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: the Unclaimed Reaches

    Today, I’m going into more detail about the Unclaimed Reaches, homeland of Ipki Chainbreaker, the goblin Inquisitor who I’m building as a fourth sample character. The Unclaimed Reaches aren’t one of Aetrimonde’s major polities (in fact, they’re not even a minor polity…), so they won’t be getting the full two-parter treatment like the Dwarven Federation and Caras Elvaren. But there’s plenty of material here to flesh out Ipki’s background…

    As a reminder, there’s a poll up to determine what kind of Divine magic Ipki will be using. If you haven’t voted yet, let me know your preference now!

    Geography

    The Unclaimed Reaches stretch from the southern borders of Waystone and Caras Elvaren, all the way to the southern tip of the continent. Most of the Reaches is arid prairie, with the exception of a few mountain ranges, which are instead arid and rocky. The soil is moist enough for some crops near rivers, but for the most part the land is better suited to ranching than farming. The land grows drier and less fertile toward the south, partly from mere reasons of climate, but also because of the ecological devastation surrounding the ruins of Gobol Karn.

    History

    As the name helpfully explains, the Reaches are unclaimed by any major or minor polity, for the simple reason that there isn’t much of anything worth claiming. Which isn’t to say that the Reaches are a wasteland: they just aren’t productive enough for any of the major polities to have put in the work to settle and build them up. The soil is just a little too poor and too arid to make for good farming, the mineral resources are too dispersed and low-grade, and what timber there is is sparse and slow-growing.

    The Reaches were settled slowly and haphazardly over time, and mostly by people who were fleeing somewhere else and didn’t have any ties back home. This led the Reaches to become a patchwork of tiny, isolated villages, without much in the way of roads or other infrastructure tying them together. The only towns worth speaking of formed near mineral deposits or stands of timber, and lasted only as long as the resources did before turning back into ghost towns once the deposits were mined out or the timber clear-cut.

    While there are still no serious plans for the major polities to annex the Reaches, the invention of the railroad and the semaphore have allowed mercantile concerns to take a more active hand in the region in recent years. During the Wars of Steel and Smoke, the Kingdom of Waystone constructed a railway line into the northern Reaches for logistical purposes (and to deter southwestern expansion by the Novan Imperium…). After the wars, the railway was sold off cheaply to Coastal and Southern Rail, which now makes a tidy profit carrying livestock, ore and timber from the northern Reaches to Waystone’s markets, and some manufactured goods back. As a monopoly, Waystone and Southern charges whatever rates the market will bear–meaning that the Reaches’ small ranchers, miners and loggers see very little of the benefit from selling their product in parts north–but larger conglomerates, based in Waystone and other major polities, can negotiate for bulk rates, and as such have been buying up land and setting up business in the northern Reaches for some years now.

    Political Situation and Current Events

    Most of the Unclaimed Reaches has no politics beyond the extremely local level: outlying villages and small towns aren’t well-connected enough to have common political interests. There is some political activity in the northern Reaches, particularly around Hayward’s Point, where the rail line from Waystone ends. Here, there are efforts at putting together some kind of cohesive political entity that can counterbalance the economic power of the railway and other foreign interests–efforts that said interests spend a fair amount of money thwarting.

    Further south, the situation is more dire: villages and towns are even more sparse, and by and large they must stand or fall on their own. The southern Reaches are at the mercy of raids by goblin tribes and outlaw gangs alike–and in recent years, there has been a rise in foreign “robber barons” employing mercenaries to forcibly seize control of productive land, creating company towns where the locals’ only options are to work for the company at pitiful wages, or be turfed out with only what they can carry with them. In many cases, the distinction between robber baron and outlaw gang is very narrow…and there are rumors out of the far south of the Reaches that some robber barons aren’t content with just wage slavery.

    One industry only possible in the lawless southern Reaches is Karnish tomb-robbing: the ruins of Gobol Karn and its outposts are rumored to still contain some of the ancient goblins’ alchemical secrets, even after centuries. And indeed, every once in a while some expedition or band of adventurers comes back from the ruins with some scrap of papyrus, sample of alchemical goo, or unnatural hybrid animal that proves valuable to scholars. (Plus, well-preserved goblin cultural artifacts fetch a good price to the right kind of collector…) So, the expeditions continue, and a few Reacher towns on the routes to and from the ruins do a healthy trade in supplies for adventurers planning to risk their lives in pursuit of treasure.

    Adventure Hooks

    • (A classic, with apologies to Akira Kurosawa…) A contact, old friend, or distant relative of one of the PCs sends them a desperate plea: their village in the Unclaimed Reaches is being extorted by bandits, and it won’t be long before they can’t keep up the payments. They need some adventurers willing to train the village militia and help take on the bandits.
    • The PCs are contracted by a merchant house to guard a caravan that will carry supplies and workers to their mine in the southern Reaches, and bring back the load of ore mined there. The merchant house’s factor neglected to mention that these “workers” would be wearing manacles. Are the PCs daring and clever enough to take on the entire mining camp full of slavers, and the robber baron backing them, or will they have to content themselves with merely freeing the slaves from the caravan?
    • A prospector staggers back to Hayward’s Point bruised and bloodied, and before falling into a coma recounts how he dug into what turned out to be a sealed, intact Karnish ruin…unleashing some kind of creature that had been sealed in there. Shortly after, farmers from outlying steads begin fleeing into town or going missing, with the survivors telling tales of strange creatures. It might be time for a good old-fashioned monster hunt…

    Campaign Hooks

    • The PCs resolve to build the Unclaimed Reaches, or at least a part of it, into an actually prosperous, free, and safe nation. Needless to say, this will require them to fend off bandits, make peace with the local goblin tribes, break the power of foreign interests…and do all of this while retaining the support of the Reacher locals that they’re nominally doing this for.

  • GM Mechanics: Awarding Treasure

    For a quick change of pace (to hopefully help with some writer’s block…), I’m going to go over some of the advice that the GMH gives to help GMs insert treasure and monetary rewards into an adventure.

    In the meantime, don’t forget that I’ve got a poll up that will determine which kind of Divine magic Ipki Chainbreaker will specialize in! (Currently leading: Wrath, consisting of rays of searing light and lightning bolts from the heavens.) If you’d like to see something in particular, go make your voice heard!

    Treasure Value

    Aetrimonde’s game balance assumes that characters will accumulate wealth, and turn it into useful magical items, at a certain rate. The calculation is easy: during an adventure where they gain a level, characters should receive treasure roughly equal to their EV during that level. So a level 8 character, whose EV is 180, should gain roughly 180gp of treasure by the time they attain level 9.

    This assumption means that characters of a certain level should have roughly a certain amount of wealth, in the form of coin, magical items, and various other useful equipment:

    LevelWealthLevelWealthLevelWealth
    010071010142470
    120081180152750
    231091360163050
    3430101550173370
    4560111750183710
    5700121970194070
    6850132210204450

    When placing treasure into an adventure, you may wish to keep the PCs’ current wealth relative to this target in mind: this is one area where different approaches can drastically change the tone of a campaign.

    Reversion to the Mean

    One way to handle treasure is to adjust how much you hand out to account for the PCs’ fortunes relative to their level: if they’ve recently blown a bunch of money carousing, or paid a lot of bribes to avoid fighting, or bought a bunch of consumables like potions and volatiles that they then used up, you may want to place more than the usual treasure into their next adventure to bring them back up. And, on the flip side, if your players are fond of looting everything down to the doors from the dungeons they venture through, and are therefore flush with cash, you might cut down a little bit on the rewards you place (or even provide opportunities to spend gold…) until their wealth is back in line with expectations.

    Savvy players, if they catch you doing this, may start to feel that there isn’t much point in seeking out money, or saving it, if you’re just going to top off their coffers regardless. This works for some kinds of campaigns and PCs, and not for others: a story about mercenaries going from job to job, always looking for paying work, loses some of its punch if the players notice that they never actually have to worry about money.

    Laissez-Faire

    The other approach to treasure is to simply hand it out at the suggested rate, and then let PCs do what they will with it. If they blow their money on ale at the tavern, give it away as alms, or spend it on potions and volatiles that they then use up, it’s gone for good and they won’t be getting it back unless they can scrounge up some extra loot to sell, negotiate for higher pay from an employer, or engage in a little entrepreneurial thievery.

    Laissez-faire treasure adds a bit of grit to a campaign by placing the PCs under more of a resource constraint. Done well, this encourages them to spend money wisely and seek out opportunities to earn rewards, but it can also encourage players to go through a dungeon stripping it of its furnishings down to the wall sconces…which detracts from the tone of a serious campaign about saving the world from an ultimate evil.

