Strange Beginnings

What started out as a simple campaign setting for that other role playing game that so many enjoy (including myself), quickly become something so much more. Having recently finished world building a homebrew setting for a campaign I was going to run for family and friends, I decided that I wanted to do something like that again. I have always been fascinated with not only Victorian era Europe but the concept of steampunk as well, and decided that my next great world building exercise would be to craft a homebrew campaign set in an alternate timeline of a steampunk universe. The further I got into this new venture, however, the more I began to realize that so many things would have to change. How did I incorporate firearms into a game that didn't have them? How did I explain magic in a world that had never seen it? How, above all else, did I explain the existence of elves, gnomes, and dwarves, in a "modern" setting? And thus the Rift was born. I still had questions though, and far too few answers. I casually mentioned to Sam that I was struggling with making this world I was building fit within the confines of another system and I'll never forget the question he asked me. "Why does it have to fit?" He was right, of course, why did this world have to fit inside of another persons definition of a game?

And so The Aether Above was officially started. Born from a single, simple question it has grown into a world of both history and fantasy. There have been ups and downs, late nights and early mornings. There has been sleep lost, angry texts, and more rewrites than I care to count. The rules have changed, the writing has been nearly nonstop, and the thirteen page campaign setting has grown to nearly 200 pages. Through it all, however, the love of this game has never wavered, never faltered, and never been forgotten.