The Fabled Appendix – Sean K Reynolds (Part 2)

Friday, July 17, 2009

Here follows Part 2 of my interview with Developer Sean K Reynolds, game designer extraordinaire and all-around nice guy, in which he discusses how he differentiates Golarion's deities from the gods of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, and gives a list of the works that most influenced his game design.

David: Is it hard to make Golarion's gods different from those of other campaign settings?

Sean; My technique is to approach the gods like they're people, with their own motivations and agendas. In fact, many of Golarion's deities were once mortals themselves; and, because the world itself is so old, often I can just ask myself, "What would these deities have been doing this whole time?" I really try to explore each god's niche. In terms of making them different than the gods of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, the history and cosmology of Golarion naturally differentiate them. A good example of this is Oerth's Pelor and Mayaheine versus Golarion's Aroden and Iomedae; the structure of the relationship between the deities is similar (an older, male deity mentoring a younger, female warrior deity), but a few obvious differences are that Pelor is a benevolent god while Aroden is more neutral, and Mayaheine is a defensive deity whereas Iomedae is an active crusader against evil.

David: Briefly give me a list of some of the most influential works you've encountered.

Sean: As a younger kid, the books that made the most impression on me were Lloyd Alexander's books about Taran the Wanderer, which discuss old magic, learning your place in the world, and the apocalypse; Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series (which includes super-science and biblical references), Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, and Piers Anthony's Xanth and Incarnations of Immortality series. In my teens I chewed through Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books, Norman Winski's The Sword and the Sorcerer, Larry Niven's linked fantasy stories ("The Magic Goes Away," "What Good is a Glass Dagger?", and so on), Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords series, Robert Asprin's Myth series, some collections put together by Isaac Asimov (Wizards, Witches, and so on), and the Thieves' World books (also edited by Robert Asprin), as well as anything by Stephen King and Clive Barker.

Growing up the in '80s, we also had a lot of cool, weird, and bad inspirational fantasy and SF movies as well: Clash of the Titans, Conan the Barbarian Labyrinth, Hawk the Slayer, The Sword and the Sorcerer, The Dark Crystal, Barbarians, Dragonslayer, Krull, the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit, Highlander, Blade Runner, Akira, and Ralph Bashki's animated features (Lord of the Rings, Wizards, and Fire and Ice).

This concludes my interview with Sean K Reynolds. Thanks for reading the Fabled Appendix, Paizonians! I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed interviewing the fine game designers at Paizo!

David Eitelbach
Editorial Intern

The Fabled Appendix – Sean K Reynolds (Part 1)

Friday, July 10, 2009

Sean K Reynolds: Developer, diehard miniatures painter, and resident "gods guy" of the Paizo offices. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with both Sean and Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider about the sources of inspiration they would include in Paizo's own Appendix N. Switching things up a bit, this week we've got Part 1 of Sean's interview, with more from Wes next week. As would be expected from a game designer who worked at TSR during the era of 2nd edition, Sean's influences stretch back to the earliest roots of the hobby.

David: I understand that you are pretty well known as the go-to guy when it comes to writing about the deities of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Golarion. What sparked this interest?

Sean: I got into D&D by playing the basic boxed set with my Dad and then later with my cousin. What really got me hooked was when, at the library, I picked up a book of Greek mythology, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, which talked about the gods, the births and deaths of heroes, and how the gods made the greatest heroes into constellations. Reading this, I realized that these characters—even the gods—had personalities and agendas, just like actual people. Later, I got a similar book about Norse mythology, D'Aulaire's Norse Gods & Giants (now retitled as D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths), which was even better than the Greeks' because they all wore heavy armor, the gods themselves fought the crazy monsters, and they even had a prophecy about the end of the world. This is probably how I became the "gods guy" of D&D, because these books laid the foundation for my interest in the apocalypse and the gods.

I remember playing in Monte Cook's Praemal campaign—the precursor to Ptolus—where the characters were the 3rd generation of humans to be on the planet, still dealing with the very real influence of the gods and the forces of creation. We even found gigantic handprints in the walls of a canyon from a battle between the gods. I found the combination of creation and destruction very appealing.

David: You started full-time in the RPG industry with Greyhawk, correct?

Sean:Right. My first Greyhawk sourcebook was about The Scarlet Brotherhood, who had always been very mysterious even from the days when Gary Gygax was doing all the writing for the published setting. My sourcebook was the first time anyone had really talked in depth about their society from their perspective. I worked with Erik on the project. One of the daunting but fun things about it was that there was an entire continent—Hepmonaland—that was entirely unexplored in game books; it was barely visible on the Oerth map and nobody really knew what was going on there. Erik and I were both familiar with really old adventures like The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, so we knew that there were Aztec-like people running around. We pieced together little bits of information and then had to make it our own. That was part of the product design philosophy at the time: we'd publish the basics for your campaign and give you a lot of room to create your own material, fill in the blanks, and make connections between various plot hooks. This was very different from my later work on the Forgotten Realms, because books for that line are more about giving people everything they need to run a campaign without having build up anything on their own.

