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Battleground Interview with Paul S. Kemp

“Deities, Demigods, and Small Folk”

Paul S. Kemp Discusses New Forgotten Realms Novel in The Sundering Series: The Godborn

Interview by Alfred O. Cloutier

Battleground Games: You’ve stated that The Sundering isn’t a retroactive continuity fix, but it does appear to be a philosophical reversal, a looping back to Forgotten Realms’ “essence.” What is this essence and how was it lost?

 

Paul S. Kemp: “Lost” overstates things, I think.  I’d say the Realms wandered a bit off the path for a while, experimented with psychedelics, joined a commune, tried out multiple marriage, and, well, it wasn’t all it had hoped.

 

To me, the Realms is a classic fantasy setting and – and this is important – it’s rooted in optimism and permeated with an exuberant sense of adventure.  Now, that doesn’t mean it’s all unicorns shitting rainbows – far from it – but it does mean its core is, in the end, hopeful.  It has a dark side, of course (every book I’ve written in the Realms explores that dark side) but the darkness doesn’t define the setting and hopelessness is not the keystone.  Hope is at the foundation of the realms, optimism, a glorious sensawunda.

 

BG: Do you think the changes made to Forgotten Realms for 4th Edition D&D were positive for the overall popularity and growth of the campaign world?

 

PK: I honestly don’t know.  I think on balance it *probably* wasn’t good for the popularity of the setting, but I’m on the outside looking in, so that’s speculation. In terms of growth, though – there’s a shitload of great material and development that came out of 4E (e.g. the development of the Dragonborn).  So there were (and are) some quite excellent aspects of 4E that enriched the setting.

 

BG: You intended The Godborn to be a trilogy, but it has been folded into The Sundering series. How did that change the way you wrote the story?

 

PK: It actually didn’t change much at all (other than making it longer).  I’d outlined the first book in the proposed trilogy and had a pretty firm notion about where I wanted the trilogy to end up (though I hadn’t gotten into the details of how I’d get there).  In the end, I found that telling that story in one, longer book, worked exceptionally well.

 

BG: Are there details, storylines, characters, etc. hidden in this arc that couldn’t come out because of space restrictions?

 

PK: There weren’t, no, for the reasons I just rambled about above.

 

BG: Do you have a formal metaphysics for Forgotten Realms, i.e., do you have a guide as to what interactions are for “souls,” “spirits,” “gods,” and “mortals?” [I always loved the old Basic D&D to Immortals path, and from looking at some FR materials, it looks like this type of path is used in the campaign world.] For example, does every PC race have a “soul” and a “spirit?” What happens to these when they die?

 

PK: Well, the Realms has its own metaphysics and I don’t mess with them much.  My job (when my stories have need for it) is to make them mysterious and wondrous.  I did this with a scene at the end of MIDNIGHT’S MASK (the last book of the Erevis Cale Trilogy) and it seemed to resonate strongly with readers.   I’m being vague here in the interest of avoiding spoilers.

 

BG: Why is it the case that “dark heroes” seems to resonate with audiences? Batman, Drizzt Do’Urden, Ari Marmell’s Widdershins and your Erevis Cale, rogue antagonists are very popular, why is that?

 

PK: You think Drizzt is a dark character?  I think of Drizzt an archetypical heroic character.  Entreri is a different kettle of fish, of course.

 

Anyway, I don’t think whether a character is dark or light has much relevance to popularity.  Superman’s popular, after all.  Whether the character is compelling is the point.  At any particularly time, there’s always a lot of dark characters who are popular and a lot of noble/light characters who are popular.  What they all share, I suspect, is that they’re compelling.

 

Now, that said, I think there are sometimes sentiments afoot in the zeitgeist that make one kind of character (dark or light) resonate with the audience more readily.  So, when world events have featured a recent atrocity, and folks are feeling fearful, or in need of vengeance, you might see dark heroes a bit more popular than would be otherwise.  But eventually that fear or need for vengeance passes and you see the counter movement – an open desire for a more hopeful future, which is reflected (to some degree) in a noble/light character.

