Hello! It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time to get a bit nerdy (I mean, it’s also this blog, so it’s always time to be nerdy, but this is nerdy in a particularly gaming way). I have been having a wonderful run of good luck lately (he says, knocking on wood) at being invited to play awesome games as a player—this is rare for me, I’m usually the narrator/GM—and as such I’m going to plan a few posts about some game systems in future posts on that front, but today I wanted to chat about a system I bumped into thanks to Green Ronin (a favourite here, as I’m sure you’ve noticed).

SAGE. Which is AGE, with an S.

The S Stands for Simple A system and four worlds, all in one magazine.

I feel like I need to preface here I’ve yet to be lucky enough to play in an AGE-engine game. AGE—which stands for the Adventure Game Engine system—is a system that lends itself two quick set-up and play (and has various supporting lines, like Modern, and Fantasy, as well adjusted versions for IP settings—Fifth Season or The Expanse anyone?—and also a robust online community with sourcebooks aplenty).

AGE functions on a 3d6 + Attribute modifier (and potentially a Focus) against a Target Number rolling system (straightforward, no massive pool of dice, and the distribution is well known—these are all clever choices) but also has two cool quirky side-effects.

One is a different coloured d6 (which has different names in various lines, but let’s stick with calling it the Stunt die because that’s also an S). When I first read about the Stunt die, I had a bit of a flinch, because I’m playing in a Star Wars game, and the way the Force Die works in that game can sometimes frustrate me (I’ll get into that when we talk Star Wars some day), but it’s handled differently in AGE. It does two things:

One: if you succeed, it’s a measure of how well you succeed, from a drama/narrative point of view. So, if I needed a 10 (not particularly difficult), and I roll a 1, a 3, and a 6, I’ve succeeded—that’s done—but if the 1 was on the Stunt die, maybe it’s not the most spectacular version of success, whereas if the Stunt die was showing the 6? Oh, I aced it.

Two: if you roll any doubles in those three dice, you gain Stunt points equal to whatever is on the Stunt die, which you can use to do extra things from a Stunt menu related to whatever it was you were doing. So, say I rolled a 3, a 3, and a 4 in the above example, and my Stunt die was the 4? I’ve succeeded, and I’ve got four Stunt points to play with. For an example of what you can do with Stunt points, when you’re attacking, you might maneuver some, re-load your weapon, or just settle for more damage. It adds to the dramatic options—and the built-in points also help limit analysis paralysis, though I’d imagine most players find a “groove” for the kinds of things they prefer using their Stunt points for.

There’s more to AGE than that, of course, but it’s the part that leads into what I said I was going to talk about: SAGE, not AGE, so…

Simple

Whereas AGE generally comes with a set-up of what the Abilities are; Classes, Backgrounds, Heritages, or What-have-you to give you Focuses and the like; SAGE appears designed in a more narrative sense in that right out of the gate was a discussion of how you can choose as a group what to use for your SAGE game, and while that might be overwhelming for people used to structure, my first thought was how much I loved the long-gone Everway system of assigning things to the four classical elements, and how I could toss in Spirit alongside Air, Earth, Fire, and Water and would this work for telling a Triad TTRPG session, given how mentally I themed everything that way when I was writing/creating the world?

And the answer to “Could I do this?” was pretty quickly—and clearly—sure.

Once you’ve picked your Attributes (and, to be clear, you can totally go with the tried and true, you don’t have to reinvent any wheels), then you assign ratings: one is a 4 (very good), two get a 2 (good), one gets a -2 (this is your weaker area), and the rest are 0. (So, if I stick with my Triad thoughts here, I’d give Curtis, my wizard character from the books, a 4 in Air (his specialty), a 2 in Water and Spirit (he’s not bad at those), a -2 in Earth (he mentions that’s his opposed element a few times) and a 0 in Fire (which suits a particular line of dialog or two and a few plot points from multiple occasions).

