Alrighty! Let's start with my promised readthrough of @EldritchCrow's recently released game Aether! (Do you use a hashtag for this? #AetherRPG or something?)

Might spread this out across a few days.

Before we do anything else, you can get Aether here: https://eldritchcrow.itch.io/aether-a-heroic-fantasy-rpg

First up, let me just say: I love the visual design of this doc, as well as the funky square-ish page format!

I was a little intimidated at first by the 180+ page count, but turns out the pages are quite a bit smaller than expected so this shouldn't overwhelm my brain too much!

Also, a hyperlinked table of contents. THANK YOU!

As someone whose RPG library is 99% digital, I'm still surprised how rarely I see this done well.

I like the call-out right at the beginning of the game that even though you might be tempted to, your fantasy world does not HAVE to include racism, ableism, transphobia, etc.

From the book: "Aether asks you to define heroism on your own terms by choosing the evils you'll face."

"Aether includes a complete Session 0 package as well as links to common safety tools"

Sweet!

The fact that Aether is completely card-based has me VERY excited, because it'll be my first game of that kind (assuming I get to play it at some point).

It also makes this 18 month old tweet of mine finally come true. https://twitter.com/yes_jon/status/1127233712373075969

I also like that "Determine Lethality" is part of the Session 0 framework here. This is something I'm personally very passionate about, but don't see discussed too often, especially not hard-coded in a rulebook.

Not every game has to deal in the finality of character death.

(Okay, Core Rules are next, but I'll take a dinner break first before jumping into those.)

Okay, meshi done, back at it!

I love the fact that accessibility and availability were deciding factors in making Aether use cards instead of dice. Brilliant!
There are still very fancy card sets out there, so players can still customize the aesthetic of their "loadout" too.

It's not a big deal at all, and it takes quite a bit of work to do consistently, but wanted to mention it regardless: In a section like this, I'd love it if the internal references "detailed in X" were also hyperlinked with those respective sections, or had a page number added.

Ah, so this is interesting! My first instinct here is "But wait, just putting them at the bottom without shuffling means I can control the order of cards drawn in future turns."

I'd be interested to see if this is actually even an issue at all when actually playing the game.

Oooh, the "Bank a card" mechanic seems really neat! Comparing it to dice, it would be similar to getting a potential bonus on a future roll whenever you fail a roll. Essentially, this looks like the game's catch-up mechanic for when the cards really aren't in your favor.

Okay, and "Cascade" works like the Magic: The Gathering keyword of the same name. That makes it easy for folx already familiar with the concept. Cool!

Man, honestly, reading through these card mechanics makes me so HYPED!! I LOVE how Crow really leans into the cards as a medium here. Like, what can you do with dice? Roll, reroll... what else?
Here, there are a whopping 8 unique card actions, all of them extremely flavorful!

You can also do this, btw. Cue the memes.

Range and zones:
I'm not the biggest grid-based combat person, so just reading them once, the zone rules confuse me a little, but I'm sure that'll clear up as soon as I see it in action in an actual game.

The two-tiered difficulty setting is interesting. The Narrator first makes one choice about the general difficulty level of a skill, but then the card draw RNG determines the final difficulty value. Once again, will reserve judgement until I can try it in an actual game.

Ah, my concern from before re: deck shuffling have been cleared up further down the text. "Decks are shuffled after Social or Combat encounters end"

Awesome! That means players likely won't be able to exploit the card order too much.

What the rulebook could use, imo, is chapter separators. Currently, while different headline formats are used to denote the start of new sections, it's essentially all one single chapter. Having page breaks and a little more white space between major sections would help, I think.

Oh, while I'm on the topic, another small annoyance for me personally is the fact that in the PDF, only the headlines seem to be recognized as "text" elements. That means, the main text body doesn't seem to be CTRL+F searchable right now, at least not on my end.

Okydoky, Potential! Your Inspiration, Luck, Fate Points, Artha, etc.

Always like to see a bonus resource like this, although I personally usually prefer it being handed out by the group collectively as opposed to just the GM/Narrator, but I know other folx like it this way too.

Okay. Gosh.

So, Breaks are cool.

But Sacrifices and Curses are REALLY cool!

I remember seeing Ajey talk about this a while ago, that idea of sacrificing an inherent value of your character to gain a narrative/mechanical bonus. I CAN'T WAIT to play around with that system!!

We're leaving card and skill mechanics behind now and go into character progression creation.

One thing I'm noticing in hindsight, a lot of the card mechanics mention playing cards from hand, but I don't actually know how I even get cards into my hand. Have I missed something?

Experience serves 2 functions in Aether. One, it is a point resource to spend for skill upgrades and the like. But it is also tracked as a cumulative value to determine your level. I assume that means even if I gain 5 EXP and spend 4 of those, I still reach the next level right?

Next section is Understanding the Character Sheet, so let's take a look!

The Aether char sheet is a hefty 7-page beast, which some players might find intimidating, but others might enjoy! I certainly feel nostalgic flipping through it. The guide in the book helps for sure!

Looking at character aspects, things like Goals, Secrets, Values should all be pretty familiar. I'm VERY intrigued though by the "Omen", which seems to be a built-in invitation to the Narrator to explore some more difficult sides of your character's backstory. Sweet!

Aether also makes the simple but very smart move of rebranding Hit Points as "Morale", which has a LOT of implications and opens up so much narrative space to explore. I really like it!

Ah, found the answer to my "How do I draw cards into my hand" question from before.

(It's determined by your Actions stat, by the way.)

A note about this in the card mechanics section earlier might help avoid that confusion, I think.

Boyfriend break!

I'll be back with this either later today or tomorrow I think!