Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Well, here we go:

Back in 2004, I wrote and published a little game called "Aetherverse". It was a sci-fi wargame centered around a fully customizable army creation system. It did pretty well, got nominated for an Origins Award, and met all of the goals I had for it. Unfortunately, I lost my job at the time (it was the start of the final "Dot-com" crash) and had to shut down the company so I wasn't able to do anything further at the time.

Fast forward to today, and I'm a student again, getting bored during commutes to/from school. I get the design bug again, and decide to start sketching out new rules. This time the rules are going to be completely free (though you'll be able to buy a "pretty" book if you'd like whenever it's done) and developed entirely in the open, allowing for community feedback. The "company" I'm running for this is doing the same thing with all of its games: open development, freely available rules (in boring plain-text versions), and no intention of any profit. It's strictly a love-of-gaming thing.

So, Aetherverse 2nd Edition is here.

At the core of the game is a highly flexible army design system. It's entirely intended to let you use anything you already own or want to own (at or around 28mm scale), but unlike games that came before it AV did a pretty good job of getting real "character" into those armies. The "character" bit isn't in 2.0 yet, as I want to balance the base design system before introducing the bells and whistles, but you can see the old system by downloading the original game which is free to download as well.

The gameplay itself has a pseudo-random activation system rather than the standard "I go, you go" system prevalent in most games these days, and I'm doing a LOT of work to streamline the rules from their first iteration. When I first wrote them, they were a little too influenced by 40k and D&D (extra and distinct melee resolution phases, saving throws, and a lot of extra dice rolling). For the second edition, I've cut out much of the excess junk, made the turn go much faster, reduced extra rolls (replacing the saving throw mechanic, for instance, with a simple modifier to certain rolls).

At this point, the base gameplay rules and the base army design system have been uploaded, making the game fully functional (though not particularly complex). A full introduction to the game is available at the website, and feedback is absolutely welcome on all aspects of the game at the forums there. I'll answer general questions here, but I'd rather have specific commentary posted there.

Get the current edition of the rules here.

Thanks for your time and hopefully your feedback. Back in the day, Dakka was a great source of playtest feedback (the site was specifically thanked in the credits) so I hope it'll be as positive now that it's back for a much more low-key existence.

I think the burning question on everyone's mind is... Eetherverse or Aytherverse?

Hey welcome back!

ph34r wrote:I think the burning question on everyone's mind is... Eetherverse or Aytherverse?

Hell, I've never decided that. I think I pronounce it both ways about equally... with the occasional "Efftherverse" (when the 1st Ed. was on Amazon in Europe, they didn't process the Æ character right and instead listed it as Ftherverse; I'm officially just calling it Aetherverse instead of Ætherverse this time).

Thanks, Kyoto.

Wow... Good to see Aetherverse back on the table. I still have my 1st edition book, although I must admit I never actually got around to getting in any games, as shortly after it came out I went through my gaming 'dry' period.


I'll have to see if I can find some time to check out the new version

I just downloaded the PDF of the first edition, looks cool. I really like the creation aspect. Ive been using Shock Force up til now.

Have to check out 2nd edition too I guess.

For those that actually have the 1st edition (or have downloaded it recently) feedback is welcome on it, too. Part of a 2nd edition is fixing what wasn't really implemented well in the 1st, so knowing that will help me work out the kinks much faster.

Feedback can go in this thread for now.

Incidentally, I've just uploaded v0.2 of the army design rules.

WHATWHATWHAT?!!

AWESOME! So glad you didn't totally throw in the towel!

Yay!

This is outstanding news!

syr8766 wrote:AWESOME! So glad you didn't totally throw in the towel!

Well, technically, I actually did. I just finally got tired of having design ideas that I couldn't put somewhere, so I started Aromatic for that purpose, which enabled me to go ahead and start work on a 2E for AEV.

Technically threadnomancy, but this forum is so light on posts that I don't think anyone will mind.

