Aetrimonde

Ipki Chainbreaker V: Equipment and Numbers

2026-05-31
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 <DEX> and <GRA>, her armor choices really boil down to a maille shirt, giving 15 AC and allowing 1 safe movement, or maille armor, giving 16 AC with 0 safe movement. She really doesn’t want to be tied up in melee, because all of her powers provoke opportune strikes, so I’m going with the maille shirt at 15gp.

Weapons and Implements

As a Divine character, Ipki can use holy symbols as implements for her magical powers. Like any implement, they can be wielded in one hand–but they can also be made in the form of an amulet worn in the neck slot and freeing up a hand. Ipki doesn’t need an amulet-style holy symbol: she doesn’t wield a shield, and so can have a holy symbol in the form of a scepter (a silver-and-copper rod in the shape of a torch, for Deum Radiant) such that she can wield it in one hand and a weapon in her other. Like most implements, the holy symbol costs 20gp.

Speaking of weapons, Ipki should have some kind of melee weapon for those unfortunate moments when she gets surrounded. For flavor, I would really love for her to have a flail made from her own broken manacles: unfortunately, she’s not proficient with military weapons, which flails are. So we’ll give her a mace, costing 2gp, and as an afterthought give her a broken, non-functioning set of goblin-size manacles that she repurposes as a belt.

Other Equipment

We’ll wrap up by giving Ipki a basic adventurer’s kit, like all of the other sample characters, bringing her expenses so far to 52gp. She has plenty of gold left over, so let’s also give her a disguise kit and forgery kit, which she needs for some advanced uses of the Deception skill, like changing her apparent height or forging official documents that use special paper. These will be useful for a sneaky Inquisitor…

That brings her totals to 72gp (with 28 left over) and 30.3 bulk.

Filling in the Numbers

With equipment selected, that lets us compute Ipki’s stats:

Health and Healing

Ipki is by far the squishiest of the sample characters. With 16 base hit points, +2 expertise and +0 <CON>, Ipki has a bare 20 hit points. She has a similar lack of resurgences, at just the inquisitor’s base 2, and regains 1d6 hit points from small heals and 1d6 + 1 from large ones. (This actually softens the blow of her low hit points a bit: Ipki recovers more hit points, relatively speaking, from small heals than tougher characters.)

Defenses

As mentioned, the maille shirt gives Ipki 15 AC (although note that the Undersized feature will make this effectively 16 against a lot of enemies). Her other defenses come to:
- Brawn: 13 = 11 + 2 (<STR>)
- Poise: 12 = 11 + 1 (<DEX>)
- Wit: 13 = 11 + 1 (<CUN>) + 1 (Inquisitor)
- Composure: 16 = 11 + 4 (<CHA>) + 1 (Inquisitor)
Note that Poise will also be increased, and Brawn decreased, by 1 against those same enemies.

Attacks and Damage

While Ipki doesn’t want to be tied up in melee, she’s surprisingly competent at it, with +2 <STR> and her mace giving her a not-entirely-terrible +3 vs. AC attack, dealing 1d8 + 2 damage.

But her Divine powers are still better: being Charisma-based, she gets a +4 attack bonus for all of them, vs. Brawn or Poise depending on the power. The damage of these powers varies a bit:
- Burning Bolt: +4 vs. Poise, 1d8 + 4 fire damage and 1d4 + 2 repeated fire damage.
- Holy Blast: +4 vs. Poise, 1d4 + 4 damage and 1d4 + 2 additional damage to Anathema.
- Blinding Bolt: +4 vs. Poise, 1d8 + 4 radiant damage.
- Peal of Thunder: +4 vs. Brawn, 2d8 + 4 thunder damage.
Note that Burning Bolt and Blinding Bolt will gain an additional +1 bonus to attack rolls from Undersized against many enemies.

Skills

Ipki’s maille shirt is going to slightly hamper many of her skills with its -1 encumbrance penalty. This brings her trained skills down to:
- +6 Deception
- +6 Intimidate
- +1 Religion
- +1 Society
- +2 Stealth
- +2 Subterfuge
Her other physical skills (Athletics, Acrobatics, Endurance) will be her relevant ability -1, and all the others will just be the relevant ability.

Movement

Ipki has 5 base speed and is wearing armor with no movement penalties, so her speed is 5, and she can move 1 square safely if she chooses to.

