Bruce Heard's page

Calidar: Dreams of Aerie

Hi All. My third book's crowd funding is coming up mid June. I've made my preview page available to the public. If you have suggestions or questions, please do bring them up. Thanks!

Centered on a flying circus, this mega-adventure and mini-setting can also be run in any game world, with RPG rules of your choice.

Adventure: This RPG adventure also is a self-contained mini-setting. Because the action takes place on a flying circus, Dreams of Aerie is easy to adapt to any game world. Drawing on Barnum & Bailey and Cirque du Freak, this book's main plot elements involve a murder mystery, the rivalries of circus guilds, urban adventuring, and monster-hunting. Countless hooks allow side trips and alternate storylines, as each of the 90+ circus folk hide shadowy pasts and secret motivations. The heroes must contend with secret societies vying for hegemony among circus folk. If left to its own devices, a monstrous presence hidden aboard heralds catastrophic world events.

Sourcebook: This book's setting includes the circus itself, standing amid side shows and carnie shacks, themselves surrounded by a ring of permanent shops and dwellings called aeries, perched at the edge of the clouds. Two more decks lie below with all that the Greatest Show on Calidar needs to function, as well as its dark secrets. Although written for the World of Calidar, this setting is nearly self-contained until the referee starts unfolding the hidden stories of circus folk, and connects them with the chosen game's universe.

Check the video here.

Hi gang! I’m Bruce Heard, the creator of Calidar, one of the top-rated game worlds on En-World. It is inspired from the Voyage of the Princess Ark stories I used to write for Dragon Magazine in the 80s and 90s. Some of you may remember me as the direction behind the D&D’s Mystara Gazetteers at old TSR. I wanted to invite you to watch a short (less than a minute) video about "Beyond the Skies," my new project for Calidar. This 220+ pg compendium tells all about gods, their spirit servants, and their foes, for use with any RPG. Click here to find out about it!

Greetings all,

I'm currently working on the next book for Calidar. It focuses on the Gods of the Great Caldera. A number of blog articles present an overview of Calidar's limbo and a summary of the gods. There's enough free material there to keep you reading for some time. I'm looking for feedback from the gaming community before I roll up all this material and finalize it in the book. We can discuss this here. The two key articles to get you started are:

Death and the Netherworld
Gods of the Great Caldera Pt. 1

To start the year on a good note, the price structure for the book's various formats (PDF, soft cover, hard cover book, and poster map) have been lowered, some substantially. Take advantage of this before it changes. Click here to find Calidar.

Another piece of very good news is Calidar's Number One rating on EnWorld for the past several weeks, ahead of the mighty D&D rulebooks.

So, Cheers and Happy New Year!

Bruce

Hey gang, the printer's proof for Calidar's hard cover book has been delivered and it looks great! More details and pictures are available at:

the usual spot!

Greetings from Bruce Heard,

The World of Calidar, a new project compatible with Pathfinder will soon become available via DTRPG. Here is the project description.

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First in a series of RPG accessories describing the World of Calidar and the adventures of the skyship Star Phoenix.

The World of Calidar combines two parts: the story of the skyship Star Phoenix and a fantasy campaign setting for use with role-playing games. This new fictional world focuses on air- and space-faring ships. In Stranger Skies is the title for the skyship's first story, which introduces the vessel and her journey in the skies of Calidar. The crew’s mission is one of exploration fraught with mystery and danger. The fantasy setting section gives an overview of the Calidar Universe and its central world, Calidar, with a focus on the Kingdom of Meryath, the future home of the Star Phoenix.

World of Calidar is intended as the first in a series of releases, each describing a new adventure for the Star Phoenix and providing an expansion to the campaign setting. This unusual format is inspired from the stories written for Dragon Magazine, Voyages of the Princess Ark, and of course vastly expanded here. These were very popular in the 80s and 90s and a major selling point for the magazine. Although written with role-playing games in mind, contents are non game-specific, therefore easily adaptable to most RPG systems. Guidelines are nonetheless provided in the book for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

This product includes a 132-pg premium color book, which provides the skyship's story and the fantasy setting, along with beautiful maps of the world and six color deck plans of the main types of skyships in Calidar's universe. Two related poster maps will become available on Amazon.com, one depicting the Great Caldera (Calidar's "known world"), and the Kingdom of Meryath. The latter is depicted in the popular hex-style format. The 22"x28" poster maps are produced and sold separately from the book due to limitations with print-on-demand.

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The book was submitted to the printer yesterday, Aug 19th. Poster maps have already been printed. A detailed project update is available here:

Bruce Heard's Blog

The original project description appeared last January on the Calidar's Kickstarter page:

Kickstarter Page

Feel free to drop by!

Greetings to all,

I wanted to update all of you on a specific issue of the Calidar project. We plan to include a set of guidelines to help adapt the Calidar setting to Pathfinder game mechanics. Details are still being worked out, but Thomas Reid, former TSR designer and editor, will be the author of that section.

Now that this is getting one step closer to the Pathfinder game, some of you here might want to have a look at this project: Calidar Project

My blog site is another place where Calidar is discussed, including a series of free promotional short stories depicting various aspects of this new campaign setting: Fun Stuff!

Thanks for your enthusiasm and support,

Happy New Year!

Bruce Heard & the Calidar team