Guildstew

Join Our Showcase!

Help us fire up the kitchen.

Guildstew is an all-in-one campaign platform for tabletop RPGs, in development at Aetherian Studios. It brings characters, campaigns, combat, lore, homebrew, and streaming into one place. It's not a VTT. It's built to handle everything around the map, whether you play in person, over voice, or alongside the VTT you already love.

We've spent three years designing and prototyping it, and we've tested early builds with a small private group. Now we need your help to build the rest. This campaign funds:

• A fully custom UI/UX
• Accessibility features
• Custom-coded homebrew tools
• The rewards you're backing

Backers are the first ones through the door.

Most campaigns don't die from dragons

Seven browser tabs. A Discord thread nobody can search. The class feature your GM approved at 11:47 PM that nobody wrote down.

Guildstew keeps the essentials in one place. You swear you'll remember later. You won't. That's fine, we did.

What's been cooking

Character creation is fun right up until you're juggling tabs and trying to remember what stacks. Guildstew's Character Creator keeps the important stuff in one place — and it explains itself as you go, so a first-timer can build something they actually understand.

• A creator that walks you through it. Races, classes, abilities, and skills are explained in plain language as you pick them — with recommended spells and starting inventory if you want a nudge.
• Forecasted leveling. See what choices open up at later levels before you commit, so every decision makes sense in context.
• Multiclassing, built in. No spreadsheets, no guesswork.
• Your own art, or an artist's. Upload portraits and tokens, or buy them from verified artists right on the platform.
• Relationships, pets, and companions. Build them in character creation — your GM can approve them and fold them straight into campaign lore.

Campaign Management, from A to Zombies

Every campaign needs a home. Not a folder. Not a half-dead Google Doc. Not "I think I texted it to you?"

Pick a system, spin it up, and keep everything organized as it grows: rules, NPCs, locations, lore, and notes. Co-GMs are welcome, players keep private journals, and the GM still holds the screen. Already wrote your world in Google Docs? Import it, and your tables, colors, and images come along intact.

Immersive Tools Keep Players Engaged

Secrets only work if they're actually secret. Guildstew enforces that at the page level, instead of asking players to pretend they didn't read something.

Languages that know who's fluent. Every language has its own font. If your character doesn't speak it, the text renders as gibberish. You can see that something is written, just not what it says.

Thieves' Cant and Druidic. Rogues and druids get a real cipher, and GMs can drop the symbols into any lore entry. Every campaign generates a new one, so nobody memorizes their way past it between games.

Knowledge gating. Lock a lore entry or an item's hidden details behind a roll. The GM decides when a failed check gets another shot: in an hour, next session, or never.

Draw straight into your lore. Sketch maps, sigils, and margin scribbles right alongside the text.

Safety and Consent First

Good games get intense. Great games are intense and safe.

Every game carries a rating, set before the first session:

• Green: family friendly
• Yellow: PG-13
• Orange: slight adult themes
• Red: adults only, 18+

Players know what they're walking into before they ever sit down.

From there, get into the nitty-gritty. Line by line, set what is and isn't allowed at your table, so nobody has to slam the brakes mid-session. Protecting minors is a huge priority for us, and it shapes how ratings and access work across the whole app.

Two Sides of Every Table

Back of House — the GM

You're not just running initiative, you're running the entire kitchen. Total control over pacing and turns and conditions, creating NPCs, custom items, monsters, GM-only visibility for hidden details, condition and loot tracking, co-GMs with shared editing — plus "Moles," players with secret access for ultimate betrayals. Hand off any encounter to a guest GM in one click.

Front of House — the player

A clean plate and the right tools. Clear turn context, abilities and reactions one tap away, tooltips for "wait, what does that do?" moments, and quiet recommendations when you want them — never taking over. Inventory, money, relationships between players and NPCs, and pets all tracked.

If it's in the rules, you can rewrite it

The Brewery isn't custom fields on a character sheet. It's a no-code creator for manipulating the system itself — and the app enforces what you build, so nobody needs to have a degree in programming to create their own custom homebrewed campaigns.

• Reskin. Rename the game's terminology — abilities, HP, damage types, conditions — and the whole system changes genre. "Spell Slots" becomes "Ammo," "Hit Dice" becomes "Fuel." Start from a genre preset or build your own.
• Sheet Modification. Add entirely new tracking systems to the character sheet — sanity, stress, corruption, custom skills — with rules for how they tick, trigger, and break.
• Code Mod. Custom triggers and formulas for advanced mechanics, for the tables that want to go all the way down.
• Race and Class. Full construction — ability scores, traits, subraces, level progression, subclass branches, and spellcasting.
• Content Packs. Bundle monsters, items, spells, and features into something other tables can download.

Publish a single piece — one spell, one monster — or bundle a full pack: a race, its classes, its items, and the rules that hold them together. Share it with your table, or ship it to the wider community.

The Tavern — open shop, get paid

The Tavern is Guildstew's creator economy: a marketplace where the most creative minds at the table sell what they make. Set your price. Set your terms. Keep your IP. We handle distribution, payment, and the boring parts. Earn in-app and cash out anytime — real money, your bank, your schedule.

