Meet the Bringing Fire team

In the past 5 months, Bringing Fire has gone from a solo project to a three-person operation, so it's high time I introduced my partners! But first…who am I?

Avery Prometheus Rosen

I’m Avery Prometheus Rosen, founder and CEO of Bringing Fire. Like my namesake, I'm passionate about elevating the human condition with thoughtful application of technology. For 25 years, I’ve been a tech/humanities hybrid in a tech world. My last gig was at MongoDB--a modern database company--where I wrote and directed production of the technical keynotes for developer conferences, and all the software demos that went with them.

Like so many of the gamers I’ve spoken to, I was introduced to TTRPGs in middle school, but didn’t really get to experience a real game, to say nothing of a campaign. My TTRPG hiatus stretched until 2014, when I made a new friend who invited me to his house to play Pathfinder with his family (more on that in a minute). Before long, TTRPGs formed the majority of my hobby and entertainment time. I was playing games, watching games, and listening to podcasts. And I started running games, because I had to, if I wanted to get my other friends playing!

But I was also frustrated by the state of technology in the hobby. It seemed stuck in the past: limited, inelegant, and disconnected. I dreamed of a better, more modern approach. At cons and online, I asked vendors to help me understand better, so I could get involved usefully. And in 2021 I left my day job and founded Bringing Fire to do my part building the world I want to live in. And I started to look for party members to go on the adventure with me.

Stephanie Erwin

First off is Stephanie Erwin, with whom I played that first game of mine at the end of my hiatus--her step-father was the friend who invited me to play--and many games subsequently. Flash forward to 2020, when I realized that Stephanie had a startup track record, an MBA, and a focus on ethical entrepreneurship. Just my kind of partner! I’ll let her tell you the rest:

Stephanie here 👋🦹‍♀️. I’m jazzed to join the team and bring my first-time GM, Big Player Energy to the table. Before Bringing Fire, I was a co-founder & COO at another totally unrelated but equally radical start-up in the sustainability space. I have also worked in the banking and the nonprofit sectors all the while playing Pathfinder 2e with the family. I’m going to be helping the team out behind the scenes crunching numbers, pulling industry stat blocks, and generally buffing my teammates up so we can get this show on the road. (support class, FTW!)

Josh Matthews

Next came Josh Matthews, one of my earliest GM friends. He and I used to run into each other in the engineering kitchen at MongoDB and share stories about the campaigns we were running, and give each other inspiration for how to accomplish our campaign goals. Josh played a huge part in expanding my RPG experience from just traditional systems like D&D and Pathfinder to include indie and story-focused games, and now I can’t imagine things being any other way. He’s the CTO of Bringing Fire now, and I’ll let him tell you about who he is and what he’s been up to:

Hey everybody! Even before Bringing Fire I was thinking about how to use technology to make my life as a GM easier, and I’m excited to join Avery in making that goal my full time job. As CTO, I’ll run all the engineering, which at this stage basically means building everything myself. 😅 No problem — in the last 8 years my career has taken me to every corner of modern app development, so I’m really looking forward to putting that experience to use building something I’m so passionate about. I’ve been running RPG campaigns for over 6 years, mainly in 5e and Powered by the Apocalypse systems. Since joining Bringing Fire, I’ve been working on our prototyping technology and process. We have a lot of ideas about how campaign management can be streamlined, but we need to test and iterate on those ideas. A functional prototype will allow us to see how our ideas perform in real world scenarios and improve them based on the feedback we receive.

And that's the team!