Category Archives: Writing

Radovan & the Count Reread: Hell’s Pawns

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Since we’re now only about fourteen weeks away from the release of Lord of Runes, published by Tor and Paizo, it’s time to get something straight. You do not need to have read any of the previous Radovan & the Count stories to start with Lord of Runes. You really don’t! Honest. I am not messing with you on this.

However, experience suggests that some of you just won’t believe that, or you’ll believe it but you’ll still want to start from “the beginning,” which is a tricky thing to define with the boys, since I’ve written a few flashback stories.

If you want to catch up on the boys’ adventures, I suggest you tackle them in publication order. In this post and a bunch to follow, I’ll guide you through that order.

Hells Pawns.

Start with Hell’s Pawns, originally published as the Pathfinder Journal in the Council of Thieves Adventure Path. This is the first Radovan & the Count story, and it’s unique in a couple of ways.

First, it’s told in present-tense, because I’d been binging on film noir and saw Radovan as a sort of hard-boiled detective type. Sure, the elevator pitch has always been “Holmes and Watson meet sword & sorcery,” but that’s not a very good way of describing the actual personalities of the characters. “Holmes and Marlowe” makes more sense, but only if you know what that means, and many don’t.

Second, it’s strictly Radovan’s point-of-view. I’d originally conceived the story as alternating between the boys’ points-of-view. Once I got down to writing, however, I felt the story didn’t have enough space to divide it among the two protagonists. For that structure, I wanted to wait for the extra space a novel affords. Also, I didn’t start to hear Varian’s voice until the third or fourth time I rewrote the early chapters of Prince of Wolves, which is a tale for another time.

Hell’s Pawns is the published story I’d second-most want to revise for a couple of reasons. I hadn’t quite found Radovan’s voice yet, and I would love to expand it to show the same investigation from Varian’s POV.

There are two ways you can read Hell’s Pawns. You could buy all of the Council of Thieves Adventure Path, which would cost about $120 and which I recommend only if you want to run that AP (it’s good, and it was the first AP designed for the Pathfinder RPG rather than D&D 3.5). Alternatively, you could buy the .epub version for $5. That might seem a trifle high compared to the cost of the novels, but these novellas are lavishly illustrated, so that’s a bonus.

Anyway, I always fear that people going back to Hell’s Pawns after reading the novels may be disappointed by the different style and the single POV, but a surprising number of readers cite it as their favorite. It’s the first and so-far only look at Varian’s house in Egorian, not to mention the capital of Cheliax itself. There are several characters there who remain near to my heart and who I’d probably revisit if I were to write a novel set there.

Fun facts: Radovan was originally a half-orc, but someone else had already pitched a story with one, so James Sutter suggested a hellspawn as an alternative, thus earning his keep in a single stroke. Also, Radovan’s name was Sabuto, and he was half-Tien rather than Ustalav. The original story pitch, which I changed substantially before writing, included a vampire. I really wanted a vampire. Thus, I introduced one later, although it became a very different sort of vampire.

Now go! Read Hell’s Pawns, and then come back here (or go to Paizo or Goodreads) and tell us what you think of it.

P.S. Now is a good time to sign up for the newsletter that I’ll likely send in May or June. There could be a giveaway involved.

Radovan & the Count Week in Review

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Did you happen to see the first part of Mordicai Knode’s interview of me at paizo.com?

How about the second part, right here on on this blog? I’d love to see some comments there.

Speaking of Mordicai, a few weeks back he posted a wonderful review of King of Chaos at tor.com, to go along with the one he did earlier of the first three novels. If you like his review, drop a comment over there and make him look like the big shot reviewer he is.

King of chaos.

Perhaps you missed the first free chapter of King of Chaos, posted courtesy of the fine folks at Black Gate. More sample chapters are on their way.

And maybe you now have time to read the first chapter of “The Fencing Master,” also at paizo.com. Some readers say very kind things about it in the comments. Chapter Two comes next Wednesday, when the plot definitely thickens.

Finally, if you’re interested in the earliest tales of Radovan and the Count, I’ve pinned a reminiscence here. Once I see ten comments (from 10 different people, mind you, not 10 from one guy), I will put together one on the Master of Devils period.

Mordicai Knode Interviews Dave Gross, Part 2

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Check out the first part of this interview at paizo.com.

How much leeway do you have for sweeping world changes? How “big” can you get without needing to check in with editorial?

Virtually none, and not big at all.

I can propose anything I like, but if it involves the death of an important campaign figure, a change in government, or even the appearance of certain powerful beings, the answer will almost always be “no.”

