Aetrimonde

Heroic Roleplaying in a World of Swords, Sorcery, and Steam

I’d like to introduce Aetrimonde, a TTRPG I’ve been designing with heavy inspiration from the houserules my group used back in our Dungeons and Dragons 4e days. I’m not ready to publish Aetrimonde yet, but I’m opening up this blog to discuss its design principles, mechanics, and systems.

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Economist by profession. Game theorist, enjoyer, and designer by vocation.

  • GM Advice: Failure Modes

    Today, I thought I might talk about failure, and how Aetrimonde handles it. Failure is a looming threat in any roleplaying game: at any moment, you might make the wrong decision, or just have a horrible streak of luck with the dice. It’s my opinion that failure should matter: it should have consequences, but ideally not ones that bring the campaign to an end.

    Aetrimonde puts a lot of the burden of avoiding terminal consequences for failure on the GM. Here’s what the GMH has to say about failure.

    Before I get any further, let me just remind you readers that I have a poll open in which you can help choose what Aetrimonde’s starter adventure will be like. Go vote: I want reader feedback!

    Sometimes, an adventure doesn’t go as planned, and the characters fail to overcome a challenge put to them. Failure does not have to be the end of the adventure: in moments like these, your job as GM is to find ways that the characters can keep progressing.

    Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of failure mode with lasting consequences that you need to worry about: plot collapse and character death.

    Plot Collapse

    A plot collapse happens when the characters fail at a challenge in a way that keeps the adventure’s intended plot from moving forward, or means that they can no longer achieve a broader objective: their enemy beat them to the dangerous artifact, they failed to make it across the bridge before it was blown up, or they misunderstood a riddle and went to entirely the wrong place. Plot collapse can also occur if the players find a way of bypassing the plot, rendering the adventure moot. Regardless of cause, a plot collapse means that the adventure seems like it is about to come to an anticlimactic end. There are a few ways to resolve this, and most of them involve tinkering with the adventure to alter future encounters or even change the flow of the adventure:

    • Helpful Nudging: If the players are leaning toward a decision that would cause plot collapse, you can nudge them away from it. Depending on context, this might mean hinting that their characters can tell this is a bad decision, or outright telling them that what they’re about to do is not something you planned for and would derail the plot.
    • Regroup and Retry: If plot collapse occurs not because the PCs have outright failed but because they just can’t get past an obstacle (like a locked door, sheer cliff, or powerful guardian), you can just let them back up, gather their resources, and try again. In some cases, all they need may be a rest to regain powers, hit points, and resurgences; in others, they may need to collect tools, information, or allies in order to have a better chance of success.
    • Soften the Blow: If a plot collapse has already occurred, one option is to work around it and find some way of getting the players back in the action. Their failure should have consequences, but you can soften them so that it merely makes some future scene more challenging, or raises the stakes. If the PCs were delayed so that the enemy beat them to the treasure, perhaps this means that only half of the treasure has already been removed by the time they get there, reducing the rewards the PCs can lay claim to; or perhaps the enemy has activated a dangerous artifact from the treasure hoard but hasn’t figured out how to fully control it in the ensuing encounter, so that it becomes a hazard to be compensated for instead of an insurmountable obstacle.
    • Reroute the Plot: If you can’t soften the blow, the next best option is to rework the plot of the adventure to account for the PCs’ failure. Failing to stop a villain’s getaway can mean that they have to face the villain again in a new encounter, or that they alert other enemies so that future encounters are different or more difficult; following a clue that was a red herring can mean that the PCs are now shorter on time, and must overcome different or additional challenges to make up for lost time.
    • Sequel Hook: If you just can’t find a way to compensate for a plot collapse, that might mean that it’s the end of the current session…but a failure like that might still be a fun premise for the next adventure: what happens after the villains win? Given a little time to prepare, you may be able to set up another adventure as the logical consequences of the PCs’ failure, even reworking the parts of the current adventure that the PCs missed out on into parts of this new adventure.
    • Retcon: If all else fails, you have no way to fix the plot collapse, and the players are disappointed to have missed out on the rest of the adventure, the last recourse is a retcon (short for retroactive continuity): you simply declare that the failure “didn’t happen,” and either give the players another chance at success, or pick up as if they had succeeded. A retcon is the last recourse, because it is generally unfulfilling: the players will know that they were only able to progress because you “took mercy” on them, and this can taint the remainder of the adventure or even campaign—so before you employ a retcon, be sure that your players are up for it.

    Character Death

    The second variety of failure mode is the death of a PC. Aetrimonde’s rules aim to make random character deaths unlikely: it should take bad tactics from the PCs, antagonistic GMing, or a really awful string of rolls to outright kill a PC—but it can still happen. Aside from disappointing the character’s player, who now misses out on any character development they had hoped for, it also means that the party is down one character and thus less capable of handling future challenges.

    Character death can usually be dealt with in similar ways to plot collapse, but there are some unique considerations as well:

    • Just Maim Them: One option for handling what would be a character death is to merely maim or seriously injure the character: given time and resources, and possibly another adventure to make it possible, a character can be healed of just about anything, including missing limbs and head trauma. This avoids permanently killing off a PC, which is useful if a player had put a lot of effort into character development or you had made the character relevant to the plot, but it does still mean that the party will be a character short.
    • Replacement Character: If the plot permits it, you can insert another character into the adventure to be played by the player who just lost theirs. (This works even if the PC was just maimed…) This could be a captive who the PCs find and set free at the start of the next encounter, a companion that the PCs had with them and rises to the occasion, or even an enemy that they browbeat into having a change of heart. They don’t even need to be a full-fledged PC: it may actually be simpler to give the player an NPC, since they won’t necessarily be playing the NPC for long and an NPC will generally be simpler, with fewer powers and traits to learn the rules for.
    • Replacement Party: If the worst has happened, and most or all of the party is dead, maimed, captured, and otherwise out of action, you may need to introduce an entirely new party. They could be reinforcements gathered by a sole survivor, backup that was on its way when the first party was wiped out, or opportunists drawn by rumors that a bunch of adventurers died and their loot and equipment is up for grabs. Since this would generally involve at least a little delay, it might be appropriate to rework some of the scenes later in the adventure, and especially the encounter where the PCs died: after all, it would be kind of repetitive to just go through the exact same encounter that they already had “spoiled” for them.
    • Handle Like Plot Collapse: If the PC or PCs died in a time-sensitive or plot-sensitive part of the adventure, it may wind up having the effect of a plot collapse. In which case, you will need to handle the deaths like a plot collapse: soften the blow, reroute the plot, treat it as a sequel hook, or just retcon it, as discussed above.

