Aetrimonde

I’m about to kick off this blog with a series of posts on the design philosophy that Aetrimonde is built on, but before I do that I think it’s for the best to answer a few questions like “what’s Aetrimonde?” and “who are you again?

What’s This Blog About?

I’m going to be talking about Aetrimonde, a game I’ve been writing, and introducing its rules and concepts to a wider audience than the handful of playtesters I’ve been working with for a while now. Aetrimonde isn’t a finished game yet: part of why I’ve started this blog is to broaden my audience, but I’m also going to be polishing up some of the rules text for an audience that hasn’t learned the rules by testing them with me. Along the way, I’ll be discussing not just what the rules are, but why I designed them the way that I did.

My intent is to cap off the first series of blog posts (which will eventually cover Aetrimonde’s Core Rulebook, the CRB, and player-facing content) with the release of, at the very least, a free starter adventure that you can play through at home. But my eventual goal is to work through the writing of a Game Master’s Handbook (GMH) containing advice for running the game, setting information, and a bestiary of monsters, which I aim to publish alongside the Core Rulebook.

You can expect at least one post per week from me (and I’ll be aiming for two) after the initial series that describes the design goals I have for Aetrimonde. I’ve only a rough guess of how many posts will be in the initial series about core rules, but I expect it to last at least through the end of 2025 if I don’t get carried away and start posting more frequently.

What’s Aetrimonde?

Aetrimonde is a system of rules for a tabletop fantasy roleplaying game, much like Dungeons and Dragons. I started seriously writing the system that would become Aetrimonde around 2016, but its ultimate origins lie in the houserules and homebrewed content that I had already created for my campaigns of D&D Fourth Edition all the way back in 2009 or so. I’m going to be referring back to 4e as I discuss a lot of design decisions; this isn’t because Aetrimonde is a 4e retroclone (I haven’t set out to write “4e but better”), but because 4e is the game system that has come closest to supporting my desired style of play, and the style of play that I aim to support with Aetrimonde.

Aetrimonde is designed to support a different style of fantasy than Dungeons and Dragons generally does, because that’s the kind of game I find fun to run as a GM. I’ll get into more details on this later, but to sum it up in a few bullet points, Aetrimonde is designed to support:

• Pulp Adventure: Player characters in Aetrimonde are larger than life, but not godlike, even at higher levels. They can cast magical spells, fight their way through hordes of zombies and slay terrible dragons, but they won’t be reshaping the fabric of reality any time soon, and they still have to worry about a knife to the throat while they’re sleeping. Think Indiana Jones, James Bond, Harry Dresden, and Conan the Barbarian, not Elminster, Gilgamesh, or Gandalf.
• Steampunk and Victorian Fantasy: Things like firearms, grenades, steam-powered golems, and railroads are assumed to be part of the setting of an Aetrimonde campaign. So are magical doomsday devices, flesh golems animated by bottled lightning, and the aforementioned terrible dragons. Aetrimonde contains rules for using these, either as a player or as a GM.
• Combat as a Puzzle: Aetrimonde’s combat rules and the monsters in its Bestiary make it easy for GMs to keep combat fresh by creating set-piece encounters that require out-of-the-box tactics and teamwork.

The name Aetrimonde is a little bit of wordplay that amuses me: “monde” being the French for “world,” Aetri-monde is evocative of “Ether-world,” and the pseudo-Victorian setting will certainly have scientists (mad and otherwise) muttering about luminiferous ether. It is also a play on “Autre-monde,” or “other-world,” if you’ll pardon my French again.

Who Am I?

I’m Novawhelk. Or at least, that’s the pen name I use for Aetrimonde. True names have power, and so I guard mine carefully.

I picked up Dungeons and Dragons during my first semester at university, back in the later days of its 3.5th Edition, and adopted 4th Edition as soon as it came out. I’ve been a perpetual GM almost since the start, although every once in a while I get to sit down as a player in someone else’s games (which is where I got most of my experience of 5th edition, Pathfinder, 13th Age, and a few other systems).

In my professional life, I’m an economist. I’ve studied and taught game theory, among other things, and I’ll probably insert a few digressions here and there on how economics and game theory influenced the design of Aetrimonde.