Now we're in the Monsters chapter.
The rules for monsters are deliberately simple. Again, 13th Age shows its 4e heritage with small, straightforward combat oriented stat blocks. There is an image accompanying each monster stat block, but it's more iconography than illustration. Monsters have standardized hit points and damage values, and don't usually roll for either.
The stats are simple and straightforward. The main thing to note is that many special attacks and abilities trigger on a specific roll of the dice. While I've been invoking D&D 4e a few times when discussing the designers and the overall combat focus of the game, it's important to note a significant difference between this game and that: While 4e had very crunchy, tactical, map-based combat, 13th Age's combat is very loose, simple, and geared towards "theater of the mind" play. Most of the time, the GM will be making basic attack rolls, with monster special abilities being triggered by specific rolls of the dice. Rather than the complex tactical machinations of 4e, 13th Age is able to get quite a bit of mileage out of "clickety clackety, I roll to attack-ety."
The monsters are very much the D&D standards. Orcs, zombies, trolls, and gelatinous cubes are all represented. Dragons and demons also use the categories that every D&D player has learned to expect.
There are also a few tables for quickly generating monster stats for your own creations. Overall, 50+ pages of exactly what you expect.
The next chapter is a description of the default 13th Age setting, The Dragon Empire. They make a point of reminding you that there's a lot of empty space on the map that you can freely fill outside of the landmarks that they've posted. On the one hand, that feels obvious. On the other hand, if you're accustomed to a very lore-heavy sort of setting where every building has several paragraphs of lore somewhere or the GM feels the need to lead you by the nose through the highlights of the setting, it can be good to have that reminder.
While there's a lot of information about each of the locations shown on the map, it's all very loose. There's an emphasis on plot hooks and things to do and see rather than hard details.
About 100 pages ago, we were promised magic items and this next chapter finally (claims to) deliver. The first topic is consumable magic items, like potions, oils and runes. Potions are for healing or energy resistance. Oils provide flat bonuses to certain combat stats but only for one battle. Runes provide pluses like oils, but also another sort of bonus or effect as well.
Then we get to the more typical sort of magic items: magic weapons, armor and other magical trinkets. The sort you expect from a D&D-alike or "fantasy heartbreaker."
They spend some time talking about how many items you can effectively use, which is basically "1 item per level, and no more than 1 item of each type." Also, each item carries a "quirk," a habit or personality detail that the wearer manifests which connects to the item's theme.
The items are listed by type, such as magic weapon, armor, and other categories. The descriptions, like most things in this book are terse and efficient, making it very easy to breeze over. There's one illustration per item type, which, like the monsters, feels more iconic than illustrative.
There are no prices given for any of the magic items, on the assumption that they are all too special to have fixed prices. They even discuss the idea of keeping a magic item for the length of your career rather than constantly looking out for the next higher bonus. This is refreshing, as someone who started in Third Edition D&D, where it felt like there was a constant pressure to upgrade and make sure that you had proper gear for your level or you risked falling behind.
Our next section is an adventure, so this feels like a good time to start a new post. I've been sitting on this one for long enough.
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