    That’s it for today—and if you haven’t yet voted to give me guidance on writing Aetrimonde’s starter adventure, here’s the poll!

  • Lore Drop: Spirits of Aetrimonde

    Continuing on with my effort to go into the lore of other classes the way I have with Divine classes, I’ll be talking about the various kinds of spirit that empower Spiritual classes through their bonds. (Not to be confused with the next part in my Alcohols of Aetrimonde series…)

    The rules for Spiritual classes don’t require characters to have defined spirits empowering them, leaving that up to the players and GM to sort out. Depending on what they want, they can leave their spirits entirely nebulous and undefined, or they can create a backstory for each of their spirits that explains why their bond lets them use each of their Spiritual powers. There is a little bit of a mechanical tie here, in that certain powers are associated with different types of spirit, but I believe I’ve left plenty of room for players to design and flavor whatever kind of spirit they want…

    The four most common kinds of spirits are ancient, animal, elemental, and land spirits. They are divided up in this way because each of the four groups has certain commonalities in how they behave both in isolation, and in their interactions with spiritualists.

    Ancient Spirits

    Ancient spirits are predominantly the spirits of people, whether real or imagined: they are equally likely to arise from stories told about people who really lived and figures of myth who were simply part of a story that took root in a culture and was retold until a spirit formed. Most ancient spirits blur the lines somewhat: it’s rare for a spirit to be a truly accurate representation of a real person, and most of those cultural heroes originated with real people and events, even if they grew exaggerated over time.

    The defining trait of ancient spirits is their interactions with mortals: they are the most like mortals, and their fundamental natures are based on mortals’ interactions with each other. Ancient spirits want to do things that mortals do: some try to protect their supposed descendants and pass on their wisdom…while others play nasty pranks or simply break things. When bonded with spiritualists, ancient spirits push their bond-partner to express this fundamental nature, whether personally, or by inspiring it in other mortals.

    Animal Spirits

    Animal spirits are based on animals, or rather, on how mortals perceive them: most animal spirits behave exaggeratedly compared to the actual animals they are based on (and there are some rare spirits based on strange beasts that may be mythical to begin with). Some animal spirits arise from generalized traits of their representative animal, while others are based on specific creatures that were notable for their size, appearance, unusual behavior, or involvement in specific events.

    The fundamental natures of animal spirits are tied to form and behavior: they allow spiritualists to express this nature by transforming their bodies, growing features like claws, fangs and antlers, or by bestowing them with instincts that influence their behavior. Spiritualists bonded to animal spirits commonly feel urges to behave like the spirit, which can be as subtle as becoming unusually sleepy in winter under the influence of a bear spirit, or as overt as trying to headbutt threatening figures when bonded to a stag spirit.

    Elemental Spirits

    Elemental spirits are predominantly related to the four classical elements of air, earth, fire, and water, with plants as a common fifth variety. Like all spirits, elemental spirits are shaped by mortal perceptions, and they are by far the most diverse kind. Fire is associated with warmth and industry as well as destruction and war; plants embody both growth and plenitude as well as the creeping influence of nature over civilization. Inconveniently, the most powerful elemental spirits are shaped by destructive events like earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornadoes that affect mortals en masse, and they are therefore considered the most dangerous and destructive of spirits even if weaker spirits are less wantonly dangerous.

    Fundamentally, elemental spirits want to influence the world around them. Fire spirits want to burn, plant spirits want to grow, and earth spirits want to stay still—until they abruptly decide to move. While they don’t influence the behavior of their bonded spiritualists, they do push—steadily and inexorably—to be unleashed.

    Land Spirits

    Land spirits are created when mortals perceive a place or region as distinct from its surroundings. While this can happen with ordinary lands, like a people’s homeland or a piece of especially productive farmland, the spirits of such places are generally somnolent and difficult to form productive bonds with. The sort of land spirits that are both useful and willing to bond tend to be dangerous to mortals in some way, like freezing glaciers and parched deserts.

    As an extension of how they tend to be perceived as dangerous, bonded land spirits also tend to be expansionistic: they want to spread their influence, making the rest of the world a little more like them. Like elemental spirits, land spirits consistently push to be unleashed, although as long as no mortals are in the way, is it much less immediately dangerous to unleash land spirits. However, if used repeatedly in the same place—especially if that is near the spirit’s place of origin—this can have lasting effects on the terrain, either by strengthening the spirit so that it can expand its influence, or by creating a new spirit related to the original in a new place.

    Complex Spirits

    Not all spirits fit neatly into these categories. Some spirits blur the lines between categories, as in the case of an ancient spirit based on a bear so dangerous that it became anthropomorphized as a force of destruction, or a land spirit formed from mountains shrouded in constant storms, so that it also has influence over the element of air. Others, thankfully rare, defy categorization entirely, and have unique powers that make them difficult to handle…or sought-after by those who would control them.

    To wrap up this series on the lore of different class types, I’ll be covering Martial training and how Martial characters develop their peerless skills with weapons and armor. Stay tuned!

  • Lore Drop: Theories of Magic

    While I was building Ipki Chainbreaker, I went into a lot of detail about Aetrimonde’s gods, religions, and even a bit of metaphysics, to give context to the Divine classes. Not all of that information is in the CRB (some of it is relegated to a section of the campaign setting in the GMH, and other stuff won’t make it into the initial books at all), but out of fairness, I think this is a great time to circle back and discuss some of the lore that the CRB contains for other class groups.

    So today, I’m going to present some of the theories of magic that the CRB discusses when introducing the Arcane classes: these are purely flavorful (although I’ve got some ideas on how to represent them mechanically, which sadly didn’t make the cut for the core rules…), but they provide players with context as to how an arcanist might think and behave in this setting.

    The mindset that an arcanist twists their mind into to cast spells is called their theory of magic. While most arcanists eventually develop their own unique theories, there are several common theories taught to apprentices as a starting point, and arcanists group themselves according to what they were taught when first learning magic.

    High Magic

    High magic is the original theory of arcane magic, as practiced by ancient elven sorcerers and eventually adapted into wizardry. Practicioners of high magic immerse themselves in studies of the forces they aim to control, internalizing how those forces behave naturally until they can visualize the effects of their intended spell in minute detail. Training in high magic is a slow, painstaking process, but its practicioners claim that it offers the most potential for those who master it. High magic is the theory most heavily associated with wizards and academic arcanists.

    Low Magic

    The name “low” magic was originally an unsubtle insult aimed at the first humans to successfully use arcane magic, because their spells were crude compared to those of the high magic that preceded them. Low mages train themselves to associate their spells with specific emotions, memories, or sense impressions, and then embrace those sensations when they intend to cast the spell. Low magicians tend to use simple, brute-force spells, and are widely feared for the possibility that strong emotions can cause them to lose control of their magic. Low magic is stereotypically practiced by sorcerers and hedge mages without formal training.

