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.

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater IV: Powers, Feat, Equipment

    Today, I’m getting down to the details on Valdo the Bat-Eater, the ghoul skinchanger. I’ll be picking his powers, feats (he gets an extra!), and starting equipment.

    Powers

    I’m going to approach Valdo’s powers a bit differently than I did Ragnvald’s. The Martial powers Ragnvald was choosing from can really be divided into just three groups: melee attacks, ranged attacks, and utility. There were very few melee attacks that wouldn’t have worked with Ragnvald’s chosen armament of a warhammer and shield.

    Valdo, by comparison, is a Spiritual character, and Spiritual powers are divided into many more groups. There is first a division into four overarching types of spirits: ancient, animal, elemental, and land. As a skinchanger, Valdo will find Animal powers to be the most consistently useful. But within the Animal powers, there is a further division into five different types of animal, each with their own keyword: Bear, Panther, Serpent, Stag, and Wolf. I’m going to start off by deciding exactly what kind of animal spirits Valdo has bonded, and let that inform his choice of powers (and therefore playstyle).

    Neither serpents nor stags seem like appropriate spirit animals for a ghoul: ghouls have no particular association with poisons, and stags…aren’t predators. Wolves could be a great spirit animal for a ghoul skinchanger who hunts in a pack with other ghouls…but Valdo is a lone hunter without a pack. This leaves bears and panthers as Valdo’s spirit animal, and I like the mechanics of both: Bear powers are about overwhelming force with a minor focus on surviving wounds (which meshes nicely with the ghoul ancestry); Panther powers are about mobility and attacks from ambush (which I like for Valdo the monster hunter).

    With that choice settled, what will Valdo want his powers to accomplish? As a skinwalker, his class features are centered around doing damage, but he doesn’t have as much staying power as Ragnvald. So a good set of priorities for his powers may be:

    • Two purely damaging attacks.
    • A mobile damaging attack, letting Valdo disengage afterward.
    • A way to recover from taking damage.

    Let’s see how we can meet these priorities.

    Feline Cunning will give Valdo a high-damage power he can use almost at-will. It does need the target to be flatfooted, but between flanking and stealth, Valdo can easily find a flatfooted target, and adding <CON> to damage is a significant increase to the damage it will deal. This is an Implement power, the first I’ve shown off; that keyword just means that the power can be used through an appropriate implement (a wand, staff, etc.), although it is not required.

    Ursine Pin does not, itself, do a lot of damage, but it enables Valdo to do a lot more damage with other attacks. This power works by allowing Valdo to grab a target (which prevents it from moving, although there is more to it than this), knock it prone (which makes it flatfooted, enabling Feline Cunning), and causes Valdo’s other attacks (including Feline Cunning) to do more damage. It also allows Valdo to move into his target’s space; while he is allowed to do it safely, and thus will not provoke opportune strikes from other creatures, entering an enemy’s space always provokes an opportune strike from that enemy. Valdo may want to do this anyways, because certain feats provide benefits to Bear powers when in the target’s space.

    Bounding Leap is a safer attack, allowing Valdo to leap in, attack an enemy, and then leap safely away. He may want to use this if he isn’t sure he can handle being in close quarters with a powerful-looking enemy. It does not grant additional movement, however: any movement that Valdo uses up to make the leaps that are part of this power count against his normal movement. The power also might have a niche use as a power dealing more immediate damage than Ursine Pin, and not requiring a flatfooted target like Feline Cunning, but as it deals only 2d8 + <WIS> damage, the greater power use it would cost is a steep price.

    Fury of the Bear is not, actually, a way to recover after taking damage. But Valdo has a lot of ways to recover from or avoid dying to damage already, just from his ancestry features. If it turns out he needs more survivability, he can always pick up another power along those lines later. What Fury of the Bear offers is a way to strike back harder after taking some damage.

    Feats

    Valdo gets two feats at level 0, thanks to the Spirit Bond feature giving him a Multiclass Initiate feat for another Spiritual class. Let’s pick that one out first.

    Valdo could begin multiclassing as either a Druid, Shaman, or Wakener. I think the Wakener would be simplest to make work with Valdo’s powers and feats, so we’ll go with that. The Wakener Initiate feat gives Valdo a choice of two class features from the Wakener class, in limited form: of the two, I think Spirit Domain is most interesting.

    Spirit Domain creates a zone where enemies are challenged by Valdo, and his animal spirits have free rein. While in the zone, he can see and target all other squares in the zone with his attack powers, regardless of range (so he could use Feline Cunning without needing to be adjacent to the target, for example). The zone starts off filling a Pulse 1 (the space he used it in plus all squares within 1 square of it), but grows each time he uses a Spiritual power within it (only up to a Pulse 2, though, until he multiclasses further).

    Describing the effect of Spirit Domain is a great opportunity to make Valdo memorable! Given that it challenges enemies, and his powers are all tied to animal spirits, I shall say that Valdo’s Spirit Domain creates an area filled with phantom bears and panthers that harass his enemies from every angle.

    As for Valdo’s normal feat, there are a number of options that would work nicely for him.

    Perhaps the simplest choice, given that he is a damage-dealer, Mighty Spirits would allow Valdo to deal increased damage (+2 now, up to +6 at higher levels) with Spiritual powers featuring either of two keywords. Given his choices of powers, these keywords should undoubtedly be Bear and Panther.

    Improved Ghoulish Tenacity will give Valdo another way to recover his Ghoulish Tenacity power. Normally he would regain the use of this power if he avoids being brought down to 0 hit points until the start of his turn, but with this feat, even if he is brought down, he still regains the power as soon as he is healed above his injured value.

    The Bear Totem feat would give Valdo a new choice of benefit that he could gain from Spirit Transformation, increasing the damage dice of Spiritual powers. And it stacks with the benefit granting +2 damage to Spiritual powers! With this feat, he could have Feline Cunning dealing 2d8 + 1d6 + 9 damage within two turns. As a side note, there is a Totem Animal feat like this for all five animal keywords…

    Alternately, Valdo could just increase his Wild Strike damage from 1d6 to 1d8, which is a smaller boost, but doesn’t require as much setup as the Bear Totem option.

    Or, rounding out the options for increasing his damage, Valdo could take Razor Claws, causing his Panther powers to also deal some repeated bleed damage. While this wouldn’t deal as much damage up front, and some creatures are immune to bleed damage, this would probably have the largest effect in the long run.

    I like the Bear Totem option, so that’s what Valdo will take as his second feat.

    Equipment

    Unlike Ragnvald, Valdo really doesn’t need a melee weapon, since between his Carnivorous Bite and Spirit Transformation, he has multiple good unarmed attacks. But he does need an implement (a totem) for his Spiritual powers, and he does need armor. He should also probably pick up a ranged weapon of some kind, since all of his powers are melee-ranged. (This is something we can fix at higher levels.)

    For his totem, Valdo could pick out a totemic staff, scepter, or wand, or he could pay to have a weapon turned into a totem. (This is unique to totems; implements for Arcane and Divine powers have their own special options in addition to the same staff, scepter, or wand forms.) As a monster hunter, and one who has hunted vampires, I like the idea of giving him a totemic hunting crossbow, festooned with the claws and fangs of his totem animals. He won’t actually be at all accurate with it, thanks to his -1 <DEX>, but it gives him an option. The crossbow costs 10gp; turning it into a totem costs another 20gp, and a pack of 20 bolts for it will be 1 more gp.

    Valdo will want light armor, thanks to that same -1 <DEX>. He has +1 <GRA>, thankfully. His Spirit Transformation feature will give him 3 (<CON>) armor resistance if wearing light armor, and it doesn’t stack with resistance from actual armor, so there’s no need for him to pick out an armor with resistance. A leather greatcoat, offering +2 AC, will cost him another 10gp.

    Next up, Valdo will pick up the same Basic Adventurer’s Kit that Ragnvald did, running another 15gp. And…that’s really all he needs! All that gear comes to a grand total of 56gp, leaving him 44gp for incidentals. Compared to Ragnvald, he’s rolling in liquid assets…which I kind of like, since it suggests that Valdo doesn’t really spend money on himself, as he sees no point in fripperies.

    Up Next

    With all the decisions made for Valdo, the next post in this series will work out all the math for him and provide a copy of his character sheet. And then, just in time for Halloween, I’ll present some options as to how Valdo might advance up to level 5.

    I’ll also be sprinkling in some posts about enemies, and since it’s spooky season, lots of them will be undead…including some vampires like the ones Valdo has hunted. Stay tuned!

  • Bestiary: Elite Enemies

    A while back, when I covered mooks, I hinted that Aetrimonde would also support enemies designed to be equivalent to multiple PCs. Today, I’m going to show off the first type of enemies like this: Elites, which are designed to be level-appropriate challenges for two PCs.

    Design Goals: Why Elites?

    The question that attentive readers may be asking themselves right now is “why do you need a special kind of enemy to be equivalent to two PCs?” I’ve shown off enemies of a few different tiers so far, and a pattern emerges: a Tier 0 enemy is worth 100 EV, and for every two additional tiers, their EV doubles. So if you want an enemy to be twice the challenge of a level-appropriate enemy…why not just pick an enemy from two tiers up?

    The first part of the answer is narrative. Sometimes a GM wants to tell a story pitting the PCs against a foe who is more powerful than a mere mortal, like an ogre, or demon, or some of the more dangerous kinds of undead. Higher-tier enemies more challenging because they are marginally more capable, with slightly higher defenses, damage, etc., but this doesn’t make them feel appropriately powerful to model these powerful supernatural beings. I want Elites to feel more than mortal, and that will take mechanical changes relative to normal enemies.

    The second part of the answer is mathematical. An enemy two tiers up can easily feel “unfair,” because they will have attack rolls and defenses two points higher (on average): this moves their chances of hitting from around 55% to 72%, and their chances of being hit from around 72% to 55%, which is a massive shift. They’ll also have an extra 8 hit points, 2 armor resistance, and a whopping +4 damage. So in short, an enemy 2 tiers above the PCs will be much harder to hit, take less damage when they are hit, and hit like a freight train when they attack. Which is not to say there isn’t a niche for this, but sometimes you want an enemy who is more powerful, but not so overwhelmingly so. Elites are designed to work like two normal enemies rolled into one: twice the actions, twice the hit points, but not significantly harder to hit or better at hitting.

