R.A. Salvatore

1. You’ve been writing D&D fiction for over 20 years, starting with The Crystal Shard, and all along the one constant has been Drizzt. How has he changed over the past 20 years, and what’s his place in the world in the current rendition of the Forgotten Realms?

He’s gone through quite a few changes. In the early books, he was quite reckless – what did he have to lose, after all? As the series progressed and Drizzt became surrounded by true friends, and thus found a home, he became much more cautious – for them and not for himself. He even went back to Menzoerranzan and certain death in a (stupid) attempt to protect them.

He fought against this attitude as he came to better understand it, but it wasn’t until now, so many years later, that Drizzt is free of the good chains. The slate is clean. He’s angry and frustrated and certainly questioning everything he’s held dear. And he’s surrounding himself with less-than-savory characters. It remains to be seen if he’ll lift them up or they’ll drag him down.

2. Tell us a bit about Neverwinter, the entire project, and your role in it.  Where you involved in the early project designs, did you have a hand in the overall arch? Or were you given a blank slate to work with and told “here, fill it”?

Basically, it came down to a phone call. Wizards of the Coast called me before I began the next Drizzt book, which became Gauntlgrym, and asked if I was going to be anywhere near Neverwinter. I’m often in that region because I use Luskan,a  city just up the coast, all the time. So they asked if I would do a few things to help set the stage for a new Neverwinter computer game.

It was very easy for me to add Neverwinter to the tale I planned on telling – the core of the story remained exactly the same, I just got to blow up more stuff. If you take all the Neverwinter trappings in this series and set them aside, you’ll see that I can accomplish all the things I needed to do regarding character development and putting pressure on Drizzt’s moral code, very easily with the tools available. I didn’t need the Shadovar or the Thayans; I was underground anyway and could have used drown ad mind flayers and all other sorts of assorted bad guys.

Given all of that, I was more than happy to jump in and help out in setting the stage. I know how game companies work, obviously, and understand the process, the lead times, the expenses, etc. So I knew how to do little things that I could pass on to Cryptic Studios that might help them with interesting side stories. If I had a villain who didn’t have to die, I could offer that villain and her surroundings to Cryptic to include in the game if they wanted.

3. When you sit down to play DnD, are you a DM or a PC?  Do you play Drizzt?  

I usually DM. I have the most time to write up dungeons, given my day job, and I prefer DM’ing. If you ask my players, the most common word you’ll hear is “suck,” but that’s because I make them earn every copper piece, every point of experience and every piece of gear. It’s not uncommon for my players to celebrate over killing a skeleton, because the femurs make better weapons than I’ve given them!

When I play, no, it’s not Drizzt. I played him once, for one week, and he was promptly killed by the DM, who told me to “play a real character.” I usually play a monk, by the way, or a mage.

4. Your son, Geno, is becoming an accomplished author himself. What does that feel like for you, to have collaborated with your son?

Geno is an incredibly talented writer, and working with him was awesome. He did most of the writing on the books and the comics; I held his hand and served as a nasty editor, mostly, although there were a couple of scenes I insisted on writing in the Tymora books because they were different angles on scenes from my earlier books. He’s working for 38 Studios now as a narrative designer, helping flash out the world of Amalur. When I created that world, I did so with my gaming group, including Geno and his brother Bryan (who is a  mechanics designer at 38 and taking on a ton of responsibility with the MMO).

Geno was planning to move to LA and work on some movies with a director friend, but he went into 38 Studios with me one day to playtest Reckoning, our upcoming single-player RPG. While we were in there, Geno got to look at a couple of zones that had been white-boxed by the MMO team – zones which happened to be the ones he had worked on in the world creation. As we walked out of the building, he said to me, “This is too cool. I have to be a part of this.”

So he is.

5. How much fantasy fiction do you consume? What’s on your nightstand (or in your e-reader) right now?

Not nearly as much as you’d think, and not nearly as much as I’d like. It’s hard for me to read while I’m writing, and I’m always writing lately! I’ve got The Hobbit dog-eared at chapter 4, still waiting to be picked up again after more than a year. I’ve got Terry Brooks’ last Shanarra series in the queue as well as Martin’s second book (fortunately, he writes them about as fast as I read them…).

6. In all these years of writing DnD fiction, with its huge fan base, place in pop culture and all that its legacy brings to the table, what has been your one experience that stands out the most? Be it with a fan, a character as you’ve sat in front of a screen, or anything else. 