Carrying Capacity

As an Undersized character, Ipki can carry less stuff than most: her carrying capacity is 40 bulk + 5 times <STR>, which actually puts her capacity at 50 bulk. That’s plenty to carry her equipment, so no worries there.

Initiative

And finally, Ipki has +1 initiative by virtue of her +1 <CUN>.

Character Sheet

With that, here’s Ipki’s finished character sheet:

IpkiChainbreaker_CharSheet Download

Up Next

I’ll wrap up Ipki in a week or two by looking at various ways she might advance, and then…it’s on to a new project!

With 4 sample characters made, and with me starting to get into material from the GMH, I think it’s time for me to start working on the sample adventure that these characters will be attached to. And like these sample characters, I’m going to be using reader feedback to write the adventure! Keep your eyes peeled for the first poll in an upcoming post…

I’ll eventually be putting together two more sample characters, but I’d like to at least nail down the setting and themes of the sample adventure before I do. Depending on how things go, there might be some interesting ways to tie a sample character into the adventure…
Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Alcohols of Aetrimonde I

2026-05-24
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 through the lens of their alcohol!

Alcohol in the Core Rulebook

The CRB contains a very small section on alcohols, in which it is mentioned that alcoholic beverages are reliably safe to drink when the local water is of unknown quality (a consideration for adventurers). It also provides prices for beer, wine, and spirits of three different qualities:

But alcohol is closely entwined with culture, and it is an excellent facet of worldbuilding for GMs to explore: the nature of the local alcohol is an evocative, informative piece of information to give the players. So, to start with, here are a few of the beers that players might encounter in Aetrimonde:

Beers
- Stormrunner Pale Ale: Waystone is a nation of merchants, whose profits depend on the speedy and reliable delivery of goods, largely by sea. In order to extend their water supplies and cut down on port stops, Waystone’s merchant fleet carries strong (and strong-flavored) beers that can be mixed with stagnant water to both sterilize it and cover its foul taste. Stormrunner Pale Ale, named after a class of ship designed to make long voyages across open ocean at speed ahead of a storm, is a strong, light-colored, heavily hopped beer brewed specifically to survive rough treatment in the hold of a ship.
- Hardvergar Dinkelbjor: Dwarven beers have a reputation: high quality, high potency…and sometimes, awful hangovers, although that might have more to do with the traditional mode of consumption (quaffing). Hardvergar Dinkelbjor, literally translated as “High Dwarfish Dinkel Beer,” is brewed in remote, highly traditional dwarven settlements according to recipes unchanged since before the Collapse. The malt used in its brewing is made from the ancient grain dinkel (also called einkorn or spelt), giving it a strong flavor of rustic bread that makes it an acquired taste. (Author’s Note: All of the Germans in my playtesting group simultaneously groaned when I explained that the local dwarves brewed nothing but dinkelbier, which is exactly the reaction I had been aiming for.)
- Auric Brown: A thick, hazy beverage favored in the Sanctean Primarchy and an extremely acquired taste everywhere else. It is fermented from bread soaked in water rather than malt, touted as a recreation of the beverage provided to the laborers building the pre-Collapse Auran Empire’s colossal temples and monuments. In truth, the recipe is more likely a modern invention, made up out of whole cloth as part of the effort to create a synthetic culture that would unify the diverse pilgrims flocking to the fledgling Primarchy. That the drink is also simple to make and highly nutritious (containing ample protein, vitamins, and trace minerals from the presence of spent yeast left in the brew) is certainly a happy coincidence: it is now a staple of Sanctean peasants, with virtually every pantry in the nation containing a bubbling jug of it.
- Monastic Lambic: Lambics are an unusual kind of beer, brewed using wild yeast that gives each batch a subtly different character. This method of brewing has been supplanted by cultivated yeasts, and lambics are now brewed mainly as an artisanal product of certain monasteries that maintain the tradition. The most mainstream lambics, with a sour, fruity, and slightly “funky” notes come from the Cession. For more advanced drinkers, monasteries from the storm-swept Salvage Coast are known for the briny (and sometimes kelpy) notes of their brews, which are often compared to Gose beers. And for the truly adventurous, there are a handful of religious missions to the goblins of the southern Unclaimed Reaches that have combined wild-yeasted brewing techniques with the goblins’ traditional mushroom-based intoxicants, producing a lambic with heavy notes of funk, exotic flavor profile, and only occasional hallucinogenic properties.
- Umpfen Hyperbier: The origins of the Hyperbier are shrouded in mystery, as the original batch was recovered from the cellars of a burned-out Eisenwaldean castle after the resident alchemist went just a hair too far even for Der Eisenwald. The pitchfork-wielding mob tapped the barrels in celebration, and immediately thereafter started combing the charred ruins of the castle laboratory in search of the recipe. Accounts of the Hyperbier uniformly agree that it was “the perfect beer,” although they are entirely contradictory on its style, flavor profile, and even color. Efforts to recreate the recipe from a few charred scraps of notes (some of which likely pertain not at all to the Hyperbier) have inspired generations of brewers and alchemists to try such processes as infusing the yeast with the essence of fire elementals and feeding the wort through the heart of a four-dimensional tesseract. The results have been mixed–and in some cases, explosively lethal–but the pursuit of the Hyperbier has grown into a uniquely Eisenwaldean obsession, culminating in an annual festival in the town of Umpf where those brews deemed safe for consumption are judged on their similarity to the mythical Hyperbier.
I’ll keep updating this mini-column as fun and interesting ideas occur to me. I’ll probably be doing wines next, including wine-like things like mead.
Ipki Chainbreaker IV: Skills, Perk, Feat