    My implementation of Elites gives them the following traits:

    • Elites have twice as many hit points as an equivalent normal enemy of the same tier. This makes them take about twice as much effort to defeat as a normal enemy.
    • The first recovery roll an Elite makes at the end of its turn automatically succeeds. Since Elites choose the order to make recovery rolls in (or rather, the GM chooses for them), this makes it harder for the PCs to keep really nasty recoverable effects on them.
    • Elites should be able to do 2-3 things per round, although they should not, generally, be able to use two limited-use actions per round, and it’s good if one of those things is something they do when it’s not their turn. This gives them around twice the offensive power of a normal enemy (who can generally do 1-2 things per round), but it spreads them out so that they don’t just pile a ton of damage on one character, all at once.

    The overall effect here is that an Elite enemy can be dropped into an encounter to replace two normal enemies, and it will take about the same amount of effort to defeat but deal a little less damage (or have a little less effect, for enemies that do things other than deal damage).

    With that in mind, let’s take a look at some Elites:

    Zombie Ogre

    The Zombie Ogre is a zombie animated from a big corpse, like that of an ogre. It’s not just bigger and tougher than an ordinary Zombie Walker (see details below for comparison), it can use that size and toughness to rampage through a group of PCs.

    This is the first Large enemy we’ve seen; this means that it takes up a 2×2 space in combat, and smaller creatures gain a +1 bonus to attack rolls vs. its AC and Poise…which are already so awful for the Zombie Ogre that it doesn’t make a lot of difference.

    As an Elite counterpart to the Zombie Walker, the Zombie Ogre does indeed have exactly twice as many hit points. It also does slightly more damage with its normal attack (due to being larger), and has a Brawl action. Many creatures (particularly Elite one) have a Brawl action, which generally allows them to make two or more attacks. All Brawl attacks must be made, if possible, before the creature can do anything else, but they take place in sequence and in theory the attacker could be interrupted partway through. The Zombie Ogre may actually have trouble making both of its Brawl attacks, because each Mighty Bash would push its target away, and thus out of range.

    This is also a great point for me to introduce one style of action that I’m building into many of the creatures in the Bestiary, which is the “interruptible” action. That’s not a defined term in the rules, but the concept of it is that actions like Lumbering Rampage are powerful, but their actual effect is delayed, and there are ways for PCs to either stop the enemy from following through (such as by breaking the Zombie Ogre’s concentration, in this case, which would take something dealing 26 damage to it, or somehow stunning it) or just get out of the way. Some interruptible actions can also be turned against the user or their allies: in this case, the PCs could shove their enemies into the path of the Lumbering Charge and let the Zombie Ogre trample them.

    Zombie Walker

    Skeletal Amalgam

    A Skeletal Amalgam is something a necromancer might make when they have a whole bunch of partial skeletons: a vaguely humanoid figure with extra arms sprouting in every direction.

    As an upgrade of the Skeletal Warrior (see below for comparison), the Skeletal Amalgam is initially armed with the same shortsword…in every one of its four arms. And it can attack with all four of those arms at once, if it likes, using its Brawl-like Flurry of Arms action. However, its number of arms can fluctuate over the course of an encounter, losing them as the PCs damage it to certain thresholds, or gaining more from the Piles of Bones left behind by other skeletal enemies.

    The Skeletal Amalgam is classed as a soldier, but if you’re just looking at its defenses in the statblock, it might not be clear why. With a mere 13 AC, it certainly doesn’t look much like a Soldier. But the Multi-Armed Parry special trait makes up for this: with +1 AC per Skeletal Arm, its actual AC will start out at 17, and can get as high as 21 if a Skeletal Amalgam manages to acquire its maximum of eight arms. And, as long as it keeps at least three arms, it cannot be flanked (due to having an arm in every direction to parry with).

    The Skeletal Amalgam benefits a lot from also having a lot of other skeletal enemies in an encounter. Skeletal Rattler mooks provide a steady supply of Piles of Bones that the Skeletal Amalgam can absorb. Skeletal Warriors (below) can also provide Piles of Bones, but they also have uses for Piles of Bones, so they might compete with Skeletal Amalgams unless it’s a very large encounter. Skeletons also have terrible Composure and mediocre Wit, and unlike zombies they aren’t Mindless, so can be easily confused or controlled with illusions and mind-altering magic.

    The weaknesses of Skeletal Amalgams, and skeletons in general, are less pronounced than those of zombies, but they do exist. Primarily, while they can make a lot of attacks, all of those attacks are individually quite weak. PCs with high armor resistance will have a field day shrugging off attack after attack, quite possibly taking no damage from low rolls.

    Skeletal Warrior

    Up Next

    Now that I’ve introduced the mechanics of Elite enemies, I’ll be sprinkling them into future Bestiary posts. Keep your eyes peeled!

  • Bestiary: Mummies

    Based on the poll I put out with the first Bestiary post, you readers would like to see some Afflictor enemies, who have consequences for the PCs that last longer than the end of a fight. In keeping with my undead and eerie theme for October, I’m going to use another kind of Aetrimonde’s undead to demonstrate Afflictors: mummies!

    In order to do Afflictors justice, though, I’ll need to introduce some mechanics for how those consequences work: the titular Afflictions.

    How Afflictions Work

    The rules for Afflictions are influenced by disease and poison rules from multiple editions of D&D, which I’ve adapted and generalized to create a framework that can also model things like broken limbs and magical curses. In general, Afflictions:

    • Have long-lasting effects on a PC.
    • Require the PC to succeed on checks to recover. These are generally Constitution checks for injuries, poisons, and diseases, but curses and psychic traumas can call for more esoteric types of check.
    • Have multiple stages that they progress through: they may start off worse and gradually get better, or they may have a check Difficulty high enough that a PC actually gets worse.
    Affliction Rules in Detail

    Examples of Afflictions

    Today’s post will focus on mummies and one specific affliction that they can cause, but I’d also like to provide some other examples of afflictions. These and many others are included in the Game Master’s Handbook for a GM to use, whether as something caused by an enemy, the result of a trap, or just a consequence of wading through sewers.

    A Burn Wound is among the simpler afflictions there is, having no particular rules to it. Once they receive the Burn Wound, characters start at the second stage, reducing their healing received and Endurance checks. They then must make a Difficulty 10 Constitution check every day to recover from it; if they get 5 or less, they instead get worse, and their maximum hit points are also halved. Burn Wounds are an appropriate injury for enemies to cause with high-damage fire attacks. (Dragons are Afflictor enemies, because they can cause Burn Wounds with their breath attacks.)

    An Arm Injury is a little more complicated, both in that it affects a specific arm and can be made worse by repeated injuries, and also that it can become a chronic condition: if a character fails too many checks to recover from it, the effect becomes permanent at its most severe step. Arm Injuries represent an injury to the muscle or joints of an arm; a separate Broken Arm condition covers injuries that break the bone. Arm Injuries are an appropriate affliction to be caused by bladed weapons; Broken Arms (being more serious and taking longer to recover from) are more likely to be caused by something like a giant grabbing a character by the arm and squeezing, or a sadistic redcap smashing their arm with a hammer.

    Compulsive Lying is a Trauma, which could be an aftereffect of mind-altering magic, or it could be caused by more mundane psychological stress, like being imprisoned and subjected to interrogation and torture. It allows the GM to compel a character to do things not in their best interests, by telling exaggerations or lies in a way that may backfire on them. A character with good Deception might be able to get away with this…but a character with poor Charisma and no training may wind up developing a reputation as a liar.

    Fae Mockery is a Curse straight out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, causing a character to become risible to anyone who didn’t already know them…at first. If a character persists in whatever behavior irked a faerie enough to curse them, and worse, badly fails a few checks to recover, they can wind up irritating people instead of amusing them. Eventually, they may even find that their old friends now can’t get over their amusing new features.

    Afflictions are not the only mechanic that would make an enemy an Afflictor (some Afflictors do things like steal, damage, or destroy PCs’ equipment, for example) but they are the most common. So how do Afflictor enemies use afflictions? Let’s look at some mummies:

    Mummy Lore

    Mummies are undead that were subjected to ritual embalming before being raised to unlife. They have all of the usual undead lore, plus a unique origin in Aetrimondean history:

    Mummified Bodyguard

    The most basic mummy that the PCs could encounter is a Mummified Bodyguard, subjected to the mummification process to guard the tombs of mummified rulers. Thanks to armor worn over their wrappings, they have decent AC and other defenses, and are therefore classed as a Soldier as well as an Afflictor. Also contributing to their Soldier role is the combination of Unrelenting Strikes and Unflinching, allowing the Mummified Bodyguard to unleash a nigh-uninterruptible flurry of accurate, though not particularly damaging attacks.

    The Afflictor role of the Mummified Bodyguard comes into play with its Absorb Vitality action. As described in the lore, mummies are able to drain the vitality–and moisture, and bodily humours–of victims, and this action is found on all mummies. It allows them to deal damage to nearby injured, living creatures, and regain hit points equal to the damage, but most importantly, it places the Curse of the Mummy on the unfortunate targets hit.

    The Curse of the Mummy is an affliction allowing a mummy to derive sustenance from their unfortunate victims, causing them to wither away into a desiccated husk unless they consume ever-increasing amounts of food and drink to make up for it. Ultimately, if players repeatedly roll terribly (or run out of supplies, as might happen in the middle of the wilderness), the curse may kill them outright.

    Details of how draining a victim rejuvenates a mummy are one point where I’m not going to provide detailed rules, instead leaving it up to GMs. Depending on what their plot demands, a mummy might instantly regain some of their youthful, lively appearance (a la the titular villain of the 1999 film), or it might be a more gradual process where it takes time for the mummy to look more lifelike. Instead of detailed rules, I instead provide a few suggestions that GMs are free to use or ignore as they find suitable for their campaigns.

    Mummified Priest

    The Mummified Priest poses more of a challenge to PCs, due to how it interacts with the Curse of the Mummy. While it has the same Absorb Vitality action that the Mummified Bodyguard has, it’s actually less effective (because the action is based off Constitution, and the Priest’s is lower).

    However, it makes up for this with its Binding of Sacrifice action, which imposes some nasty conditions (weakened, making a PC deal half damage, and dazed, limiting them to a single action per turn and making them flatfooted). It gets much, much worse against PCs already under the effect of the Curse of the Mummy, though, causing repeated entropic damage that allows the Priest to simultaneously regain hit points.

    The Mummified Priest is classed as a Controller as well as Afflictor because of the conditions caused by Binding of Sacrifice, and because of its other action, Frightening Visage (which is actually a power available to Divine PCs…). Aside from forcing PCs to move back from the Mummified Priest, and using up their reactions, this can also force them to take opportune strikes from other enemies if they have gotten well mixed-in.

