The Glass Cannon Podcast - Cannon Fodder 9/11/24

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Joe welcomes the Creator of Foundry VTT, Andrew Clayton, onto the show to discuss the genesis of Foundry VTT and the evolution of Ember, Foundry VTT's new original online tabletop campaign. Andrew goes into detail on facing the challenge of "railroading" players with a digital game, whether Ember will have PF2E support, and the preparation that goes into launching a Kickstarter. If you are interested in checking out Ember, you can find more info here: https://bit.ly/EmberGCN Submit your questions for Listener Mail at https://forms.gle/v5huj25dkVSmkbLEA Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/t9Mt_cNjTow For more podcasts and livestreams, visit glasscannonnetwork.com and for hundreds of hours of exclusive shows and benefits, make your membership official and join Glass Cannon Nation today by becoming a subscriber at jointhenaish.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Nespresso. Elevate your morning coffee ritual. From the first sip of coffee in the morning to the on-the-go cup. Make every morning unforgettable with Nespresso. Discover a world of possibilities with or without milk. Visit nespresso.ca to learn more or an espresso boutique near you. What does possible sound like for your business? It's having the spend to power your scale

with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. You are listening to the Glass Cannon Network, the premier source for role-playing game entertainment. Welcome to Cannon Fodder.

A behind-the-scenes look at the Glass Cannon Network. What is going on everybody? Welcome back to Cannon Fodder. It is Wednesday, September 11th, 2024 and I'm your old pal Joey O'Brien. It looks like, it appears as if I'm here solo today. Unfortunately, I'm without my worst half, Mr. Troy LaValley, who is unavailable this week. But man oh man, do I have a fantastic guest to join me on the FOD today. I am so excited to spend this FOD digging into a new project, something that has blown our minds that we are in the midst of playing right now every single Wednesday

night on YouTube. We are releasing an episode of our playthrough of Foundry VTT's Ember. And so joining me today on the FOD to dig into this project and talk all about the nitty gritty of it that we really couldn't get into too much in the actual play itself is the creator of Foundry VTT, Mr. Andrew Clayton. Andrew's with us today. Hey, buddy. Welcome.

Hello. Hello. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. You are in the midst of madness right now as you are mid Kickstarter. Any creator mid Kickstarter, I can only imagine, is in an absolute whirlwind at all times.

And I will, of course, be asking you about the details of that as we get into this. But I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come and talk to me for a little bit. Absolutely. Yeah, I was happy to get your email and I was really hoping we'd get a chance to do something like this. So I'm psyched. I'm psyched to get a chance to talk a little bit more behind the screen or about about how Ember is getting created and what we're up to. Obviously like what folks are seeing on the on the live play is like from the player perspective

and it's definitely sort of like the view of the play at the table, but there's a whole lot more going on, you know, behind the scenes in terms of what goes into that. So yeah, that's cool. And that is what the fodder is for. You have explained very well the heart and soul of this show. It's all about digging into the behind the scenes stuff, not only from the player's perspective and what they were thinking when they did certain things,

but also from the GM perspective. For any game, it's about learning by others' mistakes, right? Like what worked well, what didn't work well, how can our games get better, how can we be better? All of that, you know, is what builds and makes the FOD what it is. And so I appreciate you setting it up like that. That's perfect. I do want to disclaim that unfortunately for this particular FOD with Troy, it's a complete coincidence that he happens to be out

again. He wasn't supposed to be, but something came up very, very last minute. And so we have not talked about the GCP in a couple weeks. We are going to get back to it, fear not, but today we are going to dedicate a little time to learning about a very exciting new product. But that makes it sound, I don't know, not as sexy as I wanted to. It's not a product. It's an experience, right? It is an experience in the gaming world that I'm very, very excited about that I want to talk about that I want to bring to the table. And so please let me disclaim upfront to anybody that's, you know, sort of wondering like, is this episode of fodder sponsored by Foundry VTT? It's like,

no, it is not. This is not an ad for Ember. Even though it's going to seem like that at times, this is truly, Troy couldn't make it and I really wanted to bring Andrew on because playing Ember, which we have already recorded the episodes that are about to air over the next few weeks, has been a fascinating experience for me as a gamer and I would love to dig into some of the background of how this idea came to be and what exactly it is. And of course, if you listener or viewer are interested in checking it out, the project is being kickstarted right now, you can get in on the ground floor. But again, this is not meant to be an ad.

This is really meant to open up a discussion about the deeper behind the scenes things that that made Ember come to light. So let me start off just by getting everybody familiar. We'll leave Ember for a second, get everybody familiar with who you are. Andrew as a gamer, as an entrepreneur who created the Foundry virtual tabletop, which we use on the GCP. I'd like to first get a sense of, you know, it's funny. You said behind the scenes, off camera, that you were nervous about hosting the show, the

Ember show. Because you're looking around, you're in the studio. Yeah, the lights are on, the lights are hot. You know, it's action. And you were like, I'm a little nervous about this. But you also made it clear at that time that you love game mastering You're like I have no problem game mastering. I love that but it's just the showmanship aspect is new to me So I'm a little you know ease take it easy on me. I'm a rookie Mike. My question is

how and when Did you discover that that love of game mastering? Where does this come from? That's a good question. I mean, I think it probably came to me a little bit later compared to some folks that like grew up playing pen and paper with their like friend group as a kid.

