioned this above, and it’s not really a negative, but if you are coming into a Cthulhu Awakens scenario expecting a more horror-oriented vibe, this one leans more “weird” science in execution. There is a recurring line used in the adventure about how the PCs can only trick the guards because their minds are clouded, and they could never use silly tricks like you see in action movies on them otherwise. We’re playing an RPG. Some of us don’t want to think about what tactical training would or wouldn’t make guards likely to be on guard about. That’s why you set a difficulty and let dice roll. There is a lot of backstory in this adventure. Much of it may not even be revealed to the PCs, even if they manage to stop Fuller’s plans.
Speaking of things that the players aren’t likely to know in the adventure backstory, there is an element of Fuller’s story that I think is unintentionally sounding a wrong note. At most, the PCs will probably learn that Fuller is a deep cover agent with multiple identities. However, her history includes her hiding her Jewish heritage due to Russian antisemitism. That’s a compelling backstory for this era. But then the character that hid their Jewish identity ends up being part of a potential conspiracy free former rulers of the planet, and she’s using her abilities to secretly control almost everyone on the base. It’s not intentional. It’s not a critical plot. It’s just one of those things that may be interpreted in an unfavorable light.
Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.
This is a solid investigative adventure, and it plays well with the more structured Mythos history established in the Cthulhu Awakens core rulebook. It establishes that the game is about using the Mythos as a story element, and not just retreading traditional Cthulhu Mythos tropes. That said, I know there will be some people that expect this to be a little more horror heavy.
There is also just a lot going on in the backstory, and if I were running this, I would have to sit down to map places where the backstory could bleed through, if I wanted to make it more meaningful. In some places, there are areas where it can be naturally communicated, but those areas of the adventure aren’t clearly called out or highlighted, making those fine points a little trickier to remember.
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I’ve been spending far too much time giving out my opinion on concepts and events, and not nearly enough time giving out my opinion in a focused manner, specifically related to RPG products. Let’s start to turn that around a bit.
I’ve mentioned this product, and the surrounding product line, on social media a few times, but that’s not quite the same as doing a review, so let’s settle in and start looking at The Player’s Guide to Norrengard, a supplement from Lazy Wolf Studios for Tales of the Valiant.
Warning, this one is going to go a little long, longer than it would for products a lot bigger, but that’s because it’s got a lot of player-focused items, which I want to look at with at least a little bit more scrutiny.
Disclaimer
While I have purchased several Lazy Wolf Studios products before, I have also received some products as review copies, and this is one of those products. I have not had the opportunity to play with or run a game for someone using these options, but I have already been working with elements of this supplement in Shard Tabletop to set up a session zero, with some of my players picking options from this source.
Thrones & Bones: The Players Guide to Norrongard
Lead Designer, Art Director, Publisher: Lou Anders
Editor: Misty Bourne
Cover Art: William O’Brien
Interior Artists: Margarita Bourkova, Justin Gerard, Ksenia Kozhevnikova, Dio Mahesa, William O’Brien, Aleksa Stajsic, Bryan Syme
Cartographers: Rob Lazzaretti
Initial Graphic Design & Layout Concept: Invisible Rocket
Norse Language Consultant: Trond-Atle Farestveit
The Saga of the Layout
This review is based on the PDF version of the product. The PDF is 52 pages long, with the following breakdown of page count:
I am a fan of the art in this book, which manages to be thematic to the Norse inspiration, adventurous and animated in appearance, and bright in color. Even with multiple interior artists, there is a consistent feel across all of the pieces.
The individual pages are parchment colored, with dark brown headers and black lettering. Most of the book is set up in two column layouts, with the exception of the chapter titles, which have about a half page of art and a single column introduction of the topic. There is a very light alternating watermark of knotwork and a stylized dragon throughout.
I am always happy when publishers make sure to clearly credit contributors, and this book goes one step further and gives a bio of the various people involved in the production of the book, usually one or two paragraphs. I know that some products are going to live under the tyranny of the page count, but this is a welcome sight that I would love to see more often.
The Setting
While this isn’t primarily a setting sourcebook, there is enough material to explain the context in which all of the options in this book reside. This setting is based on the setting author Lou Anders created for this Thrones and Bones book series. This setting takes a lot of inspiration from Norse folklore, but it stands out a bit from some other Norse themed 5e SRD products, in that Norrongard, the central land to the setting’s framing, doesn’t go raiding.
The current High King has suspended the practice, so what we get to see is more of a country that has a martial tradition but aren’t sending warriors off in longships to raid on a regular basis. This is a land made up of farmers and merchants and craftsfolk, albeit a setting where there are a good number of people that remember when raiding was supplemental to Norrongard’s other daily activities.
The setting doesn’t assume everything that exists in a typical D&D or Tales of the Valiant campaign setting. Humans, Huldrafolk, Dwarves, and Elves are the most common adventuring peoples, with Goblins and Gnomes being less common, and halflings, kobold, and orcs not appearing. Dwarves and even some frost giants trade with the humans, and many Dwarves live alongside humans. While there are multiple Elves in the setting, the Svartalfar are the ones most common to Norrongard, although their nation sends agents to spy on and sabotage other species rather than trade or negotiate with them.
This book provides the family of gods worshipped in the setting, although it only introduces them and what their portfolio is, but doesn’t ascribe specific domains to them, in game terms. The gods used are very archetypically similar to the Aesir and the Vanir, but they aren’t directly representing those gods one for one.
Conflicts in the setting involve troll raids, the undead, linnorm dragons, people scheming against the current high king, and some of the Norronir that are ignoring the king’s prohibition against raiding. While most of the creatures in the setting are influenced by Norse folklore, they are commonly encountered (at least by adventurers), and have the big, bold traits that are common to D&D-esque monster.
