Each week, I’ll pester one of my creative colleagues with five questions about his or her work and, if I’m feeling wicked, deeply personal issues. Most of these folks are friends, a few are secret enemies, and one has been blackmailing me for years.

I first encountered Richard Lee Byers when he and I contributed to The Halls of Stormweather, an anthology of novellas featuring members of the Uskevren household. My character was the younger of two sons, and Richards’s was our mama.

Since then, I’ve bought a story or two from Richard, and we bump into each other at Gen Con. So far, neither of us has challenged the other to a duel, but it’s only a question of time.

1. You and I have a few things in common: the Forgotten Realms, Pathfinder Tales, and a love of pulp fiction. Please tell us about your New Pulp series, The Imposter.

A few years ago, I decided to try some self-publishing. People said it was the future of the business, and some of the cool kids like Mike Stackpole were doing it. Partly, I did it by collecting previous published short fiction and releasing one of my early horror novels (interested parties should look for The Q Word and Other Stories, The Plague Knight and Other Stories [available soon], and The Vampire’s Apprentice), but I wanted to put out something original, too.

I decided to do a superhero series for two reasons. One was that I’m a lifelong comics fan and had always wanted to write superheroes. The other was that I didn’t feel like self-publishing something that might actually have a chance of selling to a traditional publisher. I wanted to do something that would be fun for me and that I thought readers might like, but which I was sure New York publishing would reject out of hand. I figured superheroes in prose fit the bill.

Here, by the way, you see the same keen insight at work that has served me so well throughout my career. Traditional publishing is doing prose superheroes now. But, oh, well.

Here’s the premise of The Imposter:

Matt Brown lives in a world of superheroes and supervillains, of mutants, sentient robots, and monsters, but none of that has anything to do with him. He’s just an ordinary guy living an ordinary life… until alien invaders attack the Earth, and all of humanity’s costumed champions go down fighting. By chance, Matt falls heir to their powers, but how can a fake hero save the world when the real ones have already failed? To find out, he begins a quest through a post-apocalyptic world where alien horrors and human supercriminals battle for dominion.

There are two volumes so far, The Imposter #1: Half a Hero and The Imposter #2: The Blood Machine. Each contains four novelettes plus a bonus story. People can also download The Imposter #0: Suiting Up for free. #0 is Matt’s origin story and the first of the novelettes from #1.

2. While I haven’t written a Realms novel in over a decade, you remained and have become one of the pillars of the setting. Which characters are you using in The Reaver: The Sundering Book IV? And how will this series change the face of the Realms?

Let me answer the last part of that first.

Several years ago, Wizards of the Coast, in an effort to create a great jumping on point for new readers, shifted the Forgotten Realms forward in time a hundred years. There was also a supernatural cataclysm called the Spellplague intended to introduce new challenges and wonders for gamers and the heroes of the novels to encounter.

To make a long story short, these maneuvers accomplished much of their purpose, but over time, it became clear that in the process, the Realms lost some of the elements that made the setting special. The Sundering will fix that. Its another big, transformative event, and without any cheesy time traveling and undoing history or waking up and finding Bobby Ewing in the shower, it will bring back what fans have been asking for.

I can’t go into much more detail than that because I don’t want to spoil the surprises.

There are Sundering-related gaming products that people can find out about on the Wizards of the Coast site. On the fiction side, The Sundering is a series of six novels coming out every other month. These are The Companions by R. A. Salvatore, The Godborn by Paul S. Kemp, The Adversary by Erin M. Evans (12/13), The Reaver by me (2/14), The Sentinel by Troy Denning (4/14), and The Herald by Ed Greenwood (6/14.) Each book tells us a self-contained story, but readers who read them all will get the Big Picture of what’s happening to Faerûn.

For the most part, the other authors used their established series characters. Bob used Drizzt, Ed is using Elminster, and so on. But Prophet of the Dead, my most recent Brotherhood of the Griffon novel, didn’t leave Aoth Fezim and his sidekicks well positioned to do what my novel needed them to do. So I wrote about new characters. My protagonist is Anton Marivaldi, one of those most notorious pirates on the Sea of Fallen Stars.

3. You’re one of several writers who have contributed to both the Realms and to Pathfinder Tales. What do the two settings have in common? What sets them apart from each other? Are there locations in either of them that you’d most love to explore in a new novel?

