Amethyst Renaissance

Eventually, I’ll write some new material.

For the third time in four years, Dias Ex Machina is releasing its core setting for a game system. In 2008, it was 3.5 D&D. In 2010, it was 4th Edition under the banner of Goodman Games, followed up with Amethyst Evolution. Now in 2012, we have Amethyst Renaissance, our Pathfinder adaptation. I’m posting the details on Living Dice for two very good reasons. One, Trask is letting me, and two, Renaissance’s existence is owed directly to this website. Many readers will remember my open letter to Wizards of the Coast, which gained its own pulse and generated thousands of hits in only a few days. Long chains of posts followed, with debates posted on EnWorld and WOTC’s own forum. Although I did eventually talk to someone at WOTC only a few months ago, it was Vic Wertz from Paizo that offered the tentacle of friendship initially (only a week after the original posting). He invited me into his realm, and I felt welcome. Amethyst Renaissance is the result of this tête-à-tête.

So what about Renaissance?

Effectively, it has the same setting background from Amethyst Foundations / Evolution along with all the crunch, adapted to 3.75 Pathfinder. It is NOT an update of our original 2008 D20 book but a wholly new beast built from the DNA of our later 4th Edition books, though I’ll admit some elements of the old D20 edition did manage to sneak in. To cover the specifics, it has all ten original races, eight technology-based classes (where Foundations had only four), dozens of new traits based off our old lifepaths, a bunch of paragon paths, and probably a hundred or so feats (I lost count). Of course, it also has all the equipment listings compiled from all our books, as well as all the vehicles and monsters.

In all, we got nearly 400 pages of content, saturated with all the Amethyst artwork we had acquired in the past four years, all oversized so buyers can truly enjoy the quality of its details. We’re also throwing in high resolution images of all our color prints as well as the continent map of Canam.

You can pick up Amethyst Renaissance from RPGNow. The POD will follow shortly. Like our two previous books we sell the PDF first and wait for reports of glaring layout or mechanical problems. We then address those, update the PDF and follow that with the release the POD. If you purchase the PDF and want the package PDF/POD when it’s available, all you need to do is zip me message so I can send you the coupon to take advantage of the deal.

If it does well, when we do eventually return to the setting to create new content (my often delayed Amethyst Factions), it may likely come out for Pathfinder and 4th Edition. Though, by then, 5th Edition will be out, and I’ll have to release this book again, and Amethyst would transition through four different variations of the same rules. The circle continues…

You can also view the first 30 pages as a free preview here.

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Chris Dias

Chris Tavares Dias is the literary equivalent of that crusty burnt cheese at the bottom of the fondue pot. Some people claim he looks like Mathew Perry. He would like that to be true. It's not. In 2010, Chris co-wrote and created Amethyst Foundations, a 4th Edition setting based on the previous version under 3.5. It has received critical acclaim for integrating science fiction into classical fantasy. In August of this year, Chris was last seen staring at a dead raven that had fallen beside his car. Two months later, his watch and notepad were found in the stomach of a basking shark that had washed ashore off the coast of Florida.