Æther is everything. In the game it represents everything your character can do, it measures your ability to continue existing, it allows you to roll dice, it acts as currency, its spent to use special abilities, and its gained in numerous ways. Eidolon is, in a way, resource management and Æther is your sole (or, if you will, soul) resource.

If you run out of Æther then your Conscience drops a point and you get ten Æther. You also fade out for the rest of the scene, the ghost equivalent of being knocked unconscious. Your character can never die from Æther loss, but running out of Æther can remove you from the action for a while.
You are never limited on how much Æther you can have but since its gained and lost so quickly and often we suggest using tokens to track Æther at the table and only recording it on your character sheet for between sessions.

Since Æther can be held in vast amounts there are a handful of ways to track it via tokens, the easiest being with pennies. Think about it, you can get 100 tokens for a dollar. You could also use poker chips, White = 1, Red = 5, Blue = 10, Green = 25, and Black = 100 for example. Another suggestion made to me was Hell Bank Notes, Hell bank notes are a form of joss paper, an afterlife monetary paper offering used in traditional Chinese ancestor veneration. However you track it, it’s important you keep track. Player’s who don’t keep track of their Æther loose it, the simple rule being that if you’re not sure if you have it, you don’t.

One of the most common ways to spend Æther is to roll dice. If you don’t have any other means to gather dice you can always spend ten Æther to roll a single die. Remember that most of the time you’ll need to reach a total ten, a single die won’t likely do you any good.

There are a couple mechanical methods for gathering Æther, those are covered later, but its worth mentioning the easiest, fastest, and best way to get Æther: from your Game Master.

ATTENTION GAME MASTERS: Reward your players with Æther points! What should you reward? How about being a ghost, making decisions based on character perceptions and not player perceptions when its detrimental, doing anything that adds to the game’s fun or cool, and most importantly reward them for getting involved in your game. Someone gives you a journal entry in-between sessions? Five Æther points! Someone describes a brilliant interaction? Ten Æther! Æther is not only the character currency but also the GM currency and you should give it to your players when they do something you like.

I’ve gathered up some of the writing I’ve had posted around the internet before. Most are unpublished yet, I’m re-reading and re-writing.  One, a short zombie story, has cropped up onto the site already. They are being back-dated to when I first posted them so you won’t see them cropping up early on the main page. Sorry guys, trying to keep come chronology in tact here. There are two more short stories I have to edit and a ton of draft material I wrote for a failed comic book project with a friend of mine. I’m not sure if I’ll edit the drafts, since they were just rough drafts, but read over them and see if they are worth time anymore.

I’ve also changed the theme. I like this one. Fits a writing blog.

The entire game uses six-sided dice. You roll against a Target Number, typically 10 but it can be raised or lowered by your game master. You simply roll, add, and compare.
The rules should already exclude this but in case it comes up: You never will roll more than ten dice. Any die you would roll over ten just adds a +5 to your roll total.
Oh, and your dice do explode. If your not familiar with this term it means that whenever you roll a natural six on any die you roll that die again and add the new number to the previous one. If the new roll is a six, roll again and add it up. continue reading…

Carter woke up and starting working the sand out of his lungs. It sounded like a cough but was more like vomit from his lungs. Five minutes of hacking, spewing, and hoping this wouldn’t kill him and in the end he had a pile of wet reddish-orange sand the size of a melted golf ball laying on his floor. Carter had heard stories of people coughing for hours, unable to clear enough sand out and eventually dying from it. He just wished he could afford a new strap for his mask so it wouldn’t fall off every day when he slept.

Pulling himself up off the floor he makes his way over to his single window. The sun had set maybe an hour ago and he could still see where the sand fog had poured in through the cracked seal. Great. He’d have to start sleeping in the bathroom and hope that the door’s seal held tighter. He picked up a roll of black tape from his counter and patched over the window leak. It wouldn’t hold for long but it should last until the fog died down.

