Adventure Game Engine (AGE)
Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Adventure Game Engine (AGE)
High-Fantasy
Rules-medium
Green Ronin Publishing
The Adventure Game Engine (AGE) is a tabletop roleplaying game system designed by Chris Pramas and published by Green Ronin Publishing, first introduced in the Dragon Age Roleplaying Game, an officially licensed adaptation of BioWare's video game series. Rather than staying tied to that one setting, AGE was generalized into a standalone toolkit that Green Ronin has since reused across a growing family of otherwise unrelated game lines: Fantasy AGE, Modern AGE, The Expanse Roleplaying Game, Blue Rose: The AGE Roleplaying Game of Romantic Fantasy, and Cthulhu Awakens. Each line shares the same dice math and character-building vocabulary while reskinning them for a different genre, from grim high fantasy to hard-science-fiction space opera.
Description
Sit down at any AGE table and the character sheet looks familiar whatever the setting: a handful of ability scores, a page of Focuses that narrow down what a character is actually good at, some Talents, and a Health track that goes down rather than up. What changes by line is who's being played and what the group is doing with them. Dragon Age and Fantasy AGE put players in a class-based, sword-and-sorcery world built on the same tropes as the video games.
Modern AGE drops the classes in favor of a freeform, contemporary or near-future toolkit for playing civilians, agents, or specialists; The Expanse puts players on a scraping-by crew in a hard-edged solar system where violence is fast and often permanent; Blue Rose asks for heroes of a deliberately hopeful, consent-based fantasy nation. The Game Master narrates outcomes and calls for rolls, and underneath every one of those settings sits the same rhythm: roll, hope for doubles, and spend what's earned on a stunt table built for the scene in front of you.