2026-05-10
Today, continuing with Ipki Chainbreaker, goblin Inquisitor, we’re going to go over Ipki’s choices of skills, perk, and feat.

Skills

Ipki gets Religion as a trained skill from her class (natural for a Divine class) and the following preferred skills to choose from:
- From the Inquisitor class: Deception, Insight, Perception, Religion, Society, Subterfuge.
- From the Unclaimed Reaches culture: Endurance, Nature.
- From the Unionist stratum: Intimidate, Persuasion.
As a side note, I think this might be the first sample character with no overlaps in their preferred skills.

To represent her concept as a hardline abolitionist, I want Ipki to have the Intimidate and Society skills as two of her choices from the preferred list: she knows how to put fear of Deum Radiant into the hearts of slavers, whether in person or through a campaign of social pressure.

However, as an Inquisitor, Ipki also needs to be able to work from the shadows: unlike a Paladin or Crusader, she can’t just march into a slave camp and start smiting. In order to infiltrate, sabotage, and undermine a batch of slavers, I’m also going to give her Deception and Subterfuge, from the preferred list, and Stealth as her one unrestricted choice.

Ipki’s trained skills will be:
- Deception (CHA): +6
- Intimidate (CHA): +6
- Religion (INT): +1
- Society (INT): +1
- Stealth (GRA): +3
- Subterfuge (DEX): +3
That +1 Religion is going to be interesting: it means that Ipki won’t necessarily know a lot about her own faith (although I would definitely give favor to many Religion checks related to Deum Radiant). Ipki will be strong in her faith, but not well-tutored: she knows in her heart what Deum Radiant asks of her, but perhaps can’t put it into words, and certainly won’t be winning any formal theological debates.

Perk

As a firebrand slave liberator, I think the natural perk for Ipki is Fame. Specifically, Ipki will be famed among Goblin Abolitionists. (Referring, to be clear, to abolitionists working to end goblin slavery, not abolitionists who are themselves goblins.)

Feat

As per usual, feats available to Ipki fall into familiar categories that improve ancestry or class features, or specific kinds of power. As an Inquisitor, Ipki has access to Doctrine feats that are available to Divine classes.

Devout Prayers is a fairly standard feat: it allows Ipki to add her expertise bonus to certain kinds of power. Ipki really wants to hit with her powers, so that she can apply their recoverable effects, so adding expertise to attack rolls is more valuable than doing so for damage rolls. She would want to pick the Wrath keyword, which encompasses all of the powers she has chosen so far.

Improved Goblin Discretion would allow Ipki to use Goblin Discretion defensively, when she is missed by an attack rather than when she misses. This is useful as a way for her to get out of the way of a sudden, unexpected attack, or set up to flank an attacker.

Ipki also has access to a few ancestry feats shared between Undersized ancestries (goblin and halfling in the Core Rulebook, although I have some others that didn’t make the cut…) and representing the benefits of their small size: Beneath Notice allows her to remain unseen at the start of a fight, which is useful for a character who wants to avoid drawing attention.

Surprise and Fear allows Ipki to apply recoverable effects during a surprise round and not worry that they will wear off before combat properly starts. This would be more useful if Ipki had some powers that applied recoverable effects to several enemies; perhaps it will be a good choice at a later level. (Author’s Note: Surprise and Fear is one of three feats whose names form a reference to a certain comedy sketch…)

Brilliant Denunciation is a Denunciation feat, a group of Inquisitor-specific feats that cause recoverable effects to multiply on Denounced targets. This one applies an additional dazzled condition, which would be redundant for Blinding Bolt (since it already blinds), but would add utility to Burning Bolt and Peal of Thunder.