Well, the similarities are pretty obvious. They’re both worlds of magic and high adventure that connect to Dungeons & Dragons or a variant thereof.

To me, the primary difference is this:

The first Forgotten Realms product came out in 1987, and there have been hundreds since. There’s been so much development that while we can still see Ed Greenwood’s influences if we look for them, the Realms feels like itself and nowhere else.

In contrast, the world of Pathfinder has only been around since 2009. It has, of course, seen considerable development since, but I think the literary influences that went into it are still quite visible. You can look at one area and see that it drew inspiration from Edgar Rice Burroughs, observe that a different region reflects the work of Robert E. Howard and others. Since I love the great pulp writers myself, I don’t see that as a bad thing. I think that in its own way, it’s a strength.

With regard to pet areas, well, in the Realms, my last several books have dealt with the northeastern part of Faerûn, and I like it. If I’m offered the chance to do more Realms novels, I imagine I’ll keep hanging out there. I would like to get back to the Moonsea area specifically. I haven’t written about it since I did the “Year of Rogue Dragons” trilogy.

Pathfinder Tales: Called to Darkness is set mostly in the Darklands, and if I get the chance to do another Golarion book, I’d like to explore that underworld some more. There’s lots of cool stuff down there I wasn’t able to work into the first novel.

4. How does your experience as a fencer inform your scenes of sword fights?

Modern sport fencing is stylized, constrained by rules and conventions, and thus significantly different from the reality of fighting for one’s life with a sword. There are things I do with a fencing weapon that people couldn’t do with a broadsword or rapier (they were too heavy), and other moves I wouldn’t attempt if I were risking getting cut or stabbed and not just losing a point.

That said, though, the underlying principles of attack, defense, distance, tempo, deception, etc. are the same. On that level, learning fencing can help the writer write not just sword fights but any scene of hand-to-hand combat.

5. As an author of both novels and short fiction, what do you prefer about either form? Financial realities aside, if you could write only one form from now on, which would you choose and why?

That’s a tough question.

I like short fiction because you can hold the entirety of a short story in your head all at once and tinker and polish it until it works perfectly (or at least it feels like it’s this efficient little machine elegantly designed to achieve a particular effect without any waste motion.) Also, short stories are finished before the writer gets sick of them.

In contrast, novels are too big and complicated to focus on all the details at once and thus it’s impossible to fine-tune them with the same precision (or at least I find it so.) Thus, I never get to that same moment of feeling like, Yes, by god, that’s exactly what I meant to do. Plus, novels are not over before you’re sick of them. For me, no matter how enthusiastic I am about a novel, there’s always a point, usually around two thirds of the way through, when grinding out the damn thing becomes a slog.

On the other hand, though, when a novel is going well, I become even more immersed in that world than I am in the world than I am in the world of a short story. And that intense emotional involvement is part of what makes writing fun for me.

So, really, it’s a toss up.

Richard Lee Byers is the author of forty fantasy and horror novels including the urban fantasy Blind God’s Bluff: A Billy Fox Novel. He has published dozens of short stories and writes a monthly feature for the SF news site Airlock Alpha. He invites everyone follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, add him to your Circles on Google+, and read his Livejournal blog.

Every now and then, I pester my creative colleagues with five questions about their work. Most of these folks are friends, a few are secret enemies, and one has been blackmailing me for years.

Josh Vogt and I met in San Antonio, Texas, at a Worldcon room party. He’d already written “The Weeping Blade” for Paizo’s web fiction, and I had a hunch it wouldn’t be the last we saw of him in Golarion. Sure enough, he soon after published “Hunter’s Folley” and was hard at work outlining Forge of Ashes, the latest of the Pathfinder Tales novels. As if we didn’t have enough in common, I learned he’s also written for roleplaying games and was soon contributing to Privateer Press’s Skull Island eXpeditions.

Once we connected online, I was impressed to see how closely Josh keeps tabs on freelance opportunities, both those that look promising and those about which Admiral Ackbar would warn, “It’s a trap!” Josh is also passionate about fitness, especially encouraging his fellow writers to push away from the desk and stretch our legs now and then.