Aetherverse stuff got put on hold around the start of this year (a death in the family combined with school-related issues and other miscellaneous problems). In the meantime I decided the trouble with running it as a "company" just wasn't worth it, but that I would still work on the development of the game. Getting the miniatures bug again recently hasn't hurt matters, either.

So, it's back, again again. Instead of it being hosted at its own site, I'm just putting it up on my erstwhile blog site (formerly home to a WOW guild).

The stuff there is still fairly old (I'd not actually touched it since last winter) but I'll be working getting things running again, including putting up forums. In the meantime, commentary here is welcome.

Uassally I would Scream "LEAVE NECROMANCER!!!!" but after looking at this game, it seems that its thread is one of the few who's life is of such value that preserving it may be worth the vile heresy of the Darkest arts....I hope to see your rules succeed. I shall do a game this very night and comment on their worth

KOVAV wrote:Uassally I would Scream "LEAVE NECROMANCER!!!!" but after looking at this game, it seems that its thread is one of the few who's life is of such value that preserving it may be worth the vile heresy of the Darkest arts....I hope to see your rules succeed. I shall do a game this very night and comment on their worth

Thank you for your mercy, high Inquisitor.

Alas, even if I had found your soul guilty, you would have had little to fear. The Adeptus Admin have not yet bestowed upon me a BannHammer with which to vindicate the Emperors Righteous fury.

This looks very promising, i will have too download the rules in a bit. i am always a fan of customisation.

Thanks.

I just uploaded a slightly revised version of the Gameplay and Design Rules outlines to the game page. The only major difference between this and the previous v2 outlines was a change to the coherency rules (largely jacked straight from Warmachine) to make Morale a more important stat to actually put points into.

Was looking through the 1st-Ed rules and figured that the
one-hand/two-hand weapon issue should be dealt with using the ratio of TEK to DAM as apposed to only DAM.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Secondly, I find the ability to create diverse armie quite lacking, really. Mercenary is just not enough.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Secondly, I find the ability to create diverse armie quite lacking, really. Mercenary is just not enough.

Diversity *within* an army is something that I sort of wanted to avoid. With the amount of min-maxing that was already available within the overall army design system, I wanted to limit the extremes that things could be taken within a given army. Being able to fine-tune every single unit's stats to its desired role was too much, in my opinion.

That said, there are many ways to diversify units within an army through the use of traits and equipment. There's a huge difference between a regular soldier and a guy in a battlesuit, for instance.

My overall goal with the system, especially with 2E, is to have the army's primary statline be its sort of "baseline", and limit the amount of variation above and below that to the use of unit traits.

Am I missing something? Unit "traits" are the same as attributes right?

The Zoat wrote:Am I missing something? Unit "traits" are the same as attributes right?

Yes. Sorry, I've got a bunch of different terms in my head from doing some design outlines recently. Some terms here and there are possibly changing for more clarity.

I heard the original game produced some wonky results if you varied Tek a lot. How's that been/being fixed in 2nd edition?

I remember this, they had it on what I had seen as Aromatic Games. I loved this concept and the game was so easy to learn. I always wanted to create my own army of creatures and battle them against lord knows what my opponent has in an epic battle. It was a pretty cool idea, I just wish it would come back. I was curious and wanted to know what exactly happened to it.

Life happened.

Medical stuff, job stuff, family stuff, moving, etc. This is the first I've checked in on Dakka in quite some time, for instance... things seem to be stabilizing on the home front, though, so I'll take some time to evaluate whether or not I'm going to give the 2nd edition one more attempt at getting started.

Well I for one hope you get some sort of drive to do a new version. I read the Skeleton rules and like the changes over the old rules.
Streamlining stuff is a good idea.

Like with the Elites being able to add two +1's to any of the basic stats, for free is awesome. I always had a hard time trying to adjust the TEK to be higher for certain units rather than have it be high for my whole race/army.

I also do some drawing (granted I haven't done anything serious in a few years), if you need some pieces done let me know. I'm free for time and payment, lol. Would just like to get my stuff "out there". You can see my old page on deviantart.org/huronblakhart.

