Aerial Adventure Guide:
Sky Captain's Handbook

Sky ships, flying castles, cloud cities, and airborne monsters! The Sky Captain's Handbook is a complete sourcebook with everything you need to run an aerial campaign. With its focus on inspiring ideas for unique aerial adventures, the book contains new character options, races, monsters, feats, items, sky ships, and aerial combat rules that can be integrated into any fantasy campaign. After all, no matter what world sits at ground level, anything can float above.

The Sky Captain's Handbook collects all the information that was in the original Aerial Adventure Guide three-book series, updates it to 3.5, then adds more than 50 pages of new material. The Aerial Adventure Guide is a stand-alone book. It is 100% world-neutral.

Features:

• Fully developed background and rules for the three major races of the sky, complete with specialized feats designed for the winged avians and spider-like arachial, and everything you need to play a sky elf
• Complete sky ship rules, including stats for dozens of different designs and deck plans for the 8 most common sky ships
• A complete aerial realm ready for integration with any campaign
• Simple yet complete aerial combat rules, which allow you to run a skyship battle without bogging down the game
• Dozens of aerial monsters (roughly 50% more than in the original AAG series), fully fleshed out with racial stats for humanoids (including the popular rain sprites and skaerdrim), NPC stats for leader types and other important racial figures, advanced stats for higher CRs, and more
• Rules for heroic legacies that allow first level characters to take to the skies
• Guidelines on several ways to run an aerial campaign, how to integrate it with ongoing campaigns, and how to use the air to inject an element of the fantastic into your game

Previews:

• Deck plans: The Aerial Adventure Guide includes 8 full-page deck plans for the most common sky ships. To see a preview of them, click here. (360K PDF)

Reviews:

• Gaming Report: 5 stars. "Aerial Adventure Guide fulfills its design aims with flying colors, no pun intended. The material presented is thorough and captivating with its biggest flaw being more is needed."
• EN World, Staff Reviewer Psion: 4 stars. "My expectations there were not only met but exceeded."
• RPG.net: 4 stars. "Thanks to The Aerial Adventure Guide I'm inclined -- for the first time in almost two decades of gaming -- to run a D&D campaign amongst the clouds. I was inspired. And isn't that, after all, what a good sourcebook is supposed to do?"
• EN World, Staff Reviewer Teflon Billy: 4 stars. "All told, I think this book will be a welcome addition to our Airships game, really fleshing out some of the spots that Bastion overlooked in favor of their more comprehensive Skyship construction mechanics."
• GameWyrd: "As it's entirely possible to introduce the entire Aerial Adventure Guide without having to faff around the, "Why didn't I know about this before?" question I think the book is twice as valuable as any ground based alternative. It's good stuff."
• Silven Crossroads: "Even if you don't want to bring your campaign up to the sky and aerial adventures, you can bring the inhabitants of the sky realms down to your campaign with the theme of trading and differences in supply and demand, or you can have aerial things drop out of the sky on rare occasions to present a mystery to your characters... Ultimately, AAG succeeds at what it sets out to do and the writing of Mike Mearls and the artwork of V. Shane makes it an entertaining read."

Writer: Michael Mearls
Contributing Writers: Joseph Goodman, Tim Grubbs, Gunnar Hultgren, Jon Pollom
Cover Artist: Michael Erickson
Cartography: Clayton Bunce
Interior Artists: Carlos Henry, William McAusland, V. Shane

GMG2004. 144 pages, hardback. $27.99.

Preview of Table of Contents and Interior Art

• Introduction
• Chapter One: Characters
  • New Races
    • Arachial
    • Avian
    • Sky Elf
  • Surface Races
  • Heroic Legacies
  • Character Classes
  • Prestige Classes
    • Air Knight
    • Elemental Convert
    • Sky Elf Battle Captain
  • New Uses for Skills
  • Feats
    • New Feats Table
  • Equipment
• Chapter Two: Aerial Combat
  • Altitude
  • Weather
• Chapter Three: Sky Ships
  • Sky Ship Combat
  • Designing Ships
  • Ship Templates
  • Sample Ship Designs
• Chapter Four: The Sky Realms
  • Sellaine, Jewel of the Clouds
  • Other Locations
    • Dreadfall
    • Fulgash's Tower
    • The Wildlands
    • The Derelicts
    • Captain Lebeyewn Of The Quest
    • The Sage of Air
    • The Black Orcs of Noctilius Point
• Chapter Five: Denizens of the Sky
  • Arachial
  • Avian
  • Cloud Colony
  • Cloud Lurker
  • Devil, Sky Fiend
  • Dire Hawk
  • Dragon, Star
  • Dragon, Wind
  • Elf, Sky
  • Floating Polyp
  • Flutter Ray
  • Golem, Mist
  • Infused, Air (Template)
  • Khasri
  • Leviathan
  • Limmer Gaff
  • Lycanthrope: Werehawk
  • Noctilius Bat
  • Ombosi
  • Plague Vulture
  • Rain Sprite
  • Skaerdrim
  • Skowerlith
  • Sky Sailors & Pirates (NPCs)
    • Sky Captain Traits
  • Sky Serpent
  • Thunder Cloud
  • Traders (NPCs)
  • Velda's Mournful Whippoorwill
  • Weather Bane
  • Winged Borer
  • Winged Creature (Template)
  • Zephyrghast
• Chapter Six: Running Aerial Adventures
  • Aerial Campaigns
  • Types of Aerial Adventures
    • Exploration
    • Trade
    • Diplomacy
    • Conquest and Combat
  • Traveling in the Skies
  • Beyond the Clouds
• Sky Ship Record Sheet
• Sky Ship Deck Plans

The exotic cloud cities are filled with all manner of excitement!


Being a sky ship captain is no easy task!


The vicious arachial prey upon their sky lanes.


The Aerial Adventure Guide includes full-page deck plans for 8 common sky ships!