The Bard's College

Hello and welcome to The Bard's College. I am The Bard and today we'll be diving into the social classes, backgrounds, and optional origins rules for the Modern Age RPG. One of the things I really love about Modern Age is that it's a classless system. When you create a character in Modern Age (or Cthulhu Awakens for that matter) everything feels so open to you. Your concept is never limited by arbitrary divisions into predesigned archetypes. Now I realize my opinion here might be somewhat biased by the years I've spent playing certain other games *cough* & *cough* but background influence notwithstanding it's a feature I really love in ttrpg design. By Justin Nichol , CC BY 4.0 , modified from its original state There's not really much to say on the lack of character classes. They do exist as an optional system presented in the Modern Age Mastery Guide , but since the classless nature of the game is part of why I love it I’m skipping these. Maybe some other ...

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 ...