When I was writing "Burnt Offerings," I was focused mostly on the daunting task of setting up an adventure that would not only present goblins as monsters you love to hate, but also to launch an entire new product line. I was focused on how to make the adventure simultaneously introduce the world to a new world while at the same time feeling old-school enough that it felt nostalgic and familiar and comfortable. I wanted readers of the first Adventure Path installment to enjoy the innovations, but to feel more than ever that this was the same game they've enjoyed playing for years.
I think it's fair to say that I never really stopped to think what the characters sounded like, or how a 50 page adventure could translate into an hour long audio drama.
When we sealed the deal with Big Finish to produce Rise of the Runelords as a full cast audio adventure, though, those were among the many questions we had to answer. We worked closely with Big Finish from the start on both determining what iconics should be featured in the story and what parts of the adventure needed to be represented in the hour-long running time for each installment.
Choosing the characters, in retrospect, was relatively easy. The important NPCs would be determined by what parts of the adventure we chose to adapt, so it came down to the PCs as the main choices we had to make early on—we knew we wanted four adventurers, since that's the basic assumption we make for the game... but which four? In the end, we knew that just as the visuals of all our iconics are so distinctive, we needed the voices to be distinctive as well. The first-time listener needed to be able to tell the four heroes apart just by listening to their voices. Furthermore, we wanted to choose the four iconic heroes from those who were actually featured on the covers of Rise of the Runelords. Harsk and Ezren made a lot of sense, because their voices—an old man's and a gruff dwarf's—were so distinctive. Valeros was an obvious choice since he was the first iconic we'd illustrated he's as close as we have to a "main character" among all the iconics. And that was it for the initial party—but we needed one more. I pushed hard for Merisiel, and not only because she's my favorite iconic—she's also an elf AND a female character, two elements that were missing from the current lineup.
Ezren |
Download the sample! (147 KB MP3/zip) |
Harsk |
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Merisiel |
Download the sample! (123 KB MP3/zip) |
Valeros |
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That DOES leave the heroes without a dedicated healer in the group... but fortunately, when you get to control all aspects of the story and don't have to worry about dice and chance throwing curve balls at you, you can write the story so that the lack of a healer isn't an issue.
And that brings us to the second part of the question—how do you condense an adventure that can provide for hours and hours of game play over the course of several days of gaming sessions into a single hour?
And it's here that Big Finish's writers stepped up big time. For each installment, the authors write out a brief outline of what elements they want to focus on, and then we at Paizo would go over the outlines and approve some elements and make suggestions for others. Deciding what parts of the adventure are important to cover and what parts are not made for some tough choices—the reduction of Nualia's henchmen in number or the entire catacombs of wrath would have been great to hear, but the storyline works without them as well. Once we approve the outline, then the next step is for us to approve the full script—we'd go through page by page, giving feedback from "Harsk is spitting too much" to "Ameiko wouldn't say that," and much more... and once that stage was done, the task of actually recording the dialogue came next.
Ameiko Kaijitsu |
Download the sample! (86 KB MP3/zip) |
Nualia |
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The final step—approving the final recording—was the most fun though. It's pretty cool to sit in your office at work, listening to goblins run amok!
Goblin |
Download the sample! (180 KB MP3/zip) |
James Jacobs Creative Director