Welcome to the Universe!

We're proud to announce the long-awaited release of the Aethera Campaign Setting! We've partnered with publisher Legendary Games to bring Aethera to the biggest audience possible. The PDF version of this science-fantasy campaign setting is available now at the Legendary Games store, Paizo, and DriveThruRPG!

This magnificent and MASSIVE (nearly 600 pages) interplanetary adventure setting combines hard sci-fi, cosmic horror, magical fantasy, alien invasions, and mystical noir in a unique blend that suits all manner of genre-crossing campaigns. It’s a spectacular setting to use on its own with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game rules, as a more sci-fi-heavy companion to the Legendary Planet Adventure Path, or as a more magical setting for the upcoming Starfinder Roleplaying Game.

The Aethera Campaign Setting includes a vast amount of world-building and lore for the war-torn planets of a binary star system, with rich and evocative history, politics, religion, and more. You’ll also find over a hundred pages of character class options alone, including the brand-new cantor class and dozens of new archetypes, feats, skill unlocks, and more, plus extensive chapters detailing new playable races, magic items, technology, and monsters galore!

The Aethera Campaign Setting only grows from there, with a ton of expansions on the way, including adventures like Wanted in the Wastes by Amber Scott, Beacon in the Black and Murder in the Midlands by Isabelle Lee, and Children of the Collapse by Mike Welham all coming soon. We have even more terrific supplements in production already with the Intrigue Manual for Game Masters and players alike and the Aethertech Manual offering new options for characters' including new spacefaring aetherships and devastating weapons!

Out with the old, in with the new!

Frequent visitors to the site may have noticed that we've undergone some changes recently. As a part of our continued efforts to prepare for the launch of the Aethera Campaign Setting we've spruced up our website! Browse around and explore a little slice of what Aethera has to offer, and be sure to check out our announced products list, located at the top of the page. We've announced several new titles that we're excited to be publishing next year.

For those wondering when the official release date of the Aethera Campaign Setting will be, we're on track for an early 2017 release date and we'll have an announcement on an exact day and some build up towards it soon! Backers who supported the Aethera Campaign Setting on Kickstarter will be receiving their copies a little earlier than you'll be able to pick it up in stores.

That said, if you're looking to get your hands on some material to see what the Aethera Campaign Setting is all about, check out the Early Access Guide available at any of the online retailers listed on the left navigation bar (or from the Early Access Guide in the product schedule).

We'll have some more updates in the future and we can't wait to share them with you! Let's all hope 2017 is a better year for everyone. Happy Holidays and a merry New Year from all of us at Encounter Table Publishing!

Aethera Preview – Iconics: Surestra

Surestra by Erin Frye

The Kickstarter is long behind us and development of the Aethera Campaign Setting continues at full speed. Months ago, when we were first previewing the iconic representatives of the core Aethera races, we promised you five. Well, time came and went and one iconic was late to the party. The iconic infused, Surestra, went through several revisions of her design before reaching the final illustration you see here. Long before Surestra was a fully-realized iconic, Jeff Dahl, one of our intrepid authors, wrote up Surestra's background. This is a story we've been sitting on for a while, waiting for art and word to join together. Like we've said before: the stars have aligned.

Enjoy Jeff's story of Surestra's origins and another sneak peak into the worlds of Aethera! Make sure to follow us at our Facebook page for up-to-the minute news and new artwork!

Science Fiction, Urban Future

When I was younger, when you’d ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d answer with “space detective.” That response is a little more than snark. In my formative years I was exposed to a lot of dramatic sci-fi, from Blade Runner and Metropolis to Cowboy Bebop and The Sixth Element. I grew up in suburbia. Urban life was so unreachable to me that it was as foreign and enticing as a high fantasy world. In my mind, science fiction will always be linked to the city. It’s a genre where people of technological excess have to navigate labyrinthine living structures. New machines are developed with the purpose of helping people live either closer or further apart.

I’m a graphic designer, mobile device repair technician and salesman, and occasional column writer and illustrator. At least, that’s what I get paid to do. One of my assignments for the Aethera Campaign Setting is to flesh out Complex Four. It’s a metropolis-sized colony on an asteroid in the Amrita Asteroid Belt. Now, when Robert approached me about Aethera, the first thoughts that came to my head were hard-boiled crime stories. I imagined detectives in tattered beige coats pursuing truths they should have pretended were dreams, with worn faces that betrayed knife fights. I thought of bounty hunters, bail bondsmen and cleaners on the gray side of order. I dreamed of kung fu hooligans and gun kata specialists dancing on rain-slicked streets so that secrets remain secrets.