That said, I do occasionally propose biggish things and get approval on some of it. And I think in future, as the campaign setting progresses, they may tap novelists to write stories set during big events.

Prince of Wolves.

What was one monster that you wanted to have in there that you just couldn’t fit or had to edit out of Prince of Wolves?

You know, I don’t think there was one. I’m such a fan of gothic horror that I could write a dozen novels set in Ustalav, the way I could write a dozen novels set in Tian Xia, so there was never any impulse to cram in every possible trope and creature. You’ve got to leave some casting for later episodes.

However, months after finishing the novel, I realized that Prince of Wolves has several superficial similarities to one of my Forgotten Realms novels, Black Wolf. Among them were the presence of werewolves, a divine caster love interest, and an unorthodox vampire.

While I’ve nothing against the romantic version of the vampire, I’ve always preferred the monstrous aspects of the bloodsuckers. If those can be more viscerally horrifying than two neat puncture wounds on the neck, all the better.

Master of Devils: I think this one would make a hell of a comic, pun completely intended. If you had to pick a comic book artist and author to adapt it—and the guys doing the actual Pathfinder comic were busy—who’d you pick?

I would pick three different artists, one for each of the three POV characters’ stories.

For Radovan’s story, I’d pick Eduardo Risso. For Varian’s, Craig Russell. For Arnisant’s, Mark Nelson.

I can’t imagine who I’d choose to adapt my work. I’d much rather do it myself. But if the sky’s the limit and you put a gun to my head, I’d say Joss Whedon or one of his acolytes.

Queen of Thorns is all about genealogy, both Varian’s and Radovan’s. How far off the deep end have you gone with the family trees?

Not too far, but I have in mind the story behind Varian’s mother’s death, as well as the particular tragedies of several of Radovan’s ancestors, including his parents.

In my idea folder are a couple of flashback stories that could be revealed beside contemporary events. Several of them center on family matters.

King of Chaos: Okay Dave. You’ve just been made a Chaotic Evil Demon Prince, the whole package. What is your portfolio, what do you look like, and what is your level(s) of the Abyss like?

I’m full of phlegm today, so all I’ve got is “Demon Lord of Snot.”

Well, all right, if you were any demigod on any plane, what plane and what critter creature?

My celestial ambitions are modest. Put me in one with good alehouses that allow dogs.

Perhaps it’s the booster shot of Elysium, which we watched a few weeks ago, but I’ve no aspiration to live among the gods or the demons or any of those jerks. I’m a Prime Material boy.

Critters are all right, though. I like critters.

Okay, hot shot, pop quiz! Let’s have a soundtrack for each of your books.

My Ustalav Mix was full of Devotchka, Beirut, Gogol Bordello, Interpol, and Eivør Pálsdóttir, with occasional bursts of Lacuna Coil and Dream Theater and infrequent jolts of traditional Roma music.

Master of Devils folder started with the soundtracks for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; House of Flying Daggers; and Curse of the Yellow Flower and a little traditional mongolian, Japanese, and Chinese music. For Radovan’s chapters, I listened to a lot of Front Line Assembly, All That Remains, Alexisonfire, Bigelf, In Flames, Ivardensphere, Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, Taking Dawn, and assorted other metal.

I didn’t make a folder for Queen of Thorns, but I confess to breaking out some Enya, Clannad, Loreena McKennitt, and Mary Fahl when I didn’t feel sufficiently sylvan. To get in a demon mood, I sometimes broke out more metal or spooked myself with some Bill Laswell and Tetsuo Inoue or listened to Ligeti’s Requiem for as long as I could stand it without getting the shivers. I think there were days of nothing but trance and/or prog rock, too.

King of Chaos also didn’t have a dedicated folder, but I remember listening to Akira Ikufube’s Godzilla soundtrack, some Sigur Rós, Kenji Kawaii’s Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, Paul Ruskay’s haunting Homeworld soundtrack, and more of the above-mentioned metal and spooky stuff.

You recently had a Gencon panel with Elizabeth Vaughan, John Helfers, Lou Anders, and Brandon Sanderson on creating a system of magic and weaving the rules of a magic system into a story. You’ve inherited a Vancian magic system from the Pathfinder rules, but you’ve managed to find the knife edge of paradox; that is, you’ve gone “off the reservation” with Varian’s riffle scrolls & Radovan’s transformations, neither of which fits into a neat little box of class mechanics, but you’ve done so in such a way that their unique abilities & drawbacks still follow the cosmological mechanics of the world (and the game world). What are the pros and cons of this approach, and what do you think you have to learn from other writers in worlds with strong systems of the supernatural, like Sanderson?

