Dark Souls Bonfire (Animation)

Yet another effect I've been trying to figure out on my own for a while: How to do decent looking fire effects without using Blender's agonizingly slow and CPU-melting physics simulations. Once again I found myself on generally the right track, but needing a tutorial to help me connect the last few dots that really made everything work. I wasn't even necessarily looking for something I could animate, but the fact that this node setup actually makes that possible is a massive bonus. The only big drawback is that it doesn't work in Cycles very well, but I might be able to fix that with some adjustments.

And since I've finally gotten around to playing Dark Souls 3, I figured a simple bonfire would be a perfect scene to show off the new trick I learned.