I met a young man, a multiple cancer survivor. Blind since he was barely a toddler, he became a black belt in knife fighting (I’m not kidding). Everything in life seemed stacked against this kid. I met him when the sister of the mentor helping him through school directed me to his website. He had listed his Make-a-Wish hopes and I was at the top of the list; apparently he had found quite a bit of inspiration from Drizzt over the years.

That pales compared to the inspiration he gave me when I met him. The kid is the most optimistic person I’ve ever known, a true champion and a good soul. That my work touched him truly touched me.

I could give you dozens of other examples – soldiers who’ve given me medals they earned overseas; other survivors; the family of a woman comatose after a car accident who was reading her my books to try to help her back because she had loved them so much; the father of a crippled son who read The Highwayman and believed; a quadriplegic kid who found the will to go on…

This is the armor that writers (and other artists) wear, the reminder that what we do is about more than royalty checks. We all have stories like this, and what an incredible privilege it is to have your work let into someone else’s life on such a personal level.

7. Is it really emotional to write? Did Gauntlgrym hurt to write?

Read the forward – every word in it is 100% true. To write that book, I had to go to a very private, very dark place. It hurt like hell, every day of every week, for months on end. When you’ve been with characters for more than two decades, of course it hurts. It still hurts!

8. What’s next following Neverwinter?

I’m almost done the book for next year. After that, I’m not sure what I’ll begin working on. I’ve also got the 5-issue comic series running. The third issue should be out soon. And, finally, 38 Studios’ first product will come out in February of next year. “Reckoning” is a single-player RPG for the X-box, the PS3 and the PC and I think it’s going ot raise the bar on the video RPG genre. I really do. I can’t wait for people to see it. I’ve had to keep my mouth shut about this world for 5 years now and I can finally start to blab!

9. Who would you cast to play Drizzt in a Realms film? Do you envision certain actors or personalities when you create characters?

To the second question, no, I don’t. I don’t really know the characters when I start writing them. They talk to me and explain who they are as I go along.

As for casting…I can’t say. Even if I had someone in mind, I wouldn’t tell you. Consider the problems that might cause! If I say one actor and then they do a movie and cast another, it will be all over the place that the guy they chose wasn’t my first choice. I don’t want to get into the middle of that.

10. Lastly, and I have to ask, how does it feel to be responsible for Chewie’s death? Do you still get hate mail?

I never considered myself responsible for it. It wasn’t my choice – heck, I didn’t even know I had to do it when I agreed to write the book, signed the contract and deposited the advance check. The order came from on high, and at first I resisted. Flat out said no way. But after talking to Mike Stackpole and Jim Luceno and the other writers who were putting together the New Jedi Order, I became convinced that they were doing it for the right reasons. All I insisted on was being able to kill him in the manner of my choosing.

It’s funny, but I still regret it. I’m still not sure Lucasfilm and DelRey should have done that. If I went back in time, knowing what I know now, I probably would have declined. But no, I don’t get hate mail any longer, although I occasionally hear at my book-signings that someone else was supposed to come, but was still mad at me so he stayed home.

Ah well.

I want to thank Mr. Salvatore for taking the time to answer these questions.  His latest book, Neverwinter, is available now.

Green Dragon Inn © Wizards of the Coast

If you’ve played any of the published adventures in 4th Ed. D&D, then you are familiar with the work of Mike Schley.  In my opinion, Mike’s visual style is very closely tied to the overall palette of 4th Ed. and clearly WOTC feels the same way as his work is a part of many of their published products.  I recently had the opportunity to ask Mike a few questions, so here now are 1d12 Questions with… Mike Schley:

First, I’ll ask you two important questions:  Are you a gamer?  And if you are, do you prefer playing or DM’ing?

Yes, I love gaming. Though I haven’t had the time recently for a regular weekly game I always love a good campaign. I love to DM but playing a character is just as fun, especially if you have the room to really develop your character and the party’s story.

Give us a little bit about your background in the hobby.  How did you get into fantasy cartography and how did you get your first big break into D&D?

I started playing with some friends back in the mid-eighties. We were all in middle school so needless to say the adventures weren’t too complex back then.   I loved drawing the campaign maps and character profiles and spent a huge amount of time mapping everything from new worlds to five-foot grid versions of my own neighborhood.  Like a lot of folks I fell out of the hobby in high school and college but picked it back up later on.