Last question first: My sad confession is that I’m not up-to-date on what the current giants of fantasy fiction are doing. Most of my literary influences come from much earlier writers. I will remedy this failing over the winter, I promise!

In past work, I’ve sometimes offered characters who I felt were a little too “by the book.” Gradually I came to realize that what really makes an iconic fantasy protagonist is that he or she is an exception–not necessarily “the chosen one,” but a character who’s different from others. With that in mind, I sometimes push for a “house rules” approach to the game mechanics that provide the “magic physics” of the Pathfinder world.

But I don’t want to throw out the rules, of course. I just want to bend them sometimes, and never arbitrarily. For instance, even in the novella “Hell’s Pawns,” in which Count Varian Jeggare isn’t even a point-of-view character, I had a rationale for why he couldn’t cast spells like other wizards. I shared that reason with my editor, who generally approved of it, knowing that I wouldn’t reveal the truth until after I’d told a number of stories involving these characters. The time for the reveal–or most of it–came with King of Chaos. More of the rationale behind Count Jeggare’s unusual problem may unfold in later stories.

Likewise with Radovan’s unusual nature. I knew I wanted him to be different from other tief— I mean, hellspawn. “No horns, no tail” was the first rule I imposed on myself, but as I developed the plot of “Hell’s Pawns,” another idea occurred to me about why he might be unusual among his kind. That secret has unfolded a little more in virtually every book in the series, but there are still some fairly big revelations to come in future. I’m saving them for when the plot of a particular story intersects in the right way with his family tree.

And that’s the bottom line: I’m not bending the rules just to make the characters different. I try to do it only in ways that connect with the protagonists’ personalities or family histories, using magic to emphasize or mirror element of character or story. Since in a fantasy world metaphor is not always metaphor, it’s a fun way to connect literary devices to game mechanics.

Your novels generally have a colorful cast of supporting characters, whether they are strange elven nobility or a goblin who swallowed the spirit of the wind. Heck, Radovan’s had quite a few dalliances along the course of the story, from a werewolf fortune-teller to a holy dominatrix. Which of your minor characters are you favorites, and which are you waiting for an opportunity to take a second crack at?

I love all of them, but of course some more than others. It’s hard for me to write about a character until I find at least something to sympathize with. Every time I finish a novel, I feel I could write a dozen short stories—or sometimes full novels—about some of the secondary cast.

When James Sutter and I first discussed a sequel to Prince of Wolves, one of my ideas was a novel featuring Azra and Malena, with “the girls” taking the place of “the boys.” Soon after introducing her in the first novel, I envisioned a fairly long and involved origin story for Azra, but there was some concern about my writing a novel about a mute character. (Personally, I think it’d be a piece of cake, since as a POV character she wouldn’t have to be verbal, and half of the story I wanted to tell was of a time before she lost her tongue.) So Azra’s probably top of my list.

Count Jeggare has a long untold history, and plenty of unfinished business, with Paralictor Ivo Elliendo back in Egorian. Likewise, Radovan’s ties to Zandros the Fair and the rest of the Goatherds are not so easily severed as he might hope. As dangerous as the boys’ travels have been, their eventual homecoming might be far worse.

I fell in love with the kami of Master of Devils. In fact, when I finished that book I felt as though I could write nine more set in Tian Xia focusing on all the heroes who remained behind after the battle at the Gate of Heaven and Hell. But what I really wanted was to write an Arnisant novel in which he gathered another group of fae creatures to fight against goblin tribes—or maybe an “untold chapter” in which he teamed up with Oddnoggin from Queen of Thorns to fight the forces of the Witchbole.

When I began Queen of Thorns, I thought I’d like to write more stories about Kemeili, but by the time I finished the character I most wanted to revisit was Oparal. Because we saw her only through the POVs of Radovan and Jeggare, I felt she appeared far less sympathetic than I imagined her internal life. Fortunately, when James and I first discussed King of Chaos, Oparal was an obvious choice for a third POV character because of the Silver Crusade.

I also fell a little in love with Liane Merciel’s sorcerer Jelani, whom she graciously allowed me to borrow for King of Chaos. And I have an abiding affection for every one of the crusaders who follow Oparal into the Worldwound. Pity they didn’t all make it back. At the end of King of Chaos, the surviving heroes are about to embark on another battle. In my imagination I knew how it would turn out and what some of them might do afterward. I won’t spill it all because spoilers and because it’s possible I’ll return to some of those characters one day, but I did have the phrase “_______ Demon-Slayer” stuck in my head for weeks after finishing.

