Green Ronin’s AGE (Adventure Game Engine) powers their Dragon Age RPG and The Expanse Roleplaying Game. It also has two generic setting core rule books in the form of Fantasy AGE and Modern AGE. Modern AGE has been out since June last year, but there’s still no world setting for it.
Threefold is about to change that.
Written by Green Ronin’s ‘developer at large’, Malcolm Sheppard, Threefold is about to become Modern AGE’s first setting book.
Threefold is set in a Metacosm, a cross-genre collection of worlds. This means it can fit any of the characters you could create with Modern AGE; from anti-Nazi resistance fighters, urban mages and spy cyborgs. It doesn’t replace Modern AGE, and you’ll need that core rulebook to play in Threefold.
Writing on the Green Ronin blog, Malcolm Sheppard gives us some flavour for the setting;
What if you could go anywhere?
Let’s unpack that. By “go,” we mean through gates between worlds: magical portals arrayed in routes called chains. We mean using the quantum ark, which threads our waveforms through the needle’s eye of marginal possibilities to other configurations of time.
By “anywhere,” we mean blinding heavens, fiery hells, machine worlds a century ahead of our own, impossibly sharp mountain tops whose residents are sorcerer-hermits. They don’t want you to visit, but they might be the only ones able to answer some esoteric question, which might even lead you to another world: perhaps via Vigrith, plane of a thousand gates, or Alatum, where the children of lost gods rule an empire, or one of the countless planes where the Nighthost, warriors who defeated their demon generals before recorded history, pillage and conquer.
And by “anywhere,” we also mean parts of our world you thought of as legends, old and new. We mean the rotting mansions of psychic secret societies, the secret labs that make soldiers and spies, the Gray Hand where the secret world government they always warned you about meets.
We mean places that never were, or could have been, or places we fear might exist through superstition or some future dystopian twist, and places we hope exist and are sending their extraordinary agents to help us find the better path.
There are too many possibilities to count, but we’ve settled on some rough classifications. Three of them—and three secret forces behind them. But in the end, you’re the one who might determine the ultimate form of everything that was, is, and shall be. That’s Threefold.
The book is written, and there’s not going to be a Kickstarter for it. As it’s an original invention, something Green Ronin own outright, they don’t need to wrestle with licensing rules. Here’s what the launch poster had to say about it;
The world we know is one of many planes of existence. Some are alternate paths. Some are Otherworlds: weird realms where magic leaves its blazing mark through cities built on the back of monsters, and the floating warships of demigods. Finally, demon princes with wills of iron rule the Netherworlds, planes with twisted natural laws and legions of tormented souls. In ornate archways or simple alley doors, gates connect the myriad planes. You know where to find them. You’ve been initiated into the truth.
You might belong to the Sodality, an organization that protects the innocent and explores the planes, or you might be an agent of Aethon: a transhuman operative who protects Earth from strange forces, and manipulates the histories of alternative words for your AI masters. Battle gods and cyborgs, navigate the cold war between transplanar empires, and uncover the mysteries at the of Threehold.
If Threefold sounds interesting then keep Free RPG Day in mind. It’s just around the corner (15th June) and as Green Ronin are Silver sponsors it means there will be a free Quickstart from them. This year that’s going to be the Threefold RPG Quickstart.
You won’t be able to pick that Threefold Quickstart up from Green Ronin themselves if you’re at Origins. Why not? The goals of Free RPG Day is to help support Retailers and so if you want that freebie you’ll have to go find a retailer and do it fast enough before they’ve run out. Green Ronin’s Silver status means each Retailer will get free copies of the Quickstart.
Tempted? If you do manage to get hold of the Quickstart or have any other thoughts on this new title from Green Ronin let us know in the comments below.
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