Episode 26: Chaos Rises!

In this episode which we finally get around to talking about 13th Age Glorantha. Ludo and Jörg are joined by Becca of “Dames & Dice” fame on the Iconic Podcast, and by Evan Franke, of “Exploring Glorantha” fame. Becca is part of the Iconic Production Podcast, a bunch of podcasts and channels dedicated to talking about 13th Age, which includes 13th Age Glorantha. Becca has Glorantha experience not just from a multi-session game of 13th Age Glorantha, but also from two RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha games (one of which she talks about in episode 5 of Dames & Dice). Evan has already been on this podcast together with J-M in episode 19 of our podcast, talking about Jackals and Ancient World-Building. He may be more familiar to you as the source of deep Glorantha lore on the Exploring Glorantha YouTube series. He jokingly describes himself as a “hanger-on” of Iconic Production podcasts and actual plays. As Ludo expounds on the history of Glorantha as a setting for games, Becca drops that she has the board game: a copy of the original White Bear and Red Moon, gifted to her at Christmas last year by her dad who did a lot of roleplaying in college along a couple of AD&D 1st edition books. 13th Age Ludo admonishes people to not just buy the 13th Age Glorantha book thinking of it as a full game as you need the 13th Age rules along with this book. (Ludo claims it has to be the full rules book, but it is possible to work out the rules from the SRD which is free from Pelgrane Press) Becca outlines 13th Age: a fantasy D20 roleplaying game which feels somewhat similar to D&D 5th edition with a few exceptions (no skills, backgrounds, the idea of failing forward) and being a lot more heroic in scope than your usual start into a D20 game. Ludo quotes descriptions of 13th Age as a mix of D&D 3.5 and D&D 4th edition, usually in reflection of its authors’ involvement in those two iterations of D&D. Ludo comments on the tone