A Player's Reference
The World of Eldriloch
Airships haul ore across a bay full of privateers. Machines sweep floors, guard vaults and, if the Tinkerer Guild is to be believed, think for themselves. A runekar experiment tore the world open, and the things on the other side want back in. Now Staerhiel is sliding into civil war, the Veil is moving in the dark, and something is gathering beyond the Eldritch Mountains.
Eldriloch is an aetherpunk dark fantasy setting for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5: a continent of riveted airships and floating rail, oil-black foundries and gear-driven machines, all of it powered by the aether, a force that bends matter and energy and was never meant to be bound into steel. This reference is laid out like a player's handbook. Each chapter covers one part of the world, and the menu on the left (or behind the Menu button on a phone) takes you anywhere in it. Pages that link to each other do so in the text, and every page ends with links to the previous and next entries, so the whole book can also be read straight through.
The setting is presented as it stands in the present day, an uneasy peace a generation after the War of Souls. Material that player characters shouldn't know yet is folded away in red For the Game Master boxes. Rules that are still being written are marked In the Forge.
Contents
Chapter IRaces
Humans, the aether-sighted runekar, the twisted malumtene, the ashen who share their bodies, and the souldriven built of steel.
Chapter IIClasses
How the core classes fit the world, plus the engineer and fleshgrafter.
Chapter IIIEquipment
Aetheric firearms, piston hammers, riveted dusters, grapple guns, airship passage and what a Peacekeeper costs.
Chapter IVThe World
Five nations, the Fiend's Chasm between them, and the guilds, gangs and holy orders who fight over what's left.
Chapter VOrganizations
Guilds, gangs and holy orders: who they are, what they want, and how to join them.
Chapter VITimeline and Events
From the Dark Sunder through the War of Souls to the uneasy peace of today.
Chapter VIITechnology
Aether, fibrolite, autonomation, airships, renderers, flesh-grafting, firearms and the artifacts nations go to war over.
Chapter VIIIReligion
The Celestial Covenant, its Wardens, its ten gods, and the gift called flux.
Chapter IXMagic
Aether and flux, the rules that keep them apart, and every spell the classes of Eldriloch can cast.
Eldriloch at a Glance
Two powers shape the world. Aether is the web that binds reality together. Practitioners pull its threads to reshape matter, but it cannot touch living things. Flux is the flow of life itself. It heals, shields and strengthens, and the Celestial Covenant teaches that it comes only through the gods.
A wound that never closed. The Dark Sunder opened the Fiend's Chasm in Ethon, a land of lava on one side and ice on the other. It also let in the exspiratis, who need living hosts to touch the world, and it created fibrolite, the crystal that powers every machine.
Machines with something inside them. Mechanoids do simple work. Their successors, the souldriven, think, adapt and, in small numbers in its final years, helped end the War of Souls. Nobody agrees on whether they have souls, and the people who know the answer aren't saying.
Old kings and new wars. Regnant Sovereigni rule most nations. Staerhiel is sliding into civil war, Ethon is still recovering from the last one, Usmon trains the continent's best warriors and pretends to stay out of it all, and the Veil works in the shadows of all of them.
Using This Reference
Rules baseline. Eldriloch uses the D&D 3.5 core rules unless a page says otherwise. Racial entries follow the Player's Handbook format, and the ashen, runekar and malumtene have complete rules.
Spellings. Names follow the setting outline. Where the sources disagree (Staerhiel or Staerheil, flesh-grafting or forge-grafting), this book uses the first form and notes the other in the Glossary.