From Fiction Writer to Game Designer and Back Again - Guest Post by Shanna Germain

From Fiction Writer to Game Designer and Back Again

Guest Post by Shanna Germain

When I first started working in roleplaying games, after two decades of writing fiction, I had the impression that my transition from writer to game designer was going to be a simple one. I wrote all kinds of things—novels, short stories, essays, articles, non-fiction books. This was just one more thing, right?

And I’m pretty sure I said as much to Monte Cook, as he and I were starting to work together on my first game project, Numenera.            

“There are some big differences between game design and fiction writing,” he said. “They trip up a lot of fiction writers who try to make the transition.”

Despite the fact that he’d been a game designer for almost 30 years and I’d been a game designer for exactly 0 years, I’m pretty sure my response was something along the lines of “Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

Of course, I didn’t “have this.” I didn’t even know what “this” was. Looking back, I give him a great deal of credit for not rolling his eyes at me and bursting out laughing (at least, not where I could see him). Not even when I came back to him after failing miserably, and said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. Help!”

Fiction is about the Unknown. Game design is about the Known.

The statement above isn’t entirely accurate or all-encompassing, but it depicts the basic idea.

In fiction writing, you want to hold out on revealing things until the proper time. You ask questions and then don’t answer them until much later. Who did it? Why? When? How? The hidden, the unknown, pulls the reader along, enticing them, dancing out of reach, making them ache for the answers.

In game design, the unknown (particularly as it pertains to rules) is almost always instantly confusing and frustrating. Readers need to know the important stuff, and they need it to be clear and concise. 

I started out writing games the way I write fiction. Here, on page 2, is a red-striped tiger foreshadowing the bloody death that happens on page 311. You might not notice it now, but it will ring some distant bell for you when you get to that scene and you’ll think, “Somehow I knew this was coming.”

For game design, that looked more like, Here’s someone rolling some dice and getting a result that you don’t understand yet, but after you read the section in the way back on special rules on dice rolls you’ll know what that means.

        

I thought I was creating mystery, something to keep the reader reading. But if that had been published, it probably would have just created anger and confusion. Players probably would have thrown the book across the room and then bitched about me on some forum somewhere.

Instead, I taught myself to think of games as more of an instruction manual, to lay out everything in the order that the reader would likely need and want it. There’s a psychology involved in this. What will the game master (GM) or player need to know and when will they need to know it? How much do they need to know right now, and how much can wait until later? And, of course, every reader is different, so you can only hope you’re getting it right for most readers.

Understanding this led me to what I think is the next difference between fiction writing and game design:

Are You God or God’s Personal Assistant? 

As a fiction writer, I am god. I tell the story. I dole out the information when and where I please. I tell you as little or as much as I want to about the characters, that city in the distance, the long-necked creatures who raise their heads to the sky every morning before dawn. (Of course, I’m an imperfect god and I don’t always get all of those things right, but I certainly try).

As a game designer, I am god’s personal assistant. You, as the game master, are god. I try to anticipate your needs—“god likes to wake up with a cup of setting and a dose of rules on the side”—and give you what you want, when you want it, so that you have everything you need to tell the story. So that you can play god for your players. (It goes without saying that I’m an imperfect personal assistant too. But gods are fickle creatures, and you can only guess at their needs most of the time.).

Which leads me to:

        

Fiction Shows. Game Design Tells. 

Again, an oversimplified statement, but it captures the general idea. In fiction there’s an old adage that you should show, not tell. There’s a whole essay (or book, or series of books) on what that means exactly, how it can be used, and what it can do for a story. But the basic idea is that you keep plain exposition to a minimum and focus instead on showing your reader exactly what you want them to see. It’s a selective lens, designed to create the story by focusing only on certain elements.

If your narrator is walking along a street, looking over their shoulder for the Big Bad to jump out and shoot them, they’re not going to be telling the reader, “And there’s the department store called Roger’s Drugs; I get my mom’s prescription filled there. And after that is the pet shop where I bought my first fish.” You want them to be searching for a place to hide. “The alley between the department store and the pet shop beckoned, a small dark promise of safety.” That might be the only part of the street that the reader sees, because it’s the only important part for the story.

