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Terms of Service

Version 2026-10-15.1 · Aetherboard, at aetherboard.app

Plain-English summary. Aetherboard is a service that lets you play tabletop games over the internet. It is free, it is run by one person in Arizona out of their own home, and it can go down or go away. Don't be cruel to other players, don't upload things you don't have the right to upload, and don't attack the service. You keep ownership of your characters and campaigns. This summary is here to be read; the sections below are what you're agreeing to.

1. Who you're dealing with

Aetherboard ("the Service") is operated by an individual located in Arizona, U.S.A. (not a company), from privately owned equipment. Throughout this document “we” and “us” mean that one person. You can reach us at support@aetherboard.app.

These Terms cover the Service. The desktop application you install is covered by the End User License Agreement, and what we do with your data is in the Privacy Policy. All three apply together.

2. Your account

You need an account to host a game. You can join a game someone else is hosting as a guest, with no account at all.

3. Acceptable use

Don't use Aetherboard to:

A table is a private space between the people at it, but it is not a place where the rules above stop applying.

4. Your content

Your characters, campaigns, notes, homebrew rules and chat are yours. You keep every right you had in them. We claim no ownership.

You give us only the narrow permission needed to run the Service: to store your content and show it to the other people at your table, because a game where nobody can see your character sheet would not work. That permission ends when you delete the content or your account.

We do not read your tables, sell your content, train anything on it, or use it to advertise. Nor do we offer it to anybody else to train on: section 13 says what an AI system may read here, and your content is not on the list.

You are responsible for what you upload, and you represent that you have the right to upload it. We don't pre-screen content and we are not responsible for what other users post.

5. Memberships, what they cost, and stopping one

Joining a game is free and always will be. A membership adds more: more saved games, more players at a table, cloud storage. What each one allows is on the memberships page, and the price is shown before you pay.

Memberships renew automatically until you turn that off. Each one is billed for a period, monthly, or yearly at the yearly price, and bills again for another period at the same price unless you say otherwise. At checkout you choose whether to renew automatically; choosing not to means the membership ends on its own at the end of that first period, with nothing more charged. You can turn automatic renewal on or off at any time before the current period ends, from the shop, and either one takes effect at once. For a yearly membership, we remind you before it renews, between 15 and 45 days ahead.

Payments are handled by Paddle, who are the seller of record for every purchase. That means Paddle takes the payment, Paddle's own terms and privacy policy apply to the payment itself, and Paddle handles the sales tax or VAT for wherever you are. Your card details never reach us. We never see them and never store them.

Purchases are final. A membership charge and a one-time purchase are both final once made. We do not refund a change of mind, in the United States or anywhere else, except where the law where you live requires it. The Refund Policy sets out exactly which countries that covers and for how long, and how to ask. Please use the free tier to decide whether Aetherboard suits you before paying for anything.

Buying several things at once is one payment and one receipt, but each item is its own purchase, and the rules here apply to each one separately. A membership is always bought on its own.

Stopping is one button, and you keep what you paid for. Cancel in your profile at any time, the same as turning automatic renewal off. Cancelling stops the next payment and nothing else: your membership carries on exactly as it is until the period you have already paid for runs out, and only then does the account go back to the free tier, and you can turn automatic renewal back on at any point before that happens. Nothing you have made is deleted: saved games, characters and homebrew stay where they are. We will never make you write in, wait, or explain yourself to stop paying.

Changing tier works differently up and down. Moving to a higher tier, or from monthly to yearly, charges you now for the rest of the period you are already in, crediting the time already paid for at the old price against that charge. That is a lower bill, not money returned to you, so it is not the refund described above, and the higher tier's benefits start at once, while the old tier stops renewing. Moving to a lower tier, or from yearly to monthly, charges nothing right away: you keep your current tier until the period you have already paid for ends, and only then does the lower price and its benefits take over. Either way, the exact amount and date are shown before you confirm the change, and you are never charged more than what was shown.

If a price changes, the new price applies from your next renewal and not before, and we will tell you first. If you do not want the new price, cancel and you keep the rest of the period you paid for.

What a tier includes can change too. The same promise as the price: if a membership's benefits change in a way that matters, we tell you before it affects a period you have already paid for, not after.

Some benefits are access, not a purchase. A higher tier may include time-limited use of Aetherboard-published digital content, or a discount on buying it, as described on the memberships page. Time-limited access is a licence that lasts only as long as you hold the tier that grants it. It ends the moment your membership lapses, is cancelled, or drops to a tier that does not include it, even in the middle of a period you have paid for, and it is never something you keep afterwards the way a game system you buy outright is. Where a tier's access instead runs for a set length per product, that length starts from whichever is later: your account's first paid subscription, or the product's own release day. So a new subscriber gets everything already out for that long, and each later release for that long from when it comes out. Each product's period is set once per account: renewing, or cancelling and subscribing again, does not start it over. A member discount applies only to a purchase made through Aetherboard's own website or app; it does not carry over to a printed book or a physical copy bought anywhere else, whose own seller sets its own price and terms.

