13th Age - Foolz!

information and opportunities that fall into your
lap thanks to using your negative relationship
need to help you have bigger and better
confrontations with your enemy, rival, or jilted
lover—however you choose to phrase the
conflict!
Often you might find that enemies of your
rival see you as an opportunity to strike against
that mutual enemy. You might get help, wealth
and resources, and even magic items from quite
unexpected sources, some of which may not be
entirely to your liking. If you are a renowned
enemy of the Diabolist, for example, you might
get help from the Crusader or the Great Gold
Wyrm. Choosing a negative relationship with a
good or ambiguous icon is tantamount to asking
for dramatic and unexpected twists to be thrown
into your life . . . often.
In addition to aid from others, icon
relationships provide characters with special
knowledge. For example, if the heroes are
exploring an ancient graveyard, a player with
any relationship to the Lich King, positive,
conflicted, or negative, might be able to discern
some important pattern or underlying structure
of the tombs that the group wants to know more
about, or that will help the group achieve their
goal.
A negative relationship with a thoroughly
villainous icon is more in keeping with the
heroic lifestyle, but you should expect that the
assistance you get from a negative relationship
may end up being more directly confrontational
than more conventional conflicted and positive
relationships. If you are a player who likes to
choose negative relationships with the icons,
you must want conflict. And you’ll get it.
Remember, when you assign dice to a
relationship, you are the one deciding how
useful this relationship is going to be. Back that
up by being creative with how your relationship
applies to events in the game. Negative
relationships just require more work to make
sense of.
Changing Relationships
When your character achieves champion level
(5th), you gain an extra relationship point. Use it
to increase an existing relationship by one die or
gain a 1-point relationship with a new icon to
match your character’s story thus far. You can’t
break the relationship point limit maximum
(yet). Of course, you can save the extra
relationship die and decide to apply it later,
when there’s a dramatic campaign event or a
solid story reason for it.
At 5th level, or any time thereafter, you can
switch an existing relationship point from one
icon to another, including to a new icon. You
owe the GM and other players an entertaining
explanation of what this big change represents
for your character personally, of course.
When you reach epic level (8 th ), you gain
another relationship point, which you can use to
increase an existing icon relationship by one die,
including up to 1 point over maximum. As at 5 th
level, if switching a relationship point from one
icon to another makes sense for your 8 th level
character, go for it.
Gamemaster
Rules and suggestions for using icon
relationships in play start on page XX.
BACKGROUNDS & SKILL
CHECKS
Selecting your backgrounds is one of the fun
parts of character creation where you get to
make up story elements to add to the game.
Each background is a piece of your character’s
history that contributes to your character’s
ability to succeed with non-combat skills.
Instead of assigning points to skills as with
other d20 games, in 13 th Age you assign a certain
number of points (varying by class) to
backgrounds. With backgrounds, you still
choose how to allocate a certain number of
points that function as bonuses to d20 skill rolls.
But these points aren’t pegged to individual
skills. Instead you put them into backgrounds,
which are broad categories of experience (cat
burglar, for example) rather than specific
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