Æthercoil Thread

[DavidFoxfire]

I've been a member here for some time, but I haven't had any real reason to be a regular poster here, mainly because I'm keeping tabs on the number of sites I visit regularly.  But it's become my resolution to promote this game into something that will earn me some money with an upcoming Patreon page, so I decided to start a thread here looking for anyone who would hash some ideas with me.  Of course having Kasimir Urbanski (The RPG Pundit) invite me oh so cordially to do so, I see no reason not to include this site in my Social Media presence.

About Æthercoil

At the start of the adventure, the player characters only know the world around him.  A world of magic and monsters, of brave warriors and spectacular adventures.  A world of medieval fantasy not unlike J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Jordan, the Hickmans, Terry Brooks, George R. R. Martin, and all the other well-known fantasy writers.  The only difference is that the player characters doesn't know what happened before they there born. In fact, nobody in their world has any memory of what happened just under three centuries ago.  This missing question of their lost history is what got them started adventuring.

In time, the brave adventurers step foot on their grand quest.  Maybe it's a delve in a dungeon, or a lost castle to explore, or a wizard's tower to investigate.  It is there where characters discover only a bit about their past, but this little snippet shakes their preconceptions to the core.  Before his world, another world appeared, a world far advanced and fantastic then his wildest imaginations.  A world that has fallen and forgotten in just a span of a few decades.

A world that the players on the table, who created the characters, knows all too well:  It is their world.

The people from this medieval time find themselves among the ruins of the modern world, with all its inventions, lore, and science secreted away before an evil force destroyed it not only from existence but also from memory.  Some of these inventions are still working and the party can figure out how it works.  This will leave the party with a lot of questions:  What was this lost age all about?  What caused it to fall so completely and so quickly?  And now that they have a piece of that world, an actual working artifact of a lost time, what on earth will they do with it?
Answering these questions is part of the campaign setting known as Æthercoil.

About the Campaign Setting

Æthercoil is a result of a progression I had by making a dungeon-punk type campaign world.  It combines a standard Old School Renaissance world with a post-apocalyptic twist, setting it on the ashes of a modern.  It even uses real world maps and locations both familiar and alien at the same time.  In a typical Æthercoil campaign, the party discovers an artifact from the modern world, finds out how it works, and figures out what to do with it.  Will they flat out reject it, or try to use it to make their world a better one.  If they do try to make something out of it, what would the effects be?  Locally, Internationally, Politically, Environmentally, their actions will have world-changing effects; will they be for good or for ill...or maybe even both?!

I started to create Æthercoil while converting changes I made into the Forgotten Realms, where the Spellplague triggered the advent of invention and science, into its own campaign setting.  This happened during the recent years of political strife in America, from the dawn of the Social Justice Warrior movements, leading up to the 2016 Election.  My thoughts and emotions connected to this chaotic time created a post-apocalyptic scenario where the modern world collapsed by a total and global breakdown of society, leading to a dystrophic "True Order" that had a goal to erase all of history and restart civilization with them in charge.  They almost succeeded before rifts created during society's fall (which combined a small nuclear war with global warming) created a connection to a Dual Feywild.  The various Fey and Dragons that spilled through these rifts made short work of the True Order, but the damage was done; nobody remembers what happened a mere three centuries ago.  In the whole European Continent, only a Half Million humans survived, and they were all in post-Millennial age.  The Elves took the humans in and succeeded in pulling them away from extinction, but now they're in a world with Dwarves, Halflings, Orcs, Dragonkind, Giants, and various other monsters.  What was once a world the players lived in is now barely recognizable, and the people in this world won't even know what to recognize at all.

However, Human History was not completely irradiated from the world:  Records of the Lost Age, including inventions, artwork, writings, music, movies, and other familiar things—familiar at least to the players, if not the characters—were hidden from the sledgehammers and bonfires, sequestered in hidden keeps, locked under catacombs, buried in crypts, hidden in towers...just waiting to be found...and to be used again.

My current development

The lion's share of my development work occurs in a periodical I post on DriveThruRPG. (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/10063/FoxfireStudios) which is available to download for free (the PWYW part is for tips, and I'll greatly appreciate them.)  With Æthercoil Magazine, I have a single place to place all of my brainstorming and worldbuilding part, which includes player options, some global and regional descriptions, various campaign creation and flavor text, and even some story and artwork thrown in.  Most of the stuff in there is in a very beta form and can use some feedback on how to improve on them, which leads me to this thread here on theRPGsite.

I invite you all to read the issues of this magazine and tell me what you think.  If something you find is pretty good, let me know about it so I can keep improving it.  If there's something that needs improvement, let me know so I can work on it.  I tend to borrow some mechanics form other systems, and I'm in the process of converting it into something more original.  If you think that something needed to be taken out, well, I needed to get some crazy fluffery out of my head before I can get to more serious stuff.

My current goal now is to set up a Patreon.  I find myself getting back into a decent work ethic creating D&D content, both as a dungeon master and as a content creator.  This Patreon will have content that is more set in than what is in Æthercoil Magazine, with a 4th Edition Red Box-style starter game, (A Dungeon Delve that a party can play within an evening, unlike what you get from 5th Edition's Starter Set) followed with a series of modules that take the party through a standard Æthercoil campaign.  Hopefully any conversation here will help me create them all, and will lead into a steady streaming channel (proceeds of the Patreon will go into an upgraded computer so I can get a computer that can stream and do D&D sessions;) and maybe even a printed campaign setting.
I hope that you will find what I'm making interesting, and that whatever give and take I find here will keep me on the right path in my content creation.  I look forward to hearing from all of you.  I'll try to answer your questions, but sometimes I might need more time to find the right answer.  Sometimes you might ask me something I haven't thought of yet, or there is something here that really shouldn't be in the finished item.

But then again, wouldn't you want to find out about any problems now instead of when you're sending something to the printers?  I'm sure that Pundie (The Nickname I gave Kasimir, if he doesn't mind.) would agree with me on this one.