    Using a Mummified Priest

    Because the Mummified Priest interacts with PCs that already suffer from the Curse of the Mummy, there are a couple of great ways for a GM to use a Mummified Priest:

    • In a single encounter, a Mummified Priest could be added to a bunch of Mummified Bodyguards, increasing the threat they pose with Absorb Vitality. In this setup, the Priest should be able to stay well back from the fighting, perhaps with the aid of favorable terrain, while the Bodyguards mix it up in melee. And once one of the PCs has contracted the Curse of the Mummy, the Priest can use Binding of Sacrifice to seriously impede that PC, forcing the party to try to break its concentration or just kill it quickly to release their ally from the curse.
    • In a more extended adventure, an early encounter with Mummified Bodyguards could lead to one or more PCs contracting the Curse of the Mummy. This would be a good time to start tracking supplies of food and water, especially if the PCs are out in the wilderness: the need to consume additional supplies puts pressure on the party, and subsequent encounters including Mummified Priests can encourage them to try and break the curse before proceeding.

    Mummified Noble

    The Mummified Noble is a comparatively simple enemy to run, because it really only has one trick in two potencies. Thanks to the extra effort put into its necromantic animation, the Noble can use Absorb Vitality at will, not just once per encounter.

    Replacing Absorb Vitality as a once-per-encounter power is Demand Vitality, which is not quite a straight upgrade. Demand Vitality targets only creatures that have already contracted the Curse of the Mummy: on the one hand, this means that it needs more setup for Demand Vitality to be effective, but on the other, it means that the PCs will have a harder time avoiding it. Whereas it’s possible for the PCs to keep themselves healed above half HP, so that they are not injured and therefore not a valid target for Absorb Vitality, there are few to no ways of breaking the Curse of the Mummy mid-fight: this means that any PC that already has the Curse of the Mummy going into a fight with a Mummified Noble is going to be a target for Demand Vitality.

    The other aspect of Demand Vitality that I will highlight is that, rather than applying an affliction, it makes an affliction worse. Suddenly having to deal with an additional penalty (especially one of the nastier ones in the lower stages) for an entire fight can be a nasty shock for the PCs.

    Using a Mummified Noble

    Because it really only has two variations of the one trick (an attack that deals entropic damage in a pulse, allowing it to regain hit points based on damage done, and applying/worsening an affliction), the Mummified Noble can be hit-or-miss if used in isolation. If the PCs mostly avoid becoming valid targets for its two main powers, it will likely wind up swiping ineffectually at them, maybe grabbing one or two and dealing some paltry damage. It is better to use the Mummified Noble as a climactic encounter after the PCs have already encountered other mummies and some of them have contracted the Curse of the Mummy.

    Up Next

    There is one other variety of mummy in the Bestiary, but I’m saving it for another post that will cover enemies designed to be equivalent to more than one PC. Keep an eye out for it soon!

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater III: Skills, Perk, Languages

    Short post today: we’ll be covering Valdo’s choice of skills, perks, and languages, and since I introduced all of these concepts the first time around when covering Etterjarl Ragnvald, it won’t take much length at all today.

    Skills

    Valdo gets the following preferred skills:

    • Arcana and Engineering (Der Eisenwald culture)
    • Intimidate and Warfare (Outlaw stratum)
    • Acrobatics, Athletics, Endurance, Intimidate, Nature, Perception (Skinchanger class)

    He’s also automatically trained in Nature from the Skinchanger class.

    Because I’m leaning into the creepy and horrifying aspects of the ghoul skinchanger concept, Intimidate is an easy pick. Endurance is also a nice pick that ties into Valdo’s ghoul ancestry. Since Valdo is a hunter of monsters, I’ll also give him Perception, so that he can spot them, and wrap up the last of his four preferred skill choices with Arcana, so that he knows a little bit about the monsters he hunts.

    For his final skill choice, I’ll give Valdo Stealth, for the ability to sneak up on his prey.

    Valdo’s trained skills will be:

    • +4 Arcana
    • +5 Endurance
    • +1 Intimidate
    • +4 Nature
    • +2 Perception
    • +3 Stealth

    Perk

    My initial thoughts on Valdo’s perk is that there are far too many good choices. He could easily have an Esoteric Knowledge perk relating to some type of monsters common in Der Eisenwald, like vampires, lycanthropes, flesh golems, etc. (I’m of the opinion that “Monsters of Der Eisenwald would be too broad a subject, overlapping heavily with the Arcana and Religion skills, so Valdo would have to pick just one.) He could have Profession [Monster Hunter], which would apply to the actual work of monster hunting (finding leads, choosing supplies, preparing traps…maybe raising mobs…). Or he could have a Fame perk representing his (in)famous takedown of an entire coven of vampire spawn.

    In the interests of variety, I’ll give Valdo the perk Fame [Victims of Vampires], making him a well-known (if somewhat feared) hero among people who have suffered the depredations of vampires.

    Languages

    Like Ragnvald, Valdo will speak Westerling as the presumed common language of this campaign. He will also speak Victish, one of the two languages suggested by the Der Eisenwald culture.

    Up Next

    In the next post on Valdo, I’ll be getting into the real mechanical meat of his character: the choice of powers, feats, and equipment.

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: The Dwarven Federation I

    Well, the readers have spoken, and it looks like you’d like to hear more about the Dwarven Federation, where Etterjarl Ragnvald hails from. So, by popular demand, I have a two-part post on this nation! Today, I’ll discuss the Federation’s history and how it came to be; the next post will cover its state in the current day of the setting.

    Summary

    The Dwarven Federation is the only dwarf-majority nation in Aetrimonde (although there are plenty of dwarves living elsewhere, and they have their own distinct cultures). It is a nation not in decline, but in stagnation: the dwarves of the Federation cling to the heritage that was lost to them when their ancient empire of Gjalerbron was destroyed in the Collapse, and the world has started to slowly pass them by. They remain the most skilled stone- and metalworkers in the world…but their advantage is eroding as the rest of the world invents and innovates. Young dwarves are leaving the Federation for better prospects elsewhere, and entire clans are muttering about secession, threatening to shatter the Federation entirely.

    Vital Statistics

    Official Name: Sambandsættirdverga (lit. “Dwarven Federated Clans”)

    Official Capital: Konigstrond (destroyed).

    De Facto Capital: Hasaeti-af-Tapi.

    Official Head of State: High King Torgrim III Unbowed (deceased).

    De Facto Head of State: Ingrid Ingvaldsdottir, Thane of Clan Volsung, Regent for the Unclaimed Throne.

    Primary Inhabitants: Dwarves

    Currency: Kroner (gold), ore (silver), kopar (copper)

    Founding

    The Dwarven Federation arose in the aftermath of the Collapse. Konigstrond, the capital of the dwarven empire of Gjalerbron, had been destroyed in the final battle with the orc horde, taking with it the dwarves’ greatest stores of treasure and knowledge. High King Torgrim was presumed dead, and his heirs missing. Remnants of the horde remained throughout the Ironspine Mountains and were in control of crucial passes, blocking communication and travel between the lesser dwarven cities. In the face of such loss, the dwarves withdrew from the world: the lucky ones, who lived in defensible, self-sufficient valleys, walled them off by collapsing the passes; the less fortunate built redoubts out of old mineshafts and did their best to avoid the attentions of the roaming orcs.

    It took more than a century for the remnants of the orc horde to disperse enough that lines of communication between the surviving enclaves of dwarves could be reopened, and in that time, the enclaves had diverged culturally. Where once the dwarves had been a singular people with a singular culture, they now viewed themselves as distinct clans–and their isolation had given time for perceived slights to mature and grow into grudges. Many of the clans blamed others for the loss of Konigstrond, the death of the king and the disappearance of the royal family, and the generations of isolation and hardship since.

    The first great Thing1 after the Collapse devolved almost instantly into blame and recrimination as these grievances boiled over: there was, according to the historians, “much shouting, pulling of braids,2 and waving of hammers,” and the Thing threatened to dissolve into open warfare. This was only forestalled by Olaf Olafssen II, Thane3 of Clan Ulfenning, who brought forth his elderly father Olaf Olafssen I, the last surviving member of High King Torgrim’s guard and by this point one of the oldest dwarves alive. Olaf I related for the gathered clans the tale of his survival and retreat from the battle of Konigstrond: how he had been injured protecting the High King in the fighting for the lower levels of the city; how the High King bade him lead a column of wounded and civilians out of the city by secret tunnels; how he witnessed from afar the orcs gain the summit of the city and enter the palace, only for the mountain to quake and bury dwarf and orc alike in an avalanche. Most importantly, he related how, as the devastated survivors stopped to rest in their flight, they found the battered crown of the High King, washed up on the banks a mountain stream which flowed from the now ruins of Konigstrond.

    Olaf I produced, for the awestruck thanes, the ancient crown of the High Kings, and bade them remember their ancient duty. Admittedly, the high king and his heirs had never been found, but neither had their bodies: until it was proven that all had perished, the line of kings remained unbroken—and thus, claimed Olaf, the gathered clans were honor-bound to preserve what remained of dwarfdom until the rightful High King could be found and placed on the throne.

    The clans who accepted Olaf I’s tale and his charge formed the Dwarven Federation. While officially still recognizing the deceased High King Torgrim III as their head of state, the clans of the Federation acclaimed Olaf I as a regent for the dead king. However, legal precedent did not legally give a regent all the powers of the High King: he could pass judgement on disputes and perform certain important ceremonial roles, but he could raise no armies, levy no taxes, pass no laws. The regent would be a figurehead until an heir was found. As a stopgap, the clans came to an agreement: within their territories, their thanes would be sovereign. In matters that affected all of dwarfdom, they would confer, and come to a consensus, and all would be honor-bound to act according to the consensus.

    Early History

    The Dwarven Federation’s early history was dominated by two imperatives: the drive to reclaim the dwarves’ lost territory, culture, and knowledge, and the search for the rightful heir to the High King.

    Following the first Thing and Olaf I’s ascent to the regency, the dwarves quickly discovered just how much they had lost in the Collapse: many of the great secrets of their ancestors had been jealously guarded in the guilds and archives of Konigstrond and were lost with the city. They no longer knew the alchemical formulas and processes to create mithril or adamantine, or the intricacies of the runes of power used in their most powerful magic. Much of their history, genealogy, and other records were lost as well, which they viewed as an even worse blow: uncounted ancestors would now go unremembered, their accomplishments lost along with their memorials in Konigstrond’s great necropoli.