I loved the outline and the few chapters I was able to read while buried under my own deadline, but I’m excited to see the final version of Josh’s Pathfinder Tales novel, Forge of Ashes, available now.

1. Whether it’s a robot or a dark elf, a protagonist ends up being essentially human or else we can’t really sympathize with her. That said, in what ways do you make your dwarf heroine different from human? How about your other non-human characters?

With Akina, there are certainly going to be some “surface level” qualities that set her apart at first glance. Her dwarven strength and heritage, longer lifespan, a sensitivity to the earth itself and ability to see in the dark…all of those sorts of attributes. The dwarves of Golarion also have a fascinating history of how they came to the surface (and what happened to those left behind) and I enjoyed taking Akina through both a physical and inner journey as she discovers just how much that ancient history remains relevant to her. Her reason for fighting is more than mere survival or glory. It’s in her blood.

Ondorum, Akina’s oread companion, was also a delight to create. As an oread, with earth elemental ancestry, he has this inhuman patience that has been further honed by his martial studies. Even though they’re from different races—and possess extremely different temperaments—Akina and Ondorum actually relate to one another in deeper ways with their shared passions and protectiveness of those they truly care for. Some might view Ondorum as naive because of how he tries to treat everyone and everything as possessing of inherent value. It’s a bit of an odd perspective in a world where there are many divisive lines, be it through war, claimed territories, faith, simple banditry, or feuds that go back centuries.

2. You keep an eye on markets and job opportunities for writers, and sometimes I wonder just how much of your time that consumes. How do you balance hustling for work with writing for yourself as well as keeping up with contract gigs?

Actually, in the years I’ve been freelancing, I’ve gotten my gig-hunting process down to be rather streamlined. And I don’t have to be doing it constantly, as I now have past clients who keep bringing work to me. Those times that I do search for new contracts, if I put in a couple solid hours for a few days, I will often pull together enough work to keep me busy for at least a week or two, meaning I can scale back the job hunt again for a while.

With my personal writing, my fiction and all, I will often work to get freelance projects checked off and then give myself a couple days of just focusing on my stories. It lets me be more immersed in the process rather than constantly hopping all around. So it’s less like juggling and more just shifting into one mode for a stretch at a time. Obviously, my hope over the years to come is that I can start focusing more exclusively on my novels and other stories, but freelancing continues to pay the bills!

3. Likewise, you’ve a keen interest in fitness for writers. Apart from the obvious, that is the sedentary nature of the job of writing, how is fitness useful to the craft of writing?

Walking and being physically active in general helps me think. Sometimes when I’m trying to untangle a complicated plot issue, going on a run or hitting the gym can get more blood flowing to the brain. It also takes a little of my direct focus off the issue, so my subconscious might start processing it more and a solution will eventually emerge. I also think doing activities like obstacle course races, martial arts, or crossfit classes are excellent for introducing one’s self to new challenges and learn how to train and persevere—critical qualities for any career writer.

4. How much research do you do when writing for a setting like Pathfinder, which has thousands of pages of setting and rules material? That is, how much is enough without being too much? And how much did you absorb as a gamer before writing a Pathfinder Tales novel?

I’ve gamed much of my life and have been decently familiar with a wide variety of settings from when I was younger. I hadn’t done much since after college, so I did need a refresher. I read through every manual I could get my hand on, focusing first on locations, lore, and creatures relevant to the novel’s specific plot. Then I did some more general research so I could bring in details or mention things a bit further afield from the main action. The fun thing was, a number of items, like city layouts, hadn’t been nailed down in official canon yet, so I was able to develop those details along the way. I also read all the other Pathfinder Tales novels so I had a good idea what what other authors had explored and could see just how in-depth they’d gone. As I wrote, my editor, James, was invaluable and could easily answer any question I had or offer suggestions for particular scenes.

5. How much, if any, does writing for a shared-world setting inspire your original work? Do you ever find yourself reserving ideas for yourself rather than committing them to a project you don’t own or control? Or do you find yourself borrowing or slightly altering your own ideas for both original and work-for-hire projects?

It goes both ways. I always believe the story I’m telling, whether it’s an original setting or shared world, deserves my best effort. So if I have a big inspiration while drafting a tie-in story, I won’t hoard that by any means. There are always more ideas to be had. Honestly, sometimes I can’t use an idea simply because it doesn’t work within that specific world or isn’t allowed by the underlying nature of the game. But in original work, I make the rules!