The lead character in the Thrones and Bones books was introduced to many of the characters via his ability to play the titular game, so it gets a few pages explaining it as well. I like that the description of the game is approachable and feels very authentic, and I like the setting element of people wagering their high end, customized sets of playing pieces.
One thing I find very compelling about the setting is that this is a land where your average adventurer probably grew up on a farm, not raiding other countries on a longship. It’s a perspective that doesn’t get used as much when Norse elements are introduced into a game, and that shuts out many aspects of Norse-themed stories that can otherwise be told when you have a more broadly peaceful setting as your baseline. It allows for more interaction with social structures and political maneuvering than a Norse setting that’s more concerned with only warbands. I’m not saying those are bad, I’m just saying those are easier to find.
Engaging with that setting does bring up one thing that a GM will need to keep in mind and work with their gaming group to address. This is a setting that still engages in slavery. While it’s not a permanent state that cannot be changed, that slavery doesn’t end with the death of the slave, but is enforced for four generations, assuming the slave doesn’t pay off their debts and buy their freedom, which is a possibility, and not uncommon.
The text doesn’t endorse slavery, nor does it condemn it. The inclusion is going to be a non-starter for some players, and that’s something that has to be respected, but it’s also not something that’s central to a lot of the narrative. In fact, I don’t recall it being much of a plot point in the novels at all. That said, I would have been more comfortable with a sidebar discussing this more directly with GMs and players, pointing out that this is wrong, but that due to the fact that there are laws enforcing reasonable treatment and allowing slaves to benefit from their labor, allowing them to make money to buy their freedom, that can sometimes lead people that would otherwise oppose slavery to ignore how wrong it is to own another human, even with rules.
I’m not against having that as a setting element, I just am less comfortable if it’s meant to be a setting element that a heroic character won’t see as a societal evil. In fact, given the transitional period Norrongard finds itself in, for players that do not want to avoid the topic, it’s a great roleplaying topic and goal to engage with, outside of direct clashes of swords and spells.
There is another aspect of the setting that could be more directly addressed, but I appreciate how it is framed in the narrative. There are two subclasses that are traditionally reserved for women, however, whenever this is mentioned, it is clear to point out that whether someone is a woman is based on who they are, not on any biological determination made at birth. I would love to see some interesting guidelines on how to address gender roles, even ones that are less oppressive, in a longer campaign treatment, but I also like that you don’t walk away from those entries wondering if transphobia is an additional barrier.
From a setting standpoint, I don’t know that there is enough setting information for a GM to take this and spin a whole campaign out of it, but having read through some of the adventures for the setting, this gives enough detail to provide additional context for the adventures, and to allow the GM to introduce broader setting elements into them if they want to do so.
Game Elements
There is a lot about Tales of the Valiant that I like, but I also think that it needs an infusion of more flavorful material. A lot of what was included in the core book is foundational, but with the limited number of options in the book (see above, I get the tyranny of word count), it could have used more colorful options not striving to be broadly archetypal. That’s one of the reasons I was very interested in seeing these rules. The number of different options is as follows:
Some of these options are similar to the core elements of Tales of the Valiant, and some mirror one another. For example, Humans, Elves, and Dwarves all appear in the core rulebook, but there are some tweaks to them making them more aligned with this setting. Three of the barbarian subclasses follow the same pattern but with different patron animals. Two of the talents are setting specific martial arts, with a similar benefit, and then unique elements based on the form.
Lineages and Heritages
As mentioned above, we have a few returning friends among our lineages. The full list is:
Humans and Dwarves are mechanically the same as the Tales of the Valiant version of those lineages. There is a little bit of setting-specific lore in the lead-up to their statistics. Elves are similar but actually gain an additional benefit section.
There are five different types of Elves in the setting, though the Svartalfar are the ones most closely associated with Norrongard. The Elves are differentiated by their connection to Sky, Sea, Mountain, Forest, and Earth. That gives us the following subgroups:
Tales of the Valiant already has similar mechanics in the entries for Kobolds, Smallfolk, and Sydereans, so this works fine, and actually . . . I think these work very well with traditional D&D Elves as well and maybe I like this better than the Tales of the Valiant Elf?
Frostborn are the children of a frost giant and a human, and they aren’t meant to be common, but the setting has multiple noteworthy individuals that are Frostborn, so they get included on that basis. If you know me, you know that any kind of giant-related option is going to catch my attention. Nothing especially surprising here. They have resistance to cold and powerful build. Honestly, I wish they had a little bit more. At the very least, a higher movement rate due to their stride.
The Elves in the setting are Norse folklore mixed with some Tolkien and D&D influences to produce something a little bit unique from those sources. The Huldrafolk are more like some of the Norse stories of Elves. They are Fey, not Humanoid, and they can charm once per long rest, as well as use their hidden tail to slap someone. It’s a setting detail to point this out, but since the Huldrafolk are trying to remain undetected, casually tail-slapping someone isn’t usually done. I enjoy the Huldrafolk, and I think they give a fun additional option for players.
I know there is an advantage to not being Humanoid in some circumstances, but I feel like the benefit is going to vary a lot depending on how likely the GM is to throw in things like spells that have a restricted effect on non-humanoids. I wish the Beguiling Gaze would let you choose your spellcasting stat, instead of assigning Charisma. Charisma makes sense, but it also potentially makes this less effective for that one time you use this without using your spell slots if you have a Huldrafolk druid or wizard. That said, while a lot of more recent 5e D&D design allowed for this flexibility, I noticed some Tales of the Valiant options that defaulted back to setting a single stat for abilities like these, so it’s actually in keeping with the current design for the game.
