Aeres - A tale of Classic Adventure
The Chronicles of Aeres began over 20 years ago in high school, with a group of kids playing AD&D 2nd Edition. We started playing games in the Dragonlance universe, but we quickly shifted into making our own campaign setting, one heavily influenced by Tolkien (especially the Silmarillion). It was a monstrous world, with dozens of pages of lore, lots of maps, dungeons… pretty much everything you would expect from fantasy-obsessed teenagers making their own setting. Of course it was all a bit awkward, and the material was filled with confusing characters and tons of inconsistencies, but it was still a lot of fun.
Eventually we moved to 3rd Edition, but the setting stayed the same, and we played nearly every chance we could!
Fast forward about 15 years. We hadn’t played D&D for most of the 2000s, but the game and our world were always in the backs of our minds, and our love for fantasy never waned. In the summer of 2020, we decided to get together and launch a new campaign set in Aeres, this time with 5th Edition. We played all summer long, and we developed the setting into a juggernaut, with a complete story and theme to go along with it. We weren’t as influenced by Tolkien anymore, but that turned out to be a good thing. Aeres turned into something a bit more modern, but we had such a blast playing the game, we thought, why not try and turn the setting into a real thing? Maybe a module or a book that we could share with the D&D community?
We started cracking at the book, having never done a project like this before. It was a huge task. We wanted to take all the best elements from the classic fantasy we grew up with, like Tolkien, The Chronicles of Narnia, Dragonlance, the Dark Crystal, the Secret of NIMH, Redwall, and more, and tie into the world of Aeres, which we’d been nurturing in our heads for so many years.
We never thought the Chronicles of Aeres would be for everyone. It’s a bit of a time capsule, a setting filled with waxing nostalgia for the golden age of fantasy. We were a little worried that its old-school, storybook like sensibilities and classic “good versus evil” fare would make it a niche thing, appealing to story-first fantasy geeks (like us) who were looking for that old-world feel, and who didn’t care all that much about mechanical nuances.
(We’re probably right on that front, but we still hope that our setting has at least something to appeal to folks from across the D&D community!)
After having to learn InDesign from the ground up, spending thousands of dollars on artists, writing for almost 8 months, launching a Kickstarter, and spending as much time on social media as I can stand, our book is finally here! The Chronicles of Aeres, something that’s been part of our lives for over two decades, is now a real thing, and we appreciate the support of everyone who helped make it a reality!