Game design, on the other hand, requires blatant exposition. You don’t know what the players will be doing when they walk down the street. Maybe they’re being chased. Maybe they’re hurt and need to fill their prescription. Maybe they’re just looking for a meal and a cute puppy to buy. The point is that when you’re writing the game, you don’t know what information the game master will need. And so you need to give them everything that the players might want to know. All the shops, what they sell, who works there, what they look like.

It also means you end up with sections like “How to use this Book” and “Why Travel to Greater Garravia?” which basically talk directly to the reader, telling them exactly what they need to know to get the most out of their experience. 

Have Some Empathy 

I don’t want to overemphasize the differences too much, because game design and fiction writing do share a lot. Perhaps the most important element, the one that I think makes the difference between great writing and good writing, no matter the genre, is human empathy. I don’t mean empathy for your characters—although that’s important—but for those who are going to interact with your words. Reader empathy, if you will.

Empathy gets thrown around a lot in many different contexts, but it basically means the ability to understand, be sensitive to, and vicariously experience another person’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

I often hear fiction writers talk about this concept, but I rarely hear game designers voice it (which isn’t to say that they’re not employing it in their games, because they are). Why do we need empathy for our players and game masters? Because we need to be able to imagine how our words will hit them when they open the book. Because we need to be able to imagine a great variety of players and GMs, all with different needs. Because we need to be able to say, “If I was this type of player, would this information make sense? What about if I was this other type of player? What about if I was running my first game? My 300^th game?”

An ability to imagine and understand how someone other than you might want to use your game or read your story is, I think, a vital part of its success. It means the difference between just writing some words on the page and creating an interactive, lasting experience between you and your audience.  

*

Shanna Germain is the author of myriad stories, books, and games, as well as the co-owner of Monte Cook Games. Her most recent works include: 

The Poison Eater

Amazon US
Amazon UK

No Thank You, Evil!

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Amazon UK

and Torment: Tides of Numenera—an Explorer’s Guide

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Using Gaming to Write - Guest Post by B.J Keeton

As a child, my personality was pretty much made up of two things: gaming and writing. Some of my earliest memories involve either sitting in front of a TV with an Atari 2600 joystick in my hand or scribbling down squiggly lines in a notebook and telling my parents they were Spider-man stories.

So it really should be no surprise that as I have become a somewhat functional adult, my core personality was already set. I am a gamer, and a writer. Lucky for me, the two most prominent interests go together pretty well.

Back in 2010, I got the idea to write a novel. I mean, I’d had the idea before, but in 2010, I decided to sit down and actually do it. And, I thought to myself just like every other gamer/writer, wouldn’t it just be awesome if this book were--wait for it--like a video game adventure?

This is where y’all collectively sigh and groan at how much of a cliche I was.

However, I think I handled the idea differently than a lot of people would have (or do). Instead of writing a novel about a Dungeons & Dragons campaign my friends and I played that was full of in-jokes and situations that were only funny if you knew the context and people involved, I wanted to write a novel using the concepts and technologies that made up modern MMORPGs.

I wanted to weave things that players were familiar with into the narrative: the tank/healer/DPS trinity and instances, in particular. I started Birthright with the idea that these gameplay mechanics were a natural part of the world, that there were rules and physics that governed instances, and that when going out on a mission, the trinity was the best way to keep everyone safe.

And the thing is...neither of those elements is interesting on their own. What could I do to make readers care about them? As an English teacher, I knew just the thing--make the book about the people, not the ideas.

Unfortunately, I failed at that. At least in the first few drafts. My beta readers beat me up. They railed on how static my characters were. How stereotypical the tanks were. How whiny the healers were. How the DPS were erratic. I took it to an extreme and just made classes instead of characters.

I did exactly what I was trying to avoid, only instead of characters only I liked, I did it with characters no one liked.

