Table-Tested Review of the “13 Omens” Preview
Our local RPG Club had their yearly Halloween Event recently (I wrote a - German - blog post about it!) and I wanted to try something new and Halloween appropriate: “13 Omens” was the perfect choice. The game is currently live on Kickstarter and offers a story-focused horror experience.
- Game Designer: Jason Bulmahn
- Publisher: Paizo
- Page Count (Preview): 63 (preview rules + adventure), 32 (second adventure)
- Publication Year: 2026 (Preview), 2027 (planned release)
The Mechanics
Basic roll resolution is done with 2d6 and skill-based target numbers. You are drawing from a dice pool with shifting odds for rolls. It seemed inspired by a mix of Brindlewood Bay and Ten Candles.
The complexity is low enough to be easily explained in full before a session, but high enough that dice odds can be somewhat optimized by players (increasing your odds to succeed also increases your odds to become wounded).
The rules assume that the game is highly deadly, but in my game, I met an edge case where everyone being only one wound away from death means that the game as a whole becomes less deadly (because wounds remove a dangerous “omen die” from the pool). This is probably fixable by letting the players roll on something until someone dies in the last act, which will start to snowball (because the omen dice will return to the pool), but it’s not super intuitive to run and means that you’ll need to have an eye on players rolling enough.
The Adventures
I ran the adventure “Bequeathed”, which is about a group of estranged siblings who are being called home for the reading of their father’s will and learn of the family curse - and how to stop it once and for all. I liked the pitch, the playable archetypes, the themes, the descriptions, the individual scenes. But it's way to linear and without meaningful choices, other than the differentiation between win or fail in the end. It’s a collection of skill checks with a prewritten story wrapped around it.
The other adventure included in the preview is “The Haunting of Hollybrook”. It’s about a house haunted by an old lady obsessed with bad reviews of her inn. The playable archetypes are the crew of a TV series about hauntings, so this adds an extra layer in the narrative. This reads like it will be a lot more open to explore than “Bequeathed” was - the main reason I didn’t run it were some content warnings (especially suicide) I didn’t want to bring to a public event, otherwise it sounds liek a lot of fun.
I also tried to write my own adventure, together with a friend of mine! We wanted to see how far we can push this game away from a pre-defined plot and it worked well enough, even though it is a considerable amount of work to design a full adventure. Design-wise we drew a lot of inspiration from Brindlewood Bay to do it: for each act we had a list of clues to give out and the next act started when a certain (predefined) conclusion has been reached. Depending on the license Paizo provides for this game, we might publish it in the future!
Conclusion
I think that 13 Omens will work really well as a genre-agnostic horror system. The basic roll resolution works well and allows focus to be on the story, instead of number crunching. It’s easy to run and the customizability of the Archetypes allows you to tell the story you are looking for. What this isn’t, though, is a storytelling game that allows for open storytelling - it is still a very much GM-led game.
The game is currently in development, so adventure-wise there will still happen a lot and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with! Prep-wise it should be enough to read a published adventure once in order to run it.
If you want to tell your own story instead a prewritten one, it will need a certain amount of prep: creating Archetypes with their own Aspects, Perks and Gear and preparing enough of a story that can be told in the three-act-structure the game needs. But it’s not impossible and we had a lot of fun doing it.
