PCs can have bonds to other characters and groups. Romance, rivalry, and intrigue are important to the genre and we wanted to represent them in play. And you can play psychic animals as Player Characters if you want! Another major feature that Blue Rose introduced was relationship rules. This game introduced a completely new system for psychic abilities, since those are more in keeping with the romantic fantasy genre that Blue Rose emulates. In 2017 we used Fantasy AGE to power the new edition of our Blue Rose RPG. Indeed, the Companion will expand just about every aspect of the rules, and introduce vehicle rules (and vehicle stunts!) to the game as well. That will be expanded even more in this year’s Fantasy AGE Companion. Dragon Age had a magic system that was specific to that setting, so I designed a more intuitive variant for Fantasy AGE. We had another chance to bring in new roleplayers with Titansgrave, a show on Geek & Sundry we did with Wil Wheaton that featured the Fantasy AGE rules and a new science fantasy setting we created.
Some monsters also got unique stunts to reflect their capabilities.įantasy AGE, released in 2015, put what we’d learned from Dragon Age into a more general ruleset. Then later we added other types, like roleplaying and exploration stunts. The combat stunts proved so popular that we also added spell stunts in the initial release on Dragon Age. Also, because doubles come up on 3d6 rolls almost 50% of the time, stunts were something that happened regularly. In the playtests it soon became clear that this was the game’s “killer app.” The nature of the system meant that there was tension in every attack roll. These could be spent on a menu of various maneuvers, allowing you to inflict more damage, disarm foes, and so on.
If you made a successful attack and you rolled doubles on two of your three d6s, you generated a number of stunt points. Stunts began as a dynamic critical hit system. Something it could offer that other RPGs didn’t have. What the game really needed though was a hook.
Conveniently though, Dragon Age only had three classes (mage, rogue, and warrior) and that served to keep the complexity down. Since Dragon Age: Origins used a class and level system and that was a structure familiar to many video gamers already, I decided to stick with that. I wanted to design a game that was easy to learn and teach, and approachable to new players. When BioWare approached Green Ronin about doing a RPG to tie-in to their upcoming game Dragon Age: Origins, I thought it was a great opportunity to introduce video gamers to tabletop roleplaying. The Adventure Game Engine began as the system for the Dragon Age RPG. In this article I’m going to talk about the core of AGE and how the rules have evolved for various games. This year Green Ronin will publish two more AGE games: Modern AGE and The Expanse. I originally designed it for the Dragon Age RPG in 2010, and since then we’ve used it to power two more RPGs: Fantasy AGE and Blue Rose. Over the past eight years, the Adventure Game Engine (AGE) has become something of a house RPG system for Green Ronin Publishing.