Aetherpunk

Aetherpunk is an AI-narrated tabletop RPG set in a single, hand-built world — a neon-and-occult city called Arcadia. You play a Runner, and you act in plain natural language: sneak, negotiate, threaten, investigate, trade, or fight. An AI narrates how the city responds, while a local rules system quietly keeps track of everything that actually happened.

It's an experiment in one specific idea, explained below.

The world — Arcadia

Gothic towers, Hellenic halls, and ruthless corporate glass are crammed into one skyline, stitched together by glowing magical conduits and sky-rail. Above it all hangs Akasha's transmission crystal — vast, cold, and recording every spell you cast into a central server.

Magic here has version numbers, compatibility problems, and revocable authorization. The Arcanet bundles casting, identity, payment, and surveillance into one subscription you can't really refuse — and the leaderless underground Codex Chorus calls it the most comfortable cage ever built. You move between three districts, each with its own pressure:

• Nexus — corporate order. Every spell leaves a mark; every step is recorded.
• Bleed — neon, graffiti, black-market mods, Chorus signs in the wall corners.
• Spire — old-blood academy tradition, where everyone measures your bloodline and permission level.

The core idea — local mechanics × LLM narration

Most AI-RPGs hand the model everything, so it forgets your HP, invents items you don't have, and contradicts what happened a few messages ago. Aetherpunk is built on a deliberate split:

• A local rules engine owns the truth. It saves and validates every hard result — HP, overload, credits, inventory, NPC relationships, mission settlement — and cross-checks the AI's output against the real game state. If the narration claims something the rules don't allow, the local side corrects it. State lives in code, not in the model's memory.
• The LLM owns the telling. Its job is the narration — scenes, NPC voices, how the city reacts. It proposes outcomes through structured tags, but it never silently rewrites your stats or your past.

Because of that split:

• Your actions don't get retconned. What happened is on the ledger, not at the mercy of the next message.
• The world keeps moving when you leave. Time advances, weather shifts, NPCs accumulate grudges and favors, missions get archived.
• NPCs persist as real records — personality, pronouns, bloodline ties, history, and combat logs, kept in an archive rather than improvised fresh each turn. People you helped remember. People you crossed remember too.

How to play

1. Create a Runner — bloodline, faction, origin, attributes, terminal, and gear.
2. Take a briefing — pick a structured contract, or just walk into a district and let your character state decide how the city reacts.
3. Act in natural language — describe what you want; the AI narrates, the local system records.
4. Live with the consequences — the city remembers, and your unfinished business becomes someone else's motive.

• Play in browser (no install): https://archim-nov.github.io/AetherPunk/
• Desktop client (Windows/Linux): GitHub Releases page

Requirements & honest notes

• It runs in your browser or as a desktop client (Windows/Linux). No install needed for the web version.
• You bring your own LLM API key. There's no paid backend — you plug your own key into settings, so the cost stays small and entirely yours. Native Google Gemini is recommended (the world prompt is stable every turn, so context caching keeps it cheap).
• This is an experiment, and some seams show. Mobile display and localization are still rough in places; English is the most polished language for now.
• Feedback — especially the blunt kind — is genuinely welcome.