Check out Josh’s latest news and advice at his website.

Each week, I’ll pester one of my creative colleagues with five questions about his or her work and, if I’m feeling wicked, deeply personal issues. Most of these folks are friends, a few are secret enemies, and one has been blackmailing me for years.

Jennifer Brozek is one of the many colleagues I knew first online, even though were were more-or-less neighbors. We didn’t meet in the flesh until after I’d moved away from the Emerald City but returned for the Seattle International Film Festival. Our mutual friend Ed Greenwood had suggested I might contribute to Jenn’s Grant’s Pass project. Between movies, Jenn and I got to know each other over bowls of pho. While her anthology sounded terrific, I got caught up in other things and, well, I just never came through for her. Later, I’d bump into her at the Writers Symposium at Gen Con, and once or twice we’ve been on the same panel.

This past year, when another editor mentioned that Jenn was his partner on an upcoming fantasy anthology, I saw my opportunity to make good on my earlier intention. Finally I wrote a story for one of her many anthologies, and I feel I’ve completed a long-deferred quest.

I caught up with Jenn just after her trip to Orycon 2013.

1. Judging by your convention schedule alone, one might consider you the hardest-working editor/writer in the business. How do you balance doing the work with buying, selling, and honing the work?

I’m a very goal-driven person. I keep lists of due dates and a weekly calendar of what must be done that week by day. Then, when I need to work on more than one thing at a time, I block out hours per project per day. In short, I am very organized, and I stick to the schedule I create. I live and die by my own merit. I am my own boss and, sometimes, I can be a real pain in the butt. Fortunately, my husband and friends understand when I say, “I can’t this time, working,” or, “I have one hour to socialize.”

2. When you co-edit a project, how do you and your partner divide the work? Is one of you more concerned with line-edits and the other with content? Is one of you more paperwork and the other more author-wrangling? Which aspects of the job are your strengths?

It is different with each co-editor, and I learn from them as much as they learn from me. We divide the work based on our strengths. We both read the stories. One co-editor could then do the first edit pass with the other doing the second edit pass. Or, we each take half the stories for a first edit pass and then trade for the second edit pass. I usually do the very final consistency polish and, to date, I do most of the paperwork.

3. In the origin story of your geekness, which came first, the fiction or the RPG? How does your work in one field influence your work in the other?

The gaming—by a long shot. And it has influenced me. I tend to write, thinking about the gamer who can break systems. So, I am careful with my world building. Also, I believe working in any other part of the publishing industry influences the other parts. Slush reading teaches you about writing. Writing teaches you about editing. Editing teaches you about writing. All of it teaches you how to interact with every other part. I am a firm believer that every author should read slush for 6–18 months.

4. What is it about our field that demands we sub-categorize everything? For the writer and the reader, is there really a meaningful difference between urban fantasy and paranormal romance? Do epic fantasy and sword & sorcery really need to be separated? What really is the difference between dark fantasy and horror?

I do believe that genres are important. A paranormal romance requires there to be a romantic relationship between the protagonists. In fact, there isn’t a story without it. While an urban fantasy doesn’t require any romance. Dark fantasy tends to be traditional fantasy with a very dark bent while horror tends to be modern day. Also, fantasy generally implies adventure while horror implies a cautionary tale.

You’ll note that I say “generally” a lot because numerous books cross the lines or are “cross-genre.” The categorization helps readers find novels in the vein they are looking for.

5. If you had to give up editing or writing, which would you choose? Which of them helps you more with the other discipline?

I would give up professionally editing. I still have stories to tell that I’m not willing to give up on. But I would miss editing. Really, both skills inform the other. When I edit others I learn how they write and tackle problems. Sometimes, reading it first hand while editing—because you’re so focused on how the story is written than the story itself—you can see how things are done. That’s invaluable.

But I still wouldn’t give up writing.

For lots more info on Jennifer’s upcoming projects, check out her website.

Each week, I’ll pester one of my creative colleagues with five questions about his or her work. Most of these folks are friends, a few are secret enemies, and one has been blackmailing me for years.

My first encounter with James Sutter was an email, shortly after he’d come to Paizo and I’d moved to the Great White North. Harlan Ellison was looking for me, but that’s a story for another time.