 

BG: Is Vasen Cale going to be a dark hero? How did you go about developing his character?

 

PK: He has elements that are dark, but Vasen is more in the vein of noble character.  He’s self sacrificing and, in some ways, an idealist.  He has his father’s blood, of course, and that creates some internal conflict for him, but he’s very grounded in his faith and the fact that shadows bleed from his flesh is not going to shake that grounding.

 

In terms of how I developed him:  I did it she same way I do with every character.  I create the relevant facts of his background (in Vasen’s case:  He’s Erevis Cale’s son, but was raised in relative isolation among an elite order of holy warriors who serve the God of the Sun) and build a fairly detailed psychology for him from there.

 

BG: It’s been said that an author can’t transcend their own intellect with characters (it’s impossible to write a character smarter than yourself). I don’t necessarily agree with this, but how do you personally write from the perspective of a demigod, or a deity?

 

PK: That’s a weird thing for someone to say.  And if it were true, we wouldn’t have Sherlock Holmes, since I’m sure Conan Doyle didn’t have Holmes’ IQ.

 

The simple fact is that authors construct the reality through which the characters move, and and to give the impression of great intelligence to a character, an author need only have them see more deeply into events, better anticipate the moves of their adversaries, etc., and authors can do that because they built the events and the various characters’ responses to them.

 

BG: Will your book be one of the stories about the “iconic heroes” involved with The Sundering, or will it be more about regular folk “trying to get by?”

 

PK: Both, and that by design.  Riven and Telamont and Rivalen are probably iconic, and they provide the story with the broad, panoramic view that such powerful folks often take.  Vasen, Gerak, and Orsin, on the other hand (all of whom are new characters, first introduced in this novel) take a smaller, more personal view.  The dynamic between the two types of characters is fun to write.

 

BG: What is it about Forgotten Realms that attracts you, and inspires you to write in this world?

 

PK: First and foremost the sense of exuberant adventure I mentioned above.  I love that.  I love it’s detail, it’s richness, and I love that despite all that detail and richness there are innumerable areas and corners of the Realms in which an author can elbow out some space of their own and build something new.  It’s just a lot of fun.

 

BG: Go through your typical day of writing. How early do you get up, how many hours do you write, how many times you do throw the tennis ball against the wall?

 

PK: I have a dayjob, so I tend to write in the evenings after the kids go to bed.  There’s no magic to it.  I grab a whiskey, sit in my library and start writing.  That’s about it.

 

http://paulskemp.com

 

Paul S. Kemp is a graduate of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the University of Michigan law school. When he’s not writing tales in Ed Greenwood’s magnificent brainchild, he practices corporate law in Detroit.
Alfred O. Cloutier has contributed to Dragon Magazine, and has edited for a number of other gaming publishers. He can be found at Facebook.com/blaulb.

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Battleground Interview with Bruce Cordell

“From the Dawn of the Far Realms to the Ninth World, A Billion Year Journey for Newest Member of Monte Cook Games”

Interview by Alfred O. Cloutier

 

Battleground Games: Bruce, I had a raft of questions based on D&D, but now I’m not sure you can answer them.

 

Bruce R. Cordell: Hi Alfred! Thanks for your interest in what I’m up to. Who am I? Well, I’m Bruce Cordell. a game designer and novel author. I’ve got over 100 products to my name, several of which won awards, and not a few novels, some of which people really enjoyed. Or so they tell me :-).

 

BG: Regarding your recent signing with Monte Cook Games (MCG), who approached whom? Did you seek the position there, or did Monte come to you? If he came to you, what was his pitch, and how hard did he have to work to get to to sign?

 

BRC: After I left Wizards, several people approached me with offers of work. MCG’s was the most interesting, and I was happy to come on board and join my friends Monte, Shanna, Charles, and Tammie.

