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Aether Skies: Mapping the Uncharted Regions Beyond the Trade Routes

The known skies of Aether Skies are dangerous enough.

Airships navigate aether currents, merchant guilds control trade routes, sky pirates hunt vulnerable vessels, and enormous creatures move through the clouds. Ancient ruins drift through forgotten regions, and every skywreck tells the story of someone who pushed a little too far beyond the safety of civilization.

But the trade routes only represent a fraction of what exists above the surface world.

There are thirteen floating cities known to civilization, scattered across the vast reaches of the skies. They are the great anchors of the known world, connected by established routes that merchants, explorers, military vessels, and adventurers have learned to navigate.

Beyond them?

Danger.

Mystery.

And enormous stretches of sky that have never been properly mapped.

In our previous article, Aether Skies: Skywrecks Every Adventuring Party Wants to Explore, we explored the remains of airships lost to the dangers of the sky. Those wrecks are evidence of what happens when travelers leave the safety of established routes.

Now we’re going even farther.

What happens when an adventuring party deliberately leaves the map?

The Thirteen Floating Cities

The thirteen floating cities are more than settlements.

They are the foundations of civilization in the sky.

Each city has its own culture, industries, factions, traditions, and relationship with the surrounding skies. Some may be enormous metropolitan centers connected by busy trade routes. Others could be isolated settlements where everyone knows that leaving the city means entering dangerous territory.

Together, the thirteen cities create the illusion that the skies are well understood.

They aren’t.

The trade routes connecting these cities are like roads through an enormous wilderness. Travelers know where the roads are safe. They know where the major hazards are. They know which aether currents are predictable.

But look at a map of the known world and you’ll notice something.

There are huge empty spaces between those routes.

The empty spaces are where adventures begin.

The Sky Beyond the Map

Maps are comforting.

They give adventurers the impression that the world has boundaries.

Aether Skies should constantly challenge that assumption.

Beyond the established trade routes, the party might encounter regions where the aether behaves differently. Currents could flow in unexpected directions. Compasses may stop working. Familiar stars might disappear behind strange atmospheric phenomena.

The further the characters travel, the less reliable their maps become.

Eventually, they aren’t following a map anymore.

They’re making one.

That changes the entire feeling of an adventure.

The players aren’t simply traveling somewhere.

They are going somewhere nobody from their civilization has properly documented.

The Cartographers of the Aether

Someone has to make the maps.

That makes cartographers an important part of Aether Skies.

Aether cartographers don’t simply draw coastlines and mountains. They chart magical currents, atmospheric conditions, floating islands, dangerous creatures, storm patterns, abandoned ruins, and safe anchor points.

The best cartographers are adventurers themselves.

They travel aboard specialized exploration vessels equipped with observation decks, surveying equipment, magical instruments, and enormous quantities of blank charts.

Their work can be incredibly valuable.

A newly discovered aether current could shorten travel between two cities by weeks.

A safe route through an unexplored region could become the foundation of a new trade network.

A newly discovered floating island might contain magical resources worth fortunes.

This means exploration isn’t merely adventurous.

It’s profitable.

The First Map Is Never the Final Map

One of the most interesting ways to handle exploration is to make maps incomplete.

The characters might discover an old chart showing an enormous floating island.

When they reach the location, there is nothing there.

Perhaps the island moved.

Maybe the map was wrong.

Perhaps the island only appears during certain atmospheric conditions.

Or maybe someone deliberately altered the map.

This gives maps a history of their own.

A centuries-old chart might contain information that modern cartographers consider impossible. A forgotten route could lead somewhere that no longer exists.

An old explorer may have drawn an island that nobody else has ever found.

Was it destroyed?

Was it hidden?

Or did the explorer discover something they never had the opportunity to explain?

The Thirteenth City Should Not Be Easy to Reach

If there are thirteen known floating cities, consider making the thirteenth dramatically different from the others.

Perhaps it is the furthest city from the others, sitting at the edge of the known trade routes.

Traveling there requires passing through increasingly dangerous skies.

Maybe merchants rarely visit because the journey isn’t profitable enough.

Maybe the city was founded specifically as a staging point for explorers heading into the unknown.

Its taverns would be filled with people telling stories about places they’ve seen beyond the map.

Some are true.

Most aren’t.

And every once in a while, someone walks into the city carrying an artifact that proves one of the impossible stories was real.