    Placing Treasures

    Because it takes 10 XP to gain a level, the absolute simplest way to place treasure into an adventure is to calculate the amount of treasure that the PCs would collectively gain in a level, divide it by 10, and place that much treasure as a reward for each XP-granting encounter. That has two drawbacks, though: it’s boring, getting a predictable amount of treasure along with each XP, and it also limits opportunities to give out magical items as treasure (because even the cheapest magical item runs more than you would give out for even a huge encounter granting 3 XP).

    To improve on this, you can still start by breaking the total amount of treasure for the level into 10 equal parts–but then, scatter the parts unevenly throughout one level’s worth of adventure. Some encounters, even XP-granting ones, don’t need to have treasure in them; instead, place bigger treasures (containing magical items where possible!) in climactic encounters, and scatter a few small treasures around the rest of the adventure.

    To provide a simple example, suppose that the plan for a one-level adventure involves:

    • Three combat encounters granting 1 XP each.
    • A puzzle granting 1 XP.
    • A complicated skill encounter granting 2 XP.
    • A social encounter requiring a lot of roleplaying, granting 1 XP.
    • A climactic boss fight granting 3 XP.

    With the treasure for this adventure divided into 10 chunks, one way to break it up would be to place one chunk each on one of the small combat encounters, the puzzle, the skill encounter, and the social encounter…and all of the remaining six on the boss fight.

    To add a little more variety and verisimilitude to your treasure allocations, you might want to slightly adjust the values of each of the ten chunks by moving a few gp between them here and there: this avoids having several treasures of exactly the same value. You might also hold back one chunk (removing it from the boss fight) and keep it as a “floating” treasure that you can award if the PCs do something unexpected and deserving of a reward (and if not, it can go right back into the boss fight treasure).

    Up Next

    I’ll be picking back up next time with another Gazetteer post on the Unclaimed Reaches of Ipki Chainbreaker’s backstory. And if you haven’t voted in the poll to determine what kind of Divine magic Ipki will specialize in, go do that now!

  • Faiths of Aetrimonde: Deum Radiant and the Illuminate Society

    In today’s post, I’m going to go into more detail about the deity Deum Radiant and the Illuminate Society, one of the many sects within this deity’s faith. Both of these concepts were introduced in my recent post on Ipki Chainbreaker, goblin Inquisitor.

    This content won’t be a part of the CRB when it releases, although there will be an extremely brief summary of Deum Radiant’s principles and creed. I’m reserving this more detailed content for a supplement focused on Divine characters, and the approach I’ll likely take is to cover the basics of a deity’s “generic” faith, symbol, and creed, and then discuss a handful of sects representing variations on the generic faith: one orthodox, one heterodox, and one heretical.

    The Illuminate Society is a heterodox sect…

    The Faith of Deum Radiant

    Deum Radiant is a god of light, truth, and hope. Its followers include investigators, reformers, philanthropists, and the oppressed and downtrodden who hope for better days to come.

    Symbol and Creed of the Faith of Deum Radiant

    The symbol of Deum Radiant is a flaming torch or shining lantern. The most common creed adopted by anointed priests of Deum Radiant is “Spread hope. Uncover truth. Act righteously.” Variations on this creed include:

    • Mortalkind cannot thrive in darkness, literal or metaphorical. Light brings hope and unveils the misdeeds of the wicked.
    • Lies and secrecy seldom have any benefits; the truth shall set you free.
    • Light is most needed in the darkness, where it shines brightest. It is the duty of the faithful to bring light into dark places.

    The Illuminate Society

    Many worshippers of Deum Radiant follow a personal faith, without a priesthood or formal temples. The Illuminate Society is a movement rather than a church, attracting driven individuals from the faith who have chosen to dedicate themselves to fighting injustice and suffering.

    Members of the Society, more than any other sect of Deum Radiant, put their ideals into action: the Illuminates outright deny that the law can prevent them from doing what they believe is right. The Society plants itself in opposition to tyranny, injustice, and oppression, and it engages readily in direct action. Its adherents’ tactics start with nonviolent protest, but when that fails to inspire change, they escalate rapidly to incitement of riots and uprisings, attacks on corrupt politicians and judges, and outright insurrection against what they consider illegitimate authority. The Society’s less rebellious actions include advocating for the expansion of the right to vote in Waystone and the Novan Imperium, and working to stamp out the slave trade, which is already banned in Aetrimonde’s major polities but persists in some minor polities and lawless regions.

    Many sects have been declared heretical for actions that were less inconvenient to secular authorities. The Illuminate Society is officially considered merely heterodox, for three reasons. Firstly, the Society’s direct actions are mostly against targets that Aetrimonde’s major polities consider acceptable, like despotic city-states in the Cession and sorcerous overlords hiding out in the Frigid Wastes (although the Society does regularly have “disagreements” with the Victovan and Sanctean governments). Secondly, the Society does not preach: it draws converts mainly from the faithful of other sects of Deum Radiant, and attracts them by, essentially, doing exactly what many worshippers of Deum Radiant wish they could. And finally, the orthodox sects of Deum Radiant defend it against every attempt to declare it heretical: while they might not outwardly support it, the uncomfortable truth is that the Society merely puts into practice the creed of Deum Radiant, without the reservations or compromises that orthodox sects have. To declare the Society heretical would go against their own faith…and would likely drive converts to the Society anyways.

    Unlike many religious orders, the Illuminate Society does not give any special preference or privilege to empowered priests. Chapters of the Society are just as likely to be led by philanthropists or social workers as by clerics, and many of the Society’s direct actions against slavers and despots are executed by mundane soldiers with no divine magic. That said, the Society does attract many Crusaders, and a number of Inquisitors who, aside from holding their fellow Illuminates to necessarily strict ethical standards, also perform covert actions on behalf of the Society.

    Symbol and Tenets of the Illuminate Society

    The holy symbol specific to the Illuminate Society is a torch encircled by a band of darkness, with rays of light which pierce through the ring. Creeds of anointed priests among the Society often contain one of the following variations:

    • Do what is right, without reservation or compromise.
    • If the law forbids ethical action, then it has no just foundation and can rightly be ignored.

    Up Next

    As you can see, Ipki Chainbreaker, the liberator of slaves, is a perfectly typical member of the Illuminate Society…maybe even a little on the moderate side. I’ll be following this up with another post fleshing out the other part of Ipki’s background: the Unclaimed Reaches from whence she hails.

  • Ipki Chainbreaker II: Heritage and Abilities

    All right, after a few weeks’ delay, I’m moving ahead with the Inquisitor sample character I started previously. The poll I set up in that post has produced a tie between a human belonging to a nameless Mystery Cult, and a goblin belonging to the Illuminate Society. To break the tie, I’m going with the more interesting ancestry, that being Goblin. So without further ado, I present Ipki Chainbreaker, goblin Inquisitor, member of the Illuminate Society, and worshipper of Deum Radiant.

    Ancestry: Goblin

    I think the general idea of a goblin is going to be familiar to many an RPG player: generally speaking, goblins in fantasy media are scrawny, cowardly, cunning, and generically evil. I think that there are interesting things to be done with goblins–you may already have read my Gazetteer post on their ancestral homeland–and so I decided early on to “promote” them to a PC ancestry. Here’s how goblins are described in the CRB:

    Goblins are the smallest intelligent people on Kaern, and most have slender frames and a hunched posture making them look even smaller. However, goblins possess a wiry strength that makes them dangerous—especially when underestimated. Many goblins of both genders are completely hairless; when a goblin does have hair, it is generally black or a very dark brown. Goblins have skin tones that range from red-brown to gray, and strangely-proportioned bodies, with arms that reach past their knees. They also have alarmingly wide mouths and an assortment of sharp, mismatched teeth. While goblins grow quickly, and are physically mature by the age of 12, they do not reach mental maturity until 18 to 20 years old.

    Goblins have pronounced psychological differences compared to humans, likely due to their small size placing them at a physical disadvantage compared to those of larger ancestry. They tend to be uncomfortable when alone and most confident in large, like-minded groups, making them susceptible to groupthink and rabblerousing. They are also twitchy—even paranoid—and constantly ready to flee, hide, or duck behind cover at signs of danger.

    I’ve designed goblins to naturally fit into the Lovable Coward trope (warning: TVTropes link). They’re small and weak, and they know it, and are therefore ready to flee when events turn against them. At the same time, they know that they’re stronger in numbers, and so are capable of surprising feats of loyalty in defense of friends and allies.

    And I’ve done my best to represent these traits in goblin ancestry features, presented here:

    Horde Mentality gives goblins a sizeable increase in accuracy when attacking someone in melee with an ally. The goblin doesn’t have to be there in melee with them: they can shoot, cast spells, or just throw things and still benefit from this feature.

    Low-Light Vision is a familiar feature (and in fact, I think every one of the sample characters thus far has had it…I swear there are ancestries without it, I just haven’t gotten to them yet!).

