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.

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Airships

    Keeping on with October’s theme of mad science, today I’m going to cover one of the fun aspects of Aetrimonde, and something that lots of players might aspire to command in a campaign: airships!

    Broadly speaking, there are four kinds of flight available to PCs in Aetrimonde:

    • Flight magic letting a character fly under their own power is rare, and for good reason: it takes practice and skill, and getting it wrong while sixty feet in the air has a low survival rate. The safest variety allows a caster to transform into something with wings, but (lore-wise) even this requires practice using them.
    • Flying steeds like gryphons, hippogryphs, giant eagles, and (stretching the definition slightly) flying carpets can carry a character into the air, and work under the mounted combat rules.
    • Magical airships were invented around a hundred years back, and are the most common mode of flight, although they don’t offer the agile, independent flight of spells or steeds. (This is the kind of airship we’ll be focusing on today.)
    • Balloons and zeppelins are only about twenty years old, and are slower and less controllable than airships although they can carry heavier cargoes.

    Design and Engineering

    Magical airships are an accidental by-product of mad science: the device that allows them to fly, called a gravitational inversion-displacement engine, is what a team of artificers managed to create while trying to copy the levitation device that a mad scientist used to terrorize a remote stretch of the Ironspine Mountains. While the original device provided actual weightlessness in a bubble about two meters across, the gravitational inversion-displacement engine works differently. Gravitational inversion engines, capable of reversing gravity in a small volume through a complex arrangement of alchemical metals and magical fluxes, have long been known but are profoundly power-hungry: the key insight gleaned from the mad levitation device permitted this power draw to be much reduced by displacing an equal and opposite gravitational attraction onto a separate volume.

    In practice, the gravitational inversion-displacement engine is employed to exert an upward pseudo-gravitational force on a sphere of dense material (typically alchemically-treated lead), while displacing the equivalent force onto a much larger volume of air far below. A set of sufficiently large engines, firmly coupled to the frame of a ship, can thus be used to hold it in the air and make it rise and fall by varying the strength of the effect.

    Power for an airship’s inversion-displacement engines is usually supplied by a steam engine and thaumokinetic converter able to turn its kinetic power output into magical current. Forward thrust and additional maneuvering power likewise usually comes from steam power that turns propellers or turbines, although some airships are also equipped with sails, steering vanes, or other apparatus for steering and propulsion.

    The overall effect of this general system results in airships that resemble naval ships lifted into the sky. Some models put more effort into aerodynamics, with sealed, streamlined hulls and aerodynamic shrouds for the propellers, but the classic design is simply a multi-decked sailing ship, stripped of its masts and sails and with a set of propellers mounted on outriggers like a catamaran. This has a significant practical benefit in addition to being visually striking: a naval-style airship can, in case of a mechanical or thaumaturgical failure, make an emergency landing in the nearest body of water. It may sink shortly thereafter, since airship hulls are not always watertight (especially after a rough splashdown), but it serves as an important safety feature.

    Societal Role

    Early airships were rapidly adopted by military forces, and saw widespread deployment during the wars of the Age of Steam. Early attempts to use them in the same manner as naval vessels ended in failure with terrible casualties, as airships proved far more mechanically vulnerable than sailing ships or ironclads, no matter how much they were armored. By the end of the wars, airship doctrine had dictated a fast-attack role, performing low-altitude strafing using hills and mountains as cover, or rapidly landing troops and taking off again. However, the sheer weight of artillery that an airship could carry did serve to make aerial cavalry, mounted on gryphons and other flying steeds, effectively obsolete.

    Airship production was dedicated almost entirely to the military during the wars, but since they drew to the close, demilitarized airships and new construction have entered civilian service as couriers, passenger liners, and light freighters. While more expensive to operate than naval and rail transport, airships are significantly faster, and thus ideal for time-sensitive dispatches, perishable cargoes, and travelers in a hurry. There are established airship routes connecting many capitols and major cities, and a small number of independent airships that well-financed adventurers could hire for transportation or even a bit of close air support.

    Airship facilities come in two varieties. The simpler and more common are landing fields, with adjustable scaffolds that can support airship hulls of a variety of shapes while their engines are off. Unfortunately, bringing an airship to ground level is a difficult and dangerous process: the inversion-displacement engines that carry them aloft generate a severe downdraft, and as an airship approaches a landing field it whips up a terrible tempest that can endanger ground crews and waiting passengers alike. Even worse, as the airship reaches ground level, its displacement field must be carefully adjusted, because the effect grows much stronger once the field encompasses denser dirt and stone. The final moments of bringing an airship in for a landing require that the displacement field be drastically attenuated, and with the field at its weakest a mistake can be fatal.

    The better variety of airship facility are docking cradles: elevated structures that allow an airship to come in for a landing without bringing its displacement close to the ground. These must be built at least 200 meters in the air to accommodate typical displacement fields, and so they are most convenient to build cantilevered off the edges of tall, sheer cliffs. In the absence of suitable terrain, they can be built atop sturdy towers at great expense…which is why the tower variety are mostly built only in major cities.

    Use in a Campaign

    As mentioned already, airships can be used as a plot device enabling PCs to travel faster, move cargoes, or provide covering fire or rapid extraction at critical moments of a campaign. A typical airship can travel at 150km per hour, about 50 times the overland speed of PCs on foot and 2-3 times faster than a train (although the smaller airships that PCs might initially get their hands on could be even faster). Plus, they can perhaps pick up or drop off from locations in the wilderness that would otherwise be near-impossible to reach.