Pre-ordering something that is not out yet means paying before its release date, which is shown to you at the time. If we cannot meet that date, we will tell you and let you choose between waiting or cancelling for a full refund, however long that takes: this is about something that was never delivered, not the change-of-mind rule above, which is about something you already have. Once a pre-order is released, its sale is treated like any other. Where a tier includes early access, it opens a pre-order that long before the release date while you hold that tier, and it applies only to a pre-order made through Aetherboard's own website or app, not to one made anywhere else.

Buying or unlocking content in the shop, ours or a creator's, gives you the right to use it inside the Service, at your table, through your account, not a copy of the file. A book is read in the app, a page at a time. We do not hand it to you as a download, and you agree not to extract, copy or share it outside the Service. This is separate from the free, openly licensed rules described in section 7, which you may already repeat under their own licence.

If something you bought is later removed from the shop, whoever made it, you keep full use of it, unless we say otherwise for that item.

Nothing here affects any right you have under your own local law that cannot be signed away. Where a law gives you a refund right we cannot exclude, that law wins over this section.

6. Copyright complaints (DMCA)

Our designated agent for copyright notices is the Copyright Agent, acting for the operator of Aetherboard, registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

If you believe something on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to dmca@aetherboard.app including: your signature (physical or electronic); identification of the work; identification of the material and where to find it; your contact details; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and you are authorized to act for the owner.

We remove infringing material when properly notified, and we terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you may send a counter-notice to the same address.

7. Game rules and other people's books

Aetherboard ships rules from the System Reference Document 5.2, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Wizards of the Coast has not endorsed this project and is not affiliated with it.

The Service lets you write and load your own rules content. Free, homebrew and openly licensed material is available to everyone at no cost. If you load rules from a commercial book, that is between you and its publisher, and you are stating that you have the right to do so.

8. What we don't promise

This is the part to read twice, because it is the honest shape of a self-hosted hobby project:

9. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that data will not be lost.

10. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, OR THE VALUE OF A CAMPAIGN THAT DISAPPEARED, ARISING FROM OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN TOLD SUCH DAMAGES ARE POSSIBLE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF WHAT YOU HAVE PAID US IN THE PAST TWELVE MONTHS (WHICH IS CURRENTLY NOTHING) OR ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages, so parts of sections 8 and 9 may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for willful misconduct, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

11. Your responsibility

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, losses and reasonable attorneys' fees arising from your content, your use of the Service, or your breach of these Terms. In plain terms: if you upload something you shouldn't have and its owner objects, that is between you and them.

12. What we can see, and what we do with it

The website sits behind Cloudflare, the service that puts it on the internet. Every request for a page passes through their machines, and from those records we can see how many people visited which page, roughly which country they were in, which family of browser and device they used, which site linked them here, and whether the request failed. We look at those figures to know whether the thing works.

They are counts. They are not joined to your account, they are not used to build a profile of you, and nothing is sold or given to an advertiser. Our own server does not store your network address at all; where it needs to tell one visitor from another it uses a one-way scramble with a key it throws away when it restarts.

Your game is not part of those figures. A campaign runs on the GM's own computer and is saved there. When players reach it through our address, what they send passes through our service on the way. We carry it and keep none of it, only a monthly count of how much passed. A game hosted from the app while signed in is shown in the public list of games unless the GM marks it Private. The Privacy Policy sets all of this out in full, including the cookies we set and why, and its section 19 covers games on a GM's own computer.

13. AI systems, and what they may read

Companies that build AI assistants send crawlers to read the web, and people ask those assistants what Aetherboard is. We would rather they were told correctly, so we tell them ourselves: a file at /llms.txt is written for them, and robots.txt names the crawlers we know of and says what they may read.

What they may read is what we wrote. The pages that describe Aetherboard, the help and FAQ, the guide, the memberships page, and these three documents. All of that is ours to offer. The SRD rules we ship are openly licensed (section 7), so they may be repeated as long as their credit line travels with them.

What they may not read is what you wrote. Your posts on the forums, your profile, your characters, campaigns and chat. We do not own any of it (section 4), so we cannot offer it, and we do not. The crawlers we know of are told to stay out of the forums; a machine-readable reservation under the TDM Reservation Protocol, at /.well-known/tdmrep.json, says the same to any we have not heard of, and it is the form of opt-out that European copyright law recognises. And nothing about your game is kept by us in the first place (section 12). We cannot stop a crawler that ignores what it is told; what we can do is refuse to hand anything over, and we do.

The shop is treated the same way as the forums: what is sold there is described in its makers' words, and those are theirs.

We use no AI to read your content, and none of it is used to train anything, by us or through us. If that ever changes, it is a change to these Terms (section 15) and you will be told first.