    Undersized is a novel feature, although like Low-Light Vision it’s shared by multiple ancestries. And to explain how it works I will need to briefly detour into how Aetrimonde handles size: aside from determining the space they take up in a battle, creatures gain a +1 bonus to attack rolls, AC, and Poise against creatures larger than they are, but suffer a -1 penalty to Brawn against such creatures. It is also harder to push larger creatures around or knock them prone. By counting as one size smaller (Small instead of Medium), goblins gain these bonuses (and penalties…) against Medium creatures, and Small creatures fighting a goblin don’t gain these bonuses. Combined with the reduction in carrying capacity, Undersized is a mixed bag, but usually a net positive.

    Finally, the goblin ancestry power Goblin Discretion lets them move a very short distance safely after completely missing with an attack. While 1 square may not sound like much, this is enough to get a goblin out of melee range so that they can flee further, or around a corner so that they can take cover and hide. It can also be used with powers allowing a goblin to make multiple attacks (fairly common among Martial powers), letting the goblin reposition between attacks.

    Culture: The Unclaimed Reaches

    Ipki the inquisitor hails from the Unclaimed Reaches, a Western-themed region between the ruins of Gobol Karn and the borders of civilization. It is resource-poor and lawless, populated by ranchers, prospectors, bandits, and robber barons.

    Faith: The Illuminate Society

    I haven’t talked about faith for my other sample characters, because it doesn’t have a lot of impact for non-Divine characters (by which I mean: pick what feels flavorful!). But for an Inquisitor, this deserves at least as much consideration as culture and stratum.

    The Illuminate Society is a sect that worships Deum Radiant, the god of light…and more importantly to the Society, also the god of truth and hope. The Society is a crusading sect, but their crusade is a social one: its lay members are reformers, activists, and muckrakers, who devote their lives to shedding light on social ills and putting an end to them. An anointed priest of the Illuminate Society, however, is someone who goes into the darkness bringing the light with them: they are liberators of slaves, scourges of tyrants.

    And an inquisitor of the Illuminate Society is someone who sneaks into dark places, hunting the evils that lurk therein…

    Stratum: Unionist

    With that in mind, I want to tie Ipki’s backstory to the Unclaimed Reaches’ robber barons. In a lawless region like the Reaches, the wealthy and powerful can afford to skirt the civilized world’s laws against slavery, passing it off as indentured servitude. Mines and factories run by the Reaches’ robber barons often use forced labor “recruited” from goblin tribes and impoverished frontier towns alike.

    Enter Ipki: an “indentured worker” who learned the teachings of Deum Radiant from a fellow worker and took the creed to heart. Ipki spread a message of hope and resistance among her fellow slaves, ultimately uniting them in an uprising that ousted the overseers of their mine and seized the means of production for the workers.

    Ipki now roams the Unclaimed Reaches freeing slaves and preaching a message of solidarity among fellow workers. As a “lowly” goblin, she can easily pass beneath notice to infiltrate the ranks of enslaved workers…and as an anointed priest of Deum Radiant, she is a natural rallying point for the oppressed and discontented.

    Up Next

    I’m doing things in a different order building Ipki than I have with past sample characters. And part of this is to create an opportunity for you readers to have more input here! For the next post on Ipki, we’ll be picking out abilities, feats, and powers–but the kind of powers will be up to you! Vote in the poll below to make your preference known:

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: The Heavenly Realm

    Before I get back to building the latest Inquisitor sample character (and if you haven’t already voted on their ancestry and faith, go do that now!), I’m putting up this one last post related to faith and religion in Aetrimonde. Today, I’m talking about the heavenly realm!

    …Which means it’s going to be a short post, because despite the best efforts of Aetrimonde’s planar explorers, there simply isn’t that much known about it.

    Where Faerie and the Underworld are fairly easy planes to visit, the Heavenly Realm is quite difficult to reach. This is partly because crossings to the Heavenly Realm are rare: they occur only in places that have seen singular acts of genuine faith, and as such, they tend to wind up with shrines and temples built on top of them, with priests who tend to want to vet anyone using their temple to go and explore heaven. Complicating this is the fact that crossings to the Heavenly Realms are harder to actually use, as though universally closed off by the Seal Planar Crossing ritual.

    That said, a scarce few expeditions to the Heavenly Realm have succeeded and returned, and while some of the early ones were clearly pushing a doctrinal agenda in their recountings, there have emerged a few commonalities…many of which raise more questions than they answer.

    • The Heavenly Realm is an apparently infinite expanse: it has a perfectly flat ground made of an utterly invulnerable substance variously described as alabaster, white opal, and mother-of-pearl, and is suffused by a constant white light emanating from no particular source and leaving no shadows. There are no bodies of water and no plant or animal life; between that, the unsettling lighting, and the lack of a horizon, the plane is actually one of the more hostile to mortals, for both logistical and psychological reasons.
    • The plane’s only native inhabitants are angels, most of whom are so intent on various ineffable tasks that they pay no attention to mortals. The rare few that so much as acknowledge mortals can often be persuaded to provide food, water, and other supplies from unknown sources, but they seldom answer questions about matters of theology and when they do, the answers are uniquely unhelpful.
    • The only landmarks in the Heavenly Realm are scattered monolithic structures, ranging from the size of towers to the size of cities or mountains, which later accounts describe as having the quality of machinery but without any visible means of function or operation.1 There is an apparent center to the plane, a region densely packed with these structures2 and in which all recorded planar crossings from the material world are located
    • Some of the structures appear to be in a state of disrepair; others are tended by angels who may or may not be operating them. It’s unclear what the angels’ interactions with the machinery serves to accomplish, since for the most part their actions consist of flying to an unremarkable part of the structure, staring intently at it for a moment, and then briefly laying a hand on a spot indistinguishable from any other before flying off again.
    • Some of the structures appear to be off-limits to mortals, as attempting to enter draws first a polite rebuff from nearby angels, and then (as one unwisely persistent expedition discovered) an forceful response from angels that descend in rapidly increasing numbers on intruders. However, there are other structures where mortals are tolerated, which is to say mostly ignored.
    • Geography in the Heavenly Realm works familiarly to mortals: directions and distances are consistent, meaning that it can actually be mapped! What isn’t consistent is time: the subjective time experienced by mortals is increasingly compressed as they move further from the plane’s center, such that what seems a day to them passes as months or years in the mortal world. (One early expedition, initially thought lost, was devastated to learn that in the subjective month that they spent exploring the outer reaches of the plane, more than two centuries had passed.)

    Up Next

    There is of course one exception to the prevailing conditions of the Heavenly Realm, which is the Pit of Hell. But, I’m saving that for a later post series…perhaps for Aetrimonde’s second Halloween!

    1. Earlier accounts, from before Aetrimonde’s industrial revolution, focus solely on the monolithic size and scale of the structures. More recent accounts compare various features of the structures to pistons, boilers, ducting, and other familiar mechanical components, although they note that the parts have not actually been observed to function as such. ↩︎
    2. “Densely” here meaning that the structures are separated by mere miles. ↩︎

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: the Underworld

    Following on from its mentions in my previous post, today I’m going into detail about the “antechamber to the afterlife,” the Underworld. This is another of the alternate planes of existence that overlaps Aetrimonde; for more details on Aetrimonde’s cosmology, see this other previous post.

    Aetrimondean cosmologists often treat Faerie and the Underworld as related planes. Like Faerie, the Underworld is relatively easy to reach, it has fractal topology in place of geometry, and it is hypothesized to be a genius loci that enforces a form of narrative causality. Adventurers who take this as an indication that the Underworld can be approached in the same way as Faerie rapidly learn their mistake, or die, for the Underworld is a far less forgiving plane to visit: it is a dreadful plane of existence, in the sense that everything about it seems purpose-built to inspire dread.

    Planar crossings to the Underworld arise in places associated with terror, madness, and death, such as graveyards, insane asylums, and the sites of massacres. They are relatively stable, only vanishing if the nature of their surroundings is altered to remove the source of dread, but generally unmarked. It is possible to stray into one accidentally, but given that they occur in unsettling places, it is difficult to do so ignorantly.

    Terrain and Conditions

    This contrast between Faerie and the Underworld is immediately apparent just from surface appearances: where Faerie is rife with dramatic landmarks, scenic vistas, and quaint villages, the Underworld can only be described as bleak and dreary. The plane has a day and night cycle, but its days are consistently overcast and gloomy, with a side of fog and drizzling rain, punctuated with ominous thunderstorms. There is no sun during the days, merely an omnipresent grey illumination. What plant life exists is pale and stunted, and the waters are stagnant, brackish, and tainted.

