Miska Fredman

Astraterra RPG English Edition Coming Soon!

Added 2020-05-25 09:45:20 +0000 UTC

This is not directly related to my maps, but I thought I'd share this here also.

I guess I'm more known for my cartography outside Finland, but in my home country I'm probably more known as an RPG publisher and designer. I've been running my own small-press publishing company, Ironspine Press, since 2006, and Astraterra is my most popular tabletop RPG.

The first edition of Astraterra was published in 2014 and the second edition came out in 2017. There's been many twists and turns in translating Astraterra, but now I can finally say with confidence, that it's coming out later this summer in late-July / early-August.

Different species and character classes of Astraterra

Astraterra - A Steam Fantasy Role-Playing Game

Astraterra’s genre is steam fantasy. This is not a very common or well-known genre, so let’s explain a bit.

Calling Astraterra steampunk would be misleading, because it is not set in an alternate history, nor is it stylistically close to the Victorian era. Even if the Malorian Empire uses a lot of steam power and factories, it does not represent the British Empire of the Victorian Age – frankly, it is more like Tolmekia from Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind.

Astraterra is also unlike traditional fantasy, with its knights, wizards, and dragons. Calling Astraterra merely “fantasy” would be misleading and contain assumptions about mystic magic as part of the world. Astraterra has no magic, though the machines of the Ancestors and the psychic powers of the mancers may look like it.

And so, steam fantasy is the best description for a world that combines the wondrousness and medieval societies of fantasy with the steam engines and impossible scientific breakthroughs of steampunk.

You can read more about Astraterra on its website at www.astraterra.fi