At the end of last year, I was unsure if Manticore—my app for generating encounters for 13th Age—had a future with the announcement of 13th Age second edition and it’s changes to the encounter building rules.

Part of my reticence was due to the state of the build system, and the user of React.js. A week ago, I decided to give Svelte and Svelte Kit a shot to see what it was like, and that has resulted in a near complete rebuild of the UI and build infrastructure.

The major user facing changes so far are:

• Support for the 13th Age 2e playtest rules for building encounters. These rules are much simpler, and appear to scale up to larger party sizes better. This is currently available behind a toggle control, which currently defaults to the existing first edition rules.
• The filters section has been split out so that individual monster selection happens after filtering is done, allowing you to winnow the pool using the filters, and then refine the selection. This also provides a new workflow where you can just use Manticore to quickly find viable monsters for building your own encounters.
• Each filter group has a toggle switch to clearly indicate if it is enabled or disabled. Under the hood this makes no difference, but it is much clearer for end users.
• The Generate button is gone. Instead, Manticore will kick of encounter generation whenever the selection changes.
• Second edition includes notes about monsters that need care, or are probably a mistake to include in the table on page 176. This is reflected in colour coding of monsters in encounters. A future change may allow you to filter these monsters out before generation occurs.

I’ve also addressed some small issues and bugs. Most notably, I discovered that there were some cases where the app would underspend resulting in subtly easy encounters. That is no longer the case.

The application will stay in alpha status while 13th Age 2e is in development. I don’t anticipate any major issues in getting it finalised once the rules are.