As I revised, I went back to the games that inspired me to write the novel in the first place. I thought about why I played MMOs to begin with. I thought about what made me keep playing them. And not once was it because the classes were just too cool to pass up.

No, the reason I played MMOs was because I loved the people. The people are what make gaming worthwhile. It’s the reason that playing Mario Kart with your friends is more fun than blue-shelling a CPU Bowser.

When I thought about it from that perspective, the rest of the novel fell into place.

The tank was no longer the tank. He was Chuckie Tidwell, and he wasn’t just a meatshield anymore. He had a full personality, faults, and insecurities. And he was going to have an arc that was going to be fleshed out by the end of the series (it’s a trilogy, after all, so I couldn’t have it all be perfect in Birthright, tee hee).

The healer, Saryn, became a person who had a backstory and motivations and feelings. And so did the rest of the team. And when that happened, not only did I have characters who acted and felt like real people, I had characters who developed relationships with each other like real people.

You know, the same way that people do in MMO guilds and Discord channels and Twitter chats. These people who were thrown together in the in-universe equivalent of a dungeon-finder (an automated queueing system that puts groups together for you), and they were forced to become a cohesive unit that communicated and reached their goals by working together.

It was a concept that I had seen specifically touched on in books before--I mean, of course every fantasy novel has a party of rag-tag adventurers--but I hadn’t seen one that borrowed heavily from video games in the sense that the characters were intended to be meta (to the readers who understood the culture).

Every member of the team has archetypes they fill for their role in the story, but their personalities rely on the archetypes of the people I’ve interacted with online in the past. For instance, the kind of people who tend to play tanks may share personality traits that draw them toward that particular role, and the same for support, healers, and damage-dealing characters.

Over the course of the series, the characters grow and change, moving farther away from their original starting points. They gain new abilities and talents (see what I did there?), and they become closer and closer with one another, while still working to fulfill the goals that originally brought them together.

I stuck with this idea the entire way through the trilogy because that sole concept of growing and changing with and because of the people around me is the primary reason I play online games. I don’t do a lot of “matchmaking” games like Call of Duty or Battlefield because I prefer the long-term community and friendships that come from interacting with the people behind the keyboard far more than I do interacting with the pixels on my TV or monitor.

If you’re a gamer who loves people as much as I do (and even if you’re not!), I think you would really like The Technomage Archive. I can’t realistically say it’s the best sci-fi trilogy out there, but my totally biased opinion is that it’s worth your time to check out.

And hey, you might even make some new friends while you’re at it. I know I felt like they were mine.

B.J. Keeton is not only a science fiction author, he also co-hosts the Geek to Geek Podcast and hosts the Geek Fitness Health Hacks podcast. He loves talking to people on the internet, so feel free to give him a yell at @professorbeej on Twitter.

---

The first book in the series, Birthright, is currently available for free on Kindle
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Amazon UK
The Techomage Archive is now available on Kindle as a box set
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Amazon UK

The return of the original RPG. Guest Post - Christian Ahlin

This guest post comes from Christian Ahlin, creator of the forthcoming pen and paper RPG, Triniton...

The return of the original RPG - why RPG's grew big in the 80's and why it inevitably will again

Let's imagine a time. A time without massive gaming consoles with thousands of streamed games, without social media and their Farm crush clash of GO. A time when children were asked to be home for supper, when VHS had just launched and when "game and watch" meant a pocket-sized game with the current time on it (if you had painstakingly put in the correct time and kept the batteries charged, that is).

This was a time when Dungeons & Dragons spread like wildfire. It wasn't a book. It wasn't a war-game. It was the magical baby of heroic fantasy adventures that a group of kids could take into their basement with some dice, pen and papers and journey as far as their imagination would take them.

Storytelling has been a central part of humanity ever since speech evolved around the cave campfire. There is this intrinsic value of conveying information that one can absorb and better themselves without having the actual experience. But pandora's box opened when the first cave dweller realized you could go beyond actual experience and tell a story that hadn't happened.

Fast forward back into the cellar. With rising tension from the cold war, having your hero venturing out and defeating the evil, being in control from the safety of your sofa was appealing, to say the least.