He walks over to his closet and pulls on a shirt. It still feels clean so the seal must have held tight during the day. Maybe he’d sleep in there tonight. He walks towards the kitchen but is suddenly overcome with the urge to look out his single port window. He doesn’t know why, the scene outside of desolation is always the same, but for some strange reason he’s compelled to go look.

After clearing off enough of the red-orange condensation from the window pane with his shirt sleeve Carter cups his hands around his eyes and looks outside. He’s on the first tier of the Wessix Highrise and the window affords him a view of tier one and the gutters below. He can see the floor of tier two but there isn’t much point, it’s just a gray ceiling that blocks out the sky. Still compelled, and since there isn’t much to see for Tier One other than walls and a handful of windows, Carter looks down.

Looking down in the gutters Carter can see two levels, maybe three if he looks a the right angle. Looking down now he sees bodies laying all over, poor fools who didn’t survive the fog yesterday. He watches a mother carry a small child disappear into one of the few gutter level doors, the whole time the child is throwing up bloody red sand.  Carter hopes, prays, that it’s not his building they just walked into. The  kid clearly has the plague and Carter doesn’t want to catch it.

Just as Carter is about to go lock his door in-case that lady come knocking he sees something that would haunt him in his sleep. From the second gutter level an arm slides out of the darkness and slithers towards a body. Its eight feet long and jointed a dozen times. Carter watches as it reaches out from the shadows to grab hold of a corpse. Carter breaks his view before he can see what the monsters are doing. Just yet another reason to be happy he’s living in tier one.

He checks his door. Secured.  Then walks to the kitchen to start his day. Coffee, vitamin-syrup, and a single egg is all he managed to find last week. He slathers the egg with syrup and devours the breakfast. Just as he finishes he hears the override on his door activate. He stands up from his kitchen table and grabbing a steak knife as he stands.

As door slides open a man in black leathers steps into his room. Carter doesn’t look happy and starts to raise the knife. It is pointless though, the man in leather already has a gun pointing at Carter. Before Carter can get the knife high enough to strike three bursts erupt from the gun. Blood sprays from Carters wounds and coats his breakfast plate. Jaxon steps into the room and smiles, just another night on the job for him. continue reading…

This project is a work in progress, subject to change at a moments notice (or less than that). Keep that in mind, everything here is malleable. In fact, this is the third re-visit to this idea.

Eidolon

(ahy-doh-luhn)

An image or representation of an idea
A representation of an ideal form
An apparition of some actual or imaginary entity or of some aspect of reality
A phantom, a ghost or elusive entity

Two men inspired this game, John Wick (7th Sea, Houses of the Blooded, Wilderness of Mirrors) and Jared Sorensen (Who I hear really likes ABBA). The conversation started when I told John I was a big fan of Wraith: The Oblivion. He began to criticize the game and that got me thinking. Jared asks the same questions when people say, “I’ve got a role-playing game.” and as much as I struggled to answer the questions I think I owe him some credit. Jared’s questions, and a fourth that John added in Wilderness of Mirrors, and my answers are as follows: continue reading…

Welcome to the future home of the Blog of Justice. This is the public web blog for myself, Rob Justice. I’m just this guy, you know, but I do a podcast over at www.BearSwarm.com (the main host of this site) and I’m pretty sure if you’re here then you’ve been there… if not… You should go there.

Anyway, I’m pretty much just dropping this so I can play with theme stuff but I can tell you a little bit about whats going to be here. See, I’m currently writing a game and I figured I’d start developing it more publicly in hopes of getting more feedback. Plus, I like writing and this will be a place to post little pieces of the projects I start writing and never finish. Again, in hopes that people will send feedback and get me back into writing some things I lose track of.

Expect to see a lot of fiction and not much personal stuff. Just not about music, I do that over at Ideology of Madness, or personal stuff. My personal stuff tends to come out on the podcast or not get shared. Anyway, I’m rambling and I have work do to on this site still. Stay tuned.