I wanted a little corner of this game’s world to make that happen. The largest city of the lawless Amrita region was the obvious choice. Now that I’m older, I like my fiction just a little more complex than what I described above. I’m a huge fan of David Simon’s The Wire; in fact, our very own Robert Brookes and I hung out in Baltimore several years ago, and that particular city left a mark on the both of us I imagine. It would be disingenuous to characterize Baltimore through the crime-ridden lens of The Wire. The people of Baltimore are resilient, tough, and not to be crossed, but they are also lively and kind. But Baltimore is still a city in a precarious state and I channeled some memories of it in Complex Four.

Before I go on about the colony proper, another place that inspired me was New Orleans. I’ve never been there myself, I’m ashamed to admit. I lived in Austin, Texas when Katrina hit, and I wound up meeting and befriending several refugees from there. New Orleans just so happens to be the subject of another David Simon series, Treme, which I love despite its lack of a clearly defined conflict outside of the bureaucracy of living in a post-FEMA city. Treme didn’t hesitate to devote several episodes to Mardi Gras, or showing downtrodden people earnest trying to party. It’s from this that I remembered that Complex Four should be this grimy, depressing, and dangerous place, yet is a blast to hang out in. 

I thought something was missing from the concept until I remembered that the pulp fiction of the era included the first golden age superheroes and masked avengers. I also thought about the vigilante class that’s about to premiere in the Ultimate Intrigue book, and wondered if there was a way to accommodate players who want to play Green Hornet or Zorro in space. So, I decided that Complex Four’s also home to a small but growing population of community volunteer superheroes. A little less Avengers, a little more Rain City Superhero Movement. Good deeds don’t go unpunished though, so I recommend GMs punish anyone trying to run a superhero vigilante; the best ones have tragic backstories, after all. 

So Complex Four is a former mining project turned bandit storehouse turned full-fledged metropolis after the discovery of some especially rare resources. It has an interesting, if relatively recent history, and is a hub for war refugees, vicious yet charismatic gangsters, promising scientists, economic opportunists, and creative dissidents. It’s a melting pot of people who gather together because of promises and convenience. 

You would be forgiven for thinking that I prefer playing campaigns where society is complex and morality is ambiguous. It’s true that this is my preference in fiction. But I also enjoy killing things in my dice rolling games. I am aware many people want to just kill things sincerely. So, there are plenty of things to just kill in Complex Four, if you so desire. Giant amoebas, rogue shaolin mantises, dudes with guns, and maybe even the occasional nihilistic demagogue.

4 Ways To Survive Space Combat

So you’ve made it through the gate hub network only to be immediately set upon by pirates. I’m very glad that I am not physically on the ship with you, merely relaying this kiosk information via radio. Because I do not want to die, which you are probably about to do. I will do my best to lay out the options for survival you have before you.

1. Scream

The pirates are definitely gaining on you, and the radio signals they’re broadcasting make it seem like they might run with the no-respect-for-the-sanctity-of-life crowd. You could try to raise Gate Hub Security, but their primary motivation is protecting the hub itself and you came out of there at speed so there’s actually a surprising number of miles between here and there. Also, the paragon marshals of the Orbis Aurea Hierarchy haven’t spent as much time clearing the pirate/smuggler types out of the gate hub, so the place is crawling with them. You might just start a blood-in-the-water shooting war for the contents of your ship.

2. Run

How fast does this ship go? I’m hoping really fast but you’re new at this so I’m assuming your first ship isn’t built for races. I know a lot of aetherships are pretty easily customisable, so it wouldn’t have been too hard for you to swap out the stock engine for something that would make a lot more noise (if we weren’t in space where there is none of that).

Orbis Aurea’s gate hub sits in the barycenter of the planet and its massive captured-rogue-planet moon. It’s pretty much an equal sprint in either direction, and neither option is particularly palatable. One is a barren, inhospitable frozen nightmare and the other is the moon, a distinct yet equally terrible place. However, Orbis Aurea does have breathable atmosphere so my vote, and I can’t believe I’m actually recommending that you do this, is that you head there.

