Last year I was listening to the Reading D&D Aloud podcast with Rob Heinsoo, co-designer on the 13th Age RPG, as that week’s guest. They’d just finished up a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition of the game, and he was discussing some of the mechanics they used.
This one was about something called an Escalation Die. One of the big complaints in almost any roleplaying system is combat and how long it normally lasts. Enter the Escalation Die. The concept was this: every round this Die increased by 1 and added to your character’s To Hit rolls. This would increase the ability of the heroes to win the fight and possibly end the combat a little quicker in the process.
I’d never heard of such a thing, but it immediately made me wonder about what other treasures 13th Age might be hiding.
With a random gap in our schedule, I happened to mention all of this to Egg Embry, and he said he might be able to get us a game of 13th Age through some of his media side contacts. I’m not sure exactly what dark magic he used, but sure enough, we secured a two-hour session with none other than Rob Heinsoo!
One Unique Thing
Normally with two-hour sessions you get pregenerated characters, but Rob wanted us to see a bit of the character creation, so while the abilities and powers had been listed out on the character sheet – the “cool stuff” was coming up with our “One Unique Thing”.
Basically, 13th Age has you come up with something extremely special about your character, and in theory, it could be anything you’d like. “Anything” is a large box to figure out, so Rob gave a couple of examples (which I wish I could remember them all), but it was this one which told me he wasn’t kidding when he told us to think BIG:
“I am a former god who has fallen from the pantheon.”
I mean, you can’t get much bigger than being a god.
From a roleplaying perspective, this really gives a player a chance to place their mark on not only the world but potentially the entire cosmos. Not only that, but I can imagine hearing a player’s “Unique Thing” would get all sorts of story ideas swirling around in the GM’s head. While most of the campaigns I’ve been fortunate enough to play in throughout my life have been open to pretty much any backstory elements I might have suggested, to see it as a integral portion of the game was very cool to see.
So, we went at coming up with our Unique thing. Egg had his bard whose instruments were from skinned trolls (so the playing kept them from fully regenerating). Lee had a Draconian whose claws were his weapons. And I was playing an Elf Ranger…
As an aside, I’ve thought about Elves in our roleplaying games. Here are beings who are effectively immortal. And I always wonder how they could possibly live so many lifetimes without going mad from the pain and loss of loved ones. From the sheer number of memories weighing them down. At some point it would have to be too much and overwhelm them completely.
To stop this inevitable slide into madness (or enlightenment?), I’ve thought it might be cool if every 100 years or so you must return to your homeland and have a Renewal Ritual performed which would excise some of those memories from you. It might not be a complete mind wipe, but by reducing some of your experiences, it would let your mind reorder itself.
Defragment your mind.
In that vein, I said my Elf had forgone such a Renewal and now suffered from Swiss cheese brain. All those memories were still in there, but they could come and go as they pleased making it so there would definitely be a lot to roleplay if this was an ongoing campaign.
What I really appreciated about this was Rob listened to each of our Uniques intently. With each of our ideas, you could see his mind racing to find threads to potentially use as well. Even though this was a 2-hour session, I felt like he was about to come up with a full campaign based on some of those ideas.
Playing the Game
The actual play was a brief encounter where we fought some wannabe dwarves and got to experience 13th Age a bit. Given the lineage to D&D we had a leg up on much of the terminology, but it was still interesting to see how things like the Escalation Die worked in practice. The combat lasted around 4 or 5 rounds, and by the 3rd round that extra bit of bonus To Hit that the Escalation Die provided showed how there really wasn’t going to be too much chance this combat would go on for very long.
I also liked the fact that even if you missed an attack, you still did some damage (3 for my character). So many times during a typical combat if your dice are working against you, there can easily be those moments where you feel like you aren’t contributing anything to the fight at all. If it goes long enough where other characters are potentially going down because they’ve effectively had to play one man down… it’s just a really big “feel bad”. Having damage be more based on your level and not on whether you had a Longsword or Short Sword worked really well and became one less thing to track. Yes, it wasn’t much damage, but it could still add up over the course of multiple turns.
Rob Heinsoo had such an exuberance for the material (and for roleplaying in general) you couldn’t help but be sucked in by him. I’m a bit envious of any of those who get to have him as their GM for that reason. I can only imagine what those campaign sessions look like. I’d like to thank him for taking the time to do the session with us and showing us a little bit about the game itself.
13th Age 2nd Edition is now available at:
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A reminder that I am currently running a Kickstarter for my latest comic book: You Must Be This Tall To Ride #1.
“You Must Be This Tall To Ride” is the story of a family who inherits a run down amusement park. What they don’t know is that each of the various lands: Cartoon World, Weird West, Space Pirates, etc. are actually portals to another place, another universe!
When a game of Hide n Seek results in the youngest getting lost, they are going to need to find a way to traverse worlds and get their brother back… all before Mom and Dad get home!
“You Must Be This Tall To Ride” is a Young Adult Comic Book for fans of the Old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, The Goonies, The Never Ending Story, or any Kids of Bikes style stories.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ioda/you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride-1
The Kickstarter is currently running through April 10, 2026.
John McGuire
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