    Rune Magic

    Originally a dwarven form of magic, rune magic allows its practicioners to construct complicated spells out of simpler parts. The runes in rune magic are symbols representing parts that are common to many spells; by training to associate these common steps with a rune, runescribes are able to construct “phrases” of runes to form a complex spell. Rune magic is often cast by tracing out the runes of a spell, or (if a practicioner uses a runic alphabet with phonetic meanings) by speaking it aloud. Rune magic is most commonly practiced by artificers.

    Geometric Magic

    Much as rune magic represents the parts of a spell with symbols that form a sentence, geometric magic represents spells as geometric designs, with lines, arcs, and nodes representing the parts of the spell. This allows the parts of a geometric spell to be connected together with more flexibility than runes, which–as a theory of magic based on writing and symbols–has a rigid, sequential grammar dictating how the runes must fit together. Geometric magic is often cast by tracing out a spell’s diagram using one’s hands, with the order of the tracery allowing the spell to be altered on the fly. Geometric magic is closely tied to ritual magic, which makes heavy use of diagrams in ritual circles.

    Physiognostic Magic

    Physiognostic magic is often treated as an offshoot of rune and geometric magic due to apparently combining the symbolic aspects of rune magic with the gestures of geometric magic, but it is a distinctly unique theory. Practicioners train to associate stances and movements with parts of a spell: by moving through a sequence of poses in the correct form, physiognostics move their minds through the appropriate contortions to work their magic. Many physiognostics are easily mistaken for boxers or soldiers, until they throw a punch with their fist wreathed in flames. Physiognostic magic is associated with so-called battlemages, who combine their spells with the use of weapons and armor.

    Deep Magic

    It’s debatable whether deep magic properly counts as a theory of magic, because the core of the practice requires the practicioner to change themselves on a deep level (hence the name). Practicioners of deep magic inevitably become something other than entirely mortal, by internalizing principles of magic that twist their minds beyond the point of no return, absorbing sources of power that alter them on a fundamental level, or accepting the tutelage and influence of otherworldly entities. Deep magic is often treated as one step short of dark arts like diablerie and necromancy, and is most commonly used by warlocks.

    Stay tuned for more lore about Aetrimonde’s classes: I’ll be covering the different kinds of spirits that bond with and empower Spiritual classes next!

  • GM Advice: Exploration and Interaction

    In my continuing column on the Game Master’s Handbook’s advice to would-be GMs, I’m going to cover the book’s introduction to two of the core components of Aetrimonde’s adventure structure paradigm: exploration and interaction.

    There are a lot of ways to approach writing and running RPG adventures: the way I’ve chosen to describe things in the GMH for novice GMs revolves around scenes, being self-contained pieces that can be strung together into a narrative. Among the types of scene I discuss in the book are exploration and interaction, as well as non-combat encounters (which I’ve already touched on in this blog) and combat encounters.

    Exploration

    In exploration scenes, you present the players with an opportunity to examine scenery, objects, and other elements of the scene to uncover information that furthers the plot of the adventure. This might be:

    • Breadcrumbs: Information that plainly reveals a next step in the adventure, such as a hastily-written note that reveals where a kidnapped NPC is being taken, or a map to a hidden treasure.
    • Clues: Information that the players can piece together to figure out a next step or overcome an obstacle, like a poem concealing the secret word that opens a magical door, or a set of receipts from several shops in the same area, which hints at the location of a thieves’ hideout.
    • Lore: Obscure knowledge about people, places, events, or objects in the setting where the adventure takes place, like who built and lived in some ancient ruins, or the origin of a magical sword. Lore might become important over the course of an adventure or campaign, or it might simply be a fun tidbit for the kind of players who like understanding the fantasy world that they’re playing in.

    When running an exploration scene, you’ll need to:

    • Describe the Scene: You are the players’ guide to the adventure: they only know as much about the scene as you tell them. You’ll need to give the players all of the relevant information about the scene, so that they understand what their characters are facing, and have enough information to make appropriate choices. This includes just telling the players what their characters see and hear, but can also include narrating changes (“You push down on the statue’s arm, and it moves; the floor shudders, and elsewhere in the temple complex you hear the sliding of stone on stone…”) and suggesting what their characters might feel about a scene (“As you set eyes on the fabled lost library of Gjalerbron, the very weight of eons seems to press down on you…”).
    • Answer Questions: As they interact with the scene, the players will have questions: “What do the murals on the walls depict?” or “How cold is the tea on the colonel’s desk?” Some of these questions will (hopefully) be related to information you want them to get out of the scene, but remember: the players don’t already know what’s important in the scene like you do. Often, they will ask questions about aspects of the scene that aren’t relevant, and you’ll need to come up with an appropriate answer on the fly.
    • Adjudicate Checks: Sometimes the players will need to make checks to uncover information in a scene: they might try to use Athletics to climb up and inspect a wall carving in detail, or translate some ancient writings using History. You’ll need to set a Difficulty for these checks, if you haven’t already planned on the players making them, and adjudicate what happens based on how the players roll.
    • Drop Hints: Sometimes, players get stuck in an exploration scene, and they don’t find the information that they need. And sometimes that’s fine—the players don’t need to uncover every last piece of lore or unlock every hidden door in an adventure—but sometimes, missing out on a clue means not being able to progress further in the adventure until they find it. When that happens, you may need to drop hints like “Would you like to make an Intelligence check to decipher the riddle?” or “Maybe you should look for hidden doors…”

    Interaction

    In an interaction scene, you present the players with one or more NPCs and roleplay their conversation or other interaction with the PCs. There are a range of things that the PCs can get out of these interactions:

    • Exposition: NPCs can be a source of information, much like an exploration scene with more opportunity for roleplaying. They might be forthcoming or outright talkative, or the PCs might need to prompt them for relevant information or outright convince or coerce them into revealing what they know.
    • Aid: With the right prompting (or, again, convincing or coercion), NPCs can do useful things for the PCs. This can range from the simple and routine (selling them equipment and supplies or translating obscure languages), to the more complicated (agreeing to serve as a local guide, or serving as a distraction while the PCs pick someone’s pocket), to the plot-advancing (giving the PCs access to their extensive private library, or raising an army to resist a dark lord).
    • Fun: And of course, roleplaying an NPC can just be fun: memorable NPCs are one thing that gets PCs attached to a campaign, and interaction scenes give the players a chance to get into their characters and explore their mannerisms, outlooks, and motivations.