If you were making a library of “essential viewing” to really see the influences and references you make in your work, what movies would you put in it?

I’ve posted in various places about even more kung fu movies, but here’s a list of ten films or series that inspired the four novels, two novellas, and I forget how many short stories:

Brotherhood of the Wolf

Horror of Dracula (and many other Hammer/Universal films)

The Bride With White Hair

Green Snake

Indiana Jones series

Murder on the Orient Express

Nausicaa of the Valley of Winds (and more Miyazaki)

Aliens (and really any James Cameron film)

The Maltese Falcon (and many other film noir)

The Twilight Samurai (and its thematic sequels)

Mordicai Knode lives in Brooklyn, where he run campaigns involving generation ships haunted by vampires, samurai addicted to the spice melange and Neanderthals instead of orcs. He writes for Tor.com, most in a series exploring Appendix N, Advanced Readings in DandD. You can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.

Radovan and the Count Retrospective: “Hell’s Pawns” to Prince of Wolves

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Since most readers first met the boys in Prince of Wolves or “Hell’s Pawns,” I’ve been waxing nostalgic about the times I wrote those stories. Here are a few thoughts on the first novella, novel, and short story featuring Radovan and the Count.

When James Sutter first asked me to pitch ideas for a Pathfinder Chronicle to accompany the Council of Thieves Adventure Path, I gave him four or five different ideas. One was a revision of a sketch I’d sent another editor a few years earlier. That editor failed to reply for eight months, then passed without explanation before quietly leaving the publisher. When James picked that revised pitch, I felt the hand of fate on my shoulder.

Originally inspired by an idea in Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong movie that inspired Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, the resulting story, “Hell’s Pawns,” bore little resemblance to either film. In fact, more readers have pointed to Village of the Damned as an influence, which in retrospect is almost certainly true, although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time.

The femme fatale in the original outline was a vampire with her own agenda, but that subplot was one of the first elements to be discarded. Instead, because I’d been binging on film noir the month before James and I first talked, the plot took an even darker turn. Also, my original intention to tell the story in alternating points-of-view turned into the classic first-person, present-tense narration of a hardboiled anti-hero. Radovan’s voice emerged from those of about two dozen movie tough guys.

For thematic reasons, I wanted both of my protagonists to be half-human and of illegitimate parentage. In fact, I had thought to include the word “Bastards” in an early title, but “Bastards of Erebus” was already one of the Adventure Path titles, so that was another early change.

Radovan was originally a half-orc of Tian descent. Because Howard Andrew Jones had already called dibs on a half-orc character, and because my story was to be set in Cheliax, Empire of Devils, James suggested a tiefling or hellspawn, as we came to call them. That was the first of many good suggestions James offered, as well as the beginning of my speculation on what made Radovan different from others of his kind.

Radovan’s name changed a couple of times, first because James felt a Tian character would be too unusual in the Chelish setting, later because I picked a name that began with V, and we didn’t want V&V protagonists. I wanted Varian’s bodyguard to be an outsider even in his human ancestry, preferably from a country with a strikingly different culture from Cheliax. It took me a short time to decide on Ustalav as the birthplace of his parents. “Radovan” was my second or third name choice, but the moment I wrote it down, I couldn’t imagine any other name fitting the character.

Incidentally, both Radovan and Varian are real-world names. Most of the names I choose for Pathfinder Tales characters are real but less commonly used in North America.

Varian was always Varian and a half-elf, because I wanted a character who had lived through several generations of the great changes in Cheliax. I picked House Jeggare from the campaign setting because of their fabulous wealth and the family history linking Cheliax to Varisia. It tickled me to think my wealthy nobleman might visit places with rivers and streets named after him, not to mention encounter statues of his famous ancestor, Montlarion Jeggare. One of the early ideas for the first novel would have taken one or both of the boys to Varisia instead of Ustalav.

Starting Prince of Wolves was a struggle for a couple of reasons.

Prince of Wolves.
Dan Scott pits the boys against the Sczarni werewolves.

First, I had four early chapters that delayed the beginning of the plot for far too long. Two of them died in a fire, and the others eventually became the short story “The Lost Pathfinder.” A similar thing happened later in Queen of Thorns.