But the cold war ended. Pacman evolved into Mario kart and roleplaying by pen and paper gave way to Final Fantasy, MUDs, Ultima Online and Everquest.

Although a shrinking niche, the core promise of storytelling in roleplaying games still appealed, in contrast, the boxed experiences computer games offered and the hobby continued on, albeit just a shadow of itself.

Today, 20 years later, we have reached the top of the digital mountain and are finally taking a fresh breath of clarity. 

Reflecting upon that 

• "social" media has 90% of the posted content unread, 
• that the deteriorating mental health of our young strike twice as many since '89 
• and "undefined stomach issues", especially young girls, has become so commonplace that a non diagnosis has become legitimized ("Irritable Bowel Syndrome" means "We don't have a frigging clue, but you are hurting for real").

And all this in a time when the whole world is getting safer, more educated, healthier and richer (if you look at the data and not the news).

The macro trends I see is 

• more communication, albeit digital.
• more sending than listening
• increased polarization of issues and views
• the total absence of boredom reduces reflection and agency of one's own happiness
• less quality in the human interactions that takes place due to

1. many focusing on their phones and other conversations than the one they have at hand
2. the paradox of choice, making many believe you can "just get another friend", not committing to long term relationships
3. the total and absolute personal catering (by businesses) of everything, raises expectations and denormalizes situations that aren't "perfect".
4. the private media mostly enforcing the above values, rather than questioning them. Since their finances are bound to views and people prefer input that agrees with their current state, any questioning content weeds itself away.

And yes, by now you've probably guessed it, the solution to all these issues, improbable as it may sound... is role playing games.

Boiled down to the core, role playing games involve

• getting together
• listening
• being listened to
• creating an experience together
• facing difficulty and overcoming it, together

Many are searching for "fun", but it's the feeling you get when experiencing those things listed above.

And although the new technology can be used in a positive way with

• video chats, that enables meeting people you would otherwise never have a chance to
• online forums, that helps you find real groups playing.
• VR, that will enable shared experiences within a couple of years.

But my take on all this, is that to change the world, you must start at home, with your family and with your own/soon to be friends.

And the biggest lie is not having time, it's always a matter of priority, and now you know what's at stake.

So although I just created my first game, I took all this knowledge, mixed it up with the best stories I could muster and boiled it into a game that's aimed to be

• Filled with guides. How to find players, How to play, How to lead/GM. So everybody should be able to join!
• Simple rules included (but also compatible with FATE or DnD). Bonuses for cooperating. To further enable as many as possible to play.
• "YouTube-generation-friendly" Tons(!) of artwork, paced encounters. Magazine feel. To meet the increased expectations of today.
• Moral dilemmas, (ie. who should a fireman save first from a burning building?). To spur reflection and discussion.
• Family friendly: No sex, drugs, swearing or depictions of violence. Not explicitly forbidden during play, but neither explicitly mentioned in text or rules. Since the children are our future, let's give them a place at the table.

It took me two and a half years to get this right, and I hope my daughters will be part of the new generation that carries the healthy values and behaviours into the technological future and makes it not only a better world, but one with happy, prospering people in it.

If you want to support me, head over to www.triniton.se and get your copy, but the important thing is:

Let's play some roleplaying games!

Some sources:

(1) http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/14/5411934/youre-not-going-to-read-this 

(2) https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/Lists/Artikelkatalog/Attachments/19109/2013-5-43.pdf (Swedish study on declining youth health)

(3) https://www.google.se/trends/explore?date=2009-09-02%202016-10-02&q=stomach%20pain 

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irritable_bowel_syndrome 

(4.1) Cutting edge research in Sweden points out stress as a cause and tried stress relieving exercises using CBT with massive positive effects.

(5) https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world 

(6) https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice?language=sv 

(7) http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/

(8) http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/are-partisan-news-sources-polarizing-americans/

Angels, Psychos, and Little Girls With Bombs - Guest Post Author Ian Keeling

I thought I'd write about more video games.

