Liane Merciel's page

Now that this is almost totally done (one chapter to go!), I wanted to drop by and say that I'm really honored and flattered that Paizo asked me to write this project, and I'm also really happy that people liked the story. I'm sorry that the implementation was a little bumpy, but I am incredibly grateful that people were willing to stick with it and jump some extra hurdles just for the sake of reading another chapter. That is quite a compliment. Thanks, you guys. :)

This was a new experience for me, writing-wise, because we did it like an old-fashioned newspaper serial: new installments went live even before I'd finished writing the entire story. I'd send in a few chapters at a time, they'd get edited and queued up, and some of them would start going out to readers even before the rest of the novella was finished. This, uh, creates a certain non-negotiable deadline pressure and also means you're locked into whatever you've already put out there (no more revisions once a thing gets published!), so that was fun. (At this point, I can honestly say that. Ten years ago, "fun" would have been a euphemism for "completely absolutely sleep-destroyingly terrifying.")

Anyway it was a good time and I did, genuinely, have a lot of fun writing it, and I am so glad to hear that people have enjoyed reading it as well. Again, thanks: it means a lot, especially when I know you had to endure a few extra hassles that could easily lead people to go "AND IT WAS SO NOT WORTH IT."

Finally I want to thank Ron Lundeen for doing such awesome work with the statted accompaniments to the story. That is a great idea -- I had no idea the Paizo team was going to do it, and I didn't think to write the story with those concepts in mind at all -- and he's done a killer job with it. It is really cool to see that stuff made concrete and game-playable, and pretty impressive to see how many great ideas he's spun off from each chapter.

So, again, thanks to everyone. It has been a lot of fun. :)

I think that in the story Shalelu could have thought about how dangerous and hostile the Scarps are and compared that to many other goblins from all around the Inner Sea, to show she's mostly a sworn enemy of *these* particular tribes[.]

I want to pick this out for a little bit, because I know a decent number of people on these boards are interested in writing at least on a hobbyist level (if nothing else, lots of people play via PbP, which is... [drum roll] ...writing!), and it occurred to me that I could use this comment as a springboard to a writing exercise.

Getting there is going to be a little circuitous, though, because when did I ever write a short post. So, if you'll humor me for a little while: let's first consider the goals of this particular piece.

The specifications for this blog post were:

-- 1000 words (iirc, this piece is actually around 1350, because it's web fiction and so you're not as tightly limited by space constraints as a print piece would be, but (a) it's good practice to write to specific lengths; and (b) this piece is already overlong, so we should be looking to cut things and definitely we should not add any words)

-- story must be about the scene depicted in the art

-- story must be compatible with the material in RotRL (this is obvs. the off-screen fight that Shalelu has with the goblins before encountering the PCs in Sandpoint after the Swallowtail Festival, so everything has to be consistent with those in-game events)

-- ideally, story should remind people who played RotRL of how much fun that game is, and intrigue people who haven't played it yet

Bonus considerations (not actually required, but fun for extra challenge points):

-- create new bit-part NPC antagonist for GMs to throw at their PCs (here, Uruvuu, who might be amusing for one fight and therefore gets to survive this encounter)

-- showcase unconventional tactics that exploit goblins' quirks and give players some ideas for creative tactics of their own (here, throwing the painted prayerbook pages out the window)

-- open possibility for bit-part NPC to tie into the game some other way (here, we never see who exactly threw those pages out of the farmhouse; it could be a recurring NPC, or even a replacement PC for someone who got killed in the Swallowtail Festival and needs a new character [in which case this faceless hero might accompany Shalelu to town, being homeless now, and jump into the campaign as a new PC]; this is the other reason that we never actually see the character and the tactics depicted don't lock the character into any particular class)

-- anything else you can think of

These are a lot of goals to cram into 1000 words, which is part of why this piece ran overlength (also I talk too much; see also: this post). But it's good practice, and trying to hit all those checkpoints helps keep the pace brisk, which is good for an adventure story.

But because there's so much ground to cover in such a short time, it becomes difficult to add even more material, especially where that material doesn't support any of those goals. Here, adding a digression about other goblins not featured in RotRL wouldn't advance the primary goal of giving readers additional material to use with the campaign, and (secondarily) it would also throw off the pacing to have Shalelu ruminate about an unrelated topic in the midst of an action scene.

HOWEVER!!, and this is where we finally get to the writing exercise portion of today's long post, if the story were instead written in support of Goblins of Golarion (OG 2011 version or a hypothetical updated Pathfinder 2.0 version), then it would make sense to write the scene in such a way that the digression felt natural and supported.

So, if you have some time to kill and are so inclined, an interesting thing to do might be to generate your own checklist of goals based on that hypo. If you were writing a story using this same picture and the same word length to support a different product, what would the goal list look like? How would you write the story to achieve them?

You can do this with pretty much any of the story blogs, since the pictures are always awesomely inspiring and there's a big library of products to use as imaginative support. Or you can break down the stories that people actually wrote and reverse-engineer what the behind-the-scenes goal lists probably looked like, and how the story attempted to hit all those points.

It's useful material, and the kind people of Paizo are generous enough to give it away for free, so if you're into that sort of thing, I'd say take the free tutorials and have fun with 'em. :)

Hey hey! I'm happy people liked the story. :)

It's interesting that the discussion turned toward the essential nature of goblins, too, because that was one of the things I had to think about while writing this piece. The version of Shalelu that I got with the writing prompt listed her stats with "favored enemy: goblinoids," so it was a fun writing exercise to think about how to convey that through her POV while also keeping her a solidly Good character.

