Hands of Ether: Game Manual

By Zachariah Gillette

Secret Hearth's flagship game of reality-warping spells, brutal and impactful combat, modular character creation, and story-focused gameplay of swords, sorcery, and esoteric chaos. Hands of Ether is a vibrant pen-and-paper role playing game. The game aims to be an easily accessible alternative to mainstream fantasy RPGs, while still bringing its own surreal spells and ambitious combat system to the table. In Hands of Ether, you and your friends take on the roles of adventurers in a world of prismatic forests, sentient clay, eldritch cyclopes, crystal dragons, swords, and sorcery.

Creating your character is highly simplistic, diverse, and modular - with an abundant amount of lineages, skills, and spells to choose from. Class effects, spells, and other abilities are clearly worded and blunt, but are still fluid, open to interpretation, and easily malleable. Hands of Ether uses a freakishly fast-paced combat system that allows for the game master and the players to provide a back-and-forth dialog of attacking, guarding, countering, and casting spells.

The spells within this tome can be peculiar - like turning yourself into a coat rack, speaking to the spirits of the sea, or receiving visions about someone's life by touching their blood. Martial combat can be powerful, too - each class has a set of skills that make them equal to each other, but still reliant on their team mates. Despite its ease of use, the game is designed to be especially adventurous, with death and injury as a persistent threat. This is an adventuring game about true heroes, with challenging encounters and brutal repercussions.

What's Inside?Complete character creation - including ten core classes, simplistic ability scores that drain to realistically capture the concept of characters becoming tired or losing power without being inconvenient. Over 350 weird spells and 300 tenacious combat skills. Over 20 stellar pieces of artwork from Madelyn Vagott that explore Hands of Ether's surreal land of crystals and prismacolor forests. Magical mishaps for misusing the Ether - and vile eldritch corruptions which can curse and punish adventurers, warping heroes into monsters. A variety of weaponry which can be used with an action economy that makes sense and feels right Adventurers, for instance, can raise their shield against attacks to truly and actively defend themselves and their comrades Low numbers for easier play. Rolling two die at once is the rarest of circumstances in Hands of Ether. A multitude of surreal monsters - fight off possessive, shadowy figures made of living oil. Face off against pale cyclopes from beyond the stars. Take on fur hags, bog trolls, wrong-elves, rot runners, and oozing necromancers.

Character sheets are always available on SECRETHEARTH.COM.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 109737209X
• ISBN13: 9781097372096
• Release Date: May 2019
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.5" x 11.0"