Before I move on to heritages, I wanted to interject something about the Frostborn, and the wider umbrella of current design trends. It is a problem to portray “half” races as being unable to be accepted by either of their parent’s people. The terminology “half-X” brings up some uncomfortable connotations. But I don’t think erasing options like half-elves or half-orcs is the right way to go. I think the narrative needs to move away from being rejected, the terms need to be revisited, and we need to move away from only having humans with some other humanoid as a parent, but we don’t need to erase people that have a background that includes parents of different cultures coming together. I mention all of that to point out that the Frostborn does all of this. The discomfort they feel doesn’t come from Frost Giants or Humans rejecting them, it comes from literally being halfway between human and giant-sized. They aren’t half-giants, they have their own terminology that respects them for being who they are, while also acknowledging where they came from. This is a template to look at.
The Heritages that are available include the following (with my very quick interpretation of the benefits of each):
Each of these is most closely associate with a specific Lineage, but isn’t limited to that Lineage, acknowledging that people are affected by the culture where they grew up. The Dwarves of the setting are a prime example of this since it’s as common for them to share the Norronian heritage with humans as it is for them to have the Dvergian heritage, which indicates a Dwarf that grew up in the dwarven settlement under the Dvergian Mountains.
The Hidden is the heritage associated with the Huldrafolk, the Ymirian is the heritage associated with the Frost Giants, and the Shadow Heritage indicates someone who grew up in the underground city of the Svartalfar. Some of these take a little more work to justify when it comes to mixing and matching.
A human living on the border of Frost Giant lands, closer to his giant neighbors, but helping facilitate trade, isn’t too hard to see. It’s a little harder to envision someone other than the Huldrafolk intentionally disengaging with other societies and learning how to sneak around and hide, although it would be interesting to see the changeling story from a different angle, with a human raised by a Huldrafolk parent in their ways.
It’s also interesting to think about those rarely seen, but still present, options being mixed in with this. It seems odd to have a human or a Dwarf raised in a Svartalfar city, given the paranoia of the government there, but what about a Goblin? Would a Gnome, here or there, end up living and working with the Dwarves of the Dvergian Mountains? This is why I really enjoy the Lineage/Heritage split because it opens up this kind of conjecture for character-building and roleplaying. I also appreciate that in a specific setting, these heritages can have a bit of a stronger flavor to them than some of the broader ones presented in the Tales of the Valiant core rules.
Class Options
Let’s take a look at what we have when it comes to subclasses. One thing to note up front is, the setting has a certain feel, and that means, there aren’t Norrengard specific subclasses for every class. Earlier in the guide it mentions that if you want to play people with classes that aren’t common here, that’s fine, but it probably means those characters aren’t native to Norrengard, or they were, and learned skills from someone elsewhere. Our subclasses are:
There is a certain irony in that I wish there were more barbarian subclasses that allowed you to roleplay a character with less of a supernatural connection, but I also really like our trio of barbarian subclasses, in that they root the barbarian in the more traditional, more magical lore of the Berserkr. They have some magic about them, but it’s also related to the magic that a lot of the old stories associated with them.
In theory, you could have presented all three of these as the same subclass, and have the barbarian choose which shirt they were adopting when they picked up the subclass, because they all have certain things in common, and other subclass abilities that are distinct, but linked by theme. But, if you don’t have to worry about page count, I like splitting them out so they can each have enough space to feel like they are distinct.
Each of these subclasses needs a special shirt to access their subclass abilities but can make a new one if they lose their current one. They gain an animal-themed natural attack when they adopt the subclass, thematic resistances, and the ability to count their animal-themed attack as magical with their next subclass benefit, an ability to commune with the spirit animal that inspires them (the divination ritual) at 11th level, and an animal-themed ability that either gives you a kicker to your attacks or boosts your allies, at 15th level.
I like subclasses that tell stories. I am not a fan of subclasses that are designed around the idea of “What if we give this class these abilities they don’t usually have, and then build a theme around those abilities.” One of the best measures of this is, does this class feels like they are uniquely their subclass on a regular basis from the time they take the subclass, and yes, these all check that box. The abilities don’t all build on the same mechanic, which is probably my favorite way to unify the theme, but they are all built on the same story, and I like that. They follow a similar pattern to the core rulebook subclasses, although it feels a little like the 11th and 15th-level pattern is flipped, but that’s deriving an opinion from a sample size of two and isn’t that important.
I am going to admit my biases here. I think fear works fine in the 5e/Black Flag paradigm, especially compared to how some editions handled it. But it feels like it’s missing something to make it fun to engage with, so anything that heavily interacts with fear or the negation of fear doesn’t excite me much. The Courage Domain cleric is fine. Courage makes sense for the setting, and getting martial weapon proficiency encourages getting up close and personal to plant a great axe in someone’s face. But resistance to fear is like the gaming equivalent of a healthy snack. I like that additional resistance to damage given at 11th, but Sacred Strike feels a little late in the progression and feels like it’s very “you” focused on a level where some clerics are getting an “us” focus.
When I told one of my players, who is getting her degree in Anthropology, that one of the options in this book was the Volva druid, she was very excited to see how that translated to the game. There may be a way you could have gone the cleric route with this, but I think there is something about the feel of someone with a magic staff tied to the Tree of Life that is just the right kind of priestly trapping that skews more druid. I think they made the right call in the design.
The Volva is all about the staff. Like most 5e era dependencies, if you lose it, you are never more than a short rest away from making a replacement, but it reinforces the importance of the item. Your staff lets you cast a few divination spells a number of times per long rest without slots, based on your Wisdom modifier. I’m still getting a handle on ToV best practices, because I’ve seen abilities use both proficiency bonus and ability bonus as a basis, and I’m still trying to discern if there is a pattern on when to use one over the other, but that’s not a unique issue to this subclass.
The Galdr feature is similar to the Divination wizard from the 2014 rules, but that makes sense for this subclass, and that’s a cool ability. The 7th level ability is kind of wild, but I think I’m here for it. You can use your wildshape to turn into a minor Norn, and when you do so, you can reverse an action or a movement you just committed to, removing the effects of whatever happened. When you use this ability you gain a level of exhaustion, which makes sense, and is thematic, but it means that people may be a little less likely to want to use this ability unless they are really sure that their last action or movement was a disaster.
