A steampunk adventure in a city that stays up by machinery
Aetheria floats because a great many things keep working at once, and you are one of the people who keeps them working. Which is how you found the thing somebody went to considerable trouble to keep off the maintenance logs.
No account, no card, nothing to install. The world's lore is already built, so it starts in seconds.
Machines you understand are the point
You play an engineer, so what you can and cannot do with the city’s machinery is written on your character sheet, and an attempt is judged against that sheet — not against how impressive the sentence describing it sounded.
The world
Above the clouds floats Aetheria, a city held aloft by aether-engines. When a routine repair reveals sabotage in the great lift-engine, engineer Pell stumbles into a plot to drop the city.
Aetheria drifts on roaring aether-furnaces, a vertical metropolis of brass gantries, steam trams, and guild workshops. The wealthy live in the sunlit spires; the engine-crews live in the hot, hissing underworks that keep them all from falling.
Who is in it
- Engineers' Guild
- the grease-stained order that maintains the lift-engines.
- Skyward Consortium
- the merchant houses that own the spires and the sky-lanes.
- The Grounded
- a movement of underworks laborers who want the city brought down.
Where you go
- The Great Lift-Engine
- the colossal aether-furnace at the city's heart.
- Brassrow
- the cramped, sweltering district where engine-crews live.
- The Spire of Cogs
- the Engineers' Guild hall and clockwork archive.
What already happened
- The First Tremor
- the day the lift-engine first shuddered, hinting at sabotage.
- The Spire Lockout
- the Consortium's barring of the underworks from the upper city.
Who you can play
-
Pell Quill Engine-crew engineer
A quick-witted, oil-smudged engineer with a chip on her shoulder and a wrench in her fist.
At the start: a junior engineer who saw something she wasn't meant to.
-
Inspector Dorne City constable
A dogged inspector slowly realizing the law and justice point in different directions.
At the start: an honest officer in a department paid to look away.
Or write your own character — the setup form takes a name, a background and what you are good at, and the game master works from that instead.
How a turn works
- You say what your character does, in your own words.
- What you attempted is weighed against your character sheet and the state of the scene — and the outcome is settled before the scene is written, so the part telling the story does not get to decide that you succeeded.
- The game master narrates what happened, grounded in the world's own characters, factions and places, and remembers it for the rest of the run.
Start playing Gears of Aetheria →