Okay, I've got the most recent revision of the rules back online at the now operational new site: get them here, along with the 1st edition book.

I have performed a re-write of the draft rules for Aetherverse 2nd Edition! I was running into a wall with the changes to the army design system, especially how to balance out the change to a "per unit" cost system, so I took a pad of paper out to a park and just rewrote the rules. The newest version brings the design system a little bit back towards the original, 1st edition rules while still maintaining the per-unit cost changes. These should fix some of the weird quirks of the design system while still making an effort to balance out some of the TEK-related issues from 1E.

The most recent revisions can be downloaded from the Aetherverse page at titaniumspork.org.

Thanks!

I've put together a couple of sample armies. They should be sufficient to get a feel for the way the game plays and whether the changes to the system are working out.

They're at the AV page, along with the current rules revision.

This is the first "new" rule that I've actually added to the 2nd edition. It was created as a counterbalance to the fact that I'm defining unit sizes based upon TEK, which means that it's quite possible for a high-technology player facing off against a horde of relatively weak enemies. Since model counts are intentionally being reduced in this edition, this means that higher-tech armies will have fewer models without a simultaneous increase in the number of their shots. When they're fighting against other high-tech armies, this isn't really a big deal as there will be parity between the two armies.

When you've got a large disparity, though, there's going to be a problem. The two 500-point test armies (one TEK 6, the other TEK 3) have widely different numbers of models between them (16 vs. 54). That is not a particularly insurmountable problem, but I also put a high CON in the lower-tech army (reducing their model count as their units are more expensive). But as points get higher (and if the difference in unit sizes/tech level gets even wider) it might get to the point that the "shooty" army simply will not be able to deliver sufficient firepower to even have a chance of defeating a "weenie horde" army, to borrow a term from my old Magic days.

What the rule does is, when a sufficiently strong weapon (or melee combatant) is used against a low-constitution, low-armored enemy and rolls high enough, it will kill additional models. This can be imagined as particularly high-penetration rounds taking out additional, tightly-packed enemies or a massively-muscled swordsman cleaving through several weaklings like paper. It's not a rule that will commonly come into effect, but will largely prevent the possibility that the game will be broken by hordes of weak units.

It is my feeling that this rule is necessary to keep the balancing effects I've put into place to tone down the advantages that high-tech armies get don't go too far in the other direction. It's also fun, in my opinion, when rolling dice to be able to declare "OVERKILL!"

Here's the new rule's text in the current draft rules:

Overkill: If the to-wound roll total doubles the target number, an additional wound is automatically caused. Additional wounds are also caused if the roll triples or quadruples the TN. I.E. the enemy unit has CON+ARM (the To-Wound TN) of 7, the attacking weapon has a DAM of 6, so any die rolls of 8 or higher (giving a total of 14) will cause an extra wound.

(Crossposted from the TiSpork website)

The next step in the Aetherverse 2nd Edition design process is to revise and redesign the Army Characteristics and Unit Traits from the first edition to make them fit the new rules. I’m in the process of rewriting many of them now, as well as adding new ones, and I’m posting a “preview document” here.[url=http://www.titaniumspork.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/aetherverse_2_traits_preview.pdf] Note that there are no points costs on any of the unit/weapon/armor traits as of yet. For now, I’m mainly interested in getting them written in clear rules language so that I (and playtesters) can do a little bit of experimentation to see what the general effects of the traits are upon the game. Once I’ve gotten a good handle on what these traits really do, I’ll be working on assigning points values to them.

Another goal of mine for the 2nd Edition is to create a more unified base for the various special abilities granted by unit traits. Rather than each ability having to define what it does every time it is typed (creating multiple opportunities for errors to appear in the text) I’m simply choosing to create a single point of reference for them to refer to. This is something that has been done rather well in the most recent revisions of both Warmachine and Warhammer 40k, and it is definitely something to be emulated when it comes to writing and organizing rules.