 

BG: I’m reading the press release at MCG about your joining, and it mentions that you were an “Advanced” Game Designer at Wizards. This sounds very much like you had levels, how many xps did you have at WoTC? Did they carry over to the new company?

 

BRC: I was a 13th level Master of Winter, of course. Quitting Wizards and then later accepting the MCG offer gave me enough XP to jump out the level system entirely. Now I’m an intrepid dreamer who forges worlds by minds alone (whichs probably makes more sense if you’re familiar with Numenera character creation. The video at http://youtu.be/fxv6naySlmU offers a nice overview).

 

BG: I personally love the descriptions of Numenera I’ve read, it points to a place I’ve been looking for creatively for a long time. It is, however, *science* fantasy. Will it do as well as a pure fantasy world might? Is it a risk to take on this genre?

 

BRC: A risk compared to continue doing the same thing I’d been doing for the last 18 years? No, working with MCG represents the opposite I think. Sometimes you’ve got to shake the dust off and try something new. And truth to tell, science fantasy is something I prefer far more than straight fantasy; I’m more of a science fiction reader than someone who prefers fantasy.

 

BG: Numenera reminds me superficially of Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun.” Is this an apt comparison? What are the differences? Are there other stories from which Numenera borrows?

 

BRC: That is an apt comparison. I think that’s a better question for Monte and Shanna, but Numenera also reminds me of books like A World Out of Time by Larry Niven, The Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, and Dust by Elizabeth Bear.

 

BG: According to the singularitarians, such as Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Verner Vinge, we won’t have a billion years before artificial intelligence becomes super-advanced and changes humanity’s modes of existence forever. How does Numenera address this?

 

BRC: I imagine a few of the previous civilizations that rose and fell on Earth were forged by AIs, any one of which may have lasted 10 million years or more. But they fell too. Over the deep time of a BILLION years, it’s hard for anything to last. The Ninth World is built on the bones of all those previous worlds.

 

BG: I am very fascinated by the idea of brainstorming, or idea generation, and I’m guessing that you attend these kinds of sessions regularly, is that true?  What is this process like? Are there “rules” (such as the classic openIDEO brainstorming rules)?

 

BRC: I’m a fan of brainstorming sessions where someone has already thought about the issue to be discussed, and can guide the direction of new ideas. I’ve been in a few brainstorming meetings with a lot of oars in the water, which just spun the boat in circles. That’s usually the result of meetings with 2 or 3 too many people involved. I’ve also been in probably hundreds of fabulous brainstorming sessions. Most of those either had the ingredient I first named (pre-thought), or just 3 people pitching ideas.

 

BG: Is there someone you can name, a designer/developer that generates a lot of ideas, or a lot of crazy and cool ideas for the industry, or for a particular game?

 

BRC: Most of the people I’ve had the pleasure to work with do that every day :-).

 

BG: I’ve always had this acute awareness–when I’m Game Mastering, and because of the GM screen–that the game could very easily become “non-ruled,” or to put it another way, just completely taken over by the GM’s mind. I’m acutely aware of this when a player at the game store, after the session is over, is taunting the GM with how powerful his character is. I think “doesn’t this player realize the GM has all the power, if he wished to take it?” Is this something you’ve wrestled with as a designer? Is it something that is directly addressed in your design philosophy?

 

BRC: An aspect of of 3.5/Pathfinder and 4th edition D&D is that they’re designed to be engines so robust that a GM is hardly needed. That has several long term undesirable effects, at least from my perspective: game mechanics become as important as the story, player abilities become overly complex and hard to parse even for long-time players, and the GM feels his or her options are limited. I much prefer a game where the rules are NOT the main course but rather just one INGREDIENT that the GM uses to craft the main course. As you may have noticed, the game system Numenera uses follows my preferred design philosophy 🙂

 

BG: I wonder if my non-rules awareness actually grew from my eventual mastery of certain game systems. As a Game Master, I felt I had a good answer for most scenarios. With all the playtesting you do, and changes to the play systems you work on, do you find it difficult to achieve this level of mastery?

