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.

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  • GM Advice: Planning and Linking Scenes

    Today, I’m going to talk about some of the early steps in writing an adventure: planning the scenes that will go into it and linking them together into a cohesive framework. I tend to write adventures from the top-down, starting with a few big-picture concepts and fleshing out various scenes and encounters to support those…

  • GM Advice: Failure Modes

    Today, I thought I might talk about failure, and how Aetrimonde handles it. Failure is a looming threat in any roleplaying game: at any moment, you might make the wrong decision, or just have a horrible streak of luck with the dice. It’s my opinion that failure should matter: it should have consequences, but ideally…

  • Lore Drop: Theories of Magic

    While I was building Ipki Chainbreaker, I went into a lot of detail about Aetrimonde’s gods, religions, and even a bit of metaphysics, to give context to the Divine classes. Not all of that information is in the CRB (some of it is relegated to a section of the campaign setting in the GMH, and…

  • GM Advice: Exploration and Interaction

    In my continuing column on the Game Master’s Handbook’s advice to would-be GMs, I’m going to cover the book’s introduction to two of the core components of Aetrimonde’s adventure structure paradigm: exploration and interaction. There are a lot of ways to approach writing and running RPG adventures: the way I’ve chosen to describe things in…

  • Ipki Chainbreaker VI: Advancement

    To wrap up Ipki Chainbreaker, I’m going to take a look at one way that Ipki might advance through her first few levels. And, this will be a nice opportunity to preview some other types of Divine power, aside from the Wrath powers that Ipki focused on at level 0. Also, be sure to read…

  • GM Advice: Playing the Role(s) of the GM

    I’ve recently gotten the Game Master’s Handbook to the point that I can start sharing excerpts of it on a more regular basis. I’ve still got a lot of material to write–but then, that’s part of what this blog is for, to help me organize and trial material going into the GMH. Today, I’m going…

  • Ipki Chainbreaker V: Equipment and Numbers

    We’re almost done with Ipki Chainbreaker: today, we’ll pick out her equipment and fill in her character sheet, and then I’ll wrap things up with one last post showing off some options she might pick as she gained levels. Equipment Armor Ipki is proficient with cloth, leather, and chain armor—no shields! And with just +1…

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Alcohols of Aetrimonde I

    I’m slowly working on a post that will go into more detail about the titular spirits that grant powers to Spiritual classes, but the title “Spirits of Aetrimonde” put an idea into my head that has been hard to get out. So today, I’m presenting the first in a series of posts examining Aetrimonde’s cultures…

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Map of the Known World

    If this post is taking a while to load, or you have a large chunk of whitespace in it, not to worry! It’s because today’s post features a map of Aetrimonde, in what may be overly high resolution. It’s going to be a short post today, although I’ll mention a few pieces of worldbuilding that…

  • Bestiary: Goblins of the Unclaimed Reaches

    Today, I’m going to be picking up after my brief hiatus by covering some of the goblins appearing in the Bestiary, specifically goblins that might appear in the Unclaimed Reaches. Goblins are a staple of RPGs, where they usually appear as weak low-level enemies that the PCs can mow down in droves. While there are…