    But owning an airship is a common aspiration for a PC or even an entire group of them, so here are a few ways to tie an airship into a campaign:

    • Acquisition: Airships are rare, and each new hull produced is generally spoken for years in advance. Unless they have an incredibly wealthy and powerful patron (and that is something you could work into a campaign), acquiring a brand-new airship is likely out of the question. Second-hand airships, however, are more reasonable for the PCs to acquire, whether as a reward for a job well done, a prize in a high-stakes card game, or as a prize seized from its previous owners.
    • Upkeep: Once the PCs own an airship, they have new and pressing expenses. Actually flying the ship will require fuel (coal or alchemical fuel) and large quantities of water, but the costs keep racking up even when it’s on the ground: there are maintenance costs, fees for commercial docking slips, and wages for the crew (which the PCs will need for any but the smallest airships, and even then they will need a crew if they want the airship to operate while they’re not on board). These expenses put pressure on the PCs to find paying work, which can motivate them to take on bigger adventures with higher stakes than they’d normally opt for.
    • Equipment: A stock airship is useful enough for a party of PCs, but there are plenty of aftermarket add-ons that they might be interested in finding and bringing aboard. Shipboard weapons like cannons and ballistae are obvious choices for adventurers getting into scrapes, but there are other things that they might find useful, like shipboard laboratories, winches for dropping onto the battlements of enemy fortresses or bringing up big, heavy treasure, and magical wards to prevent scrying and keep unwanted boarders out.
    • Facilities: Adventurers with an airship may not want to be at the mercy of commercial airship facilities…especially if they operate in a legal grey area through smuggling or privateering. At that point, they may want to establish a landing field or even a docking cradle under their exclusive control…which they could also grow into a base of operations with its own facilities or even a staff of followers and assistants.

    Battlemaps

    All this discussion would be incomplete without giving an example of an airship your PCs could fly…and fight…aboard. So I’ve got one! This set of maps depicts a mid-sized (30 meters, about the size of Queen Anne’s Revenge, the flagship of the infamous pirate Blackbeard) sail-powered airship, making it the sort of quiet, stealthy vessel that might be used by smugglers, blockade runners, and intelligence operations.

    The five maps are designed to be used as a set of stacked tiles (in a virtual tabletop that allows for it), so that you can design a running fight where the PCs fight their way up from the cargo hatches or down from the quarterdeck, as appropriate. For ease of use, I’m also providing .zip files of both plain .png images and also .dd2vtt files that can be imported into virtual tabletops like Roll20 and FoundryVTT (using the Universal Battlemap Importer module), complete with things like walls..

    Airship_pngDownload
    Airship_dd2vttDownload

  • Apocrypha: Death Rays

    Today, I’ve got a post about one kind of mad science that the PCs can get their hands on and use, even if none of them have themselves succumbed to mad science and started warping the laws of nature. And that’s death rays! Every self-respecting mad scientist has to have a death ray of some sort: it’s a matter of pride (and if you build one big enough, that really helps in an effort to conquer the world, or at least the neighboring castle). But after the PCs have whipped up the mob, handed out torches and pitchforks, unchained the experiments and pushed the big red buttons on the machinery, they’re going to want to test-fire the death ray…and you need some rules for that.

    Aetrimonde’s death rays are mostly associated with mad scientists: anyone can use them, but it’s mad scientists who create them, and they tend to be…erratic…when anybody else uses them. Nonetheless, PCs who get their hands on a mad scientist’s death ray (possibly after letting them be torn to shreds by their own creation) are likely going to try test-firing it…so it helps to have rules for such a thing. To the left are a selection of handy examples, giving guidelines for how to design such a thing for your campaign. As for how they work in general:

    • A death ray is not a weapon, and cannot benefit from feats like Weapon Aim.
    • Death rays have a built-in energy supply that powers their attacks, and can be charged to full capacity during a long rest.
    • Their attacks consume a variable amount of energy, with greater effects the more energy they draw. It may be entirely random, or may be somewhat controllable.
    • Firing off an especially powerful attack from a death ray has drawbacks: it may be likely to injure the wielder, take several turns to get it to full power, or just be an inefficient use of the energy supply.
    • The examples shown here are roughly equivalent to a greater magical weapon (valued at around 400 gp).

    The examples here show off how those principles can be combined:

    • The Fluctuating Kinetic Actuator makes an attack with random potency: it might deal a mere 2d8 + 4 damage, or could go all the way up to 5d8 + 4, pushing the target 4 squarers and knocking it prone. But at the high end of the scale, it suffers from a slight recoil problem, blasting the user backwards and off their feet.
    • The Overcharged Psyche Domination Blaster offers a very rare thing: a reusable, instant-effect domination attack. It also generally requires that you get right up close to the intended target, so that it’s the nearest viable creature, takes several turns to charge up if you want multiple targets, and has a small chance of misfiring and stunning you if you do try to charge it up.
    • The Runaway Ion Stream Projector is the least chaotic of these examples: its attack just gets more powerful (and chews through more of the energy supply) each turn that you fire it, going from 2d8 + 4 all the way up to 7d8 + 4…if you manage to fire it six turns in a row. And if you do, well…that last shot would consume a 21st thaum, meaning that it subsequently deals 6d4 lightning damage to you.

    All of these death rays can be useful, but they have a niche…and using them outside of that niche may do more harm than good. Which is exactly how the products of mad science ought to be viewed, frankly: use them for a purpose, and don’t try to adapt or tinker with them.

  • Bestiary: A Pair of Mad Scientists

    Following on from my previous post, An Introduction to Mad Science, today I’ve got a Bestiary post featuring a pair of mad scientists that your PCs can face and defeat!