    In an interaction scene, you’ll need to:

    • Play the Part: Like always, you’ll need to play the NPCs. Depending on the particulars of the scene and the importance of various NPCs, you may also want to narrate notable features and habits (like for an NPC who hiccups uncontrollably when nervous, or whose every appearance has them wearing a different outrageous set of clothes). And, if you have the acting chops for it, giving NPCs different voices helps distinguish them from each other.
    • Convey Mood and Motivation: NPCs have moods and motives that can (and should) inform how the PCs approach them—and it’s up to you to convey this all to the players. If you’re up to it, you can often convey this through body language and tone of voice as you speak for an NPC—but if you need to convey a particularly complex motivation or attitude, it helps to state it outright in the narration, e.g. “She violently twitches as you mention Inverchyle, spilling red wine over her dress and breaking into vituperous swearing in Victish” or “He eyes you up and down as you speak, seeming to ignore you as he focuses on the quality of your clothing and jewelry.”
    • Adjudicate Responses: Depending on how the PCs interact with an NPC, the NPC’s attitude toward them may change. This may be the product of pure roleplaying, but use of social skills (particularly Intimidate and Persuasion) can also be involved. You’ll need to decide how NPCs react to what PCs say and what checks they make—and since players can be unpredictable, you’ll sometimes need to decide on the fly what an NPC does in response to particularly strange or unexpected prompts.
    • Take the Lead: As in exploration encounters, the players may get stuck when speaking to an NPC, either because they’re not sure what to say, or they haven’t picked up on a social cue, or similar. Dropping hints can actually be easier in an interaction scene, because if necessary you can have an NPC take the lead to bring up an important topic of conversation. You can also drop hints to a player by suggesting what their character might think of an NPC (“You find it odd how he’s been steering the conversation away from the topic of…”).

    This passage from the GMH serves as an introduction to these two types of scenes, but as I have it planned, they also get their own chapters later in the book offering more detailed advice on running (and writing!) these scenes effectively. Stay tuned–excerpts from those chapters will be showing up here eventually!

  • Starter Adventure: Kickoff Poll

    Starter Adventure: Kickoff Poll

    With the fourth sample character Ipki Chainbreaker recently finished, I think it’s time to start the next stage of building Aetrimonde’s starter kit: writing an adventure! As with the sample characters, I’m going to incorporate some reader feedback into this writing process, and the first thing I want to get settled is the location of the adventure.

    I’d like to set this adventure away from Aetrimonde’s major powers, somewhere not quite civilized and yet not quite wilderness. This will give me the most flexibility to write in segments of the adventure dealing with combat, exploration, and intrigue, and to drop in brief visits to neighboring regions that are a bit more or a bit less civilized. Fortunately, Aetrimonde has plenty of places like this! Don’t worry: I’ll make sure to provide plenty of exposition on whatever region the poll selects before I ask for any more reader input–and if you just can’t decide which one sounds more interesting, you can pick multiple options in the poll!

    I’m aiming for the starter adventure to take characters from levels 0 to 3, meaning it will contain around 30 encounters all told. They will likely be running around the entire region during the adventure and maybe crossing into neighboring areas: here’s a map showing what this might entail, and here’s a post where I briefly described Aetrimonde’s major polities. With that in mind, let me ask:

  • Campaign Concepts: What Are Aetrimonde’s Gods, Really?

    One of the things that I think is crucial to writing a campaign setting is to raise interesting questions and not give a definitive answer to any of them. As tempting as it might be to write a canonical answer to the big questions of the setting, authors have to remember that a published setting is intended to be a sandbox for other GMs and players to work in. A setting works best when it leaves plenty of room for a campaign to fill in the blanks and tell a unique story.

    So I’m not going to answer some of Aetrimonde’s big-picture questions, like “how old is Aetrimonde’s planetary system” or “what does the colossal machinery in the Heavenly Realm do.” But that won’t stop me from discussing some potential answers and how they might make for an interesting campaign. Today, since I’ve lately been touching on topics related to Divine characters, I’m going to tackle one of the big ones: what are Aetrimonde’s gods? Finding a definitive answer to this question has consumed generations of Aetrmonde’s fringe theologists, and would make a great high-concept for a long-running campaign.

    The Canon

    There are a couple of things known about Aetrimonde’s gods (and if you want to change these facts, more power to you–but it might conflict with the campaign hooks I’m about to discuss):

    • The gods are distant: they don’t have avatars, they don’t talk directly to anyone, and even their servants, the angels, are tight-lipped about them.
    • The gods are associated with certain philosophies and creeds, and adopting those creeds can let mortals tap into divine power.

    So what can we do, working within these facts?

    Playing it Straight

    The simplest way to use Aetrimonde’s gods is to take them at face value: they’re powerful entities with the quality of “divinity,” each of them embodying a different philosophy or concept, and they interact with Aetrimonde largely through empowering mortals whose beliefs are properly aligned with them.

    The biggest question here is: why don’t the gods intervene more directly in the world? Why doesn’t Deum Militant lead armies, and why doesn’t Deum Harmonious prevent logging and mining from despoiling nature?

    • Neutral Territory: The gods don’t intervene directly because they have agreed among themselves not to. Perhaps they’re simply tired of fighting each other when their interest conflict, or perhaps their interventions would risk destroying the world, or perhaps there are metaphysical consequences to intervention that they aren’t willing to suffer. A campaign could revolve around getting the gods to make an exception in the face of a world-ending threat; if the players are on board for it, you could also write a campaign about breaking the agreement between the gods and aiding their preferred deity in winning the ensuing struggle…consequences (literally) be damned.
    • A Difference of Scale: The gods don’t intervene directly because they can’t easily do so: they’re so cosmically huge, and Aetrimonde so tiny in the grand scale of things, that for them to intervene directly would be like trying to remove one particular ant from an anthill…without crushing it. So the gods listen to prayers, and identify mortals who they can empower and guide to act in their interests on such a fine scale. A simple campaign in this vein might have the PCs trying to draw a god’s attention to some impending threat or overlooked wrong, and getting it to do something about it directly. A more ambitious campaign could let the PCs try to fix the entire system by pulling the gods down to a level where they can actually understand the mortal perspective…
    • Cosmic Dead-Zone: The gods don’t intervene on Aetrimonde because they can’t do so at all: something about the world (or solar system, or plane of existence) prevents them from directly exerting their will. Perhaps it lies in a cosmic dead zone where divine powers simply don’t work, or it is under the influence of some eldritch quasi-deity from a previous cosmos, or the gods themselves did something that placed the world beyond their reach. A campaign based on this premise could involve this situation changing in either direction: the PCs might discover that the gods are becoming even weaker as Aetrimonde passes further beyond their reach, and set out to do something before the world is completely cut off from divinity…or it could be the opposite, where the gods are returning and the PCs must reckon with the consequences (intentional or not) of having divinities active in the world once more.

