It’s May 2021. I was five years into continuous flashbacks from CPTSD, since 2016. My waking days were filled with harsh and awful memories... and for a time I had consolation in sleep. But, beginning in 2018 dreams of a black-haired girl were becoming more frequent and intense, robbing me of sleep as an escape. Burning Wheel was my way out. I ran campaign after campaign after campaign, some of which never made it onto this blog. I was playtesting Heroes of the Grid and loving it. Then I finished The Book of the Short Sun, and everything changed. Suddenly I realized I had put too much into making Burning Wheel do what I had made it do… and I was running out of energy. But I loved what I was doing!
For a little while I didn't understand that I was on borrowed time. The concept that I was a limited being, who was harried and tired and about to collapse, wasn't a part of me. I denied it as hard as I could.
But I did collapse.
Suddenly I had nothing left. I don't know how else to describe it. I was empty.
For whatever reason, I was left with a choice: I could either design a game that worked with me better in the long run, burning off whatever was left, or I could slowly spiral into the dark. Why was it that choice? I have absolutely no idea, but that's what I had. I don't make the rules here.
But it was a simple decision, all told.
One problem: I had no design experience. Or game writing experience. In fact, the previous designs I had attempted were awful, by and large. It was a common joke that my homebrews were to be avoided at all costs. And I felt, for lack of a better word, dead. Utterly dead. There was no drive, but absolutely no native ability at all.
That didn't stop me from trying, of course. I declared I was working on Crescendo and just started. I wrote and rewrote and rewrote drafts of the rules for Crescendo. But I couldn't figure what to aim for. I just sorta... swung. Wildly. I hit a few notes, but they felt like they were accidents. That was better than before, sure! But accidents aren't something you can reproduce, and I needed the systems I was designing to reliably reproduce results. There was just a feeling that I needed to somehow keep feeling like I was reading Short Sun for the first time. And I realized I had absolutely no internal barometer to measure anything, anymore. I had all the drive in the world, but no knowledge. And definitely no talent.
And then The Warning released their version of Enter Sandman. By this point in time I was a big fan of the band, and knew their cover was coming. I was really excited for it! The cover was what put them on the map, as they've related repeatedly. So I was happy they were leaning into it and Metallica were helping them. So I was there, at debut on YouTube, excited to see what they had come up with.
I hit play.
Something shifted.
It wasn't just a solid cover — it was ferocious, precise, and carried a kind of raw ownership that made the original merely a blueprint. The Warning had transmuted it into a sonic cathedral. Dany, Pau, and Ale didn't cover the song, they took it for their own. Remade it. When I think of Enter Sandman, Metallica doesn't even enter the conversation for me anymore. Hell, I barely remember what it sounds like now. The Warning's version of Enter Sandman is a journey through a land old and dark, to a crescendo atop a mountain, bright and loud and hot.
In that moment, everything I'd been wrestling with in Short Sun clicked into place. Short Sun isn't the sterile modern heroism, but the older and truer model: the man who leaves home, becomes the legend, but loses pieces of himself and then must reforge. Horn's splintered memories, Silk's quiet command, the unreliable narrator piecing together a new self.
Crescendo suddenly had the beginnings of a soundtrack.
It all clicked together.
The "dead" feeling I'd been carrying didn't go away. Instead, there was a torrent of fire going through the dried riverbed that was me. It wasn't the frantic Burning Wheel brawls of spouting flame, but something slower, mythic, something that built into a roaring inferno. Wolfe's Short Sun whispered through speakers at me: the papermaker realizing he's the rajan now.
I sat for a few minutes after the video, in shock. I rewatched it four times, right then and there. I couldn't feel something in me, but I could feel something. Suddenly, I knew what I was doing wrong with Crescendo. It wasn't mechanics that I needed to put together, but to replicate the feeling. I needed the jolt of recognition that Wolfe had been training me to chase.
From that day forward, all the dozens of prototypes I wrote over the next two years had a new north star: capture the sense that something ancient and vital had just been reborn through human hands. The fire wasn't a part of me. I wasn't looking to replicate something I felt, but a perception of a reality that fed me. I wasn't trying to replicate the feeling I had, but to lead people to the watering hole and let them drink as deep as they wanted.
I didn't know the goal in a way that I could say, but it became clear: a slow-building crescendo, carrying players from internal fracture to something new, something they didn’t know they were missing until it arrived. Not because the Weaver (GM) forced it, but because the game had led us all to a frighteningly wondrous place. The game would then get out of the way and let the eternal Now work. It took years of wild swings, dead ends, and quiet rewrites, but the prototypes started breathing. Players would sit down exhausted or numb and walked away with the same jolt: “Something just shifted.”
And with Crescendo, I succeeded. I did it. And I didn't do it because I looked at a set of mechanics, but because I realized that gaming can be an evocation of a reality that's bigger than the participants. Four and a half years later, looking back from December 2025, I can see September 2021 for what it was.
The bottom of the riverbed, not the end.
Short Sun taught me that the quest fractures you, leaves you pieced together wrong, but in all the right ways.
It's December, 2025. Crescendo's second full Ashcan draft is done, just waiting for the cover from the artist. I'm happy with that. It's going to be worth the wait. I mean, look at that! On the right! How crazy is that??? Thats the cover illustration done for my game. The guy who couldn't design worth shit all of a sudden... has a game. With an amazing cover illustration, inbound. The fire going through the trench has been dimming a long time now.
I am absolutely astounded. I didn't dream of this.
But something shifted in my mind. I don't know how it did so, I don't really know why. But suddenly a new flame started going through the trench. I knew it for what it was, immediately.
And now, while I am helping Crescendo find its way, something new is starting in its place. Something darker. More violent.
Something involving wolves and panthers.
No comments:
Post a Comment