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Your City Shapes You in the floating lands of Aether Skies

How Your Skyborne Home Defines Who You Are in Aether Skies

In the floating world of Aether Skies, the place you’re from isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a lens through which you see the world.
The sky may be shared, but life in gilded Orashul is nothing like survival in trash-strewn Purgamentum.
Your city shapes your values, your biases, your ambitions… and your scars.

When your character steps onto an airship deck or down a foreign street, they carry the weight of their home’s air in their lungs.

🏙️ Why Your City Matters

A character’s origin city is more than a dot on a map—it’s:

• A social framework (who they trust, who they don’t)

• A cultural toolkit (what skills they learned just to survive)

• A moral compass (what’s worth protecting, and what’s worth burning down)

It also gives the GM rich material for worldbuilding—politics, rivals, slang, and secrets.

🏛️ City Archetypes & How They Shape You

Here are some examples from Aether Skies:

Orashul – The Gilded Heights

• Atmosphere: Marble promenades, crystal domes, and politicians in embroidered robes.

• Values: Elegance, tradition, reputation.

• View on the World: The sky is orderly if you know your place.

• Impact on Characters:

  • Likely educated and articulate, but may look down on “uncultured” outsiders.

  • Carries the pressure of family name and public image.

  • Knows the art of subtle politics—sometimes to a manipulative degree.

Purgamentum – The Heap in the Clouds

• Atmosphere: A labyrinth of junk, scrap shanties, and smoke-belching refineries.

• Values: Resourcefulness, loyalty to your own, “use every part of the beast.”

• View on the World: The sky is hostile—grab what you can before it’s gone.

• Impact on Characters:

  • Inventive and practical, used to making do with nothing.

  • Distrustful of polished promises.

  • Fiercely protective of what’s theirs, quick to scrap (verbally or physically).

Theopholis – The Holy Mantle

• Atmosphere: Bell towers, sanctioned markets, streets swept clean under watchful clergy.

• Values: Piety, moral duty, obedience to divine law.

• View on the World: The sky is sacred and must be preserved from corruption.

• Impact on Characters:

  • May have strong convictions—whether devout or rebellious against the faith.

  • Familiar with navigating systems of ritual and authority.

  • Possesses moral clarity… or rigid judgment.

Kerfluffle – The Rebel’s Stage

• Atmosphere: Hanging gardens of graffiti, music echoing through pipe tunnels, sly grins in shadowed markets.

• Values: Freedom of expression, defiance, art as weapon.

• View on the World: The sky is a stage—make your mark before it blows away.

• Impact on Characters:

  • Quick-witted, loud, and unafraid to provoke.

  • Views rules as guidelines at best.

  • Uses charm or spectacle to get out of trouble (or deeper into it).

🎭 Bringing City Influence into Play

For Players:

• Work your city’s values into your decision-making—even when inconvenient.

• Use slang, cultural habits, and etiquette unique to your city.

• Decide what prejudices or assumptions your upbringing gave you—and whether you reinforce or challenge them.

For GMs:

• Reward city-specific approaches to problems (a Purgamentum tinkerer solving things with scrap ingenuity).

• Bring NPCs from the character’s city into the story—with offers, news, or trouble.

• Use the politics of their home city to pull them into larger conflicts.

🧩 Prompt Questions for Session Zero

• What’s your city’s reputation, and how do you feel about it?

• What’s something only people from your city understand?

• What’s the worst thing about your home? The best thing?

• If you never returned, what would you miss most?

• Who or what in your city would you betray everything to protect?

✨ Final Thought: You Can Leave the City, But…

The sky may stretch forever, but the place you came from shapes your heart, your habits, and your shadows.

In Aether Skies, you don’t just carry your city’s colors on your sleeve—you carry its ghosts in your bones.

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