13th Age - Foolz!

have to wait in the worst places where no one
expects you.”
The GM buys it and tells Kasarak’s player
that Kasarak can use his Black Fang
background, so the player rolls a d20 and adds
+3 for Black Fang, +3 for Kasarak’s level bonus,
and the half-orc’s Con mod of 1, a total bonus of
+7 vs. the normal adventurer tier environment
DC of 15. If the DM thought the mountain was
particularly nasty it would be a hard check, a
DC of 20.
Opposed Rolls?
Other d20 games frequently use opposed d20
rolls that pit skill vs. skill. Our system doesn’t
do that much, partly because we’re not tracking
skills for our NPCs and monsters. We’d rather
use DCs set by the environment the skill check is
occurring in than have to figure out accurate
backgrounds/ability scores/skill checks for all
our creatures.
But of course Initiative is sort of an opposed
skill check. And if two PCs are competing to see
who is the first to do something, or who does it
better, by all means, use opposing skill checks
and award speed or quality to the character with
the better result.
Choosing Your Backgrounds
Most players choose backgrounds that help
them make sense of their character’s past. If
you’re stuck, think about jobs your character has
had. If you’re still stuck, give the job a setting.
Still stuck? Use the short list of backgrounds
below or the lists at the start of each class
section.
The fun of roleplaying diverse characters is
figuring out how your background might help
in unexpected ways. GMs can interpret
backgrounds benevolently or rule out cheesy
ploys. 13 th Age isn’t about min-maxing, so
background and skill use is meant to be about
fun in-character methods of attempting to
advance the plot.
Some players will want to choose
backgrounds that correspond to their character’s
class. The most boring way to do that is to say
“Well, I’m a fighter, so I’ll put 4 points into a
fighter background.” We usually don’t settle for
that in our games. Instead we ask players to
figure out what type of fighting their characters
did in the past. Did the fighter learn weapons as
a gladiator? A bounty-hunter? A bodyguard? Or
perhaps as a former sentient magic weapon
turned into a dwarf as a reward for long service
(which would probably also involve the
character’s one unique thing!). So long as the
GM agrees, you should feel free to create a
background story about a group that the
character was part of or perhaps a special magic
or monastic style that’s part of the character’s
past.
On Languages
It’s a staple of our fantasy games that most
everyone can speak the same language (call it
common) while individual races and monsters
have their own preferred languages (elven,
dwarven, orcish, gnollish, etc.) and that there
are even stranger Big Languages in the world
(magic languages, god tongues, Abyssal, etc.).
Our attitude toward languages is that you
should pay attention to them when it’s cool and
ignore them when it’s not. Is it cool that the orc
berserker screams “Many parts are edible!” in
orcish as he attacks? Absolutely. Is it cool if no
one understands the battlecry? Not so much.
So we assume that most everyone speaks a
common tongue and that when people say
things in other languages, anyone with a
relevant background should be able to speak
enough of the language to piece it together,
especially if they have backgrounds that make
that more likely.
But if you like games that are more specific
about languages, decide what the languages are
going to be in your campaign and then use the
adventurer-tier and champion-tier linguist feats
(see page XX) to provide access to them. Again,
if a player makes a big deal about speaking
languages as part of their background, we say
give it to them, don’t charge feats unless there’s
going to be true advantages in your campaign
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