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

In the summer of 2015, I noticed an intriguing Kickstarter campaign for an “experience” from The Mysterious Package Company. My perfect wife made me a gift of it, and I became an instant fan of the MPC. Even before the final “reveal” of my first experience, I’d become so enraptured that I subscribed to the company’s Curios & Conundrums, a periodical full of puzzles, stories, toys, and other sundries.

Much as I loved the subscription, the MPC’s experiences are the showstoppers. They range in complexity (and price), delivering a number of letters and parcels either to you or to an unwitting friend.

The creator listed for the Century Beast Kickstarter was Jason Kapalka, famous as the co-founder of PopCap games, through which he’d already stolen hours of my life with the games Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled. Oh, he claimed he was merely fronting the effort for the enigmatic Curator, but I had my suspicions. After all, it would take a mind as brilliant as the Curator’s to envision the Storm Crow Tavern, a nerd bar in Vancouver and later in Toronto. In addition to the MPC and Storm Crow, Jason is also currently creating “a series of comically violent horror puzzle games via Blue Wizard Digital.”

As Jason—or the Curator—has launched another Kickstarter, this one with the ominous name HASTUR. I thought it a propitious time to ask him a few questions about my favorite of his creations.

Curating The Mysterious Package Company must be like editing a magazine. What disparate talents must you gather to make that incredible thing work?

The Mysterious Package Company is a surprisingly large enterprise, with around two dozen full-time employees in a large, suitably ominous post-industrial warehouse in a bohemian district of Toronto. The employees, as you might imagine, are a varied lot, ranging from assembly-line packers of crates full of evil artifacts to artisans casting fake antiquities in-house to forgers of aged diaries and documents to assorted writers, graphic designers, e-commerce and website engineers, and—the really scary types—the odd accountant and procurement manager.

Most MPC experiences are collaborative and multi-disciplinary projects that involve a lot of odd specialties, from calligraphy to cryptography. They may start with a creative brief from me but usually end up as a joint project.

There’s a strong Mythos undercurrent to the MPC. What’s your history with the Mythos, especially in gaming?

I’ve been a fan of the Mythos from my teen years and was a rabid fan of the original Call of Cthulhu RPG. As a Keeper, my most memorable experience was a disastrous one-shot that ended with the entire party being ritually sacrificed by Deep Ones; as a player, I was the sole survivor of the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, who, half-mad, lame, and hideously scarred, gave his life at the climax to save the world, at least temporarily.

Most recently I was very proud of the Crate of Cthulhu that we offered at the MPC, which is a faithful “physicalization” of the Call of Cthulhu novella, including most of the newspaper articles and statues/bas-reliefs mentioned by Lovecraft, brought together in a reasonably plausible crate meant to have been abandoned in a basement of the Natural History Museum in London for decades.

MPC used to offer a subscription to Curios & Conundrums. What special challenges did that complex wonder pose?

C&C was a very strange project that evolved from a simple newsletter in the early days of the MPC to an elaborately themed quarterly box. In its latter incarnation it was envisioned as a kind of more demented, literate, eerie answer to the various Loot and Nerd Crates full of name-brand merch. Instead, we offered things like papercraft toys of burning Victorian insane asylums and pewter statues of unspeakable Egyptian gods of madness.

It was certainly a challenge creating an entirely new set of artifacts and storylines every couple of months, but I’m proud of the final results.

When you envision the ideal customer of MPC, what sorts of films, books, and games do you suppose are already favorites?

With the exception of our McElroy Brothers Adventure Zone collaboration on Taako, which has a pretty obvious media tie-in, our audience tends to favor horror and mystery material, as you might have guessed. A more divisive line is between the fans of narrative and collectibles and those who are more interested in puzzle-solving. The puzzlers really want intense, challenging riddles and secrets in their experiences to decipher, while the more narrative-inclined fans can be stymied or frustrated by codes and cryptograms. Trying to satisfy both types of customer in that regard can be challenging!

And of course, Lovecraft and related writers are favorites of many of our customers.

How did the first Storm Crow Tavern come about, and how has it expanded? What can visitors to expect to find inside?

The first Storm Crow Tavern was spawned in Vancouver in 2011 from an idea that me and my partners had: if sports fans have sports bars, why can’t “nerds” have a “nerd bar” that appeals to their own interests, from sci-fi memorabilia to board and card games?