    The Gods are Missing

    What if the gods don’t intervene because they’re…gone? In this take on the gods, they used to be around, and perhaps intervened more often, but something happened to them.

    • Gotterdammerung: The gods aren’t just missing, they’re dead, and all that remains of them are fragments of their power, which resonate with mortals who embody the creeds of the dead gods. Could the gods be brought back, a la Osiris? Could someone take up the shards of their power, beginning a new generation of gods? And most pressingly…what killed them, and what does it intend for Aetrimonde?
    • Neglectful Creators: The gods made Aetrimonde, but they don’t care about it. Either it already served its purpose, or they made it on a whim and abandoned it once they lost interest. The echoes of their power still resonate with mortals following the appropriate creeds, but the gods themselves barely notice. What does it do to mortal society to know that they have no cosmic importance?
    • Celestial Bureaucracy: The gods may be omnipotent, but they’re not omniattentive: they can only do so much at once, and with an entire cosmos to manage, they’ve had to delegate. Specifically, they’ve created a celestial bureaucracy staffed with angels and devas and all sorts of other divine servants. Of course, as we all know, bureaucrats never get involved in departmental politics or inter-service rivalries, so obviously the branch office looking after things on Aetrimonde must be working as intended…right?

    The “Gods” were Misidentified

    Perhaps there are no gods, just something that Aetrimonde’s mortals mistook for gods because they could draw power from them.

    • Cosmic Forces: There isn’t any intelligence or consciousness behind Divine powers, but there is a truth to their creeds: contrary to Terry Pratchett’s Death, there is an atom of justice and a molecule of mercy. Mortals are tapping into these impersonal cosmic forces and mistaking them for gods…but is there a way to connect more deeply to them, or even control them, to become an actual god?
    • Extraplanar Visitors: The gods are actually powerful, but mortal, entities that hail from another plane of reality, or a distant alien world. Their advanced grasp of technology and magic seemed godlike to primitive Aetrimondeans, and for reasons of their own (or even without their noticing), they began to empower mortals. What exactly did these alien visitors want when they first arrived? What do they want now? And could it be possible to take direct control over the mechanisms they use to grant powers?
    • Eldritch Horrors: It’s well-known that there are many variations on the creeds acceptable to the gods of the pantheon. But the horrifying truth is that none of these creeds even come close to approximating the true natures of the gods: the creeds heretofore accessed by mortals are merely the ragged fringes of some vast and incomprehensible idea that a mortal mind cannot grasp…not without breaking. The sudden appearance of strange new doctrines and heresies could herald an alien god taking note of the tiny mortals drawing on its power…and attempting to reshape them into a better reflection of its true nature.

    So there you have it: nine different treatments of Aetrimonde’s gods, each one serving as the setup for a different tone and style of campaign. As to whether any of them are the canonical truth for Aetrimonde…well, that would be telling.

  • Ipki Chainbreaker VI: Advancement

    To wrap up Ipki Chainbreaker, I’m going to take a look at one way that Ipki might advance through her first few levels. And, this will be a nice opportunity to preview some other types of Divine power, aside from the Wrath powers that Ipki focused on at level 0.

    Also, be sure to read (or skip) to the end of the post, because I’ve got an announcement about where this blog will be going from here…

    Level 1

    One thing that Ipki’s level-0 powers don’t have is a melee option for when Ipki gets in over her head. Dazzling Smite helps with that: it exemplifies one “strain” of Divine melee powers, representing a weapon strike that erupts in magical energy–in this case, a flash of dazzling light–affecting creatures near the target. Powers like these are Divine melee characters’ main source of area damage: unlike Martial characters, who get powers that attack many targets at once, Divine characters make a single attack which spills over to other creatures nearby–if it hits. This means that they are all-or-nothing: the attack either hits its target and damages several creatures, or misses and does nothing at all.

    Beneath Notice is one of the feats I previewed in an earlier post; it allows Ipki to remain under the radar until she gets her first turn in a fight, and I think it ties in nicely to her backstory as a guerilla slave liberator.

    As her level-1 perk, Ipki will take Esoteric Knowledge [The Slave Trade]. This helps her out with knowledge checks related to capturing, transporting, selling, and working slaves–not so that she can engage in the trade herself, but so that she can better dismantle it. Better to know your enemy…

    Level 2

    Word of Mortality occupies a midpoint between Ipki’s ranged powers and Dazzling Strike: it has a 5-square range, but because it has a Pulse range, it can be used without provoking opportune strikes, giving her a little more range when tied up in melee. Aside from only targeting Anathema, this exemplifies another strain of Divine powers: “Word of” powers, representing a Divine character channeling the power of their god through the recitation of scripture, target a single creature at short range, cause small amounts of psychic damage, and have increased effects on injured creatures. Word of Mortality is an excellent niche option for cutting through the resistances of Anathema, and Ipki can Denounce non-Anathema to make them valid targets of it as well.

    Radiant Exemplar is another feat I previewed in an earlier post: it has a minor but useful effect of giving Ipki a renewable, hands-free light source, which is not to be sneezed at when trying to fight something in a dark place. It’s also a rare example of a feat which is a prerequisite for another feat: we’ll see the second feat in a couple of levels.

    For her perk, Ipki will take Craft [Improvised Weaponry]. This is a bit of an odd perk, because if you’ve used a Craft perk to make a weapon, is it really improvised? But the way I would adjudicate it is that this perk lets Ipki repurpose tools and other objects that are already similar to weapons (pitchforks, mining picks, manacles…) into actual, functioning weapons, given a bit of time to work. Very useful for arming slaves prior to an uprising…

    Level 3

    We’ve given Ipki a couple of powers branching out from the Wrath powers she specializes in: time to get back to those basics. Sweeping Sunbeam is a sustained area-damage power: while it has a relatively small area (blast 1, so a 3×3 area), it really shines on subsequent turns, when Ipki gets to move the zone it creates, attacking every creature in its path. Used well, this can sweep over wide swathes of a battlefield, and its path can be adjusted to avoid catching allies in the beam. Plus, it sheds bright light, effectively shining a spotlight on enemies in the zone. The big drawback to Sweeping Sunbeam is that it eats up Ipki’s main action: if she doesn’t use it to repeat the attack, her concentration breaks and the zone expires. That means she likely won’t be firing off any other powers while concentrating on the sunbeam.