    It is possible, if only barely, for mortals to eke out an existence in the Underworld. The immediate problem faced by those optimistic mortals intending to settle the Underworld is growing food and finding clean water for sustenance, but beyond that obstacle lurks a subtler one: mortals simply were not made to live in a place like the Underworld, and it inevitably wears on them psychologically. While it might be fine to visit, the lack of sunlight, the perpetual gloom, and the absence of green growing things all combine to drive mortals to ennui, followed by madness, in the long-term.

    Inhabitants

    The Underworld has three kinds of inhabitants, who appear completely unrelated to each other, and largely ignore each other.

    Shades and the River of Souls

    First, there are the shades of the dead: when a mortal dies, the important parts of their soul1 transmigrate into the Underworld, becoming a shade. Shades appear as a silvery, translucent reflection of how the living person saw themselves in life: typically younger than they were when they died, and in possession of personal effects that they were attached to, like favorite articles of clothing, weapons, and so on.

    While they remember who they were in life, shades are almost completely passive and apathetic, perhaps not even self-aware: left to their own devices, shades wander listlessly but persistently through the Underworld towards a fixed point that draws them all. The crowds of shades grow denser as they approach this destination, and their silvery, shimmery appearance can cause a procession of shades to be mistaken for a stream or river from a distance. The processions of shades are thus collectively called the River of Souls, and they serve as a kind of landmark.

    It isn’t known what lies at the end of the River of Souls, although the Pantheonic faith, for one, would say that it leads to the true afterlife. There is a point where all the River’s known tributaries have joined together, but the River continues far beyond that point. Many explorers have tried to follow the River in search of answers to their theological and cosmological questions, but there is a danger in this: as shades proceed along the river, they feel the call of whatever lies at its end. Follow it too far, and even living mortals will hear this call…and join the procession. Successive expeditions, using ever more sophisticated protective wards, have managed to follow the procession further and further over the years, but pushing the envelope of what is possible is risky, and many of these expeditions never return.

    Resurrecting the dead–not raising them as undead, but truly returning a dead person to life–invariably requires retrieving their shade. The Pantheonic sects known to perform resurrections (on rare occasions and for only the gravest of reasons) have ways of doing this without actually paying a visit to the Underworld. Vitalists–the scientists, alchemists and magicians aiming to replicate the temples’ closely held secrets–are generally forced to enter the Underworld, dowse out the desired shade (or just pick one at random, sometimes), and magically bind and contain it for transport back to the material world and installation in a new body. Indeed, vitalism is in enough demand that there is a small industry in undertaking such tasks, for a sizeable fee…

    The Gravelords and their Courts

    The second group of the Underworld’s inhabitants are the Gravelords and their courts. Each Gravelord is a being of great magical power, with some capacity to pull shades from the River of Souls and grant them a degree of awareness and self-direction. This allows the Gravelords to create their own personalized afterlives, filled with whatever shades they find worthy of expending their magic on.

    The various Gravelords prefer different traits in shades and induct them into their courts for different purposes. Some are warlords, with ambitions to conquer the Underworld and even the material world, and they pick out shades of great warriors and soldiers. Others are collectors or scavengers, who seek out the shades of famous and powerful people in order to learn the secrets they took to their graves, or just to have interesting company. And some (largely of mortal origins) have simply decided that they weren’t done living, and continue to live it up in the Underworld in the company of any shades who feel the same.

    It isn’t known who the first Gravelords were; when the first mortals entered the Underworld to explore, the Gravelords of their time described predecessors from whom they had inherited, won, or usurped their positions. Among the minority current Gravelords whose origins are actually known are some shades who inherited the position and a source of power from older Gravelords, several formerly mortal necromancers, an ancient vampire, an extraordinarily powerful ghoul, and a dragon who hoards the shades of the wealthy and powerful. But most Gravelords hide their origins, and some of them are difficult even to describe: among the stranger Gravelords are a female giantess who calls herself a “dead muse,” a living shadow, and a collectively intelligent swarm of locusts.

    Monsters

    Finally, the Underworld also contains what can only be called monsters. Many of them are undead, or at least resemble undead (ghouls may have originated from the Underworld, although it’s not clear). Others, which explorers of the Underworld have taken to calling “slashers,” resemble mortals, of the most sadistically violent and violently insane persuasions. And some are simply animalistic: great savage wolves, bloodsucking giant bats, and maneating spiders are in abundance throughout the Underworld. These different varieties have one trait in common: they are seemingly designed to inspire dread and terror in mortal visitors.

    The Underworld’s monsters utterly ignore the shades of the dead in the River of Souls, and while they are known to attack the courts of the Gravelords, they appear only to do so when no actual mortals are nearby. And when mortals are nearby, they know it: these monsters have an uncanny ability to pick up on a mortal presence and home in on it. The only saving grace to be had is that they apparently don’t aim to kill interloping mortals as much as horrify and psychologically torment them: Underworld monsters have been observed to toy with their prey, picking off the members of an expedition one by one over days rather than wiping them out in one confrontation, even when it appears that would be trivial for them. They are even known to purposefully leave survivors, though never without a few psychological scars in addition to the physical ones.

    The Genius Mori Hypothesis

    Like Faerie, the Underworld is hypothesized to have, or be, a genius loci. This would likely be a popular hypothesis just based on the behavior of its monsters, but what really clinches it is the nature of its fractal topography. Faerie’s fractal topography is relatively firm and settled: new ways through Faerie are discovered all the time, but always in ways that make it at least plausible that they were just previously overlooked–and once discovered, they seldom close.

    Not so in the Underworld. New connections open up all the time around mortals visiting the Underworld, and often in places that they could not possibly have been beforehand. A cave system will turn out to have one cavern full of hundreds of zombies, which somehow went undetected for weeks before they abruptly burst out in the middle of the night; an abandoned manor will turn out to have a secret passage, allowing a slasher to make it inside, even after an expedition spent hours searching and fortifying it. Even worse, connections that mortals are counting on will close, generally at the worst possible moment. A small creek will flood and turn into a morass just in time to trap a bunch of mortals fleeing from some horrible monster, or a mountain pass will suffer an avalanche and trap them with dwindling food supplies.

    Both behaviors are extensions of a truism coined by the earliest explorers of the Underworld: no matter how bad it seems, it’ll always get worse. The Underworld’s narrative causality (and genius loci, if it has one) isn’t concerned with telling a tale of heroism and nobility: it will settle for a tragedy, if that’s all it can get, but ultimately, it wants to tell a horror story. Events unfold in the Underworld in a manner calculated to traumatize mortals: they will be made to witness steadily escalating scenes of horror and make ever more terrible decisions, until either they snap under the pressure, or give up and flee. Either outcome serves the interests of the Underworld, which seems to desire that mortals view it with reverent dread.

    Plot Hooks

    You can always use denizens of the Underworld as enemies in an encounter, but the slow-burn, dread-based nature of the Underworld lends itself better to longer-term usage, such as adventures or entire campaigns that revolve around it.

    Adventure Hooks

    • A bedraggled, half-crazed adventurer bursts into the inn where the PCs are staying, raving incoherently about the “creature” following them. Upon questioning, the few lucid answers they can give suggest that the adventurer narrowly survived a doomed expedition to the Underworld…and that something else came back with them…
    • The PCs have recently lost an ally (a fellow PC or a close NPC ally), and have decided to have them resurrected by a vitalist, despite the risks. This, of course, necessitates a trip to the Underworld to dowse out their shade before it gets too far down the River of Souls.
    • A representative of a Gravelord makes one of the PCs an offer: in exchange for riches or a favor now, the Gravelord demands their service after their death. Of course, the Gravelords are often impatient, and this offer carries no guarantee of a natural death…

    Campaign Hooks

    • One of the Gravelords has become ascendant, and is assembling an army of shades, undead, slashers, and other denizens of the Underworld to invade the mortal plane. It is up to the PCs to organize a defense and ultimately overthrow this Gravelord.
    • For an unusual campaign, the PCs begin the game as shades in the service of a Gravelord (or are killed in a hopeless battle early in the campaign and fished from the River of Souls), and must earn their freedom and resolve their unfinished mortal business. For added fun, the nature of shades can allow the PCs to “respawn” when killed.
    1. The Intellectus, housing memory, knowledge, and skills, and the Spiritus, housing beliefs, morals, and ethics. The Animus, or life-force, which houses instinct and motivation, is left behind and is often what animates undead. ↩︎

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: the Pantheon

    Continuing on from the overview of Aetrimonde’s many approaches to faith and religion, today I’m going to focus on the Pantheon, those gods that are responsible for the powers of Divine classes.

    Also, if you haven’t already, go vote in the poll that will determine the faith and ancestry of the sample Inquisitor I’m working up!

    The Major Gods

    The CRB covers the fourteen major gods and their creeds, and encourages GMs and players to make up their own minor gods if they so desire (although they won’t have the benefit of the creed-specific feats in the CRB…).