    The early centuries of the Dwarven Federation were marked by a series of expeditions decreed by Olaf I and his successors in the regency: every clan was called upon to contribute funding, equipment, and dwarfpower to reclaim territory and track down artifacts and fragments of knowledge that had escaped the Collapse. Soon, however, the expeditions succeeded in reconquering or collecting all of their easily-accomplished goals…leaving Konigstrond and its surrounding territory as the only avenue to regain what remained lost.

    Successive regents poured ever-increasing amounts of blood and treasure into the effort to reclaim Konigstrond. Early expeditions to the ruined capital were promising, unearthing long-lost treasures and volumes of forgotten lore, including the secret of smelting mithril. However, the greatest treasures of Konigstrond were believed to be buried far beneath the mountain, and excavating them would require a permanent position in the Vale of Glories, as the region had come to be called. This, unfortunately, proved problematic.

    The Vale had long since been occupied by orcs who remained after the breaking of their horde, and the orcs living there now were a warlike people. They viewed the ruins of Konigstrond and Caras Seidharen as testaments to orcish might, and while the various orc tribes in the region fought among themselves, the dwarven expeditions posed a unifying threat. Time and time again, the dwarves fought their way to their ruins and began excavating, only for a warlord to emerge among the orcs and lead a horde to drive them back out.

    The repeated failures to reclaim Konigstrond badly weakened morale in the Dwarven Federation. To make matters worse, the effort to find and enthrone an heir to the High King had met with no greater success: countless dwarves came forward claiming to be a descendant of Torgrim III, but none were accepted by the council of Thanes. Some were unable to prove their claim to the stringent standards of dwarven genealogists. Others were simply mistaken, and were sent home with the council’s regrets. A few were pretenders, and these were executed and their clans shamed or exiled.

    Repeated cycles of hope and disappointment changed something in the culture of the Dwarven Federation. The dwarves became more and more gloomy and fatalistic; the clans contributed less and less to each successive expedition; and the Thanes began to dismiss most claims to the throne with only a cursory review of the evidence. In 542 AAC, Regent Audur Astridsdottir proclaimed that no more of the heritage of Gjalerbron could be reclaimed. There would be no more expeditions; no further claims to the throne would be entertained. Henceforth, all that the Federation could hope for was to preserve what was left of their lost glory.

    Recent History

    The Dwarven Federation since Audur’s Proclamation has been a nation in stasis. While innovation and invention are not illegal, per se, they are very strongly frowned upon. Where new ideas or inventions would replace or render obsolete the heritage that the Federation recovered from their ancestral glory, they are shunned and suppressed. The dwarves of the Federation look inward and backward to their history, and aspire to nothing more than what their ancestors possessed.

    Until recently, however, this was enough to make the Federation prosperous and powerful. Such was the ancient dwarves’ mastery of metallurgy, smithing, masonry, and all the other crafts of stone and metal that the fragments of knowledge that their descendants recovered were sufficient for dwarven craftsmen to be renowned throughout the known world. The rich and powerful of every nation came to the dwarves to commission everything from arms and armor to art and architecture. Virtually the only things that the dwarves did not grow wealthy from selling were their tools and techniques, which they guarded jealously and passed on from generation to generation within their clans.

    Eventually, however, this advantage eroded. While the dwarves are still the unquestioned masters of stone- and metalwork, the gap between them and the craftsmen of other nations has narrowed sufficiently that the Federation is no longer the hub of industry that it once was. Increasingly, buyers go elsewhere for their purchases, because while human foundries cannot compete with dwarven master-smiths on quality, they can certainly compete on quantity…and cost. The loss of income from trade has disrupted the dwarven economy, forcing master artisans to let go some of their apprentices, and in a vicious cycle some of these disillusioned, unemployed apprentices have abandoned the Federation for opportunities abroad, further eroding the Federation’s technical advantage.

    The Federation became directly involved in the wars of the Age of Steam a total of three times. Twice, it declared war to secure its claim to rich ore deposits in the face of encroachment by Victovy and the Novan Imperium. The third time, it allied with Tir Coetir in exchange for the repatriation of certain artifacts from Gjalerbron that the wood elves had “recently discovered.” In all three cases, the Federation achieved its objectives through direct application of overwhelming force and promptly sued for peace. For the remainder of the wars, the Federation maintained neutrality and sold arms to all sides.

    During the final exchange of superweapons, after taking casualties as collateral damage from the spread of Tir Coetir’s engineered plague, the Federation unleashed its own weapon in the form of Everwinter, a glacier spirit from the high peaks of the Ironspine mountains. Federation spiritualists had purposefully bound Everwinter but kept it riled up, over a period of decades, to a point just short of breaking its bonds: when pointed in the direction of Tir Coetir and released, it carved a path of icy destruction through the heart of the wood elves’ ancient forest before turning east and ruining the majority of the harvests across the Novan Imperium and Sanctean Primary, causing a borderline famine.

    1. Meeting of the clans. ↩︎
    2. Men and women alike in the Dwarven Federation grow their hair (and beards, for men) long, styling it in intricate braids. In fact, there is an entire language of braids, with different stylings allowing a dwarf to convey information about themselves, like what they do for a living, whether they are married, and so on. Long braids are a mark of age and wisdom; pulling of braids is thus a serious insult. ↩︎
    3. The title for a leader of a clan. ↩︎

  • Why it Works: Level Scaling I

    Today, I’m going to go over how characters–and the enemies they face–scale with level. This is tied into one of Aetrimonde’s core design principles, Solid Level Scaling, so I want to get it right, and that means putting some thought into the math.

    Player Character Scaling

    Let’s start by going over how PCs scale with level. This scaling is split into three parts: some aspects of a character, like defenses, scale automatically as the character’s expertise bonus increases with level. Other aspects, like attacks, do not automatically scale, but a character can improve them by taking feats that allow them to add expertise or otherwise gain a bonus. And finally, a character can gain additional, non-scaling bonuses from magical equipment.

    Built-In Scaling

    From level 0 to level 20, an Aetrimonde PC’s expertise bonus will increase from +2 to +6. By default, this increase translates into an additional:

    • +2 to all defenses (half expertise bonus).
    • +4 to trained skills and any check they have a perk related to (full expertise bonus)
    • +8 to hit points (double expertise bonus).
    • +2 to large heals (half expertise bonus).

    Feat Scaling

    Characters can choose to apply their expertise bonus to certain additional aspects by taking feats. Various feats can allow a character to add:

    • Half expertise to certain attack rolls (attacks using specific kinds of weapons, or magical attacks with specific keywords).
    • Half expertise to armor resistance.
    • Full expertise to certain damage rolls (in the same manner as attack rolls).

    Because characters do not already add expertise to any of these things, these feats provide a small boost at low levels, which can be valuable in its own right, and that boost gets larger at higher levels. For example, Weapon Aim would grant a +1 bonus to attack rolls using certain weapons at low levels, increasing to +2 at level 10 and +3 at level 20.

    Other feats provide a smaller, constant bonus to aspects of a character that already benefit from expertise:

    • +1 to AC.
    • +1 to Brawn and Poise.
    • +1 to Wit and Composure.
    • +2 to trained skills (one skill per feat).
    • +4 to hit points and +1 to large heals.

    Item Scaling

    Aetrimonde’s magical items are a topic for another post, but for now, suffice to say that magical items can provide a character with additional bonuses equivalent to the constant bonus from feats discussed above. This works out to:

    • +1 to AC.
    • +1 to Brawn and Poise.
    • +1 to Wit and Composure.
    • +2 to trained skills (one skill per item)
    • +4 to hit points and +1 to large heals.
    • +1 to certain attack rolls.
    • +2 to certain damage rolls.
    • +1 to armor resistance.

    Total Possible Scaling

    The greatest possible numeric advancement a character can get from level 0 to level 20 therefore works out to:

    • +4 to all defenses.
    • +4 to all trained skills.
      • An additional +4 to specific trained skills.
    • +16 to hit points.
    • +4 to large heals.
    • +4 to certain attack rolls.
    • +8 to certain damage rolls.
    • +4 to armor resistance.

    To max all of this out (assuming a character specializes in only one kind of attack, and not counting skills, where scaling is purposefully less stringent) would require 7 feats and 7 enchantments applied to magical items. 7 feats are certainly affordable for most characters, since they would have 21 feats by level 20: this leaves 14 feats to customize a character in other ways. 7 enchantments are even more affordable: the magical items that a PC would acquire by level 20 naturally varies depending on the campaign (and how the character spends their money), but the guidelines in the Game Master’s Handbook would allow a character to amass magical items with around 20 enchantments in total.

    Notes on Skill Scaling

    Skills are a little different than other aspects of character scaling, because I don’t necessarily want skill difficulties to increase at the same rate that characters’ skill bonuses do.

    To be more specific, I want the difficulty of a given task, like climbing a rocky cliff, to remain constant so that characters become more likely to succeed as they gain levels. At the same time, I also want characters to be able to tackle more “epic” tasks, like climbing a smooth wall of glass, as they approach level 20. I’ve previously discussed the calibration of skills and difficulties, and I think that this is already in a good place.

    Which is to say, I’m not going to assume that characters fully max out their skills by taking feats and acquiring magical items. Getting +4 to all their trained skills by level 20 is, I think, enough of a difference to make characters feel more skilled all by itself. The option of getting an additional +4 from feats and magic items exists partly for the sake of completeness and symmetry with other scaling factors, and partly for players who really want to max out certain of their characters’ skills.

    Enemy Scaling

    With this in mind, I’m going to balance enemy scaling around the idea that a character will, between level 0 and level 20, max out their numeric advancement in every aspect that matters to them. Support characters that specialize in aiding allies and making few attacks themselves may not see a need to max out their attack and damage scaling, while characters that do not have access to good armor resistance to begin with (like a wizard) might not see the point to maxing it out. But I will assume that a character gets the maximum possible scaling by level 20.

    As I’ve discussed already in my Bestiary posts, enemies are grouped into tiers corresponding to levels where the PCs’ expertise bonus increases. Each tier encompasses 5 levels, so at level 0, Tier 0 enemies are an appropriate challenge, while at level 20, Tier 4 enemies are an appropriate challenge.

    If you’ve been attentive, you may have noticed that all of the maximum scaling bonuses are divisible by 4. This is not a coincidence! The way that I’m going to handle scaling is that, for each tier, enemies gain:

    • +1 to all defenses.
    • +1 to all trained skills.
    • +4 to hit points.
    • +1 to large heals
    • +1 to all attack rolls.
    • +2 to all damage rolls.
    • +1 to armor resistance.

    What does this mean in practice?

    On average, a PC will improve at the same rate as the enemies they face. Over 20 levels, PCs and their enemies will improve by the same amounts (with some exceptions like attacks that a PC has not chosen to fully specialize in, which will become significantly less accurate against high-level foes).