3. Hide

I suppose you could make a break for some space debris and try to lose them. Maybe you could agitate a void kraken so the pirates get caught up in those crushing, sucking tentacles to be slowly compressed into nothing in its black hole of a beak, but there’s a chance that’d happen to you instead so maybe not. If you were closer to the Amrita asteroid belt you could do all sorts of hiding there, but out here there aren’t a lot of options other than Orbis Aurea’s cloud cover and that’s not exactly a great place to hide an aethership. It’s pretty much only a great place to lose all power to the ship and catch on fire as you hurtle at blinding speed toward a frozen mountain.

4. Fight

You have failed to run and hide like a sensible person, leaving you with one unspeakable option: you must rally your crew of misfits and fight to survive! Get into your spacesuits (or creepy erahthi vacuum-symbiont), buckle up, and hope you weren’t mentioned in the Score as “Dies in Space Today”. You’re all going to have to work together to make it out of this. Put your gunslinger on weapons control, your cavalier in the pilot seat and maybe get a magey-type to blast a few spells out through the arcane turrets.

Remember to stay a reasonable distance from the enemy lest they board you! Some pirates, or even taur, have mechanical grabby-arms for pulling you in so they can punch through your hull, in which case you’ll have to resort to good old-fashion melee combat.

You made it! I honestly did not see that coming. Though, I am no cantor of the Score, merely a lowly knowledge-relay servant. Your ship seems to have taken quite a beating, so you’ll need to get that repaired at Catena. I’m referring of course to Orbis Aurea’s space-elevator station and sole means of transit to making the biggest mistake of your life.

5 Things You Should Know About Gate Hubs

Well, if I can’t talk you out of your foolish journey to Orbis Aurea, I am at least glad you are electing to use the gate hub to get you there. Who wants to die in space, am I right? We’re becoming familiar with each other, so don’t mind if I mention a thing or two you should have already known when you got this far.

1. What Are The Gate Hubs

The gate hub network is a series of honeycomb-like space stations orbiting the planets of the Aethera System. Gate hexes come in many different sizes on this honeycomb, allowing small personal craft and ships all the way up to war cruisers to pass through them. This eliminates the need for long, wildly dangerous journeys through nightmare-infested vacuum in order to get from planet to planet. Fun fact, they are also the reason we discovered the erahthi people of Kir-Sharaat and immediately went to interplanetary war with them! For one hundred years!

2. Exploited Ancient Ruins

It might come as a surprise you but no contemporary species built these. The gate hubs are ancient Progenitor artifacts which have been retrofitted with aethertech to function. It takes a lot of aetherite to power these hexes, and the bigger the hex the greater the expenditure required. Don’t have the aetherite to pay? Don’t get to go. Please tell me you brought money. Also...

3. Condition

Many of hexes of the hub have not been reactivated, restricting our access to those which are regulated and functional. The stations themselves are massive, with large areas of the structures unexplored to this day. Some foolish, foolish people will occasionally enter restricted or abandoned area in search of riches, but rarely find anything other than millennia-old monsters or death in vacuum. Some scavengers are more successful, mapping safe areas and powering them as needed, far from the watchful eye of local law enforcement. These scavengers work with smuggling organizations, repairing hub hexes in secret for discrete black market transportation.

4. Ownership

The Hierarchy does not have exclusive claim to the gate hub network. Due to conditions of the treaty that ended the Century War, the erahthi tritarchy maintains total control of their world’s gate hub, as do the paragon marshals of Orbis Aurea theirs. The other powers have dedicated hexes for their private use, determined through lengthy negotiations during the treaty signing. Though the gate hub itself is controlled by the governing body of its host planet, these dedicated hexes and the functional station surrounding them are considered embassies and sovereign soil of the power that resides there. Obviously, once your ship is out in space, you fall into the jurisdiction of whatever party controls that area of space for laws and taxes. Also, some interplanetary business conglomerates or other monied powers can rent sections for their own exclusive use to not have to wait in line with us poor, unwashed plebs.

5. The Fold

When a gate hub hex is activated, a demiplane called the Fold is accessed to get you from point here to point there. A demiplane created by the use of a gate hub, the Fold makes the distance between those two points incredibly short.The journey will be uneventful, and only take a few minutes instead of months or years! What’s that? Noises you say? Wailing of the damned you say. I didn’t hear anything and neither did you.

Good job! You’ve successfully made it through a gate hub and can now continue on to oh for the love of the score, it’s pirates, isn’t it. Yeah, it’s pirates.