When I was first offered this opportunity to guest-blog (thanks guys!) and write how games influenced my own writing, I figured I'd tell stories about how my first foray into world-building was in my cramped basement trying to recreate the map from Ultima IV with a pencil and graph paper. And yes, I just used the words Ultima IV, pencil, and graph paper in a single sentence. I'm a little old.

Now sure, that influence has extended throughout my extended life, so much so that my new novel, The Skids, (BLATANT PLUG: COMING OCTOBER 2016! I HAVE NO SHAME!) borrows so heavily from Tron that by halfway through the book you'll expect to see Recognizers coming around every corner. And sure, Tron's a movie, but let's face it: it's a video game.

Yep, I thought I'd be writing about Ultima, or Tron, or Final Fantasy, or Doom, Tomb Raider, Fallout, Burnout, KOTOR, Mass Effect, Fallout again, Tomb Raider again…look, it's a long list. And while I have stolen from—I mean, been influenced by—all of those games and many more, just about all the things I wanted to write about, including the world-building mentioned above, could be summed up in one line of dialogue:

"I just bought a pony made of diamonds. Cause, you'know, I'm rich. I'm thinking of calling him butt-stallion."

So instead of talking about Oblivion or Super Mario Kart or Vagrant Story—seriously, long is the list—I've come to celebrate one simple game: Borderlands 2.

I have a confession: I never finish video games. I finished Final Fantasy VII…I think. I finished the first Knights of the Old Republic. Recently, because it was short and the story was great, I finished the relaunch of Tomb Raider. That's it. Three games in a gaming life long enough have included graph paper.

Plus one more.

Because I finished Borderlands 2. Then I played it again with a different character. Then I played it half-way with all of the characters (I could probably walk to Sanctuary blindfolded). Then back to my fav, Gaige, with whom I played all the DLCs. Then True Vault Hunter mode. Then Ultimate Vault Hunter. Then…look, my very extended point is I played the bullymog out of that game.

All the things I love about BL2, things that I try to bring into my own writing, can be seen in that line of dialogue above, uttered early in the game by the villain, Handsome Jack. Although technically it’s an amalgamation of two lines of dialogue, but hey, I cheated. Here’s to console commands!

First and foremost: the line is just funny. The first time I heard it, I laughed out loud and thought: yeah, I think I'm going to like this. Sometimes the genres I tend to write in the most—science fiction and fantasy—can be a bit…uptight about comedy. Or even humour in general. Thank god for horror.

I honestly believe you can’t have great comedy without drama or great drama without comedy. When I watch Zach Galifianakis, I laugh because his pain is real. On the flipside, I once bailed on watching the TV show 24 because I couldn’t believe not one character cracked: “Man, this day is the worst, I say we go for tacos."

Hamlet is funny, people. Actually, Hamlet is hilarious. And that, to me, is great writing. You can be laughing one sentence and crying the next. Borderlands 2 nails that.

I laughed constantly throughout BL2, but even as Jack would zing me from space—more about that later—he'd turn around and commit some horrible atrocity. If you look past the laughter, there are moments when Borderlands gets crazy dark.

My favourite character, by far, is Tiny Tina. I don't think I'm alone in that among people who've played. But while Tina made me giggle almost the entire time I spent with her, if you peel back the façade and actually take a good hard look at her—where she is, how she was orphaned, what her motivations are—then her story is unbelievably sad. And the end of the DLC in which she makes all the other main characters relive the game as a Dungeons & Dragons session was so beautiful I cried. And not a little. Big, gob-smacking tears.

God bless you, Tiny Tina.

The other thing I like about Handsome Jack’s taunts is they’re all rock-solid dialogue. I love good dialogue and take pride in trying to write it myself. From Jack’s smarmy yet at times cold-as-crap drawl to Mr. Torgue’s over the top bluster, BL2 has great dialogue everywhere. By the way—Mr. Torgue? Imagine the former wrestling great Randy the Macho Man Savage souped up out of his gourd as a politically-correct gun runner. "NOTHING IS MORE BADASS THAN TREATING A WOMAN WITH RESPECT!!!!!!!"