Because, on the one hand, she has to hold certain views in order to class "goblinoids" as a "favored enemy," and those views can't be totally unreasonable or unfounded, because if she just holds irrational prejudices for no reason (and, moreover, holds them to the point where she is extra efficient at killing these guys on account of it), then that's not terribly Good. On the other hand, goblins are PC-able now, which means they can't be Always Evil Always.

So my thinking was: well, obviously these goblins are bad, because we actually see them in the act of burning down a farm and trying to kill everybody on it, so first we'll show that part, and then we'll relate that to Shalelu's personal experiences and firsthand knowledge about these specific tribes and their varying flavors of psychotic giggling malice, and then we'll use that to support her generalizations concerning All Goblins. That way (a) it's clear that her views are not in fact unreasonable, based on her personal experience of these specific antagonist tribes in this specific region; and (b) if players or GMs want to push back against that, they'll know where she's coming from and what they need to do to effectively play that angle.

So based on that, I knew this particular piece had to be written in tight third-person POV (which is my general preference anyway, because it lets you build in these effects), so it would be clear that what we're seeing comes through Shalelu's personal filter. (By contrast, the Shyka piece takes a more fairytale mythic tone, with no clear or anchored point of view, because the effect I was aiming for there was the exact opposite: nobody has direct personal knowledge of how that story went down, and possibly the whole thing was just invented out of thin air in the first place.)

HOPEFULLY -- and whether or not this succeeded, I couldn't tell you, but it's always part of the goal -- there's enough in the text to both support the playstyle of "Sandpoint's goblins are psychotic giggle fiends! LET US SMITE THEM!!" and "here's a potential character-building point of disagreement that our party/this PC might have with a major NPC. LET US ARGUE WITH HER (in a respectful and mutually enlightening fashion)!!"

Ultimately all this stuff gets folded into the story and (again, hopefully) isn't disruptive to the flow of the narrative, but it's always fun when there's that extra little challenge of trying to build in enough texture for people to strike sparks off it in whatever way best suits their home games. It's a big part of why I enjoy writing game-linked fiction. :)

and that, I guess, is today's episode of real long blabbling from the DVD director's commentary

Oh hey, this one went up!

So here's a behind-the-scenes DVD extra commentary (they still have those, right? no, don't tell me, I don't want to know how out of touch I am):

Dragons are such familiar and iconic adversaries that it's pretty tricky, especially in a short piece, to convey the full depth of the menace that I think they ought to have. I spent a while rolling the problem around in my head, and along with the usual techniques (visuals that hearken back to mythic descriptions, POV character responses, a little bit of grisliness [although not as much as with the phlegm worms, because too much gore tends to undercut awe and shift the mood from grandeur to horror]), I thought: what if the dragon is just really mean? Not just ferocious and cruel in the grand way, but down to the small, petty, knife-in-the-heart details?

Personal anecdote time: I have a three-year-old toddler, and one of the things I'm making for him is a family recipe book. I've passed this book around to all of his grandparents and asked them to handwrite their favorite family recipes in its pages.

Part of the reason I'm doing this (besides that I think food is a vivid and concrete way of passing down a certain kind of family history) is because it's actually really hard for most people to convey deep emotion in the written word, and I want this kid to have something, and this is a way of breaking that ice so that his grandparents have a starting point to work from.

Because for most people, most of the time, it is paralyzingly difficult to convey profound emotions in writing. The deeper the feeling, the harder it is. Prison letters, letters from the home front to soldiers, letters from dying people to their friends and kin -- these often are written in moments of extreme emotion, and quite often, unless the writer has had a lot of practice in the form, they fall into certain rote patterns, because those are the words that spring to mind when you want to say something but don't know how to articulate the idea.

It takes a certain kind of bravery to push your way past that, and to commit your feelings to paper regardless. Especially if you're not someone who's super comfortable with written language, it can take a lot of bravery. And these are typically very private thoughts, thoughts that you'd be mortified to have any stranger reading, let alone picking apart and mocking for spelling mistakes and grammar and relying on Hallmark card phrases.

So my thinking was: well, probably, if you're someone sending personal letters to a hardscrabble mining camp in a poor part of Taldor, you probably are not terribly literate, and it is probably very difficult to do this. The same is likely true of the recipient.

And a red dragon, being both highly intelligent and enormously cruel, would know this, and would derive tremendous amusement from twisting that particular knife in the soul again and again, exposing each person's secrets before an audience of their friends and co-workers, and torching the lot of them before anyone has an opportunity to explain, or laugh it off, or try to retaliate against the dragon itself.

And so there are three sentences about that.

I'm actually not sure how that comes across to readers (is it just, like, weird that a dragon is reading people's diaries out loud?), but anyway that was the intent there.

/DVD extra

It is so good to read Tim Pratt working in Golarion again. Loved this one and the last.

ooo this is a fun story.

I, too, would love to know what happens next. :)

Nice overview of the Broken Lands and excellent illustrations (which I vastly prefer to the anime style). The top few especially reflect the "feel" of this region, while the topmost illustrates that beauty can yet exist amidst the scarred terrain of these lands.

Yes!! I agree wholeheartedly. I love the art Paizo gets; it's so varied in style but always incredibly evocative.