    Kauderwelscher

    The Kauderwelscher (and yes, I did name various examples of mad scientist in German…) exemplifies the madness of mad science. They can charm their enemies (Charmed: has disfavor on attack rolls against the charmer and is flatfooted against them.) just by expounding on their fantastical theories, and once a PC is under their influence, can order them to run around throwing levers, pushing buttons, and so on to the exclusion of all else. This is useful enough just to make PCs run to the other side of a room, but in a hazardous environment (filled with giant Tesla coils, vats of acid, or just a nice pit trap) can be even worse for an incautious PC. However, the Kauderwelscher is actually less charming against PCs that are trained in Engineering and thus are more likely to understand the inanity of what the mad scientist is spouting…

    The Kauderwelscher also has an inaccurate melee attack using a handy wrench, and a slightly more accurate but significantly more potent attack using a “pocket death ray.” While these aren’t very accurate attacks, the Kauderwelscher’s ability to charm foes sets them up for an inevitable betrayal…

    Alchemischer

    The Alchemischer, on the other hand, represents a different strain of mad scientist…one who samples their own wares. This is an Assassin, a class of enemy I haven’t provided many examples of, and it’s an unusual example of the class to boot.

    An Alchemischer starts an encounter with only one attack, an inaccurate and underwhelming stab with a scalpel. But it also has the ability to drink raw alchemical ingredients and not just not die, but also benefit from them (the benefit of its mad theory of alchemy). The Drink Alchemicals action usually gives the Alchemischer a random beneficial effect, although it can occasionally fizzle out with no effect or even backfire and remove previous effects. These effects in turn empower its Alchemical Spittle attack, a close-ranged spray attack that (in practice) can deal from 2d4 + 8 to 4d4 + 16 damage, depending on how many effects it has gained from Drink Alchemicals.

    So in practice, the best way to use an Alchemischer is to have it hang back, hiding in the shadows or behind a cadre of test subjects, guzzling its alchemical mixtures until it has an appropriate number of effects, and then spring it on the PCs with a possibly devastating opening attack. (Catching two or three PCs in a surprise Alchemical Spittle attack with 4d4 + 16 damage is a great way to put them on the back foot.) The catch (because there’s often a catch with mad science…) is that each use of Drink Alchemicals carries a 1/6 chance of wiping out the beneficial effects that it granted, so trying to get all three of Acid, Fire, and Toxin is a risky endeavor. For GMs that like to gamble, I think this makes the Alchemischer a fun enemy to throw against the PCs.

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: An Introduction to Mad Science

    It’s a little bit early, but today I’m kicking off this year’s Halloween season of the blog. Last year, I expounded at length on the undead, as part of introducing the basics of how Aetrimonde’s monsters and enemies worked. This year, I’ve got a different topic: mad science and occult magic!

    Both mad science and occult magic are things that Aetrimonde won’t have support for PCs using right out of the gate (although there’s nothing stopping a GM from working out their own system…). Frankly, I think they’re interesting enough that they deserve their own supplements. But they will get a mention in the Aetrimonde Gazetteer and the Bestiary, because they’re notable phenomena in the setting.

    Aetrimonde is a world where magic is, if not exactly commonplace, at least accepted as a fact of life. As magic becomes better understood and codified, Aetrimondean engineers eagerly incorporate it into machines and devices as a convenient way to sidestep “mundane” physics: it is used to provide motive force at a distance, create frictionless lubricants, and confer intelligence on mechanical servants. But there is a strange grey area of inventions that work in ways inconsistent with (or outright contradictory to) any known laws of science or magic. This is mad science: the domain equally of obsessive geniuses chasing an inspired theory, and deluded kooks meddling with forces they don’t understand.

    The boundary between mundane and mad science can be fuzzy: plenty of isolated geniuses over the years have built devices or run experiments that were ahead of their time and inexplicable until the rest of the scientific community caught up with them and discovered the underlying principles. But true mad science is consistently and resolutely inexplicable, a field where perpetual motion machines don’t just work but can be packaged and sold by mail-order, where doomsday devices can hold a country to ransom on the power of a solitary hamster-wheel, and where strange radiations turn test subjects into supermen instead of masses of tumors.

    Mad science has been around, in one form or another, since about two hundred years ago, which is coincidentally around the same time that Aetrimonde’s intellectual enlightenment really took off and the sciences started becoming as prominent as magic. Despite that, in all that time nobody has ever produced a satisfactory explanation for what mad science actually is or how it works. The best descriptions of mad science revolve around what it isn’t:

    • The important thing to understand about mad scientists is that they are not, in any important sense of the word, actual scientists. Mad science may resemble ordinary disciplines like chemistry, engineering, alchemy, and artifice, but behind its outward appearance it bears as much resemblance to actual sciences as chalk does to cheese. The actual sciences start from observing how the world works and fitting a theory to explain those observations; mad scientists, it is thought, start from a theory and force the world to accommodate it by sheer stubborn insistence.
    • Mad science also isn’t magic. Although that was an early hypothesis for how mad science achieved its wondrous results, mad inventions don’t contain any detectable magic (aside from whatever magical components may have gone into them), and mad scientists themselves don’t seem to work any magic while they’re working in their laboratories or tinkering with their contraptions. Whatever force or power allows their physics-defying inventions to work, it isn’t merely magical.
    • Mad science isn’t coherent. The theories of more lucid mad scientists often seem to fit into an ordinary scientific paradigm, but they inevitably contain some glaring flaw buried deeply within: an irrefutable contradiction, glaring omission, or simply a math error that makes the theory profoundly wrong. Less sensible mad scientists come across more as raving kooks, spouting easily-refuted arrant nonsense with the occasional scientific term mixed in and badly misused.
    • Products of mad science are not reproducible. Take a mad scientist’s invention, have the most brilliant minds take it apart and build an exact copy piece by piece, and you will get, at best, a heap of pointless, nonfunctional machinery. At worst, you may get an explosion. Mad inventions work best for their inventor, and sometimes don’t work at all for anyone else.
    • The one thing that mad science actually, consistently is…is mad. Mad scientists are not insane geniuses, but merely insane. All of them are monomaniacal, and this is only the surface of their madness. More capable mad scientists (those with more sophisticated theories and more capable inventions) tend towards megalomania, paranoia, and delusions…and it’s contagious. A competent actual scientist who studies the theories or inventions of a mad scientist will be lucky not to understand them. To actually understand mad science carries a risk of plain, simple insanity…or worse, of falling into the madness and embracing a delusional theory themselves.