Yeah, sign me up.

The voices flow out of the broad characters—Clap-Trap’s clap-trap prattle, Moxi’s sexy twang, Patricia Tannis’ sociopathic paranoia—but more importantly, the dialogue is just as strong in its down-to-earth characters that drive the story: Roland, Lilith, and Angel. BL2 is a wild, crazy world, but the dialogue feels real, and so I believe in this world.

And that world is wild and crazy, which brings me to the final thing I love about Jack’s taunt, BL2, and heck, video games in general: If it’s fun, screw logic, let’s do it. The genre of science fiction, particularly SF novels, can get a little obsessive about the laws of physics sometimes. Most times. Okay, almost always a lot. Now I get it, gravity works, nothing can move faster than the speed of light, you can’t curve a bullet, etc. But, you know what? I’m not smart enough to write 2001 or any more appropriately modern reference, and curving a bullet is an awesome idea. So is carrying around three thousand pounds of guns, jumping fifty feet, jumping even higher if you use a grenade to jump (WHAT?!?), suspending people in mid-air, summoning a robot from the ether, and randomly finding loot in boxes and chests that are, you know, just spread all around the world. And yes, I know other games created many of these things—I think Quake did the grenade trick first—but I love how BL2 incorporates all these absurd things and more.

Including having the antagonist taunt you from space on his own little personal—what is that, Skype? Now the idea of the antagonist taunting the hero has appeared in multiple mediums and certainly gets used in gaming a lot—the cake is a lie—but when you think about it, WTF? It doesn’t matter where my character is; Handsome Jack has exactly the right thing to say at exactly the right moment. But if he knows where I am all the time, why doesn’t he just blow me up from space: that would make sense, right? For that matter, how does he even do it? His taunts are clean and clear every time. Who’s his wireless provider? I can’t even get a clear signal from my router half the time and I live in a bachelor apartment the size of a pony. There are so many things about that idea that don’t make sense if you think about it too much.

But who cares? It’s awesome when the villain does it. I liked it so much that I put it in The Skids (COMING SOON, #NOSHAME!!!) Because even if there is a small part of me that wonders if it makes sense, what we get in return is great. We get opportunities for humour, character development, and most importantly, we create tension, an awareness that the threat is always, always, always there. And that’s good fun. It’s good writing, and it’s why I love Borderlands 2.

Plus, you know, butt-stallions.

Ian Keeling is an author, actor and owner of a half-decent beard. His day job is teaching improv and sketch at The Second City, in Toronto, Canada, which is, you know, pretty cool.

 His first novel, The Skids, will be published in October 2016 by ChiZine books, and is a full-throttle cross between the video game Burnout, the Hunger Games, and the Matrix. Which, hopefully, is also pretty cool.

Amazon UK link

Amazon.com link

You can follow me on Twitter @KeelingIan, or my website (under construction, be gentle ) www.iankeeling.com  Thanks so much for having me!

Blaugust 2016 Day 21 - Mass Effect and writing - Guest Post by Author KC Alexander

For my 200th post, I'm honoured to welcome guest blogger K.C. Alexander, Author of Necrotech from Angry Robot Books, oh and she's played the occasional game.

Mass Effect & Writing

I think it’s no secret that I love Bioware games. With the exception of one—okay, two notable abominations, I have been a Bioware fanatic since Knights of the Old Republic (please, we will not speak of The Unfortunate Sequel). To date, I have over 500 hours clocked in to the Mass Effect franchise, creeping up on 400 in Dragon Age, and prepping for more as Mass Effect: Andromeda nears its release date.

Anyone who has read my books and played the games probably realize exactly how much playing these games flavors my writing.

First of all, Bioware has made a fucking art out of turning a protagonist into A Protagonist™. Of course it’s always about the player in a single-player RPG, but Bioware takes it a step farther. 

Between Bioware’s steadfast refusal to canonize Shepard, for example, and their loud and proud public line of validating the player’s choices, they make clear that whatever your Shepard did, it was their choice, the right choice for Shepard, and that’s that.