And I've always been partial to mysterious landscapes too. Cool character designs are nifty to look at (that Kevoth-Kul illustration is amazing!), but there's just something about an eerie landscape or ruined city stretching off toward the horizon that always makes me want to set a story, or a game, in that place. What is it? Why does it look that way? What's the significance of the details in that landscape? SO MANY QUESTIONS.

Which is all a long way of saying: I love that piece too, and I'm so glad you gave it some praise. :)

It is really cool seeing this stuff. So often I see a picture and think "that's awesome, I want to write about that." Watching it unfold the other way, where you write the thing first and then some really talented artists pull the words into color and life, is a weird but really special feeling.

I'm gratified by the reception in this thread. :)

Aw man I missed Nick Logue!? BUMMER.

Also I should footnote that on my way back up to the hotel room I ran into Amanda Hamon and Thurston Hillman (I was very excited to meet Thurston because he, too, has written some of my favorite things) as they were attempting to decode the vending machine in the hotel hallway.

That vending machine was programmed by a truly evil GM but they did figure it out eventually. I applauded their puzzle cracking and staggered off incoherently.

Good night, A+ con, would do again.

Sunday morning: did a Diversity in Gaming panel, proudly advocated FAILING IN PUBLIC!! as a critical component of inclusivity (also my only genuine maxed-out skill), was totally amazed by Diego Valdez's super awesome Arshea concept/Gods and Magic spoiler, which everybody who skipped the diversity panel missed, and that's what you get for skipping diversity panels. (Also, it is legitimately a super cool idea; I am now way more intrigued by Arshea than I ever was before.)

Sunday afternoon: went to Wayne Reynolds's seminar on medieval armor and weapons, saw some excellent line art, was amazed by the discovery that Wayne has a 90-lb. suit of custom-made plate armor that he actually fights in. There are pictures as proof! I am delighted to know this. Also it was an excellent panel with a lot of really neat information about unusual armor and a slide proving the existence of "boob plate" as a thing. (I didn't say this at the panel, which involved a guessing game as to whether a piece of line art depicted a real item or a fantasy invention, but I totally knew the boob plate was a real item because no art director on the planet would approve that in this day and age.)

I missed the Future of Paizo seminar because I was extremely tired at this point and fell asleep for a lot longer than I meant to. Bummerrrrr.

Sunday evening: went out to Seattle for a while, had a lovely dinner at Six Seven (great restaurant, amazing views, you should definitely go if and when you feel like lighting a giant pile of money on fire; it's worth the splurge!), ran into some relatives, etc. etc. civilian non-con stuff.

Returned around 11 pm Sunday evening and WHO DID I SEE AT THE BAR but Painlord and Co., sitting with some dude that they introduced as "this is Greg! You should know Greg!" I was all "who the hell is Greg?" but then we ordered drinks and, you know, how can I keep track of who I'm yelling at when there are drinks on offer? Right? Right.

Anyway it ultimately transpired that Greg was and is Greg Vaughan, author of some of my favorite adventures incl. Skeletons of Scarwall and the Riddleport gazetteer, so I was like "whoa you were totally right! I SHOULD know Greg!" and that was really cool.

Then I saw Wayne Reynolds wandering away from the hotel bar, so I immediately excused myself with extreme grace and alacrity (this is true as to the "alacrity," not so much as to the "grace") and literally ran him down in heels on his way to the bathroom. It was pretty much: "WAYNE!!" [boom boom boom, clattering of impending doom] "WAAAAAYNEE!! I AM COMING FOR YOU WAYNE" [BOOM BOOM BOOM]

(At this point I should note the relevant detail that I had never previously spoken to, or even been introduced to, Wayne Reynolds. This is, from his perspective, pretty much him getting run down by some drunk wild-eyed rando on his way to the bathroom on the third night of a convention.)

Anyway he explained that he was not, in fact, leaving, and ultimately came back to our table with extreme good grace and only a small amount of much-deserved mockery for the highly smooth and cool self-introduction performed by yrs truly.

Then we all cheered Imperial Cheliax (ALL HAIL IMPERIAL CHELIAX!!) and I figured I'd embarrassed myself enough for one night, so that was it for me. I don't know what shenanigans they got up to afterward, but I hope to find out in this thread later.

Thank you Derek!

This really has been a great convention. My personal highlights so far:

-- randomly yelling at everybody ever

-- abandoning my entire party, as Fumbus, to DIE HORRIBLY during our liveplay panel (sorry!, but apparently not sorry enough to get help, instead of just creeping back two weeks later to loot your bones). It was a very fun game, and James Jacobs is scary good at stabbing things in the face as Merisiel. A level 1 character should not be throwing down entire fistfuls of dice for damage.

Of course this did not save any of them from said horrible deaths, but hey. It was a ton of fun playing with BB Wolfe and Luis Loza, and Lyz Liddell is a great GM who rolled admirably with the goofiness and kept us all moving along at a solid clip.

-- getting a truly awesome and lovely audience for the Worldbuilding panel, which I was totally terrified about doing because (a) I am not a convention person; and (b) I know nothing. So it was really sweet and very much appreciated when people came up afterwards to say it didn't suck, and I am deeply sorry if I was so flustered that I miswrote anybody's name in their books. I'm so grateful to all of you, for real. <3

-- getting to tell my two stories at the Horror in RPGs panel. You have no idea how long I was waiting to bust those out. Well, no, if you were there you could probably tell from all the cackling.