    DeityCreed
    Deum HarmoniousRevere nature. Preserve life. Prevent destructive change.
    Deum KnowingUnderstand the world. Spread knowledge. Act on evidence.
    Deum MakingBuild usefully. Create beautifully. Hone your craft.
    Deum MilitantFight for glory. Fight to survive. Fight to win.
    Deum MockingAct in the moment. Speak truth to power. Count on nothing.
    Deum RadiantSpread hope. Uncover truth. Act righteously.
    Deum RevelingSpread joy. Build community. Comfort the desperate.
    Deum RulingGuard civilization. Bring justice. Act lawfully.
    Deum TerminalAccept endings. Embrace change. Break what can be broken.
    Deum ValiantProtect the innocent. Act honorably. Fear nothing.
    Deum VeiledGather knowledge. Guard your secrets. Act subtly.
    Deum UntamedStand firm. Act freely. Defy limits.
    The Bright LadyNurture children. Heal the sick.
    The Dark MaidHonor the dead. Ease their passing.

    The Pantheonic Canon

    The Pantheonic faith’s loose approach to doctrine and canon means that even Orthodox sects have their own distinct myths, practices, and beliefs. All of them, however, agree on several core points of doctrine, the most important of which are:

    The names of the gods hold power

    Pantheonic sects agree that the gods should not be named, and refer to them only by titles and poetic epithets. Sects have a variety of approaches to this: some believe that the gods’ names simply cannot be known to mortals, and that giving them a name of mortal invention is disrespectful. Others believe that speaking or writing a god’s name weakens them in some way, or that the gods for their own ineffable reasons dislike hearing their names in the mouths of mortals, and are likely to curse them with ill fortune. Regardless of the reasons, the gods of the Pantheon are identified by titles reflecting their divine portfolio, which generally begin with the honorific “Deum:” Deum Valiant is the god of courage, while Deum Terminal is the god of endings, for example.

    The gods help those who help themselves

    Aside from the divine powers channeled by anointed priests, there is little hard evidence of divine intervention in Aetrimonde. According to the Pantheonic faiths, this is because the gods are distant and subtle. They seldom send direct divine intervention, but they empower mortals who they trust to act on their behalf, and engage with the world in other, subtler ways. 

    The true afterlife lies on the far side of the Underworld

    The extraplanar realm of the Underworld indisputably exists—mortals even visit on a regular basis—but it’s not a pleasant place to spend eternity. Upon transmigrating to the Underworld, mortal souls are inexorably drawn to the River of Souls—not actually a water feature, but an immense procession of souls which can be mistaken for a river at a distance. The procession moves slowly, but inexorably, into the deepest reaches of the Underworld, and although mortal explorers have attempted to find the end of the River, none have ever returned from it. According to the Pantheonic faiths, this is merely an antechamber to the true afterlife: a soul’s time in the River of Souls serves to purify it and allow it to lose its earthly attachments, at which point it reaches the end of the River and enters into its chosen god’s true afterlife.

    Hell exists, but is hard to get into

    Hell, or the Abyss, or the Pit, is a prominent part of most Pantheonic sects’ teachings. It is home to demons who oppose the angelic hosts serving the Pantheon; it is also popularly believed that those demons were once angels, and were condemned to the Abyss as punishment for some transgression against their patron god. Demons covet the souls of mortals, for unspecified reasons: possibly because those souls are a source of power, or to satisfy their sadistic impulses, or maybe just because it offends the gods. A demon can only obtain a mortal soul if the mortal signs it away intentionally and willingly—demons cannot trick a mortal’s soul away from them, or take it by force, and even the most foul and wicked mortals will not end up in Hell unless they have signed away their souls.

    The mortal soul is sacred

    The soul cannot be destroyed—this is not just a belief of the Pantheonic religions, but has been confirmed by various researchers. (This line of research is a decidedly unsanctioned one, but some of the researchers’ experimental notes survived to be studied after their authors met their just ends.) However, souls can be tormented and warped, even used as a source of power—and the Pantheon abhors this. No matter how badly a soul is damaged, it will eventually recover in the River of Souls, but the process of recovery delays a soul’s entry into the true afterlife. For a soul to be signed away to a demon is even worse, for it is rarer than rare for a soul to escape Hell and pass even into the Underworld. Pantheonic sects hold any tampering with the mortal soul to be an abominable act, punishable by excommunication.

    Aetrimondean Atheism

    It’s difficult for atheism to persist in the face of actual, commonplace divine magic as practiced by anointed priests. Aetrimondean atheism therefore does not deny the existence of the Pantheonic gods–just that they have some special divine nature. There are a few seeming inconsistencies in how the Pantheon’s gods work that allows staunch atheists to argue that the gods are nothing special:

    The Pantheon are poor judges of character

    Becoming an anointed priest requires believing in and living an appropriate creed–but particularly deluded mortals can convince themselves that seemingly any action, including some that plainly run contrary to the creed, are in fact consistent with it. That the gods empower mortals who then act against their purposes suggests that they lack the omniscience attributed to the Pantheon.

    Angels themselves seemingly don’t consider the Pantheon gods

    Granted, angels don’t talk much about anything: they are purpose-driven, and single-mindedly focus on whatever purpose they were created for. But, on those rare occasions when angels have deigned to speak with mortals, they have had nothing to say on questions of doctrine or theology. It can be difficult to read angelic faces and body language, but many observers have described angels as seeming “baffled” or “uncomprehending” when asked even simple theological questions.

    Aetrimonde has plenty of powerful beings who aren’t called gods

    There are some people who revere dragons, elementals, demons, powerful spirits, or their own ancestors. Some of those entities can even grant powers, much like the gods empower their followers, and some of them don’t even demand worship. The gods empowering a cleric aren’t any different from a faerie empowering one of their servants—so why treat the gods differently?

    I wrote the lore surrounding Aetrimonde’s Pantheon to be ambiguous: the true nature of the gods, or even if they actually exist, is a mystery, and one that GMs and players can interpret as they like for their games–or, a GM can decide on some answers and let the players discover them as part of a campaign. (Author’s Note: I absolutely have my own answer to what the gods are actually like. But I’m not going to spoil the fun for everyone else by making it a canonical answer to this question.) As with much of Aetrimonde’s deep lore, I prefer my writing to raise interesting questions for players to explore.

    Up Next

    I’ll be picking back up with the creation of a sample Inquisitor soon. And seriously: go vote in the poll that will determine this character’s faith and ancestry!

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Faith and Religion

    Since I’ve just started a post series focused on the creation of an Inquisitor as a sample character, now seems like a great time to dive into how Aetrimondeans worship. I’m going to split this into two posts, first covering all the common forms of religion in Aetrimonde, and in a second post I’ll dive deeper into the Pantheon, whose religion is the most widespread and who are believed to be the deities to empower Divine classes.

    Also, as a reminder, there’s currently a poll up to determine the faith and ancestry of the fourth sample character I’m building, an Inquisitor. Go vote to let me know what you’d like to see focused on as I build this character out!

    The Pantheon

    Aetrimonde’s most widespread faith is actually a loose collection of faiths, practiced by a wide and diverse assortment of religious sects that are more or less compatible with each other. Pantheonists practice henotheism, acknowledging the existence of multiple gods and occasionally participating in rites for most or all of them, but principally worshipping a single one.

    The Pantheonic faith coalesced around a very loose religious canon, recognizing fourteen major gods and an uncertain number of minor ones. The boundaries of Pantheonic faith are fuzzy: most sects are relatively small compared to the Pantheonic faith at large, there is no central authority who can decide whether a sect worships the Pantheon “properly,” and the faith’s religious canon is governed by an informal process of building consensus among disparate sects (and the occasional summit meeting). In theory any sect, even one devoted to a minor god whose existence is not universally accepted, can claim to be Pantheonic if it accepts the existence of the fourteen major gods and the most important and agreed-upon points of canon. In practice, new sects are admitted to the Pantheonic faith by a consensus among established Pantheonic sects; there can be a certain amount of disagreement and conflict over whether certain fringe sects really belong in the Pantheon.

    Organization

    Strictly speaking, the term sect refers to an organization of anointed priests (members of a Divine class, and anyone else who can employ similar powers), lay priests (who lack these powers but are vested with the authority to perform appropriate rites), and associated temples, monasteries, meeting houses, etc. where these priests conduct rites and lead services. Only the priests of a sect are said to “belong” to the order; ordinary people who worship under the auspices of the sect are instead said to “adhere” to it.