6 Reasons You Are Going To Die In Space

So, you’ve done it. You got yourself an arguably spaceworthy aethership and you’re in orbit. Good job, this has never gone poorly for anyone before I’m sure you’ll do fine. Before you hammer down on that accelerator, let me just remind you of some of the challenges you will face out here in the black.

1. Bureaucracy

I hope you cleared your voyage in advance, because the gate hubs are highly regulated. Your ship will probably be inspected because we can’t have invasive flora and fauna just spewing out into the system. There are taxes and forms and rituals. You can grease palms to save time, but some cantors are actually good people who frown on bribery and it’s hard to tell them apart because they all wear the same outfit.

2. Distance

You’re right, you should just skip the gate hub and rocket through space until you get to your destination the old fashion way. This will probably take a few months of travel if you time it right. Also, if you are off from your original estimation by half of a degree you could miss your target by millions of miles, but let’s table that.

You’re going to need to eat and drink for this whole voyage. Bring lots of food. Make sure you enjoy the company of your crewmates because you will be seeing a lot of them and have no way to avoid them unless you put them in the airlock. That reminds me…

3. Space Is Awful Even When You Don’t Count All Of The Monsters

It’s cold out here. Also, you will die if you go outside. Some sort of radiation is pulsing in every direction at all times, so while you freeze to death you will also be irradiated. There is no air in space, so it will take whatever is in your lungs faster than you can breathe it out which I’m told is more painful than it sounds. It’s pretty dark out here too, and the Plane of Shadow is nearby at all times. Also, you probably saw this coming, but...

4. All Of The Monsters

Space is lousy with monsters. There are lots of harmless ones, or at least some that aren’t malicious but occasionally crash into you and break your ship. There’s not much you can do about these ones other than not fly into them, but there are some types of monsters which warrant special attention.

• Fish: There are swarms of monsters in space which for all intents and purposes behave like fish. They can be pretty, but some are as terrifying as you would expect a thing that can survive in space without a suit to be. Whether it’s an acidic hull barnacle jamming up your ducts with its spores or what is effectively a whale swallowing your entire ship, keep an eye out for these guys.
• Ghosts: I’m not a scientist, so I shouldn’t wager a guess as to why they haven’t moved on. Obviously, a lot of ghosts ended up in space due to people dying here during the Century War. Sometimes they have the decency to haunt the ships they died on, but generally they’re just flying around, presumably wailing about how unfinished their business is. If you are lucky, they will be too consumed with existential sadness to notice that they are floating through your ship, but who am I kidding?
• Taur: You obviously remember when these aliens arrived and literally stole a moon. I should now remind you that no one knows for sure where they went after they did that. They came here, they stole a whole moon, and we do not know where they went with it. We do know that they are really good at stealing people for mysterious purposes but it’s a pretty safe bet those people have been eaten or enslaved.
• Demons: I don’t want you to blame the Plane of Shadow for everything that’s wrong with space, but I have to tell you it’s pretty awful. As an example, apparently it is just full of masochistic pain-worshiping torture-demons. I don’t know how I can make that sound worse.

5. Pirates

Do you know who else doesn’t use the gate hubs? Pirates. While some will allow you to live in exchange for your calmly standing by while they rob you blind, others have gained a harsher reputation. The latter have found aethership crews to be far more pliable when all of the breathing air has been unceremoniously vented from the ship through large cannon holes.

6. Near Total Lack of Information

Probably the most dangerous thing about space is our complete ignorance of what else is out here. The Progenitors were here first, and presumably they were here for a long time. They left some of their technology behind, and we don’t know how to use it properly. This ignorance results in dozens of deaths a year even under laboratory conditions. We’ve only been travelling around the system for a little over one hundred years and the Aethera system is enormous. To put this in perspective, Akasaat has had an active civilization for thousands of years and we still haven't explored the entire surface, let alone the underground.

After all of these warnings, do you still want to go into space? It can be quite rewarding if done with a little forethought. There are vast riches to exploit and ruins to explore. There are sights unseen and miracles and wonders waiting for discovery. For every unknowable horror, there is a ray of hope. So, maybe don’t give up on your dream just yet. Get back to the gate hub, wait in line, and head on to, where were you headed? Orbis Aurea? Why, in the name of all that is-

No. You know what? There’s obviously no reasoning with you.