-- the banquet! What a fun banquet. I am excited to see the trivia collection take shape and I'm thankful to all my tablemates for making it a very fun dinner.

If anybody sees me tomorrow, say hi! I will be very happy to meet you. I will also probably yell a bunch and maybe curse at Taco Bell for CLOSING AT TEN PM, WHAT THE HELL, so fair warning about that. But you should still say hi anyhow.

I POSTED IN YOUR THREAAAAADDDD

edit: okay now I have a picture but I can't post it because I am bad at the internet.

According to imgur this should work but clearly it does not, which makes me very sad because I really wanted to thank and/or embarrass everyone who put up with my brilliant three-drinks-in idea to go crash the projector screen with a group photo (after which they immediately made everybody sit down and be good, which I can only assume was to stop anybody else from doing that).

I mean okay maybe it's the thought that counts, but the thought was SUPPOSED TO BE a working picture link. And instead it is only this:

https://i.imgur.com/WXy0slq.jpg

woe, woe is me

(but seriously, big thanks to everybody who put up with me at the banquet. for real!)

I also missed signup (although sort of on purpose) so I will be in the crowd of people floating around and looking for random fun things to join. :)

I think it'll be fun. I like doing conventions that way -- for me, at least, it's always nice to leave a window for serendipity and unexpected things.

Anyway if you see me/us around, say hi! I am definitely up for a few quick pickup games (and/or watching and cheering other people playing in theirs, hopefully not in a too-annoying way).

I'm really happy this book is getting a positive reception. It was the first time I'd written any out-and-out gaming materials, and I wasn't altogether sure we'd hit the brief. But hey, looks like it came out all right after all. :)

I thought Lyz did a really amazing job with the adventure locations, btw. Lots and lots of neat game ideas nested into each of those.

re: Uskwood druids, there's a pretty neat plot of theirs in Horror Realms under the location writeup for the Uskheart, and I'd suggest checking that out if you want more information about what they might be up to.

This book will have some glancing references to that, mostly in terms of how you might use that to set up Umbral Court intrigues (there are a couple of Umbral Court members that have simmering disagreements with one another, and the Uskheart plays into one of those conflicts), but there's not a whole ton of additional material on that.

re: monsters, I had no involvement in that part of the book and it will be as much a surprise to me as to you, so no hints there. :)

Question: waaay back in Dragons Revisited, we got a description of an ancient gold dragon that lives in disguise in Nidal, quietly trying to do good and help the place's miserable inhabitants. Is that still part of canon; and if so, is the dragon mentioned or referred in this book?

Yes and yes. There isn't a whole whole lot, but I did put in a hook if you want to use the dragon. :)

Sadly I don't think there's anything about chains going through people's eye sockets (at least not in the parts I wrote), and there's nothing about the Empyreal Lords either.

The project had some pretty detailed specifications as to what topics should be covered and how many words should be devoted to each section, and it turns out that it's actually really hard to cram that much material into the allotted wordcount. As a result, a lot of stuff that I would have liked to explore just couldn't fit into the available space, and some topics (like faith and deity interactions) mostly got omitted.

(Incidentally, after working on this project I'm even more impressed with the Qadira book, which is a really excellent piece of work, but I think is also the kind of thing that requires enough time to build an iceberg of supporting material beneath the shown text. There's clearly a lot of writing and development beyond what made it into print on that one.)

Pre-Age of Darkness, the inhabitants of Nidal were, IIRC, horselords with a sort of Kellid feel to them, and I'm curious as to whether or not, farther away from the heavier church of Zon-Kuthon/government centers of power, some of the locals still retain some elements of their earlier culture (such as a fascination with horses, or a tendency to think of homes and buildings as transitory and families and bloodlines as forever, even if they haven't been nomadic for many generations).

That's pretty much exactly where we went with it, yeah. :)

Hey guys!

Update/more in Dept. of Managing Expectations: I've turned in my contributions to this project and I hope that people interested in running games in this corner of the world, or just learning more about it, will find them useful.

Because one of the things that interests me about SF/F is using imaginary worlds as a prism through which to consider real-life problems, one of the goals with the gazetteer was to establish ways for GMs to draw real-world ethical questions into their games. If you want to use fiction (which is what I think tabletop games are: interactively told stories) to explore ethical questions about prenatal genetic testing, paid adoption, governmental policies (esp. punitive policies) intersecting with drug addiction, immigration lotteries, immigrant communities' efforts to re-establish cultural histories that they've largely forgotten, etc., then this book should give you some openings to do that.

On the other hand, if your preference is more for straightforward heroic or horror adventures, you should (hopefully!) find lots of hooks to build those, too.

One thing you won't find a lot of is statted-out traits, spells, and sub-systems. My feeling is that there's a lot of stuff from Horror Adventures, Horror Realms, Occult Adventures, etc. that already covers all those bases. Rules building isn't my strongest point and those books already have so much solid material on running corruptions, curses, etc. that I felt like anything I came up with would be redundant with that material. It's already there, this is a good place to use it, but there's no need for me to spend wordcount repeating what somebody else already did better.

Another thing you won't find -- and this was a very deliberate decision -- is stats for the Black Triune. There's an explanation for who they are, what they do, and the role they occupy in Nidal, but there are no stats.