  • Aetrimonde Anniversary Post: Stone Golems

    I’m back with another post on golems (continuing a series that I started early this year and then put on hiatus). This time around, it’s stone golems: massive walking statues, with the strength and durability of stone.

    Stone Golem

    The basic stone golem is a bog-standard Brute: big, tough, strong, but slow and limited to melee-range attacks. It still has a handful of quirks:

    Firstly, while the Stone Golem can’t run (making it even slower than its 4 speed suggests), it also can’t be slowed or immobilized. This negates one weakness of typical Brutes, which is that immobilizing them makes them more or less helpless. A Stone Golem may take a while to get to the PCs, but it can’t be stopped and will just get closer and closer each round…

    Secondly, the Stone Golem has what is essentially a trample attack: it can move through the PCs’ spaces, attacking them in the process. If the Stone Golem sets its sights on one of the PCs, other PCs aren’t going to be able to stop it by getting in the way. Its Topple attack complements this, allowing the golem to, well, topple forward onto a group of PCs and crush them under its bulk. (Of course, a prone golem makes for a good target for the next round…

    Finally, the Imperishable Stone trait means that a Stone Golem’s usefulness doesn’t end when it finally gets bashed to bits: it just turns back into inanimate stone, becoming a lasting obstacle that can complicate the rest of an encounter by blocking line of sight and effect and acting as difficult terrain.

    One great use for a Stone Golem is to have it pursue the PCs through a narrow passageway or tunnel filled with obstacles, with a bunch of other enemies hanging behind it. The PCs are thus forced to pick locks, smash down doors, lift portcullises, and so on to stay ahead of it, while the golem can just walk through them. When the PCs finally bring it down, then the other enemies push past its immobile remains and begin a more traditional fight.

    Dwarven Ancestor Golem

    I’ve previously mentioned dwarven ancestor golems, the giant animated statues that are a focus of veneration for certain traditionist dwarves. And yes, they do make an appearance in the Bestiary, as a variant of stone golem:

    A Dwarven Ancestor Golem lacks the standard Stone Golem’s ability to knock its enemies every which way, but (thanks to being actually armed and armored) deals even greater damage…and as a Brute/Protector, it also has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve to support a group of other enemies.

    Replacing Ponderous Advance, Inexorable Advance allows the Ancestor Golem to plod forward pushing the PCs out of its way…and with a whopping +5 bonus to AC during this movement, this puts it at far less risk from the opportune strikes it provokes entering enemies’ spaces.

    Secondly, the Protective Ancestor trait allows the Ancestor Golem to stand over a handful of other creatures, shielding them with its stony body. And if it joins a fight alongside a bunch of dwarves, its mere presence inspires them and instills them with courage and Composure. I think there’s something iconic about the image of a Dwarven Ancestor Golem leading a (very slow) charge at the head of a throng of dwarves, who cluster around its feet firing crossbows and using its stony bulk as cover.

    Now, the actual nature of a Dwarven Ancestor Golem is, as I hinted when talking about golems earlier, a bit unclear. This is another question I don’t intend to answer…but I’ve got a few suggestions if you want to run with this as the core of an adventure or campaign.

    • The Inoffensive Answer: Ancestor Golems are perfectly ordinary stone golems, animated by a bound spirit, with no special connection to their namesakes except for what the dwarves believe they have. The special veneration given to them is a cultural tradition that accomplishes nothing except to help dwarves feel closer to their ancestors.
    • The Unusual Answer: Ancestor Golems are mostly ordinary stone golems animated by a bound spirit…or rather a pair of them. One is the typical elemental stone spirit, but the other is an ancestor spirit, carefully shaped by dwarf shamans as a representation of a venerated ancestor. The veneration given to ancestor golems helps to keep this spirit stable as an accurate representation of their namesake…because a ten-ton stone statue is a dangerous thing to give a mind of its own.
    • The Blasphemous Answer: Ancestor Golems are blasphemous stone golems, animated by the actual soul of a venerated ancestor dragged back from the Underworld and bound into a statue. This started out as a desperate practice aimed at preventing the greatest of dwarves from being lost forever, preserving their knowledge and wisdom, but gradually became a tool of societal control used by the Stonekeepers who create the golems and carefully guard access to them. If the truth got out, it’s a toss-up as to who would tear the Stonekeepers limb-from-limb: angry dwarves incensed at their ancestors being used as a political pawn, or angry priests incensed at the dead being ripped from the afterlife.

    A question that has occurred to me while I was writing this is: what’s the difference between a stone golem and an earth elemental, aside from the cosmetic? Well, I’ve got an answer for that…which I’ll get to when I get around to writing about elementals more generally. Stay tuned!