If it meant your Shepard was a stonecold bastard who Renegaded every chance he got and slept around with everyone he could before the romances tangled? Then that’s Shepard.

If your Shepard was a hardcore diplomat with a heart of gold, cozied up to Liara in the first game but fell for Thane’s “gonna die” zen in the second? That’s Shepard!

Did he die?

Did she live?

Did he make the choice to finish the mission?

Did she decide to play god?

Any option, all options, specifically chosen by the player in the moment, combined to create a powerful, solid, thought-filled (if not thoughtful) character. Was she woman? Who cares! Was he a man? Who cares! Did he sleep with other men? Who cares! Did she sleep with eeeerreone? Who cares!

You, as they say, got to do you, boo. And Bioware didn’t flinch.

Mass Effect inspired generations of gamers to believe that their choices, their character, their dialogue mattered, and they only got better with time.

So I thought to myself… Who says I have to stay in a lane designated by some old white guys back in the day? With all due respect to them, I am neither old (yet) or a guy (mostly), but I am white, and as a white female-presenting author, I was tired of being told that my protagonists had to be “heroes”. That they had to be “redeemed”. That they couldn’t have flaws that would make them “unlikable”—and counted among them, I felt, were protagonists of color. Of sexuality different than what the stereotypical “men can sleep around for virility and women can’t because chastity” trope demands.

My Shepard is a badass woman who talked a good Paragon game and pulled a fast Renegade hand. She’s a woman who fell for a crewmate and made a hard fucking choice, only to be betrayed by that same crewmate. She’s pansexual, hard-assed, with a sense of humor and a fierce protectiveness for her crew.

But she ain’t afraid to hit ‘em if they come at her. Or get punched for her troubles.

My Shepard has never been sexually harassed.

I took these choices—this right to make these choices—and I wrote Necrotech without bowing to the establishment. Riko is a thug: angry, loud and crass. She’s a multi-racial balls-to-the-wall woman—shit-talking, sex-loving, aggressively flawed and incredibly skilled. The kind of ambulatory tech-sporting bundle of energy and sinew you hope to god you never meet on the thrashdance floor because she’ll take you out at the knees and leave you with the trash when last call rolls up.

Shepard made choices that no one else can take away from her. So does Riko. As The Protagonist™, her story is her own. Maybe readers will see their playstyle or themselves in her, in her swag or her mistakes, but I never bend to someone else’s demand that my characters be something else. I didn’t start in Dragon Age, when that bastard noble interrupted my wedding, I didn’t start when those old white dudes in SF/F told me women weren’t supposed to act “like men”, and I ain’t starting to bend now.

So thanks, Bioware. Thanks for showing me that I could tell the story I wanted to tell, and that it could be epic and heartwrenching and badass and never even bother to take beauty, gender or tired old limitations into account.

Riko is what she is. She makes the decisions she does because of who she is. I stand by them.

Any good RPG would, too.

About the Author

About K C Alexander

K C Alexander is the mostly human, occasional Outer God, and author of Necrotech – a transhumanist sci-fi called “a violent thrillride” by award-nominated noir urban fantasy author Stephen Blackmoore. Previous writing credits include a critically acclaimed stint as Karina Cooper, where she won an RT Reviewer’s Choice Award for her steampunk urban fantasy series and contributed to well-received collections such as Fireside Fiction Magazine, Protectors 2: Heroes, and Last Night, a Superhero Saved My Life.

After peeling off sixteen layers of outer chitin and hiding the evidence across dimensional planes, K. C. Alexander is now indistinguishable from the rest of the human species. She intends to make the most of this by writing transhumanist sci-fi, epic fantasy, and speculative fiction of all stripes.You can find K C online at her website and on Twitter as @kacealexander

About Necrotech

Street thug Riko has some serious issues — memories wiped, reputation tanked, girlfriend turned into a tech-fueled zombie. And the only people who can help are the mercenaries who think she screwed them over.