14. Ending things

You can delete your account at any time from your profile. We will delete it as described in the Privacy Policy.

We can suspend or end an account that breaks section 3, or that puts the Service or its players at risk. Where it's reasonable, we'll tell you why and give you a chance to respond first; where the content is illegal or someone is in danger, we won't wait.

15. Changes to these terms

When these Terms change in a way that matters, we tell you in the app while you are signed in, and ask you to agree to the new version before you carry on. A new account always agrees to the latest version. Your account records which version you accepted and when. If you don't want the new terms, delete your account.

16. Disputes, and the law that applies

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Arizona, U.S.A., without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Let's talk first. If something goes wrong, email support@aetherboard.app and give us 30 days to put it right. Most problems end there.

If that doesn't work, any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Maricopa County, Arizona, and both of us consent to their jurisdiction and venue. You may also bring a qualifying claim in small claims court.

Nothing in these Terms prevents you from reporting a concern to a government agency, or waives any right that cannot lawfully be waived under the law where you live.

17. Shop requests

When you ask for something to be added to the shop, you tick a box agreeing to these Terms, and we keep a record of that with your request: your account, the version of the Terms, and the time. Your request (its name, kind, who made it, any link, and your reasons) is public on the Shop requests board under your username, and a copy is emailed to our support mailbox. You let us show it, read it and contact whoever holds the rights to ask about it.

Asking does not oblige us to add anything, and does not give you any payment or share in it. If you say the work is yours, you promise you made it or hold the rights, and that you have the right to offer it to us, the same promise section 18 relies on. We only add what its owner agreed to or what is openly licensed.

18. Selling your own work

You can send your own work to be sold in the shop once your email address is confirmed. Each time you send it you tick three boxes: that you agree to these Terms, that you made the work or hold the rights to sell it, and the fee. We keep a record of that with the work: your account, the version of these Terms, the fee in the words you were shown, and the time.

The work stays yours. Sending it gives us only what is needed to sell it and deliver it: to keep its files, to show its cover, pictures and description in the shop, and to show its pages in the app to the people who bought it. When it comes down we stop selling it. People who already bought it keep full use of it, unless we say otherwise for that work.

We look at work before it goes on sale. We may approve it, ask for changes or turn it down, and we may take down work that is on sale. A change to work on sale, its price included, is looked at the same way, and the version on sale stays until the change is approved. Our look is not a check of who holds the rights, and approving work does not move your promise about the rights to us. Section 6 applies to work sold here like anything else on the Service.

Paddle's own fee for taking the payment comes out of each sale first. Our handling fee comes out of what is left, at the rate you agreed to when you sent the work. The rest is yours. A free item pays nothing.

We pay out once your balance reaches US$50. The balance is what you have actually earned: the price paid, minus Paddle's fee, our handling fee, and any refund or chargeback on that sale. Less than $50 is not paid yet. It rolls into the next month and keeps adding up.

When a full month ends with your balance at $50 or more, we have 60 days from the end of that month to send it, in US dollars, by whatever method we make available. One payment is at most $1,000. If you are owed more, the rest follows in further payments of up to $1,000, each within 60 days of the one before, until your balance is zero or under $1. An amount under $1 is not sent on its own and stays in your balance.

Refunds and stolen work are yours to answer for. When a sale of your work is refunded or charged back, the whole amount comes out of your balance, including the handling fee we took on that sale. We may decide to give our fee back instead, case by case. If a refund takes your balance below zero, you owe us the difference, and we may take it from what you earn later. If work you listed turns out not to be yours to sell, you are responsible for every claim, cost and loss that follows, and you cover ours on our behalf. Section 11 applies in full.

Money we cannot pay yet is held, not taken. If your balance has still not reached $50 by 160 days after the end of the first month it fell short, it is held. So is a payment we send that still cannot be completed 160 days after the first attempt, for example because your payment details are missing or wrong. Held money is still yours. It still counts toward the $50, and we send it once the balance reaches $50 and we have working payment details for you. We write to you about it at least once a year. If we have not been able to send it for three years, it is treated as abandoned property and handed over as the law requires.

The first 90 days. If your account is deleted, suspended or revoked within 90 days of your work going on sale, for any reason, what the work earned in those 90 days is held in the same way, and is not paid on the usual schedule. You agree that the work stays on sale until the 90 days are up. It is then removed from the shop. After the first 90 days, closing your account does not change what you are owed, and work that is on sale stays on sale until you ask us to take it down or we do.

Delays in handling, shipping, at a bank or over a holiday do not count toward any of the periods in this section. Where the law sets a different rule for money owed to you, that law wins.

You are responsible for reporting and paying any tax on what you earn here. This is not tax or legal advice. Ask your own accountant if you are unsure what applies to you.

19. Odds and ends

If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest still stands. Our not enforcing something once doesn't mean we've given it up. You can't transfer your account without asking us. These Terms, the EULA and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about the Service.

Last updated 2026-10-15.1.