The first Storm Crow was relatively modest in size and ambition, but each successive restaurant has expanded in size and, er, grandeur, with the most recently opened location, the Storm Crow Manor in Toronto, being housed in a grand 100-year-old Victorian manor with a seating capacity of over 400, including the patio. The Manor is basically a series of themed genre rooms, from a postapocalyptic cyberpunk lounge with faulty holograms and mysterious steam-blasting pipes, to an eerie asylum bar with haunted portraits and electric-chair seating, to a futuristic Warhammer 40k-inspired space dungeon sub-basement.

The Curator of MPC embodies the sort of courteous, formal correspondence one associates with a bygone age. What made you enlist such a personage in the age of email and video games?

Part of my interest in projects such as the MPC and Storm Crow post-PopCap was due to their real-world, analog nature. I love video games, but I think that many people miss the tactile experience when you get too tied up in digital realms. So the common thread of the Storm Crow and the MPC is that they are both real, physical things, whether that’s a bar or a nailed-shut wooden crate in your post box.

Given that throwback nature, it was natural for “The Curator” to affect a somewhat courtly and antiquarian prose style. That said, the MPC is still largely a denizen of the electronic world, with all of its sales being driven through a web site, so we are looking at ways to “modernize” the eeriness without losing that quality.

You’ve already presented an experience involving the Yellow King. Why have you returned with Hastur? Aren’t you afraid too many unwitting fools will say the name three times?

In fact, we have referenced the King in at least two experiences so far, including the original King in Yellow and then the later Carcosa. So HASTUR is in fact the concluding segment of a “trilogy” of sorts. While it’s perfectly suitable for new customers, longtime MPC fans may find some interesting linkages.

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.

Jane Lindskold and I first met at Gen Con about 20 years ago. The previous year, she had published her wonderful debut novel, Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, coincidentally the same year as I’d made my first short fiction sale. We also discovered we’re both tabletop roleplayers, and my one regret of that convention is that we never got a chance to play together.

Jane and I exchanged letters and D&D books for a little while but eventually lost touch except for a brief greeting at a convention five or six years later. Since then, we’ve reverted, as so many have, to following each other on Twitter.

This past spring, a remark by someone at Tor prompted me to ask whether they’d send Jane a copy of my latest Radovan & the Count novel. Soon after, we resumed our correspondence and she asked me a few questions for her delightful blog. Our exchange was so much fun that I had to ask to turn the tables and continue the conversation here.

1. As a pragmatist, I’m of the opinion that writers aren’t born but made (or self-made). They come to the craft from many different vectors, including formal education, writers’ groups, the guidance of a mentor, and a thousand other angles. What was your trajectory?

“Trajectory” is a neat way to look at the process of becoming a writer. Let’s see…

For me, the launch pad to becoming a writer was telling stories—often based on my dreams—to my younger sister, with whom I shared a room until I was twelve. I also had a vivid daydream life, in which I would construct elaborate stories. And I’d play “pretend” with my youngest sister.

I’m not really sure when I started letting the stories out of my head and onto paper. By college, definitely, but my sister says she’d find fragments back when we were younger. I certainly never finished these, nor did I take them very seriously. At this point, I had no ambition at all to be a writer.

Freshman year in college I discovered RPGs. This was the year the AD&D hardcover guides came out, I believe. Gaming very much fueled my desire to actually write down stories. Often I’d construct an elaborate backstory for my character. These rarely were used, but I found myself stimulated by the process. Later, I’d write down portions of games—more or less unconnected fragments—but the attempt to put down on paper words that would convey to a reader something of the vivid sense of the characters and events from the game was there.

I even tried an epic poem in rhymed couplets.

At the same time, I was majoring in English, so I was reading a lot of wonderful material—or sometimes not so wonderful. Thinking about what stirred me and what didn’t helped shape me as writer as well, as did making friends who read SF/F and talking about books with them.

Basically, those four years when I was earning my undergrad degree in English, I was also, all unknowing, doing a second “self-directed” degree in fiction writing.

I did take one class, an elective, in short story writing. Honestly, the class didn’t teach me much that I hadn’t already figured out for myself, but it did force me to finish what I was working on. That—as I’m sure you know—is a huge step.

I went directly from undergrad to grad school, but even though I was intensely focused on my studies, I didn’t give up either gaming or fiction writing. When I finished my dissertation, I decided to slot fiction writing into the space where the dissertation had lived.