Next you create Bonds—these are statements of belief, eccentricity, relationships, etc., that fit into the game world, and you also assign a rank to them between 1 (it’s a minor thing) to 5 (this is character defining), though at the start you choose to have either two Rank 3 Bonds, three Rank 2 Bonds, or a Rank 1, Rank 2, and a Rank 3 Bond.

Again, since I was practicing with Curtis, I went with: Self-Taught Orphan (Rank 1; Eccentricity); I Refuse to Join the Families (Rank 2; Belief); More than a Coven with Luc and Anders (Rank 3; Organization). Bonds basically offer you extra Stunt points or Fortune points (Fortune is a pool you can use to affect dice rolls and the like) and I’m getting a bit into the weeds here, but the short version is that by the time I was done reading through the character generation notes for SAGE, I was nodding along and thinking this feels super flexible.

Then I got to the example worlds and learned just how flexible.

One Simple System, Four Game Settings (So Far)

Okay, the four settings included in the third issue of Engine: The AGE Roleplaying Game Magazine made the purchase worthwhile all on their own, even ignoring all the SAGE crunch (but, y’know, don’t ignore the SAGE crunch). Honestly, I felt like I was taking a master class in game setting design, and had that wonderfully familiar itch of “I want to play this… Oh, and this… Ooh! And that!” that everyone who is an adult who can’t possibly play all the games they want to play will find familiar, but there was an added little voice this time on my shoulder noting: And it’d be great for a one-shot to try it out! Because AGE—and, even more so, SAGE—doesn’t ask you for massive crunch-learning to get up and running.

But let’s talk about the four settings.

Guardians of the Key (by Monte Lin): This is a space-setting, Earth is owned (and occupied) by the 1%, the rest of us humans are scattered among the solar system in various habitats, but oh, hey, you just found an alien relics, teleported to an alien world, found out there’s a whole council of Milky Way alien folk and those relics you just found? They’re called keys, and they were long gone but their return marks you as a protector/warrior for keeping the peace—which, their return also suggests is now under threat. Welcome to the galaxy, go fight to stop it from being destroyed!

The Half Moon Department (by Katherine Schuttler): There are humans, there are spirits and living things other-than-human, and there are the dead who aren’t, y’know, good at remaining dead. Everyone is supposed to deal with their own problems, but since when has humanity (or other-than-humanity) ever been good at following rules or fitting into categories? Sometimes, you need someone who can deal with the things that fall outside the rules—and jurisdictions—of the clear-cut, defined, roles. Welcome to the Half Moon Department. Contemporary urban fantasy/horror, you play an agent who doesn’t fit the three neat boxes who is out there to deal with situations that also don’t fit in those neat three boxes. Also, those things are going to get messy.

Zarat Adventures (by Colm Lundberg): This one is desert fantasy, all sand and heat and flame and cleverly designed to be either (a) its own setting, with more than enough culture, clash, and factions to keep a game running among the three sketched out locations of main note, or (b) to be a starting point of a larger world or folded into one you’ve already got planned as a desert biome, complete with all of the above to make it feel like a living, breathing setting already existing before your heroes got there. It’s also magical—free sorcerers—as well as a powerful individual who seems to have settled the volcanic eruptions (but has, in fact, delayed them and made them build to something apocalyptic—which the heroes should probably do something about before it’s too late). The whole setting feels cinematic.

Transmigration (by Sian Ingham): Okay, I need to just say it outright: this setting fucking rocks. Think apocalypse (biological, a spore) only all the people who got shoved aside? Us queerfolk, the neurodivergent, people who just never quite fit in? The biological apocalypse is fine with us. It’ll change us, but y’know, that’s cool. There’s a breakdown of the breakdown: the stages of the fall of civilization that felt chillingly on the nose and then there’s the game-play of being, well, a being that’s now also spore. So, while the vast chunk of humanity affected by the spore basically devolve into mindless awful, some don’t, and you play as these transmigrated folk and look, the subtext here is text and I am here for it.

Have you played with the AGE system (any AGE system game)? I’d love to hear about your experiences, and if you do pick up this issue of the magazine and are considering running any of these games remotely, ohmigosh please let me know.