Writing Emergence

7Line_4846 by Metropolitan Transportation Authority, CC BY 2.0

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This post contains spoilers for Emergence. It’s hard to talk about the ideas and planning without giving some of the surprises away!

If you can believe it, the beginnings of Emergence began in October and November of 2022. It started with inspiration from a song. Over that year, I grew tired of my car autoplaying random music from my phone, so I loaded The Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice’s Moon Colony Bloodbath EP onto it. On that fantastic album, the last track is Emerging. The song’s lyrics end with my favourite few lines:

I will sail home again
Concealed among the upright walking men
To know that sleeping bodies hide
Sweet things inside

I sat with an idea inspired by that song for a long while. An early version of the module played with the idea that horrible, slender, arthropod things folded inside human shapes. The character is lost when these creatures break free. Keen eyed readers might find a small easter egg in one of the roll tables in the final module. Those creatures will return someday in a future project.

The early titlemark mockup I had on my website, during the arthropod days. Still creeps me right out.

Over 2023, I adapted a few of the pieces of those early drafts into a home campaign I titled Debts Considered Settled. Emergence sat in an archive over most of that year, but I began writing a more complete draft over May and June 2024, culminating in playtests later that summer. At that point, I incorporated a memory recall aspect and tested it as a one-shot, not a funnel.

The facility drew inspiration from an Ars Technica article about using compressed gas as a battery for solar or wind energy, pushing the water up and out of underground aquifers, and running it in reverse to gain the energy back. I had a cavern under the facility, and the water mechanics in the final module draw from that. Over the rest of the writing, the facility’s mechanics got a lot simpler.

I simplified the facility in order to make it something interactive for players. Over a weekend, I worked out all of the moving parts, wrote them out on sticky notes, and did some card sorting—a user experience technique I do often in software UX design. With the desired functionality clustered in groups, I gave them labels, connected them, and drew a sketch on a whiteboard. That was trimmed down even further as writing continued, thanks to Jordan Boschman’s developmental edits.

An early whiteboard drawing of the early functionality within the HACC, then just called Henkō Complex. Along with locations and functionality, I had an early gist of the types of encounters I wanted to include.

In between bursts of activity on Devil’s Due, I incorporated my playtest feedback and made a working draft by the end of 2024. I sent off a draft submission to Tuesday Knight Games in mid-January 2025, and Jordan completed a developmental edit right before the Kickstarter began on February 11, 2025.

In April, the playtester backers helped me refine quite a few implementation details as well. Jordan and I made even more changes over the next few months during the copy edit over May, followed by layout-level tweaks in August.

Emergence describes a facility that’s larger than your players have time to explore. Some rooms begin partially flooded, as indicated in the module map diagram. Threats don’t stay dead, and some are so large they can only be pushed back temporarily. There are dead ends, facility equipment that require power, and people pushed past their limit.

While there are two kinds of personnel and three kinds of inmates, they are less factions and more starting flavour—each person could be aggressive, fearful, selfish, or helpful. It depends on the situation the players find these NPCs in.

While writing this retrospective, I flipped through the older versions of the manuscript. It’s amusing to see how much changed from the early ideas in 2022, but the core seed remains. The module’s horror still builds on top of the concept of unjust imprisonment; people with no recollection of the crime they are charged with. They aren’t even the original who did the crime.

Emergence is my largest published RPG project. I’m planning to keep it that way for a while, and focus on things a little smaller for the next while. Expect to see more from Henkō Acquisitions and MSV Dynamics in future work.

Emergence

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