    But, a PC probably won’t improve at exactly the same rate in every aspect. At various levels between 0 and 20, a PC can expect to be ahead of the curve in some aspects and behind in others. For example, a character who takes Weapon Aim and acquires a magical weapon giving them a bonus to attack rolls using it will have a total of +2 to attack rolls (relative to their baseline) by level 5, while level-appropriate enemies will only have gained +1 to defenses. However, if this character hasn’t taken any feats or gotten any items to increase their defenses by level 5, the appropriate enemies will have +1 to attack rolls while they still only have +0 to defenses.

    In these middling levels (from levels 5 to 15, roughly) part of the challenge of the game, and the tradeoffs in character-building, will come from the fact that individual characters, and possibly the entire party, have bad match-ups against certain enemies.

    At lower levels, characters will tend to be quite good at one or two things that they have invested in, relative to the difficulty posed by a typical enemy, but a little subpar in other areas. A low-level character specialized in making their attacks very accurate will do poorly against a Brute enemy, since Brutes tend to be easy to hit anyways, and deal lots of damage that the PC can’t deal with.

    At higher levels, characters will have the resources needed to be a little above par in most areas, but might have one or two glaring weaknesses where they haven’t invested enough to fully keep up with their enemies. A high-level character who has invested in every aspect of their character except their Wit and Composure defenses will suffer dramatically when faced with illusionists and mind-controllers.

    Up Next

    This is where I’m going to leave level scaling for now, but I’ll be following up with a second part looking at some of the math involved here in more detail, to try and see just how much more difficult an enemy becomes when they get adjusted up or down by one tier. Stay tuned!

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater II: Class and Abilities

    Today, following in the pattern I set with Ragnvald, I’ll be introducing our second sample character’s class (skinchanger) and picking his abilities. This character, you’ll recall, is Valdo the Bat-Eater: a horrifying hero with a background in hunting, and messily devouring, the horrible monsters of Der Eisenwald. Let’s see how he actually accomplishes this:

    Class: Skinchanger

    Skinchanger is not a particularly recognizable name in the milieu of fantasy classes, the way fighter, wizard, and cleric are. So I think I should start off by introducing the lore associated with the class:

    Skinchangers are often misunderstood, and equally often feared, for the powers they gain by bonding spirits can be unsettling. A skinchanger’s bond allows them to draw spirits into themselves, expressing them as changes to their own body. While this is most often done with animal spirits, allowing them to sprout the antlers of a great stag or the claws of a ferocious bear, they can do this with most any spirit, allowing them to turn their skin to stone or gain the strength of an ancient warrior.

    Welcoming spirits into their bodies comes with risks for a skinchanger: while the bodily transformations they provide can be helpful, some spirits will also try to impose mental changes as well. The keen senses of a wolf spirit may allow a skinchanger to track their enemies by scent, but if the skinchanger cannot maintain control of the spirit, it can also give them pack-hunting instincts, or drive them to attack anything that presents itself as prey. The side effects of a transformation grow greater when the spirit is more powerful; the mark of a practiced skinchanger is that they can resist the mental changes forced on them by the most powerful of spirits.

    Of course, not all skinchangers choose to resist when their spirits try to affect their minds. Some of them feel that embracing the strange thoughts and ideas that come to them when in a transformed state allows them to better understand their spirits, deepening their bond. Others simply enjoy the thrill of the hunt when in the form of a wolf, or appreciate the beauty they see in flames when influenced by a spirit of fire.

    While normally a skinwalker’s mental changes are as transitory as the physical ones, there is a danger that they may become permanent, especially if a skinwalker embraces them, or repeatedly comes under the influence of an especially powerful spirit. Once this happens, they often experience a rapid decline into an inhuman mindset, becoming something other than simply mortal.

    The skinchanger class takes part of the lore associated with the druid class of D&D, that being their ability to transform into animals (and other forms, but it is most strongly associated with, and has the most mechanical support for, turning animals). The druid has traditionally been a very broad class with a ton of features letting them fight as well as a fighter when transformed into an animal, plus cast spells almost as well as a cleric or wizard when not. In the interest of having more well-defined classes, I’ve split the druid’s traditional niche apart into the four Spiritual classes, each with a different focus.

    Let’s take a look at their class features: I’m going to go into more detail here than I did for the fighter class, because I think the skinchanger class is going to be less self-explanatory.

    Basics

    The skinchanger is a lot more fragile than the Fighter. With only 20 base hit points, 3 base resurgences, and 1d8 healing die, it is, on paper, about as tough as a Rogue. However, its features give it a surprising amount of durability in practice…

    Skinchangers gain +1 to Brawn and Poise, based on the resilience and agility of animals. They gain proficiency only with leather armors and simple weapons, but (as with all Spiritual classes) they are also proficient with Totem implements used with Spiritual powers.

    Finally, skinchangers are trained in Nature, and gain a variety of preferred skills suited to surviving in the wilderness (plus Intimidate, which is a natural extension of being able to sprout fangs…).

    Spirit Bond

    All four Spiritual classes gain the same Spirit Bond feature (much as all Martial classes gain the Martial Endurance feature). Spirit Bond gives a skinchanger an extra feat, which must be a Multiclass Initiate feat for another Spiritual class. But what does that mean?

    D&D typically allows multiclassing by taking individual levels of a class. Which is to say, a 4th level character could have 4 levels of fighter, or 2 of fighter and 2 of wizard, or whatever combination you can think of. D&D 4e was an exception to this, and is in fact what I based Aetrimonde’s multiclassing on, with some departures.

    In Aetrimonde, you will always be a member of your original class first and foremost, but you can, by taking multiclass feats, gain some of the features of a second class. Spirit Bond gives Spiritual characters a head start on this process, and does not prevent them from also multiclassing to a third class (which would normally not be allowed). Part of the theme of the Spiritual classes is that they are versatile, and Spirit Bond gives Spiritual characters a broader set of tools from level 0.

    Multiclassing Details

    Multiclassing as far as possible takes a total of up to four feats:

    • [Martial/Arcane/Divine/Spiritual] Dabbler: Makes you count as a member of a class from the appropriate power source, just not any class in particular. (You can take powers of the associated power source and feats requiring to to be, e.g., “Any Arcane class,” but not feats specifically for wizards.) Also grants appropriate weapon and implement proficiencies.
    • [Class] Initiate: Makes you count as a specific class from a power source you already have, and grants a version of one of their class features, with added restrictions on how often you can use it. The Dabbler feat is a necessary prerequisite if multiclassing to a class from a different power source than your original one.
    • Multiclass Adept: Grants an additional class feature from your secondary class (or, in some cases, removes a restriction from the Initiate feature).
    • Multiclass Mastery: Removes the restrictions from the class features gained from the Initiate and Adept feats.

    Importantly, multiclassing will never give you another class’s “signature” feature: you can never gain Martial Endurance if you didn’t start out as a Martial character or Spirit Bond if you didn’t start out as a Spiritual character (and you can’t get them a second time if you did). These are powerful features, and it helps preserve class identities to make them unique to characters that started as that class (rather than being available at the cost of a few feats).

    Spirit Transformation

    The first of the skinchanger’s two unique features contains two parts: firstly, a skinchanger can enter a transformed state where they gain some pretty significant armor resistance and an alternate unarmed attack (which isn’t actually as good as Valdo’s Carnivorous Bite, but still…). The armor resistance is not a bonus, and does not stack with other sources of armor resistance (like hide armor, for example), but with even modest investment in CON this can give Valdo AR on par with plate armor.

    But the meat of Spirit Transformation is the ability to gain a shifting array of bonuses as Valdo uses Spiritual powers. There are 6 bonuses to gain, of which Valdo can keep up to CON at once. (It is becoming apparent that Valdo will want to have good CON for a variety of reasons.) This allows Valdo to tailor himself over a few turns to whatever enemies he winds up facing.

    The second part of Spirit Transformation ties into another part of the theme of Spiritual characters, which is growth. All four Spiritual classes have a class feature of this nature, that gets more powerful as they use Spiritual powers, and many Spiritual powers themselves have effects that get bigger or more powerful over time.

    Wild Strike

    The skinchanger’s second unique feature also has two parts to it. Firstly, it allows a skinchanger to use some Spiritual powers that would normally be long-ranged as melee attacks. Why would this be a good thing? Because using a ranged power while tied up in close combat normally leaves a character open for opportune strikes. Being able to use these powers as melee attacks gives the skinchanger a wider range of powers they can realistically use.

    And, this ties into the second half of the feature, which grants the skinchanger additional damage with Spiritual melee attack powers and unarmed attacks. In the interest of clarity, I’ll confirm here that this additional damage applies to attacks using Valdo’s Carnivorous Bite and Spirit Transformation unarmed attacks, and to Spiritual ranged powers that Valdo uses as melee powers via the first half of this feature.

    Several other classes have additional damage features like this, including the rogue’s Sneak Attack, the warlock’s Law of Contagion, and the crusader’s Vengeful Oath. The amount and circumstances of additional damage varies by class; Wild Strike is the easiest source of additional damage to gain, but provides the smallest amount of damage.

    Abilities

    Next up, let’s pick Valdo’s abilities.

    I haven’t shown any Spiritual powers yet, but they will use Wisdom in their attack and damage rolls, and either Constitution or Intelligence, depending on the type of power, for secondary effects. Valdo will want Constitution over Intelligence: this is partly because of his class features, partly because the powers that work best with Wild Strike will mostly use Constitution, and partly because as a melee-focused character with rogue-level toughness, he needs the extra hit points.

    To get +4 WIS, without WIS being a preferred ability, will cost 10 ability points. However, CON and INT are both preferred abilities, so Valdo will pay another 3 points for +2 CON, boosted to +3, and 1 more point for +1 INT boosted to +2.

    We have positive abilities contributing to Brawn, Wit, and Composure so far, so to round it out, let’s also pay 1 ability point for +1 GRA so that he also has decent Poise. This will bring our ability point cost to 15 points, so we’ll now need to drop two abilities.

    I’ve settled on Valdo being well-intentioned but off-putting, so giving him negative CHA is fitting. I think that he should have at least +0 CUN, since the backstory I’ve written has him survive hunting vampires, and while he doesn’t strictly need STR to use Spiritual melee powers, negative STR would make it especially difficult for him to actually use his unarmed attacks. So, let’s also drop DEX to -1.

    All told, Valdo will have the following abilities, using up his 13 ability points:

    +0 STR-1 DEX+0 CUN+4 WIS
    +3 CON+1 GRA+2 INT-1 CHA

    Up Next

    The next post on Valdo will be a short one covering his skills, perk, and languages. Stay tuned!