    The various Pantheonic sects organize themselves as they see fit, and there is a great deal of variation in their internal structures. Most commonly, a sect maintains a high temple where, in addition to leading services for its adherents, new priests are trained, holy texts are copied out by hand (or more recently, printed), and the sect’s high priest tends to matters of theological and administrative import. Depending on the size of the sect, it may also maintain other, smaller temples, monasteries, and other facilities, appointing priests as necessary. Departures from this common structure tend to go hand-in-hand with the god a sect worships: sects devoted to Deum Ruling tend to be larger, with multiple layers of administration and authority, while those devoted to Deum Knowing tend to be highly centralized, eschewing additional temples in favor of expanding on their archives and scriptoria, for example.

    It is difficult for a sect to grow large without losing its identity. Anointed priests gain their powers by embodying a creed associated with their deity, but there is a considerable range of creeds that each deity seems to find acceptable. Thus, the larger a sect grows, the more likely it is that an adherent will become an anointed priest with a creed outside the sect’s norm. When this happens, it acts as incontrovertible proof that this creed has divine approval, and often leads to the priest splitting off from the sect to found a new one, taking a few adherents with them. The largest sects devoted to each god thus tend to be the ones that are most accepting of variant creeds, which tends to dilute its identity and leads to a certain genericity; smaller sects, by comparison, have more focused beliefs, and their adherents tend to be more committed in those beliefs.

    Heterodox Sects

    Religious sects with doctrines reasonably consistent with the Pantheonic faith, but that are not (yet) accepted into it by consensus are called heterodox sects. Heterodox sects can be excluded for a variety of reasons: the most common is that their deity’s purported sphere of influence encroaches on that of a major Pantheonic deity. Other reasons for exclusion range from the trivial, like a disagreement over the appropriate form for liturgies and rituals, to more significant factors such as an inability to produce an anointed priest capable of channeling divine powers.

    Orthodox Pantheonism views these sects as fundamentally misguided (sometimes dismissing them as having misidentified a major deity as a new one), but not dangerous, just kooky. Adhering to a heterodox sect might make the neighbors look askance at you, but generally won’t put you at risk of witch hunts.

    Heretical Cults

    Sometimes, though, a nominally Pantheonic sect strays too far from the consensus canon, and begins preaching a doctrine that is flatly incompatible with Orthodox Pantheonism. Such sects are denounced, again by consensus among Pantheonic orders, as heretical cults. This is not a step to be taken lightly: Aetrimonde had its share of religious strife in past centuries, and mainstream Pantheonism, with its extremely loose canon and tolerant attitude towards heterodoxy, arose partly from the bloodshed that started when people threw around accusations of heresy for trivial reasons. Declaring a sect heretical is a last resort, used when it engages in practices dangerous not just to its members and adherents, but to the general public: common features of such a doctrine include summoning demons or other extraplanar creatures, animating undead, performing resurrections outside of rare circumstances, and tampering with the immortal tripartite soul.

    Openly adhering to a heretical cult is likely to get someone shunned, and that is the most lenient outcome: most governments outlaw heretical cults for reasons of public safety, and remaining with a cult after it is declared heretical can be punished with fines, imprisonment, exile, or execution…and that’s for adherents who are caught by the law, and not a frenzied mob of Orthodox zealots.

    Ancestor Worship

    Some cultures—notably the dwarves—worship their own ancestors. In the case of the dwarves, this practice takes place alongside more traditional Pantheon worship: the dwarven form of ancestor worship focuses on emulating respected and accomplished ancestors so as to bring honor to the deceased. However, the dwarves also have a practice in which the most honored of ancestors are “immortalized in stone” by dedicating lavish and detailed statues to them, supposedly allowing their souls to linger in the world and watch over their descendants. Certain religious orders—none of them predominantly dwarven—are suspicious that this conceals some form of necromancy or soul-manipulation (especially since the statues are known to walk off of their pedestals and fight when the dwarves go to war…).

    Other forms of ancestor worship are practiced by tribal goblins and orcs, the wood elves of Tir Coetir, and the primitive inhabitants of the Horselands. In many of these forms of ancestor worship, shamans call upon the ancestors for strength or wisdom, occasionally manifesting their ancestors as a ghostly spirit. This, too, is sometimes condemned as necromancy.

    Ancestor worship is sometimes considered a form of animism, discussed next.

    Animism

    Aetrimonde is home to a bewildering variety of spirits—concepts personified by the thoughts and minds of mortals. Animism is a catch-all term for religions formed around the worship of spirits.

    Animistic religions usually revolve around powerful nature spirits—the spirits of places, beasts, or the elements—which offer powerful boons if properly appeased, or which threaten to cause destruction if not placated. Such spirits often demand sacrifices: if the worshippers are capable of opposing the spirit, these sacrifices can simply be ceremonial, such as a token offering of blood or the choice cuts of meat from a successful hunt, but if the spirit outclasses its worshippers, the sacrifices may turn deadly.

    Animism is widely practiced in Tir Coetir, Urku, and the former territories of Gobol Karn, to such an extent that Pantheonism has little presence there. In most other places, it is considered a pagan belief, the domain of uncultured rustics and superstitious sailors. However, in recent years, animism has experienced a revival in an unlikely place. The engineers of steamships, railway locomotives, and other powerful engines have always been prone to anthropomorphize their machines, and in so doing it appears that they have created a kind of spirit, one that responds to prayer and supplication by causing machinery to run smoothly. 

    Demon Cults

    Demons are often willing to grant power, wealth, or other rewards in exchange for the promise of a mortal soul, and cunning demons sometimes encourage the growth of cults as a way of attracting supplicants. Aside from providing the demon with a steady supply of souls, demonic cults also allow demons an opportunity to indulge their sadistic or lascivious desires when summoned to the mortal world.

    Demonic cults frequently engage in sacrificial rituals, as well as other debased and decadent practices: they can often be spotted by a sudden spree of grisly murders or unexplained disappearances. Cults with more cunning leaders often disguise themselves as a legitimate religious order, or coopt small temples as a disguise.

    The Auran Empire suffered from an infestation of demonic cults in the years leading up to the Collapse, as the nobility and commonfolk alike succumbed to desperation and the allure of demonic power. The Novan Imperium inherited many of these cults, and never quite managed to stamp them all out: new cults, and resurgences of older ones, continue to pop up several times per year, and the imperial bureaucracy has an entire department of lawmen dedicated to rooting them out.

    Dragon Cults

    As some of the most powerful and majestic creatures native to Aetrimonde, it was inevitable that dragons would become the object of worship—or something like worship. Dragon worship often resembles a protection racket more than a religion, with the dragon demanding regular tributes of livestock and valuables to ensure that it doesn’t simply devour and plunder as it pleases.

    Less commonly, dragons form actual cults around themselves to gather a supply of mortal agents. The dragons who choose to do this are often older, and require guards for their periods of torpor, or catspaws for the schemes they direct against rival dragons. Such dragons are often able to convey “blessings” upon their worshippers: many dragons are accomplished magicians themselves, able to provide their cultists with magical weapons and secret arcane knowledge—or simply fortunes in gold. 

    Dragons, and therefore dragon worship, are most common in mountainous regions such as the Ironspine, and other remote places where a dragon can conceal a lair to house itself and its hoard.

    Faerie Cults

    Many of the inhabitants of Faerie are quite happy to be worshipped by mortals, although the ones who actually pretend to be gods tend to be the least dangerous. Satyrs may create cults to ensure a steady supply of wine, music, and pleasant company, and enterprising redcaps might view a cult as a way to keep their caps freshly dyed in blood, but the Sidhe rulers of Faerie are mostly above such pretenses.

    Sidhe who cultivate mortal followings typically treat it as a form of feudal bond, or even a simple transaction. Their followers perform tasks required of them—an assassination here, a fertility ritual there—and are rewarded in kind. Those who have sworn the faerie troth are protected in many small ways: their crops grow bountifully, their children grow healthy and tall, and none who cheat them ever prosper by it. For the few who attract the personal attention of their fey liege, more is expected—but the rewards can be valuable indeed, from magic beans, to seven-league boots, to elixirs of true love.

    Faerie cults are widespread, and tend to spring up around elven ruins from the era of Caras Seidharen, which are spread throughout the known world. The elven successor-states of Caras Elvaren and Tir Coetir are relentless in stamping out the influence of faerie cults, but the Sidhe are no less relentless in their attempts to infiltrate and gain a foothold in the nations they believe they should rightfully rule.

    Grave Cults

    With the nature of the afterlife being such a mystery, many mortals seek to avoid it altogether. For those who cannot attain immortality by extending their lifespan with magic, and do not wish to risk signing their souls over to a demon, an alternative is to join one of the grave cults and seek the patronage of the Gravelords, the undying rulers of the underworld. 

