I thought it was time to bring these interviews a little closer to home. I was able to connect with Eric (@EldritchCrow), a Canadian game designer and the creator of Aether RPG, an heroic game of fantasy storytelling. Ahead of Aether’s upcoming Kickstarter campaign I was able to talk with Eric about TTRPGs, game design, and the importance of accessibility in the TTRPG industry.
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Brent: Eric, thank you for taking the time to talk with me. For our readers not yet familiar with your work, please tell me a bit about yourself.
Thanks for the chance to chat Brent, I appreciate it a lot! I’m a Canadian TTRPG designer from Southern Ontario and I’ve been a part of different tabletop spaces for the past four and a half years. I’m 27, just finished out a Masters Degree in novel writing, and I have my Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing as well. So, as you can imagine with that kind of background, getting into tabletop games was almost inevitable (though it happened a bit later for me than a lot of folks I know). Funny enough, almost all of my publicly available work is TTRPG related, so I’ve somewhat sidestepped novels in the past few years (though I may get back to solo story writing in the future when the desire hits). That work includes Aether and its expansions, another TTRPG called EXO, as well as multiple streams and a long-finished podcast. I’ve also got a background in music, having been a classically trained bassist and performer for 10+ years at this point.
All this to say that I’ve got a deep rooted love of storytelling, and music got me to enjoy collaborative creative works.
B: What drew you into tabletop roleplaying games? What was your “hero origin story” in the hobby?
Like a lot of people, I started out playing D&D5e about four and a half years ago (I was around 22 or 23 at the time, I can’t remember which exactly). I got pulled into it because of Critical Role, which I started watching because I was between my bachelor’s degree and masters degree, without much to do while waiting to get the next phase of my life started, so I had a lot of time on my hands, was burnt out trying to write stories, and needed a new hobby. I took a shot on a Critical Role fan group by responding to an LFG post, and that group and I have been playing together ever since. It’s half a miracle if you know any of the horror stories about how online game groups of strangers tend to turn out.
B: How and when did you shift from playing and GMing to designing your first game? Was that gradual or did you jump in right away?
I shifted to designing my own game slowly, after about two years of being a player and GM. I had a decent grasp on mechanics with regards to D&D5e, and I started out with homebrewing monsters and items tailored to my players. After a while I ran into what I consider the “invisible walls,” of the system; those various restrictions or things I found clunky, the barriers that kept me from fully being able to tell the kinds of stories I wanted to tell together with my friends. My first attempt was changing the way some social skills work, then later I created some skyship combat mechanics that wound up becoming the basis for the earliest versions of Aether since they established a workable starting point for their own game.
B: Tell me about Aether RPG. What was the design process like? What drove you to create Aether?
Aether is the result of two years of work focused on one idea: How do I create a game that is more tailored to my game group’s tendencies and fun than what I currently have access to, which is just as fun for me to run?
That started a long, long process of design. The earliest drafts of Aether used a dice pool system that made the math way too complex, and at one point I hit a hard writer’s block with the mechanics. I started tinkering with a card based system for a one-page RPG, but the card system retroactively solved my issues with Aether’s design, so I pulled Aether apart and made it a card game. Once I had the core resolution figured out, I wanted to dig into making a classless game so that players could be able to make whatever characters they think up (hence the skill based system and build-your-own-abilities style mechanics in it now). The last major changes happened when I read LUMEN by Spencer Campbell and wound up mixing its design principles with the mechanics I liked and the thoughts on my core audience above.
B: Aether is built on the LUMEN system created by Spencer Campbell. Why was LUMEN such a good fit for the game you wanted to create?
LUMEN fixed two issues I was having in Aether: the combat was fairly clunky and I needed to streamline it to keep player turns from taking long enough for people to get bored or stressed, and the Success/Partial Success/Failure core resolution fit my heavier narrative focus for the game. Basically, having LUMEN as a basis allowed me to take the lightweight math and fast paced combat of that system and use them to hone Aether’s systems to fit somewhere between Pathfinder 2e and Quest as a play and combat experience. LUMEN also showed me how much fun it can be to be able to just use powers as a player, without worrying about resources that need to be refreshed. As a result, the math sort of got out of the way of the narrative play, making players using their skills and abilities more fluid and quick, with more interesting potential outcomes than strict pass or fail scenarios.
An unexpected but amazing outcome of changing to a Success/Partial Success/Failure system meant that the Narrator (game runner) for Aether no longer needed to determine the difficulty of any checks. For me that was huge, because I’m a neurodiverse designer (I have ADHD and very likely undiagnosed autism), and my particular neurodiversity meant that choosing difficulty on the fly and figuring out math in the moment was my weak point as a game runner. The numbers were also the most exhausting part for me, leading to a lot of burnout when GMing. At the end of the day, LUMEN forced me to examine what was fun for me as a game runner as much as I was focusing on fun for the players, and resulted in a far more refined game in my opinion.
B: Looking at the files in my Aether RPG download I noticed you have PDFs formatted for cell phone screens. How important is it for games to offer support to different platforms for play? What other accessibility aspects are incorporated into Aether RPG?