Beyond the Thirteenth City

What lies beyond the final city?

That’s where the campaign can become truly open-ended.

The characters could discover that the thirteen cities are only the civilized portion of a much larger world.

Perhaps there are other floating settlements beyond them.

Maybe entire civilizations have developed in regions that the thirteen cities don’t even know exist.

There could be enormous floating continents.

Sky oceans.

Permanent storms.

Ancient ruins larger than cities.

Or something else entirely.

The point isn’t to define everything immediately.

The unknown should remain unknown.

The Surface World Below

The surface world should remain important even when the campaign takes place high above it.

From the thirteen cities, the surface may be distant, mysterious, or even forgotten.

Perhaps clouds permanently obscure it.

Maybe ancient records claim that civilization once lived there before some catastrophe drove people into the sky.

Perhaps nobody living in the floating cities has ever actually visited the surface.

That makes expeditions downward just as exciting as expeditions outward.

Imagine an adventuring party discovering an ancient elevator hidden within a floating ruin.

It doesn’t go upward.

It goes down.

Very far down.

Suddenly the characters aren’t simply exploring an uncharted region of the sky.

They’re heading toward a world their civilization has spent generations ignoring.

Why Don’t People Explore?

If the unexplored regions contain resources, ruins, and potential riches, why haven’t they been mapped already?

The answer should be simple.

People try.

They die.

This gives the setting weight.

There should be names of famous explorers whose expeditions never returned. Memorials might exist in the thirteen cities. Universities could display the final maps created by legendary cartographers.

Every few years, someone announces an ambitious expedition.

Sometimes they return.

Often they don’t.

The fact that people regularly disappear beyond the trade routes should make exploration feel dangerous without requiring every journey to become a death sentence.

The characters aren’t the first people foolish enough to try.

They’re simply the latest.

The Last Known Position

One fantastic adventure hook begins with a map.

Not an ancient map.

A recent one.

An exploration ship disappeared three months ago while surveying an unexplored region. The party is given the expedition’s final known coordinates.

There’s no distress signal.

No wreckage.

No survivors.

Just one final entry in the ship’s navigation log.

The characters are hired to find out what happened.

When they reach the location, they discover the ship.

It is intact.

The crew is gone.

And according to the ship’s instruments, the expedition never left the location.

Something is wrong with the sky around them.

Islands That Move

Floating islands don’t necessarily have to remain stationary.

Some might drift with aether currents.

Others could migrate deliberately.

Perhaps entire ecosystems travel across the sky according to ancient patterns.

This creates an enormous challenge for cartographers.

You can’t simply mark an island on a map.

You need to understand where it is going.

Some islands could only be reached once every few years.

Others might appear for a few days before disappearing into distant skies.

This also creates opportunities for seasonal adventures.

An island that contains a rare magical resource might become accessible for only one week every decade.

Whoever reaches it first controls the resource.

The Aether Currents Nobody Understands

The established trade routes exist because their aether currents are predictable.

Beyond those routes, currents may behave strangely.

A current could accelerate an airship to incredible speeds.

Another might slow time.

One might cause ships to travel sideways through the sky without changing their heading.

There could even be currents that carry vessels upward indefinitely.

These regions can become natural barriers.

Instead of placing an invisible wall around unexplored territory, let the sky itself provide the challenge.

The characters aren’t told they can’t go there.

They simply have to figure out how.

The Storm Regions

Some areas of Aether Skies may be permanently hidden behind enormous storms.

These aren’t ordinary weather systems.

They could be magical phenomena that have existed for centuries.

Lightning might travel upward instead of downward. Clouds could become solid enough to walk upon. Aether energy might become visible as glowing rivers through the sky.

Nobody knows what lies inside.

Expeditions disappear.

Occasionally something emerges.

And whatever comes out isn’t always something that anyone recognizes.

The characters could spend an entire campaign trying to discover what exists beyond one particular storm.

Sky Beasts Beyond Civilization

The further the characters travel from the thirteen cities, the less familiar the creatures become.

The creatures near civilization have adapted to airships, trade routes, aether engines, and settlements.

Beyond the known routes, the characters can encounter species that have never seen a civilization before.

Some may be enormous.

Others could be incredibly intelligent.

A species might have developed an entire society within a remote floating ecosystem.

This is where the earlier Aether Skies articles about sky beasts can become useful again.

The creatures aren’t simply monsters waiting to attack.