My other problem was deciding on the narrative style. I didn’t want to continue with the present-tense narration of “Hell’s Pawns.” At the same time, I was considering a shift to third-person narration. I had Radovan’s first-person voice and was happy with it, but it took me three revisions of the early chapters to decide. It was one of those instances in which James’ advice was, “Just figure out which works best.” That didn’t make things easier on me, but once I finally worked out Varian’s voice, I was glad James had left me to work it out on my own. Third-person would have been a safer choice, but I didn’t want to abandon the intimacy of Radovan’s first-person voice. What I needed was to find a voice for Varian that was equal to Radovan’s but completely different. This proved an even greater challenge when I introduced a third POV character in Master of Devils and then in King of Chaos.

I left the flash-forward, third-person, present-tense Radovan prologue in Prince of Wolves to act as a pointer past the exposition-heavy first chapter, a promise that action was coming. It makes the book asymmetrical, but I’m glad we left it in there. To me it feels like a movie trailer.

Lost Pathfinder.
Eric Belisle’s Count Jeggare is a perfect reflection of his character.

While those early Varian chapters now seem a bit thick with fancy vocabulary and complex sentences, I’m also glad of the decision to tell his half of the story in first-person POV. His diction has since lightened up, even by the end of Prince of Wolves, but in the struggle to find his voice in those early chapters, I began to understand much more about his character. The epistolary approach scared James in the beginning, but I’d always planned to abandon it at the right moment later in the book. I knew it was a trick that would grow tired if I tried to do it every novel.

When Words Collide Pre-Convention Signing August 13

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Lord of Runes.
Cover by Alberto Dal Lago

When I ran into my old comrade Erik Mona at World Fantasy in Calgary in 2008, I dragged him away from the convention to see a local game store. This sort of side trip can be irritating for those who visited for business, but I knew Erik would forgive me. You see, this wasn’t just any gaming store. This was The Sentry Box.

In my time at TSR, Wizards of the Coast, and Paizo, I visited a bajillion game shops. They ranged from the noisome cat-piss store to Hemingway’s ideal of the “clean, well-lighted place.” The Sentry Box starts with the latter paradigm and dials it up to 11.

The place is vast, with its own book store and large areas devoted to miniatures, board games, RPGs, card games, and even game-adjacent stuff like videos, manga, and the inevitable nerd-focused tchotchkes that infiltrate such establishments. But that’s only the downstairs. Upstairs there’s a large space for gaming. And beyond that is the military games annex.

An annex.

I’m going to stop right there. The web page doesn’t do the location justice, and neither can I. You must visit the next time you visit Calgary to understand the full scope of gaming awesome.

Anyway, since I first met Gordon Johansen, the proprietor of The Sentry Box, he’s been a terrific supporter of Pathfinder Tales, making sure there are always copies available at his table at Western Canada’s great literary festival, When Words Collide. This year Gordon’s going at step further and hosting a signing for Lord of Runes and the rest of my Pathfinder Tales novels at his store on the eve of the convention.

Better yet, Calgarian filker extraordinaire Vanessa Cardui will join us to sing a few songs and sign copies of her excellent CDs.

Come hang out with us after 6:00 p.m at The Sentry Box (map). Even if I’ll see you at the convention, I hope you—and all your local friends who dig sword & sorcery and hilarious filk songs—will join us at this pre-con event.

Radovan & the Count in Chronological Order

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Recently I realized that the adventures of Radovan & the Count have exceeded half a million words and somewhere around 40% of my published fiction. Some of it has appeared in novels, some in Adventure Paths, some in Wayfinder magazine, and some on paizo.com. It’s no surprise that some folks have questions about where to start. The simple answer is “anywhere you like,” but I think the best entry points are “Hell’s Pawns,” Prince of Wolves, or Queen of Thorns. Here’s a list of all the stories in publication order, with notes indicating the two stories that occur in “the past.”

“Hell’s Pawns.” This novella originally appeared in the Council of Thieves Adventure Path. It’s distinct from the other stories in that it’s told only from Radovan’s point of view and in the present tense.

“The Lost Pathfinder,”* The first instalment of Paizo’s free web fiction feature is a bridge between the first novella and the first novel. It’s also the first appearance of Count Jeggare’s POV, even though I wrote it after Prince of Wolves.

Prince of Wolves.
Dan Scott pits the boys against the Sczarni werewolves.

Prince of Wolves was the first Pathfinder Tales novel. Months after I wrote it, I realized just how many elements it has in common with Black Wolf, my first full-length novel set in the Forgotten Realms. I won’t spoil them for you here, but if you dug one, you’ll probably dig the other, although I think Prince of Wolves benefits from ten years’ more writing experience.

