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: GM Mechanics
Posts about the systems and advice that Aetrimonde provides to help GMs run a fun campaign.
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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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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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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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I’ve shown off enough enemies, and discussed how they scale in difficulty, that I think today is a great time to share some of the guidance that the GM Handbook has for building encounters. The Encounter Metric Every enemy has an Encounter Value (EV) that represents how difficult they are to defeat, based on their…
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