Note: please don't post in this one yet, I'll have a lot of posts to reserve.
A short explanation: a long time ago, I started posting and writing a setting called Etherworld on here. I stopped at some point, because I saw it was becoming kind of an incoherent mess, where I would change ideas as I wrote them, and then older posts would barely be connected to it. So, I told myself I'd walk away from it, take some time to think it over, and then write it in one go before posting.
That has not happened yet. But I want to run a game in the setting, and a half-done one is better than nothing for that. And I'm not sure it will ever be done.
Quite a few sections are shorter than I'd like them to be, especially world descriptions. Perhaps I'll add more details to them later.
So, let's get this started:
„It was a thousand years ago, when the Council of Archmages, the most powerful mortals to ever live, declared war on each other. For each of them wanted to be the only one to wield such power, a power rightfully reserved tot he LORD only. And while they sat safely in their Ethereal fortresses, around them the Earth was torn asunder by fire and storm, and demonic armies marched across the shattered world, devouring and enslaving the living.
But the LORD had mercy on his believers, and he gave them a new world, akin and yet different from the archmages' Ethereal fortresses, a place of trials where they would grow strong and rebuild, and from where they would eventually reconquer the world...“
-The First book of Redemption, the World that Was
“When a man is out of balance, his family is thrown out of balance. When a family is out of balance, their village is thrown out of balance. When a village is thrown out of balance, the province, the country and the world soon follow.
Worlds, be they the Old World or the New Worlds, are as heavy weights balancing on the point of a needle. They are as single knots in a net that connects all things.
Man acted against nature and ignored his place in the order. and so, the weight fell, the net was torn, the world was ended.“
- Teachings of Master Perbane
„It is typical of the reactionary mindset to blame the destruction of the Material Plane on the arcane sciences. The uneducated mind often fears that which it does not understand, and from that fear, it is only a small step to blame, to hate.
Now, what we do know is this: approximately one thousand years ago - the exact date is uncertain - a catastrophe resulted in the complete destruction of the Prime Material Plane and its subsequent invasion by entities from the dimension commonly known as the Far Realm, coinciding with the disconnection of the Starplane
Some mortal races, our ancestors in fact, escaped this cataclysm by escaping to the Ethereal Plane. I do of course not need to stress how important the often-blamed magic was for this exodus: without scholars of the arcane sciences to create new demiplanes, often under cost of their lives, few would have survived even the first year in the Ethereal.
Of course, this had the side - effect of fracturing the mortal races, as they were now isolated for several hundred years in demiplanes, which no one could enter from the outside. Leaving them even on short expeditions was tremendously dangerous and rarely proved worthwhile.
It was, after all, only eighty years ago that the Shipwright's Guild first perfected the Aethership and the Planar Penetrator, thereby once again bringing the worlds back into contact with each other. and these are, I must stress once again, both inventions only made possible by arcane magic.“
-Danard Aqueon, Magus of the Sixth Circle, Caligo Polymagic University
Content
- A Short Introduction to the Aether
- Major Organisations of the Aether
The Shipwright's Guild
The Faceless Cabal
The House of the Sun
The Order
The Retrievers
- Demiplanes
- The Core Worlds
The Core
Belamin: Songs of the Earth
Ashaton: Living Steel
Caligo: City on the Waves
Waketown: City of Shards
Ember: Fires of Life
The Spire: Roaring Thunder
Sirnia: Wealth and Mystery
- Life in the Core Worlds
Magic and Technology
Trade and Currency
- Border Worlds
Neth
The Evershard
- Minor Organisations of the Aether
The Rogue Traders
The Mist Raiders
The Core Gazette
Dreamers, Inspired, Revellers
Caligo Polymagic University
The Latern
The Strangeness
- The Aether
The Boundless Sea: The Deep Aether
The Grey Between: The Border Ethereal
Into the Maelstrom: The Elemental Aether
The Deeper Mysteries: The Lower Ways
Navigation in the Aether
Aetherships
- Creatures of the Aether
The Ravenous Hordes: The Nathri
Nightmare and Daydream: The Fey
Death and the Aether: The Departed
The Sleep of Aeons: Dragon Dreams
Endless Empires: The Genies
Diverse Creatures
- Other Planes
The Tempest: The Elemental Planes
Between Black and White: The Plane of Shadows
All That We See or Seem: The Dreamscape
The Shattered Prime
- A Timeline of Etherworlds
- Ways and Powers
Arcane Magic
Divine Magic
Favoured Souls
Incarnum
Pact Magic
The Sublime Way
- From the Mist: Secrets and Anecdotes
- Appendix 1: Remarks on Rules in Etherworld
Magic
Skills
Races
- Appendix 2: Miscellanea
Alchemy
Feats
Templates