This week’s update will be the last one for the month of November because of the upcoming holidays. However, we have quite a bit of progress to report, so it’s a good one!
The Aether core rulebook manuscript saw a lot of progress this week. I finished rewriting and expanding the equipment chapter, including the general equipment lists for the fantasy, modern, and science fiction genres. The combat chapter got a few revisions but was largely unchanged – the rules were fine, so I just did a bit of editing for clarity. Though we considered replacing the Action Timing mechanic with a simpler Initiative mechanic, in the end we decided to keep the Action Timing and just explain it a bit better.
The chapter on creating settings saw the biggest boost in content this week. There are several more genres in play now, including a few that were missing and a few that previously were grouped together under a single genre. A couple of the new ones are post-apocalyptic and espionage. I replaced the pulp genre with the adventure, frontier, and sword & sorcery genres. Since this work impacts Aethermancy also, I’ve been working on making sure the changes to Aether are reflected in the Aethermancy book where appropriate.
That concludes all of the chapters from the original edition of the game. Previously, there were also three appendices. These were archetypes, bestiary, and vehicles. These are going to be expanded into full chapters in the new edition. The archetypes chapter will include stats for all three core genres as well as guidance on creating new archetypes. The bestiary chapter will cover stats for common animals, for various fantasy monsters, for non-sentient aliens, and rules for horrific one-off monster creation. Finally, the vehicles chapter will cover stats for modern vehicles as before. It will also gain stats for vehicles common to other historical time periods like carts and galleons, as well as a large section on fictional vehicles like steampunk airships, fantasy star-faring ships, and starships. These three chapters will be my new focus.
The next update will be posted on December 11. While there is going to be a gap in blog posts, we’ll still be working on both Aether and Aethermancy over the next couple weeks, so the December 11 update should be a big one.