  • Bestiary: Mooks

    Aetrimonde supports enemies that are not just a one-to-one equivalent to a PC of an appropriate level. I’ll cover all of these types eventually, but today I’m going to focus on mooks: these are enemies designed to be used in great numbers, without overwhelming either the PCs or the GM who has to run all of them.

    Some of the mooks I’m using as examples today are undead, and I’ll be using more undead as examples in later posts. Let me know what kind of undead you’d like to see more of in later posts!

    Mook Rules

    Mooks are built differently than normal enemies to minimize how much mental load they place on a GM:

    • 5 mooks are equivalent to a single normal monster of the same tier.
    • Mooks do not have hit points. Instead, they have a Threshold value, and they are killed or destroyed when they take that much damage from an attack, or if they take that much damage from any other source and subsequently fail a recovery roll.
      • The Threshold value is calibrated to be between 1/5 and 1/4 of an equivalent normal enemy’s hit points. This means that 5 mooks will be destroyed by 5 typical sources of damage, just like a normal enemy.
    • Mooks have only normal and at-will actions, so there is no need to track which powers they have used or what resources they have expended.
      • A mook will deal the same damage as a normal enemy’s at-will actions. 5 mooks will initially do 5 times the damage of a normal enemy, but their collective damage will drop rapidly as they take damage and are eliminated, especially if the PCs use area attacks to take out several at once. Between this and not having higher-damage, limited-use powers, the total damage 5 mooks can do before being eliminated is roughly the same as a single normal enemy.
    • The only bookkeeping a GM has to do for mooks is to keep track of what conditions have been applied to them, and since many effects that would apply a condition would kill the mook outright with damage, this becomes less of a chore.
    Minions in D&D 4e

    D&D 4e implemented a kind of enemy called minions to fill a similar niche to my mooks, but minions had a few flaws from my perspective:

    • They were destroyed by taking any amount of damage, no matter how small, and never took damage from missed attacks. This made them frankly trivial to clear out with any power that created damaging areas, no matter how little damage it dealt.
    • They also did only a small, fixed amount of damage with their attacks. This removed the suspense of rolling for damage, although not having to roll did slightly speed up combat.
    • Minion was treated as a role in and of itself, and so there were no Brute minions or Assassin minions. All minions therefore felt much the same in combat. I have instead created guidelines on how to adjust a Normal monster of any role to create a mook of the same role.

    Now let’s take a look at a few mooks:

    Ghoul Scavenger

    I’ve already showed off the Ghoul ancestry for PCs, and this gives me an opportunity to show off how some PC ancestry features would be adapted for a mook.

    Like the section on dwarves, the Bestiary section on ghouls contains some additional lore building on what the core rulebook presents PCs with. The Ghoul Scavenger is a feral ghoul as described in this lore: poorly clad in reeking skins, attacking with its mouthful of fangs, and no less dangerous for it. Its role is Brute, indicating that it has relatively poor defenses but loads of hit points, and can do high damage in melee.

    The Ghoul Scavenger indeed has mediocre defenses. And while mooks don’t have hit points, it has a relatively high Threshold of 8, meaning that a typical damage source (1d8 + 4) will fail to kill it more than a third of the time: this gives it the toughness of a Brute.

    All three of the Ghoul Scavenger’s actions and special traits are lifted directly from the ghoul ancestry:

    • Carnivorous Bite is the Scavenger’s normal attack, and is what gives it the high melee damage making it a Brute.
    • Low-Light Vision is another ghoul feature that doesn’t need explanation in its stat block.
    • Ghoulish Resilience is a twist on the Ghoulish Regeneration and Ghoulish Tenacity ancestry features, which would be problematic if given to a mook: the GM would have to track whether each mook had used Ghoulish Tenacity, and would also have to make survival rolls for each one to make use of Ghoulish Regeneration. Ghoulish Resilience captures the essence of these features, which is that a ghoul has a good chance of surviving a lethal blow and standing up again on their next turn, and does it without requiring the GM to track anything other than prone-ness.

    Undead Mooks

    One great application of the mook rules is for undead mooks: this makes it possible to run the classic “attacked by a horde of undead” encounter. So I think this is a great time to introduce the rules for Aetrimonde’s undead, and then introduce a couple of undead mooks:

    • Undead are not living creatures and do not need to eat, drink, breathe, or sleep.
    • Undead are immune to bleed and poison damage.
    • When critically hit, undead do not suffer critical damage, although damage is still maximized.
    • Undead are destroyed as soon as they are reduced to 0 or fewer hit points, rather than entering the dying state.

    Undead also have their own lore section:

    Zombie Rotter

    First off, there is of course some additional lore about zombies:

    The Zombie Rotter is another Brute mook like the Ghoul Scavenger, but taken to the extreme. It has absolutely atrocious defenses, with the exception of Brawn, and an incredible Threshold of 11 (meaning it would survive a typical damage source 75% of the time). While its damage isn’t actually that much greater than the Ghoul Scavenger’s (8.5 instead of 7.5), its normal attack lets it grab enemies.

    And, if that weren’t enough, it has the added advantage that it is mindless, and thus immune to a whole slew of psychic damage and control effects.

    The only reason that the Zombie Rotter doesn’t have a higher Tier is that it has downsides to go with these strengths: it’s slow, it can’t run, and it’s destroyed by any damaging critical hit (even if the damage from that wouldn’t break its Threshold, which is entirely possible with weaker attacks at low levels).

    In short, the Zombie Rotter is an absolute terror in close quarters. The Bestiary provides the following advice on actually using the Zombie Rotter and other zombies:

    To ensure that their weaknesses come into play, ensure that encounters with zombies allow the PCs to engage on their terms. This could mean giving the PCs a fortified position that it will take the zombies time to break into or a line of retreat so that they can turn the fight into a fighting withdrawal, or just starting the encounter with the zombies far away so that the PCs have a few rounds to thin them out with ranged attacks.

    The Zombie Rotter doesn’t have a major puzzle element to it, but it pairs nicely with other zombies (who I’ll show off in another post…), who become a lot more threatening to grabbed or otherwise impeded characters. A horde of Rotters with other zombies mixed in can thus form an absolutely tense encounter.

    Skeletal Rattler

    Skeletons animated by necromancy are an entirely different kind of threat than zombies. And they do have to be purposefully created: with no flesh left on their bones, the only way to make an animated skeleton is with magic.

    The Skeletal Rattler is the simplest, weakest skeletal enemy in the Bestiary. Not nearly as durable or as strong as a zombie, it is a subtler enemy with a couple of tricks to pull. The first is that it can ambush the PCs by pretending to be an inanimate skeleton, or blending into a heap of bones (like might be found in a crypt or abattoir). This is what makes it an Assassin.

    But the second of the Rattler’s tricks is that, when destroyed, it leaves behind a Pile of Bones that other enemies (primarily other skeletons) can use. Without spoiling those other skeletal enemies just yet, various of them can use Piles of Bones to gain temporary hit points, bonuses to AC, and extra attacks, or can just reanimate Piles of Bones into more Skeletal Rattlers.

    By themselves, Skeletal Rattlers don’t pose much of a threat. But in an encounter with other, more powerful skeletal enemies, PCs will need to be careful about killing them off: wiping out a horde of Skeletal Rattlers will leave a lot of resources lying around for the other skeletons to use. The PCs can of course just let this happen, but they could also try to dispose of the Rattlers by, say, tossing them off of cliffs, or throwing them into industrial machinery that would destroy the Piles of Bones they leave behind. Or, they could devote some attacks to destroying the Piles of Bones as they create them.

    Up Next

    Skeletons and zombies aren’t the only undead in Aetrimonde. I’ll eventually need to show off some enemies of the other “special” types that are designed to be equivalent to more than one PC; and there are enough undead of these types that I think they’d be great examples. So let me know in the poll up top what kind of undead you’d like to see more of!

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: Astronomy, Meteorology, and Timekeeping

    Today, I’m going to talk about the actual world of Aetrimonde, by which I mean the planet and the solar system that it exists in, and some of the everyday consequences of things like lunar cycles. Notes in italics are out-of-universe references using Earth as a point of comparison.

    I have just enough knowledge of physics that I think I was able to work out the math behind the lunar orbits correctly, but if you’re better at astrophysics than I am and you think I’ve gotten something wrong, let me know!

    Before I get into that, though, I’ve got a poll for you: I’ll be continuing this Gazetteer series by covering the Great Polities of Aetrimonde, which I’ve discussed briefly in a previous post. So, which one would you like to see more about first?

    The Planetary System

    The world of Aetrimonde occupies a planetary system orbiting a yellow sun. Astronomy is an important field of study on Aetrimonde, for reasons discussed below, and local astronomers are aware of six planets in the system, including Aetrimonde itself. However, the more distant of these planets were only discovered recently, and given that there is still plenty of room for telescope makers to improve their craft, the astronomy community suspects that there are still more planets that are still beyond the reach of their vision.

    • Caldimonde, the Forge, closest to the sun, is a scorching hot world. Observations through Aetrimonde’s telescopes are indistinct, but suggest that the planet rotates slowly (just once every three Aetrimondean years), with the side facing the sun growing hot enough to melt stone and metal before cooling as it rotates away.
      • The parts of Caldimonde that are not currently molten are a rust-red, and even before its forge-like environment was discovered, it was associated with Deum Making, god of the forge and of craftsmanship in general. Various legends hold that finishing a work of craftsmanship when Caldimonde is at its zenith will make the result blessed, lucky, or just less likely to break.
    • Nubrimonde, the Jewel, is visibly covered in clouds through telescopes, and is believed to be hot and humid. Even before the invention of the telescope, it was observed to cycle through shades from yellow to violet. More detailed recent observations suggest that the planet has an atmosphere containing several different gases, with some atmospheric process that churns up the gases and periodically brings different ones to the top.
      • Nubrimonde is associated with Deum Reveling, god of, among other concepts, aesthetics. As one of Deum Reveling’s other domains is joy and celebration, there are numerous festivals held at various points of significance during Nubrimonde’s transits. Most of them have no deeper meaning, and are simply excuses to hold large parties.
    • Merimonde, orbiting slightly inside Aetrimonde’s own orbit, is a slightly wetter and warmer planet. Because it is the planet that comes closest to Aetrimonde in its orbit, Merimonde was the first planet that astronomers could view in any detail through their telescopes: it appears to consist mostly of ocean, with no ice caps and only a few, small islands, and is wracked by constant, continent-sized hurricanes. Some astronomers argue that the greenish tint to its oceans are a sign that Merimonde is home to plant life, at the very least.
      • Merimonde is associated with Deum Harmonious, god of nature. Originally this was due to its green coloration, but the association has been reinforced since the theory that it has plantlife became widely known. The transit of Merimonde is considered an especially auspicious time when it coincides with a solstice or equinox, already important dates in the worship of Deum Harmonious.
    • Aetrimonde itself orbits fourth from the sun.
    • Melamonde is a small and apparently frozen world orbiting far beyond Aetrimonde. Viewed through telescopes, it appears to be covered in ice or snow, with jagged peaks of black rock showing through.
      • Melamonde was unknown until the development of powerful telescopes, but it has come to be associated with Deum Untamed, the god of storms and trials. It has no historic association with festivals or folklore, but astrologers (not to be confused with astronomers) have started associating it with periods of hardship such as famines and floods.
    • The final known planet in the system is recently discovered and not yet definitively named, for the measurements reported by the astronomers who discovered it were widely disbelieved. The sixth planet has a radius twelve times that of Aetrimonde, which was previously believed to be the largest object in the system. Like Nubrimonde, it is apparently covered in thick clouds (it is a gas giant, but Aetrimonde’s astronomers haven’t realized such a thing is possible yet), and is orbited by numerous moons, of which fourteen have so far been detected.
      • The unnamed sixth planet does not yet have a strong divine association. Astrologers have very recently started linking it with Deum Veiled, the god of secrets, for having escaped notice for so long.

