Aether is a wound, not a gift
Five hundred years ago a civilisation learned to draw power out of the substrate of reality. It did not understand that every drop drawn leaves a hole, and that something else lives in the holes.
Grim, serious, and not without light
Aetherfall is dark magitech horror at a gas-lamp, early-industrial level of technology: Aether-blue glow inside the cities, a sickly Aether-green bleed in the Wastelands. The Sundering was not a war. It was an infestation. The Aether-engines kept running, the tears in reality kept widening, and the Things came through.
The survivors rebuilt smaller, as fortified city-states under protective Aether-Lamps. Outside the lamp-light lie pre-Sundering ruins, pockets of active corruption and raw Aether bleeding through. The things that haunt them are former people, former machines, or Things That Came Through.
You are a Warden: a sanctioned, or rogue, Aether-user licensed to enter the Wastelands. You wield the same poisonous power you are trying to push back, because it is the only thing that works. Every spell costs you a little more of yourself, and the long question of the game is how much you are willing to trade.
The horror comes in three registers: cosmic things from outside reality, the tragic human horror of corruption, and the unburied dead. The light is real too. There are innkeepers and smiths worth knowing, Lamps worth the walk home, and a few people whose hope is contagious because it was earned.
“In the Long Hour” is what people say when something has gone catastrophically and inexplicably wrong.Common saying of the Reclamation
The Brass Imperium and the Sundering
For about eight centuries the continent was united under the Brass Imperium, a magitech state ahead of anything the present day has rebuilt. It had Aether-rail for long-distance travel, Aether-telegraphy for near-instant messages, Aether-medicine that stretched aristocratic lives by a century, and Aether-printing for mass-produced books. Its capital was Sundercrown; its engineers were a de facto aristocracy.
In the Imperium’s final decade, its leaders funded a state programme called the Aether Veil, led by the engineer Magister Veylinn. Its goal was to pierce the membrane between life and death so that the recently dead could be spoken to; powerful people had lost children to a plague. Veylinn believed she had found a safe way. She had not.
The Long Hour
The Veil’s central engine tore the membrane open at Sundercrown, and the gate opened in both directions at once. Souls of the dead poured out, and things from elsewhere poured in. Tears spread outward like cracks in glass. The event lasted nine days by outside clocks, but inside the rupture survivors describe a single endless hour, neither night nor day, the sky the colour of brass and the air ringing like a struck bell. About nine in ten people died.
No one alive remembers the world before. It survives only through four unreliable witnesses: a damaged, partly censored Imperial Library beneath the Lit Quarter; oral tradition, true in feeling and corroded in fact; the Names, who shape their memories to suit themselves; and the silent pre-Sundering automatons scattered through the Wastelands, who never edited their records.
Three eras
| Era | Years | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| The Hollowing | Reclamation 0–100 | A lawless century of scattered survival. Lamp-keepers whose Lamps happened to run in reverse became, by accident, the seeds of new settlements. |
| The Lamp Years | Reclamation 100–300 | A survivor whose Lamp seemed to eat tears rather than feed them gave the world the reverse-Lamp. Cities rose around Lamp-shrines and the Lamp Orders formed. |
| The Reclamation | Reclamation 300 to now (420) | Stable city-states under the Lamp Orders, organised Wardens, and a slow retaking of the Wastelands one Lamp-shrine at a time. |
The Lit cities and the Wastelands
Every Aether-Lamp throws a circle of safety, and the cities are built inside it.
The Lit Cities
An Aether-Lamp powers its city and seals the tears nearby. Inside its radius the Names find it harder to reach into your life, and it is where a fallen Warden is put back together. The fortified capital, the Lit Quarter, stands on the ashes of Sundercrown itself, with Imperial infrastructure still buried beneath its streets and Lamp Order Antiquarians descending into the old Library to recover what they can.
The Wastelands
Beyond the light: pre-Sundering ruin, active corruption and the raw bleed of Aether. Two zones are open to the first Wardens. The Hollow Reach, fog-haunted and built over the drowned colony of Halewater, and the Brass Wastes, under a sky that drops bronze ash. A Lamp’s radius is the only reliable shelter.
Wounds in the world
Aether is the residue of an enormous, ancient, dead-or-dying mind on the far side of reality. The Imperium did not discover a power; it discovered a corpse and learned to draw on it. Every tear is a place that drawing left open.
Pinhole
A hairline tear with a slow bleed and no passage. A single Lamp-keeper seals it in minutes.
Wound
A small active tear where Things slip through now and then. Sealed by ritual and a Lamp-keeper in hours.
Maw
A large two-way tear that pulls things in and spits things out. It can be suppressed for years, never sealed.
Rift
A tear that shapes its whole zone, warping weather, time and geography. Contained by standing rotations of Lamp-keepers.
The Veil-Wound
The original wound, at the heart of Sundercrown beneath the Lit Quarter. The central Lamp suppresses it. No one fully understands why that works.
What came through
- The Hollowed are corrupted former humans. They keep some reflex (pathfinding, tool use, fear) but their interior is gone.
- The Hollow Things were never human. They mimic people poorly: almost right, and then not.
- The Brass Things are machines that move. Perhaps surviving automatons, perhaps Things wearing brass. Some are friendly, most are indifferent.