  • GM Advice: Pacing

    Today I’m going to go over the GMH’s advice on pacing: how to space out scenes (particularly combat encounters) so that they push players to conserve resources without becoming insurmountable. The advice here is a counterpart to D&D 5e’s concept of an “adventuring day,” being

    Once you have a rough idea of how your scenes link together, the next step is to make another pass over your scenes and consider pacing. An adventure is not (usually) a series of scenes that the players sprint through: there need to be points in the adventure where they can rest, stock up on supplies, and roleplay off of each other to have some character development. When writing an adventure, this means making sure that there aren’t long stretches of action or tension where the characters can’t reasonably decide to stop and take a rest.

    There are some general guidelines about how often an adventure should offer the prospective for a rest (although if you are writing for a specific group, you may be able to fine-tune the time between rests):

    • Short Rests: PCs primarily need short rests to regain their greater powers. If they are economical with the use of their greater powers (and don’t have abysmal luck), a typical party of PCs can typically get through a standard-difficulty combat encounter using one greater power apiece; this means that it is only in the third consecutive encounter that they might start to run out of greater powers, and so in general, the PCs should have opportunities for a short rest no less frequently than every 2-3 combat encounters. However, more difficult encounters become even more difficult when the PCs are low on greater powers: consider giving opportunities to rest right before, or at least right after, a difficult encounter.
    • Long Rests: PCs mostly need long rests to replenish their resurgences after taking damage and healing up. Generally, you can expect a standard-difficulty encounter to deal each PC roughly one resurgence worth of damage, but since each triumph they achieve restores one resurgence, this in theory means that they can go on indefinitely. However, since a patch of bad luck or a more difficult encounter can cost them more than one resurgence, they will eventually need to take a long rest. As a rule of thumb, expect that PCs will need a long rest after facing 5 standard-difficulty encounters, 2 difficult encounters, or an extremely difficult encounter, whichever comes first.
    • Downtime: PCs need downtime mostly to level up, buy supplies, and possibly recover from nasty afflictions. It’s also an occasion for player-led roleplaying, where the players pursue their own goals and riff off of each other’s characters. An adventure should have an opportunity for downtime at least every 10 XP worth of scenes, so that the PCs can take the time to use those XP and level up. Other than that, the need for downtime is driven more by the narrative (and player preference) than by mechanics. Narratively speaking, the PCs should have downtime before embarking on a long journey, or before any other change of pace that might require different equipment that they don’t already have, like cold-weather gear, climbing equipment, or potions of acid resistance.

    The second factor to consider is how your adventure’s narrative makes resting harder or presents costless opportunities to rest:

    • Immediacy: A scene with immediacy pushes the PCs to tackle it as soon as they are able: if they delay too long, the scene may become harder (because some more guards will have time to join the defense, for example) or the PCs may outright fail the objectives of the scene (because the villains will have disposed of a kidnapped NPC after they have no further use for them, for example). Immediacy means that the PCs may not have time to rest, although there are different degrees of immediacy: long-term immediacy means that the PCs might not have time for a long rest, or downtime to stock up on supplies, but can still take short rests, while short-term immediacy would prevent them from resting at all.
    • Security: The PCs also need to be reasonably secure to let their guards down and take a rest (especially in the case of long rests). If the PCs are in the middle of enemy territory, resting gives their enemies a chance to find and ambush them while they are injured and exhausted from a previous battle. As with urgency, there are different degrees of security that could just make it difficult to take long rests or downtime, or in worse situations, could make any rest at all risky.
    • Travel: It is safe to assume that any time the PCs have to travel between scenes, they will also rest at some point during the journey if it is safe to do so. The scale of the journey will determine what kind of rest they can take: to give a few examples, going across town to follow up on a lead will give enough time for a short rest, traveling to the next town over will allow for a long rest, and crossing a province can even allow for downtime.

    With both of these factors in mind, the goal of the pacing pass is to revisit your rough adventure structure and identify long stretches of the adventure that have immediacy and lack security. If you find any that would deprive the PCs of a rest for longer than the guidelines above, consider what changes you could make to the narrative or adventure structure to allow for a rest to break up these stretches.

    Example

    Here’s what a diagram of an adventure might look like following the pacing pass:

    The dashed box denotes a group of scenes taking place in the same location (no travel required between scenes), which is dangerous and difficult to rest in. Depending on the specifics of this adventure, that could mean that the PCs run a risk (or a certainty…) of being ambushed if they rest in this area, or that they recover fewer hit points due to toxic vapors or entropic magic, or some other complication.

    The double-arrow linkage between scenes 1 and 2 indicates immediacy: once the PCs complete scene 1, they must proceed to scene 2 quickly or immediately, lest they suffer some consequence for dawdling. Note also the one-way arrows: there is no going back from scenes 1, 2, or 3, although the PCs could make a detour to 2a (an optional encounter) before going to 3, and they can return to scene 3 following the end of this adventure or arc (in an epilogue, perhaps).

    Scenes 1, 2, and 2a form a potentially difficult sequence of scenes if they are combat encounters: these are three scenes in a row where resting is difficult, and if that applies to short rests, the PCs may decide they don’t have the resources to tackle 2a and skip it. Which is a shame if it’s just content that they miss out on, but it could be made into a positive by foreshadowing that this sequence of scenes will push them and that if they can tackle 2a there will be a special reward…

  • Aetrimonde Anniversary Post: Steam Golems

    I’ve been reminded that the first anniversary of my starting this blog recently passed without my noticing or doing anything special for it. So I’m going to fix that! Over the next few weeks, I’m going to put up a few posts on iconic elements of Aetrimonde: creatures, rules, and concepts that tie together its default setting and design philosophy in ways that exemplify the kind of game I’m writing.