I didn't have that. I grew up on CRPGs. I grew up on, you know, Baldur's Gate and Morrowind and, you know, all these amazing sort of old school, like computer game experiences, and, you know, books, like so many books. And of course, all of that kind of like primed me to be totally into role playing. But I just like didn't really have that until college actually. And so like I started, you know, playing in college and I don't always been like familiar with D&D, but familiar with D&D from the perspective of like, oh, that's like the video games that I play or like, oh, that's like the cartoon I saw. I'd not I wasn't familiar with

like the actual pen and paper game. But then in college, I, you know, joined like a gaming club, and I like started playing with folks and, you know, really sort of started enjoying it. And, you know, I, I guess discovered that I kind of had an enthusiasm for the storytelling aspect of it, both as a player, but also in terms of like the creative process of, you know, envisioning a world envisioning the characters envisioning the plot lines envisioning the adversaries, the nemesis, you know, envisioning all of that, and then trying to kind of like draw people into it. And so that was something that is the job of a game master. Yeah, Right. And so, I kind of came to being a GM later in my life, I guess.

I mean, not so much later. I was still young. You're still young now, Andrew. Stop. I know. But importantly, after college, there was this sort of diaspora, right? Everyone scattered, friends from gaming,, you know, friends from gaming, friends from school, friends from life, just all over, not connected. I was out in Seattle

then for grad school and, you know, none of my friend group was there with me. So, you know, I kind of kept in touch and kept playing with people online because we were playing, you know, MMOs or we were playing Path of Exile or we were playing whatever else video game together online. And then we were also saying like, well, you know, let's let's let's play D&D. So let's figure out how to do that. Let's let's look into map tool or fantasy grounds or roll 20. And you know, all of these options that existed to help facilitate that. And so we started diving into that. And it was like, oh, this is so great. We can have a scene.

And let me interrupt you there. So when you started doing this remote gaming with your friends and you were out in grad school, were you the GM? Some mixed, but mostly, yeah. Mostly, I was sort of the ringleader, I guess, of trying to get it to happen. So yeah, and were you your first forays into GMing? Were they pre written

DND modules? Yeah, but I just did you start out home brewing? No, I would I would usually start with a module and then just kind of when I got tired of it, go off the rails. You know, sort of like just use it as sort of the seed to get things going and then kind of take it in whatever direction it ended up feeling like was right for the game. So yeah, you know, playing a lot of, you know, playing a lot of pre-written modules, not just D&D, but also Pathfinder oney at the time. You know, we had a really like great sort of Curse of Crimson Throne game going for

a while. Great AP. Rune Lords, another great AP. Yeah. And so, you know, just like And so you would do this using virtual tabletops of some kind or another. And hold on, let me back up one more second. Where were you growing

up? Where did you go to college? I went to Clemson. Go Tigers. Clemson. Nice. You went to Clemson. Are your friends still in that area? Are they still in the southeast? Some. Honestly, it spread out a lot. There's a few folks still in that area, but for the most part, it's kind of all over. And what did you study? Economics.

Really? So that was my professional career for a while before going full time into the family of football. I assumed you were a software designer, a programmer from day one. Well, I was doing applied microeconomics, which is really actually quite focused on software in that we're building statistical models to predict customer behavior.

So we won't go too far into that unless I like cause everyone to just close their browser window immediately. But I guess suffice it to say that there is a fair bit of like software development involved in that. And that's where I picked up a lot of the skills that ended up, you know, serving me well in making Foundry VTT totally different concept. Yeah. So when does Foundry VTT come into the picture? When do you decide something's missing with my current options and I need something different? Well I was probably feeling that way for a while, just not taking any action on it.

And then I kind of always had a sort of hobby or hobbies that I sort of like poured free time into, whether it's gaming or, you know, painting Warhammer minis and going around to 40k tournaments, or making a fan site website for playing the Elder Scrolls online. All these random projects that I've done in the past and modding for games always had something going. I sort of found myself without or in between hobbies and so I had the itch like I need a I need a project I need something to do. And this was back in 2018 and we were playing you know a weekly game on Roll20 at the time and I just was like you know

I'm feeling a little bit constrained here. I'm feeling like I'm boxed in a little bit with like what the software is doing for us. And so I was like, you know, what if, what if it was, what if there was something different? What if like there was a software that was a little bit more immersive or a little bit more focused on like the visual storytelling, or it was a little bit more maybe snappy, you know, a little bit more performant. Just various things. And I guess that's something that I'm sure people have thought, but I guess the difference

is that I had the hubris to feel like I could actually do something about that. And folly or not, it turned out to be not, but I just sort of started hacking around. And it was a time when, like, web technologies had kind of evolved to a point where there was sort of a new generation of tools that were available to do, to make something like Foundry that maybe weren't available, you know, when a prior generation of solutions were made. So it seemed like a cool opportunity. Let's take a lot of the ideas that I've liked from those other tools that I've used and let's try and do it in a slightly different way

that has a really focus on autonomy and control over your space. I feel like as game masters, we all want to be like, absolute sort of masters of our own environment. And so because of that, I never really loved the like, you know, software as a service approach to DMing that that felt like sort of wrong to me, because it's it's like, it's my stories, it's my data, it's my characters, it's my music that I've chosen to be part of the game, it's my images that I've, you know, hacked together or sketched myself or whatever.

Like, I didn't really love like having all of that body of work on, you know, someone else's service that could go down or could become unavailable or, youailable or could go in a direction that I didn't like. And I was like, why can't just all of this be on my computer? Why can't I be the host? Why can't I be in control of my own environment? And so a lot of the genesis for Foundry was like, let's make something self-hosted. Let's make something web-based. Let's make something that doesn't force people to pay a subscription fee every month. I was like feeling very cynical about subscriptions at the time. So like, let's let's make something where you just buy the software and then you have it. And I don't have to host your game for you. You host your

own game. People will just connect to you and play. And you as the game master have all of the files, all of your data, it's all on your hard drive, it's all on your computer. You know, it's up to you, you just do whatever you want with it. And it's it's a tool to empower GMing. And so, you know, that yeah, that was kind of the vision. And that that's how foundry came together. And I was working, you know, sort of nights and weekends to develop it for a couple years, about a year and a half and then put it out on Patreon. Were you playing your games?

Yeah, I subjected. Like a jacked up pre-op version of it. I subjected the party to some horribly subpar experiences during the early days of Foundry VTT, but they were all very, you know, supportive of like, of the effort. And honestly, like, it didn't take so long and to achieve at least sort of a basic level of functionality that didn't feel like it was like too much of a step backwards. I think, you know, I sort of hustled to get to a point where it felt like, okay, you know, we have more or less a similar experience that we had before, but now we can continue to make it better from here.

That's great. So I'm going to keep it moving forward here because there's so much I want to talk about with Ember. And so I mean, we could spend an entire show talking about the evolution of Foundry to make it, you know, where it is today and why it became the focus of our network as our VTT, why we approached you about sponsoring a new show in Campaign 2 and how we could become, you know, start working together. A large part of the reason behind that is the sheer just brilliance of the software and how wonderful it is to play on and how wonderful it looks to an audience. And so that's what really eventually, obviously it evolved into a fantastic product. And we would not have come to you most likely if we didn't have such a huge army of Foundry fans

among our listeners who were just coming to us and being like, why are you not using Foundry? Your experience would be so much better with Foundry blah, blah, blah. And you hear once or twice that from people and you're like, yeah, I'm not interested in your fringe software that you use. But then when you start hearing dozens and dozens and dozens of these comments and people, well, maybe we should look into this. And it really was an incredible step up for us. And so we're excited to be partnering with you.

I guess that's another tidbit of news, which is really exciting, that as we very quickly approach episode 52 of the Glass Can of Podcasts here, which will be the quote unquote one year anniversary, we can also announce that we've re-upped with Foundry VTT for another year of sponsorship of GCP Campaign 2. So thank you, Andrew. That is huge. And we're so excited about that.

But what I want to get back to now is when- Joe, just one second. Yeah. I need to say something related to what you mentioned, which is that the work that I did and the work that the team that now exists around Foundry has done is, of course, wonderful. But it is also really important to shout out the incredible community of Pathfinder 2 users on Foundry in particular. Not just gamers playing, but specifically the team that's building

that game system for Foundry. Because what you mentioned in terms of like it becoming such an amazing experience and you know beautiful and easy to use and like very popular and everyone's recommending it that would have only happened and that did only happen because of the many many people who have volunteered their time to making the Pathfinder system on Foundry as excellent as it is. And so, you know, I think like whenever we're shouting out, especially in this context, especially in terms of like, how did like Gatewalkers end up using Foundry? Like that wouldn't have happened without the community that we have. And so you didn't personally do that. I didn't personally do it. Yeah. And so, you know, I think what, what our focus has been is to create the landscape, the ecosystem that has allowed that amazing outcome to happen. And then of course, Paizo, you know, taking up the torch as well and joining up with us and making that official partnership and like figuring out the

right ways to work together. Like it's been amazing on all fronts. And so I think like it's obviously been like a big team effort. And, you know, I just wanted to make sure to acknowledge that. Yeah, that's great and very important. And something that I, obviously been like a big team effort and I just wanted to make sure to acknowledge that. Yeah, that's great and very important. And something that definitely passes me by as I've never been involved in this kind of thing. I remember playing Skyrim on PC years later after playing it on PlayStation and being

absolutely blown away by the mods, right? Like this was like an entirely, so the idea of a community that builds and adds on to a platform that someone else has built is not something I've ever been a part of in terms of a community. I've never built that kind of stuff and I tend to forget how community based that is and what a beautiful thing that is. It's really awesome that people are passionate about making Pathfinder 2e part of this software that they can use. And so they put in the time to do it and then we obviously benefit from that. But it is, and all of us users that use 2e on Foundry benefit from that. So yeah, thank you for shouting them out. That's awesome.

Looking for a path to accelerate your career? Clear direction for next level success, in a place that is innovative and practical, a path to stay current and connected to industry, a place where you can be yourself, you will find it at York University School of Continuing Studies, where we offer career programs purpose-built for you. Visit continue.yorku.ca. I'm not going back to university to be your friend. I'm going so I can get Uber One for students. It saves you on Uber and Uber Eats.

I'm there for $0 delivery fee on cheeseburgers, up to 5% off smoothies and 5% Uber cash back on rides. Just to be clear, I'm there for savings, not whatever you think university is for. Get Uber One for students, a membership to save on Uber and Uber Eats. With deals this good, everyone wants to be a student. Join for just $4.99 a month. Savings may vary.

Eligibility and member terms apply. But I want to talk about Ember. As you, as the founder of ETT grows in success, we talked about this around the time of our initial partnership. You correct me if I'm wrong, had never spent money or resources on traditional marketing for Foundry VTT. It really sort of grew out of word of mouth. I'm right. I mean, isn't that fair to say traditional marketing being more like paid advertising, we just historically don't really do that. I think what we've always leaned into is trying to focus on sort of authentic sort of grassroots messaging and then like work

with our community of users to, you know, focus on engaging with them and then rely on our community to help sort of spread the word. You know, ultimately, someone who gives a personal recommendation of like, I think you should use Foundry VTT, that's so much more powerful than, you know, a paid ad that shows up on your social feed. Yeah. And so, you know, we're really focused on like trying to, you know, listen to and build for and be receptive to what our community wants us to do. And of course, it's really hard to live up to that sometimes, because there's so many amazing things we could be doing, or like so many things that we don't have the time for. But like, I think we've been very community focused in the way that we've developed Foundry. And what that's done is it turns all of our users into advocates for the software. And I think that like community based advocacy, it just feels better to me than talking about return on ad spend or converting click-through rate.

Or yeah, it just sort of makes me grimace a little bit. I mean, I understand how valuable that can be. And it does play a role. And we actually are doing a little bit of paid ad spend for Ember because there's like a way to do that through Kickstarter that has made it kind of easier for us to help get the word out. But you know, we, we really like, like you said with Gatewalkers, you know, like when you've got folks in your audience who are saying, I'd love it if you

used Foundry VTT, like how valuable has that been for us? You know, so, you know, I think, and we're kind of hoping, I guess, with Ember that it will be a little bit of the same sort of experience that like if we focus on building this incredible product that hasn't really existed before, not in this format, like it's not the kind of thing that has been created by anyone, that, you know, it does make it a little bit hard to get people in at first, because there's this uncertainty. Like, you know, what exactly is this? Like, is this gonna be for me?

You know, should I jump all on board with this? It's kind of a new thing. Is it gonna work? Is it gonna be good? It's a little bit expensive. Like, should, you know, should we split that with the group? Like, do we wanna do that? we split that with the group? Like, do we want to do that? There's all these questions that people have. But then I think like, once people

get a chance to see and I think the live play that we've done is an amazing way to show that, but then also experience themselves, like once some people start playing Ember, I'm hoping that there will be a sort of similar phenomenon where people who've experienced it themselves will become believers and then will share that excitement with their friends and with other folks that are adjacent to them in the community. So we'll see. But it's sort of a risk, just like Foundry VTT was a risk. And it grew steadily over time via positive word of mouth. I'm thinking and hoping that Ember will be much the same. Yeah, it is very interesting and what it leads me to think about is the, well, what I'm kind of skipping over is all of that development that got

Foundry to where it is now, it's such a strong software and so strong in the space and I can see how that developed over time. At what point during that evolution does the seed of Ember get planted? At what point are you like, oh, I need to make an original campaign that uses the software. When did this happen? Was it like almost immediately? Or did it take a couple years before that idea happened? When did that occur? I think that, you know, dreams around what the Foundry ecosystem could someday be have kind of existed for a while. But in terms of what when did it become kind of a clear plan or a clear

direction that we wanted to move in? It took a little bit of time. I think the focus for the first couple of years was so much on like, can Foundry VTT approach something that feels relatively feature complete? And we're not even there yet. There's still features that we feel like belong in Foundry that aren't there yet. So, you know, we've still got a lot of development to do on the core software. But, you know, once Foundry grew to a point where it has so many people using it, then the question is, especially given our business model of like the one time purchase, what is the future for our company? You know, like, what is it that we do if we've already made Foundry and we've already sold you Foundry? Like, what do we do next? And there's a multi-prong strategy to that. We have amazing publishers, partnerships where we can work with publishers to bring their content onto the

platform. And that's a good way to do it. But we're also very inspired and creative people. So, like, it's fun to convert someone else's content to Foundry, but it's much more fun to make our own content. And so I think like we're trying to do a little bit of both of those things, you know, to sort of balance things out. And we've got many irons in the fire. But Ember actually isn't the first first party adventure that we've made. We did two relatively smaller forays into the space, both of which I think are actually excellent. One of them is called The Demon Queen Awakens, which is a two- to three-shot adventure for mid-level players, supports both D&D and Pathfinder.

It's really flavorful. It's a boss fight gauntlet-type dungeon experience. Then we've got a product called House Divided, which is a longer, maybe 12 to 15 session, adventure arc, gothic horror, extra planar, metaphysical fantasy, really great medium form campaign that people are playing through it. We love seeing the feedback in Discord when someone gets through it and it's like, we just finished. It was amazing. Lo through it. And we love seeing the feedback in Discord when someone like gets through it. It's like, we just finished, you know, it's amazing, loved it. And so those kind of were like, warm up exercises for us in terms of getting to the point of then committing to a project like

Ember, where, you know, each one of those steps has been sort of proportionally like 10x in size of the thing we did before. And so kind of ramping up in terms of the level of ambition to this sort of insane point where we are now with Ember and the scope of it. Also, in terms of the genesis of Ember, a lot of it came out of my friendship and discussions with Kaora, a wonderful, talented creator in the Patreon community, map maker, token maker. Kaora and I, we just were talking for a long time about like, do we want to try and make a setting? Do we want to try and make something more like an all-inclusive game experience? It kind of was just a back and forth brainstorm for a while. And then we eventually sort of committed to doing it.

And we had all these initial design conversations. And the genesis of Ember was born out of those. And so yeah, sort of a history. But in terms of the strategy, we've got this amazing platform. Ember can be this incredible setting. And then we're also investing into the game system Crucible, which, you know, we haven't talked as much about, but hopefully, you know, maybe a later show,

we could do like a one-shot or something and dig into it if that ends up being an option. But, you know, having the three pillars of that triangle, the platform, the system, the setting, as well as all of the publisher partnership content that we have. That's the recipe that I envision in terms of how we build our little mini VTT empire. I do want to get to – I had a little bit on Crucible I wanted to touch on. I think you're right. I don't think we're gonna have a lot of time for it. That is for something down the line.

I say too much, I'm sorry. No, no, it's okay. It's an interesting concept and it's jumping ahead a little bit. I want to back up for a second because Ember, as it develops in your mind, is a completely original world. And our experience with it, although brief, was really eye-opening and extremely fun and very, you know, as a fan of fantasy, I read a lot of books and I play a lot of video games and I play a lot of role-playing games.

And so you end up getting a lot of different worlds kind of thrown at you. And some stick and some don't so much. And this one really jumped out to me as complex, yet easily digestible and something that, from a very early stage in the game, I was eager to learn a little bit more about the world, just because of the way you parsed it out. It was very, it was like little breadcrumbs, right? To kind of follow this trail.

So the way it's designed in terms of its introduction is well done. But the overall world building, we barely scraped the surface. Can I ask, just as an overarching question, where, what is the, are there some particular inspirations for the world building? Where did it begin? And are there certain ideas that got you into the space to make Ember what it is from a fictional world standpoint? Yeah, absolutely. You know, we always wanted to make something that was a little bit what,

I guess, we internally use the term imaginative fantasy. And of course, all fantasy is imaginative to a degree. but a lot of fantasy is grounded in a certain archetype, whether it's medieval Europe-based with augmented by magic, whether it's Tolkien-esque, whether it's something that's a little bit more weird and wild spelljammer style or sort of grim dark. There's all these different genres. And we wanted to make something that felt like you were stepping into a totally different world with its own ecosystem,

its own peoples, its own cultures, its own expectations that you couldn't necessarily take what you know from another setting or take what you know from another setting or take what you know from Earth history and project it in a way that lets you really understand Ember or feel like you understand Ember. And that would leave you with this sense of like the desire to discover because you don't necessarily feel like you already have it mapped out. You know, you're like, you're curious. We're in, we're trying to inspire that curiosity. And so, you know, you're like, you're curious, we're in, we're trying to inspire that curiosity.

And so, you know, part of the design of the early game experience, but also the design of the setting itself is intended to be kind of, you know, just different from the types of fantasy settings that are typically played, but also very focused on like the mechanical requirements for those settings, like, there's certain things that from a gamification perspective, you want to have certain structure, like you want to have a way to talk about elemental forces, you want to have a way to talk about good and evil, you want to have a way to talk about, you know, what is the, what is your spiritual journey in terms of your soul or your essence or what what creates life or what happens after you die. You want to have a framework for all of those things that can then turn into game experiences. And so with Ember trying to think about like, what are the sort of essential foundational components of a fantasy setting, not just any fantasy setting, but a fantasy setting

that's specifically well thought out for the perspective of role playing games where it has that structure and it has those fundamental pillars, but it leaves a lot of open scope to take those elements and tell really compelling stories with them. Inspirations that we have, of course, games we've played, book series we've read, movies we've watched. There's a little bit we've sampled from, games we've played, book series we've read, movies we've watched. There's sort of a little bit we've sampled from a lot of different places. But ultimately, it's kind of about thinking like,

taking the kind of vision for what type of feel of the setting would be, and mapping that onto the architectural framework of like, what's needed for game design. But how do you come up with this infrastructure or these elements that you just rattled off like it was nothing that are key components to understanding a character's place in a fictional world? You rattled them off like they were bullet points. Are these things that you've just kind of learned over your experiences of, you know,

just kind of bringing together the experiences of video games and TTRPGs and books you've read over the years? Or, I mean, are you getting this out of like a world building guide? Because it just, it sounded so detailed of like the major pillars that you need to have in place to build a fictional world. There are some very good world building references and resources out there and some of which I have engaged with over the years. You know, I've read a lot of like articles on sites like World Anvil, a great community of world building enthusiasts over there.

That's cool. I know that site. I've never really dug into that, like the community aspect where you could probably hear a lot from people about ideas and stuff. Yeah, but I think to a certain extent, it's also about, I guess maybe my left-brained sort of structural approach, the same approach that tends to work well for software development in terms of thinking about like, what are the fundamental concepts, the fundamental building blocks that you need in place to then create something powerful or something extensible.

about creative process in terms of what are those cornerstones of a game setting that you need to then have these powerful components that can motivate conflict or introduce tension or build suspense or give characters something to anchor to that lets them feel grounded in the world. And are you sure you studied economics in college? You didn't study literature? Like, your your grasp on the detail of storytelling, it seems it's academic, almost. You're too kind. I think I think probably you're over overselling my ability. And,

and, you know, I, Ember would not be here without Kaora's creativity on these points as well. I think we tend to be a very good partnership because I bring that kind of structured framework, and Kaora brings the most creative ideas that have then sort of populated and fit into that as well. So that's cool. The game itself is really fun to play. Obviously, the world is an interesting thing already. But then you described this in the actual play in the introduction as being a mesh between TTRPGs that you would play remotely with your friends, and like a digital multiplayer video game, it kind of marries the two together. When you attempt to do something like that.

First of all, I think that it's a very bold move. I don't know of too many options in this space for that, which is why I'm very honestly and genuinely eager for people to check this out because I've never seen anything like it personally. It's also, I think that there's a danger there of getting a little bit too railroad-y for lack of a better term, right? Like you have to, if you have to build

these beautiful video elements to go along with something, then the players have to do that thing. That's right. And that in and of itself feels kind of railroaded. How do you address that challenge in this project? Yeah, that's a great, a great call out. And I think, you know, when we're trying to build that hybrid, there is sort of this, I don't know, it's not an uncanny valley in the sense of like the way that people look when you illustrate them. But there is this sort of valley where if we get too close to the video game experience, it would become bad.

It's like Ember would become unrecognizable as a tabletop role playing game. And it would feel more like a poorly executed video game than a really elegant and fun collaborative storytelling experience. So the first thing we need to keep in mind always than a really elegant and fun collaborative storytelling experience. So right. The first thing we need to keep in mind always when we're doing this is how do we stay a little bit more on the TTRPG side of that hybrid model, because we don't want to go too far, you know, we're never

going to be able to compete with what people think of as the state of the art on the computer gaming side. When you think about, oh, I'm going to log into Baldur's Gate three with my friends. Like, we can't make that. So, you know, you're laughing, but I mean, obviously, it's true. It's a funny way to put it. It's like, we can't do that. Yeah, we cannot do that. And so, you know, we have to think about where can we position ourselves, which is very much like, let's make a TTRPG, but let's augment it with these video game like elements. Let's design it in a way that still requires and relies on a human game master sitting at the table to lead the experience and to connect all of the different narrative threads that the party's pulling on. And we rely on that person heavily. So we're not trying to script away the role of the game master, we're trying to empower that game master to have an easier time telling really rich

and deep stories. Now, the first part of the Ember game experience is a little bit railroad II. And that is by design because we need to tutorialize the way that Ember works as a setting the way that Ember works as a game and we need to kind of ease people into it. And so giving too much choice too early on, we would would not be successful. But like, as I remember it, so you and I had a very brief conversation off in the studio about Morrowind where we talked about like my initial experience in Morrowind when they just like let me off the boat out in that town, say to Neen, I'll never forget the name of the town.

Like, and I walk out and say to Neen and I got nothing. Like I've got no clear objective. I'm not sure what to do. And so I just started looking in stumps for magic rings and stuff. I just started stealing silverware and plates and selling it for like a dagger. I mean, it was realistic in its own way, but it was a little bit, uh, it felt a little, I felt a little lost. And so yeah, that, I think that opening tutorial is a real commitment, I think that type of game experience is a real commitment to the art of absolute

sort of open world design. And before it was really thought of that way. But like, I think, you know, the early Bethesda games, Morrowind in particular, I think was a sort of really defining accomplishment for a whole genre of games that now we kind of think of as fairly commonplace. But they don't usually commit to the bit the same way that Morrowind did. And I think that's a certain aspect in gaming that has been lost over the years. Anyway, I'm sorry, I cut you off.

No, no, it's okay. But yeah, you know, you're going back to your question around like, how do we design this content so that it doesn't become too railroad to you? It's a tough challenge. I think like what we have in Ember, those we have really nice sort of nonlinear quest designs, like these flow charts of events that define the quest. And we always give our events sort of multiple jumping off points. Like there's never just one event that can start a quest. There's always like, it could be breadcrumb A over here. It could be breadcrumb B over here. It could be something else that happens later in the game that incentivizes you to backtrack and go back to an area you were before in case you missed something. Then we try and have these tributaries that lead to the river that we want you to be on. And so, you know,

railroading is sort of what it what the term you use when it feels forced, like when you feel like I have to do this thing. You know, we're trying to pursue a type of design that, you know, incentivizes you with the urge to explore a topic that we put in front of you as an appetizer, because when the players want to latch onto the hook that you've given, then it's much easier as the GM to follow that track without it feeling like you have to force them into it. Right. So in increasing the motivation of the players is really the key. You got to find a way to make them want to do it.

And yeah, I guess we try and provide that out of the box. But again, this is a place where we rely on having a, you know, an engaged and capable game master at the table who can, if for whatever reason the players like didn't really like this NPC that they made. And so therefore they're feeling reluctant to like follow up on the lead that they just got, you know, we, we rely on the game master in that case to think about like, do I want to try and frame this a different way? Or do I want to try and give a different on ramp to the players to get onto this quest? Because I think I know what this quest is, and I think they'll really enjoy it once I can get them kind of going with it. And so there is there is absolutely a role to happen there. And that's true, I think, in any kind of adventure path or published campaign that you'll play. There is always the expectation that the GM is going

to help to channel the gameplay towards the writing in the book. I think we can do that a little bit. I think that's the heart of my question. But you've answered the question very well. My next question goes right along those lines. It's like, how would you describe how more or less. Railroady this experience might be versus just a pre-written adventure is,

does it have to be a little bit more, um, set or is it just as customizable in a way as any pre written published adventure? I think there's I think there's trade offs on both sides, because I think with some pre written text book adventures, there is more latitude around like, how do you get a certain gameplay experience across? Say in the book, you've got an assassin that's tracking you down and they're supposed to jump you at some point and you have to fight them off. If that's the only information that's given in the book,

then the GM has a lot of latitude, like where does that encounter take place? What's it look like? What's the assassin look like? When does it occur? Like the GM can kind of make all of those decisions themselves. like where does that encounter take place? What's it look like? What's the assassin look like? When does it occur? Like the GM can kind of make all of those decisions themselves. In a game experience like ours, we're probably making some of those decisions for you. Like we're saying, oh, the assassin is going to get you when you're at the crossroads, or it's much more likely to happen when you camp for the night. Or, you know, so like, we put our finger on the you know, on the lever and we affect the probabilities of things happening,

or in some cases, we just define when they happen. And so those are some ways where because you have these added video elements that accompany the visual storytelling assets. Yeah, we need that encounter to play out a certain way so that you get the value that we've created out of it. But that's on one side. On the other side, I think we actually can do a lot more to create meaningful choice and consequence and branching narrative paths than any print product can do. Because in a print book, you have to put all of your content in a linearized format, page one, page two, page three, and you have to present it in a certain way. And everyone's familiar with choose your own adventure books. It's like a fun little thing, like, oh, like flip to page 93

and then flip back to page 22. But there's a reason that like full TTRPG campaigns aren't that. There's a reason why when you're playing, you know, Gatewalkers, it doesn't tell you to go get the other book and flip to page 73, and then go get book three and flip back to page 13. Like that's just too chaotic and experience for the GM in the heat of the moment. But in our software, everything can be completely nonlinear, we just link you to where you need to go. And so, you know,

when you have this meaningful branching choice, like, you know, you've reached this pivotal decision point for your party, are you going to follow path A or path B or path C? We can support all three of those paths to a degree of fidelity that a print product simply can't. And so, you know, those are the types of ways that we can add levels of non-linearity or openness or meaningful choice and consequence that can only happen in a software product like this one. I'm gonna throw this out there just because I think that the audience would wanna know.

