Herding Dice

If you are going out to buy the latest edition of the Engine magazine #3 you will find articles about a small experiment in the AGE families of systems. This new one is called SAGE and stands for "simple adventure game engine". The fastest way to get to the parts and existing AGE enthusiast is to flip to the last article which is a conversion guide between AGE and SAGE. Here are some of the main conversions you might be interested and some of the critiques I have for the developers choices. Bonds Instead of Relationships, Class Theme, and Specializations The new element in SAGE "bonds". It uses the same mechanics as seen in FAGE 2e Modern AGE with ranks and wordy themes. I think the developers liked that it represented a small boost of resources that can be spent to improve outcome. What bonds are in SAGE do are basically an additional pool of fortune points. Each bond has a rank and number. You can spend a bond point to create a fortune point to be added back to yo...

The Adventure Game Engine has always been on the rules light side of things but the minimal number of classes make it really easy to wonder why they are there at all. Common Class Starting Advancements All classes have some similarities in starting advancement. They vary a little bit in terms of total number of advancements but not enough that we can't smooth it over if necessary. 1 to 2 starting talents (2 for envoy/warrior, 1 for mage/rogue) 0 to 3 starting class abilities (0 for warrior, 3 for mage/rogue/envoy) 1 specialization advancement 2 to 5 weapon groups (2 for mage, 3 for envoy, 4 for rogue, 5 for warrior) 20 to 30 starting HP (20 for mage, 25 for envoy/rogue, 30 for warrior) Common Class Advancements All classes have some similarities in character progression after level 1 from 2 to 20. 19 focus advancements, one for every level after level 1 19 ability score advancements, one for every level after level 1 10 stunt advancements, one for every even level 10 talent advance...