The 11th level ability fits with the stories of Volva, but it also breaks with the theme of this subclass so far, getting “fate-based” abilities. You create a localized storm that you can move around to damage foes, and it’s a neat effect that you can trigger “when you use the seidstafr as a spellcasting focus,” meaning you are manifesting this without damaging your action economy, as long as you need to use your staff to do something else. It does lock you out of casting augury or detect thoughts, but if you need to zap someone with a tiny thunderstorm, I don’t think you want to be performing divinations anyway. It’s not a big limitation, but it is kind of a neat thematic element to reinforce that your power is dependent on how the staff does what it does.
Your 15th-level ability lets you cast a higher circle divination spell without a spell slot, once per long rest, which is a definite boon but isn’t boosting your combat presence. However, you’ve had a persistent damage effect that you can just summon when you cast other spells since 11th level, so that’s kind of a consolation. Despite the slight break in “game” theme, which wasn’t a break in “lore” theme, I think this one holds together well and does something new with the druid, that still feels like a druid subclass.
The Shield Maiden fighter is fun. You get shield abilities, from hitting people with a shield to using shields for your dex saves, providing a better bonus when you guard someone else, and finally just trapping a weapon with your shield. Shield Bind is cool, but feels like it hits a little late. Otherwise, this is a fun subclass that is on theme for a Norse setting and also on theme for someone who wants to play a shield specialist.
I don’t think I’m against subclasses that are restricted to a particular type of character, and I like that both the Agent and the Bat Rider have a prerequisite that can be either based on lineage or heritage. I think there is some room to play with that kind of cultural specialization and setting detail. I’m not sure I would have put these in a general player’s guide, thinking about the kind of characters you may make up to play some of the adventures for the setting, versus some broader archetypes. I may have saved these for a full setting book, but that’s me.
That said, I love the Agent’s abilities, and how it reflects a spy/assassin trained by a society to send them into dangerous situations to cause havoc. The 3rd level base of this subclass is gaining a number of tricks that augment your actions or movement, which you can use a number of times based on proficiency bonus . . . not ability score. Later on, you get advantage on initiative and can hide at the start of combat, then you get the ability to reroll attacks where you would have caused sneak attack damage when you miss, and finally, at 15th level, you can use a light weapon to just shiv anyone within reach. That’s a great 15th-level ability, and I like this as a spy/assassin subclass.
The bat rider is cool, however . . . you get a large creature, and a lot of your abilities are based on using that large flying creature, which inherently means you may not be able to use your class abilities in some pretty standard adventuring situations. I’m also kind of surprised this isn’t a ranger subclass, since it has to do with a close affinity for an animal and doesn’t have much that interacts with other core rogue abilities, like skills, tools, or sneak attacks.
The Warlock Pact has your PC making a pact with The Norns, so you’re trying to benefit from knowing what’s coming up, while also helping them make sure the right things happen at the right time. You get advantage on initiative, and I like that over a boost, because, well, fate could have you roll low on both dice. Your additional spells feel very thematic, either messing with someone’s probability to do something, knowing something you otherwise wouldn’t, or making someone do something they don’t want to do.
Weave of Fate goes back to the “roll some d20s and record their rolls to replace rolls later” well, and I would be a little less receptive to that since we’ve already seen that with the Volva, except there is a fun spin on it here. One die is able to alter your fate, and the other is about altering someone else’s fate. It’s a nice way to tie this back to threads of fate and destiny, by putting a slight restriction on the mechanic. Regarding their next, ability, at 11th level, I like the ability to damage something that hits you with something you are resistant against, as a general concept for a subclass ability.
The 15th level ability is something that I’ve seen several Warlock subclasses get, a variation on Hurl through Hell, but I love this one, because of the reason that it causes psychic damage. You show them the wider weave of fate and how insignificant they are against the enormity of all reality. I’m not sure I, myself, not a character, wouldn’t take psychic damage if I thought about that one too much.
Backgrounds and Talents
There are four new backgrounds, and I’m going to try not to take too much time on these. The new backgrounds are:
These do your standard background jobs, i.e. providing skills, proficiencies, and equipment, as well as letting you pick from one of three talents. Where I think these shine is in the Adventuring Motivation. Most of them serve as a really good explanation for why you would be adventuring, a really good campaign seed to hand to the GM to let them weave into the campaign, or both.
As an example, as a housecarl, you’re jarl may have died, or you may have been dismissed from service . . . but have you considered that maybe you just want everyone to think you don’t work for your jarl anymore and you are working on a long term plan for them?
The Freefolk background is a great example of something I touched on earlier in this review. You can tell a great story by having a background where you were set free from being a thrall, but you need to make sure everyone at the table is comfortable with that being a character element that one of the PCs is going to have as a foundational element. It is a strong story element, it’s just one that has to be employed carefully.
This section is also a very strong example of why adding some actual story weight to a background can make them a useful part of creating a character and contributing to a campaign, rather than something that gets reduced to a proper noun that gets to be the dumping ground for a mechanic that you decoupled from a problematic element, but somehow didn’t just eliminate by rolling the assumption into your starting ability score numbers. But surely no company would do something like that.
The three additional talents are noted as being alternates that you could let anyone from one of the previously listed backgrounds take, instead of the three talents listed for each background. Dirty Trickster and Glima Master are similar, in that they allow for unarmed attacks using dexterity instead of strength, increase your unarmed damage, and then give you a kicker ability, either a penalty from a dirty trick or an additional bonus action to shove or trip. Avid Gamer is all about tying everything back to the name of the book series, by giving you proficiency with a game and a boost to playing other games as well, and my favorite part of the talent, you can make insight checks based on how they play the game to get answers to questions about the person you are playing. You don’t need to ask questions to which you already know the answers (sorry, I got caught up with playing chess, Charles and Erik, you know the whole thing).
