Review of Aether: Heroic Fantasy RPG

Aether is a tabletop roleplaying game for a high fantasy, magical, world. The rulebook is focused almost exclusively on the mechanics of the game system, without discussion of the lore or setting of a particular world, so it could be used easily with any world of the gaming groups’ preference. The game system focuses primarily on storytelling and characterization, with an emphasis on tactical combat.

Aether is written by Eldritch Crow, who can be found at eldritchcrow.com and on Twitter @EldritchCrow.

Note, a review copy of the Aether RPG was provided to the reviewers at no cost.

What excited us most about this system?

Narrative and Character First

We were most excited about the Destiny and Omen mechanics. In Aether as part of each character’s Aspect (the part of the character sheet that gives life to a character and isn't just numbers or stats), the player decides on narrative events that are significant to the character. The Omen is an event that challenges the character and pushes them to grow. Destiny is an event where the character is acknowledged as a hero by others in the world. The Aether system is very player, character, and narrative driven; allowing the player to make the decisions for huge events in their character’s story will lead to some very powerful moments.

Additionally, every character has a short- and long-term goal, describing specific things they want to accomplish, and a secret, something in their past that they’re not eager to become widely known. Characters also have values, explicitly defined principles that matter to the character and guide behavior, priorities, and reactions to others and situations. These aren’t just abstract concepts to help define a personality. Resolving goals and filling trackers related to destinies, values, and secrets yields experience points for character progression. Tieing character portrayal to character advancement can have mixed results. It works beautifully for some groups, but if some players become more focused on earning points than playing the character, it can slide toward turning characters into caricatures.

What one feature really stood out that made this system unique?

Morale instead of Health or Hit Points

One of the rule system choices that interested us greatly is that every character has a Morale statistic in place of what other systems might call Health or Hit Points. The Morale mechanic combines more traits into the ability for a character to keep fighting, and it lets the gaming group decide what it means to be defeated. Although it could represent physical damage bringing a character to the brink of death, it might instead mean being routed into retreat, succumbing to exhaustion, yielding in a duel, or something else entirely. In many stories a hero who should be broken or defeated raises again and again until they are finally victorious. If Rocky Balboa was using Hit Points instead of Morale, he would have been knocked out early, but determination kept him in the ring.

This mechanic also means that characters who are not martially gifted are not useless in combat scenarios, as there may be other methods to reduce an opponent’s Morale.  In fact, a combat-like encounter might not involve physical blows at all.  Morale could be diminished by taunts or slurs exchanged in a social setting as opposed to injuries in a physical confrontation.

What could use a little more polish?

Cards Instead of Dice

Aether uses a standard deck of playing cards as the randomness factor for skill checks and the like instead of a set of dice. The rules for resolving conflict using the playing cards are in some ways more simple, such as a task’s difficulty being on a 1-5 scale of how many cards are drawn for the specific check. In other ways the rules are more complex, with mechanics like Banking, Burning, and Stacking cards, which are mechanics for holding cards in reserve for future use. In combat, the suits of the cards provide the opportunity for tactical decision-making. Actions such as attacking, defending, and moving require a card of the correct suit to be played from a hand.  For example, a character lacking a card with the suit of clubs is unable to attack in a round.

There are some very cool consequences of the system using cards instead of dice. For example, critical successes and critical failures, called Triumphs and Tragedies in Aether, will occur more often than on a D20 roll, and there is more strategy involved which lets a player have more agency. However, without yet having extensively playtested the game, we remain uncertain about the card rules overall, and whether they would lead to counterintuitive or nonsensical outcomes. For example, it makes sense that depending on footing, how hard one’s enemy is pressing a flurry of blows, terrain, distractions, relative skill, and other factors, one may not always be able to attack, defend, and/or move.  In that sense, the random element of whether you happen to have the right suit in hand is appealing. We can foresee situations wherein someone is paralyzed from a certain kind of action without a reasonable narrative reason to match the mechanic. We suspect the authors may have run into this situation as well, as there is an optional rule allowing for the redrawing of hands during combat encounters.