They are part of an ecosystem the characters don’t understand.

An aggressive creature might be protecting its territory.

A seemingly harmless migration could signal something enormous following behind it.

A strange predator could be the only thing keeping an even more dangerous species from reaching the thirteen cities.

The Explorers Who Never Came Back

Every unexplored region should have stories.

Perhaps the most famous is the expedition that disappeared fifty years ago.

The expedition was enormous.

Three airships.

Forty-seven crew members.

A team of scholars.

Military escorts.

The best cartographers of the era.

None returned.

Until now.

An airship appears over one of the thirteen cities.

It is unmistakably part of the missing expedition.

The vessel looks exactly as it did when it disappeared.

The crew is still aboard.

But nobody has aged.

And they refuse to explain where they’ve been.

That single event could launch an entire campaign.

Mapping the Unknown as a Campaign Structure

Exploration campaigns can sometimes struggle with direction.

The characters know they want to explore, but what do they actually do?

Mapping provides a natural structure.

Each expedition begins with a destination.

The characters travel into unknown territory.

They discover landmarks.

They record aether currents.

They encounter creatures.

They locate ruins.

They establish safe anchor points.

They return to civilization.

Then they prepare for the next expedition.

Over time, the players literally fill in the blank spaces on the map.

This gives the campaign a visible sense of progress.

The world becomes larger because of what the characters have accomplished.

Let the Players Draw the Map

One of the most satisfying approaches is to give the players an actual map of the known skies and leave unexplored regions blank.

When they discover something, add it.

A floating island.

A dangerous current.

A ruined temple.

A monster migration route.

A strange storm.

An abandoned skywreck.

A new settlement.

The map becomes a campaign artifact.

Eventually, the players can look at the original blank spaces and see everything they discovered.

But leave some blanks.

Always leave some blanks.

There should always be somewhere they haven’t gone.

The First Contact Problem

Eventually, the characters may encounter people who have never heard of the thirteen cities.

This creates one of the most interesting possibilities in an exploration campaign.

The characters aren’t necessarily the most advanced civilization.

They may discover societies that have developed completely independently.

Perhaps these people don’t use airships.

Maybe they ride enormous sky beasts.

Perhaps they use living plants to generate aether.

They could have entirely different concepts of ownership, trade, warfare, magic, or exploration.

The players arrive expecting to be explorers.

Instead, they discover that they are the strange outsiders.

What If the Map Is Wrong?

Here’s a particularly fun twist.

The thirteen cities might not actually be arranged the way everyone thinks.

Ancient maps could reveal that the cities themselves are moving.

Perhaps they orbit something enormous.

Maybe they are pieces of a gigantic machine.

Perhaps the cities aren’t independent at all.

They could be components of a forgotten civilization’s enormous construction.

The thirteen cities may have been built according to a pattern that nobody alive understands.

And once the characters map the surrounding skies accurately enough, they realize what that pattern is.

The Unknown Is the Point

Aether Skies doesn’t need to explain everything.

In fact, it shouldn’t.

The thirteen floating cities provide civilization.

The trade routes provide familiarity.

The unexplored regions provide possibility.

Beyond the maps are stories waiting to happen.

There might be civilizations older than the thirteen cities. There might be monsters that have never been named. There might be floating islands nobody has ever seen. There might be ancient technologies capable of changing the balance of power across the entire sky.

Or there might be nothing.

And that’s okay too.

Because exploration isn’t about knowing what you’ll find.

It’s about going anyway.

Every Blank Space Is an Adventure

The most exciting thing a Game Master can put on a map isn’t a dungeon.

It isn’t a city.

It isn’t a treasure.

It’s an empty space.

An area marked simply UNKNOWN gives players something that a detailed map can’t.

Possibility.

In Aether Skies, the thirteen floating cities are the lights of civilization scattered across an enormous sky. Between those lights are dangerous aether currents, forgotten ruins, skywrecks, strange creatures, lost expeditions, and places where nobody knows what waits beyond the clouds.

Many explorers have gone looking.

Many never came back.

Maybe that’s because the uncharted regions are too dangerous.

Maybe the explorers simply weren’t prepared.

Or maybe something out there doesn’t want to be found.

And eventually, the player characters will have to decide whether the blank space on the map is worth filling in.

Because the greatest adventures in Aether Skies may begin where the trade routes end.

Thanks for reading. Until Next Time, Stay Nerdy!!