“A Lesson in Taxonomy.”* While this is chronologically the first story, don’t read it first. Read it after Prince of Wolves, or at least after “the Lost Pathfinder.” Trust me on this. It’s told from Varian’s POV, and it introduces the character of Prince Kasiya.

“A Passage to Absalom”* is a mystery set aboard a sailing ship. It bridges the events of Prince of Wolves and “Husks.” This one is told from Varian’s POV, even though the boys are together during the entire story.

“Husks” is another novella, this time from the Jade Regent Adventure Path. It’s an homage to some of my favorite samurai and yakuza films. Once again, Radovan and the Count are together the whole time, but the story’s entirely in Radovan’s POV. Until Queen of Thorns, this was my editor’s favorite of the stories.

Master of Devils is my love letter to three types of kung fu movies: romantic intrigue, hard-hitting action, and high fantasy. In addition to Radovan and Count Jeggare, it features a third point-of-view character.

“Killing Time”* is a nasty little tale set in Absalom, just before the events of Queen of Thorns. This one is best enjoyed after reading “A Lesson in Taxonomy” and Master of Devils.

Queen of Thorns is the third Radovan & the Count novel, this time set in what Radovan calls “Elfland” and the count knows to be the elven nation of Kyonin. The boys work side-by-side almost the entire novel, along with an unusual assortment of gnome and elf companions.

King of chaos.
Tyler Walpole sets Oparal and Bastiel against Radovan.

King of Chaos follows soon after Queen of Thorns. The events of the story dovetail into the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path, which will become especially noticeable in the AP’s fourth instalment. Like Master of Devils, this one features a third POV character, this time one who receives equal time.

“The Fencing Master”* is the last web fiction story featuring Varian’s POV. It takes place decades after “Taxonomy” but decades before “Hell’s Pawns.” Despite its place in the chronology, you’ll probably enjoy it more if you read it after a few of the novels, especially Queen of Thorns.

Two years after the events of King of Chaos, Radovan & the Count arrive in the Varisian city of Korvosa. There Varian hopes to find out once and for all why the masters of the Acadamae never “diagnosed” him properly. Instead, he finds an unexpected bequest from an old colleague, one that leads to an even deeper mystery of the Count’s arcane origins and ultimately the Lord of Runes.

Lord of Runes.
Alberto Dal Lago reveals Varian and ally

Have you read most or all of the stories? Which are your favorites? And where in Golarion would you most like to see the boys go in the future?

These stories are still available free at Paizo’s web fiction page.

All illustrations ©Paizo Publishing, LLC®.

New Essay on Black Gate

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Varian Sword.
Art by Eric Belisle

Black Gate is one of my favorite sites, focused on fantasy but with a diversity within the genre that keeps it fresh and often introduces me to things I hadn’t discovered. Also, the folks at BG share many of my non-fantasy interests. For example, Bob Byrne posts a regular Sherlock Holmes feature.

Last week Bob invited me to contribute an essay based on the “Holmes & Watson” pitch that launched the Radovan & the Count novels. That led me to consider both the limitations of the “elevator pitch” and the perils of “pinching” ideas from famous books and movies. You can read it right here.

King of Chaos #1 at Black Gate

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King of chaos.

Black Gate publishes not only cool essays but also fabulous fiction. Last month, an excerpt of King of Chaos (Chapter One, introducing Oparal) hit their #1 spot, buoying their previous excerpt of Queen of Thorns (Chapter One, featuring Count Jeggare) to #4.

My fellow Pathfinder Tales scribe Howard Andrew Jones appears in the #3 position with an excerpt from The Bones of the Old Ones, the second novel in his excellent Dabir and Asim series, which you really should go read right now. It’s a thrill to see the two of us on a list of so many talented writers.

Check out the complete catalog of Black Gate’s free fiction.

Creative Colleagues Roundtable: Heroic Fantasy Round 1

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For this month’s Roundtable, I sent out questions way, way before deadline. If you know writers, you already understand my mistake. I ended up with only two replies and a couple of requests for a nudge closer to the drop-dead.

A little over a week ago, I sent out that nudge with the original questions, this time to a slightly larger group. The response was larger—so much larger that I’ll spread the answers over the next few weeks.

This month’s topic is heroic fantasy. Consider these answers a starting place to continue the conversation right here in comments. One randomly determined person who comments here, on the blog—not on one of the social media sites advertising this post—will receive a free copy of Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, Queen of Thorns, King of Chaos, or Winter Witch from audible.co.uk.