• Character portraits, tokens, splash art, and NPC sets
• Custom dice — materials, finishes, engravings, and how they catch the light
• UI themes that reskin the whole app
• Dice SFX and animations
• Cursors, banners, borders, and frames
• Direct commissions for artists from the tables that find your work

Your playstyle, plated nicely

The P.I.E. Chart — Player Intelligence & Experience — quietly tracks how your character actually plays, how the party operates, and what keeps showing up in your story. Not to judge you. Just to confirm what everyone already suspects, and help you become better at your class choices.

Streaming, built in

Guildstew 1.0 ships with broadcast tools for the audience tables. No green-screen jankery.

OBS-ready overlays. Clean, transparent, and ready to drop into your scene.

Per-character lower-thirds. Each character gets their own, with portrait, class, and HP.

Initiative banners and live stats. Switch between cinematic and stat-rich modes in one click.

Audience-safe by design. Your GM's secrets stay off-screen in real time.

Auto-tracked highlights. Crits, big hits, and death-save drama are logged the moment they land, so you're not writing show notes at 2am.

Discord bots and more plugins are coming soon to make every game feel even more immersive.
 

Made by people. No AI art.

Every piece of art in Guildstew is drawn digitally by hand, mostly by our in-house artists at Aetherian Studios. Anything we bring in from outside is properly licensed and credited by name. Tap any credit to browse that artist's gallery, or commission them directly.

Different recipes, same kitchen

Your group shouldn't have to switch tools every time someone says, "Okay, but what if we try another game next?"
 
At launch: D&D 5e (2014 & 2024) and Pathfinder 2e

• At 1.0: two more native systems
• On the roadmap: Mörk Borg, CY_BORG, Blades in the Dark, and beyond

Don't see your system? Guildstew is homebrew-native. Reskin an existing one in the Brewery, or build your own from the ground up.

The Itch.io of TTRPGS

Where your pledge goes

Our base goal is $10,000, and every $2K milestone locks another guarantee into 1.0:

• $2K: Custom UI/UX and backer goodies
• $4K: Accessibility features across the app
• $6K: Custom-coded homebrew tools
• $8K: Merch production for backer rewards
• $10K: Fully funded, with every goal above guaranteed

Stretch goals

Stretch goals unlock for everyone and ship as post-1.0 updates. They never delay launch.

$15K: World Lore Update. The GM worldbuilding minigames our playtesters loved in early prototypes, rebuilt bigger and better. It starts with a full redesign of the constellation maker, make your own calendar and time system, make your own interactable merchants that players can interact with and buy without having to roleplay shopping anymore, plus deeper, more polished tools for shaping your world.

$25K: Player Minigame Update. Reasons to stay in the app between turns, and between sessions. Feed, dress, and play with your pets, familiars, and summons. Decorate your own quarters in the guild. Play cards, gamble on dice, and arm-wrestle your party.

$50K: Music Update. Set the mood without alt-tabbing to a playlist. Music and ambience live inside your campaign, so the tavern sounds like a tavern and the boss fight sounds like a boss fight.

$75K: Mobile Companion. Guildstew in your pocket. Check your sheet, roll dice, and catch up on lore from your phone, whether you're at the table or waiting for the bus.

$100K: Forager. A living-world map where the world keeps moving between sessions. Your players come back to a world that didn't wait for them.

Higher goals get revealed as we climb. We only promise what we can build ourselves, with nothing that depends on someone else saying yes.

Bring your whole table

Pick the tier you want, then add a party add-on to bring your friends:

Alpha party: five first-wave alpha keys.

Beta party: five beta keys.

*Both come with Guild access and an exclusive party theme, profile border, and frame.

Back us and get the good stuff

Merch!

The road to opening night

• Sept 30, 2026: Kickstarter launches
• ~Nov 30, 2026: Closed alpha access goes out to backers at $15 and up, once pledges clear
• Winter 2026: Closed beta for Supporter backers and the waitlist
• Spring 2027: Open beta
• Fall 2027: 1.0 launches, subscriptions and backer sub credits kick in, and merch ships

Cooked by Aetherian Studios

We're a small team. Not "startup small" with a VC-funded office and a coffee bar. Actually small: a handful of creative weirdos, worldbuilders, artists, and problem-solvers who got tired of running campaigns out of three different applications and a hundred Google Docs with too many revisions. So we're building the tool we wanted.

We've been pouring ourselves into Guildstew since 2023. For us, making things has always been how we make sense of the world: coding, writing, building systems, designing places that didn't exist yet. Guildstew is all of that stirred into one pot, for our people. The storytellers. The daydreamers. The forever DMs. The players who spend three hours on a character and then fall in love with them like they're a real person with suspicious companion choices, trauma, and way better hair.

Every pixel is drawn by hand by our own artists. Every feature is designed because someone at a real table needed it, and every backer who joins us is helping a tiny studio build something big.

We have standards. Eccentric standards maybe, but standards.

Thank you for trusting us with your stories, your campaigns, and your weird little tabletop rituals. We're excited, very nervous, and wildly grateful you're here.

Build weird. Build bold. Build worlds

Pull up a chair

Our Discord is where the stew actually gets made: dev updates, playtest calls, art dumps, and a cast of goblins with opinions. 

Come tell us what your table needs:
discord.gg/DRh72tJW7Y