Spells (and the Butter Cat)
There are eight new spells in this section, which are as follows:
We’ll come back to Create Butter Cat. Eye of the Valkyrja is fun, in that it frames the debuff as the Choosers of the Slain paying attention to the target of your spell.
Freeze Air or Water can damage in a specific circumstance, but otherwise, it does what it says. Ice Armor is interesting, because the material component is another one of those things that makes me wonder if the spell is meant to be hard to cast, or it’s just very specific flavor. I don’t know many people who carry a whole bucket of water so they can cast a spell, so this spell might require another spell to fill the bucket to begin with. Ice Shield is a slightly less aggravating-to-the-GM version of Shield that just imposes disadvantage. Ice Sword gives you a cold damage-based melee weapon, but it’s a little less flexible than other weapon-conjuring spells in that it doesn’t let you use your casting stat to attack with it, but you can throw it and then summon it again as long as you’re concentrating.
Kvir’s Fortune is a “buy now, pay later” spell, giving you advantage, then disadvantage. Sky God’s Vengeance gives you a concentration-based persistent damage effect, which you can shift from ice, to lightning, to thunder, to wind, with each damage type calling for a different save, meaning you might be able to figure out what your opponent is good or bad at regarding saves, and shift accordingly.
Then there is the best spell in the whole product, Create Butter Cat. When you create a butter cat, it exists for one day. You make it out of yarn and cat whiskers. It then proceeds to go out and absorb up to five gallons of milk and returns it to you. If anyone damages the butter cat, it hurts you. But you’ve got milk. But the best part about all of this is that sometimes a butter cat doesn’t cease to exist at the end of the spell, it just starts to act like a normal cat. Except made out of yarn and whiskers, and able to absorb vast quantities of milk.
Hostile to Bad Reviews
This product just oozes with personality and presents some strongly Norse-themed options that feel like they would be appropriate in any game with Norse elements, but also make perfect sense for the setting for which they are designed. This is a strong showcase of what you can do with some of the underlying concessions native to Tales of the Valiant, making good use of the split between lineage and heritage and adventuring motivations, and showing how those things can be used to convey roleplaying hooks, setting details, and personality.
Eager to Experience the Rough Road
It’s not something the product does a bad job of presenting, but I do wish there were a little more guidance on both the narrative inertia of a setting with slaves, as well as a discussion of safety around the topic. Humans and Dwarves make sense to include, just to highlight that they don’t change, but they don’t change. Every once in a while, a strength can be a weakness, and the very strong setting personality presented may push a couple of options, like the bat rider, into less than immediately useful territory.
Recommended–If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.
If you like the feel of D&D 5e from the 2014 rules, you should probably be taking a serious look at Tales of the Valiant, and if you are taking a serious look at Tales of the Valiant, you should be taking a serious look at the Player’s Guide to Norrongard. For a product created early in the life span of a game by a third-party publisher (albeit one that’s worked with the game’s producer before), it’s a great showcase for where Tales of the Valiant/Black Flag products can go, if designers embrace and understand some of the unique elements of the game.
#008000 #800000 #800080 #BlackFlag #BlackFlagRoleplaying #ffcc00 #LouAnders #Norrongard #Norse #NorseMythology #PlayerSGuideToNorrongard #TalesOfTheValiant #ThronesAndBones
I’ve been spending far too much time giving out my opinion on concepts and events, and not nearly enough time giving out my opinion in a focused manner, specifically related to RPG products. Let’s …
Something I hear a lot from people is “what even is a ranger?” I’ve seen people argue that if someone is a stealthy archer, they count as a ranger. I think that’s an oversimplification. The foundational text for rangers, The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t use ranger as a generic term for scouts or guides. Ranger in The Lord of the Rings has the same connotation that paladin has taken on in Dungeons & Dragons and other games. In other words, “paladin” isn’t just a knightly warrior.
That said, we don’t get a chapter full of information telling us exactly what rangers do, and what makes them special, just that they do seem to be special, that they seem to be a particular calling. It also doesn’t help that while we know rangers are special, and they are looking out for dangers in the wilderness and gathering news of growing danger, some of what we know about rangers, we know because of Aragron, and it’s not always easy to extricate what is special about Aragorn, versus what is special about rangers.
Absolutes
Nobody should be getting absolute abilities. Someone being good at something in the game should still require the player to engage with the rules, instead of ignoring them. Rangers can get lost, it’s just not likely. Rangers can help people find food and shelter, but that should make things last longer, not remove whatever you want to track for resources as a concern.
Animal Lore
Rangers should be good with animals. A normal animal that isn’t compelled by something malevolent probably won’t want to hurt a ranger, as long as the ranger can reach out to the animal and calm them down. On the other hand, I don’t think rangers should have an animal companion as a mandatory feature. It should be optional.
Rangers being able to calm animals down is a good ability. Rangers being able to speak with animals at some point in their career? Also another good ability for rangers. If you really want to do something we haven’t seen before, what if rangers have resistance to damage from beasts? Something that shows a ranger knows how animals work.
Rangers can have an animal companion, as an option. But it would also be interesting if that manifested, not just in different actual animals or different stat blocks for flyers or land creatures, or whatever. But what if those companions had an express secondary ability. You have a hawk? You get a special ability to gather information at range. You have a snake? Beyond just doing poison damage, does that open up new conditions to inflict? Just something beyond a stat block with different movement rates or hit points.
Combat Style
If Drizzt wasn’t the origin of two weapon fighting in rangers, and I’ve seen some designers say that’s the case, I don’t know what ranger “story” inspires a dueling style that is usually associated with swashbucklers rather than woodsy types that may or may not be good at stealth and ambushes. That said, I’m not against it as a possible combat style.