Supporting different platforms and building accessibility options into TTRPG design from the start isn’t an option; in my opinion, they’re an obligation as a designer. The reason I released Aether for sale was because people enjoyed it, and I figured that more than just my friends might enjoy it. I can’t in good conscience use that as my reason for release while actively closing the door to various people who can’t access the game due to having different preferred devices or various disabilities. Adding file types for phones, as well as dark mode and print friendly modes to help with reference and visual impairment were later additions once the game was released, but the only reason they took longer to make was because I was doing the layout myself. They were planned from the start. One thing I’m excited about for the upcoming Kickstarter is that the layout artist, Dee Pennyway, has been kind enough to offer to create a fully browser based ruleset for Aether, which makes the rules text play nicer with screen reader software than PDFs.
Within Aether’s rules there are three major areas where you can see accessibility guide the design. The Session 0 section of the game includes explanations of Lines and Veils as well as X cards as two TTRPG safety tools that I recommend, since they work well with the play style of the game, but the section also links to the TTRPG Safety Toolkit in case people want to use other safety tools. The game openly says that safety tools while playing Aether are a requirement, not an option.
To back that up, character creation asks players to make Omens for their characters which are basically timed plot points that can happen in-game focused around their character. It gives players a measure of control of the story, and they trigger based on a countdown clock mechanic that allows players to have significant warning of potentially heavy or emotionally impactful story beats that could come up during play. The Omen system is probably one of my favorite accessibility-focused mechanics because it ensures that players have open lines of communication about what’s going on during play so that everyone can have a good time without any negative surprises.
B: Are there design elements of Aether you are particularly proud of? Is there anything you hope other designers can learn or take away from your design?
As mentioned above, the Omens are probably my favorite aspect of character creation just because they let players tailor the story beats to their characters, they give the Narrator plot beats to build a campaign around, and having them tied to countdown clocks makes using the various safety tools I recommend feel more ingrained in gameplay rather than just as failsafe systems for discomfort.
Another thing I’m really proud of is my Narrator toolkit (the game runner’s portion of the rules). It’s a bit more personal to me in that it’s every lesson I’ve learned about running games, coupled with mechanics I love and a bunch of very quick and lightweight planning methods for sessions. It exists to try and make the game easy to run, and I’ve even had people message me saying that they’ve taken the things they’ve learned from the Narrator section of Aether into other TTRPGs they run as well, which I’m ecstatic about!
B: What can you tell us about the upcoming Aether RPG Kickstarter? What changes or updates can we expect with the new attention on the game?
The Aether RPG Kickstarter is… well going to be a tad different than most Kickstarters I’ve seen and supported. First off, you get the currently available version of Aether as a Day 1 reward for backing, so you’ll be able to play the full game from the get-go. The Kickstarter is allowing me to hire a team of editors, sensitivity readers, an illustrator and a layout artist to take the game to its (ideally) final form.
Secondly, the only planned stretch goals for the campaign are the browser-based ruleset by Dee and extra artwork by our illustrator David. There’s no merch, no print run (sadly the costs of printing games just made it untenable for this campaign), you just get a fantastic game and all its expansions to play with your friends. Beyond the extra art stretch goal, any money we make (as well as any money left over from the initial budget) is getting split equally among the team.
That’s the most important part to me. I’m hiring people that I want to see work on a game I’ve sunk two years of my life into. I sought out very specific people for this work, and usually they were the first people that came to my mind when I realized what positions I was looking to fill on the team. So, not only do I want to pay them well, I want all of us to have the chance to get paid more without adding extra work or stress to ourselves. The goal is to finalize a solid game and make it so pretty that it immediately inspires character and campaign ideas on opening the files.
B: Speaking as a designer, what other games are out there right now that excite you? What do you reach for for a quick evening of fun with friends?
Right now, I actually run an Aether campaign for my friends and I’ve been utterly fascinated with what’s coming out of Pathfinder 2e lately. I’m an epic fantasy nerd to my core, and Pathfinder is looking like the system that would let me make a few characters that have been coalescing in the back of my mind for a while now, but that I just couldn’t make anywhere else.
B: Beyond the Kickstarter, any future projects in the works? Anything you can tease or talk about?
Honestly? I haven’t had much going with regards to new designs or anything like that. I may release more player options or modifications for Aether in the form of expansions in the future. But the one thing I would love to do, should time and circumstances allow, would be a second Aether campaign to fund a print run.
I’d love to have a print copy of Aether in my hands. Right now it’s just too expensive, and I didn’t want to risk the stress of it on my first Kickstarter campaign, but if all goes well and there is a clear interest in a print run, it’s definitely an idea on the table for the future.
B: Thank you again for talking with me! Where can folks find you if they want to see what you’re up to?
Ah Brent, it’s been a pleasure. You asked some fantastic questions and I was excited to get to ramble about Aether for a bit. If people want to find Aether and its expansions they can check out my Itch page. I also have started woodworking as what will hopefully be a full job, so if people want to find the jewelry or TTRPG accessories I make, they can go to ko-fi.com/eldritchcrow, or find me on Twitter @EldritchCrow and keep an eye for my posts. Thanks again for the chance to talk!
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Thanks again to Eric for talking with me! I hope you’ll check out all of Eric’s work and keep an eye pealed for Aether RPG when it goes live on Kickstarter.
In the meantime, are you an indie TTRPG designer who would like to talk about the industry and your upcoming projects? Do you know a designer I should talk to? Reach out to me through my DMs at @DorklordCanada and let’s talk!