Above you mentioned “mentors.” If I had one, it was Roger Zelazny, who I met as I was finishing up my degree work. Roger read some of my early stuff and decided that I was already writing at a professional level. So, although we talked about writing a lot, he went out of his way to avoid making me, as he put it “into a cut-rate Roger Zelazny.” He never edited my stories or made more than the most indirect suggestions. Instead, he taught me about markets and various business aspects. Of course, I couldn’t have been as close to him as I was without learning a lot—I have a file drawer filled with his letters to me—but he never was in the least directive.

After grad school, I started teaching college English and writing fiction (and non-fiction) on the side. Eventually, I sold a short story or two… And even later, a novel (Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls). Twenty-four or so novels and seventy some short stories down the pike, I’m still at it.

2. I think you’ve both collaborated on fiction and finished someone else’s work, one of the things we have in common. How do those experiences compare with each other and with writing alone?

I’ve done collaborations with a couple of writers—two novels with David Weber (Fire Season and Treecat Wars) and a short story (“Servant of Death”) with Fred Saberhagen.

And Roger asked me to finish the two novels he was working on if he didn’t “make it” (as he didn’t). These were Donnerjack and Lord Demon.

I’ve also written stories set in other people’s “universes,” which—if you’re respectful of the source material—is a sort of indirect collaboration.

Each of the experiences was very different. “Servant of Death” was set in Fred’s “Berserker” universe, so he contributed the foundation. We talked over the story and I wrote the first draft. Fred then made some suggestions that he felt would draw the story closer to the “feel” of the universe.

Working with David Weber was very different. Since the novels were prequels to the Honor Harrington stories—set hundreds of years earlier—there was a lot of new material to come up with. Weber and I are good buddies, and he gave me a lot of room to play, as long as we didn’t violate anything he’d already established. One area he hadn’t done a lot with was treecat culture, since most of the treecats in the Honor Harrington novels are not exactly stay-at-homes. I came up with a long list of questions. If he didn’t have an answer, he gave me leave to come up with my own solutions.

Finishing Roger’s novels was completely different, since he wasn’t there to talk with. However, we had talked a lot about what he intended for both. He didn’t outline, so I had to go with what we’d talked about and what he’d already written. Earlier, I said he didn’t try to teach me how to write, but I feel that rising to the challenge of finishing novels by one of the greatest SF/F prose stylists of all time taught me an amazing amount.

3. More and more writers are open about being gamers, but you’ve never been shy about talking gaming. Is there still a danger of being “tainted” by association? And are there hidden or surprising benefits to gaming as a writer?

The other day, I realized that by my next birthday, I will have been gaming for two-thirds of my life… And it hasn’t been a casual hobby either. Except for a few breaks when moving between locations (and thus between groups) I’ve gamed the whole time. Right now I have a group that meets almost weekly, and I really look forward to Sunday evenings for that reason.

My first non-academic publications were gaming-related: two gaming scenarios for Call of Cthulu, published in Challenge Magazine. The second of these was badly messed-up in production, so I fear that any who tried to play it would have failed their Sanity roll at the outset.

I think that the danger of being negatively stigmatized for being a gamer is greatly reduced these days. I mean, when people realize that Hugo and Nebula award-winners like George R.R. Martin and Walter Jon Williams are gamers, it becomes really tough to justify equating gaming and poor writing.

Projects like the long-running Wild Card anthologies, and James S.A. Corey’s “Expanse” novels have their roots in games played by or designed by the authors. Neither of these are “game-related” but gaming had a positive influence on their development.

I think the benefits are myriad, especially for those of us who run games as well as just playing. When people ask me in what way a game is like a story, I explain that the Referee provides the setting—because even in those games set in an established gaming “world,” still the Ref is the one through whom the players “see” the setting. The Ref also provides most of the characters in the form of NPCs. The players provide the main characters. The Referee provides the start for the plot but—in a good game—the story’s plot is a result of collaboration between the Ref and the players.

4. What are some lessons writers can take from roleplaying games in handling magic and the supernatural? And/or what are some lessons one must never take from gaming?

Magic and the supernatural are a bit separate in my mind, so I’ll deal with them that way.

Despite reviewers who seem to frown at such, traditional magic is more often than not tied to a system of some sort. I wrote a long piece about this called “System = Unmagical” for Tor.com, that I revised for my own blog in March 2013 and included in my book Wanderings on Writing, so I’ll spare you why the “numinous” magics so beloved of critics are actually less “realistic” than magic systems that use spell components, gestures, and the like.

That said, a writer can’t simply tag a spell by its game name and leave it at that. One thing I’ve found amusing when reading Pathfinder novels is how often I can tell precisely what spell is being described—and I haven’t played any version of D&D for over twenty years! A creative description of a spell effect is great, but just saying “Chromatic Orb” or “Spider Climb” is pretty clumsy.

