Molten Aether is a collection of role-playing and creative writing settings, characters, and ongoing plot lines designed to allow new and experienced writers / role players alike to enjoy a creative environment for new ideas. Through our three primary settings the site spans from classic renaissance / medieval themes (based roughly on d20 SRD) to science fiction (loosely based on mix of multiple science fiction genres but rooted in Star Trek).
Our writing and role play is split largely between our web forum and our Discord server. The chat server allow for real time or near-real-time writing, discussion, and role playing. The forum allows for everyone to access a place for long form and less time sensitive writing. It is a good place to post stories, poetry, artwork, and the like which tends to get lost in the flow of a live chat server. We also have an area on the forum to post notes called the Infinite Codex which works like a kind of informal Wiki where a post can be edited multiple times and replied to like any other post.
We consider role playing to just be another form of writing, encouraging people to fill out as much of their character personalities, back story, and traits as possible. The goal is to make as deep and meaningful of a character as possible. Often times as a character begins to develop the player will write more in depth back stories and the like on the forum. Thus when we talk about role playing, it is really more collaborative writing. Since we focus on the creative writing aspect of role playing, we do not employ a standard dice-based or otherwise chance-based system. Instead we rely on Free Form Role Play or FFRP.
The main purpose of this site is to keep everyone in the game (or whoever wants to know more) informed about the current state of the game. Users should feel free to follow or otherwise comment on posts. Commenting on posts requires an account on our Discourse forum, which is linked above.
Free Form Role Play
The main component of a free form system is the lack of dice rolls or other systems of chance to decide things. We do, occasionally, use dice but not in a systematic way. Rather we use dice to resolve conflicts or add spice to a game. A player can choose to roll dice to decide an outcome or not. The system is based on the idea of collaboration and communication around a story arc that the players wish to explore.
In this, communication is a key component. Someone wishing to explore a story arc (we call them storylines or SL’s often for short) should communicate their goals with participating players. Players should then communicate intentions to the person running the story arc, if that event has the chance to disrupt the arc itself. The increased communication between players may be jarring to players new to the idea, however, it becomes clear during larger events how nice it can be to talk things over and decide on a general path for characters and the arc itself. Often times the details are left in the air but a general direction is decided on — i.e. where the story is headed, but not how it gets there.
Blazing Umbra or Molten Aether?
The site was originally dedicated to our main, science fiction, setting called Blazing Umbra, which is set in a Star Trek-like universe. However, with repeated requests we expanded our site to include two other settings; Angelic Sins and Embers of Soteria for modern-horror and medieval-magical fans respectively. Under all three settings, we got a new name — Molten Aether.