As the final feat I’m going to preview here, Radiant Exemplar is an Exemplar feat, available to any Divine class but requiring that a character worship a specific deity. The CRB contains a couple of Exemplar feats for each of the faiths in the book; unsurprisingly, Deum Radiant’s Exemplar feats revolve around light. Radiant Exemplar gives Ipki access to a long-lasting, hands-free, no-concentration light source, which is a comparatively rare thing. And, the light can be improved with additional effects by a successive feat…

Of these options, I think that the most appropriate to Ipki’s character concept is Surprise and Fear, so I’ll be going with that. But several of these feats are useful enough that I’d probably be picking them up as Ipki gained levels.

Up Next

The next post on Ipki will tie her together: we’ll pick out some equipment, and then fill out some values on her character sheet. Stay tuned!
Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Map of the Known World

2026-05-03
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 I’ve worked into the map:
- Perhaps most noticeable is the in-world title of the map, marking it as the product of the cartographers Everson, Courtland, and Wye, of the City of Waystone, in the Kingdom of Waystone. This is not some amateurish map, no: it’s the work of professional cartographers successful enough to have established premises, and who offer a guarantee of accuracy (the “Bonded” in “Bonded Cartographers.”)
- Also of note is the compass rose in the bottom-left corner, and the two latitude-longitude lines extending from it: these are the equator and the Waystone Meridian, marking 0 degrees of latitude and longitude, respectively. If it’s becoming apparent that the City of Waystone is important to cartography, good! Waystone is Aetrimonde’s largest mercantile and naval power, and Aetrimonde’s map-makers adopted the Waystone Meridian as their longitudinal datum because the most accurate charts were commissioned by Waystone’s Admiralty.
- Finally, I’ll point out the evocative names of the major bodies of water on this map: The Storm-Wracked and Restless Seas, the Gulf of Lost Hopes, and Stormbreak Bay. Aetrimonde’s oceans are rough and risky to sail, and they got names reflecting that. Aetrimonde’s jet streams travel the same direction as Earth’s (west-to-east), and most storms travel the same direction. The west coast of the continent is battered by storms, with Stormbreak Bay being a rare safe body of water, shielded by the island to its west. The Restless Sea is likewise shielded by the bulk of the continent, but still occasionally gets hit by bad storms out of the east…and the Gulf of Lost Hopes is named for the many voyages that successfully navigated the southern cape, let down their guard, and were struck by a freak storm that crossed overland.
Now, is this the extent of the world of Aetrimonde? Definitely not: there’s the entire southern hemisphere and the opposite side of the northern still uncharted. It’s tricky to sail out that far from shore…but Aetrimonde’s naval technology continues to improve, and if a GM wants to invent another continent and run a campaign centered on an expedition into the unknown, more power to them!
Bestiary: Goblins of the Unclaimed Reaches

2026-04-29

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 a few goblins fitting this role in the Bestiary, I’m attempting to be a bit more nuanced with them. I confess to being a little uncomfortable with the use of always-evil intelligent creatures in RPGs (which I suppose puts me in good company; Tolkien’s struggle to reconcile the evil nature of orcs with his belief in free will has its own Wikipedia page). So, have a look at some of the more interesting and developed goblins that the Bestiary presents…for PCs to mow down in droves, if that’s what your campaign needs.

Goblin Raider

The tribal goblins of the Unclaimed Reaches aren’t all hostile: some of them have an uneasy coexistence with the settlers moving in from the north. But surviving in the Reaches is hard enough that when push comes to shove, most tribal goblins will resort to raiding soft targets for supplies. Goblin Raiders are the “professional” warrior class among tribal goblins, and they are no mindless rabble or ravening horde: they’re cautious, clever, even tactical…although their favored tactics revolve around running away to fight another day.

The Goblin Raider is a Skirmisher: mobile, evasive, but not particularly sturdy or hard-hitting. In fact, this is almost an archetypal Skirmisher: the Raider has both melee and ranged attacks, of roughly equal effectiveness, and it has multiple options to let it get out of an inconvenient position.

Nimble Strike allows the Raider to get an extra square of safe movement in, to either push through enemy lines and attack a high-priority PC, or to attack, disengage, and then retreat all in one turn.

