Brass & Embers: The Beginning, or How We Got Here

The First Spark 

The first sparks of what is now Brass & Embers first lit up during my last semester at my graduate program around September 2024. We had to come up with a product and turn it into a business idea and do our best to develop part of  it during the semester. I was burned out from turning in my capstone project 3 weeks before, and I knew many of my peers already had made plans to work on other projects, so I started thinking of a game I could start development on my own and use some of my strong suits while at it. 

Anyone who knows me can confirm I am a fantasy junkie and I have always loved epic fantasy, epic quests and journeys into magical lands. I know some of this will always show through in whatever genre I am tackling just because it is something so close and dear to me. However, even though I loved fantasy, at that moment I couldn’t see myself contributing to the genre in any significant manner. And that is important to me. I don’t want to be so derivative when creating something of my own that my project is barely more than a different skin of someone else’s creation. I want to create something that feels like its own thing, something that feels like me. Of course what I or anyone else creates will always carry echoes of many other creative works that paved the road where we stand today, but let them be echoes and not ghosts possessing your work wholly.   

When I’m uncertain about where creative direction to take, I usually turn inward to my dreams, day dreams, reflections, or any other strong emotional current I can tap on to inspire me. We are living in quite chaotic times: not only old structures of power are crumbling, but also minorities are being stripped of their rights, abuse of power is running rampant in multiple sectors, technology is looming ahead to some like a new god promising salvation and to others like the executioner’s axe. The game industry itself has become extremely unpredictable, with thousands of highly skilled people losing their jobs and thousands more asserting that the industry as it stands right now is becoming unsustainable and obsolete; and rising to meet these challenging times are smaller and bolder teams daring to share their vision with the world. 

My second point of inspiration was one of my favorite subjects: history. If you’re a fan of history, a few different time periods might come to your mind as a mirror to our own, but in terms of change, disruption and technology affecting so many different levels of society, it immediately brought to my mind the Industrial Revolution and the American Gilded Age. Connecting all these things, my mind went to steampunk. 

Steampunk. A delightfully odd bridge of the old and new, retrofuturism tackling innovation and social issues. A genre that always fascinated me when I encountered it in different media, but one that isn’t as commonly explored as classical fantasy or sci-fi.

How could I explore the issues I wanted to explore, and create a world and game that felt my own within the steampunk bounds, using it to bring forth collaborative storytelling, cooperation, creativity  and some other of the best features TTRPGs have? 

I wrestled with these questions as I started worldbuilding.

Pushing Through Frustration

Ever since the idea started to develop in my mind it made me more and more excited to work on it, to create places, people, factions, institutions, religions, superstitions, legends, and everything that could inhabit this world that was slowly taking shape in my mind.

Despite my great enthusiasm to work on the project, I still felt like I was fighting an uphill battle. Not only did everything depend on me to happen, but I felt isolated from my peers by working on my project by myself. It is intriguing how easily we can get used to something even if we haven’t done much of that before. As someone with a creative writing background, I wasn’t used to working with others until I started my graduate program. What surprised me the most wasn’t that I had to learn how to be vulnerable and  ask for help, admit when I didn’t understand something, or learn to communicate different ideas with people with completely different brains than my own. What surprised me was that I liked it.

After the growing pains were over, I realized that the community, the camaraderie, the support, the feeling of working together with others toward the same goal was extremely motivating to me and gave me a drive and energy I had never experienced before. 

Even with me enjoying and believing in my project, working in the void during the first few months was definitely one of the most challenging aspects of the project: having to believe in it alone, showing up everyday with no one to bounce ideas off just my own inner voice, and working on it with no other eyes on it felt draining.

Bringing Community to the Project

It felt like a vicious cycle: the less motivated I felt, the less proud I was of my work, and I wanted to show it to people less and less. 

But I knew at least one thing: I needed art for my project. I will be so bold as to say that one of the most exciting aspects of getting a new TTRPG is flipping through the book and admiring the gorgeous pieces of art, and immersing yourself further in the world even before you ever get a party ready to play said game with you. I knew I needed art, and that was the first opening I had to expose my work to a community: I needed artists to illustrate the book and give a face and personality to the world I was describing. I contacted one of my peers from the graduate program, Brian Rushing, and asked him to make cover art, and character art for the different classes in the book. Having to introduce my world to someone else, and seeing him bring that world to life with his art gave me a much needed motivation boost to keep working at it.

Going to GDC and pushing myself to talk to others about my project helped me feel connected to a larger community of game developers and designers also working on their own projects. Hearing that people were curious and intrigued about the project made me return home with even more determination to push through and keep going with the project. 

By then I had started to post art and lore about the classes on LinkedIn and put part of my project out there for the community to see and interact with. Sharing that part of me with others as I worked on the project helped me once again to feel connected to a larger whole.  

I started talking with my spouse about the different enemy classes and talking ideas back and forth about what we could do with them. We would spend 4 hours every night talking about the different enemy types and classes and, despite the grueling pace I set eager to playtest the game as soon as possible,  it was incredibly enjoyable to be discussing these classes, enemies and characters aloud. Discussing, trying to improve them, imagining different scenarios where to put them. . . all of that made them feel real. 

Time to playtest finally got here and a few of my friends from my usual D&D party showed up to play, and my spouse showed up to GM the session and I think that was when it hit me: it was real. It was something that was really happening. And despite what my harsh inner critic was saying, I was doing good progress. It only took a year of development to get me where I am. And now I have other people on the boat with me supporting me, helping me, giving their feedback, their encouragement and their energy; the conclusion of this project feels closer everyday. Opening up and seeing new emails with new art being developed fills me with excitement. Seeing my friends playing and having fun during a session makes me feel sure that this is a project that will soon be able to stand on its own two feet. 

Where We Are Now

After three successful playtests, collecting a lot of feedback from my friends and having some art for NPCs and environments completed by the wonderful artists at Altergate Studios, the project is becoming something solid and real. Something I want to share with others, and think and talk about it non stop. I can’t wait to finally be able to expand my community and share more of it with the TTRPG community.

I haven’t been a member of said community for too long. I started playing in January 2022 but ever since I started playing I can say without a doubt that it changed my life: it made me establish friendships, learn about the joy of sharing stories, struggles and being silly around others, it made me more comfortable in my skin, more creative, more expressive, and I can’t wait to be able to share some of this magic and joy with others around me.

— Blake