The supernatural is another thing entirely. Gaming universes often mix up elements that came originally from numerous sources—fictional, legendary, mythological, historical, even movies and TV—with no attempt to justify why, say, a creature from continental India would be in the same area as European-style werewolves. In the gaming context, that’s fine, because that’s the fabric of the universe.

However, when writing fiction not set in that sort of universe, a writer must be careful to understand where various supernatural elements originated. A Norse elf and an Irish elf have element in common, but they are different creatures—despite the contact between the cultures. The same is true of a host of other creatures.

The same story that might delight a gaming audience can seem a ludicrous mishmash in another context—and consequently subject to rejection from non-gaming publishing houses.

Coincidence is another thing to watch out for. Gamers are accustomed to how the dice shape the story, but the chance success of a one-in-a-million hit or an out-sized spell effect even if “It really happened that way, honest!” can make for a weak story, especially if the plot relies on repeated “good die rolls.”

5. You and I, and a great many other writers, have an obvious affinity for wolves. What is it about those animals that remains so romantic in our imaginations?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I apparently imprinted on wolves at a very young age. One of my favorite imaginary characters had a wolf companion. When I’d speak about my enthusiasm for wolves, I was always told “Oh, you wouldn’t like real wolves,” but, in fact, I do.

Over the years, I’ve learned a considerable amount about wolves. What I’ve learned has not diminished my enthusiasm for them, but rather caused it to grow. I’ve even had a wolf in sit in my lap, been licked on the face by several, and the like…

This doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge that wolves can be dangerous. I try to get out the word that wolves are not meant to be house pets. I do what I can to support the mission of Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary here in New Mexico, which provides homes for wolves and wolf-hybrids who have been unfortunate enough to be victims to humans on a power trip.

Wolves are not monsters—not werewolves or Pathfinder’s “winter wolves” or anything of the sort. However, they’re not Firekeeper’s “Royal Wolves” either. They’re creatures who deserve to be respected for what they are.

Watch for Jane’s latest at her website.

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.

I’d seen the name J.F. Lewis on book covers but new nothing about the man until the good people at Pyr Books sent me a copy of his upcoming novel, Oathkeeper, second in a series begun by Grudgebearer. Instantly I was envious of his Todd Lockwood covers. As I began reading, I realized Jeremy and I had a little more in common than good fortune in cover artists. His epic worldbuilding gave me the impression that he too was a tabletop gamer, a suspicion confirmed by a quick search on his author biographies. Soon after we began chatting, we discovered we had even more influences in common. To wit:

1. Who are some of your main inspirations as a writer?

Corwin from Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles is basically my gold standard when it comes to how first-person narratives ought to feel. If you’re going to put the reader in the head of a protagonist for fifty thousand words or more, that protagonist needs to have a certain amount of snark, wit, and natural-sounding internal commentary. Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett were very transformative for me, satire-wise. I think all writers tend to pick up story architecture and stylistic quirks from our favorite books as well as the world around us.

Whether it is readily apparent or not, each of my novels explores a series of philosophical questions that interested me at the time I was writing. My core goal is giving the reader a fun ride, though, so I’ve never cared much whether readers picked up on why I was writing something. I think it’s kind of obvious that The Grudgebearer Trilogy deals with questions about slavery, gender and race equality, and parenthood… but it can absolutely be read as an epic vengeance tale with cool fights and snarky heroes.

2. One of the reasons I admire Zelazny is that his writing bridges the divide between clear prose and poetry. When and how often do you feel a writer should indulge in a bit of lyricism for the most powerful effect?

One thing I love about Zelazny is the way he tells just enough for you to know what something looks like without getting lost in graphic word poems focused more on impressing than evoking. When I first write a novel, it doesn’t usually contain a lot of vivid detail. Maybe it’s a Hemingway influence or that I don’t have a movie in my mind when I write or read, but detail doesn’t come naturally to me. Since many readers need more description than I do, I tend to add details with every pass, checking to see if a reader has a good sense of setting. When I start delving into visuals, it is usually because something complex is happening or the imagery is important to convey emotion, character, or plot.

3. Where do you think gaming can help one as a writer of narrative fiction, and where do you think the two arts diverge? That is, what’s a bad lesson one might take from gaming to writing fiction, and how do you resist the urge to indulge your inner gamer while writing a great story?