This is because the power level they would need to effectively occupy that role is so variable depending on your campaign's overall power balance that I didn't think it was advisable to actually stat them out. If they need to be Level 15 to do what they're described as doing, cool, make them Level 15. If they need to be major outsiders with 20 class levels and 5 mythic levels, fine, make them that. But what's appropriate for one campaign would be ridiculous in another, so I didn't stat them.

Finally, the last thing you won't find is a bunch of ultra gory descriptions of specific tortures used in Nidal. There are a couple of things that do get spelled out, and a couple of hints from which you can extrapolate more, but my feeling is that (a) you're creative and you know it's there, so you can go as dark as you want and is appropriate for your own game; (b) I don't need to write out a bunch of detailed splatterpunk that other people don't necessarily want to read; and (c) there are more effective ways of conveying dread than that anyway.

Anyway, that's more or less what I was going for with this writeup. Whether or not that actually got accomplished is something you'll have to judge for yourself. But that was the intent.

Thanks, that's helpful for me to know. :)

I have some thoughts that should hopefully cover those three angles. Whether they'll suit your campaign is a separate question -- I think Nidal is lowkey like Numeria or Alkenstar in that some people just don't want that kind of thing in their fun fantasy adventures, although "relentlessly grimdark, ultra-insular nation chained in eternal servitude to wacked-out pain god" isn't quite as clear-cut a case as robots and spaceships or guns -- but I do hope to incorporate some suggestions on how and why PCs might have left that country, and why parties might choose to swing by.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but overall -- from this thread and others -- I'm getting the general impression that what people want is primarily:

(1) What is Nidal actually like, how does it even work, what's it like to walk through its streets and talk to its people, etc.;

and

(2) why on earth would PCs ever want to go there.

Does that sound about right?

In the department of managing expectations:

(1) yes, I'm on deck to cover part of this book. Definitely not the whole thing. Definitely not any stat-heavy parts;

(2) my tendency is to approach the material from the perspective of "what information would help people tell stories set in this country?" I'm looking more at history, culture, how society functions (and dysfunctions), what everyday life is like for various subgroups, etc. While there may end up being some class-specific material, I don't expect there to be a whole lot of that, and there might not turn out to be much at all.

BUT there should, hopefully, be a lot of stuff that's easily adapted to various class concepts, in terms of both background and development within Nidal, if that makes sense. Not so much mechanics, more story and worldbuilding stuff.

Just stopping by to see what people are interested in, for, uh, idle curiosity, and stuff...

I'm wondering, what is the time frame of this book? Like, how long from start to finish in story line? One month, one year or another amount of time?

It's a single summer, iirc about ten weeks from start to finish, not counting the epilogue.

There are, or should be, enough context clues to figure out the exact number of weeks, but it's been a couple of years since I wrote the thing so I wouldn't want to try blind guessing it now.

Anyway, one summer. :)

re: worldbuilding, everybody has their own approach, but what has worked well for me is to seesaw between the story and the world. This is pretty much the same regardless of whether I'm creating an original world or working in a researched setting (either a tie-in universe or a story set in the real world -- those are basically the same in that you have to research what actually exists rather than purely making stuff up on your own).

The constraints and incentives of the world and the specific societal settings they come from will (or should) shape your characters' motivations, backgrounds, and methods. At the same time, some settings will foreclose some story types (you can't set a classic sword and sorcery tale with monsters and magic in real-world Dallas in 2017).

So in general I start with a rough idea of the type of story I want to tell and the genre I want to work in, then figure out the major story beats in the broadest possible fashion. At this point, characters are just placeholder archetypes with one or two defining traits that I think would be fun to write about, and plots are just super vague sketchy arcs.

Then I'll spend some time trying to work out whatever details of society and setting are necessary to ground the plot beats and the characters, and figure out how the ramifications of those cultural and geographical structures would shape the characters' choices and outcomes. It's a continual ping-pong process between character goals/actions driving which parts of the setting I need to figure out next and how those setting details affect the character goals and actions.

This continues throughout outlining (which is where most of the heavy lifting gets done) and onward through writing and revision.

I only ever build out (or research) about as much of the world as is necessary to ground the story in plot points and verisimilitude. The rest can just exist in a fog of "to be determined." If it doesn't influence anything in the immediate story, I'm not going to spend much energy on it, and in any event I find it preferable to leave maximum flexibility to determine other things later as needed.

Any chance we'll see Jheraal again ?

There is definitely a chance. I have a mostly-written (well, totally written, mostly revised) manuscript featuring Jheraal in a starring role. It's not completely finished, and I gather there are a few things in flux at the moment, but it is a thing that mostly exists. Mostly. :)

As protagonists or villains?

If villains, and we're only talking about class levels (not high-powered monsters), then my guess would be Lord of Runes. I'd have to hear a real convincing argument for how anybody outpaces that particular Big Bad strictly on the basis of class levels.

If we're talking about on the protagonist side then I genuinely don't know. I have a pretty good sense of where some of the main characters in the various novels fall, but others I have no idea about, and still others (cough-Radovan-cough) have some complicating factors going on.

I'd be interested in hearing other people's theories, but I would not feel confident about advancing my own. :)

I'm so happy you liked it! :)

And Isabelle is correct, Vhaeros is a Super Secret Devil of undisclosed variety. Maybe someday in the future we'll get more into that, but as of right now it's a deliberate unknown.

How does a novel get commissioned? Do you guys go to James Sutter with a story idea and pitch it to him, does he come to you? Does it generally start as something loose: "We want you to write a pirate novel" or is it more defined: "Here's a completish outline of the story we want written - note the goblin with a lisp in chapter four"?

