Icons of Parsantium – now on sale!

Very pleased to announce that Icons of Parsantium is now on sale at drivethrurpg.com and Paizo.

Icons of Parsantium is a supplement for use with the 13th Age Roleplaying Game and Parsantium: City at the Crossroads,  featuring the fifteen most influential NPCs in the city and the world beyond. These movers and shakers will also prove useful for GMs running Parsantium games using the 13th Age icon relationship rules with other incarnations of the world’s bestselling fantasy RPG – or indeed anyone using the setting.

“The blueprint for 13th Age campaigns set in a world of Byzantine intrigue” – Rob Heinsoo

The influential NPCs described in depth throughout the book include the rulers of kingdoms, powerful priests, arcane and martial orders and their leaders, and monstrous beings, both malevolent and benign. Your player characters can ally with or work against the machinations of these icons, thereby driving the story of your campaign in interesting new directions.

Icons of Parsantium contains:

– Full two-page descriptions for 15 icons
– New PC races – the gnoll and the vanara
– Five pages of icon relationship dice results and adventure hooks
– Secret Knowledge for the GM
– World Map

Icons of Parsantium – coming soon

While everyone was out enjoying the hot weather and celebrating 4th July this week, we’ve been working hard on Icons of Parsantium, getting it ready for publication in the next couple of weeks.

Editing and layout are done, front and end matter has been added, and the cover is finished. Next up is a final proofread of the text, then creating and uploading the PDF to drivethrurpg.com and Paizo.

Like Parsantium: City at the Crossroads, the project has become bigger than originally planned and has taken longer than expected, but I’m very happy with how it’s turned out. I hope you enjoy it too!

Latest News

We’ve both been very busy with our day jobs so work on Icons of Parsantium has been slow-going since my last update.

However, I do have one bit of exciting news to make up for it – Rob Heinsoo has very kindly written an excellent foreword to the book in his own inimitable style. Rob’s connection with Parsantium goes back a few years when he found out I’d named a villainous rakshasa in my campaign after him. Fortunately, he took this in good spirits, and since then, he’s given me some great advice on how to adapt Parsantium’s NPCs into icons. I’m thrilled to have him write the foreword to Icons of Parsantium.

Today I’ve been wrestling with InDesign as I make some final revisions to the text before editing, including adding a short section to each icon describing their NPC champions and followers. This has played havoc with the two-page layout for each icon but I’ve every confidence Kate will be able to fix this when she starts editing.

More news and hopefully a finished cover to follow soon….

Revisions & Edits

This weekend I’ve made a few edits to Icons of Parsantium, rewriting the True Danger sections for each icon so they provide cool adventure ideas the GM can use, and also reworking the introduction. I even managed to update the text in InDesign without breaking anything (I hope) 🙂

More news to follow…

Latest News

This weekend we worked on Icons of Parsantium – my forthcoming Parsantium supplement for use with 13th Age and all editions of D&D, and featuring the fifteen most influential NPCs in the city and the world beyond.

Kate has completed the initial layout of the book in InDesign. It’s crisp and uncluttered, and should hopefully look familiar to anyone who’s read Parsantium: City at the Crossroads. Total page count is currently 45 pages, with two pages dedicated to each icon, plus an introduction, racial write ups for the gnoll and the vanara, four pages of icon relationship dice results/adventure hooks, a page of GM-only secret knowledge, and a world map.

After reviewing the layout, we spent some time sourcing a few additional illustrations where we felt we needed to break up the text and pep up the layout. This isn’t an art-heavy book, as I want to keep the selling price from getting too high, but hopefully you’ll like how it looks.

Next up, we need to turn Joe Shawcross’ excellent cover art into a finished cover design, then Kate needs to edit the text and do some final tweaks on the layout before final proofreading and uploading to drivethrurpg.com and other fine purveyors of RPG pdfs 😉

Quick Update on Icons of Parsantium

Apologies for not posting for a while – things have been very busy around here. I’m happy to report that Icons of Parsantium is in layout, with the PDF looking like it will be at least 40 pages as each icon write up is too long to fit on a single page.

We’re also moving the icon relationship roll results and the secret knowledge sections to the back to avoid having adventure hooks and DM-only information on the same page as the icon write ups. Hopefully, this should make it easier to print the icons out and share them with your players without them reading stuff you don’t want them to see.

Once the layout is done, Kate will be working on editing and proofreading the text. More news to follow shortly…

Icons of Parsantium Cover Art

Here’s the superb finished cover art by Joe Shawcross for Icons of Parsantium. This forthcoming PDF product details fifteen important and powerful NPCs from the world of Parsantium for use with 13th Age or D&D and Pathfinder games using its excellent icon relationship rules.

From left to right: Jagadamba, the Witch of Flotsam; Faisal al-Aqil, the Great Caliph of Aqhran; Naelere, the Dragon.

Sneak Peek: Icons of Parsantium Cover Art

Here’s the sketch Joe Shawcross has drawn for the cover of Icons of Parsantium, my upcoming collection of NPC movers and shakers from Parsantium and beyond, for use with 13th Age.

From left to right, Jagadamba, the Witch of Flotsam, the Caliph of Aqhran, and the Dragon, Naelere.

The final image will be in full colour and is going to look awesome if the sketch is anything to go by!

Icons of Parsantium

Quick Poll: 13th Age Icons PDF

Someone asked me yesterday if there was any chance of a PDF collecting the 15 icons I wrote for 13th Age and Parsantium. I’ve been thinking about doing this so it would be useful to gauge how much interest there would be.

I’d be looking to price the PDF at around $2 and lay it out in the style of Parsantium: City at the Crossroads with minimal art to keep the cost down.

Would you buy a PDF like this? Please vote in the poll or let me know what you think in the comments.

13th Age: 15 Icons

The Rajah, posted earlier this week, completes my 15 icons for 13th Age and the Parsantium setting.

Here’s how the icons line up in my campaign. Feel free to tweak these as you see fit in your own games – you might decide that the Grand Master of the Blue Lotus is secretly up to no good, or that the Witch of Flotsam is a useful ally for your PCs.

Heroic Icons: Usually the Archbishop, the Dragon, the Grand Master of the Blue Lotus, the Maharani and the Platinum Knights; possibly the Caliph and the Basileus.

Ambiguous Icons: Usually the Caliph, the Lady of the Summer Kingdom, the Basileus, the Emperor of the Jade Throne and the Water Lords; possibly the Archbishop.

Villainous Icons: Usually the Boss of All Bosses, the Gnoll Khan, the Mummy, the Rajah and the Witch of Flotsam; possibly the Water Lords.

I’ve had a lot of fun writing the icons and hope you’ve enjoyed reading about them too! Please do let me know what you think in the comments.

And if you haven’t already purchased Parsantium: City at the Crossroads to use with 13th Age, you can save 20% on the print and PDF editions until 30th September at drivethrurpg.com and paizo.com 😉