    The Gravelords themselves are powerful entities caught between life and death: some are simply the shades of mortals who somehow avoided being drawn into the River of Souls, and rose to power over the denizens of the Underworld. Others are powerful natives of the plane—shadowy beings reminiscent of vampires, mummies and other undead. Regardless of origin, the Gravelords themselves cannot leave the Underworld, and so they recruit courtiers to do their bidding in the mortal world: these agents procure luxuries that cannot be found among the dead and engage in intricate plots and counter-plots against rival cults. The Gravelords’ mortal agents do all of this in the hope that, when their time ultimately comes, their patron will see fit to winnow them from the River of Souls to spend eternity in their Court.

    Grave cults tend to resemble their patron Gravelord’s Court in miniature. Some are filled with grim, fatalistic warriors seeking to win a place in an army of deathly soldiers. Others are bleak, with supplicants subjected to the uncaring, iron rule of an immortal despot, and yet others are joyous and colorful, inhabited by those who had so much joie de vivre that they chose to continue existing after death much as they did in life—even if it meant refusing the true afterlife.

    (Author’s Note: I’m putting together an entire post expanding on the nature of the Underworld, to be delivered later this month.)

    Paths to Enlightenment

    Not every religion is centered on an object of worship, or even calls for worship in the traditional sense. Some revolve around meditation, philosophy, and a quest for enlightenment.

    Naturally, some of these religions are scams created by charismatic con artists to exploit gullible, troubled, or desperate people. Some of them even attract enough true believers that they survive past the point when their founder dies, retires, or has the law catch up with them.

    And then there are the genuine article—belief systems and philosophies intended to help people better themselves and unlock their hidden potential. While they may not grant magical powers like the faiths of the Pantheon, or even some cults, followers who achieve enlightenment sometimes attain extraordinary mental or physical prowess—perfect memory, for example, or in the case of some philosophies that strive for a more physical sort of perfection, the ability to literally punch good sense into someone.

    Star Cults

    Many ancient societies looked up at the stars and saw something divine in them. Early forms of Pantheon worship associated each of the gods with a constellation in the night sky and interpreted the movements of planets and moons against the stars as omens. This is no longer a widespread practice among the faiths of the Pantheon, but other, stranger beliefs involving the stars survive.

    Most so-called star cults are benign, as their beliefs typically revolve around predicting the future from the movements of heavenly bodies. Star worshippers often lead their lives by strange rules that seem to have little reason behind them, but it is rare that their religion inspires them to act out: most of them are eccentric but harmless kooks.

    However, star worship can, in rare cases, become something vastly more dangerous. Like more conventional astronomers, star worshippers who spend too much time gazing through a telescope are prone to strange forms of madness. This typically begins with speaking in tongues and strange obsessions, and progresses to violent paranoia and a desire to “enlighten” the sufferer’s friends and family. To make matters worse, star madness is sometimes accompanied by bizarre and disturbing magical powers. As astronomical telescopes become cheaper and therefore more available to casual star-worshippers, these events have become more common, and it is whispered that kidnappings, murder sprees, and mass suicides are only the least horrifying acts committed by star cultists—the worse incidents having been covered up by shadowy government agencies.

    Sun and Moon Worship

    Although no longer widely practiced in any modern society, the first religions created by mortals involved worship of the sun. A variety of beliefs were invented to explain the sun’s daily passage through the sky, involving everything from chariots, to reflections from the eyes of celestial lions, to industrious dung beetles. Similarly, the phases and erratic orbits of the three moons have been explained as the dance of three feuding sisters, the eyes of a pack of wolves, or as the cheeses formed from the spilled milk of a primordial cow.

    The primitive societies that worshipped the sun and moon also created surprisingly complex astronomical calculators in the form of stone circles and obelisks. When these beliefs fell out of favor, the purpose of these constructions was forgotten, causing much mystification and speculation until it was rediscovered by modern astronomers. Although the original beliefs have mostly been lost to the mists of time, there have been periods when it was fashionable to hold celebrations (mostly invented out of whole cloth, it must be said) at the local standing stones during solstices and equinoxes. A handful of modern revivalists have come up with their own beliefs involving the sun and moon, inspired by the beliefs of the ancients (or rather, what they happen to think the ancients believed).

    As you can see, Aetrimonde gives characters a wide range of options when it comes to faith and religion. Divine characters are slightly more constrained, but only a little: a Divine character gets their powers from their belief in and embodiment of a creed, not a god. It’s possible for someone who isn’t a devout worshipper, but nonetheless lives according to an appropriate creed, to gain the same powers as someone who lives the creed for religious reasons.

    Up Next

    Stay tuned for the second part of this post, focusing on the common beliefs and consensus doctrine of Orthodox Pantheonism. And, if you haven’t already, do go and vote in the poll I’ve put up to determine the faith, and ancestry, of the Inquisitor sample character I’m building!

  • Ipki Chainbreaker I: Class

    Author’s Note: This post was initially titled “Sample Inquisitor I: Class.” It featured a poll which would determine the ancestry and faith of the Inquisitor sample character. Once this poll concluded, and the character was decided to be a Goblin belonging to the Illuminate Society, she was then named Ipki Chainbreaker and this post was renamed accordingly.

    Today kicks off my post series creating the fourth sample character for Aetrimonde’s starter kit, who is going to be an inquisitor to fill in a gap in the party left by the previous sample characters. I’m trying a new thing with this series and starting with the class first–which will let me put in a couple of polls letting you pick this inquisitor’s ancestry, class, and other aspects of the character.

    Class: Inquisitor

    The inquisitor class is designed as the “sneaky” Divine class, more at home with secrecy and subterfuge than paladins, clerics, and crusaders. Here’s what the CRB has to say about inquisitors:

    Any organization must eventually reckon with corruption within its ranks, and religious orders are no exception. The priesthood offers authority over the devout, and charlatans, egotists, and heretics sometimes see joining it as a way to amass money, followers, or power. Then there are the dangers posed by Anathema, which are not always mindless undead or ravening demons: many an Anathemaic plot has begun with the infiltration of a temple or community from within.

    Inquisitors are anointed priests whose calling is to watch their superiors and fellow-worshippers, and ideally themselves, ensuring that they remain true to the creed of their faith. Of all the anointed priests, inquisitors are most willing and able to grapple with difficult questions of theology, dogma, and morals, and when schisms and heresies arise within a religious order, it is the inquisitors who attempt to resolve it. It is also inquisitors who watch for signs of cults and dark magic, and protect congregants from the depredations of demons, undead, and other unholy monsters. Their divine magic allows them to denounce the wicked (or those who they decide are wicked), metaphysically casting them out as the equivalent of said unholy monsters.

    Inquisitors are unusual for anointed priests, in that they are all too familiar with the failings of their orders, and even their own creeds. They tend to be cynical, although most of them would insist that they are merely realists; many inquisitors start down their path when they witness or fall victim to an abuse of power by authority figures in the church, and somehow emerge without their faith being entirely shattered. Most are not attached to a temple or congregation, although major orders in large cities might have an inquisitor or two who rotate between their temples as needed. Like crusaders, inquisitors tend to be itinerant, following whispers of corruption, heresy, or Anathema wherever they lead. Unlike crusaders, they seldom allow themselves to be beholden to the leadership of their church, viewing it as their first duty to keep that leadership honest. At their best, they are grim but benevolent protectors, able to grapple with the failings of their fellow-worshippers while maintaining their own faith. At worst, they can become paranoid extremists, who see heresy in every corner and risk causing more harm than the foes they imagine.

    Inquisitors are especially common in the faith of Deum Mocking, whose creed of speaking truth to power encourages the typical inquisitorial mindset. They are also common among worshippers of Deum Veiled, who find acting in secret comes naturally to them, and Deum Knowing, whose search for knowledge can overlap with the hunt for lies and deception.

    To summarize: a stereotypical inquisitor is someone who grapples with the flaws and failings of their faith and their religious order, and still holds on to that faith. They concern themselves with threats to their order and congregation that come from within, rather than without, and they are willing to break the letter of their creed to uphold its spirit.

    Let’s take a look at the Inquisitor’s class features:

    With a mere 16 hit points, 1d6 healing die, and 2 resurgences, Inquisitors have the frailest base stats of any Aetrimonde class, shared with Druids, Shamans, and Wizards. Inquisitor powers and features don’t favor Dexterity or Grace, so most Inquisitors will be wearing maille armor or a maille hauberk, making them slow and giving only mediocre AC with minimal armor resistance.

    Inquisitors make up for this relative frailty with a trio of class features that all build on each other, making them incredibly potent:

    At the center of the Inquisitor’s toolkit is Conviction, making it substantially harder for Anathema (unholy creatures like demons and undead) to shake off the effects of Divine powers. Anathema blinded by holy light, burning with holy fire, or fixed in place by holy terror will remain so much longer than most foes. (Mathematically, a recoverable effect will last for around 1.81 recovery attempts normally, and 3.45 with disfavor: this about doubles the expected duration of recoverable effects.)