It varies, but the first stage is generally pretty open-ended. If it's going to be a story with a totally new character (for example, when I switched from Isiem's story in Nightglass and Nightblade to writing a new protagonist, Jheraal, for Hellknight), then typically there's a little more guidance in the sense of "here's a protagonist we'd like to see, and here's a part of the world that would showcase that protagonist's unique traits," but it's still pretty broad, and there's a fair amount of back-and-forth in working out the details.

So for Nightglass and Hellknight, there was a suggestion that Nidal and Cheliax, respectively, were parts of Golarion that hadn't been heavily represented in the novel line at the time that I was looking for new projects, and for Hellknight there was a brief to write a story about (duh) a Hellknight, but I had a great deal of leeway to design the specifics of the characters beyond that. Nobody specified that Jheraal needed to be a hellspawn, or female, or in the Order of the Scourge as opposed to any other Hellknight order; those were all decisions that I made because I felt they'd make an interesting combination.

Sometimes pitches get shot down because they're too close to what someone else is working on. After Hellknight, I pitched a story about the Bellflower Network, but plotwise it ran too close to a couple of other projects (and, after Hell's Rebels/Hell's Vengeance, there was a sense that maybe the fans would prefer to move away from Cheliax for a bit), so that was a no-go. I think Sutter tries hard to ensure that a variety of locations, protagonists, and adversaries get showcased in the Tales, so if several other authors happen to be writing books that feature gnomes and rogues in major roles, then your gnome rogue is probably going to have a harder time getting approved.

Once a basic pitch gets approved, then you work up a chapter-by-chapter outline and send that in. Often there'll be (very helpful) comments about structural issues or plot points that are too similar to what another author is doing. Once those have been suitably adjusted, the project gets a green light, and then it's off to the (extremely slow, in my case) races. :)

^Okay, now I'm curious . . . .

Oh, I'm being obnoxiously coy. But that's a large part of what my Pathfinder Tales novel Hellknight is about, because I'm easily entertained by that sort of thing and I thought it would be fun to write a LG/LE relationship (paladin/diabolist, no less, because I figure if you're going to play with alignments anyhow, you might as well dial them up to 11, amirite?).

Anyway, I'm unsurprisingly of the view that the answer to the question originally posed in this thread is that it depends on the characters involved and what you want to have happen for your story. You can have LG/CG characters who get along beautifully or hate each other's guts. You can have LG/LE do the same too, depending on the extremity of their views and how readily they act in accordance with their alignments.

I don't think there are any LG LE friends are there?

I don't know if "friends" is exactly the right word, but there's at least one example I can think of.

Neither!

If a spell has expensive components in the game rules, then it will (or should, unless I made a mistake and overlooked it) similarly cost a ton in any story I write.

I think that's sort of fun, actually; any time you have cost, you have potential conflict (think of all the other things that money could buy!), and then you have a plot driver. It isn't always a big issue in the story, but it's always there. For example, in the story I'm currently tinkering with, the cost of Limited Wish is a minor point. It doesn't get a ton of emphasis and it's not critical to the story. But it's there, because the rules say it's there, and that drives certain characters' behavior in certain directions.

I'm so happy you guys liked the book (and sorry it took me so long to get around to this thread, but it's been wacky out here for the past few weeks...). It was a lot of fun to write, and I've been delighted at its reception. Thanks, all. :)

re: follow-up plans, all I'll say at this juncture is that the next book is not a direct sequel and, tonally, is a little bit of a change of pace. It's less focused on a specific part of the setting and more adventure-y (I seem to have settled into an accidental pattern of setting-heavy books followed by ones that put more emphasis on dungeon crawlin' hijinx), and doesn't focus entirely on the same characters. But you haven't seen the last of these guys just yet.

re: writing and weird words in a word processor, I do all my drafting in Wordpad so it doesn't even have spell check or grammar functionality. It's pretty much just bare-bones text, which works beautifully right up until the point where I have to show the file to somebody else. Oh well. Anyway, it avoids the need to build a custom dictionary to cover all the Golarion- and game-specific terms, because there's no dictionary in that thing anyhow.

Add me to the list of people who'd love to see more material about Taldor.

It's a huge part of the world's history, a huge part of the map, and there's so little we know about it. Personally, I'm really curious to learn more about the fading empire. Seems like it could be a really fun place.

Have any of you read any particularly good books lately?

I wish, but unfortunately not. Mostly I've been reading baby books (I'll throw out a rec for Emily Oster's Expecting Better, if anyone needs a good book on that particular topic; it's refreshingly sane and evidence-based) and case files. So many case files. So many.

hnnrrrgghhh

re: Velenne's build, yes, she is a wizard (well, wizard [conjuration specialty] --> diabolist).

One of these days I may attempt a summoner, but I need to understand the eidolon rules a lot better first. ;)

It's a secret!

...but no, not a barghest. :)

Because he's an actual designer and also 99.99% of the time I'm wrong about rules. ;)

Also because I suspect -- crackpot alert! I totally made up this theory based on zero evidence! -- that Behind the Scenes, the different interpretations are rooted in different play styles.

I'm blessed (cursed?) with an extremely inventive and investigation-oriented group of PCs who turn their considerable rulesbreaking power not so much to min-maxing their characters' combat builds (although they do that too, IF YOU GUYS ARE READING THIS, I'M ONTO YOU) as min-maxing their info-gathering capabilities.

