Because convention season should never end, Erik, Sarah, and I spent a good part of our long weekend checking out the Penny Arcade Expo here in Seattle, previewing lots of incredible-looking games and hanging out with thousands of gamers gripping both joysticks and rolling dice. I also made another delightful discovery downtown. Here are some of the highlights!
Book of the Damned: Heresy Devil and Erinyes Queen on Labor Day
Monday, September 7, 2009
Ahh, Labor Day! A day to relax, share the company of friends, and enjoy one of the last summer weekends in the northern hemisphere. Of course, if you're this heresy devil from Princes of Darkness, Book of the Damned Volume I, you've probably never had an honest day of work in your life—just beers, bratwurst, and corrupting existing religions to evil. He's really let himself go, the guy probably weighs like 2,300 pounds! And here's his nagging girlfriend, one of the Erinyes Queens. "Why can't you get a job? All you do is loaf around with your stupid friends! My mother was right about you!" Feels like home, doesn't it?
Now that we're back from the adventures, misadventures, and unexpected romances of Gen Con, it's again time to talk about one of our upcoming books, Princes of Darkness, Book of the Damned Volume I. I'll just quote Master Schneider's text.
Illustration by Kieran Yanner
Moloch: All who burn join the armies of Moloch. A being of seething wrath, the Lord of the Sixth embodies both absolute discipline and directed destructive force. General of Hell's Armies, Moloch endlessly trains his infernal legions to be the greatest martial force in the multiverse.
Whatever body Moloch might have once possessed was consumed in flame long ago. Now, the General of Hell is an embodiment of the most devastating, inhuman aspects of war, a creature of fearsome black metal and spiked armor encrusted with the blood of countless opponents. With his clawed gauntlets he exerts the strength of a titan to heft the blood-soaked sword Ramithaine and the horned battleaxe Goreletch. Even in his most tempered moods, flames leap from Moloch's eyes, flaring nostrils, and every other joint and chink of his scorched armor, this blaze growing more wild as the archfiend's ire rises. He never removes his armor, though on the rare occasions where it has become damaged in the heat of battle, nothing lies beneath but flames and the faint outline of withered, fire-charred bones.
Stygia: Every lie spoken throughout the planes condenses as a drop of poison to flood Stygia, the fifth layer of Hell. Amid the tangled swamps and fetid jungles rise moldy ruins, mired temples to false deities, and whole blasphemous cities. The waters of the Styx mix with the layer's venomous bogs, creating vast noxious moors before flowing into vast black seas. Dilapidated avenues paved with cracked stones—remnants of empires that never were—cut through these dense bogs, though they regularly succumb to unexpected floods of stagnant water. Travelers who brave the paths or manage to fight their way through the swamps for long enough inevitably discover examples of the layer's countless ruins, overgrown temples and cathedrals, disparate crumbling monuments, and fortresses upturned as if flung by gigantic and careless hands. Most of these decrepit structures—drawn in their entirety from innumerable mortal worlds—still bear artifacts and artistry from forgotten epochs, typically idols and icons of deities and divine forces unknown to even the longest-lived inhabitants of the multiverse.
In the mountainous scriptorium called the Library of Oaths, diabolical clerks record every mortal oath with a damning consequence. These records prove binding, and those who break their words are damned to eternity in Stygia for as long as their vows remain within the library vault.
The Fabled Appendix – F. Wesley Schneider (Part 2)
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Presented here is the second part of my interview with Pathfinder Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider about the sources of inspiration he would include in Paizo's own Appendix N. In this part, he discusses how Golarion was created to accommodate a wide variety of influences and inspirations, and lists his most recent favorite gothic horror authors!
David: So how did the influences of mythology affect the design of Golarion?
Wes: Well, Golarion is meant to be a place where you can have everything. It's not just a place for editors' pet projects—gamers should be able to run whatever type of game they want in the setting. However, we have only shown 1/16 of the entire world of Golarion, and future products will open new doors for influences and inspiration.
