Building a World on A&E
A&E is a universal, setting-agnostic game system built on Relative Power Scores. It scales infinitely to any setting while keeping fluid narrative momentum through episodic, TV-show pacing. That universality cuts both ways, and this chapter tells you exactly which side of the line your job is on.
What A&E Already Handles (Setting-Agnostic)
These systems ship with the game and need no setting-specific rules:
- Shots and Shot Sequences — the universal action engine, identical in a ballroom and a battlefield.
- The Power Score and the two d20 rolls — one resolution system for everything.
- Energy and Morale — the four stamina pools, breathers, panic. Human-scale by design; your fireballs and starships just cost more Energy.
- Scene Levels — how the Director grades any threat, from tavern brawl to cosmic horror.
- Features, Tiers, and progression — the same growth curve whether a character is a knight, a hacker, or a lich.
If you find yourself writing a new subsystem for your world, stop — you almost certainly express it through Features, Mitigations, and Scene Levels instead.
What Your World Must Supply
A setting on A&E authors four kinds of content, stored as structured files:
- Races and Subraces (in
/A&E Universal System/Races/) — the biological foundation: 9-stat pools, size, and 3 Racial Features. - Classes and Subclasses (in
/A&E Universal System/Classes/) — the training engine: 3 Class Features, stats untouched. - Conditions (in
/A&E Universal System/Conditions/) — transformative overlays like vampirism, lycanthropy, or planar-touched lineage. - Features (in
/A&E Universal System/Features/) — the shared vocabulary all of the above are built from.
Hazards, organizations, deities, technology — anything without a character sheet is just a Scene Level plus narrated Risks; put it in Locations or Lore files and let the Director's framework carry it.
Director Authority
A&E deliberately leaves the exact texture of consequences — the narrative Risk layer — in the Director's hands rather than on a chart. When building a world, you are calibrating tone: a pulp adventure world leans on light consequences (knocked down, gear damaged); a grimdark world should announce early that characters will come out looking like stereotypical pirates, if they survive at all. Write that calibration into your world's Lore so every Director runs the same promise.
Episodic Pacing
Structure campaigns as Episodes. Minions and non-sheet threats carry pressure through Scene Levels; Key Characters get full sheets and Shots. The Sequence Narrative is your episode beat: build scenes so that resolution naturally lands where a TV act would.
The Workflow
- Author your Races, Classes, Conditions, and their Features as files.
- Build starting locations and at least one playable character.
- Configure a Game Start so players can pick up and play.
- Play. Author more content as the story demands it.
Everything else — the math, the pacing, the pools — is already waiting for you.