Don’t forget to check out the websites, and especially the books, of those who’ve bestowed their jewels of wisdom on our humble site.

What was the first heroic fantasy novel you remember reading? Has your own writing emulated it or responded with an alternative take on the genre?

Lou Anders: When I was a tween, my father handed me a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and said, “You’re going to read this.” I automatically objected to anything my father was ordering me to do, so I looked for a way out. We were a conservative southern family living in Alabama, so even though I rather liked the beautiful Michael Whelan cover illustration, I used it as my line of attack.

“But it has a naked woman on the cover,” I pointed out. Actually, my accent was a bit thicker back then, so what I said was “nekkid.”

“I know it has a naked woman on the cover,” my father replied. “But it’s still a good book, and you’re going to read it.”

Thus beaten, I read A Princess of Mars. Then the rest of the Martian series. Then every other book by ERB I could find over the next year. This led me to Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, and Michael Moorcock, and on to a life in genre fiction.

After fifteen years working as an editor in the science fiction field, I’m now a full time author, the writer of the Thrones and Bones series from Penguin Random House (www.penguinrandomhouse.com/). Having read thousands upon thousands of works of science fiction and fantasy, it’s somewhat surprising to me to find that these early influences are still perhaps the strongest in my work. I see Moorcock and Leiber all over Frostborn, Ian Fleming gets a nod in Nightborn, and you’ll see a big Burroughs nod when Skyborn is released next year.

Sometimes I’m writing in emulation of, others in reaction to, but these childhood influences never go away.

Bill Bodden: I think The Hobbit was my first epic fantasy read back in second grade. If that’s not epic enough for somebody, I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy soon after. My brother Mike funneled a lot of good books my way back then, and got me hooked on Michael Moorcock not long after. I hope my own writing takes a page or two from Tolkien, but I’ve read so much other good stuff that I can’t imagine its influence being too overwhelming.

I’m working on a novel right now that starts out with the good guys having lost and being on the run and where they go from there.

Richard Lee Byers: It’s been a long, long time for me, and I’m honestly not sure anymore. But some of the ones I read very early on are Conan the Conqueror by Robert E. Howard, Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson, The Incomplete Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and Witch of the Four Winds by John Jakes. I think Howard, Anderson, and de Camp and Pratt all influenced my approach to the genre. Howard showed me the exotica, violence, and darkness that underlie sword-and-sorcery, deCamp and Pratt brought a realistic perspective and humor to the form, and Anderson achieved a synthesis of the two. Though I don’t claim to be anywhere near as good, I think I take an Anderson kind of approach. (Jakes may have influenced me in some way as well, but I think that when doing heroic fantasy, he was essentially a Howard imitator, and if I took something extra away from him, I’m not conscious of it.)

Heroic fantasy is a blanket term that includes popular genres like epic fantasy and sword & sorcery. Do you feel epic and S&S are mutually exclusive? Or can (and should) we mix them like peanut butter and chocolate? Are there some other, overlooked subgenres of heroic fantasy? And does grimdark fit under this blanket or lie outside?

Lou Anders: My short hand for the difference between epic fantasy and sword & sorcery is that epic fantasy is The Iliad and sword & sorcery is The Odyssey. This could work as easily with The Lord of the Rings (epic) and The Hobbit (S&S). But the genres really aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s always a mistake to be prescriptive, rather than descriptive, with genre definitions, to draw lines in the sand or build fences and declare “always this, never that.” Michael Moorcock’s Elric series is surely one of the defining works of sword & sorcery (the term exists because he called for it and Fritz Leiber answered), yet Elric destroys all his gods and remakes the world—surely the most epic of epic-scale actions. For me, subgenres are mountain tops. You know it clearly when you are on their peaks, but as you walk down the hill and enter the valley between one mountain and another, things blend and mix. It’s a direction you are facing, a course to chart, but not a boundary you are forbidden to cross.

Bill Bodden: I don’t feel that the terms “epic” and “Sword & Sorcery” are mutually exclusive. The boundaries between most genres in the genre fiction category are so fluid now that even if S&S and epic weren’t commonly (and strongly) associated with each other, there would be no way to split them up easily and cleanly. Grimdark, or dark fantasy, fits into this category as well, but again, there’s a lot of overlap.