As much as I missed my plate armor that my 1st edition AD&D ranger had, I agree that rangers shouldn’t have armor that doesn’t let them move fast and potentially lets them hide out in the wilderness. I’ll go one step further and say, shields don’t feel especially woodsy. I don’t know that I would say rangers shouldn’t be able to use them, just that maybe it’s not something they should have a dedicated style to reflect.
Archery makes sense, but it also shouldn’t be the only option, or the only option other than two weapon fighting. It shouldn’t even be the only ranged option for rangers. I can easily see a wilderness based combatant throwing daggers, hand axes, or spears, rather than shooting a bow.
I know I mentioned that shields don’t feel like something a ranger wouldn’t have exceptional talent with, but I’m fine with them having two handed weapons. A lot of that is that I can picture a lot of rangers using versatile weapons that can be used one or two handed, in two handed mode when they go toe to toe with a specific foe, once they track them down.
We’re going to get into this a little in the “guide” section, but rangers are often portrayed as wilderness guides or protectors. That means rangers should have access to fighting styles that help them protect others.
Guide
Rangers are often portrayed as guides and protectors of others that aren’t as woodsy or outdoorsy as the ranger is. If we look back to Aragorn and rangers from Middle-earth, you can see why earlier editions restricted rangers to good alignment, but I don’t think hanging mechanics on alignment is great.
That said, keeping roads clear and escorting people traveling across the wilderness should be something rangers are good at. Some might do that because they want to protect the innocent, but no matter how special and mystic rangers are, I don’t think there is an issue with rangers that escort or patrol for money, or those that work for a particular druid circle, so they don’t really worry about anyone that isn’t a member of that circle.
Because of this, having the ability to protect others is rangery, but I also like the idea that rangers can grant their allies some benefits in the wilderness by telling them what they need to do. It might not even be a bad choice between working with an animal companion, or having the ability to boost your allies on the road.
Hunting
Rangers are wilderness and weapon focused characters, so hunting feels like its a natural element for rangers. Early editions gave a wide bonus on certain opponents. Other editions made the ranger pick a really specific subset of enemies. All of that pushed the rangers towards hating a certain thing, rather than being a skilled hunter.
My preference is for rangers to be able to carefully observe a target, and once they do they get some kind of benefit. It can be a bonus to hit, a bonus to damage, but I kind of like the idea that it does something like inflicting conditions. But definitely “do a thing to show you are studying a target, get a combat benefit, probably being limited by being focused on hunting a single thing at a time.
Mysticism
I think sometimes rangers as spellcasters or not spellcasters kind of misses why rangers have spells. Aragorn had something about him that was beyond just the normal, mortal abilities of a human. Some of that was due to him being part of the royal line of Numenoreans, but there was a mystique about rangers in Tolkien, and like most things in Tolkien that had an air of the supernatural about it, that mysticism was kind of subtle and vaguely defined.
So my take is, it’s fine for rangers to have some kind of mystical abilities. In fact, they probably should have mystical abilities, to reinforce why there is something special about rangers. But because that mysticism was subtle, I think the ranger needs to be able to establish their wilderness lore and hunting and all of those abilities before the mystic abilities start to kick in and potentially overshadow whatever else they have going on.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want them to have spells, but I do think having a custom ranger spell lists helps tailor spellcasting into that supplemental mysticism. If their spells help them do what they already do, but they can do it without the spells, that’s probably a good start. On the other hand, if you don’t want them to be full on spellcasters, giving them more subtle supernatural abilities is fine too.
Wilderness Lore
Rangers are people that spend a long time in the wilderness. They feel natural there. At a base level, this usually translates into tracking, but when everyone can track, it doesn’t always feel satisfying to just get a bonus to making those checks compared to others, because if you both make the check, the bonus doesn’t matter. You can’t do something someone else can’t do.
Ideally, a ranger gets something extra when they successfully track something, like information that other people would not get, maybe beyond “this is where they went,” and “this is how many there are.”
Stealth also falls into this category. Its also another thing that other classes can do, so again, just getting a bigger bonus in the wilderness isn’t always as satisfying. Ignoring impediments like terrain that slows a ranger down is a good kicker to this, as is being able to move at full speed when they use stealth.
Some games have made it harder to surprise rangers, and I like the concept of a ranger being vigilant. Whatever surprise is in your game system, the ranger doesn’t have to worry about it when they are in the wilderness.
As far as the survival aspect, it’s good if the ranger is better able to survive in the wilderness, but not every game really emphasises some form of survival. I do like the idea that rangers recover from fatigue in the wilderness as an expression of that toughness.
I like the idea that a ranger setting up a campsite might grant people who camp there a special benefit. The ranger knows how to make people comfortable out in the wild, and maybe even know how sleeping under the stars may be better than sleeping in an inn.
https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/08/21/what-makes-a-ranger/
#Aragorn #Drizzt #FavoredEnemy #FavoredTerrain #ffcc00 #Gondor #LordOfTheRings #MiddleEarth #Numenoreans #Ranger #Scout
I’ve said this before, but I am really grateful that game lines can be supported electronically between larger releases. There are a lot of games that I really want to see remain visible, and these electronic support releases, either on a company website or on a place like DriveThroughRPG, demonstrate that the game is still being actively supported.
Today we’re going to look at an adventure for Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition. If the title Return to the Valley of the Whispering Titans sounds familiar, that may be due to your familiarity with the Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition adventure, The Valley of the Whispering Titans. This is both an updated version of the original adventure, as well as a sequel, with a new follow up scenario included.
Disclaimer
I was sent a review copy of this adventure by Green Ronin Publishing. I have not had an opportunity to run or play the scenarios in this product, but I am familiar with the AGE system and have played it in the past.