This concludes Part 1 of my interview with Sean K Reynolds. Tune in next time for his comparison of Golarion's gods with the deities of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, and his list of some of the works that most influenced his game design.

David Eitelbach
Editorial Intern

PAIZOCON Wrap-Up, Episode I

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

PAIZOCON has come and gone, and we're all still recovering from the unbelievable amount of fun we had this weekend. Those of you who were there doubtlessly have your own favorite moments, but for those who weren't, I'd have to say my high points were playing Wes's imp familiar during the Pathfinder Society Interactive, possessing the spirit-medium Sean during the same event, running panels, hearing hundreds of people yell out Paizo trivia answers at the banquet (and yes, I'm in fact the youngest editor—don't be fooled by Wes's beardlessness!), and kickin' it into the wee hours of the morning with a number of our favorite fans and contributors. I'm sure several other Paizo staffers will be on here in the week to come sharing their favorite con memories and photos, but for now, I wanted to show you all pictures of two particular events that stand out in my mind:

These pictures were taken on the first day, and totally blew my mind. In order to make it easier to read on the bus, superfan Mark Moreland (aka Yoda8myhead on the boards) decide to rip the text from all 18 Eando Kline Pathfinder's Journal episodes and bind them into a single, totally beautiful chapbook, complete with Jason Engle's art on the cover. As I'm particularly attached to Eando, it warmed my heart to see everything collected under one cover.

And of course, as Wes will happily tell you, no account of PAIZOCON would be complete without a photo of me manhandling Mr. Reynolds. But that's what you get when you insist on channeling the spirit of the great and powerful imp Chumley...

Thanks again to everyone who attended the con, and hopefully we'll see even more of you there next year!

James Sutter
Fiction Editor

Tracking Sheet Doodles

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Every book we work on has a folder with a tracking sheet, which helps us monitor the progress of each article in the book—design turnover, developer's pass, edit 1st pass, edit 2nd pass, layout, edit 3rd pass, copy edit, and final approval. Because the schedules for these books overlap, I usually have multiple folders on my desk at one time (currently I have seven). As I'm a visual person, I find it's easier for me to locate which folder I want if I put a big recognizable doodle on each tracking sheet, rather than having to read the handwritten title. Some of these doodles are pretty simple (a dragon's head for Dragons Revisited, a pyramid for Osirion, Land of Pharaohs, and so on). Some of them get a little strange.

The doodle for Blood of Dragonscar is a weird, pallid, white-eyed face with a scythe, as weird, pallid undead play a role in much of the adventure. I had to get more creative with the doodle for the Legacy of Fire Player's Guide, as it relates to Katapesh and I didn't want to confuse it with the folder for Dark Markets, so I made a bit of a rebus (LEGO + C + FIRE = Legacy of Fire). The third is for Beyond the Vault of Souls, and requires a bit of backstory. The author of that adventure is my friend Colin McComb, who wrote for (among other things) TSR's Planescape setting. One of the Planescape adventures was called Well of Worlds, and the cover art featured a man being pulled into a pit by a weird slime creature... and the model for that illustration was Colin. So my doodle for this Colin-authored planar adventure is of Colin-as-art-subject from an entirely different, older planar adventure.

Sean K Reynolds
Developer

The Mad Artist of Manifest!

Monday, November 17, 2008

A few years back Sean K Reynolds had a hand in writing a particularly morbid and unusual book. That's probably not too helpful a statement considering that he cranks out like 35 a year*, so to narrow it down a little more, it was about ghosts. And to narrow it down even further, it was called Ghostwalk.

Since moving into the desk next to mine (and covering it with enough miniatures to give the tarrasque lead poisoning), Sean's been brimming with artistic fervor. To help with that, a few weeks back Lisa dropped a few big boxes of Ghostwalk at his desk and asked for signatures. That way, anyone who buys the book through the Paizo store gets a neat little collectors item.

But oh no! Sean "The 'K' is for Kreative" Reynolds couldn't just sign a box of books, he had to get out his colored pens... and pencils... and oil paints. Just check out a few of his unexpected masterpieces here. And if you've ordered a copy of Ghostwalk recently, good luck, 'cause there's no telling what you might get!

F. Wesley Schneider
Pathfinder Managing Editor

*(Expect more details on the SKR Book of the Week Club in the distant future.)