    But building on Conviction, there is also Denunciation, allowing the Inquisitor to declare any enemy Anathema, with the only condition being that the Inquisitor has to then engage this enemy by attacking it, or getting in close enough to threaten it with a melee weapon. Aside from subjecting the Denounced enemy to Conviction, this also allows the Inquisitor to target them with certain Divine powers that are usable only against Anathema, and have unusually potent (or just unusual) effects.

    And finally, the Inquisitor has Wrath of Heaven, a Miracle power. Each of the Divine classes has a Miracle they can perform: this is a greater power with an especially powerful (if short-lived) effect, which they can use only a single time per long rest. The Inquisitor’s Wrath of Heaven allows them to completely prevent an Anathema (including a creature made Anathema by Denunciation) from succeeding at recovery rolls against their Divine powers: this is an excellent power to use once an Inquisitor has gotten one or two recoverable effects onto an enemy, ensuring that these effects stay in force for at least another full round. And, as a bonus, this Anathema takes repeated damage until it shakes off all of the Inquisitor’s recoverable effects.

    These class features combine to make the Inquisitor incredibly dangerous to Anathema—and anyone they decide to treat as one.

    Up Next

    Next week I’ll be covering this Inquisitor’s heritage and abilities (and giving it a name and background). And I’ll be leaving some of these choices up to you readers! I haven’t done a poll in a while, so now seems like an opportune moment: I’ve yet to cover five of the CRB’s eight ancestry options, and I’ve got an inquisitorial concept that uses each one of the remaining choices, with related faiths. (I’ll be talking more about religion and faith in Aetrimonde in my next post, but I think the names of these faiths are evocative enough to go on.)

  • GM Mechanics: Endgame Super-Bosses

    For today’s topic, I’m taking a breather from non-combat encounters to discuss their polar opposite: extraordinarily powerful enemies inspired by videogame “bonus bosses!”

    General Concept

    The core rules in Aetrimonde are designed to support characters from level 0 to roughly 20. That’s a soft cap: you can absolutely run a campaign past that point, and characters can keep gaining levels and powers and feats, but past that point the system’s solid level scaling (one of my initial design goals…) starts getting less solid.

    So level 20 is the maximum supported level, and as such serves as an “aspirational” level for a campaign: this is the level at which the GM, if they aren’t going to start using a lot of homebrewed content to keep going, needs to start bringing the campaign to a satisfying conclusion. And one thing that a satisfying conclusion needs…is a climactic fight with the campaign’s villain.

    You can absolutely make a satisfying climactic fight without the ultimate villain being some gigantic demon or eldritch monstrosity. (For my part, I once ran a well-received final battle as a gauntlet, where the PCs had to fight their way through a huge force of the villain’s guards and lieutenants, and the villain himself was a noncombatant.) But, that’s an option that the rules need to support. So, Aetrimonde’s Bestiary contains several endgame super-bosses (which is not a rules term, just a description): Tier 6 Champion enemies designed to be a challenging fight for a level 20 party, all by themselves. All of these creatures are unique individuals with their own lore and, in some cases, unique loot…

    Viridithrase the Avaricious

    As initially mentioned in the dragon lore I revealed a few weeks back, Viridithrase the Avaricious is a dragon largely responsible for the invention of paper money in Aetrimonde. (Because after she stole the reserves of several banks, they had to start issuing claim slips in place of coin…) And she’s still around!

    Viridithrase Lore

    Difficulty 15 History: Viridithrase the Avaricious became notorious four centuries ago with a string of bank robberies—in which she simply tore the roofs off of the buildings, ripped out the vaults and flew off with them. She later graduated to corporate raiding, leveraging her wealth to perform marginally less hostile takeovers of other banks and add their reserves to her hoard.

    Difficulty 15 Society: Today, Viridithrase’s public face is the “Bank of Viridithrase,” a commercial bank with branches across the continent. The bank is notable for accepting deposits in both coin and paper money, but allowing withdrawals only in banknotes backed by Viridithrase’s hoard (and her willingness to do violence when provoked). Viridithrase’s banknotes are considered a high-quality asset and widely accepted as a form of payment.

    Difficulty 20 Society: Viridithrase has her claws in many industries: through an array of holding companies, she owns major stakes in numerous merchant houses, manufacturing concerns, and trade guilds. Her investment strategies are unorthodox, often making returns only after decades or centuries.

    Secret Knowledge: Though no less avaricious than any other dragon, Viridithrase’s financial holdings serve a long-term agenda rather than to enlarge her hoard. The actual goal of this agenda is unclear, but over the centuries she has periodically suffered avoidable financial losses, some of which coincidentally contributed to changes of government and outbreaks of war.

    Viridithrase as an Enemy

    Viridithrase is based on a different “family” of dragons than the Fierce Dragonet/Rampaging Drake/Cataclysm Dragon I previewed earlier. She’s a Skirmisher, a role for enemies whose challenge lies in their mobility…and despite her Colossal size, Viridithrase is a swift and evasive flier. The initial challenge, for any party of adventurers who don’t all have effective ranged attacks, will be to bring her down to their level by damaging her wings until she loses her flight speed. This is more easily said than done, given that one of her initial moves may be to make a Flyby attack, grabbing a handful of PCs in passing, and then just…fly off with them. Played cunningly (and Viridithrase is nothing if not cunning…), she can open an encounter by grabbing the PCs whose ranged attacks pose the greatest threat to her, at which point they face the dilemma of trying to use those ranged attacks from inside Viridithrase’s melee range, using their presumably weaker melee attacks…or trying to get out of her grip and falling to their dooms.

    Viridithrase is also unique among the dragons in the Bestiary in breathing poison, rather than flames. Her Dragonstrafe power allows her to lay down a lingering trail of poisonous fumes, which will force any PCs not thoroughly resistant or immune to poison to relocate or take a deadly amount of repeated damage. (4d4 + 14 averages out to 24 poison damage per turn, which is enough to reliably incapacitate unprotected PCs in 2-3 turns even at level 20.) And, this poison damage comes with a side of the Dragontox affliction, causing the affected PCs to hallucinate horribly.

    Viridithrase has some other movement-based abilities, including Wingover (allowing her to dodge out of range of an attack or behind cover), Backwing (letting her scatter the PCs as she moves in for the kill), and Heavy Landing (knocking her enemies prone across a potentially huge area as she touches down). And this is capped off with Terrible Roar, forcing enemies to flee her in terror.

    Viridithrase as a Villain

    The GMH naturally provides some advice for using such a unique enemy in a campaign:

    Viridithrase is the wealthiest individual in Aetrimonde, and she uses that wealth to guide and manipulate mortal society for her own agenda—which is unclear, but some interesting possibilities all revolve around her desire to own everything in existence:

    • She is working on a ritual that will physically draw all of the refined precious metals in the world to her, causing untold physical destruction.
    • She is working on a device to crack open the planet and draw the gold from its molten core.
    • She is working on a scheme to enslave all of mortalkind by poisoning every source of food or water outside of her control.

    There is virtually no way for Viridithrase to be taken by surprise in her torpor: the entire purpose of her guards and other security is to detect and delay intruders long enough for her to rouse to full wakefulness. A party of adventurers who intend to slay Viridithrase could, with extensive planning and preparation, obtain various maps, talismans, keys or disguises allowing them to penetrate partway into her lair before being detected: they will still inevitably set off an alarm at some point, but if everything goes according to plan they might be able to reach Viridithrase before she is fully ready to fight back.

    Other ways to prepare for a confrontation with Viridithrase involve removing her two main advantages: her flight, and her poison.

    • A good first step would be for all the PCs to acquire good ranged attacks, so that they can all help to damage Viridithrase’s wings and bring her down to ground level.
    • It could also be effective to set up an ambush with siege weapons or artillery to damage her wings.
    • Poison resistance will help the PCs cope with Viridithrase’s poison attacks, but most commonly-available sources will not stand up to the amount of damage they deal. The PCs could seek out specially-made antitoxins or poison-proofing spells to compensate.

    Viridithrase’s Hoard

    Viridithrase’s hoard can hypothetically contain literally anything that the PCs are looking for: powerful magical items, tomes of forgotten knowledge, lost cultural artifacts, etc. It also naturally contains vast wealth in the form of coinage, bullion and precious gems; however, because the hoard consists of the reserves of numerous banks that Viridithrase pillaged or acquired over her centuries, PCs that lay claim to the hoard may find themselves fighting off rival claimants to the treasure, with paperwork and legal rights giving their claims legitimacy. (This can be the basis for a further adventure, in fact.) How much of the hoard the PCs can legitimately keep is up to you, but it should be at least a few million gp—far more than PCs could ever hope to spend on magical items and other adventuring equipment, and enough for them to retire in style and comfort even after paying out any competing claims.