As for my career, I originally started working in the fantasy RPG field as associate art director for Dungeon Magazine while it was being published by Paizo. Working with the art and editorial staff over there was an absolute blast. Before then I had worked as an in-house designer for the gaming company Decipher so I already had a bit of exposure to the gaming industry. After a while at Paizo I noticed that I was constantly looking for high quality cartographers to contribute to the magazine. Unfortunately there just weren’t as many out there as I would have liked.

There were tons of illustrators but very few cartographers in comparison. Later on, as I began thinking about pursuing a career as an artist and leaving the role of managing artists to other folks, I recalled the need for quality cartographers and called Rob Lazzaretti over at the WotC.   He was running WotC’s in-house cartography department at the time.   I showed him some of my previous work and he was kind enough to toss a project my way.

Looking at the work I did back then makes me cringe.   I had a lot to learn but luckily they have stuck with me over the years.

In my opinion, your visual style is now closely tied to 4^th Ed., as many of the introductory products included your cartography.  Was that accidental, or were you tapped to be one of 4^th Ed.’s primary cartographers from the beginning?

Although I can’t speak to what was going on behind the scenes at WotC, simply because I wasn’t in-house, they did let me know that I would be helping establish the flavor of 4^th Ed. Cartography. I think they may have also asked some other cartographers to emulate my style but that’s just a guess.

Tell us a bit about the map making process.  What tools do you use, and how do you approach a map?  Do you have a digital palette where you just draw stuff from, like set dressings (tables, statues) for example, or is a new map completely original from top to bottom?

The process of making a map is actually similar to that of inking and flatting comics. Once I have the basic sketch imported into Photoshop and all the standard design elements in place, like the background texture and grid, I begin by laying down my inks.

Organization is absolutely critical since the inks will serve as templates for selections and masks down the line. After the inks are done I send the image off for approval and if I have the green light I then move on to painting the colors underneath my ink layers. I maintain a large content library of inked objects to pull from.

The key is just using the inks and not the colors to build scenes that would otherwise take forever to draw. This way I can have a dozen barstools inked in a flash while giving them all unique lighting and color treatments.

Walk us through the design of an adventure.  Do the writers work jointly with the cartographers as the adventure is being written, or do you get basic descriptions of the encounter areas once the adventure is written and get to add your creativity to the process?  How much of the map is your own creation vs. the needs of the writers?

Many times I receive sketches from the writer only after they have worked out all the details of the adventure setting. In those cases I generally keep to the script since a map must work with the story it’s illustrating. It all depends on the project though. Some require a more strictly facts approach while others leave more up to my own interpretation. By far the most fun is when I have free rein to create out of whole cloth.

When you work on a battle map, do you take into account the limitations of a DM?  By that I mean the size of the encounter area, the difficulty in transferring the map to the game table, etc.  Does knowing that DM’s need to eventually transfer a map to the table keep you from going overboard in details?

Heh! Not really. I figure that it’s my job to present a map that’s understandable and evocative. The DM can choose to transfer as much or as little of the detail as he likes during the game. I just want to immerse him in the world and give him as much information as possible to pull from.

What do you prefer working on, outdoor larger scale maps, or battle maps?

I love large regional maps. The maps of Sarifal and Cormyr were an absolute joy! Battle maps are great as well. I just love maps. I even dream in top-down perspective.

Can you tell us what D&D related project you’re currently working on?

Well, I just finished the maps and a few illustrations for the 4E Adventure HS1 Reavers of Harkenwold. I am also contributing monthly to WotC’s DDI adventure path Scales of War and Paizo’s Pathfinder Society adventure series.

What advice would you give amateur fantasy cartographers out there who are looking for their first break in the industry?

Keep drawing! A fundamental understanding of rendering, design, and color will help immensely as you create new maps. Each map for me is a work of art in and of itself so a lot of the issues that I address in illustrations also come up in my cartography projects. As for getting a break into the industry; show only your best pieces and don’t get discouraged by criticism, use it rather to improve your work.

So a little over a year after launching 4e, what are you most proud of?

I’m most proud of the foundation that we built, which is proving to be a very strong foundation for continued innovation. I view it as my responsibility to keep pushing the design team to innovate, to push the boundaries of what we think we can do. At the moment, I’m very proud of the work that we did for Player’s Handbook 3, which took the basic math of our system, exploded it, and put it back together in a way that feels completely new, feels like psionics, and yet works perfectly within the system’s math. I think that’s a great example of the kind of innovation I’m pushing the team toward. Dark Sun has some of that as well, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet.

Do you think the game has brought more DM’s into the fold? What kind of feedback have you gotten from DM’s out there?