Goblin Discretion (as seen with Ipki Chainbreaker) allows a second square of safe movement after making an attack and missing: combined with Nimble Strike, this lets the Raider step safely in, attack, and if the attack doesn’t work out, make a hasty retreat.

Goblin Unsoothsayer

Being the smallest intelligent people in Aetrimonde, goblins are forced to rely more on trickery than brute force. Even their magicians, who certainly aren’t held back by their small stature, tend to use illusion and subterfuge more than directly offensive magics. The Goblin Unsoothsayer has two tricks in its repertoire, both of them based on Spiritual powers available to PCs. (And the Unsoothsayer itself is, lorewise, similar to the Shaman class for PCs.)

Misstep forces a PC not just to use up its reaction (which can mess with some PCs’ clever tricks), but to move in a chosen direction. This isn’t ordinary forced movement, which is generally safe for the creature being forced to move: it requires the target to use an action and actually move…which provokes opportune strikes. Using it on a PC already surrounded by a bunch of the Unsoothsayer’s allies can be really nasty…

And it only gets worse when coupled with Misplacement, which swaps an enemy with an ally, and makes it easy to get a PC abruptly surrounded by goblins. As a bonus, it can also abruptly put a goblin in the middle of the PCs…

With these two tricks combined, the Unsoothsayer can cause some serious havoc, and it makes for an excellent way to upset a group of PCs who have well-planned tactics revolving around positioning, forcing them to think on their feet.

Goblin Alchemist

The Goblin Alchemist is a Shooter, an enemy focused on ranged combat, with a variety of attacks and a nasty trick up its sleeve for the PCs to interact with. I’ve presented a few monsters with telegraphed attacks; this is another variation on the same concept, in which a creature gradually powers up an attack until it becomes a pressing threat to deal with.

Unlike virtually all creatures in the Bestiary, the Alchemist lacks at-will actions or attacks, other than its pathetically weak Dagger attack. Instead, it carries an ample supply of alchemical volatiles, which function exactly like they would for the PCs. The nine flasks that the Alchemist carries are enough to see the Alchemist through any but the most drawn-out encounters even throwing one every round. (And if the PCs manage to defeat the Alchemist before it gets through all of its volatiles, that’s some extra loot they can claim…).

The focus on volatiles makes the Alchemist a very flexible enemy; the volatiles presented in its statblock provide plenty of repeated damage coupled with control effects, but they can be swapped out for others to tailor an enemy for a specific encounter: it would be trivial to give a Goblin Alchemist access to Alchemical Shine, for making the PCs into brightly-glowing targets in a pitch-black cave, or Fragmentation Grenades for raw damage.

However, the Alchemist’s real gimmick is its Volatile Improvisation action, allowing it to strap several volatiles together into a single large bomb. There is no limit on how big a bomb this can create: left to its own devices for many rounds, an Alchemist could conceivably strap together all nine of its volatiles, creating a monster of an explosion dealing 3d6 + 3d4 + 3 immediate damage, plus quite a bit of repeated damage, in a blast 5 (an area 11 squares across…). Bringing a Goblin Alchemist down quickly is therefore a high priority for the PCs.

Fortunately, Volatile Improvisation has a built-in way to do that: if the Alchemist takes as little as 6 damage (1/4 of its maximum hit points, enough to break its concentration), it drops and detonates its own bomb. This could be quite the deterrent for a PC attacking it in melee, but a well-placed shot from range could do it safely, and the damage from the explosion can further soften the Alchemist up.

In my next Bestiary post, I’m planning to show off a few of the monsters created by goblin alchemy: some of them are still used as beasts of war, while others have escaped into the wild and bred true.
Ipki Chainbreaker III: Powers and Abilities

2026-04-26
Today, as I return from an impromptu hiatus, we’ll be looking at a handful of powers for Ipki, our goblin Inquisitor of Deum Radiant. My poll results say that you would like to give her Wrath powers, which…actually fits quite well with Deum Radiant, so thanks for making this easy!

Power Objectives

The Inquisitor class makes Ipki really good at locking down Anathema (abhorrent creatures like demons and undead) using recoverable conditions, and allows her to also declare a single enemy temporarily Anathema. To play to these strengths, we should give her a combination of powers causing recoverable conditions and affecting Anathema.

