Aetos: The State of the Game

Annus Cartographiae. The year of mapping.

338 weekdays ago, on May 9th, 2025, I challenged myself to draw the largest map of my career for 365 days. Little did I know that this project would become so much larger than just a map.

Where did it all start?
When we started, it was quite literally just an art challenge. For the next three months, that’s how it continued, but I wanted it to be something more. Engagement was low and I wanted more and more people to see my daily short videos and give ideas for what to draw next. I reached out to other mapping artists to collab with them on locations for the map, hoping for more visibility. During the same time, I decided I wanted to turn it into some sort of game. Over the next week, at the end of July 2025, I spent my time writing down lore from the creation of the world of Aetos (then called Aeros) to the present day. It wasn’t perfect, but that 5,000 word flood of ideas and timeline built the foundation for the political landscape today.

The Original “Battle for Aetos”
Season One: Days of the Future began shortly after. I drew out a grid board and using figures from the Risk board game, the first battle between Chahar and Taealar took place in a town called Erak. The game closely resembled Risk and it eventually got very monotonous after several weeks. We had two or three players who joined in now and then and often no one would show up to streams. It was boring and I knew it. I remember one stream where my girlfriend at the time and one player named Mithril sat on stream, mid battle, when I suddenly went, “you know what, let’s end the battle here. I wanna make a new game because this is boring.” For the rest of the stream, I talked to Mithril about how to make the game more interesting. My girlfriend told me about a trend where this person would tell their followers that they were part of District X and suggested I do something similar. With my new ideas for the Battle for Aetos and how to get people to play it, I set to making my changes. The posts were launched sometime in Season 2 (at the time we had nine factions up from four) and many of them immediately started to gain traction, some even going viral. A handful of players joined the discord server (then called Ethan’s Writing League) and the new game where you controlled a champion began.

The Evolution of Aetos
It was never in the plans to make Aetos a large board game, but over time, it obviously evolved. Many different features and ideas came and went. The Wanderer’s Handbook didn’t actually exist for a while, but I saw the need and wrote down all the rules and posted it to a channel. One of the players, Bjørn, created an app for the very rudimentary Handbook and inspired me to make a fully polished handbook. The rules were loose. You could do anything. But chaos quietly spread and players went off script. The revised handbook was eventually published in December 2025 and introduced hard rules about character creation, battling, and other small aspects. During this time, I created stats for each character on stream. It was slow, clunky, and there was no hard system. The players wanted to make their own stats, so over the following months, I created a stat creation system, eventually released in March or April 2026. Also during this time, roleplaying wasn’t common in the Discord server. A small handful of players were actively roleplaying, but I wanted to make it easier to get into roleplaying. Early 2026 began the process of creating systems for every type of play in Aetos, but role play started with me taking on the role of a game master. For a few weeks I role played with players, again with a soft, DnD like system. It took much of my time and I eventually had to stop it. In its place, I made a list of guidelines for role play to eventually be replaced by a role play update.

The Aetos Pass, Dev Updates, and Balancing Personal Life
The following seasons, starting from Season 7 or 8 through Season 10, began a pattern of excitement, burn out, and crushing work. I wanted to work on updates most importantly, but videos and the recently announced Aetos Pass demanded my attention. For three or four months, I attempted to balance the work, but it was slow and in a way, failed. Promises were unkept, rewards came late, and videos felt more like an undesirable burden than a passion project. Yet through the Aetos Pass, I had hope. I set a goal to reach $100 worth of Patreon/Aetos Pass members by the series finale for me to continue the world of Aetos, then continued to grind through my work. Season 9 was my catch up season. I would stop at nothing to catch up on late work and make Season 10 a comfortable one for myself. The Discord server demanded my attention and I poured too much emotional energy into it. It was cut. Updates were fun, but the Aetos Pass coming out on time and having videos to get new members were priority number one, so updates were mostly cut unless I was able to work on them during the weekend. Season 10 was the month that I would not be behind. And it payed off. Everything but the Season 10 premiere video came out on time, and even then, the premiere was released only four days late. I finally had time to work on the things I had neglected, and boy did they need work.

The Explosion
A common theme has always been this: get more players. The more players there were, the more fun streams would be, the more stories there would be around the world, the fuller the world would feel. In early Season 9, I wanted to do something about it, so I launched Small Faction Appreciation Week. For a week straight, I released a daily video introducing a small faction and recruiting people to it. In that week, the Discord server grew from around 200 members to over 1.2k members and growing. It was overwhelming and I needed help. I recruited the aid of some players to help mod and keep control over the sudden influx. It was no longer a small community game. It was finally becoming the large scale MMOTTRPG that I wanted.

Modern Aetos
Looking at how Aetos started and how it is today, it is very different. Things changed much over the single year of its existence. So what does Aetos look like today? Aetos is an ever evolving, living game. Features come and go, rules strengthen themselves, stats nerf and buff; things are never the same for very long. Currently, the game is built as a war game—all features are intended for soldiers. Systems help you role play and battle to the most enjoyment possible while allowing you to do whatever you want, even if that isn’t being part of your faction’s military. But unfortunately, we are in between what Aetos was and what it is supposed to be. Systems clash. Growing pains can be experienced. The game is still rough around the edges. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The End of a Chapter
The Aetos Series Finale is right around the corner, beginning on September 22nd. The climax of all wars in Aetos thus far is coming and many unanswered questions linger. Where is Aetos going after the finale? What is the series finale? Can I still play Aetos after the finale?

The series finale will begin September 22nd and end September 26th. Every day for those five days there will be a livestream focusing on a different aspect of Aetos. Every player is invited. On the fifth day, Aetos Volume 1 will come to a close then on the following Monday, the final touches to the map of Aetos will be made and Aetos will take a break for an undetermined period of time.

The Future
Although a chapter is ending, Aetos is not. The Aetos app is currently in development, introducing a streamlined way to access your rewards, features to complete quests easier, new cosmetics, chat with fellow players, and a better way to role play. With the end of Volume 1, a battlefield will hopefully be added to the app in time for you to enjoy and play while I am away working on Aetos. The battlefield feature will allow you to match up against other players like yourself and fight with your stats or custom, non-canon stats. After all that, you will likely not hear much from me or from Aetos for a little while beyond updates and teasers. No Aetos Pass or quests will be announced, but if you wish to stay the most updated and help fund the future of Aetos, the Patreon will be restructured and I will do my best to post content there. So what will I be working on during this break? Quite a bit, actually. My biggest plan is to expand Aetos beyond just a war game, introducing new archetypes like explorers, politicians, and merchants. I want to make Aetos fun and friendly to every type of player and expand the horizons beyond just a weekly battle stream. Alongside that, Volume 2, Season 1 will be in development: a new Aetos Pass, new rewards, new ways to play, and a brand new story where you the player will have more influence than ever before. Will this all happen by the launch of Volume 2? No, there is no telling what I will be able to accomplish. How long will it take? Could take weeks, could take months. I offer no promises, just hope and inspiration for what is to come.

Aetos is no longer what I once wanted it to be… and that’s ok! I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would become a structured game like it has. It was once a game that anyone on any platform could play. Then it became a Discord game. And now it is even growing out of that, becoming something larger, something greater.

I want Aetos to be a place where you come to unite with other people all across the globe, from the United States to Europe to Australia to enjoy a world of endless possibility, to experience the same love I have for fantastical and fictional worlds in an ever-changing environment.

I hope you enjoy the journey and happy questing, traveler!