- The Aether-Touched are wolves, ravens, big cats and fish warped by the bleed. Their young are born warped.
- The Great Ones are cosmic horrors behind the Rifts and the Veil-Wound, largely unseen. What lies deeper than the Names is worse.
- The Dead are ghosts locked in the moment of death: the drowning of Halewater, the Long Hour at Sundercrown. Defeating them is releasing them.
Its mouth is frozen open. Whatever sound it made at the moment of corruption is still locked inside it. Field Wardens call them Wretches and kill them quickly.On the silent cry
There is no sun
The post-Sundering world has no day and night. In their place the Aether-tide turns through three phases, the same for every Warden in every zone at the same moment.
| Phase | Length | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Wane | 90 minutes | The Names’ attention is at its faintest, and silent inside a Lamp’s light. |
| Veil | 60 minutes | The baseline. The Names pay ordinary attention; a Lamp still silences them. |
| Surge | 90 minutes | The world runs hot. The Names press hardest, and their Whispers reach you even beside a Lamp. |
Phases cross-fade over several minutes rather than cutting hard. The Lamps hold the dark back; they never switch it off.
What the wound let through, or what the wound made of us
The Names are Aetherfall’s pantheon: godlike, sometimes benevolent, never safe. Each is bound to a portfolio it cannot ignore. The Drowned Hymnist cannot ignore drowning; the Last Soldier cannot ignore a gate held against odds. What a Name actually is is never answered. They may be apotheosised dead, or Old Things wearing the faces of the dead, or both, or neither. Some do not know themselves.
The Drowned Hymnist
Suspect · Hollow Reach
“She sang her vigil through the rising water. The Lamp went out. The hymn did not.”
The Last Soldier
Sanctioned · Brass Wastes
“Three days he held the gate. There was no one left to relieve him on the fourth.”
The Brass Crow
Suspect · Hollow Reach
Bound to the clockwork ruin.
The Hollowed Inscriber
Forbidden · Brass Wastes
Bound to the corruption tear.
The Marshal of the Brass Watch
Sanctioned · Brass Wastes
Bound to the frontier garrison.
The Lampkeeper of the Lost Quarter
Sanctioned · Hollow Reach
Bound to the Lamp-shrine in the fog.
The Brass Spider
Forbidden · Brass Wastes
Bound to the deep tear.
The Witnessed Child
Forbidden · Hollow Reach
Bound to the Apparition Walk.
The ninth
Magister Veylinn died at ground zero on the first day of the Long Hour. Whether she persists as a ninth Name, the Mother of Tears, is the one thing the Lamp Orders will not discuss. Their liturgy includes the Litany of Denial: to her name we do not speak. The heretical Children of the Mother of Tears say she walks, and that she became part of the membrane she pierced. The game never confirms which account is true.
Sanctioned, Suspect, Forbidden
The Lamp Orders try to classify every Name, and they are sometimes wrong.
- Sanctioned Names are endorsed, with state-recognised worship and open cult sites.
- Suspect Names are tolerated but watched. Public devotion draws stares, but is not a crime.
- Forbidden Names are suppressed. Worship is criminal in Lit Quarter law and cults go underground.
At least one Sanctioned Name is, in truth, an Old Thing. At least one Forbidden Name is, in truth, a human soul that deserved better.
Standing
Every Warden has a Standing with each of the eight Names, running from Cursed through Hunted, Marked, Suspect, Indifferent and Approved to Devoted. A new Warden begins Indifferent. The further your Standing drifts from the middle, in either direction, the more often a Name reaches for you.
A Name acts through interventions, and every one is telegraphed with a sensory cue before it lands, so there is no ambush. Most are only a Whisper, a cue and a line of text. A favoured Warden may draw a Blessing; a hunted one, a Curse; and a Name may leave a visible Mark, a sign of its attention that other Wardens can read. Lamp-light dampens all of it.
The ones who can lose and come back
The Lamp Orders consolidated the reverse-Lamp craft, hold the Lamp-shrines, keep the Library and perform the rituals that keep the Lamps lit, without fully understanding what those rituals do. They cultivate Wardens because Wardens are the only renewable defenders the world has.
At initiation a Warden accepts a Soul Crystal: a fragment of bound, stabilised Aether, sized and shaped to hold a human soul. This is what makes a Warden different. When your body fails, the Crystal catches your soul. You become a Shade, present at the place you fell, and when you choose to release, a Lamp ritual raises you again at the nearest active Lamp-shrine, gear and all. Each death leaves a stack of Soul Fracture on the Crystal that dims your strength until it fades or a Lamp clears it.
For everyone else, death is final. A citizen’s soul passes on, or lingers as one of the Dead, or is caught by something else: a Name claiming a follower, a passing Wraithbinder, a Tear that is pulling. The funeral rites sometimes work, and the Orders do not announce when they fail.
When a Crystal finally fractures past saving, the Crystal remains, small and dangerous. It may pass to a chosen successor, go back to the Orders to be re-issued, or be claimed by a Wraithbinder for binding work, since it carries the echo of its last bearer.
The population of Aetherfall is human, entirely. The setting has no other peoples, and its horror does not need them.
Step past the lamp-light
Aetherfall is in closed development. Sign-ups are closed for now.