Recoverable powers mostly break down into three broad categories:
- Making an enemy less dangerous.
- Making an enemy easier to harm.
- Causing repeated damage.
Ipki has enough power choices that she can cover all of these bases, and have a power that just deals bonus damage to Anathema.

Powers

Divine Wrath powers have a lot of similarities to Arcane powers: they involve calling down the wrath of the gods, in the form of destructive energies. Wrath powers invoke searing fire, deafening thunder, blinding light, and bolts of retributive lightning. Most Wrath powers are long-ranged, which suits Inquisitors like Ipki just fine: they’re fragile enough that they don’t want to be anywhere near close combat.

Burning Bolt is likely to be Ipki’s mainstay attack: it’s usable as a normal attack, deals solid base damage, and is one of a very few lesser powers that cause a recoverable effect. It makes for an excellent opener against an Anathema, or a creature Ipki has denounced, since her Conviction feature makes it incredibly hard for these creatures to shake off the repeated damage. Ipki can then follow up with other powers while the Anathema burns, reapplying Burning Bolt as necessary.

Holy Blast gives Ipki an area attack, and while it doesn’t do a whole lot of base damage, it does deal additional damage to Anathema: it can be used to make a solid attack against a single Anathema or an enemy Ipki has Denounced while also dealing some scratch damage to other enemies around it; or, if Ipki and her party have run up against a whole bunch of Anathema, it can be a effective crowd-clearer.

Blinding Bolt is a nasty control power by itself, because it inflicts one of the nastiest of Aetrimonde’s standard conditions. (Blinded: a creature that is blinded is flatfooted, cannot see, cannot take opportune actions or reactions, and becomes helpless if it is also deafened. All creatures have total concealment from a blinded creature.) It also synergizes incredibly well with Conviction: blinding an enemy drastically handicaps it, and if it is Anathema or Denounced, Ipki can expect to keep it blinded for several turns with a single greater power use.

Peal of Thunder is a powerful area attack with the added benefit of staggering creatures in the center of the blast: like Blinding Bolt, this synergizes with Inquisitor class features, although staggering an enemy (Staggered: a creature that is staggered is flatfooted and cannot take actions when it is not its turn) is not nearly as potent an effect as blinding them. This is useful to help allies attack a single high-value target, while also helping to clear out the chaff from around them.

Abilities

As can be seen from these powers, Ipki will want high Charisma, followed by high Wisdom. She may also want some Strength: Divine melee powers (which I haven’t gotten into here) make use of Strength and Wisdom, so if Ipki wants to later pick up an option to be able to handle a little bit of melee, that Strength will come in handy.

Ipki has Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma as favored abilities from her heritage. It is a no-brainer to pay 6 points for +3 Charisma, and boost it to +4; she will also pay 3 points each to get +2 Wisdom and Strength.

As an aside, high Charisma is actually a bit less necessary for Ipki than it would be for the other sample characters seen so far: as a goblin, Ipki is Undersized, and because of that small size she gains an effective +1 bonus to attack rolls vs. AC and Poise against a lot of creatures. (She gains a +1 bonus against regular Medium-sized creatures, and doesn’t suffer a -1 penalty against Small creatures as most PCs would.) This wouldn’t entirely make up for having only +3 Charisma, but if we were short on ability points (like if Ipki didn’t have Charisma as a favored ability) I might have gone for it.

For her remaining scores, we have some options: I envision Ipki as more sneaky than she is brawny, so I’m going to lean into that and boost her Dexterity rather than her Constitution. I’d also like her to have decent Grace and Cunning, but with only 1 ability point of 13 remaining, that will mean having negative Constitution or Intelligence. Inquisitors are fragile enough I don’t feel great about negative Constitution, so I’m going to drop Intelligence, and have Ipki be clever but not smart: if I were playing her, I’d have her come up with good ideas in the moment, but have issues planning ahead.

Ipki’s finished abilities will be:

+2 STR +1 DEX +1 CUN +2 WIS
+0 CON +1 GRA -1 INT +4 CHA

Up next, we’ll be picking out Ipki’s skills, perk, and feat. Stay tuned!
Aetrimonde Gazetteer: the Unclaimed Reaches

2026-04-05
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

2026-03-29
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:

Level Wealth Level Wealth Level Wealth
0 100 7 1010 14 2470
1 200 8 1180 15 2750
2 310 9 1360 16 3050
3 430 10 1550 17 3370
4 560 11 1750 18 3710
5 700 12 1970 19 4070
6 850 13 2210 20 4450

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

2026-03-22
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

2026-03-18

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: