Ember Kickstarter Launches for Foundry VTT

[SteveC]

A Kickstarter from the Foundry team for their Ember campaign dropped yesterday. As of day one, it had hit $130000, so it seems to be doing well. A link to the Kickstarter is here.

What is it? It's an adventure, designed for use with 5E (2024 edition) or Foundry's Crucible system. It is designed to be highly immersive and has things like a hex-crawl built in. The maps are multi-leveled, with animations and music. Here's the announcement video so you can take a look at it:


This looks really solid from a visual perspective, and it should be able to find a great audience with 5E revised. I'm not familiar with Crucible, but I know the Foundry team has been working on it for a few years now.

 

[Zaukrie]

It looks amazing! Likely unusable on the forge without the highest paid tier, given it's size. But seriously, this looks amazing

 

[SteveC]

Glass Cannon Podcast is doing a series where they play the adventure. You can see some of the basics of how character, traveling, and combat work. Check it out if you have some time:

 

[Cergorach]

What is it? It's an adventure, designed for use with 5E (2024 edition) or Foundry's Crucible system.

Not entirely. It's a campaign setting, with a sandbox campaign, that has dozens of adventures (40 questlines).

And it's especially made for use with Foundry VTT, leveraging the abilities of FVTT and adding some interesting new ones. Like a 25k hex map (1 mile hexes) that give you visibility depending on terrain, for example on the top of a mountain you can see miles around you.

The Codex that tracks your achievements/events during the campaign automatically. And there's an event sytem for the DM with quest flow visualizations.

A ton of animated maps with depth blur and parallax. Things like light beam puzzles, vehicles (a minecart ride over a track), etc.

A visually nice character creation tool.

An animated token creator.

A dynamic audio engine that handles music/audio depending on location, biome, time, situation.

Vista's: Dynamic side viewed 2d scenes with side view 2d tokens. You can use those that they provide or you can make them yourself with a new editor that's included. Very nice for those that find the constant battlemaps in VTTs a slog and 2d images of scenes aren't giving you enough interactivity...

A calendar system, not only tracking time, but the planetary positions in this universe, which is apparently very important in this game. Including weather systems.

The campaign is apparently ~500 hours, 1 to level 12 for 5e. That's about 4 years of our biweekly game sessions...

There's stretch goals that expand Ember further:
$200k (unlocked) - Mega dungeon added.
$300k (locked) - More islands/archipelagos to discover with points of interest, events and encounters.

You get all this for a basic pledge of $90, which imho is a very good deal content and tool wise.

I'm not sure if I'll ever run the Ember campaign, BUT just being able to look under the hood of this product is worth it's weight in gold. Looking at their two previous self designed adventures ('The Demon Queen Awakens' and 'A House Divided') the quality is high, the implementation is great, well worth the price and for me the example of what you can achieve with FVTT as your platform for online pnp RPGs.

 

[SteveC]

Not entirely. It's a campaign setting, with a sandbox campaign, that has dozens of adventures (40 questlines).

You're totally right, of course. There is a lot more to the project than a typical adventure. I have a bunch of content for Foundry, and this is the biggest project I think they've ever done. The Kingmaker campaign would be a second, and that is also an amazing piece of engineering.

I'd really suggest that anyone who's at all interested checks out the Glass Cannon video to get a great idea of what the whole project includes, as it's incredible. The world of Ember has several moons, for instance, and the game tracks their position in time with the day/night/calendar cycle of the world. You can see where all the moons are at any time, and they can modify a character's abilities. In any normal campaign that would be a nightmare for the GM to track. Here is just happens behind the scenes.

It really is something special to look at, and from what I've seen from the playthrough, the writing looks really solid too.

 

[Laslo]

This looks like it will be amazing!

 

[Juxtapozbliss]

I watched the 4 episodes on Glass Cannon Network playing Ember. The system looks amazing! (And the series is hilarious and awesome.) There's only a few hours left to support this Kickstarter if anyone is tempted. I snagged it myself. I'm really excited about it!

 

[MechaAllTheTime]

I watched the 4 episodes on Glass Cannon Network playing Ember. The system looks amazing! (And the series is hilarious and awesome.) There's only a few hours left to support this Kickstarter if anyone is tempted. I snagged it myself. I'm really excited about it!

Do the episodes use their Crucible system? Is there any non-video format writeup, review, or something about the system? I'm a lot more excited about a new game system + adventure than another 5e adventure.

EDIT: Answering my own question: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/foundryvtt/ember-rpg/posts/4208703 this goes into it some more depth!

 

[Distracted DM]

I wish it had a system-neutral option so I could run it with A5E.

 

[Juxtapozbliss]

Do the episodes use their Crucible system? Is there any non-video format writeup, review, or something about the system? I'm a lot more excited about a new game system + adventure than another 5e adventure.

EDIT: Answering my own question: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/foundryvtt/ember-rpg/posts/4208703 this goes into it some more depth!

Crucible is still in playtesting and not ready to run yet. However, one of the stretch goals that was unlocked was a Crucible Starter Adventure! It will be an experience that will be a set up experience to the full Ember storyline—will be a good introduction to the system. Even though the live play was 5e, it shows off the experience beautifully.