Richard Lee Byers: To me, all epic fantasy is sword-and-sorcery, but not all sword-and-sorcery is epic fantasy. In other words, If the story’s got swordplay, wizards, castles, monsters, all that noise, it’s sword-and-sorcery, but if it’s a short story about a couple rogues camped out in an alley who run afoul of a supernatural menace (“The Cloud of Hate” by Fritz Leiber) or a barbarian thief who sneaks into a wizard’s citadel and ends up releasing an imprisoned alien being which then takes its vengeance on the mage (“Tower of the Elephant” by Robert E. Howard), it’s not epic fantasy. The scale is too small. Epic fantasy deals with the fate of nations if not the entire world, and it lends itself to long stories which cover a lot of ground and have many characters and subplots. The tricky part is deciding on a threshold, the point at which sword-and-sorcery becomes epic. We would probably all agree that The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams are epic fantasy, but is Conan the Conqueror? It’s much shorter than any of the multi-volume works I just mentioned and has a much simpler, more linear story line, but in it, too, the fate of a great kingdom and probably the whole world of the Hyborean Age hangs in the balance. So people may well differ as to whether it meets the qualifications to be considered epic.

As for grimdark, my answer is similar. All grimdark is sword-and-sorcery, but not all sword-and-sorcery is grimdark. Basically, if your heroic fantasy has a noir-ish, cynical tone to it, that qualifies it as grimdark.

Elaine Cunningham: Urban fantasy isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when we’re talking heroic fantasy, but I would definitely list several series under that banner. The first that comes to mind is the Kate Daniel series by Ilona Andrews. Kate is a classic fantasy hero. She starts out as a tough loner who was raised and trained for one purpose: to kill her insanely powerful father or die trying. She spent her childhood on the run and has always had to take extreme measures to hide her identity and her magic until she was powerful enough to have a chance of succeeding. But as she starts making connections with other people (and were-people), she takes on the responsibilities that come with the package. She makes her first real friend, adopts an orphaned teenager, falls in love, and risks her life over and over. Kate is, quite simply, heroic. If someone tries to harm her people, she’s there in front of them, sword drawn and half-understood (and frequently back-firing) magic blazing. Kate is currently my favorite fantasy hero, hands down.

Another example is Harry Dresden. It could be argued that he’s more of an anti-hero—especially now that he’s bound to the Unseelie Court and the half-mad Queen Mab—but despite his complicated history and current alliance, he’s as self-sacrificing as he is badass. Kevin Hearn’s Iron Druid series also has the tone and themes I associate with heroic fantasy.

Roundtable Contributors

Lou Anders.
Lou Anders

Lou Anders is the author of Frostborn, Nightborn, and the forthcoming Skyborn, the three books of the Thrones & Bones series of Norse-themed fantasy adventure novels written for boys and girls equally. Anders is the recipient of a Hugo Award for editing and a Chesley Award for art direction. He has published over five hundred articles and stories on science fiction and fantasy television and literature. A prolific speaker, Anders regularly attends writing conventions around the country. Find Lou on Twitter at @LouAnders.

Bill Bodden has been a freelance writer for more than a decade, with numerous credits in magazines and in the Tabletop RPG field. Currently working on fiction as well, Bill has sold two short stories to anthologies: “In the Shadow of His Glory,” from Sidekicks (Alliteration, Ink) and “A Quiet House in the Country” in Haunted: Eleven Tales of Ghostly Horror (Flames Rising Press). Bill lives in Wisconsin with his wife, a cat, and piles of books on most flat surfaces.

Richard Lee Byers.
Author Richard Lee Byers

Richard Lee Byers is the author of forty fantasy and horror novels including the “Black River Irregulars” trilogy (coming soon from Privateer Press), and the “Impostor” series (launching in February from Rothco Press.) He invites everyone to Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Ello.

Elaine Cunningham is a former music and history teacher, but can’t seem to shake either habit. She performs with the Providence Singers, a symphonic choir associated with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, and is currently (and slowly) researching her first foray into historical non-fiction. Her publications include 20 novels, about four dozen short stories, some odds and ends of poetry, and a graphic novel. After taking an extended break punctuated by the occasional short story, she has finally begun writing a new novel.

Dave Gross.

Dave Gross is the erstwhile editor of such magazines as Dragon, Star Wars Insider, and Amazing Stories. Among other settings, he’s written stories in the Forgotten Realms, Iron Kingdoms, and the world of Pathfinder Tales. His latest novel is Lord of Runes, and his most recent story “The Wendigo” in Gods, Memes, and Monsters.

Creative Colleagues: Richard Lee Byers

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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.

Richard Lee Byers.
Author Richard Lee Byers

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.

Imposter 2.
Cover by Jamie Stubkjaer

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.