Basic Dungeons & Dragons in the red box was my first encounter with gaming. That was back with then whole “D&D is evil” thing was happening, and it was laughable how little most people understood about role-playing games. From there I quickly ran through the other boxes, moved on to second edition, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the RPG, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, Middle-earth Role Playing, Rifts, DC Heroes, Marvel Superheroes (the FASERIP version from TSR), Westend Games D6 system, and into more modern systems like Cinematic Unisystem, Pathfinder, Numenara, and Fate Core. I even worked in a comic and gaming store for seven or eight years (the Lion & Unicorn). Amber Diceless Roleplay likely had the biggest impact on me, because the entire emphasis is on the storytelling.

One pitfall into which I’ve seen many aspiring writers fall is the idea of building a game setting and running a campaign set in it with the plan of then turning that into a novel. It can work but often doesn’t and winds up frustrating everyone involved.

Character is the avenue through which I approach story and the plot and world-building all follows from there. In Void City, the characters who defined the setting were Eric and Winter; everything else sprang up around them. In Grudgebearer, it was all about Kholster and Uled until Wylant and Rae’en came along. That’s a common thread for me. Sometimes I have to rewrite massively once I “encounter” the strong female protagonists that always seem to show up in my books. Learning to see through the eyes of a character who might have very different opinions and beliefs than mine clearly had its roots in gaming and was a huge help in writing.

Game balance also informs world-building from a laws of the universe standpoint. My years of Gamemaster practice help me make sure that threats are of the proper scale so that the protagonist, regardless of power level, faces a genuine threat. Since I have always leaned more toward roleplaying than “roll” playing, I don’t usually have to fight against my inner gamer; we’re on the same team.

4. Beyond acting as the adjudicator of player choices, how does the role of narrator of a story differ from that of a Gamemaster or Dungeon Master?

The narratives which are told within a roleplaying game are much more of a collaborative effort than the stories which unfold in a novel or short story. To capture the same group effort in a novel would entail handing over decision making responsibilities for the book’s cast to other people. While I do tend to let my characters (and my players when I’m running a game) drive and or change the plot, my characters are still all mine. Even though they don’t always do what I want them to do, it’s still me making the decisions and I can plan and adapt pretty easily.

When running for a group of players… Well, let me put it this way: If Raiders of the Lost Ark were a novel, we’d know that Indiana Jones is always going to go after the Ark of the Covenant and wind up in the pit full of snakes, but if it were a roleplaying game, there would always be the chance that Belloq would end up down in the tomb or that Sallah would leave his wife and kids to elope with Marian and her pet spy monkey who would turn out to have been a double agent all along.

5. The various species in Grudgebearer fit classic archetypes like elves, lizard men, and plant-people, but they are all a little different. Why do you embrace archetypes while other authors shy away from them? And how do you make them your own?

One of the drawbacks to creating something new is that, as people, we tend to look for familiar ways to relate to things. The Aern in my novels, for example, are metal-boned carnivores who exist as a semi-hive mind dominated by a leader who insists they have free will. If they break an oath, they are unmade. They shed and grow new teeth like sharks and have eight canine teeth (four on the upper jaw and four on the bottom). A whole subsection of their culture is developed to handle the need to keep track of the weapons and armor they forge from their metal bones and those of the dead. They have bronze skin, red hair, and eyes that work more like security cameras than biological eyes. They’re a lot like golems… But they have wolf-like ears, so “elves,” right?

On the surface, the Eldrennai are more typical elves and the Vael are plant people. The Cavair are bat people. The Issic Gnoss are insect people, etc. I know that. But if I’m doing my job right, down the line a reader may encounter someone else’s version of a dwarf or a dragon and think, “That’s not how that should work. In Grudgebearer…” Archetypes are comfortable because of their familiarity, and then as readers learn the unique traits that set these species aside from archetypal forms, they get the chance to really get to know the Sri’Zaur, for example, and see them as something more than the “evil” reptile army they appear to be at first.

It’s up to me to make sure those differences are there and that they are interesting and genuine. As to how I do that, it all springs from character and, since I’m a Pantser, that often means a lot of rewriting as my characters reveal more about their cultural attitudes, history, biology, etc. with those facts informing their actions and driving the story while filling in the details of the setting so that we can see not only what they did, but why, and how, in many cases, they couldn’t have done anything differently while remaining true to themselves. That’s one of the main reasons there is only one actually evil character in the trilogy. Everyone else is just doing what they think is best for them on a personal level or for their people or country.

Look for more of J.F. Lewis’s previous and upcoming projects at his website.