This is generally pretty awesome and fun for me as a GM, but also means that sometimes I need to foil them from taking too-easy shortcuts that would ruin a mystery plot too early. As a result, I tend to interpret spell mechanics in a way that provides Clue X while denying Infodump Y. The upshot is that Speak With Dead, in my home campaign, doesn't work on damned or soultrapped creatures because you need a soul to commune with, ergo inaccessible soul = no spell result (but you do learn that the victim's soul is missing, which itself might be a valuable piece of information in context). That's been the rule in our game for years and years.

Over time, these gray-area interpretations tend to solidify in your brain as "oh yes that is actually the correct rule, of course it is" and that's, I guess, kind of the flipside of writing books as someone who plays the game vs. someone who doesn't: when you're writing about a part of the system that gets regular use in your own campaign, it's pretty easy to slip into default mode and use the familiar interpretation for your own game, which is what happened here.

However, if you play in a group where people are really concerned with not disturbing the souls of the dead for moral reasons, or where the investigation slider needs to move a little down toward Easy Mode because the PCs aren't going to push through obstacles to get information, then maybe Speak With Dead works just fine on a soul-stripped corpse.

I'm not saying either version is actually right or wrong (depends on what you want the rule to be for your campaign!), but just that that's one of the ways in which these interpretation differences can slip into a manuscript.

And since I know that having a One True Ruling is really important for a lot of people, my default response when I get caught out on a discrepancy (and can even remotely use this excuse) is "the character did it!" ;)

I loved the grinder scene, it made me chortle so hard when I got to that part.

I mean, yeah, it was super messed up, but on the other hand, props for coming up for something that actually made me wince as I was reading.

Thanks! I'm happy you liked it, and hope that you'll consider writing a review. :)

re: post-death questioning, you are correct that the characters have different takes on how the magic works.

My usual copout (which I'll freely admit is a copout, but hey) is that if one of the POV characters is not herself a spellcaster and/or you don't actually see the spell in action as a reader, then it is entirely possible that the POV character just has an imperfect/incorrect understanding of how that magic works. This is especially likely if her most likely source of information is, oh, let's say, the Church of Asmodeus, which might have a vested interest in ensuring that people have a slightly erroneous view of what they can and can't actually do.

So, in sum, it's very possible that Sechel's just wrong, or assumes too much about how the other parties involved might respond. :)

I suspect it's just hard to make recommendations because fundamentally, the styles are so different. Not that one is better than the other, but they're just trying to accomplish different things. I think people often fail to appreciate how difficult it can be to produce good pop entertainment; you have to balance pacing, action, and overall story structure as much higher priorities than litfic typically needs to care about, and then find ways of shoehorning character development and thematic resonance into a pretty tight word count, ideally while wrapping it in not-painful prose. When you see somebody who can pull that off (and fwiw I'd agree that both Barry Hughart and Scott Lynch do it really well, albeit in very different directions), it's pretty amazing to behold.

But it's a totally different thing. So that request can be a little like saying "I like classical symphonies; can you recommend a good '80s power pop song?"

Well... that's a tall order, and not because Blondie's better or worse than Beethoven. It's just such a different sensibility that it's hard to guess what's going to come off as a "good" pop song to somebody who's previously been tuned to different rhythms, cadences, and structures.

And then when you're talking about pulp fiction, it's often even rawer than that. Pop fiction (including fantasy) is, IMO, like pop music; some of it is genuinely innovative and brilliant, while some of it is purposefully engineered as lowest-common-denominator cash grabs (which takes its own kind of talent, I think, but probably not the kind you're looking for), but in general it's aiming for a pretty broad audience. It's not going to try to bust your ears open either way.

Pulp fiction (which I personally suck at, but admire greatly when done well, because that stuff is hard) is like punk. It's raw. It's emotive. There's brilliance and innovation there, too, but lots of it relies on pretty simple chords and repetitive structures that work on propulsive energy and animal thunder to achieve their effect. It's often not polished, and sometimes its practitioners scoff at excessive polish because they feel like it gets in the way of the intensity, and it can come off as unpleasantly dissonant and clumsy if your ear's not tuned to that style.

But again, doesn't mean the Sex Pistols are better or worse than Beethoven. Just means they're doing something different -- and that it's even harder to make an accurate recommendation for someone whose preferences run toward the latter.

Having said all that (and exhausted my Strained Analogy Allowance for the day), the good news is, there are free sample chapters available for all the Tales novels, and also free web fiction stories from the same authors (as well as many others), which might be helpful in deciding which authors' styles are most congruent with your personal tastes. :)

Liane Merciel wrote:

Ed Reppert wrote:

A hellknight, a diabolist, and a paladin. Quite a team, that.

One of the things I wanted to do in this book was pose one possible answer to the age-old question of "can a paladin team up with a known evildoer?" Like, forget about the conceal alignment or lie-to-the-paladin tricks. What happens if the evildoer is just straight-up "pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name"?

Posing the question made me laugh, anyway, which is 99.5% of what makes these stories fun for me. ;)

Will we also learn what happens when the hellknight, diabolist, and paladin walk into a bar?

Two out of the three, anyway.

The diabolist doesn't really do bars. Unless they're the kind of bars that have $15 cocktails with no fewer than three unpronounceable ingredients per drink. Because that right there, that is a Lawful Evil kind of bar.

