Ember: A Shard of Fear

About the adventure

Ember is an original fantasy world, and it is nothing like the ones you already know. There are no other planes, no parallel dimensions — the cosmos is a single sealed bubble called the Weave, with the living world of Eiru at its center and something patient and hostile pressing in from outside. Six elemental moons track overhead in real game time. Hundreds of ascended Shard Gods walk among mortals, fallible and scheming, while five Elder Gods hold the balance. Two and a half thousand years ago the Sun Tower of the Aedir exploded, annihilated a continent, cracked one of the moons, and let horror pour into the world for the very first time. People are still living in the wreckage of that mistake. Your story starts on a merchant road heading east across the Arctus Plateau toward Ordain — a metropolis of white stone and red rooftops, half a million people, run by a fragile alliance of sages, trading houses, and the city's shadowy investigative arm. When and how you arrive there will be entirely up to you and your crew as you travel across literal thousands of hexes and hundreds of discoverable locations. Time passes with every mile, and some quests branch on how fast you got there, so "let's take the safe route" is a real decision with real cost. Encounters play out on illustrated maps with interactive traps, puzzles, and dynamic lighting, or in first-person scenes where NPCs step out of a painted backdrop to talk to you. Everything you find, fight, meet, and decide gets written into your Codex (Foundrys' online Journal) automatically. You'll build a character unlike anything you've made before. Sixteen Unique ancestries, eight cultures, and twenty-two backstory paths feed into the Crucible Foundry VTT Created Classless system. Play how you want and create a character tailored exactly how you wish to play. Crucible & Ember work hand in hand and you'll be able to create your own Beautiful Custom Animated Token Designed however you wish! Who this game is for. You're curious about a world nobody has mapped yet and you'd rather be early than safe. You like exploration and roleplay as much as combat, and you're comfortable with a table that talks, plans, and argues about which way to go. Fair warning, said plainly: both Ember and Crucible are in active development, encounters can swing unbalanced, and I'm learning this world right alongside you so that take that with a grain of salt. Which honestly means nobody at the table gets to be the rules lawyer, and we all discover it together. I run a collaborative, character forward game with a Session Zero for each player, and real consequences for the choices you make. If something isn't working or your character needs a change this game is an experimental one and one I happily want to make work in everyones favor. Try out different builds and see what works and what doesn't. No books to buy, no prep required. Bring a concept and a reason to be on the Strayhearth caravan and your sense of adventure!