 

BRC: As a professional game designer, my full time job is to master different game systems, so not really.

 

BG: What are you currently reading?

 

BRC: Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoth’s In Bloom, Linda Nagata’s Vast, Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, and Miyazaki’s Nausicaa Valley Of the Wind compiled set.

 

BG: Stephen King writes–I’m paraphrasing here–that idea generation is fairly random, it is the ability to identify the collision of ideas in one’s mind as a viable story, or seed of a story. Have you had any memorable “collisions” that led to interesting plots, or mechanical ideas?

 

BRC: I rely on that collision. New ideas only come through synthesis. Your brain only has available to it what it’s previously experienced. It’s putting those things together in new ways that creates new ideas and insights. So it’s important to always be putting more things in your brain if you want to stay creative.

 

BG: Do you retain the copyright to some of the worlds you’ve created for the D&D multiverse? Will you be able to go back and create an ultimate timeline or story that ties all of the fantastic events and scenarios you’ve created into a unified piece? Will you be able to show that all the D&D universes are just the troubled dream of an Old One?

 

BRC: Wizards of the Coast owns the copyright for almost all the work I’ve done over the last 18 years, save for a few d20 projects I did. However, I do continue to earn royalties on my nine novels. So, if you’re seeing this, dearest interview reader, go out there and give me some love ;-). I suggest you start with Sword of the Gods!

 

BG: I’ve read that you were a wrestler in school, and practiced Jeet Kune Do afterward. How does being a martial arts practitioner inform or enrich your writing?

 

BRC: Depends on the book. In the past, it informed what I wrote a LOT, especially when I wrote the Abolethic Sovereignty novel trilogy, where the main character Raidon Kane was a monk. Honestly though, the biggest issue with a martial artist writing fiction is the tendency to focus too much on the technique and not enough on the story.

 

BG: In the age of Mixed Martial Arts (UFC/cage-fighting), do you think JKD is a strong martial arts school?

 

BRC: I practiced Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiujitsu a lot more than JKD, actually. (I have a level 8 certification in Muay Thai, and for a while I was instructing Jiujitsu as the school where I attend. That said, I must admit I’m doing a lot less Muay Thai and all the rest these days, due to time commitments required.)

 

BG: I personally had the most memorable adventures as a player using the 2nd Edition rules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but I really liked DMing 3.5. Which is your favorite iteration of D&D? As a player? as a DM?

 

BRC: 2nd edition brought me in on the game design side of things, and the wide open rules of that edition allowed me to write some of my most remembered adventures, including Gates of Firestorm Peak and Return to the Tomb of Horrors. That said, 3rd edition was the D&D renaissance, and I also had many successes, like Sunless Citadel, the Expanded Psionics Handbook, and Libris Mortis. For me, 4th edition offered fewer triumphs, though Gamma World was a standout (we used a simplified version of the 4th Edition rules as our basis). As a player, I’ve enjoyed games using 1st (my first edition), 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and Next rulesets almost equally.

 

BG: What are you most excited about for the next edition of D&D?

 

BRC: Renewing interest in the tabletop game industry.

 

BG: What was your role in the creation of the next version of Dungeons & Dragons?

 

BRC: I was one of the designers.

 

BG: Whose idea was it to release the playtesting materials for D&D Next? Who wanted the next version of the game to have extensive playtesting by the general public?

 

BRC: I bet that was Mike Mearls.

 

BG: Was this choice to release wide-access playtesting a result of some perception of failure in the 4 edition rules, or do you think it was a marketing choice, or some other factor?

 

BRC: It was done through a legitimate desire to make the best game possible by gathering actual, statistically real data.

 

BG: I feel the Internet age causes a lot of online heat from vocal minorities for companies like WoTC, who get instant feedback from users of the products, how do you deal with this?