    Aetrimonde’s Moons

    Aetrimonde itself has three moons:

    • Nomis, the Constant, the White Moon, is the largest and typically closest of the three. (It is about 3.5 times the mass of Luna, Earth’s moon, but 30% further away, appearing about 15% larger in the sky). Aetrimonde’s lunar calendar is based on Nomis’ lunar cycle, which takes just over 35 days.
      • In Aetrimondean folklore, Nomis is associated with the virtues of steadfastness and loyalty, as its short lunar cycle and consistent size makes it a predictable presence in the night sky.
      • Nomis is generally associated with Deum Ruling, the god of laws, kings, and civilization, owing to its constancy as well as the fact that it is generally the largest celestial object in Aetrimonde’s sky.
      • Nomis is often cast as the narrator in classical dramas. In a common style of staging, the actor portraying Nomis moves gradually from one side of the stage to the other to symbolize the passage of time throughout the play, giving narration while in motion and remaining onstage but motionless during the action.
    • Ubris, the Messenger, the Red Moon, is the smallest moon and has the second-closest orbit, but that orbit is eccentric, meaning that Ubris changes in visible size during its lunar cycle. At its closest approach, it appears about a quarter the size of Nomis. Ubris’ lunar cycle takes 191 days, more than half an Aetrimondean year.
      • Ubris is associated with wanderlust and deceit: its red light is bright enough, when it is close to Aetrimonde and Nomis is not in the sky, for thieves and scoundrels to ply their trade, while casting deep enough shadows for them to go unseen.
      • Ubris is sometimes associated with Deum Mocking, the god of trickery and defiance.
      • Folk belief would have it that actions taken under the red moon are subject to the whims of fate: they are unlikely to go exactly as planned, but may turn out for the better as a result.
      • In classical dramas, Ubris is often personified as a character hidden among the ensemble, who provides other characters with advice or objects that become important much later in the play. At that point, the actor portraying Ubris traditionally performs a dramatic reveal, shedding or reversing part of their costume to become clad in red.
    • Exeris, the Stranger, the Black Moon, is the middle-sized of the three moons. It also has an extremely low albedo, and a highly eccentric orbit lasting more than three Aetrimondean years, making it all but invisible except when it is at its closest approach to Aetrimonde, when it passes just inside the orbit of Nomis and appears almost as large.
      • Exeris features in many myths as a harbinger of disaster (likely inspired by historical events discussed below).
      • When it has a divine association, it is with Deum Terminal, the god of endings and change.
      • According to a widespread folk belief, actions taken under the black moon will inevitably lead to disaster, and superstitious people try to remain indoors, doing nothing of import, when Exeris is in the night sky.
      • In classical dramas, Exeris is represented by a masked, silent player clad in black, whose presence in a scene indicates that the action on stage will, regardless of intentions, lead to tragedy.

    Importantly, all three moons orbit Aetrimonde at angles to each other. Nomis and Ubris’ orbits are far enough from each other that they do not exert a significant gravitational pull on each other, but Exeris’ eccentric orbit passes near the other two, and means that it can, and has, come close enough to the other moons to disturb them. There is a close pass between Exeris and the other moons roughly every century, which normally affects their orbits just enough to require recalibrating some tide tables.

    (Non-coplanar lunar orbits are possible in reality, but rare, and indicate a relatively young world. Over time, a planetary system with multiple moons would generally see the moons either crash into the planet, be slingshotted out of the system, or converge into a single orbital plane.)

    However, the second-to-last close pass, which occurred just over a century ago, came close enough to Ubris that the resulting alteration to the Red Moon’s orbit was visible to the naked eye. This, in turn, significantly changed the pattern of the tides and altered some oceanic currents, resulting in a period of severe hurricanes and typhoons as the climate adjusted to its new equilibrium. The storms, thankfully, died down after a period of some ten years, but the events of the Stranger’s Message, as the close pass came to be known, inspired doomsday cults across Aetrimonde. Some believe that the resulting instability contributed to the outbreak of war during the Age of Steam.

    Other Celestial Bodies

    The Aetrimondean system is home to a number of other astronomical phenomena, including the Eye of Heaven, a toroidal nebula strongly resembling an eye, and the Herald of War, a red-tinted comet whose appearance in the night sky has preceded several major wars…probably by coincidence, but the astrologers claim otherwise.

    Tides and Weather

    With three moons in wildly different orbits, Aetrimonde has extremely rough seas, though they are becoming more navigable thanks to advances in shipbuilding, astronomy, and meteorology. In ages past it was only possible to sail the oceans because generations of sailors had charted safe routes through painstaking trial and error, and established sheltered harbors all along Aetrimonde’s coastlines.

    The large mass of Nomis means that tidal forces are already relatively strong (about twice as strong as on Earth), but the presence of two other moons, and in non-coplanar orbits, make the tides far harder to predict, and can create freakishly strong tides at conjunctions where two moons line up closely with the sun over Aetrimonde. Under normal circumstances, astronomers can compute tide tables that are reasonably helpful up to a few months in advance, but when Ubris and Exeris pass close to Aetrimonde, their predictions become much less accurate (though the astronomers are getting better over time).

    Aetrimonde has currents that are not driven by the tides, too, but they are weaker in comparison to tidal currents. Nomis’ tidal currents alone are strong enough that there are very few usefully consistent currents close to the coastline. (Aetrimonde has equivalents to Earth’s Gulf Stream and Antarctic Circumpolar Current, but close to shore, tidal currents are strong enough that they can weaken, cancel out, or redirect these permanent currents at various points in the lunar cycle.) When Ubris and Exeris form a conjunction with Nomis while passing close to the planet, their tidal forces added to Nomis’ can cause devastating tides, flooding coastal towns or completely draining shallow harbors.

    Especially strong tides, such as those during a conjunction, are sometimes enough to bring together warm and cold currents that wouldn’t otherwise meet. This, in turn, causes hurricanes and typhoons that regularly batter coastal areas. Aetrimonde’s meteorologists are only just figuring out how to predict these events: historically, the first sign of an unseasonal storm would be a cloud on the horizon, at which point it was often too late for a ship to find safe harbor. Today, perhaps one in five major storms can be predicted a few days in advance, giving sailors enough advance warning that they can remain in port while it passes…or try to outrun it, if they feel like taking the risk.

    To make all these matters worse, when Exeris makes a close pass with one of the other moons it causes changes to the orbits of both, which requires astronomers and meteorologists alike to recalibrate their models and leaves the tides and weather unpredictable for as much as a year at a time. The Stranger’s Message was particularly bad in this respect, and it took the better part of a decade for seafaring to become as safe as it had been before the Message.

    In short, Aetrimonde’s seas are incredibly dangerous, and not just to ships at sea; coastal regions have to be rebuilt on the regular, and port cities have to be carefully planned to deal with the occasional freak tide. Most ocean-going ships stick close to shore whenever possible, because the risk of a freak storm is such that captains prefer never to be more than a day’s sailing from a safe harbor. Blue-water exploration is a fool’s errand in Aetrimonde, and although astronomers and cartographers are confident that Aetrimonde is far larger than what they have explored and mapped, there is no real effort to find out what lies beyond the edges of the map.

    Sea Magic

    Because of all the dangers associated with the oceans, ship captains hire “sea witches” whenever possible. These are people with some magic making seafaring less dangerous, whether that be outright control of the weather, the ability to predict storms and currents ahead of time, or a divine blessing that ensures a ship will survive rough seas. Some of these people are trained arcanists or anointed priests with other magic to their names, but many just have the one trick letting them sail the oceans without fear.

    Other Tidal Effects

    Aetrimonde’s stronger tidal forces are most apparent in the tides and weather, but the moons’ gravity affects the entire planet and everything on it. Avalanches, landslides, and earthquakes occur more often during conjunctions of the moons, and Aetrimonde’s few volcanoes become more active during these periods as well. Mines are known to shut down operations during a close pass (if the owners have any care for the workers) as a precaution against collapses, and many nations have laws mandating structural inspections of large buildings following a conjunction.

    The Calendar

    Aetrimonde’s solar year is 353.14 days long. The Novan calendar, which is the most widely-used in Aetrimonde, observes a year of 353 days, divided into ten months of 35 days each (matching Nomis’ lunar cycle) with the leftover three days making up a short intercalary month around the winter solstice. Every seven years, the intercalary month is extended by one day, to account for the extra 0.14 days in the solar year.

    The months of the Novan calendar are the unimaginatively named Primus, Secundus, Tertius, Quartus, Quintus, Sextus, Septus, Octus, Novus, and Decus. The intercalary month, which occurs between Decus and Primus and is generally celebrated as a holiday, is named Festus.

    Each month is divided into five weeks of seven days. The names of the days of the week are taken from the old Auran calendar, in which they were associated with the seven gods with the most prestige and power in the old Auran Empire. They are (in order of the associated god’s ascending importance) Luxens, Scirens, Facens, Pugnens, Virtens, Concordens, and Imperens. The days of the intercalary month are considered to be outside of the normal cycle of months and weeks, and are not assigned a day of the week: every month and year thus begins on Luxens and ends on Imperens.

