At the UK Games Expo this weekend, fans queuing at the Paizo booth for a traditional high-fantasy experience were met with a brutal surprise. Jason Bulmahn, Director of Game Design at Paizo, is back at the convention running live playtests of 13 Omens, an upcoming rules-lite supernatural horror game. The departure from the tactical crunch of Pathfinder and Starfinder is stark, and the body count on the show floor proves it: across three full tables run by Bulmahn, there have been only five survivors.
Jason Bulmahn, Director of Game Design at Paizo, told Geek Native at UK Games Expo that the few players who survived “got lucky,”. Jason also explained the game’s “special dice system”, and it is easy to see how the tension and danger mounts.
The extreme lethality is entirely by design. Heavily inspired by 80s horror cinema, 13 Omens is built explicitly for one-shot sessions where character death is the expectation rather than the exception. Because of this, character generation is fast and highly adaptive to the specific scenario. If the story takes place at a picturesque lake house, players choose from classic slasher archetypes like the jock, the cheerleader, or the nerd. If the scenario shifts to an isolated Arctic research station, the system seamlessly adapts to assign appropriate roles, such as head of security, quartermaster, or radio operator.
The tension at the table revolves around that special dice system, which utilises a single, shared bag of six-sided dice. Players begin with exactly eight “safe” dice in the communal pool. As the game progresses through a cinematic three-act structure, the Game Master, referred to in 13 Omens as The Host, adds “Omen” dice to the bag. Whenever characters must make a check or resolve an action, they draw between two and four dice from this shared pool. After the check is resolved, the safe dice and any drawn Omen dice are normally returned to the bag, but there is a brutal exception. If a player is wounded by an Omen die, that specific die remains in front of them as a persistent mark of their injury. It stays out of the bag until that character inevitably perishes. Upon their death, all of their accumulated Omen dice are dumped back into the communal bag, drastically increasing the statistical danger for the remaining survivors.
What makes the system particularly devious is this shared probability. If you are playing sensibly, but your fellow party members make foolish decisions that require drawing from the bag, the risk profile of the pool fluctuates. The cascading effect of a character’s death flooding the bag with Omen dice means the jeopardy scales rapidly as the night wears on. It is a mechanic designed to foster paranoia and squeaky tension early in the session.
The reaction on the ground from seasoned tabletop players has been a mix of confusion and delight. While waiting to speak with the Paizo team, Geek Native observed a dedicated Pathfinder player blinking in genuine surprise at the sheer brutality of the rules-lite horror format. It makes perfect sense, however; while Paizo’s flagship roleplaying games are beloved, they are distinctly rules-heavy, and there is a clear appetite for something faster and deadlier.
Bulmahn pitched the concept for a rules-lite game directly to the board at Paizo, and 13 Omens is the resulting nightmare. Following its baptism by fire at UKGE, North American players can expect to get an early look at the game at Gen Con later this year.
Correction: 31st May. This article was updated to reflect Jason Bulmahn’s clarification that players draw two to four dice per check and that Omen dice remain with wounded characters until their death rather than immediately returning to the shared bag.
Quick Links
- 13 Omens’ mailing list.