    Today’s topic: steam golems. I previously put together several posts about golems, but somehow I neglected to post any of Aetrimonde’s most common (and in my opinion, most flavorful) variety of golem. So today, I’ve got three basic (meaning civilian-grade and standard-model) golems that the PCs might find turned on them by their operators.

    Mining Steam Golem

    The Mining Steam Golem is exactly what the name says: a steam golem for mining. To that end, it lacks arms and hands, and in their place features an earthmover bucket and a piledriver that is nominally for breaking rocks…but which also packs a punch in a pinch.

    Like all steam golems, this is a big, stompy, tough creature, with plenty of hit points, armor resistance, and some hard-hitting melee attacks. But it has its own twists on that recipe, tied in with its flavor as a glorified piece of mining equipment:

    In a fight (e.g. against an illicit mining operation with the funding to operate a golem), the Mining Steam Golem has a fun little three-part combo: it opens by using Dredging Swipe, which hopefully hits and drags in one of the PCs, but more importantly, fills up its excavator bucket. On its next turn, it uses Fling Debris, showering a clump of PCs with enough earth and stone to knock one of them prone. And once a PC has been knocked prone, the threat of its Piledriver, which automatically does 37 damage to a prone creature, becomes a pressing issue for the party.

    Its other two quirks are common to all steam golems. Dim-Witted gives it an external vulnerability, in that it can no longer use some of its more dangerous actions if the PCs eliminate its (likely easier to tackle) handler first. Overheat gives the PCs a sizeable burst of extra damage each round if they choose to deal fire damage…which they might instead avoid if they don’t have a way to handle the golem’s subsequent increased speed and power.

    Logging Steam Golem

    The second steam golem I’m presenting today is similarly industrial, but with a more forestry-oriented flavor. As Aetrimonde’s equivalent to a logging harvester, the Logging Steam Golem has a big grabby hand, just right for lifting tree trunks in one hand, and an utterly devastating rotary saw mounted on the opposite arm. This is the sort of golem that the PCs might encounter despoiling an elven forest or clearing the overgrowth from an ancient ruin.

    This combination of limbs gives the Logging Steam Golem a similarly devastating, and even swifter, combo: it opens by using Grasping Swipe, preferably against PCs that are bunched up, in an attempt to grab one. And if it succeeds, it spins up that rotary saw blade and menacingly lines up an attack of similar lethality to the Mining Steam Golem’s piledriver. The grabbed PC and their allies then only have a short window of time to either get them free or, if all else fails, bait the golem into swinging the saw at them via Hazardous Equipment and (hopefully) miss, or at least not crit.

    The Logging Steam golem shares the Dim-Witted and Overheat traits with its fellow steam golems.

    Stevedore Steam Golem

    The final steam golem in today’s lineup is the Stevedore Steam Golem, which is the simplest of these three: it has no special built-in equipment, just a couple of big grabby hands for hefting giant crates and containers onto ships and traincars. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous than the other big, piston-driven, iron-plated golems we’ve seen today–just less specialized.

    Personally, I’ve always found that picking up an enemy and using them as a bludgeon gets a good reaction at the table: for whatever reason, there’s always someone at my tables who gets a kick out of doing it to a goblin or having it done to themselves. And the Stevedore Steam Golem does just that: its Brawl action gives it two chances to catch up a PC in its big grabby hands, swing them bodily at their allies, or hurl them into the distance. (This naturally hurts the grabbed PC as much as the actual target of the attack.) There’s no fancy combo here, unless grab-then-throw counts as a combo: the Stevedore is just a straightforward Brute, but one that a certain kind of PC will have a lot of fun fighting.

    Up Next

    At some point over the next few weeks, I’ll follow this up with some actual militarized golems that pose a greater threat for more experienced PCs. Until then, stay tuned!

  • GM Advice: Planning and Linking Scenes

    Today, I’m going to talk about some of the early steps in writing an adventure: planning the scenes that will go into it and linking them together into a cohesive framework. I tend to write adventures from the top-down, starting with a few big-picture concepts and fleshing out various scenes and encounters to support those concepts; the advice in the GMH, in the best tradition of “write what you know,” follows on from that approach.

    Planning Scenes

    Previous chapters have discussed how to design a scene in isolation, but when writing an entire adventure there is also the issue of choosing scenes. Before putting in the work of designing each scene, it helps to consider the entire collection of scenes together: this way you can build a framework of how scenes relate to each other and how they fit into the larger scope of your adventure before fleshing each of them out. Big-picture factors to take into consideration at this step include:

    • Types: An adventure intended for a general audience should have a balanced variety of scenes, including exploration, interaction, and both combat and non-combat encounters. Aetrimonde is a fairly combat-focused system: a good basic approach is to, for every 10 scenes, start with 5 combat encounters and one each of exploration, interaction, and non-combat encounters. Then, fill in the remaining two scenes as you feel fit.
    • Variety: It is generally a good idea to break up scenes of the same type to provide players with a little variety. If using the basic approach above, in which half of the scenes or more will be combat encounters, that generally means interspersing other kinds of scene to break up long stretches of combat, and if you have duplicates of other scene types, do not set them one after the other.
    • Significance: Not every scene has to be vital to the plot–in fact, for longer adventures, having every single scene introduce new plot twists, supporting characters, or locations can make it hard to follow. It helps to have some scenes that don’t bear significantly on the plot: these can be plot-related but not advance the plot, like a fight against an antagonist’s minions who are just standing in the PCs’ way, or they can be completely unrelated, like a game of riddles against a giant who just happened to be wandering through at the wrong time.
    • Difficulty: As a rule of thumb, most scenes should be of default (i.e. moderate) difficulty. For every 10 scenes, one or perhaps two should be difficult, and an equal number should be easy. Significant scenes do not have to be difficult, although a final climactic battle against an adventure’s villain should generally be on the harder side. In fact, making significant scenes difficult can make an adventure harder to complete, by raising the risk of failure at crucial junctures.