Question for everyone:

How did you get started? Fan-fic, open submissions, etc? What was your first foray into the field?

I wrote some short stories, sent them out into various slush piles, got some number of them published. After racking up three pub credits (a number I had invested with mythical significance for no particular reason beyond that three seems like a good number to do that with, generally speaking), I took a shot at drafting a novel.

I think it's good to start with short stories if you can. It's good practice for putting together plots, establishing characters, working on prose at the sentence/paragraph level, and -- importantly -- learning to take criticism and rejection (which there will be a lot of, always, for any writer) on a project that only represents a week of your life instead of a year or more.

So here is a question for all authors:

What was the hardest part of adjusting to the fandom that Paizo attracts?

Was it hard to get used to?

*sniffle* I had a long response all typed out to this one and then I screwed up and lost it to the ether. Alas.

Anyway, short version: I don't know that there was a "hard part" to adjusting to Paizo's fanbase. It's weird getting used to the concept of having fans at all, but once you get past that hurdle, it's really nice writing for Paizo. For one thing, the fans tend to be a pretty great group of people. For another, there isn't as much pressure on me as an individual writer, because even if a fan doesn't necessarily love your take on the world, there'll be another writer up in the rotation pretty soon, and there's a good chance that reader will find something to like in the next story. Writing for the IP feels like being on a team, not just playing solo. I think that's pretty nice.

How do you folks outline your novels? Bullet points? Mindmapping? Sticky-notes with push pins and string and low-res pictures on a cork board a la conspiracy theorist?

I just write a paragraph of plot summary per chapter in a WordPad document.

It generally works pretty well for the first two-thirds of a story and then the little divergences in the manuscript steer me too far away from the plot outline and I end up driving the story off a cliff and having to redo the entire ending. You'd think by now I'd have learned not to do that, but haha no I never learn.

A hellknight, a diabolist, and a paladin. Quite a team, that.

One of the things I wanted to do in this book was pose one possible answer to the age-old question of "can a paladin team up with a known evildoer?" Like, forget about the conceal alignment or lie-to-the-paladin tricks. What happens if the evildoer is just straight-up "pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name"?

Posing the question made me laugh, anyway, which is 99.5% of what makes these stories fun for me. ;)

I bought some shiny rocks.

I mean, unless someone identifies as such or they're a viewpoint character and you get to hear a lot about their sexual/romantic interests and lack thereof...how can you tell?

Even with a POV character it's usually not obvious unless (as you've pointed out) romance and relationships are a central concern of the story and the author goes out of their way to lampshade the issue. Otherwise, most readers will just assume that "it's not that kind of story" (in other words, it's a fantasy or a mystery or a non-James Bond spy thriller, and romance is just not a primary concern) and interpret the lack of a romantic or sexual subplot as the author's lack of interest rather than the character's.

Sometimes that's true, and sometimes it isn't. I've definitely written short stories where there wasn't any room for a romantic subplot and so no thought of sex ever crossed the POV character's mind one way or another. You could interpret those characters as asexual (and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong, any more than you'd be wrong to imagine them as gay or straight or anything else; the text would be silent either way), but you'd be giving me-the-author too much credit if you assumed it was a deliberate choice.

On the other hand I've also written a novel with an asexual protagonist where that did get lampshaded as a deliberate choice, and pretty much the only readers who picked up on it were the ones who were asexual themselves. Most other readers just didn't see that aspect of the character at all -- which is fine with me, since I very much wanted it to be a situation where you could catch the subtext if you were looking for it, but nobody would get bludgeoned over the head with the Cudgel of Obviousness.

Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that IMO this is very much a situation where it's easy to not see a depiction of an invisible minority, and it's hard for writers to make that super obvious without being, well, super obvious to the point of (in my view) detracting from the story. But certainly they're out there.

All other considerations aside, Isiem is (currently) way too poor to get all spendy on nightglass components. ;)

As of about 75-80% through Nightglass he is a failed cleric, yes. "Threw that level straight in the trash" is my preferred phrasing. ;)

And thanks for the kind words!

Heeyyy, check that out. Spiffy. :)

I really liked this book, as I posted in the product discussion thread when it first came out.

The author actually did such a good job evoking the heat and humidity of the Mwangi that it ended up stalling me out on doing a perfume post about the characters. At the time I'd been planning to revive my on-and-off thread in which I try to guess what fragrances various PTales characters might wear, but Firesoul and Forge of Ashes were a total double whammy on that front.

I couldn't come up with anything for the dwarves in Forge of Ashes (seriously, what would dwarves even wear? smoke? blood of their enemies?), and while I had some ideas for some of the characters in Firesoul, the setting and climate threw off my guesses pretty hard. Perfumes operate differently in high heat and humidity, and ultimately I just threw my hands up in surrender because I couldn't figure out how to compensate for that complication in my guesses.

So I never did write that post, because the setting was so vividly evoked that I could not for the life of me figure out what would work there. Ah well. Maybe someday I'll go back and give it another shot. Regardless, these were super fun characters in a super fun story and I greatly enjoyed reading about them. :)

+1 for Lastwall/Mendev if you want the classic crusader-against-evil knight.

For Wars of the Roses, maybe Brevoy? iirc it's supposed to be the part of the world geared for Game of Thrones-type fantasy political intrigues, and Game of Thrones is inspired by the Wars of the Roses, so that part of the setting might work for that style of campaign.