The Bard's College

Hello and welcome to The Bard's College. I am The Bard and today I'll be highlighting a system that I've been following for a number of years now, Green Ronin's Adventure Game Engine more commonly called the AGE System. The AGE System began its life powering the Dragon Age ttrpg as the brainchild of famed designer Chris Pramas. There's a bunch of variations on the engine at this point as the system has proven fantastically hackable, including licensed games for Dragon Age, The Expanse, and N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, as well as a pair of setting agnostic versions called Fantasy Age and Modern Age. This latter version in particular has really captured my imagination, so today I'm going to walk you through the basics of Modern Age and discuss the character creation process for first timers.  As with all the AGE System games, the foundational mechanic of the system is rolling 3d6 with two dice of one color and one of another (or some other way to flag ...

Hello and welcome to The Bard's College. I am The Bard, and as is likely abundantly apparent I continue to struggle with consistent updates across my various social platforms, this blog among them. Nonetheless I continue to push myself to continue creating and sharing because I love it. So while life may frequently get in my way and I find myself leaving spaces without updates for months or even years at a time, it is always best to refuse surrender. Thus I shall endevour to update all my spaces more frequently, beginning with this brief entry. Since my last entry a good deal has changed. I've published a few more supplements to the DM's Guild, but I've also come to hold deep moral frustrations with Wizards of the Coast. To that end, I've elected to make all content I release for WotC games a pay-what-you-want model. In this way I hope to continue contributing to the community without necessarily requiring those who enjoy my work offer financial support to WotC. ...

General announcement: The new Barbarian Path of the Ragecaster subclass is now officially published on DM's Guild. Please check it out!

Hello and welcome to The Bard's College. I am The Bard and today's materials include a pair of new subclasses for the Monk which will be headed for the DM's Guild. As always, my brilliant students have the advance opportunity to review the beta version and provide any feedback on the new content before it is finalized and released on DM's Guild.  Check out the playtest PDF HERE>> I am also keenly aware that my lectures have not been posted with the regularity I had hoped. Nevertheless the college is far from abandoned, even if my responsibilities beyond the academic do place a greater than anticipated burden upon my schedule. I have been continuing my work on the Metroidvania module previously mentioned and will hopefully have a worthwhile update soon (complex map design is certainly a process). Additionally I've been hard at work getting our first few DM's Guild releases formatted and finalized for release. As one might expect this is slow going as the ...