 

BRC: I stop reading forums that are taken over by toxic loudmouths, which nicely solves that issue. When I worked at Wizards, I advocated that Wizards get rid of its forums and call it a day–obviously I didn’t win the day with that argument, but I still believe it to be the right choice. If toxic people find me on my various social media outlets (g+, Twitter, and FB), I block them, and am never troubled again by that particular foolishness.

 

BG: Thanks for your time Bruce, and good luck!

 

BRC: Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk to you and your readers! If people are interested in keeping up with what I’m up to at Monte Cook Games, please follow me at one (or more!) of the following sites.

 

twitter.com/BruceCordell

bit.ly/gPlussBruceCordell

brucecordell.com

 

Bruce Cordell is a game designer at Monte Cook Games, and was a designer and novelist at Wizards of the Coast from 1995 – 2013. He is the author of many novels, adventures, and gaming accessories. He was also a part of the D&D Next design team.

 
Alfred O. Cloutier has contributed to Dragon Magazine, and has edited for a number of other gaming publishers. He can be found at Facebook.com/blaulb.

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This Week in D&D

Mike Mearls has added a new article in his Legends & Lore column over at the Wizards of the Coast D&D site. He gives a few more interesting insights into where things are headed. It sounds like they are pretty close to wrapping up what will comprise the Basic Game (another Red Box maybe?) and are beginning to move on to some of the more advanced game areas. The constant usage of certain words being used by lead designers at Wizards makes me wonder if we are headed for a return to the moniker “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.” I think I’d be alright with that.

 

Some other interesting news I’ve come across is regarding future reprints Wizards plans to do for D&D. They’ve obviously decided to fill the space between the demise of 4th edition and D&D Next with a host of throwback books and adventures. We’ve already seen reprints of the 1st edition books and the 3.5 edition books. It now looks like they’ll be releasing the 2nd edition core books and several classic adventure modules, including the Scourge of the Slavelords series and the “S” series classics. The “S” series contained what is arguably the best adventures every written for Dungeons & Dragons. They consist of S1: The Tomb of Horrors, S2: White Plume Mountain (my personal favorite), S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Both series will be released as hardcover books. For those of you too young to remember these adventures, I strongly urge you to run them, or beg your Dungeon Master to run them for you!

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D&D Next: Round 2 Playtest Available

If you are interested in signing up for the second round of the D&D Next public playtest, you can now do so. It includes character creation for levels 1 – 5, rules of play, DM guidelines, pre-generated characters, and an updated bestiary.

 

I took a quick look at everything and noticed some interesting changes. Specifically, it looks like attention has been given to healing, the cleric, the wizard, the rogue, and the fighter. Apparently, the most hotly debated topic from the feedback Wizards of the Coast has been getting revolves around the fighter and how he functions in combat. The masses seem very eager for the fighter to “have something interesting to do” in combat, other than rolling a 20-sided die and doing lots of damage. I’d be curious to hear anyone’s opinions in the comments as to what they think of the fighter as he looks right now, in this new public playtest download.

 

Here is a link to Mike Mearls’ summary of the changes in this round.

 

And here is a link to the actual page where you can download the new playtest.

 

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D&D Next: Playtest Update

Mike Mearls, senior manager of the D&D research and design team, has recently added an update on where things are at in the development of the upcoming edition of Dungeons & Dragons. He discusses feedback they’ve received regarding options for the fighter, the surprise round, critical hits, skills, resting, and healing. The article talks about what they’ve been focusing on and what we can expect to see in the next public playtest packet that will be releasing soon.

 

Here’s the link to the article.

 

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UNBOXING THE 1ST EDITION D&D CORE RULEBOOK REPRINTS

In their debut vidcast, Sam and Chuck, regulars at Battleground in Plainville and bloggers over at difficult-terrain.com, review the 1st Edition Dungeons and Dragons Core Rulebooks. These reprinted books were released this past week and are available while supplies last.

 

Here’s the unboxing:

 


 

Following their unboxing, Sam and Chuck kept the camera rolling and reflected on D&D past, present & future. Listen, enjoy and share your thoughts in the comment section.

 

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