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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Category: Design and Mechanics
Posts about my goals for Aetrimonde and how I implemented them in the system’s underlying rules.
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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…
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To wrap up this series on non-combat encounters, I’m going to share an excerpt from the GMH providing advice on how to actually use non-combat encounters in an adventure. My previous excerpts have covered how to construct non-combat encounters of various types, but this advice is more about when and how to work a non-combat…
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In this penultimate post on non-combat encounters, I’m presenting one example of a nodal encounter designed to capture the complexities of a bank heist: sneaking past guards, cracking vaults, and of course, planning the heist. This is a bare-bones version of a heist, which a GM could adapt to many more specific situations… Example: The…
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Following on from my previous post about alchemical volatiles, today I’m going to cover potions and elixirs, the sort of alchemy that adventurers drink for healing, invigoration, or protection. Using Potions and Elixirs Potions and elixirs, with a few exceptions, are magical liquids that interact with mortal biology: they accelerate healing, toughen flesh, sharpen senses,…
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After last week’s unplanned delay, I’m continuing with my series on planning and running non-combat encounters! This post will cover the basics of the third format of non-combat encounter presented in the GMH, which is designed to model complex situations with many moving parts, like heists. This topic is complicated enough that I’ll be splitting…
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Having dipped a toe into the topic of alchemy with last week’s post on alchemical metals, I’m going to continue on this topic by getting into the actual mechanics of alchemy. There are broadly two kinds of alchemy that the Core Rulebook has support for, and one of them is Volatiles. These are things like…
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Last week I introduced some of the guidance the Aetrimonde Game Master’s Handbook provides for creating and running non-combat encounters where the focus is on the characters’ abilities and skills and their ability to apply them creatively to a problem. In that introduction, I focused on resource encounters where the challenge stemmed from a need…
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Today, I’m going to talk about some mechanics written for the GM, rather than the players. Aetrimonde provides multiple frameworks for creating encounters that don’t involve outright combat: these mostly use skills to overcome whatever the challenge in the encounter is. To start with, I’m going to cover what Aetrimonde calls a resource challenge where…
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Having introduced the concepts of hirelings, mercenaries, and companions to represent various kinds of NPC ally, the question remains: how would an Aetrimonde campaign handle the PCs getting their hands on a golem and wanting to operate it? Well, if that interests you, read on…today’s post features an excerpt from the Bestiary section on golems…
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As a preface to my promised rules enabling PCs to construct their own golems, I’m first going to discuss the general rules surrounding allied NPCs, which can come in several different flavors. Allied NPCs: Three Paradigms First, I want to discuss what an “allied NPC” can be in a game like Aetrimonde: as I see…
Aetrimonde 