    Devout Prayers is the semi-obligatory bonus-to-attack rolls feat for Divine characters, and by level 3, Ipki will probably want to take it. Because Ipki really wants to apply her recoverable effects to Anathema, she benefits from a bonus to attack rolls more than a bonus to damage rolls, so that her attacks land and the effects go off. The Divine keywords Ipki can choose from are Binding, Psychic, and Wrath:

    As her level 3 perk, Ipki will begin dabbling in Ritual Magic: as part of this perk, she learns three rituals which for the sake of brevity I’ll just summarize here:

    • Dowsing: Creates a talisman that indicates the direction to a known creature, object, place, or substance. Ipki plans to use it when hunting down slavers known to her, or trying to rescue specific captives.
    • Astral Projection: Allows Ipki to enter a trance and project an intangible duplicate of herself over a distance of kilometers. Ipki plans to use it for reconnaissance and communication, sneaking into slaver dens and slave quarters by simply floating through walls.
    • False Face: Conceals Ipki’s identity by projecting an illusion over her. In a pinch, could be used to conceal even that she’s a goblin. Ipki plans to use it for infiltration, disguising herself as either a captive or a slaver.

    Level 4

    Another variety of Divine powers, which has the Boon keyword, provides direct support to allies. Unlike Armament and Ward powers (and there are Divine variants of these…), Boon powers have simple numeric bonuses or otherwise improve capabilities that characters already have, rather than adding new effects to their attacks or defenses. They’re also easier to use in the moment, rather than taking forethought to use well like many Armaments and Wards. Guidance, in particular, gives an ally a small but noticeable bonus to attack and damage rolls.

    And, while on the topic of Boons, each Divine class has a feat that ties Boon powers into their class features. For an Inquisitor like Ipki, that is the Denunciative Boon feat, allowing her to use a Divine Boon power as a free action each time the target of Denunciation fails a recovery roll–which they will, given what Denunciation does. As long as Ipki can get a recoverable effect onto an enemy she’s denounced, she can then hand out Guidance for free on a regular basis.

    For her level 4 perk, I’m going to give Ipki a free-fom perk: Terror of Slavers. Building on the Fame [Goblin Abolitionists] perk she already has, Terror of Slavers will give Ipki the perk benefits for checks related to terrifying slavers. That includes plain old Intimidate checks made against slavers, of course, but also extends to things like spreading propaganda, inspiring uprisings, and otherwise waging a campaign of psychological terror.

    Level 5

    The last type of Divine power that I’ll showcase in this post is a Binding power. These powers generally deal no damage directly, but have an effect on a single target lasting as long as the user concentrates. Extirpating Seal is of a variety that, while it deals no damage by itself, causes other attacks against the target to deal additional damage and have additional effects. It also complements Word of Mortality nicely: where Word of Mortality removes an Anathema’s resistances, Extirpating Seal worsens its vulnerabilities–and many Anathema, not to mention some other creatures that Ipki can denounce, have both.

    And to cap things off, we’ll give Ipki the second Exemplar feat for Deum Radiant, which Radiant Exemplar was a requirement for: this allows Ipki’s light sources to help allies shake off mind-altering effects, like some Anathema are known for inflicting.

    Last but not least, Ipki will delve a little further into ritual magic–this time aimed at striking fear into the hearts of slavers. This second Ritual Magic perk lets her specialize in one kind of ritual–she’ll choose Divination, to help her find and investigate slavers–and also learn another three rituals:

    • Fabricate: Turns raw materials into finished goods. Useful for arming slaves in, say, an iron mine, and more generally to manufacture weapons that can’t be repurposed from tools or whatnot using Craft [Improvised Weapon].
    • Geas: Forces a creature to follow one overriding command (while giving it freedom in how it interprets the command). Ipki will use this to dispose of slavers she captures in a way that spreads terror and has the veneer of legality: when a slaver marches into the middle of town and starts uncontrollably confessing their crimes to everyone they can find, nobody’s going to shed tears over what an incensed citizenry does to them.
    • Remote Viewing: Allows Ipki to see and hear a creature at range using a mirror or pool of water, along with their surroundings. Ipki will use it to spy on slaver organizations from a safe remove, learning their plans and schemes.

    Equipment

    Finally, let’s take a loot at some items Ipki might find useful:

    Ipki really wants to be sneaky, partly because of her backstory as a guerilla liberator but also because, well, she’s a really fragile character who doesn’t want enemies focusing on her. Something like a Chameleonic Cloak would be great: this allows her to flit past enemies, unseen as she blends into the background (Stealth check permitting…), and could also be useful to maybe dodge a few attacks if she gets caught in the middle of a fight with no other escape.

    While Ipki doesn’t particularly need an amulet-style holy symbol to keep her hands free, one advantage of such an item is that it can be given enchantments for both holy symbols and amulets, and there are a couple of enchantments that can only be applied to holy symbols in this form. This kind of item is a useful way to make an item that serves double duty as an offensive and defensive item in one convenient package. In Ipki’s case, she’d love a holy symbol combining the Righteous and Sanctified enchantments:

    These enchantments are a mixed blessing (ha) compared to equivalents: Righteous combines the item bonuses to attack and damage rolls of two other enchantments (Prevailing and Fervent), and applies them to all Divine powers instead of only those with a single keyword, but only to Anathema. Ipki can denounce a single creature to treat it like an Anathema, but unless actual Anathema make an appearance in an adventure, this means that these bonuses will only apply to a single creature: good for handling a priority target, less so for a horde.

    Sanctified likewise combines three enchantments (Deflection, Protection, and Resilience, all for jewelry like amulets) with the caveat that their bonuses only apply vs. Anathema. Again, since Ipki can designate a foe as Anathema, this means she can always protect herself against at least one enemy in a fight, but that relies on being able to Denounce a foe before it attacks her. On the other hand, if she is facing a bunch of Anathema, this bonus becomes incredibly powerful. The Sanctified enchantment also gives this holy symbol another niche use, in that it can be passed off to an ally in need of protection from Anathema.

    Up Next

    That wraps things up for Ipki Chainbreaker, Goblin Inquisitor! I now have four completed sample characters, giving a representative sample of all four character origins and combat roles. I’d actually like to have six sample characters to include in Aetrimonde’s starter kit…but I’m going to hold off on that for now, because the next thing that I want to build for the starter kit is an actual introductory adventure. And, like these sample characters, I’m going to design this adventure with reader input: I’ll be putting polls as I write this, giving you the opportunity to help pick locations, guide the plot, design NPCs, and so on. Keep your eyes peeled for the first one, coming up soon!