Fantasy AGE Journeys: Return to the Valley of the Whispering Titan
Writing and Design: Jesse Decker
Development: Jack Norris
Editing: Matt Click
Graphic Design & Art Direction: Hal Mangold
Art: Rael Dionisio
Cartography: John Wilson
Journey Through the Product
Return to the Valley of the Whispering Titan is a 20-page PDF, with the pages breaking down like this:
The PDF is in a two-column layout, in full color, with the background, text, and header in light tans, browns, and greens. There is a map of the valley, and five pieces of artwork detailing NPCs, locations, and potential encounters.
What Are We Returning To?
In the background information, we find out about the location, its ongoing curse, and some of the malefactors currently inhabiting the valley. On either side of the valley, there are various enormous skulls, three on one side of the valley, and two on the other, with one near the passage out of the valley. The reason the valley is called the Valley of the Whispering Titans is that whenever someone is traveling through the region, they can faintly hear the voices, the voices of the beings to whom the skulls once belonged.
The oldest of the potential adversaries in the Valley, unless you count the titans themselves, is Mallorsa. Mallorsa would have been a mountain nymph, but because she was bonded to the land, and didn’t come into existence until after the titans’ skulls found a home in the valley, she’s become warped by the titans. She doesn’t directly work for Callem, but she does work in what she considers the general interests of the titans.
Callem Ressmil is a druid who was concerned about how the local settlements utilize nature, and after wandering into the valley, Callem began hearing the voices of the Titans. They convinced him that they could give him the power to protect nature. After years of dwelling in the valley, his connection to the titans began to physically change him and has warped his perspective on what it means to protect nature.
The Valley Huntsman is the spectral remains of a hunter who died within the Valley, cursed to continue haunting the region. Whenever an animal dies within the Valley, the Huntsman feels it, and can travel to that location. He can also animate the body of the recently fallen animal for his own purposes.
In addition to the three NPCs above, there are animated vines, swarms of giant mosquitos, corrupted animals, and the vinedolls, humanoid-shaped plant soldiers being grown for a push into the environs near the Valley, to expand the influence of the titan skulls. Each of the skulls has its own traits. The skulls are:
The three main NPC villains are all solid, evocative archetypes. I especially like the recurring danger of the Valley Huntsman inhabiting animals and using the animals form to attack the PCs, then leaving once the body has been worn out. Modifying stunt points and spell points is a solid way to model the subtler effects being caused by the presence of the skulls, and I like that the PCs could warp themselves or touch the corruption of the skulls to gain access to some abilities. It helps to underscore the idea that while it may not be possible to reach Callem, his story is a tragic one that could potentially happen to others who wander into the Valley.
Into the Valley of the Titans
For characters of level 5th through 8th
The first adventure is a standard location-based adventure. There are some hooks that may give the PCs more reasons to explore more of the Valley than they would if they were just trying to travel from end to end, but for now, there isn’t one specific nefarious plan they are trying to thwart. As the PCs travel through the Valley, they may decide that they need to limit the ability of the evil to spread.
Because it’s location-based, this adventure not only assumes you are running for experienced adventurers, but it’s assuming you have a place to put this Valley in your setting, and you have a reason that the PCs need to cross through the Valley to the other end. Because of the geography of the Valley, the PCs are going to pass near the Learning Skull and the Skull of Fear.
At the threshold of the Valley, they are attacked by corrupted animals, which are meant to be obviously acting in an unnatural way. The animals that attack them are animals that should not be working together, like boars and wolves. This is meant to let the PCs know that whatever is going on in this Valley is a perversion of the natural order.
If the PCs travel to The Learning Skull, they encounter Mallorsa for the first time. She doesn’t hide her nature as a fey creature, but she does feel them out to see if they are likely to follow the will of the Skulls, or if they are going to be a problem. Assuming they don’t give Mallorsa potential Titan Skull Cultist vibes, she points them toward the Skull of Fear for more answers. If the PCs are already aware that there are problems with the Valley, Mallorca is willing to portray herself as an innocent spirit trapped within the Valley by the power of the Skulls. If the PCs head to the next Skull as she suggests, the Huntsman has an ambush set up for them.
There are a few more ambushes on the way through the Valley, some connected to the Huntsman and his ability to inhabit dead animals. If the PCs make it to the Skull of Fortune, they find out that they can redirect control of the Skull’s special abilities to themselves, and away from Callem. Mallorsa may visit the PCs again at this skull, worried about what they are going to do with their knowledge, and she tries to convince them that there is a specific order in which they need to redirect the Skulls, which is a lie to give her time to set up ambushes and warn the others.
If they decide to use what they learned at the Skull of Fortune, they can cross back over the Valley to visit each Skull again, and if the PCs avoided the Skulls even when they were right next to them on the trail, this is the chance for them to run into those encounters. They can also move to the Shaping Skull, which is where Callem will confront them.
In addition to wresting control of the Skulls from Callem, the PCs can perform a ritual at each Skull to quiet the Skull’s voice and lessen its control over the Valley. If they do this at each Skull, the Valley will be free of overt evil and corruption for a long time.
If you aren’t going to come up with a reason for the PCs to enter the Valley, I think you may need to juggle some of the components of this adventure if you want to present it as a location based adventure where the PCs have all the information they need to start engaging with sites. I think the Skull that lets the PCs know they can wrest control of the Skulls from Callem should be the Learning Skull, mainly because it’s right next to the stream where the PCs are likely to see it and interact with it without going out of their way. If you make this change, Mallorsa’s deception about visiting the Skulls in a specific order can be introduced immediately.