The second encounter was shortly after Erik Mona told me the secret that Paizo was launching Pathfinder Tales. James wanted to try me out on a story before deciding whether to tap me for a novel. As I recall, my first pitch didn’t send him, and he asked for several more so he’d have a selection. One of the follow-ups was a re-tooling of an sketch I’d made for another, disappearing, editor. James liked that one, we changed one character’s name, and thus began a steady stream of Radovan & the count stories and novels.

Not to be outdone, James entered the fray to much acclaim with his own Pathfinder Tales novel, Death’s Heretic. The sequel, The Redemption Engine, continues the adventures of Salim Gadafar, unwilling servant of Pharasma, the Lady of Graves. Read a sample chapter, and check back to the web fiction link soon for a new Salim story.

1. As the editor for Pathfinder Tales, you’ve seen a wide variety of outlines, some incredibly long, others quite short. What is the perfect outline for you to read as an editor? And what is the perfect outline for you to write as an author?

Outlines are everything. As an editor, especially an editor of tie-in fiction, I require detailed chapter-by-chapter outlines from all of my authors.

Some authors really hate outlining, because they feel like it kills the fun of exploration. I can sympathize with those folks, but I can’t hire them. If an outline comes to me with too much Underpants Gnome-style handwavium in the middle, I send it back.

That may seem like an overly hard line to take, but it’s actually done out of love. Because as much as it can be annoying to sit down and come up with every plot point for a novel in advance, it’s nothing compared to the devastation both of us will feel if I have to go back to an author and say that, because of a problem that could have been caught in the outline phase, she’s going to have to rewrite half the book. My goal is to always frontload any editorial concerns in order to save both the author and myself as much time and heartache as possible.

For that reason, my ideal outline as Paizo’s Managing Editor is about 5,000–8,000 words, and tells me every twist and turn of the plot. I don’t need every detail of who says what, but I need to be able to follow the connections between events, as well as understand any rules that are pertinent to the plot (to make sure that a spell is being interpreted correctly, that the right monsters are being used, etc.).

As an author, I was never been a big outliner before I started editing novels, and now I outline everything, using basically the same format identified above. For me, it’s extremely freeing to know where a story’s going. I don’t have to worry about how it’s all going to come together or try to hold it all in my head, and instead can relax and focus on having fun with each individual scene.

2. What’s a challenge you overcame while writing that later translated into advice to an author?

Honestly, I think the biggest challenge I’ve overcome is the act of writing novels itself. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist but spent most of my life terrified of embarking on a project of that size. It just seemed impossibly huge. But when I started editing novels professionally—starting with yours, Dave—and saw the process a novel goes through from birth to final product, it took away a lot of the mystery, and I realized that a novel is really just a collection of scenes that tell a story. If you can write a scene, you can write a novel. And looking back at the work I’d done on the original Eando Kline Pathfinder’s Journal, tying each episode together over the course of 36 volumes, I realized that in many ways I’d already been through the process of outlining something like a novel. That gave me the confidence to move forward and write Death’s Heretic.

So that’s a big piece of advice I give to authors, both neophytes and budding pros: don’t psych yourself out. Novels are just long stories. (In some ways, they’re even easier than short stories, because you can do all the planning up front and then just write for months.) A corollary to that revelation is the fact that authors are just people. It’s easy to look at your favorite authors and think, “I could never do what they do.” But realize that you’re likely seeing those authors at the top of their games, after they’ve been polished and prodded and otherwise made the best they can be. You can’t hold yourself to that standard. Just write the best book you can. (And if you can’t write the best book you can, just write the book—you can judge it once you’re done.)

3. In the endless skirmishes between anti-adverb, pro-passive-voice, and various other pet peeve guerrillas, what are a few of your style and grammar bugbears? Can you think of something you always immediately change in a manuscript? What’s something you once might have changed but now let stand?

I adore contractions. They’re a fundamental part of how we speak, and to me, writing in the vernacular is the best way to get yourself out of the picture and let the reader interact directly with the story. This is triply important in dialogue. My eyeballs itch every time I see someone write something like, “I cannot do it, Captain! I do not have the power!” That’s probably my strongest linguistic prejudice. (This is, of course, problematic in those exceptionally rare cases where contractions might not actually be warranted, such as from a robot or a particularly obsessive half-elven count.)