    Linking Scenes Together

    Once you have a general idea of what scenes your adventure will contain, but before fleshing them out, it pays to think about how the scenes flow together and how the players may move from scene to scene. The goal of this step is to establish a structure for your adventure, defining the order that the players are expected to progress through each scene (although they may get inventive and find unanticipated ways to progress, which is where the GM has to do some quick thinking…). It’s particularly important to make sure that all of your scenes are reachable—that you haven’t done the narrative equivalent of locking the key to a door behind the door itself. Factors to consider here include:

    • Geography: Where do the scenes of the adventure take place, and how can the characters physically move from scene to scene? Scenes taking place in a wide-open wilderness may allow the party to move freely from any one to any other, but scenes set in a ruin, fortress, or some rougher kinds of outdoor terrain may limit the party’s movement. It may be necessary to first defeat the guards at the gate to the fortress before attempting to rob the fortress’ vault or face the sorcerous overlord, for example.
    • Ordering: Do the players need to complete one scene before attempting another? For example, do they first need to shoot down the dragon using the ballista atop the castle, before they face it on the ground? If so, they need to be able to reach the ballista on the roof before fighting the dragon—but they might be able to pass through the courtyard where that fight will take place, just with no dragon currently in it. In fact, having the players pass through locations where later scenes take place—perhaps with separate scenes occurring on each visit—is a great way to provide foreshadowing and let the players have advance knowledge of where they’ll be fighting.
    • Knowledge: Are some scenes inaccessible without the players getting a clue or advice? This might be the case with scenes taking place in remote caves that aren’t on any map, or that require the players to speak a password that they have no way of knowing until they interrogate a prisoner from another scene. If so, think about which scenes would give the PCs the appropriate clues—you may want there to be several options so that the players don’t miss them. Like with ordering, scenes requiring knowledge might take place in the same location as previous scenes, with elements of the location only becoming noteworthy or understood with the benefit of further knowledge.
    • Points of No Return: When the players start a scene, does it lock them out of other scenes either temporarily or permanently? This could be a matter of geography (attempting to cross a bridge causes it to collapse and forces the PCs to find a way out of the ravine before doing anything else) or it could be because plot developments in a scene make another scene moot (attacking the warlord in his throne room draws all of his guards to the battle, and so the guards formerly in the barracks aren’t there anymore).

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Resurrection

    I recently wrote about failure modes and what a GM might be able to do if an adventure goes awry. One of those things is resurrection: bringing back a dead character so that they can still participate in the adventure. Today, I’m going to go into more detail about how that works in Aetrimonde.

    The Problem with Resurrection

    Resurrection has two drawbacks, one mechanical and one narrative.

    Mechanically, resurrection lowers the stakes of the campaign. Being able to bring a character back from the dead lessens the incentive to keep them alive in the first place. If resurrections are simple and easy, players may throw their characters into greater peril, expecting that they will be able to bring them back instead of making a new character, which is a self-fulfilling prophecy: taking those risks is likely to cause more character deaths, and a high rate of character deaths makes it tempting to employ resurrection as a solution. Campaigns with frequent deaths and resurrections have their fans, but Aetrimonde is not designed for them by default.

    Narratively, easy resurrections raise a lot of questions with regard to the campaign’s setting, mostly related to why it isn’t widely used among NPCs. If it’s within the realm of possibilities for mere adventurers to resurrect one of their own, surely it must be feasible for kings, wealthy merchants, and other powerful personages to arrange for their own resurrection–which, for players who think about such things, takes a lot of the urgency out of trying to prevent (or arrange) the assassination of powerful NPCs. Depending on the exact mechanics of resurrection, it might even raise the question of why anybody ever dies, even of old age. Campaign settings that explore questions like these have their place–but Aetrimonde is not intended to be one of them.

    The Purpose of Resurrection

    With those drawbacks in mind, Aetrimonde has a fairly narrow intended role for resurrection. It is a solution for a character death that either:

    • Interferes with the plot because the dead character was somehow integral to it,
    • Cuts short a story arc or series of encounters that the GM or player had put a lot of work into, or
    • Occurs at a really inconvenient point in the plot, where it would be difficult to introduce a replacement character.

    It should not be a solution for every character death, at least not in a typical campaign, but it still has a niche.

    Mechanics for Resurrection

    Aetrimonde’s philosophy on mechanics for resurrection is simple and straightforward: there are no such mechanics. Because resurrection should be employed to resolve plot-related problems, it should always work in the manner that the GM needs it to. This means that unlike many systems, Aetrimonde contains no “Raise Dead” or “Resurrection” spell accessible to players. Instead, it has guidelines for how a GM can employ it, which lead naturally to a few different scenarios:

    • Resurrection Should be Difficult: Performing a resurrection is not something that ordinary characters can do on the regular. It should require special training and knowledge, special circumstances, or special resources that aren’t generally available.
    • Resurrection Should Involve the PCs: Resurrecting one of their number shouldn’t be a process where the PCs drop off a corpse and pick up a live character an hour later. It should require them to participate in the process, or at least do something to enable it. It can even form the basis for an adventure in itself…
    • Resurrection Should Have a Cost: A resurrection solves a problem, but it should not be a perfect solution: either the PCs performing the resurrection or the resurrected character should have to pay a price for the solution.

