New Endzeitgeist Review: Awesome Alternate Icons

Endzeitgeist has just reviewed Icons of Parsantium and given it 5 stars and his seal of approval!

He says “Richard Green’s Icons of Parsantium are absolutely STUNNING….The icons herein are very much tangible; they are characters with names, histories etc….and yes, they may die and fail and struggle. What we have here are proper characters with ambiguous, versatile uses…that lose none of the icon’s required gravitas. Even if you’re not interested in Parsantium (why?), I pretty much can guarantee that, if you’re even remotely interested in a more down-to-earth or sword and sorcery-esque version of 13th Age, the icons here will provide inspiration galore for your own designs…or make for great scavenging material.”

Read the full review.

Icons of Parsantium Review

Lester Gash has reviewed Icons of Parsantium on his Thoughts of a Part-Time Hobbyist blog. He says “Icons need to hook the players in and encourage them to engage with the setting. Parsantium’s icons do just that. They have personality in spades.”

Read the full review

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…

Latest News

Yesterday I finished writing Icons of Parsantium, my forthcoming PDF-only sourcebook detailing 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.

Word count stands at just over 14,000 after I added an icon relationship rolls section to each icon, giving example results for 6s and 5s rolled on icon relationship dice in Parsantium. If you have 13 True Ways and have read the sections on Drakkenhall and Horizon, you’ll know the kind of thing I mean.

Kate is hoping to start editing and layout shortly after the Easter break, so hopefully the book will be available in the next couple of months 🙂

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.