I also really can’t stand stilted language, again particularly in dialogue. Too many people think that in order to write fantasy, you have to write purple prose or faux-medieval dialogue, and that just doesn’t cut it with me. I want the language to be smooth and clear, including dialogue. Even in a story set in a fantasy world with many medieval trappings, like Pathfinder, I’m way happier with a character shouting, “Hey, asshole! Hands off my horse!” than “What ho, varlet! Dost thou thinkest to deprive me of my noble steed?”

Last but not least, I’m not a big fan of third person omniscient point of view. When I’m in a scene, I want to be in a character’s head, or at least hovering over that particular character’s shoulder. If I know what one character is thinking, I shouldn’t be able to know what another character is thinking until there’s some sort of scene break. You can have multiple point of view characters, but there need to be set break points when you shift focus, so that you’re not just drifting between characters’ thoughts. (I also hate it when you’re spending all your time following the hero, and then suddenly the book cuts away for a single scene to show you what the villain’s been up to and give you information the hero has no way of knowing. That always feels lazy to me.)

Whew! That probably makes me sound more cantankerous than I actually am, but such is the nature of the job. In terms of things I might have changed but now let stand, I can’t really think of anything off the top of my head, save for those contraction instances I mentioned above. That may sound arrogant, but actually it’s because if I’m ever unsure about whether to make a change, I consult with my immensely talented and knowledgeable coworkers and get their read on the situation, which hopefully keeps me from making too many unnecessary changes.

4. You’ve mentioned a variety of literary influences in past interviews, but can you think of some artistic influences from other media that influence your fiction? For instance, are there musicians, visual artists, comedians, or interpretive dance companies that inspire your writing?

Fantasy art is a huge inspiration for me, though I’m only now coming to realize how I can deliberately capitalize on that. I’m particularly fond of fantasy landscapes and monster design that portrays fundamentally alien things in a realistic style. I’ve written before about how fantasy landscapes inspire me, and some of my favorite artists are those like Wayne Barlowe, Michael Whelan, and Stephan Martiniere that can bring a new world to life. And just the other day I sat down with a copy of the new Spectrum art journal and began flipping through it, and realized, “Oh my god—I could write a book about every one of these pictures!” So I think that’ll be my new secret weapon. From here on out, whenever I need inspiration, I’m just going to google “concept art landscape”—or pull up Reddit’s amazing Earth Porn subforum for real-world landscapes—and let my brain run free.

I also get heavily inspired by music, but that usually drives me to make music. Every time I go to a good show of any style, I inevitably come home thinking ,“That looks like fun! I should do that!” Which is why my personal music projects tend to bounce around stylistically, from hardcore metal to folk to hip-hop to musical theater. (I’m actually finishing up mixing on the debut EP from my new band, Brides of the Lizard God, as we speak!)

5. You write about a lot about faith and the afterlife, especially in Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine. Have you ever had any real-world encounters with the supernatural or inexplicable?

Actually, yes.

First, some background: I’m about as white as untoasted sourdough, but growing up, I had an uncle named Cha-das-ska-dum Which-ta-lum, one of the spiritual leaders for the Lummi Tribe. The man was seriously larger than life: He’d hung out with Jimmy Carter and the Dalai Llama. He’d been hit by lightning twice. He’d once been flown out to Japan because a bunch of secluded monks saw him in a vision. And there were even stranger stories—the ones my parents rolled their eyes at. In the 1970s, when he’d been a police officer on the rez, he’d been the one to investigate several suspected sasquatch attacks, tracking the creatures and taking (ultimately inconclusive) blood and hair samples for the research labs. And even once he’d retired as a cop and gotten more into the spiritual side of things, he continued to sometimes act as a sort of psychic detective, tracking auras when there was no other way to locate a corpse.

Was some of it bullshit? Maybe. The man loved a good joke as much as anyone, and was a hell of a tale-spinner. But when so many of his stories were empirically provable—not even my parents could argue with the pictures of him and the Dalai Llama, or the results of the lightning strikes—you had to wonder why a man like that would even need to make up stories. Certainly twelve-year-old me from the boring Seattle suburbs was happy enough to have a little magic in my life.

