Carnage & Aether Playthrough: The Silent Gods, Part 1
Alright, it’s time to play the Crunchlord! The game that can actually chip your dice and make them look worn from so much use.
Carnage & Aether is an arena-battler created by the one and only Alex T. from Blackoath Entertainment, loosely inspired by the Monster Hunter video game series. We fight opponents, harvest their parts, and craft new equipment toward a desired build, mixing and matching abilities, passives, and attributes.
The game is set in the same world of Ker Nethalas, Blackoath’s dungeon crawler and magnum opus, so it’s considered a spin-off. They’re separate games though, and play very differently.
I’ve played a ton of it already before deciding on writing a playthrough. The thing is, despite the jokes, the game is actually really crunchy, and I’m not sure how the gameplay would translate to the written form. As I always wanna portray the games in their best, I was torn on it, but C&A is just too fun and underrated. A lot more people should play it, so here I am.
That’s enough rambling, let’s get to it.
Character creation
Our character is a Revenant, someone between life and death given a second chance by fighting a series of increasingly difficult battles in the arena of Veldonia.
Until you become Reborn you are nothing but a Revenant, though, a living corpse, alive but dead. Or at least in the eyes of the gods, the king, and your fellow citizens, that is. You are still very much alive, and the pain and suffering you’ll experience in the arena will be a constant reminder of it.
We’ve been accused of a crime and condemned for it. However, we weren’t executed.
But for some reason, the gods have a new path for you, one full of violence, blood, and pain. And at the end of it, if you survive, true freedom.
Starting with the basics. I’m playing a 30-ish year old woman named Noa Galavahn. She has a lean, wiry physique. Her long black hair hangs dirty and greasy. Filth clings to her clothes and her skin, but her sharp jaw and a perfect, pointed nose makes her seem dignified, and is often mistaken for condescension.
Token for Noa
Now we decide on her past life. I’ll roll on tables to find out who she was before becoming a Revenant and what crime she was accused of:
Who Were You?
D20: 10 = Priest: You serve a deity that demands grim sacrifices, and you struggle with your faith as the divine requests grow darker. +10 Resolve.
Which Crime Were You Accused Of?
D20: 19 = Child Theft: Kidnapping or abducting children for various reasons, including ransom, forced labor, or adoption without consent.
Oh, no. Perfect for a priestess, right?
Anyway, I’m interpreting those as Noa being a keeper of rites performed in darkness and silence, in service to old gods, never forgotten. Their miracles had little to do with healing or mercy. They demanded sacrifices to realize their grim will, and those demands started showing the face of children.
Noa went after the sick, cursed, or simply chosen children in homes and temples, and abducted them all as her gods ordered.
And then she kept them safe, away from their vicious ceremonies and mad clerics.
They found her, tortured her, took the children away, and sent her to Veldonia.
The gods never intervened.
Now, we start filling our sheet, following the book. I won’t bother explaining most things because it’s all pretty straightforward. I’ll post the final sheet at the end.
We choose a starting weapon that grants the corresponding skill a score of 60. I’m going with a Claw (Unarmed & Fists skill). Then we get some armor, a helmet, gloves, and boots. They all add a bonus to our skills.
Finally, we get two rings. Each one has the Mastery Sigaldry Property, which allows Revenants to choose two Tier 1 Mastery Abilities. We haven’t picked our two starting abilities yet, so let’s do it.
Masteries and abilities are the core of our builds, and that’s one of the ways we make our characters shine.
They cost Dedication to unlock. Different Ability Tiers have different Dedication costs. Tier 1 Abilities cost 5, and those are the only ones we can have for now. We start with 150 Dedication, and we can spend them all now if we want, on any Tier as long as we can afford it, but there’s little point since we can only equip two Tier 1 Abilities, one on each ring. So we’ll dive into more Abilities later.
I’m going with Tiers 1 from Brawler and Weapons Master.
Brawler Tier 1: Iron Fists
Passive: Your fists are your weapon, and you’ve trained hard to make them as strong as iron. Increase the damage dealt while unarmed to D6, and by +D4 when using fist weapons.
Weapons Master Tier 1: Evasive Strike
Passive: You simultaneously attack and avoid any incoming blows. Whenever you score a hit with your weapon, you deal your usual damage and your next defensive check receives +10.
Noa gets a little more damage with Fist weapons and some survivability in the form of dodging/blocking.
That costs a total of 10 Dedication, leaving us with 140. Those Abilities are now slotted in the starting rings we have equipped, so they’ll be active during our next battle.
If we unlock Abilities but don’t insert them in our equipment, we don’t get their benefits. As you can see, as the game goes on, making a build involves juggling equipment with the right properties and skills.
We can have as many Masteries as we want. The only restriction is that Abilities must be unlocked in order, from Tier 1 to Tier 5. Tier 5 Abilities cost 150 Dedication, so that’ll require some serious investment.
All these starting items are Bone tier, the lowest and most basic. As we go up in Ranks, we unlock better equipment tiers (Bone > Bronze > Iron > Steel). After the first battle, we can use any harvested material to slot properties into them. I’ll explain it better when we get to it.
We’re done with character creation. Here’s Noa’s sheet: C&A Sheet
By the way, I do have some house rules that I think I’ll be using in this playthrough. They’re really simple, and not game breaking or anything, just aimed to reduce the grinding a little. You can check them here: C&A House Rules
I’ll go over those aspects in the future.
But that’s it for this session. Noa is thrown into the arena with a shabby bone claw to see if she can survive the initial chaff. Winning or dying, the crowd will have their entertainment.
The gods remain silent.
Carnage & Aether is available on Itch, DTRPG, and as POD on Amazon.
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