  • GM Advice: Playing the Role(s) of the GM

    I’ve recently gotten the Game Master’s Handbook to the point that I can start sharing excerpts of it on a more regular basis. I’ve still got a lot of material to write–but then, that’s part of what this blog is for, to help me organize and trial material going into the GMH.

    Today, I’m going to open with an excerpt from the introduction to the GMH, explaining the roles that a GM has to play and how the GMH will support them in those roles.

    What It Means to Be the GM

    The GM in an Aetrimonde campaign is, as with most role-playing games, the linchpin to the campaign. While you might be able to have a game session where one or two other players are absent, it’s nigh-impossible to play without the GM.

    Being the GM comes with responsibilities that the other players in your group don’t have. You’ll be juggling several roles at the same time throughout your campaign:

    Storyteller

    The GM is responsible for telling the campaign’s story, by narrating the situations that the players get into. This means providing exposition about the world they are in, describing the scenery around them, and voicing and describing the actions of allies and enemies they encounter. Parts of this handbook will give you tools to help convey information in an evocative way that draws the players into the story, and to quickly devise an answer when the players want to know something you hadn’t planned out ahead of time.

    Referee

    The GM also needs to be able to apply the rules of the Aetrimonde game system, which are mostly in the Core Rulebook. You don’t need to know the rules inside and out, but you should be broadly familiar with how things work and know where to look up details should they become important. This handbook also contains guidelines for handling situations where there is no pre-defined rule or system to cover something that your players want to do, letting you keep the story moving when the players get inventive.

    Opponent

    As the mind behind the monsters and other enemies that your players will face, you’ll often be the opponent that the players are working to defeat. The goal here is to challenge the players, not beat them: ideally, you’ll set challenges that are beatable, but not trivial, so that the players can still muddle through by brute force if necessary, but coming up with a clever plan and choosing good moves makes things meaningfully easier. This handbook provides guidelines as to what constitutes appropriate challenges, and how to adjust on the fly to make your challenges enjoyably difficult.

    Author

    If you’ve never GMed before, it’s probably best if you begin by running a published adventure, like the one in Aetrimonde’s free starter kit. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll probably start having ideas for your own stories to tell, featuring new locations or even entirely new settings, fun NPCs and dastardly villains, interestingly dangerous monsters, and strange new magics. This handbook provides examples of settings, enemies (and allies), and encounters that you can use as a framework for your own story—and even some advice on how to write your own content from scratch.

    Organizer

    As the GM, it may wind up being your job to organize your campaign by finding players, choosing when to play, holding on to character sheets and notes, and so on. You might also be delegating certain roles, like notetaking and bringing snacks and drinks, to your players. While it’s a little bit beyond the scope of the rules for a role-playing game, this handbook does provide a little bit of advice on how to work with players to create a game that’s fun for everyone.

    This excerpt is just from the introduction: up next in this column, I’ll be moving on to the first chapter of the GMH, which gives an overview of what it takes to run an Aetrimonde session.

  • Ipki Chainbreaker V: Equipment and Numbers

    We’re almost done with Ipki Chainbreaker: today, we’ll pick out her equipment and fill in her character sheet, and then I’ll wrap things up with one last post showing off some options she might pick as she gained levels.

    Equipment

    Armor

    Ipki is proficient with cloth, leather, and chain armor—no shields! And with just +1 <DEX> and <GRA>, her armor choices really boil down to a maille shirt, giving 15 AC and allowing 1 safe movement, or maille armor, giving 16 AC with 0 safe movement. She really doesn’t want to be tied up in melee, because all of her powers provoke opportune strikes, so I’m going with the maille shirt at 15gp.

    Weapons and Implements

    As a Divine character, Ipki can use holy symbols as implements for her magical powers. Like any implement, they can be wielded in one hand–but they can also be made in the form of an amulet worn in the neck slot and freeing up a hand. Ipki doesn’t need an amulet-style holy symbol: she doesn’t wield a shield, and so can have a holy symbol in the form of a scepter (a silver-and-copper rod in the shape of a torch, for Deum Radiant) such that she can wield it in one hand and a weapon in her other. Like most implements, the holy symbol costs 20gp.

    Speaking of weapons, Ipki should have some kind of melee weapon for those unfortunate moments when she gets surrounded. For flavor, I would really love for her to have a flail made from her own broken manacles: unfortunately, she’s not proficient with military weapons, which flails are. So we’ll give her a mace, costing 2gp, and as an afterthought give her a broken, non-functioning set of goblin-size manacles that she repurposes as a belt.

    Other Equipment

    We’ll wrap up by giving Ipki a basic adventurer’s kit, like all of the other sample characters, bringing her expenses so far to 52gp. She has plenty of gold left over, so let’s also give her a disguise kit and forgery kit, which she needs for some advanced uses of the Deception skill, like changing her apparent height or forging official documents that use special paper. These will be useful for a sneaky Inquisitor…

    That brings her totals to 72gp (with 28 left over) and 30.3 bulk.

    Filling in the Numbers

    With equipment selected, that lets us compute Ipki’s stats:

    Health and Healing

    Ipki is by far the squishiest of the sample characters. With 16 base hit points, +2 expertise and +0 <CON>, Ipki has a bare 20 hit points. She has a similar lack of resurgences, at just the inquisitor’s base 2, and regains 1d6 hit points from small heals and 1d6 + 1 from large ones. (This actually softens the blow of her low hit points a bit: Ipki recovers more hit points, relatively speaking, from small heals than tougher characters.)

    Defenses

    As mentioned, the maille shirt gives Ipki 15 AC (although note that the Undersized feature will make this effectively 16 against a lot of enemies). Her other defenses come to:

    • Brawn: 13 = 11 + 2 (<STR>)
    • Poise: 12 = 11 + 1 (<DEX>)
    • Wit: 13 = 11 + 1 (<CUN>) + 1 (Inquisitor)
    • Composure: 16 = 11 + 4 (<CHA>) + 1 (Inquisitor)

    Note that Poise will also be increased, and Brawn decreased, by 1 against those same enemies.

    Attacks and Damage

    While Ipki doesn’t want to be tied up in melee, she’s surprisingly competent at it, with +2 <STR> and her mace giving her a not-entirely-terrible +3 vs. AC attack, dealing 1d8 + 2 damage.

    But her Divine powers are still better: being Charisma-based, she gets a +4 attack bonus for all of them, vs. Brawn or Poise depending on the power. The damage of these powers varies a bit:

    • Burning Bolt: +4 vs. Poise, 1d8 + 4 fire damage and 1d4 + 2 repeated fire damage.
    • Holy Blast: +4 vs. Poise, 1d4 + 4 damage and 1d4 + 2 additional damage to Anathema.
    • Blinding Bolt: +4 vs. Poise, 1d8 + 4 radiant damage.
    • Peal of Thunder: +4 vs. Brawn, 2d8 + 4 thunder damage.