Yet there’s a big difference between firsthand experience and a story, no matter how good the tale. One time when I was maybe thirteen, he invited me to come along to a powwow in a friend’s smokehouse. What he didn’t tell me until we were on the road was that the gathering was actually exclusively for high-ranking medicine men from all over the Pacific Northwest. When we showed up, it was a bunch of very old native guys—and me. Such was everyone’s respect for Cha-das-ska-dum that nobody said a word about it.

Most of it was what I’d come to expect: a lot of drumming, a lot of chanting and singing, some dancing. Yet toward the end, they brought out an extremely old man who’d been brought down from way up in British Columbia, who my uncle whispered was a Big Deal even among the medicine men. He was decked out in full regalia and carrying a staff.

The drums began, and he started to dance. They got louder, he got faster. Then just when it reached a crescendo, he silenced them with a wave of his stick and pointed it at the ceiling.

BOOM! The sound was like the world exploding. I lept up from my seat, ready to run for the door, but Cha-das-ska-dum collared me and sat me back down. Above us, the smokehouse roof shook and roared like a tornado was trying to rip it off. Then the old man began to dance again, the drums resumed, and he repeated the gesture with the staff.

The rest of the ritual was a blur, but I remember pushing through the doors and discovering the source of the roaring: a thick carpet of hail.

Hail which extended for maybe fifty feet around the smokehouse, then stopped in a clean line.

Above, the skies were just as clear and sunny as they’d been when we’d entered the smokehouse. When we eventually got back to my parents—staying only a few miles away—they hadn’t heard about any hailstorms. The weather reports didn’t note anything.

Was there a rational explanation for what I witnessed? Quite possibly. But I think that was the day I first decided that there is indeed weirdness in the world, and that while we should always remain skeptical and strive to find rational, scientific answers, there will also always still be more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Keep an eye on James’ website.

Each week, I’ll pester one of my creative colleagues with five questions about his or her work. Most of these folks are friends, a few are secret enemies, and one has been blackmailing me for years.

For a while, as far as I knew him, James Jacobs was “the new guy” who worked on the far side of the cube farm in the first Paizo office. (They’re now in their third.) He’d come aboard to work on Dungeon after I’d migrated to a galaxy far, far away. It took a while for us to realize we had a shared interest in horror and Asian cinema. It’s taken him and Wes Schneider even longer to forgive me for inviting them to see what turned out to be one of the less coherent examples of both forms.

Even though I’ve long since departed the Paizo offices for the northern prairie, Pathfinder Tales and the Seattle International Film Festival bring us back together now and then. And while I forgive James and Wes for refusing to let me choose the movies, I rely on them to introduce me to the best breakfast joints that have sprung up in Seattle since I left.

1. You’re best known as a designer of RPG adventures, and H.P. Lovecraft is an obvious influence on your choice of subject matter. Who are some other authors or filmmakers who have influenced your game writing?

Lovecraft is hands down the biggest influence on my writing, but not the only one. His pulp companions Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith are important as well (Clark Ashton Smith’s Xothique stories having been a huge inspiration for the necromancer empire in my home-brew setting that would eventually itself inspire and inform the nation of Thassilon on Golarion), along with modern writers like Clive Barker, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Ramsey Campbell.

Horror, for the most part, is what inspires me, and that carries over into film, with the works of directors like John Carpenter, Guillarmo del Toro, and Akira Kurosawa being very inspiring (yeah, I know Kurosawa’s not a horror director, but he’s awesome!). George R.R. Martin is my favorite fantasy author of the moment. For some more obscure writers and film directors, I’d have to give call outs to T.E.D. Kline, Tim Lebbon, Thomas Ligotti, and most recently Joseph Payne Brennan have been huge influences on the writer side of things. As for more obscure film directors, I’d call out Ti West, Xavier Gens, Pascal Laugier, Gareth Edwards, and Mike Flanagan as having delivered some truly unforgettable and inspiring movies.

2. I once watched in awe as you began a Call of Cthulhu session at PaizoCon. Not only were you great, but you had three or four great players at your table. What struck me is that none of you were performing in the sense of improv actors, but the talk was so fluid and conversational compared with the awkwardness we often see at convention gaming tables. How do you do that? Is that how all your games go, or was that an anomaly? If it’s always that way, how do you do that?