D&D for the last 30 years has been a fantastic thief, stealing ideas from mythology, folklore, and pulp fantasy and horror. Golarion is similar in this regard, as you can see many of the same trappings in our own setting. But we also are trying to present things that people haven't seen before, like a land of devil-worshipers where people live in fear but order has been maintained; or a land where religion has been outlawed, despite the very real presence of the gods; or a land where questionable eugenics are being used for the supposed betterment of humanity. The wide variety of styles and influences is obvious enough when you look at the titles of each nation–Numeria, for example, is described as the "Savage Land of Super-Science." The influence of things like Thundarr the Barbarian is very clearly present. Despite any obvious influences, however, Golarion is meant to fuel ideas for stories and campaigns; rather than present a story for you to participate in, the approach we wanted to take with the setting was "here is an interesting locale in which to tell a story."
David: Give me a quick list of some things that have recently inspired your game design.
Wes: Off the top of my head, I've really enjoyed Sheridan Le Fanu's stories. Among other things, he's famous for writing Carmilla, a vampire story that predated and influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula. I've also been reading M. R. James's work; he wrote tons of ghost stories that have quietly influenced hundreds of stories and movies like The Twilight Zone and the recent film Drag Me To Hell. I also recently discovered the artist and author Wayne Barlowe in my research for the Book of the Damned Volume I, who greatly influenced my take on Hell.
James Jacobs and Pierce Watters also introduced me to the old Hammer Horror movies—they have terrible acting and even worse special effects, but the ideas presented in many of these movies are amazing. The Devil Rides Out has been one of my favorites so far: Christopher Lee fights a cult trying to summon the Devil. Awesome!
Thus ends my interview with Wes Schneider, Paizo's resident expert on the intersection of folklore and horror. And this wraps up interviews with Paizo's editorial pit. Thanks a ton to all the designers and to all of you for reading!
The Fabled Appendix – F. Wesley Schneider (Part 1)
Friday, July 3, 2009
The Fabled Appendix continues! Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Pathfinder Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider and Developer Sean K Reynolds about the sources of inspiration they would include in Paizo's very own Appendix N. Both had very different replies, which was fun to see. I'll begin with Wes, whose early experiences with console RPGs and later introduction to horror literature have coalesced to form a unique style all his own.
Alas, today is my last day as an editorial intern, so these Appendix N blog posts will be the last I write. With any luck, however, future interns will continue where I leave off!
David: I understand that World of Darkness, Ravenloft, and Call of Cthulhu were some of your first loves when it came to roleplaying settings. How much were those influences on your game design today?
Wes: Those games and settings both were and weren't influences. My majors inspirations tend to come more from the things that inspired those worlds than from the games themselves, from authors like Walpole, Lovecraft, Shelly, Stoker, Poe, Le Fanu, and Crane. I really enjoy finding the more obscure early horror writers, people who wrote when horror wasn't even truly considered a genre and their tales were more often regarded as ghost stories or dark romances. I've also always been very interested in mythologies from a wide variety of cultures and time periods. What began as a childhood fascination with Greek myth took the typical evolution into Norse and Egyptian legends, and gradually turned into an interest in folklore in general–especially South and Eastern Europe, Middle Eastern, and East Asian.
Also, having been the young guy at Paizo for a long time, I've always felt that I come from the generation after a number of my coworkers. Talking to Erik and James, it becomes clear that their background is in 1st edition D&D and the literature listed in the Dungeon Master's Guide’s original Appendix N. But I didn’t start playing D&D until mid-2nd edition. Although I have great respect for it and the origins of the game, I never played in Greyhawk, getting most of my early D&D exposure through the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Planescape, and their novels. Even before these, though, probably my earliest introduction to RPGs came with the Nintendo Entertainment System in the late '80s. I remember getting a NES for Christmas and it coming with a coupon for Nintendo Power magazine, and if I used the coupon I could also get the game Dragon Warrior for free. Of course, Dragon Warrior led to Final Fantasy, which led to Shadow Gate and the D&D “Gold Box” games, and so on and so on to this day. So, for as long as I've been a D&D gamer, I've been a computer and video game player.
This concludes Part 1 of my interview with Wes Schneider. Stay tuned for Part 2, in which he discusses how Golarion is like a melting pot of ideas and lists his favorite, most recent sources of gothic horror!
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