A New Dawn
Emindar: The Last Emperor was born out of my love for a lot of very different things.
The deep worldbuilding of The Lord of the Rings and The Witcher. The economic systems of games like Victoria 3. The smart, strange, deeply human writing of Disco Elysium and Planescape: Torment. And, of course, political simulation games like Suzerain.
Somehow, over the last three years, all of those things got smashed together and became Emindar.
But before there were political parties, economic systems, laws, advisors, elections, or even really a game, there was a world.
And that world started with one question:
What happens when the age of fantasy and heroes ends?
The End of the Third Age
I grew up as a huge Lord of the Rings fan, as I assume most game narrative designers have to be.
Tolkien was probably my first real introduction to the idea that you could create a world simply because you wanted that world to exist. There were languages, religions, and thousands of years of history. Most of which barely ever appeared in the book.
Tolkien is even part of the reason I studied Latin and map-making in middle school and high school.
But one idea in particular stuck with me. Near the end of The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Aragorn that the Third Age is over and that a new age is beginning:
“This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what must be preserved. For though much has been saved, much must now pass away; and the power of the Three Rings also is ended. And all the lands that you see, and those that lie round about them, shall be dwellings of Men. For the time comes of the Dominion of Men, and the Elder Kindred shall fade or depart.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
That passage was probably the single biggest inspiration for the world of Emindar. If you remember Galadriel saying this, you are not wrong; she says it in the film.
The heroes won, the Dark Lord is dead, the great magical powers are fading, the Elves are leaving, the Dwarves are disappearing, and the world now belongs to Men.
Okay. So what happens next?
How does Aragorn raise enough money to repair Minas Tirith? What happens to Osgiliath? Do the workers rebuilding Minas Tirith eventually unionize? What happens when veterans come home from the war? How do you govern all of these territories that were united against Sauron once there is no Sauron left?
These are questions that, despite my enormous love of Tolkien, I am fairly certain he would have hated me asking.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, I wanted answers.
That was really the beginning of Emindar.
What Does “Post-Fantasy” Mean?
The term we eventually started using for the setting was post-fantasy.
Emindar is not a fantasy world where all of the fantasy suddenly disappeared.
The fantasy happened. There were Elves. There were Dwarves. There were great heroes, ancient kingdoms, strange creatures, magical wars, and people capable of doing things that would seem impossible today.
But history kept going.
Thousands of years passed. Kingdoms rose and fell. Religions changed and schismed, if that is even a word. Old stories became myths. People discovered new ideas, then forgot them, then rediscovered them. They built factories and railroads.
By the time Emindar: The Last Emperor begins, the world has entered what its people call the Age of Reformation.
You aren't going to spend the game hunting dragons or throwing fireballs at people.
You are going to worry about rebuilding the economy and making sure you can feed your people. You are going to argue over whether a railroad is actually worth building, deal with workers going on strike, and whether the collection of kingdoms your ancestors stitched together can actually survive the modern world.
You are going to worry about all this, while living in a huge, beautiful castle and in a city that feels like an old fantasy world with modernization and industry built on top of it.
What Happened to Magic?
This is the question I get asked the most.
Magic still exists in Emindar. It is ancient, mysterious, incredibly powerful, and increasingly out of place.
Magic once shaped kingdoms, wars, and entire landscapes. Some of the most important events in the world's history happened because of it.
But magic has a problem. The Industrial Revolution happened.
A powerful mage can still accomplish things no ordinary person could dream of doing. But powerful mages are rare. Their knowledge is slowly disappearing, and magic itself is dangerous and poorly understood.
A machine doesn't need to be born with some extraordinary connection to an ancient power. You can build another machine. A factory can even mass-produce thousands.
An electrical grid can power an entire city. A train can move hundreds of people across the country every day without requiring any magic.
That leaves magic in a very strange position. It is still feared. It is still studied. Under the right circumstances, it can still change history.
It just isn't necessarily the best solution anymore.
Emindar isn't a world where magic has vanished. It is a world beginning to wonder whether it still needs it.
Building an Empire That Probably Shouldn't Work
Once I had the basic idea for the world, I had to figure out what kind of country the player would actually govern.
I knew I wanted something sprawling and complicated.
An empire filled with different cultures, religions, political traditions, regional interests, and national identities. An economy that was industrializing but falling behind its neighbors. Ancient political institutions attempting to deal with modern problems. A monarchy that still looked incredibly powerful from the outside while becoming increasingly fragile underneath. And a political dynasty as fractured as the Empire it ran.