Well, thanks! You’re making me blush! I suppose it’s no real secret that having great players at a table really helps to make a game overall much better, and when I’ve got great players at my table, they inspire me to do better. At the very least, they’re constantly giving me new things to go on and to expand upon.

I’m not afraid to throw out parts of the adventure’s plan if, for example, a player comes up with a much more interesting interpretation of a clue or whatever; not only does that make the game more fun, but it gives the players the feeling that they figured things out. In any event, being good at improv is, I think, an essential skill for a GM. You have your script (in the form of an adventure), but the players are really good at going off script. Being a voracious reader and watcher of films helps here—you build up a lot of material in your head when you immerse yourself in stories like that, and it also certainly helps to have spent some time acting as well—I was pretty active in the drama club in High School, and dabbled a little more in college with a few acting classes as well. In any event, that’s more or less how I run all of my games. I’m not afraid to let the dice get set aside once the players and I start getting into playing out conversations and the like with NPCs. I run very few convention games, in any event, so all of that comes from my home games I’ve run over the past three decades.

3. The world of Golarion is vast and varied, yet it seems certain areas (notably Varisia) are much more popular among players than some of those that depart from the European paradigm. With the Jade Regent Adventure Path, you seemed to have a strategy to ease Euro-centric players into Tian Xia. How well did that strategy succeed? And how would you apply it in bringing players to areas like Osirion (soon), Qadira, or Vudra?

I think that the strategy worked pretty well. I do kinda wish we’d gotten to Tian Xia at least one adventure sooner, but the way in which that Adventure Path “eased” players into playing a game steeped in Asian mythology and inspiration was always the intent.

For an adventure set in Osirion, Qadira, or Vudra, we can kinda cheat—there are nations in the Inner Sea region that are already all about those cultures—they’re right there on the map, bordering (or near bordering) other more European-themed nations. As such, it’s much easier I think to do adventures there, since you can allow the players who prefer more European tropes in their games to simply play “next door neighbors” visiting the area.

For the upcoming Mummy’s Mask Adventure Path, we’re starting in Osirion and staying there the entire time—we’ve done enough with that nation already that I think folks are familiar enough with the ideas there already that we don’t need to ease anyone in. It certainly helps that we’ve done a few adventures set there already, and that one of the factions for the Pathfinder Society organized play campaign is Osirion!

4. I’ve heard that you’d like to write fiction but just can’t find the time. How much of the fiction itch does writing game adventures already scratch, and what additional or different satisfaction do you anticipate when you do write that first novel?

Writing adventures is certainly fun, but for me, at least, it only intensifies the itch to write fiction.

The main difference between writing fiction and writing adventures is that when you write an adventure you’re missing out on the chance to write the best part of the story—the protagonist’s role. In an adventure, those roles are played by the player characters, and you have to be comfortable with that if you’re writing an adventure. Comfortable with the fact that, no matter how much work you put in on what you write, those NPCs are often just gonna end up being reduced to numbers and things to loot in the end. Comfortable with the fact that in a typical group, only the GM gets to actually read what you wrote—what the others at the table get to experience is more the GM’s creation than yours.

It’s weird, for example, seeing a bad review of an adventure you wrote and reading it and realizing that all the things the writer was complaining about are bad ideas introduced (unknown to the reviewer) by the bad GM. Or likewise, seeing a great review of an adventure you felt was terrible, because the GM was brilliant and turned a poor adventure into a masterpiece.

I’ve written a fair amount of short fiction, and have plenty of ideas for novels in my head, what I’m really looking forward to there is the ability to spend time with characters I have full control over, rather than spending time on the surrounding characters whose fates I have no control over… and to seeing more people check out my writing, I suppose.

5. Like some of your Paizo colleagues, you have a reputation for liking the dark and scary stuff. Yet I have a feeling you have some big, bad phobias knocking around in your imagination. What is your worst one?

I hope this doesn’t backfire, but the worst one is, hands down, clowns. I’m not a fan of crowds (and as such conventions tend to be high-stress for me), and tsunami are the most often-repeated themes in my actual nightmares, but clowns are the thing that distress me the most. Ugh.

Keep up with James’ latest hijinks at Bigfoot Country.

And if you missed yesterday’s Crossing the Streams book giveaway, check it out.