    In the Auran Empire, Imperens was a day given over to religious services and civic duties, and people generally worked the other six. The use of Imperens for religious observations persisted after the Collapse, and spread wherever the Auran calendar was adopted. Recently, labor reforms originating in Waystone have turned Concordens into a second day of rest, although this has not yet spread to the rest of the world.

    The Seasons

    Aetrimonde has an axial tilt just slightly greater than Earth’s, making it experience slightly more severe seasons (though they are also slightly shorter, owing to the shorter year). In the Auran calendar, the seasons are defined to be:

    • Spring from 10 Secundus to 27 Quartus, with the equinox occurring on 17 Tertius.
    • Summer from 28 Quartus to 9 Septus, with the solstice occurring on 1 Sextus.
    • Autumn from 10 Septus to 27 Novus, with the equinox occurring on 19 Octus.
    • Winter from 28 Novus to 9 Secundus, with the solstice occurring on 2 Festus.

    Days, Hours and Minutes

    I preface this section on Aetrimondean timekeeping by saying that I only include it in the interest of worldbuilding, and I strongly recommend that a GM only use it if the players at the table are heavily into roleplaying and want the extra immersion. Otherwise, just pretend that Aetrimonde somehow independently invented the same system of hours and minutes that Earth did.

    The Aetrimondean solar day is almost exactly as long as Earth’s day. Before the invention of accurate timepieces, it was customary to divide the time between dawn and sunset into ten roughly equal hours, and the same for the time between sunset and the next dawn. In the summer, hours would be longer during the day than during the night, and the opposite would be true in the winter, but since nobody could accurately measure time this was not too awful a problem.

    As clocks became reasonably widespread, the world largely adopted a system of timekeeping based on the one invented and imposed by the bureaucrats of the Novan Imperium. This system divides the day into twenty hours (ten each in the morning and the evening) of a hundred minutes, with each minute being further divided into a hundred seconds. An Aetrimondean minute is thus only about 72% as long as an Earth minute, or about 43 Earth seconds.

    The Novan bureaucracy, as may be becoming apparent, very much likes being able to decimalize, or divide things into ten parts. They originally lobbied for there to be only ten hours in the day, but were overruled by the Novan Emperor of the time, who objected to the idea on the grounds that a tenth of a day was far too long a period of time to be useful. (His exact words are reported, perhaps apocryphally, to have been “Once you have doubled the length of the hour, will you then halve the hours of our meetings? I think not.”)

    Campaign Hooks

    Aetrimonde’s unusual planetary system offers several oddities that could be the foundation for an entire high-concept campaign:

    • A wealthy and eccentric shipbuilder has financed the construction of a vessel that can survive the open seas, in order to fulfill his dream of exploring those parts of Aetrimonde more than a few days beyond a safe harbor. The PCs have been recruited as part of the ship’s company; what strange new lands and new civilizations will they discover?
    • Aetrimonde’s astronomers have come to a dreadful conclusion: the Stranger’s Message has put Exeris in a new orbit that will see the Black Moon collide with Nomis within a few short years. The resulting shower of orbital debris will most likely wipe out all life on Aetrimonde. The only hope of averting this lies in recovering and repurposing a variety of artifacts and major rituals, like Orcimedes’ Lever and the Dread Spell of Eternal Night, to readjust the lunar orbits into a more stable configuration.
    • Cosmologists have for some time now claimed that Aetrimonde is an unnatural planet, pointing to “anomalies” like the misaligned lunar orbits as evidence that Aetrimonde is a far younger world than the rest of the planets in the system–too young, they say, to support life. Since Aetrimonde self-evidently has life on it, they have mostly been laughed at. But now, a team of applied cosmothaumatologists have measured intense concentrations of magical activity spread throughout inaccessible regions of Aetrimonde: deep beneath the seas, buried at the edge of the planet’s molten mantle, and even on the far sides of the moons. They believe these loci are actively maintaining Aetrimonde as a habitable world, and are planning an expedition to the most accessible one. Is Aetrimonde an artificial world? If so, what created it? And should mortals really be messing about with whatever keeps their world habitable?

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater I: Heritage

    I’m excited today, because I get to kick off the post series about a second sample character, who (by popular demand) will be a ghoul skinchanger: this is a combination that I’ve always thought was great from a lore perspective, and yet I’ve never actually built one or seen one played. So, let’s get started:

    This time around I’m not re-building an established character like Ragnvald, so I’m going to be making up this character’s background on the fly as I pick each part of his heritage.

    Ancestry: Ghoul

    The ghoul ancestry is going to take some explaining. Dwarves are a familiar enough part of many fantasy settings, and Aetrimonde’s are traditional enough that I didn’t see much need to explain them, but ghouls are one of the odder parts of Aetrimonde. So for starters, here’s what the rulebook has to say about them:

    Ghouls are thought to be humans altered by exposure to the shadowy power of the Underworld. They superficially resemble humans, but have several key differences which can be used to identify them. The most easily spotted is their teeth, which resemble the teeth of a shark, adapted for eating meat. Ghouls also tend to be lean and wiry by human standards, with pallid complexions and dark hair. Ghouls nominally mature at the same rate as humans but (because they often have difficulty gaining acceptance in mainstream society) are often forced to grow up quickly.

    Although they can live on more or less the same diet as humans, ghouls are obligate carnivores: they must have at least some meat in their diet, or suffer from malnutrition. However, a healthy ghoul is extremely difficult to kill: ghouls can survive blows that would kill or mortally wound other creatures, and can recover from almost any injury as long as they have time and a supply of meat. Ghouls have the psychology and instincts of scavengers: they tend to be pragmatic to a flaw, especially where their food is concerned, and they are often blunt-spoken and dismissive of etiquette and social customs.

    So to summarize: ghouls look human until you see their sharp teeth, but they don’t think like humans, they’re incredibly hard to kill, and they have to eat flesh and they don’t often care where it comes from. They’re intended to be among the creepier ancestries of Aetrimonde, and I’ll illustrate that in more detail with a Bestiary post at some point.

    I’m going to lean into the creepiness of ghouls, but not to the extent of making this character an outright villain (after all, I want him to remain a usable character for the starter kit). My general concept so far is that this will be a well-intentioned but poorly-socialized ghoul, who happily does some unsettling things because they don’t bother him and he doesn’t see why they should bother anyone else, either.

    With that in mind, here’s how the ghoul ancestry supports this lore:

    Basics

    Ghouls are much like humans: they have the same height, only a slightly lower weight (because of the tendency to wiry builds) and the same speed. They also have Constitution as a preferred ability, reflecting their inhuman toughness, although this is actually the smallest of the factors contributing to it.

    Carnivorous Bite

    Ghouls get a much better unarmed attack than other ancestries. A default unarmed attack has +0 precision and 1d4 damage die, so this is a vast improvement.

    Ghoulish Regeneration

    This is the first of the two ghoul features making them unnaturally hard to kill. Normally, when a character is reduced to 0 or fewer hit points, they are incapacitated and start dying: this means they make a survival roll (a Core roll, very rarely with any modifiers) and get closer to death if they roll 10 or less. Rolling 11 or higher is a success, but that just means they don’t get any worse.

    Ghouls, however, can actually regain hit points on a survival roll success. This occurs at the start of their turn, and means that they can possibly get up and get back in the fighting the very turn after they were downed. If they don’t want to do that (which they might not, if they’re currently surrounded by enemies and prefer to play dead), they instead stabilize, meaning they no longer make survival rolls.

    Low-Light Vision

    We’ve seen this feature before, and the ghoul’s version works just like the dwarf version.

    Ghoulish Tenacity

    This is the second feature making ghouls hard to kill. This is a free action allowing a ghoul to survive an attack that would otherwise bring them down and stay on their feet. Like dwarves, ghouls have a way to recover the use of their ancestry power: they just need to avoid being hit and damaged again until the start of their turn.

    Culture: Der Eisenwald

    For culture, I’m going to lean into the creepiness of ghouls, and pick out a suitably creepy culture: Der Eisenwald. As the description to the right hints, Der Eisenwald is inspired by the Transylvania of old Hammer Horror films, filled with mad scientists, vampires, werewolves, and everyday citizens who are equal parts angry mob and loyal lab assistants. Other inspirations that went into Der Eisenwald include Uberwald, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and the Europa of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius comic.

    How will this affect the character? Ghouls are predators, and Der Eisenwald contains a lot of things that it is socially acceptable for a ghoul to prey on. This character will be a hunter of things that go bump in the night…even though he arguably is one himself.

    Stratum: Outlaw

    This character concept is starting to come together now: he’ll be an outcast, someone who hunts dangerous things and protects the innocent, despite horrifying them almost as much as the creatures he kills. For a stratum, I want something that makes this character an outcast…or even an outlaw.

    At the risk of doubling down on Constitution as a preferred ability, I’m going to choose Outlaw as a stratum, and lean into this character being a do-gooder who has run into trouble because of his horrifying methods.

    Bringing it All Together

    So: we have a ghoul from a region haunted by monsters, who hunts horrifying things in part because of his predatory instincts (and appetite for flesh) and is an outlaw. Let’s tie this together into a name and a backstory:

    Valdo the Bat-Eater is a hunter of monsters from Der Eisenwald. As an infant, he was the sole survivor of a nest of feral ghouls that had devoured half the inhabitants of a remote village; the monster hunter who exterminated the nest took pity on the child and did her best to raise him as a human.

    It didn’t take.

    Faced with a child whose prey drive made him unsettlingly good at hide-and-seek, the huntress gave in and trained Valdo in her family trade: killing the horrifying creatures in the dark forests of Der Eisenwald. Valdo proved a natural at it, although as he grew older and more capable he abandoned the traditional sword and crossbow of the Eisenwaldean hunter in favor of fang and claw, as the spirits of the dark forests’ apex predators found him a receptive channeler.

    One might even say that Valdo grew too good at his trade, for he eventually moved on from hunting feral ghouls and escaped laboratory experiments. Seeing no difference between these mindless creatures and the vampires who likewise preyed on the people of Der Eisenwald, he earned his soubriquet by methodically hunting down and devouring an entire coven’s worth of vampire spawn. This, however, attracted the attentions of Der Eisenwald’s elder vampires, and Valdo was forced to flee. He now makes a living as an adventurer, though he still considers himself a hunter of monsters above all else.

    Up Next

    So that’s Valdo: a decisively darker character than Ragnvald, but still a hero at heart even if he doesn’t entirely understand why seeing him messily devour a horrifying monster makes people turn green and flee. In the next post, I’ll cover the skinchanger class, which (as hinted above) allows Valdo to transform into shapes with even more fangs than his natural state.