So naturally I looked at Austria-Hungary.
I've always loved the history of the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is one of those rare periods where almost every part of society seems to be changing at the same time.
Old empires are beginning to collapse. Nationalism is exploding. Marxism and other new political ideologies are spreading. Industrialization is transforming how people live and work. Colonial empires are reaching their height while the forces that will eventually destroy them are already taking shape. Countries are becoming increasingly interconnected economically and politically.
And then all of these contradictions smash into the First World War.
It is an absolutely fascinating period to me.
More than anything, I love that feeling of an old world realizing that something new is arriving, but nobody agrees about what that new world should actually look like.
I think of this loosely translated Gramsci quote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”
That became a huge part of Emindar.
At First, There Wasn't a Game
I started working on Emindar in early 2023, and at the time I honestly had no idea what it was going to be.
Maybe an RPG. Maybe a novel. Maybe some kind of strategy game.
I was also completely fine with the possibility that it would just stay a giant worldbuilding project that nobody except me ever cared about.
At that point, I mostly wanted to build the Empire and tell the story of this political dynasty slowly dying, with everyone involved handling that decline in an incredibly healthy and well-adjusted way.
Obviously, that does not happen.
So I just started making the world because I wanted to make the world.
Very Tolkien of me. Yes, I am basically Tolkien.
Eventually, though, the story started narrowing in on one person.
You would play the Emperor.
More specifically, Theo Bernhard, who inherits an Empire that is already cracking apart before he really gets a chance to decide what he wants it to become.
And yes, spoiler alert, Theo is the last Emperor of Emindar.
It is, unfortunately, right there in the title.
Turning It Into a Game
Once I realized Emindar was actually going to be a game, another problem emerged.
I didn’t want all of this stuff to just exist in the lore.
If I say Emindar has a stagnant economy, the player should feel that when they try to spend their budget.
If I say the Empire is deeply divided culturally, that should affect elections, laws, stability, and the way different regions react to you.
If industrialization is changing the country, then workers, aristocrats, businesses, and the government should all feel that change differently.
That is really where a lot of the systems came from.
I wanted the things we were talking about in the story to actually push back against the player.
So yes, eventually that meant numbers. Sometimes a lot of numbers. Thank goodness I love numbers.
Games like Victoria 3 became a big influence here. Not because I wanted Emindar to become a giant spreadsheet simulator, but because I love the idea of real economic and political systems working underneath the narrative.
Systems need to support the story; it's a key part of my game design philosophy.
Finding the Game's Voice
The other major part of Emindar was figuring out how all of these politics should actually be written.
Suzerain was obviously a huge influence on the political side of the game. It showed how compelling it can be to govern primarily through conversations and decisions rather than moving units around a giant strategy map.
But Disco Elysium and Planescape: Torment were just as important to me.
Characters aren't there simply to represent the Good Position and the Bad Position so the player can choose correctly.
That is something we try very hard to do with Emindar.
Nobody in Emindar has a political belief just because the game needs someone to represent that belief. It should come from somewhere. Maybe it is their family. Maybe it is their religion, their class, or something that happened during the war.
Two people can support the same law for completely different reasons. And two people who genuinely love each other can completely disagree about what the Empire should become.
That is much more interesting to me than having one advisor who is obviously “the liberal” and another who is obviously “the conservative.”
Also, sometimes the character you hate is right. Which is annoying.
Three Years Later
We had a working prototype in 2024, and looking at it now is honestly kind of strange. The basic idea is recognizable, but almost everything else has been rebuilt at least once. Some things have probably been rebuilt three times. The UI changed, the story changed, characters got rewritten or cut, systems disappeared and were modified.
Most of what you are seeing from Emindar today has really come together in the last year.
There is still a lot of work ahead of us, but for the first time I feel like the different pieces are starting to look like the game I imagined when I began scribbling all of this down in 2023.
That's part of why I wanted to start writing these development posts.
There is a lot to talk about.
The political system. The economy. Elections. The different regions of the Empire. The Bernhard family. Our approach to writing choices and consequences. How we research history. All the systems we've built, rebuilt, and occasionally thrown out.
But before getting into all of that, I wanted to start with the question that started Emindar in the first place.
That is really the idea behind Emindar.
The fantasy story already happened.
The heroes won. The Elves are mostly gone. Magic is slowly becoming something the modern world may not even need anymore.
And somebody still has to rebuild Minas Tirith.
Welcome to Emindar.
Emindar: The Last Emperor
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