While the adventure explains that interacting with the Skull of Fortune they learn how to attune to the Skulls, the ritual to quiet the Skulls is introduced near the end of the adventure and isn’t something they specifically learn at any site. It might work better to let the PCs know that they can quiet the Skulls, and Mallorsa can try to deceive them to tell them that they need to attune to the Skulls before they can quiet them, or else the people “trapped” by the Skull’s power will suffer. Otherwise, it seems like the ritual to quiet the Skulls is something they would learn if they asked around after they leave, and it may be challenging to keep the Valley a fresh encounter area if they decide to return and crisscross it all over again.
Rise of the Death Titan
For characters of level 5th through 8th, with an intervening adventure needed if you played through that one
If you performed the quieting ritual, the baseline assumption is that the Valley is quiet for a century. This adventure assumes that either you didn’t quiet the Valley, or somehow, Callem or whomever replaces him as the servant of the Titan Voices learns how to reverse the quieting. Corrupt creatures start coming from the Valley to the nearby lands to harass them, letting the PCs know that evil is still there, and is moving from passive to active.
The structure of the adventure is to take the PCs to each of the Skulls again. From the PCs’ point of view, they are getting clues as to what Callem or his replacement is up to. From Callem or his replacement’s point of view, they want the PCs to travel to each of the Skulls and shed blood there to seal in the ritual sacrifices that have been performed at each site. Each Skull has a clue to what is going on:
If the GM wants an additional encounter, there is an area of the Valley where an army of vinedolls is being grown, to serve the Titan as it’s conquering army. In this adventure, the GM is told that some routes through the Valley can just be clogged by animated vines, which is a little heavy handed, but it does make it easier to keep the PCs on track to engage with the content in the Valley. I also think it’s more acceptable to have this kind of “bumper” available for a follow-up adventure that’s meant to be an epic confrontation, as this adventure is.
The Reaping Skull doesn’t have a clue at the site, because this is where Callem/Callem’s replacement is performing the ritual to allow The Reaping Skull to rise as a 70-foot-tall skeletal colossus. In theory, this is just the first of the Titans to be animated in this manner, but one is enough to cause an enormous amount of damage.
What happens if the PCs pick up on the idea that they are shedding blood at each site as part of a ritual? Mallorsa is held in reserve in this adventure, so that if the PCs manage to skip a site without shedding blood, she will sacrifice herself to activate that site.
I always worry that “the ritual is ending just as you get here” stretches credulity, but the implication in this case is that the Titan is still powering up. Callem summons its full form, doing so before it’s fully charged up, so it’s not so much happenstance as it is pulling the switch early. In theory, PCs can outlast the Titan by keeping it active for an hour, burning out all the power that it’s accumulated.
This second adventure is a good example of how tropes that may be problems, can be structured to pay off. Mallorsa’s sacrifice is a good way to show the fanatical degree that she and the others have been manipulated by the Titan skulls. The Titan animating for a final fight isn’t just in time so much as, “okay, wake up for now, finish them off, and then you can sleep until you’re meant to wake up.”
My biggest wish for this second adventure is that a bigger loophole than, “whoops, you didn’t banish evil for 100 years” existed in the first adventure. Dropping a hint about some item that could reverse the quieting, and then letting the PCs know that item has been stolen would be a great precursor to this.
The adventure mentions that you may want to replace Callem if he was killed in the first adventure, and it implies that spiritual creatures can’t attune to the Skulls, so Mallorsa and the Huntsman can’t take over for him. I was wondering if you could just make sure he was some kind of physical undead to explain why he’s still around, so I went poking around the Fantasy AGE 2e adversaries section. This is when I realized that I have grown accustomed to the Fantasy AGE 1e adversaries section as well as the 1e Bestiary.
I was looking either for a suitable replacement, or for something that would let you present him as perhaps being mutated and changed to bring him back. In the 2e adversary section, you could replace him with a Warlock, either showing him as having left his druidic talents behind or being replaced by a new spellcaster. I was looking for a good special quality to add, but none of them really sung to me.
If you have the 1e books, there are a few good candidates:
As an aside, I’m looking forward to a Fantasy AGE 2e Bestiary.
The Time Has Come
The adventure has three very evocative, archetypical adversaries as the primary antagonists, one of which has a great excuse for playing hit and run with the PCs, and another that is a great conduit for roleplaying. The setting with the giant Skulls is evocative, and the special powers is just enough mechanical reinforcement to give them additional narrative weight. The second adventure has a good “backup plan” to keep the villain’s plot moving forward, with an associated cost, and frames the final battle well.
Running Up That Hill
There could be a few more “bumpers” built into the first adventure to entice the PCs to interact with the various sites, and getting false information from an NPC that costs the PCs additional time may not pay off when measured against frustration. The start of the second adventure could feel arbitrary if the ritual to quiet the Skulls was presented as a long-term solution.
Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.
The only thing that keeps me from recommending this more broadly is that it’s a little trickier to drop a whole valley into a campaign that has been running for a while, and that both adventures are stronger together, but they require you to do your own cutting and pasting of content in between them to make them work.
While there is a lot of solid Fantasy AGE-specific mechanical effects with the Skulls and how they interact with spellcasting and stunts, the outline of this adventure works well with any fantasy RPG that’s okay with fantastical elements like 70-foot-tall skeletal titans. It wouldn’t take too much to adapt this for 13th Age, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, maybe even Dragonbane. If you’re looking for campaign settings where this would fit, the Old Margreve forest in the Midgard setting may be a good candidate. It’s large enough to have some hidden valleys in it, and the weird sleeping titans, corrupted fey, cursed huntsmen, and fanatical druids all work pretty well with the themes of that place.
If you are interested in taking a look at this adventure, or Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition, should you be so inclined, the links below are affiliate links that will send a small offering of power to me if you sacrifice some of your budget. Thank you!
#808000 #993300 #FantasyAGE #FantasyAGE2e #FantasyAGEJourneys #ffcc00 #GreenRonin #rpgs #ttrpgs #ValleyOfTheWhisperingTitan
Leigh Garland
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What Do I Know?
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