Anecdotally, yes, I absolutely believe that 4th Edition is the friendliest version of the game yet to the poor Dungeon Master, and that folks have responded to that in droves. We did a panel at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) last weekend called “The Art of the Dungeon Master” that drew in somewhere between 300 and 500 Dungeon Masters!

I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback from DMs both new and experienced about how much easier their job has become in the new edition. They feel more freedom to focus on the story of their campaigns instead of niggling details of monster stat blocks. Behind the screen, they’re less worried about keeping track of minutiae and more focused on keeping the game moving and entertaining.

Talk a little about the DMG2, what do you think is the single neatest thing in the book for new DM’s?

For the new DM, I would point primarily to Chapter 2: Advanced Encounters. This chapter is chock-full of advice about turning combat encounters into more dynamic, dramatic events, from the basics of how to encourage characters (even archer rangers!) to move around during combat, to advice for building encounters for smaller or larger groups.

It’s also worth noting that significant chunks of this chapter were written by two RPG bloggers, Johnn Four (of roleplayingtips.com) and Yax (from dungeonmastering.com).

Let’s talk skill challenges.  Do you think people have finally “gotten it”?  What can the DMG2 give me as a DM who for the most part has ignored them for x or y reason?

I don’t have a lot of insight into how people are using them out in the real world, but I think we’re publishing an ever-increasing number of good examples, and DMG2 has a much stronger chapter on the subject than what we managed to get in DMG1. I compiled a lot of good advice and strong examples from places like Mike Mearls’ column in Dungeon magazine and our published adventures, added a lot of my own insights, and structured the chapter in a way that I hope makes skill challenges easier than ever to understand and use. There’s also an example of what a skill challenge actually looks like around the table, though that could probably have been a lot longer.

If you’re a DM who has ignored skill challenges so far, I hope this chapter will open your eyes to the possibilities they offer. I’m most excited about the way you can use a skill challenge to give structure to what is often the most difficult part of a game—the unstructured time between encounters, or between the acts of an adventure, when the players are trying to figure out where to go and what to do next.

It seems to me that with some of the storytelling excerpts that were released, you guys are trying to shut down the “all fighting, no role play” complaints levied against the game.  What can you tell us about this chapter you’ve called “D&D as an indie game” ?

That chapter came about because I was following Robin Laws’ blog (robin-d-laws.livejournal.com), and he talked a lot about the D&D game he was running. It was very clear to me that folks who complained about a perceived lack of roleplaying possibilities in 4th Edition were not reading Robin’s blog. Robin not only recognized that the players at the table, not the game system, determine how much roleplaying is possible in a game, but also actively ported over a lot of the storytelling techniques and mechanics that you often find in independently-published RPGs.

So to some extent it’s true that this chapter is in the book because I wanted to blow the minds of people who were arguing that the game isn’t about roleplaying any more. But more importantly, it’s there because I think Robin was doing some really cool and interesting stuff in his game, and I wanted to learn how to do it too. In fact, I was just re-reading that material last night and thinking about starting a new campaign that would put it all to full use. We’ll see if I ever get that off the ground…

So in the MM2, monster design for elites and solos was altered.  Are we going to get new rules for monster design in the DMG2, and if we are, will we get a way to re-stat the monsters in the MM1 to match the new philosophy of design?

The DMG2 does present that altered math, as well as guidelines for creating minions. There’s no alteration to MM1 monsters, because they’re still perfectly playable out of the book. There is a note that you can drop elite and solo defenses, but you should use caution, because that doesn’t always work across the board.

It is safe to assume that you guys are little by little building the assumed world through multiple sources:  stuff in the published adventures, the new location books that were announced, Fallcrest in the DMG, and now Sigil in the DMG2.  What can you tell us about the 4e version of Sigil?

That is a safe assumption, yes.

We reintroduced Sigil to the game in the Manual of the Planes, but it gets a lot more attention in DMG2. Michele Carter, who was the editor for a tremendous number of 2nd Edition Planescape books, was also the lead editor for DMG2 and took a tremendous interest in this chapter from start to finish, so Planescape fans can trust that we haven’t done terrible violence to their favorite planar metropolis.

One of the exciting things about Sigil as it appears in DMG2 is that we’ve found a way to reintroduce the idea of gate-towns—the planar villages that ringed the outskirts of the Outlands and contained portals to all the outer planes. The 4e gate-towns are suburbs of Sigil that exist in every other plane in our smaller multiverse, giving planar adventurers clear connections to Sigil wherever their travels may take them.