And I don't wanna put you on the spot too much here in the middle of a Kickstarter. But I think that the choice to launch this game or launch this Kickstarter, I should say, as 5e compatible is without question, the way to launch a product like this. I mean, you essentially are giving a framework to the kind of largest known fantasy, high fantasy gameplay framework that's out there. You also envision a future for Crucible as being a part of this game, which I love

and want to talk about in another cannon fodder down the line. Do you envision a future where Pathfinder 2E, or whatever version may be around at the time, Remaster, will be compatible with Ember? Yeah, I don't know. I love the idea of it. And to be honest, ever since we started working on this, we've had a lot of difficult internal conversations about like, what is the dice resolution mechanic that we're using for Ember? You know, ultimately, because of the way that Ember is as a game, it's such a substantial layer on top of that game system. I think a lot of times campaign is sort of a thin layer on top of the game system. And therefore, the choice of game system proportionally is like massively impactful to the experience that you have. I think because Ember is so dense and so expansive, in proportion, the choice of game system is a little bit less impactful, but it's still very

meaningful and very impactful to a lot of people. And so, you know, within our team, we've had some really tough conversations about what that was going to look like. people. And so, you know, within our team, we've had some really tough conversations about what that was gonna look like. And bear in mind, like, we've been developing Ember now for about two years at various stages of development. And so during that time, there's been an OGL crisis. During that time, there's been, you know, major licensing discussion.

During that time, there's been new systems coming out, like Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press or Drawsteel from MCDM. There's all of this that's gone into that. So much has happened in two years. Yeah, so much has happened in two years. Ultimately, with 5E, like you said, the reason for that is because it is the most familiar starting point for the most people. And so like on one end of the spectrum, that's the choice that lets us reach the largest audience is the choice that lets people feel like

there's a very low barrier to entry into Ember because it's the D20 system that almost everybody knows to some degree. Now, Crucible is on the complete other end of the spectrum in that it is our passion project. It's part of our little empire building strategy. One of the pillars. One of the pillars.

And so we weren't even committed to Crucible until a couple months ago. As much as I wanted it to happen, we didn't necessarily have the clarity of vision or the clear alignment that it was for sure going to happen until pretty shortly before the Kickstarter. Because it is such a tough conversation. Now, Pathfinder, I love Pathfinder, and it would be a wonderful game experience to have Pathfinder 2e in Ember. It really would. But it also would be extraordinarily effort intensive to make that happen. And also, there's some tough challenges that we've been working on in terms of the open world nature of it. As those of you who play Pathfinder 2 very regularly know, encounter balance is pretty sensitive in 2e. Like if you are two levels higher

or two levels lower than you are like intended to be for a certain passage of play, that can be either effortless to the point that it's not fun or you're going to die. And so, you know, the need for something to be like really immaculately balanced becomes greater. And the need therefore for the content that we have in Ember to scale with your party level becomes more important because it is an open world game. And we have all of these quests that you could be doing in different orders. And so that's another thing that from a design perspective, and there's some variant rules that you can use. you can play Pathfinder without proficiency bonus to your roles.

And so it keeps things a little bit more flat in terms of progression. But yeah, it's a difficult thing. And so the challenge that we're facing in terms of thinking about that is the effort required to do that conversion, but not just to do it, but to do it well. Cause I think like we would want,

if we did Pathfinder 2E and Ember, we would want it to be an excellent experience. And I think there's just a lot of challenge in that in terms of the scope of the project and some of the design principles that would make it a little bit difficult. And so- I hear you, I hear you. I mean, it's, I'm gonna take that as saying, a little bit difficult. And so I hear you. I hear you. I mean, it's I'm going to take that as saying there's a chance.

There's a chance. Yeah, there is a chance. But I think, but that, but I understand that like I didn't before. And thank you for answering that. Like what a lift that is. It would be when you explain like an open world to be balanced well and to be, you know, it's in a totally different system is a massive, massive. I'm playing Kingmaker and enjoying it.

It's a great campaign, but it is the kind of thing like, if you go one hex off trail in Kingmaker, you may just die. And it's the responsibility of the GM to signpost that and to warn you like, oh, if you go East, instead of going West, you've gone into a totally higher level zone where the content here will probably just kill you. And we didn't want to have those sorts of invisible barriers in Ember to say like, don't go west. You can only go east if you want to stay alive. And so we need the design of that becomes a little bit of a

challenge in terms of like how to make that possible. The other thing is that like, like I said with crucible, originally, like we had this stretch to add crucible support that came shortly before the Kickstarter. That kind of was our internal stretch that we already made. And so I think, you know, it's easy to think about, like, oh, could Pathfinder 2 be a stretch goal? And it could be, but it would be like a second stretch on top of the stretch that we're already committing to, to add Crucible support. So anyways, you know, if Ember grows and if Ember continues to flourish and the community of people playing it and its reputation in the TTRPG ecosystem matures and grows, I think there is a possible future where we can add Pathfinder support

to it someday. But I do think it's not an easy thing. And I would rather that we deliver Ember to spec at the end of next year than push our development timeline out until 2026 or beyond. Yeah. I'm going to ask you a couple Kickstarter questions, and then we'll get you out of here.

What is it like to launch a Kickstarter? I mean, it's very stressful. Obviously, that's the predictable answer. I think the prep that goes into the page and like trying to figure out how to communicate what you've made, especially when it's more fully formed than just the genesis of an idea. Sometimes a Kickstarter is about like, I have a vision. And this vision will not exist at all, unless there's enough people willing to embark on it with me. And that's a certain type of page. But with Ember, it's like we we've already committed to making Ember. What the Kickstarter helps us do is to achieve additional internal targets to expand expand the scope, to do some things

that otherwise wouldn't be possible without that source of funding, add features. Like that's what Kickstarter empowers us to do. And so for us, the challenge is really like, how do we communicate what Ember is on a page, on a Kickstarter page that's like 600 pixels in width that you just have to scroll down, like scroll, scroll, scroll. And yeah, you get a video, but then you're just scrolling through the page and you have to communicate like what are the tiers? Like what is this even about? It felt almost like an impossible task for us to even explain like what is Ember? And so that was largely the reason why I was so keen to work with GCN.

