Adapting Fortera, Éterlumin and Airships
Preserve the scientific framing of Fortera and Éterlumin and treat airships as vessels, environments, and sources of pressure.
Use this page when
- You are converting an airship encounter into another game.
- You need a Fortera anomaly that keeps the setting's scientific framing.
- You are deciding how dangerous an Éterlumin failure should be.
- Your converted vessel now feels like a stat block instead of a vessel.
Fortera
Fortera-related phenomena are scientific or natural anomalies that the people of Aeon do not yet fully understand. Study of Fortera is performed by philosophers, engineers, and academies, not by clergy or spellcasters.
When adapting Fortera to another system, do not describe it as magic, divine intervention, planar energy, spellcasting, or supernatural power from another realm. When a target system has only "spell" language available, treat Fortera effects as equipment, phenomena, environmental hazards, or specialised training instead.
Éterlumin
Éterlumin is not inherently toxic. Its dangers come from how it behaves under load and how carefully it has been prepared. Adapt it accordingly.
Sources of danger
- Volatility
- Pressure
- Instability
- Resonance
- Combustion
- Rupture
- Degradation
- Failed calibration
What grades represent
- Degradation rate
- Remaining service life
- Calibration quality
- Reliability under pressure
Airships
Airships must be treated primarily as vessels, environments, and sources of pressure. A boarding, a chase, or a storm is far more than an exchange of damage. When adapting, consider each of the following factors and preserve as many as the target system can express.
- Vessel scale
- Crew competence
- Position
- Range
- Weather
- Visibility
- Structural stress
- Lift stability
- Ammunition
- Fire
- Éterlumin reserves
- Command cohesion
- Boarding risk
- Escape routes
Do not reduce an airship encounter to a single pool of hit points.
Worked example: a damaged Éterlumin regulator during a storm
- Fictional role
- The regulator holds lift stable in weather that would otherwise drag the vessel down. It is failing.
- Capability or resistance
- Trained under normal conditions, Familiar under storm load. Rerating requires an Expert engineer and half an hour of stable flight.
- Scale
- Vessel.
- Pressure
- Time pressure as the storm worsens; environmental pressure from weather; operational pressure from a stretched crew; moral pressure if passengers cannot be told the truth.
- Consequences
- Harm to the crew closest to the regulator, resource loss of Éterlumin reserves, delay to arrival, exposure of an insurance problem, escalation into a rupture if uncorrected.
- Mechanical expression
- One environmental clock for the storm, one operational clock for the regulator, and a handful of targeted checks. No single ship hit-point pool.
Before you finish
- Is Fortera described as a natural anomaly, not as magic or spellcasting?
- Are Éterlumin hazards drawn from volatility, pressure, and calibration?
- Does the airship encounter present at least three distinct pressures?
- Have you preserved position, weather, and boarding risk?
- Does the mechanical expression avoid a single pool of hit points for the ship?