Play The Aethra Chronicles: Volume One – Celystra’s Bane Online

The Aethra Chronicles: Volume One: Celystra's Bane is a fantasy role-playing game released for MS-Dos in 1994. It is a shareware title that follows the design traditions of the Gold Box series of Dungeons and Dragons computer games. The narrative centers on the kingdom of Celystra, where the newborn heir disappears shortly after King Lythare's coronation. The king imprisons his Champion Knight-Paladin and others for failing to prevent the kidnapping, prompting the Champion's son and two companions to embark on a quest to find the missing child.

Players begin by creating a party of three characters, selecting a class and assigning values to statistics such as Strength, Agility, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Presence, Memory, and Reason. These core stats determine a character's proficiency in various skills, which include magical spell lists, lock picking, and woods lore. The player can later recruit three additional characters, forming a full party of six. Progression involves exploring the game world from a top-down perspective to follow the main quest and uncover other objectives. Combat is turn-based, pitting the player's party against monsters using a system resolved by die rolls against character stats and skills.

The game was distributed as shareware, with its first episode, titled The Book of Prophecy, available freely. The two subsequent episodes, Gems of Power and Demon's Might, were accessible only to users who registered the game. This structure allowed players to sample the initial portion of the adventure before obtaining the complete experience.