    Forms of Resurrection

    So with that in mind, here are three different formats that a resurrection could take:

    • Illicit Vitalism: In an effort to resurrect their fallen comrade, the PCs take his corpse to a vitalist: a mad scientist practicing the forbidden art of vitalism, reviving the dead using lightning bolts and chemicals. The vitalist requires a bit of assistance obtaining supplies for his machinery, including some chemicals that have been impounded by the watch specifically because they can be used in vitalism…and the process is still experimental, of course, which means that the resurrected character might have a few…quirks…to sort out afterward.
    • Churchly Resurrection: Because of the world-saving nature of their quest, the PCs seek out a suitably large temple, with suitably potent clergy, in the expectation that they might be able to reunite body and soul. Which they can…if said soul can be found in the Underworld, contained, and brought back to the land of the living. And the clergy may also require the resurrectee or one of their intercessors to make certain vows to justify performing such a sacred ritual…
    • Embodied Spirit: Having discovered that their fallen comrade had earned enough of a reputation to form a spirit of sorts in her image, the PCs decide to embody the spirit, binding it into her corpse as an emergency form of resurrection. This requires, first, that they strengthen the spirit by telling stories about her living self, until it has the power to animate a corpse…and then to continue telling these stories to ensure that the resulting person stays a person instead of being a spirit inhabiting flesh.

    There are any number of other forms that a resurrection could take, dependent only on the inventiveness of the GM, but these three provide examples of the level of difficulty, involvement, and cost that it should involve.

    Having dipped my toes into the topic with mentions of vitalism and other forms of resurrection, I think I may put out a couple more posts touching on mad science and occult magic in the near future.

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Alcohols of Aetrimonde II

    Today, I’m going to continue my series on Aetrimonde’s alcohols, ordinary and unusual, with a discussion of wines:

    • Imperial Purple: The Novan Imperium, like the Auran Empire that came before it, has a long history of winemaking, and wine is the alcoholic drink of choice in the Imperium even today. Sadly for the Imperium’s urban underclass, however, wine fermented from actual grapes is expensive and largely a luxury for wealthy fabricians. Most affordable “wine” in the Imperium is distilled grain alcohol diluted with water and given color and flavor using additives. Imperial Purple is the epitome of such drinks, given an artificial violet hue using beet and red cabbage juice.
    • Reveler Sacramental: Although almost as cheap as Imperial Purple, Reveler Sacramental is the real deal, made from grapes grown, juiced, and fermented by a monastic order dedicated to Deum Reveling, the Chancel of Vines. In accordance with Deum Reveling’s doctrine of spreading joy and gaiety to all, the monks focus on large harvests and efficient fermentation over flavor. Reveler Sacramental is thus a serviceable but uninspiring wine, best drank as an accompaniment for food or entertainment and not for its own merits. The wine is sold at cost by the monks, although they share it for the asking at their services, which are rather more convivial than most religious rites.
    • Gynnande Onyx: The winemaking regions of the Petty Kingdoms are not large or productive, owing to the region’s backwardness and instability. Currently, the most renowned vineyards are located near the town of Gynnande, where the soil and the local varietal of grape combine to produce a juice so darkly purple as to be almost black (hence the name). Gynnande Onyx is a sweet dessert wine, served at the tables of the Kingdoms’ nobility and exported in small quantities at exorbitant prices, which have grown ever higher as the Iron Duke’s armies press closer to Gynnande’s vineyards.
    • Cession Sekt: Sparkling wine was invented more or less at the same time in three or four city-states in what is now the Cession (and it is hotly debated which one of them got there first). The Cession already had a strong reputation for its dry white wines, made from grapes grown in terraced vineyards along the steep banks of the region’s winding rivers. The addition of bubbles further popularized Cession wines, to the point that sekt is now a major export from the region, and its vintners fiercely defend the name against foreign producers seeking to capitalize on its recognizability.
    • Formic Mead: In what is possibly the strangest origin for any of Aetrimonde’s alcohols, formic mead is brewed not from honey, but from the crystalline sugar produced as a happy by-product from one of ancient Gobol Karn’s bio-weapons that found a niche in the wild. So-called “honey ants” were engineered to sabotage enemy food supplies: an anthive surreptitiously introduced into a fortification (or catapulted over the walls) would see the inch-long insects seek out and consume any source of carbohydrates they could get their pincers on, refining it into solid sugar while multiplying exponentially and biting anything that got close to the hive. Honey ants are a perpetual nuisance in the south of the Unclaimed Reaches, but a mature hive can contain hundreds of pounds of crystalline sugar which, when dissolved in water and fermented, produces a beverage similar to mead with a unique acidic tang.
    • Deepwoods Rootwine: The elves of Tir Coetir, living as they do in the depths of a primeval forest, do not have vineyards. They do brew alcohol from fruit and berries, but their most prized drink is rootwine. This drink gets most of its (actually quite minimal) alcohol content from fermenting fruit juice, but the exact choice of fruit matters little: the supposed merit of rootwine comes from the medicinal herbs, spices, and of course roots that are added to the fermenting pot. According to elven folklore, rootwine promotes everything from good health and keen senses to prescience and a deeper connection with the forest spirits. Rootwine isn’t often found outside of Tir Coetir other than in enclaves of wood elves, but specialist bottle shops sometimes carry it for discerning customers.