The Explorer’s Guide is now available on DrivethruRPG. You can also find a new Downloads page on this website.
The Explorer’s Guide contains all necessary instructions for creating and gearing up your own exploring hero, as well as rules for playing steam fantasy adventures in the wondrous world of Astraterra. The Gate Master’s Handbook will have more thorough guidelines for the GM and that should come out early next year.
At the moment The Explorer’s Guide is available as a PDF, but we are working on a print-on-demand book and that should be available in a few weeks.
A Roll20 character sheet is also being worked on and Foundry VTT support and a form-fillable character sheet are in the plans as well. More news about these a bit later.
Check out The Explorer’s Guide here and while at it grab the premade characters and a rules summary here.
PS. I have made some updates here and there on this website, but I think this whole website needs an overhaul, and that is being planned soon 🙂
Hi everyone! It’s been a while since my last update. When I started working on the layout of the English Edition I did not anticipate how things would go and I had to put this aside. Now, we are finally getting the English edition layout for the Explorer’s Guide done and it should be finished in a week or two.
The Explorer’s Guide (TEG) is the core rulebook that we often call also as the “player’s book” because it includes everything you need to create your own character and play the game.
At the same time, we are working on The Gate Master’s Handbook (TGMH) which in turn includes more details about the world of Astraterra, guidance for GM’s (Gate Master’s that is 🙂 ), creatures, and magic-like tech items of the Ancestors.
While The Gate Master’s Handbook includes most of the creatures there is a good selection of pets and some common creatures in The Explorer’s Guide that gets you started with your adventures. Also, we are trying to have a short introductory adventure released as soon as possible.
Here you can see a few sneak previews of the layout. These are still work in progress, but you can get an idea of how the books will look.
Release and Other Plans
The plan is to release TEG first as a PDF and the print version soon after that. There is always a slight chance of typos and other errors with the first release version so we would like to check the PDF version thoroughly before offering the print version.
There are also plans to offer some sort of support for the virtual tabletops. This is still being investigated, but at least Roll20 and Foundry VTT are some platforms we are considering seriously.
Website Update
We are also planning to make a quite extensive website update before the end of the year. The schedule is still a bit unclear, but this is quite high on our priority list. The goal of this update is to improve the responsiveness of the website and make it easier to find all the relevant downloadable and information.
Astraterra has been very popular since its release in Finland in the summer 2014. We sold out the whole first printing in 9 months and there has not been another printing since. This means that the books have been out of stock for a year and a half already. I’m constantly getting inquiries of the new printing and its schedule, but I have not felt ready for a new printing just yet. There has just been too many open questions and over-lapping projects happening. But after the latest Ropecon, I had to reconsider. There were so many people asking for Astraterra.
We had a one hour presentation about the Astraterra’s English edition at Ropecon (translates literally to “RPGcon”), the biggest Nordic RPG convention.
Here’s a video of the presentation (apologies for the poor sound quality):
You can now download the first chapter of the Astraterra rulebook as a free preview from HERE. The translation is done by Jukka Särkijärvi and more is in the works.
I hope this short preview gives an impression of what kind of game Astraterra is. In the full rulebook there will be of course much more content from equipment and creatures to gamemaster advice and in addition to these today we decided that some new material will be added for the English edition. We will expand the setting and a few rules based on the feedback we got from the Finnish players through a web survey we did recently.
We, or to be more precise Jukka Särkijärvi, has now finished translating the first chapter of Astraterra. We are still juggling around a few words and I need to do the layout, but as soon as those are done, I’ll link the first chapter here as a free preview for you all.
About the Translation
As we started discussing about the English translation with Jukka last fall, we quickly noticed that this is not going to be a cake-walk. Many of the creatures’ names and terminology in the game are word plays or have otherwise funny connotations or double-meanings in Finnish. This playful use of words sets a certain creative mood which is characteristic to Astraterra.
Regardless of the playing with Finnish words, I think we have found pretty good translations for some words already and Jukka has done really good job in finding good English counter-parts even for some more obscure Finnish words. And if there are some words we just can’t translate properly (my guess is there will be some), I’m pretty sure we can find a lot of English words to play with and convey the same light-hearted tone into the book that the Finnish edition now has.
Twitter (This is my personal account. I tweet about Astraterra, but also about other games and gaming and geekness in general)
I will post quick news and updates to the social media pages a bit more often than here. I can suggest in the comments, if you think we should be in some other social media sites. Thanks!
Until now, we had only one page in English about Astraterra. As we are working on the English translation, the demand for a full English site is growing all the time.
I translated the most essential pages to begin with, but the content will be expanded and as we have more material in English, we might include some downloadable previews, character sheet and such.
This is just a brief announcement, but stay tuned for more 🙂