Who would we recommend this game for?

We would recommend the Aether system to players who are interested in character driven stories, who have a very specific idea for a character arc that they want to explore, and who can separate themselves as a player from their characters. The players determine the beats of the narrative, and will have done a lot of world building along-side the narrator, so the story may not provide as many surprises or plot twists for the players. In fact, the mechanics of the game are built in a way to provide warning to the players when important events will occur. For example, the Omen and Destiny trackers which show the progress towards the event being added to the story. The system provides a safe place for ideas, challenges, obstacles, and evils to be overcome. This game system will be ideal for players who want a cathartic, personal experience.

Questions for the Author: Meet Eldritch Crow

In the inspiration section of the rulebook you mentioned gaining inspiration for various mechanics from video games. What are the aspects of storytelling that you see in video games that someone can bring to their TTRPGs to make them better?

I think video games have taken encounter design much farther than TTRPGs have had the opportunity to, just because of the saturation of the industry and the many iterations of the ways in which video games deal with conflict resolution across their genres. I feel like one of the best things tabletop designers can do to sharpen their design, especially when it comes to narrative games and narrative design, is to consider the way in which video games use encounter and conflict resolution to support story beats through using a variety of objectives, and shifting objectives during encounters. While it can feel a bit repetitive when the objectives wind up the same, I think designing encounters and conflict resolution systems that revolve around the players having various clear objectives can shift the dynamic of a game immensely and it also ensures that even the classic random encounter can feel like an engaging and active puzzle to solve. From there, giving the game runner clear tools for structuring those objectives into overarching stories means that narrative games can feel broad in scope without ever feeling like an encounter or conflict is just getting in the way.

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I'm Eric, a 25 year old bisexual Canadian writer and TTRPG dev. I have a background in both creative writing and music performance, and I made the big-brained decision to start writing and releasing tabletop RPGs in the same year I have to write my master's thesis. I started out in tabletop games about two and a half years ago, playing and almost immediately running D&D5e as many do, and after about two years I wound up moving more towards other TTRPGs for personal reasons. But, the majority of my gaming and storytelling experience actually comes from playing video games.

What inspired you to create this system?

I had a few reasons for making Aether and it's gone through a few updates and iterations over the past year just because each iteration sort of sharpened those influences more as time went on. It started out as general frustration over not having specific rules in D&D 5e for airship combat for a campaign I was running at the time. Add in a bit of frustration over a lack of guidance for running social encounters and incentives for using non-lethal combat, and my players often wanting to get creative in how they did things but talking themselves out of problem solving because they thought the rules wouldn't let them do things, and you have a pretty potent mix for creating a game. That's why, for the most part, the game centers on blending combat and social mechanics and largely ignores exploration as a factor when compared to other big fantasy RPGs. The last reason I wanted to make my own game was because I found I really enjoyed making aids for running games, so the Narrator (game runner) materials mostly come from the systems and ideas I built for myself to make running things like D&D easier on me. I listed out all those things I wanted to make one day and realized with a few tweaks I had a concept for an entire TTRPG on its own.

What is your next big goal?

Aether is something I'll always be pushing to improve in terms of quality. Even though it's already selling well for an indie-rpg and I think it's up there in terms of quality despite only having a 2 person team so far, I want to build it up into something that rivals the big names with regards to production quality. That means major playtesting, hiring editors, more artists, a layout designer, sensitivity readers, etc., all of which require both time and money. That's more long term, so my short term development plans are to start putting out what I'm calling campaign starters (small packages that can help gaming groups establish a setting and idea for a particular type or genre of campaign), and a few variant rules for alternate health systems and vehicle combat. There are possibly some game hacks on the horizon but those are in the very rough planning stages at the moment.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself!

I've been playing the double bass for 13 years and I'm trained in both classical and jazz.