Aether is everything you want from a full-priced fantasy RPG. At its core lies its innovative and highly intriguing rules system, ditching dice in favor of a deck of playing cards (a genius move in my opinion, as playing cards are easily available while still offering a lot of room for the aesthetic aficionados among us to come prepared with custom art decks). Aether's author Crow really put a lot of thought into the card-based core mechanics, making it at least as exciting, if not more so, to flip over cards than to roll dice. Very intricate, highly creative.

Aside from its core system, Aether provides you with a character creation system that is at the same time straight-forward and also very customizable and extremely evocative. Blood magic, time magic, fate magic, any kind of JRPG skill shenanigans... you got it, it's yours my friend.

Aether doesn't just shine through its ruleset though. The sizable core rulebook comes with a very well thought-out GMing section, a full ruleset for running session 0, safety tools, etc.

It's apparent that EldritchCrow poured heart and soul into this game, and it shows. It's meaty, but also streamlined; innovative without being too complicated. Aether can definitely stand with it's head held high among other setting-agnostic fantasy RPGs like Quest, Dungeon World or the Dragon game.