Hello fellow delvers. Andrew D. Devenney, publisher of Superhero Necromancer Press here. It's time to stop alluding to this game on my social media and release it in some form or another.

So, here: the beta version of ALTERITY is now up and available. 

As I note in the introductory chapter (and on the main Itch page), ALTERITY is a Forged in the Dark tabletop RPG about the delvers of an Aetheric Order, a radical guild or cell whose members scour glooms across the ruins of Alteris in search of the multiversal aether they need to fuel their power, prestige, and protection. 

 There are dangerous delves into glooms; battles against gloomspawn and rival orders; gloom hunts and ruin rangings; secret conspiracies and hidden ceremonies; archaeological digs and searches for ancient technological artifacts, and aether-fueled multiversal shifts to prior historical epochs.

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This has been in my head in one form or another for a long time. It originally started as a game using Superhero Necromancer Press's long in development Skeleton Game System ruleset. I think my earliest notes for that version date to March 2019. But that all changed after I first read through Band of Blades around Christmas 2020. That quickly pushed me on to Blades in the Dark, which I had owned since 2018 but never read, and well, Alterity changed drastically then, for the better.

As a beta, it is incomplete, but only really here and there. In writing it, I've made some attempt to boil down the FITD mechanics of the game into something more concise. Your mileage may vary, of course, and also maybe FITD-type games need clear and detailed explanations of their mechanics for a reason. I'll guess we'll see if I accomplished my task. 

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The pdf files associated with this beta drop include:

• The beta manuscript itself, all 136 pages (but fully bookmarked), but missing a few sections that shouldn't cause too much trouble if anyone wants to kick the tires on anything.
• The delver playbooks, of which there are 6 (the aetherwright, the arcanosmith, the gloomstomper, the gloomwarden, the hierosavant, and the lamplighter).
• The aetheric order sheets, of which there are 4 (the pathfinders, the preservers, the vanguard, and the venerators).
• The order faction sheet, for tracking your relationships with other orders and factions in the Veiled City.
• The gloom creation worksheets, for when you want to use the game's gloom generator to put obstacles in your players' path.
• A set of reference playsheets, which condense the core rules down to four handy pages. This is mostly written for a GM, but players will find it useful (hopefully).
• And finally, a map of the Veiled City, which I clipped from the laid out version of the game (I write to layout, like a madman).

In the next beta drop, which will hopefully be in July, I'm targeting the sample gloom and starting scenario sections of the manuscript, which really should be in this beta, but, well, I have a day job that's all writing, design, layout, and crowdfunding fulfillment, so you know how it is. 

If anyone has questions, comments, or issues they see, please reach out. You can comment here or send an email to superheronecromancerpress@gmail.com. We'd love to hear what you think.