What advice can you give new dm’s out there looking to start a campaign?

I’ve put a lot of that advice out there already, between the first DMG and my monthly column in Dungeon magazine, called Dungeoncraft—which is pretty much devoted to that topic. I’d boil it down, though, to a simple nugget: Don’t over-prepare. You don’t need a fleshed-out world with unique cultures and detailed maps to run a D&D game. Relax and have a good time.

Being the author of the DMG, are people beating down your office door at work trying to get in your games?  Are you the DM king at Wizard’s?

Well, there are a couple of problems. First, I don’t have an office door; I sit in a cube with only two walls. So I’m frighteningly easy to get to.

Second, I’m only running one game right now, and it’s a lunchtime thing that’s hardly high DMing art. There is some demand for space in that game, but not violent demand.

Third, I think I talk a good show, but when it actually comes down to practice, there are better DMs in the world—and in the building. Chris Perkins, for example. He is Dungeon Master to the Stars, after all, and his two weekly games are packed to the gills.

Finally, tease us with something we can expect in 4^th ed. that we don’t know yet.

I suppose this is a nice way of coming full circle from the start of the interview. You should expect the unexpected! I don’t ever want the design team to fall into ruts or do things because that’s what we’ve done before. For example, when we started Dark Sun design, we had a lot of discussions about what class we should include in the book, because we had introduced a class in each of our previous two campaign setting Player’s Guides. But first we had to ask the question of whether a new class was the right thing to add to the game in Dark Sun, and ultimately we decided no. So instead, Dark Sun is going to offer an entirely new mechanic that will take you by surprise. Stay tuned!

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There you go, good stuff.  I want to thank Mr. Wyatt for taking the time to answer the questions, and WOTC for making it happen.  The Dungeon Master’s  Guide 2 releases tomorrow, September 15th.

Mike Mearls

It’s meant to be a reflection on the 4th Ed. of D&D, almost a year after launch.  Here’s Mike Mearls, answering 7 questions:

1. Almost a year later, what are you most proud of about 4th Ed.?

 I’m most proud of how the humanoid monsters
 came out. I really like that a tribe of gnolls feels like a very different opponent compared to a group of kobolds. A good DM could always use story and descriptive elements to make them feel different, but now those critters have special abilities that unify each type and, in so doing, make them more distinct.
 
2.  If you could go back to the planning stages and alter something, what would  it be, and why?

I’d change rituals. I think they have a lot of promise, but they are a little too hard to use to fill the  role I think they should have.

 3. What can we expect as far as published adventures are concerned, once the
third epic level adventure is on the shelves?

I think you’ll see Dungeon continue to hit all the tiers each month, and this summer we have Revenge of the Giants coming out. It’ll cover most of paragon tier and give you a chance to battle giants, travel the planes, and take part in an epic, world-shaking sage.

4. What’s your least favorite class in the game, and why?

My least favorite is probably the warlord. Part of it is that in one game, I played an obnoxious, pushy aristocratic warlord who led a charge into a goblin cave and found that nobody else in the party particularly wanted to  follow his lead. So, he ended up unconscious (and quiet) much to the rest of the party’s relief.   On a more serious note, I guess I just like clerics too much. I think mechanically the class is fine, but  I’m just happier with a mace, a holy symbol, and the indomitable power of St. Cuthbert when I’m playing a leader.
 
5. Is the skill list in the game definitely locked in, or is there the possibility of future phb’s expanding it?

I don’t think you’ll see us expand the skill list. I think there is room in the game for mechanics that let you do other things, but I think that those mechanics would be something else. They wouldn’t compete with the core adventuring skills.

6.  Tell me something about 4th Ed. that always brings a smile to your face
when you come accross it.

All of the things that make me smile are little fixes that make the game easier to play. I like that we added shifting to the game, in place of the somewhat nebulous 5 foot step. I like how opportunity attacks are simpler, but get across the same effect in the game. The little things that are intuitive and natural, the kind of thing that just feels like it’s been in the game forever, those are my favorite parts.

 7. We know it’s being worked on, so can you drop a PHB3 tidbit exclusively
for newbiedm.com readers?

Sorry, but PH 3 is still under tight wraps.

Still under tight wraps?  I’ll take that as a Mummy reference.  OMG teh Mummy in PHB3 is teh brokenz!!!  I think he’s throwing me a hint.  I’m kidding, I’m kidding… 

And there you go, 1d12 questions with Mike Mearls.  Thanks Mike!