First, a little meta-history. Back in 2016, I was daydreaming at work. (I assure you, that's never happened since.) Engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, I was making a list of the various campaigns I wanted to run sometime for a group of players, the different specific RPGs and broader genres and tones that I wanted to explore as a GM. Previously, I had also discovered the Dungeon Synth Archives YouTube channel and was making my way through its contents, listening to every album in the order it had been posted to the channel. And it's got a lot of albums. So my mind at the time was steeping in a lot of old-school dungeon synth minimalism while I worked and periodically daydreamed of imaginary worlds.
Earlier that year, I'd been developing a concept for a fantasy setting. It was nothing particularly inspired—Western high fantasy roots and all the usual trappings. I'd recently started playing 5th Edition D&D, my first return to the Forgotten Realms since high school, so that was undoubtedly on my mind. I was building this embryonic setting's history and lore, which seemed on course to become pretty extensive. Not surprising, that: I tend to overplot my campaigns. At the time, I'd recently started running a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1920's Philadelphia, and had already built out a roster of approximately 40 NPCs to pepper around the PCs as they investigated. I could already feel this world starting to get bogged down before I'd even really begun.
Then, an idea struck me: a fantasy world that took a deliberately different approach, something much less pre-scripted and historied. And something with a darker, grittier feel, something that channeled the kind of atmosphere I was hearing in the music and album cover art of Old Sorcery, Guild of Lore, GuardianSorrow, and Dungeons of Irithyll. Less of the high fantasy aesthetic, more of a shadowy realm full of muted colors, where technology is less developed and magic is more uncommon and still largely feared (or at least viewed suspiciously). Again, nothing wildly original here; plenty of other game settings have done this and committed more to that course (e.g., Outcast Silver Raiders, Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing, etc.).
I also wanted to infuse the world with a weird vibe—weird in the sense of the uncanny, the unheimlich. A baseline familiarity of the expected (at least in fantasy genre terms) that sometimes just feels off. High strangeness. A darkness that you can't pin down and definitely can't shake. But, lest it drift too far into grimdark excess, I wanted players to also have moments of hope. Lightness. Humor. Sweet to contrast with the salt.
I also wanted to play with the tension between individual character agency and the immense forces of the world. Emberreach should have and be its own character with its own story, a history being shaped by, with, and around player characters. Sometimes they are central characters, but, other times, they are dealing with shockwaves made by the world as it moves past them. The relationship and rivalry between Fate and Fortune (important and challenging ideas for me, personally). I would keep all of this in mind as I grew the setting and added detail to the initial sketch.
This new worldbuilding direction would also incorporate a looser approach: I'd use more randomly generated elements and would embrace improvisational GMing tactics. I wanted it all to feel evolving and slightly unpredictable, like a roiling, complex system. I scoured my game books looking for the better random tables to spark ideas. I sketched out a few simple sub-systems for use during play that could keep things unexpected, yet still maintain a sense of place.
At this point, I found the website, Wizardawn, which would prove important for gathering initial resources. At the time, it was still an active website, but has since shut down. It had a number of great random generators, including an excellent regional hexmap generator. The output was black-and-white, with simple icons for the biomes and landmarks within hexes. I fiddled with the settings and produced a sequence of three large hexmaps, one bordered by ocean to the east, another to the south, and another to the west. I regenerated each of the three maps multiple times, until each 'looked right' to my eye, then took all three into GIMP and stitched them into one expansive map, a sprawling subcontinent surrounded by water on three sides. This would be my baseline model of Emberreach. I then generated a few settlement maps—a few large cities and a few small towns—and decided to start working from there.
I knew I also wanted to take a more collaborative approach to worldbuilding. A few years earlier, I'd run a short mission for The Sprawl RPG. The game takes a very structured approach to its Session Zero, which I appreciated—but I especially liked its collaborative means of sketching out the metropolis that would be used during play. Players were formally prompted to add in details and elements of lore for the world. This quickly led to a unique place that incorporated pieces of each player's sensibilities and taste, and created opportunities for greater investment. I wanted to ensure that Emberreach would have that same interactivity and would appeal in the same way. I established a basic principle that ultimately became a standing rule: at the start of each session, players could make 'worldbuilding statements,' facts about the setting that would, from that point on, become true (provided they didn't directly contradict an established truth).
At this point, I had a large, sketch-like map and emerging ideas about a few settlements. LOTS of ground, presumably all filled with people, towns, governments, principalities, thrones, dominions... If I wanted to avoid lore-creep, I needed a solution, or at least a stop-gap measure. And I came up with one: a pocket. I specified a distinct part of the map along the eastern coast of the subcontinent, delineated it with clear borders, and made it a focus of attention. I sketched some more detail into this pocket, placed major and minor settlements, divided the pocket into three political regions ('domains' in WoE terms) that operated with semi-autonomy within a single, governing authority overseeing the entire pocket—now known as the realm of Merannen. Presiding over the realm was a line of archdukes/archduchesses, the recent few being isolationist and authoritarian. For the past hundred years, borders have been sealed; the realm has cut itself off from the rest of the world. History is curated and limited; nothing is available about the non-Merannish world. And it's here that play begins for characters. It's been interesting to see players start adventuring in this realm, have lots of space to explore, go on adventures, undertake entire campaigns, and take notice that they're immersed in unusual norms and ideologies around regional borders and the world outside them.
I ran the first adventure for this setting in 2021, five years after I started developing it. The world bible has gone from one page of sparse notes to a 16-page document. I'll admit: I'm pretty impressed that I kept my mitts off the world as much as I did, and managed to avoid turning it into a bloated, history-saturated setting. In the end, I think I struck a good balance, putting in just enough established detail to make it feel to players like something I'd created, and pairing it with enough collaborative authoring that it has room to grow in ways I'd never imagine.
Next, we'll have a short look at the winding path that led me to the final version of the rules. And then, we'll start to vivisect the rules of the game itself.