It's like, what better way to communicate what is Ember than to actually show what it means to play Ember? There's no more powerful explanatory tool to us than that. We talked about it a few times before the summer. This was back in April, May. We discussed, you said, I want to have a call with you guys. I have a big project coming up. It's called Ember. I've been working on it for a couple of years, blah, blah, blah. After all those meetings and

discussions, I still did not really know. You were unprepared. Yeah. What it was going to be. The second we recorded that first episode, I was like, oh, I see what this is now. I see the vision. So you're absolutely right that it's very hard to explain over text, even talking to you in a meeting. It was really kind of hard to wrap my head around what made this different or what was going to make this experience different. That's why I urge people to check it out. It's on our YouTube page. It's premiering every Wednesday night in

September. We did one episode last week. We're doing another one tonight, 8 o'clock Eastern, another one next Wednesday, and then one more at the end of the month every Wednesday night. And if you can't be there for the premiere at 8 p.m. Eastern, it'll be there on the page after. You can watch it, check it out, and just kind of see what that experience means. So the Kickstarter launches, and how did you feel after day one? Good, relieved that it was out.

Relieved that like- It's out in the world. To a certain extent, the acceptance of like, okay, you know, yes, we're going to post campaign updates. And yes, we're gonna, you know, hopefully record a FOD or whatever like that we can continue to do to support the campaign. But like, the relief of it just not feeling like the responsibility of of it, like, what's done is done, the die is cast, you know, it's like, let the let the dice fall where they may, to a certain extent, there's a relief in that I think there's just kind of a fear, a dread with a project like

this that the people won't get it. Like, because, you know, I feel like we have created something so magical and the potential for it is enormous. But the reason, like you never want your project to fail because people didn't get it. Because people couldn't see the value. You know, if a project fails, because ultimately the idea like, wasn't that great or like the execution was sloppy or,

you know, maybe like you over promised and you couldn't quite deliver on it. Like you can look back at that and you can say, well, there's lessons to learn there. Like I might have regrets, like maybe we could have done that a different way. But I think I would truly regret if Ember didn't take off just because people didn't really understand what it was or couldn't like wrap their head around like, is this going to be fun or is this going to be for me? So

I think that's kind of what I've been like, wrangling and struggling with a little bit is like, are people going to see what we're making and be able to get it? And I think that's gonna partly take time, but we've got like 1600 backers plus that have fully jumped on board and said like, yes, this looks amazing, sign me up. And I'm optimistic and hopeful that that number is gonna continue to grow for the rest of the campaign

as we keep showing more things and whatnot. And so, yeah, it's just like, once it's out, it's hard not to just kind of keep hitting F5 on the keyboard and be like, oh, you know, another $100, another $100. It's hard not to do that. But you know, we have lots of work to do. So like, we're busy making quests and building foundry VTT features and I'm hard at work updating crucible so we can put out a new crucible playtest and you know there's just so much work to do and I think like it's nice to be able to just not be focused on like the messaging of it because I just feel like that's not necessarily my personal strong suit

and there's there's people who exist it's a real challenge you know that's not necessarily my personal strong suit. And there's people who exist. It's a real challenge. It's their career that exists to do this sort of marketing. And it's a real hard challenge. Yeah. Well, I wish you all the best of luck. I am very excited at the performance of the Kickstarter so far.

I hope it continues to grow. I mean, you've got 20 plus days left, around 20 days left. Still a lot of time left. Yeah. Yeah, still a lot of time left. If you guys continues to grow. I mean, you've got 20 plus days left or around 20 days left. Still a lot of time left. Yeah. Yeah. Still a lot of time left. If you guys want to check this out, you want to be a part of it, want to be a part of the initial release and get your copyright away, there'll be a link in this description that you can go to check out the Kickstarter directly and see if this is something for you. When I scrolled through and looked at all the details, I was blown away. I couldn't even imagine the months of work that went into just that page.

There's so much detail on there. We did the page in about a week and a half. Are you serious? It was so much graphics. There's so much detail about all the different like taking a very well deserved break. Now, I think I think we yeah, it was very impressive. A little bit manic. Very impressive. Before I let you go, I'm going to get you out of here.

Let's change subject for a second here because you told you said as part of your video game and gaming life kind of growing up in this hobby you enjoyed reading as well, and novels as well. What are some of your favorite fantasy novels, fantasy series? What jumped out to you all time as some of your favorites? Yeah, sure. Well, I really sort of grew up on, you know, Wheel of Time in the fantasy, in the fantasy genre, you know, Shannara other series, you know, it's tough like so many of the series we look back on from that era like beloved series, but it's like now are they problematic in ways that we now realize? Yeah. But you know, also like

science fiction, Herbert Asimov, you know, just like, you know, all things, things like that. And did you watch Foundation on TV? Yeah, I did. You like it? You know, I liked it, probably because like, I, I couldn't honestly really remember some of the details from the books. And I think that that actually worked in my favor. Yeah, I feel like I'm if I was maybe a little bit more like, had the immediate recall of all of the details, I might have been like, I'm not sure like, I like that creative choice. But I was able to sort of set that aside a little bit and just kind of enjoy the spectacle of it. Yeah, so I've watched both seasons of it so far. It's pretty good. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, buddy, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Like I said, we've got three more weeks of Ember actual play from Glass Cannon Studios in New York City. Andrew came up from Philly to join us and GM us through these games. It was really, really fun. And I'm very excited to share that with all of you guys. So please check that out every Wednesday night, 8 o'clock Eastern on our YouTube channel. Andrew, thanks for taking the time out. I know you got to get back to Quest building and crucible testing and lots to come from Foundry VTT. And we're

just excited to be a part of it. Another year of the Glass Canna podcast on Foundry. You heard it here. It's going to be awesome. Thanks again, Andrew. Take it easy and we'll see you soon, buddy. See you soon. It's time to make your membership official. Become an official member of The Naish today at JoinTheNaish.com. That's JoinTheNaish.com where you'll get access to exclusive podcasts and live streams you can't find anywhere else. See what everybody's talking about

and join the nation today at jointhenation.com.