Etherscouts treat creativity as an adventure. We’re writers who build worlds, game designers who craft stories, artists who explore narratives. Anyone who believes that the act of creation is worth celebrating, documenting, and sharing can become an Etherscout.
Our primary tools are the Etherscout Handbooks, “playable creative methods” in the form of roleplaying games that help us to discover what we’re capable of making, capable of creating.
Each Handbook is a guided expedition into a different creative territory. You play through structured prompts, make meaningful choices, and generate characters, worlds, stories, or insights that serve your creative work. It’s part game, part tool, part philosophy.
Through creation, freedom. Through story, truth. Through community, understanding.
The Four Duties of the Etherscout
Every Etherscout expedition is guided by four principles. These aren’t meant to serve as rules, but invitations to approach your creative work with intention and joy.
The Duty to Create
Bring new things into existence. Add something to the world through the quality of attention and intention you bring to your work. Creation honors the infinite potential that surrounds every moment of exploration.
The Duty to Serve
Make work that helps others. Offer your creativity in service of communities, stories, and worlds beyond your immediate objectives. Let your creations contribute to something larger than yourself.
The Duty to Witness
Notice and preserve what matters. Observe deeply and document what deserves to be remembered. Hold space for stories that might otherwise pass unnoticed, and practice the patience to receive what the world offers.
The Duty to Play
Keep wonder alive in your work. Embrace joy, experimentation, and the simple pleasure of discovering what becomes possible when curiosity guides your actions. Play prevents creative work from becoming mere obligation.
These Duties appear throughout every Handbook where they’re woven into systems, reflected in mechanics, and inviting you to explore different facets of your creative practice.
The Etherforge and Ethersmiths
In the mythology of the Etherscouts, there exists a realm called the Etherforge. This realm of power is the source from which all creativity flows. It’s the space we touch when we’re fully engaged in making something, when inspiration strikes, when a story reveals itself.
When exceptional creators pass on from this mortal plane, their creative essence is said to ascend to the Etherforge. These ascended creators, called Ethersmiths, leave behind their distilled methods, approaches to creativity that radiate outward as inspiration for those still working in the mortal realm.
Each Handbook channels the philosophy of a different Ethersmith. Some focus on structure and discipline. Others emphasize intuition and play. They might be more serious or more playful. Each offers a unique lens through which to approach creativity, a game that leads you towards new ways to make interesting things, tell interesting stories.
The Handbooks are how these methods of the Ethersmiths themselves reach us, captured, translated, and made playable.
The Etherscout Handbooks
Every Etherscout Handbook is a “playable creative method,” a roleplaying game designed as a creative tool. Each one guides you through a different approach inspired by a unique creative philosophy.
You bring the curiosity. The Etherscout Handbook brings the journey.
When you complete the process detailed in a Handbook, you earn a badge marking your journey. These badges are markers of creative territory you’ve explored and methods you’ve learned. Over time, your collection of badges serves as reminders of every step you’ve taken on the path of the Etherscout, of the amazing things you’ve created and stories you’ve told.
Join the Etherscouts
Becoming an Etherscout begins with submitting your Registration and receiving your Designation, a unique identifier that marks you as a creative explorer on the path of the Etherscout.
Choosing your Designation means you have become part of a community that treats storytelling as adventure and creation as discovery.
From there, you’re free to explore. Choose a Handbook. Complete the expedition. Claim your badge. Share what you’ve discovered. Begin again with a different method, a different Ethersmith, a different creative challenge.
There’s no hierarchy here. No levels to climb. Just paths to walk, territories to explore, and the invitation to keep making things that matter.
Luke Miller, Etherscout Archivist
The Etherscout Handbooks are created and maintained by the Archivist, Etherscout Luke [ARCHIVE-5T0-25V].
Luke is a writer, game designer, and software developer who lives in sunny California with his husband Roman and their two corgis, Luna and Sol. He has had a lifelong passion for fantasy and science fiction and has discovered a love for tabletop roleplaying games.
After designing and publishing a number of creative tabletop roleplaying games and seeing how his first game Journey could help creatives of all stripes explore their worlds and gain new inspiration, Luke was struck by the inspiration of the Etherforge itself and was called to create the Etherscouts.