Through Monday, March 30 we present the Age of Ambition Bundle featuring Age of Ambition, the forward-facing fantasy RPG from Tab Creations set in a world evolving into a perilous modern age. The moon called Trystell, home to many magical peoples, is rapidly moving from the equivalent of our Middle Ages into a time of new technologies and magic. Tinker Gnomes craft matchlock firearms. In the shantytowns of Lower Melanoc, dwarven missionaries preach new religions to refugees from the turbulent Yirdril Lands. Ships with magnetic compasses find markets overseas; merchants at the new foundries import metal ingots and export ingenious clockwork devices. Even the goblin kingdoms are making peace. But off the coast a Pirate Queen has built a fleet – the tyrannical king’s goons try to suppress unrest – and no one’s quite sure about this new paper money. An amazing future draws near, but who will shape it? By making discoveries, overthrowing tyrants, righting wrongs, and clawing their way to higher status, heroes can help guide the world into a brave new era.
Age of Ambition is inspired by fantasy fiction like Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series, Daniel Abraham’s The Dagger and the Coin, Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard Sequence, and Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage trilogies. Age of Ambition is set in the fantasy world of Trystell, home to different peoples from humans and gnomes to ogres and minotaurs. Trystell is a moon orbiting a gas giant, and has a hostile sister moon that once tried to colonize the world.
Trystell’s Dark Ages ended with the Lunar Occupation. The advanced Blaugh’ock civilization introduced many new technologies and ideas: the empirical worldview, the crossbow, gunpowder, lunar magic, and (unfortunately) colonialism. With these, Trystell was jolted to a new age of reason. But the Lunar Occupation also did great harm to the world’s social fabric. Families were torn apart; borders were imposed. Despite the success of the Native Revolts, it took civilization a long time to recover and to fully absorb the new technologies and social methods. Today these changes continue, as the world leaves the medieval trappings of its past behind and enters a brave new era of exploration and discovery.
Trystell is rapidly evolving both socially and culturally, from its equivalent of Earth’s Middle Ages into what might be called the Early Modern era. It’s grown beyond medieval fantasy on its way to something new. Age of Ambition heroes are agents of social change – inventors and agitators, spies and civic leaders – who bravely help guide the world into an uncertain future.
Age of Ambition adapts the card-based Saga Machine rules system seen in Tab’s Shadows Over Sol (in our Sept 2024 Shadows Over Sol Bundle), adding new systems for magical inventions, bonds, status dynamics, and raising your social class. You flip cards from a standard poker deck to determine your action’s “consequences,” Fate-like conditions you can confer on other characters. But watch out for jokers: They bring critical failure.
This all-new Age of Ambition Bundle gives you 20 rulebooks, supplements, campaigns, scenarios, and play aids for an unbeatable price well below the going rate for a smilodon hide from the Bellmoon Mercantile Trading Company. Pay just US$9.95 to get all ten titles in our Core Collection (retail value $50) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 321-page Age of Ambition core rulebook, plus the Consequence Cards and GM Screen Inserts; six sourcebooks – Character Options and Campaign Options, the Bestiary and Expert Bestiary, the Game Master’s Toolkit, and Heights of Power; and the introductory adventure Out of Shackles.
And if you pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $19.95 to start, you’ll level up and also get our entire Campaign Collection with ten more titles worth an additional $67, including the full-length campaigns What Lies Beneath and Strange Bedfellows, plus their poster map sets, along with seven standalone adventures: The Butcher’s War, Escape From Prison Isle, A Little Murder, Melanoc Adventures, Tainted Gold, Time Forgot, and Will to Power.
This Age of Ambition offer falls prey to Kimba the Harbinger and her Naugual Elites, to say nothing of the Cranium Squirrels, Monday, March 30.