    Note that Burning Bolt and Blinding Bolt will gain an additional +1 bonus to attack rolls from Undersized against many enemies.

    Skills

    Ipki’s maille shirt is going to slightly hamper many of her skills with its -1 encumbrance penalty. This brings her trained skills down to:

    • +6 Deception
    • +6 Intimidate
    • +1 Religion
    • +1 Society
    • +2 Stealth
    • +2 Subterfuge

    Her other physical skills (Athletics, Acrobatics, Endurance) will be her relevant ability -1, and all the others will just be the relevant ability.

    Movement

    Ipki has 5 base speed and is wearing armor with no movement penalties, so her speed is 5, and she can move 1 square safely if she chooses to.

    Carrying Capacity

    As an Undersized character, Ipki can carry less stuff than most: her carrying capacity is 40 bulk + 5 times <STR>, which actually puts her capacity at 50 bulk. That’s plenty to carry her equipment, so no worries there.

    Initiative

    And finally, Ipki has +1 initiative by virtue of her +1 <CUN>.

    Character Sheet

    With that, here’s Ipki’s finished character sheet:

    IpkiChainbreaker_CharSheetDownload

    Up Next

    I’ll wrap up Ipki in a week or two by looking at various ways she might advance, and then…it’s on to a new project!

    With 4 sample characters made, and with me starting to get into material from the GMH, I think it’s time for me to start working on the sample adventure that these characters will be attached to. And like these sample characters, I’m going to be using reader feedback to write the adventure! Keep your eyes peeled for the first poll in an upcoming post…

    I’ll eventually be putting together two more sample characters, but I’d like to at least nail down the setting and themes of the sample adventure before I do. Depending on how things go, there might be some interesting ways to tie a sample character into the adventure…

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Alcohols of Aetrimonde I

    I’m slowly working on a post that will go into more detail about the titular spirits that grant powers to Spiritual classes, but the title “Spirits of Aetrimonde” put an idea into my head that has been hard to get out. So today, I’m presenting the first in a series of posts examining Aetrimonde’s cultures through the lens of their alcohol!

    Alcohol in the Core Rulebook

    The CRB contains a very small section on alcohols, in which it is mentioned that alcoholic beverages are reliably safe to drink when the local water is of unknown quality (a consideration for adventurers). It also provides prices for beer, wine, and spirits of three different qualities:

    But alcohol is closely entwined with culture, and it is an excellent facet of worldbuilding for GMs to explore: the nature of the local alcohol is an evocative, informative piece of information to give the players. So, to start with, here are a few of the beers that players might encounter in Aetrimonde:

    Beers

    • Stormrunner Pale Ale: Waystone is a nation of merchants, whose profits depend on the speedy and reliable delivery of goods, largely by sea. In order to extend their water supplies and cut down on port stops, Waystone’s merchant fleet carries strong (and strong-flavored) beers that can be mixed with stagnant water to both sterilize it and cover its foul taste. Stormrunner Pale Ale, named after a class of ship designed to make long voyages across open ocean at speed ahead of a storm, is a strong, light-colored, heavily hopped beer brewed specifically to survive rough treatment in the hold of a ship.
    • Hardvergar Dinkelbjor: Dwarven beers have a reputation: high quality, high potency…and sometimes, awful hangovers, although that might have more to do with the traditional mode of consumption (quaffing). Hardvergar Dinkelbjor, literally translated as “High Dwarfish Dinkel Beer,” is brewed in remote, highly traditional dwarven settlements according to recipes unchanged since before the Collapse. The malt used in its brewing is made from the ancient grain dinkel (also called einkorn or spelt), giving it a strong flavor of rustic bread that makes it an acquired taste. (Author’s Note: All of the Germans in my playtesting group simultaneously groaned when I explained that the local dwarves brewed nothing but dinkelbier, which is exactly the reaction I had been aiming for.)
    • Auric Brown: A thick, hazy beverage favored in the Sanctean Primarchy and an extremely acquired taste everywhere else. It is fermented from bread soaked in water rather than malt, touted as a recreation of the beverage provided to the laborers building the pre-Collapse Auran Empire’s colossal temples and monuments. In truth, the recipe is more likely a modern invention, made up out of whole cloth as part of the effort to create a synthetic culture that would unify the diverse pilgrims flocking to the fledgling Primarchy. That the drink is also simple to make and highly nutritious (containing ample protein, vitamins, and trace minerals from the presence of spent yeast left in the brew) is certainly a happy coincidence: it is now a staple of Sanctean peasants, with virtually every pantry in the nation containing a bubbling jug of it.
    • Monastic Lambic: Lambics are an unusual kind of beer, brewed using wild yeast that gives each batch a subtly different character. This method of brewing has been supplanted by cultivated yeasts, and lambics are now brewed mainly as an artisanal product of certain monasteries that maintain the tradition. The most mainstream lambics, with a sour, fruity, and slightly “funky” notes come from the Cession. For more advanced drinkers, monasteries from the storm-swept Salvage Coast are known for the briny (and sometimes kelpy) notes of their brews, which are often compared to Gose beers. And for the truly adventurous, there are a handful of religious missions to the goblins of the southern Unclaimed Reaches that have combined wild-yeasted brewing techniques with the goblins’ traditional mushroom-based intoxicants, producing a lambic with heavy notes of funk, exotic flavor profile, and only occasional hallucinogenic properties.
    • Umpfen Hyperbier: The origins of the Hyperbier are shrouded in mystery, as the original batch was recovered from the cellars of a burned-out Eisenwaldean castle after the resident alchemist went just a hair too far even for Der Eisenwald. The pitchfork-wielding mob tapped the barrels in celebration, and immediately thereafter started combing the charred ruins of the castle laboratory in search of the recipe. Accounts of the Hyperbier uniformly agree that it was “the perfect beer,” although they are entirely contradictory on its style, flavor profile, and even color. Efforts to recreate the recipe from a few charred scraps of notes (some of which likely pertain not at all to the Hyperbier) have inspired generations of brewers and alchemists to try such processes as infusing the yeast with the essence of fire elementals and feeding the wort through the heart of a four-dimensional tesseract. The results have been mixed–and in some cases, explosively lethal–but the pursuit of the Hyperbier has grown into a uniquely Eisenwaldean obsession, culminating in an annual festival in the town of Umpf where those brews deemed safe for consumption are judged on their similarity to the mythical Hyperbier.

    I’ll keep updating this mini-column as fun and interesting ideas occur to me. I’ll probably be doing wines next, including wine-like things like mead.