In an apathetic society devoid of ethics or regulation, where fusing tech and flesh can mean a killing edge or a killer conversion, a massive conspiracy is unfolding that will alter the course of the human condition forever. With corporate meatheads on her ass and a necro-tech blight between her and salvation, Riko is going to have to fight meaner, work smarter, and push harder than she’s ever had to. And that’s just to make it through the day.

This post is part of Blaugust 2016, an initiative to Blog throughout August. For more information visit the Tales of the Aggronaut Blog

Blaugust 2016 Day 18 Dialogue and Tabletop Games - Guest Post by Jason Anspach

I was going for a hike during my lunch on a nearby trail. There’s a wonderful park with a stunning view of Mount Rainier just a block away from my office. The exercise is nice and the scenery is beautiful. It makes me feel like I’m travelling along a tree canopied path in a Tolkien forest, breathing in the warm scent of pine needles, blackberries, and leaves baked by the summer sun.

These walks also provide an opportunity to try out new dialogue.

The way I write, it’s rare for me to just sit down and—whoops—out comes pages of dialog. No. I spend hours thinking about a scene, playing it back and forth in my head like a movie so that when I go to my keyboard, I’m just transcribing what I’ve witnessed. Like a really thorough court stenographer who mixes their OCD with LSD.

Testing my dialogue is a part of my process. Is it something the character would say? In that situation? Is it something the reader would believe? I constantly mutter phrases and retorts to myself, listening for authenticity.

When I’m alone, I deliver the lines with the same intensity I see my characters using, like how I imagine Robert DeNiro reads his lines in a Hollywood trailer. I’m totally absorbed. Only, for me, it’s just going over a single line. Like a method actor cast as an extra, pouring over the deeper meaning of, “The mayor is on line one.”

So I’m walking along in Lothlórien, and the line is from my novel, ‘til Death. The scene involves Frank Rockwell coming home to break the news to his wife that he’s been murdered. She tells him that she wasn’t expecting him to die for at least another five years. I channel Frank—a hothead—and respond, “I’m only fifty-one and in my prime. I had plenty more than five years left. My great-grandfather Sherman lived to eighty-nine!”

Cut. Print. Perfect.

I nailed the delivery. The dialogue was pitch perfect for the scene and if the Academy had heard it, there’d be a golden statue waiting for me after that performance.

Only, the Academy didn’t hear it. But I could tell by the subdued laugh from around the bend that someone had. At first I was exhilarated. Yes! Confirmation. An unbiased listener heard my line and laughed.

That gave way to embarrassment as the couple turned the corner and saw a man in his mid-thirties walking by himself, shouting about being fifty-one in the past tense. My finger was even pointed up in the air like Jackie Gleason. They gave me a wiiiiide berth and I had to cut my walk short and get back to my office, hiding inside with blinds closed as a pair of orderlies in white uniforms looked for me, commitment papers in hand.

Situations like that make me thankful for tabletop gaming.

A good game of Dungeons and Dragons or Sheriff of Nottingham goes perfectly with my need to test out dialogue. The rapport with players is helpful and constructive. Unlike online multiplayer gaming, where most conversation can be summed up in a message I recently received after a strong showing in Star Wars Battlefront: “ur gay.”

But there are no such insults (to my face) when I’m Dungeon Master in a game of D&D! There, improvisation and delivery are an art form. The game improves because of it, and going all-in enriches the experience and encourages the other players to relax and join in the fun.

I can take a quip or joke from a book, season it with BBC accent, and test it with my guinea pigs—er, players—to see what works.

As a writer, this is a HUGE help. Especially when writing humor, as I do. Masterfully.

A comic is only as good as his audience’s response. Comics die a thousand deaths, honing their act by gauging its impact on the audience until it’s…good enough. The same thing goes with writing. You’ve probably heard an anecdote from a storyteller who is sure—SURE!—that a goldmine of belly laughs is coming. And then…lackluster deliver, flat punchline, polite smile, courtesy laugh, awkward silence.

Only it’s far worse with writing because the awkward silence is the kindle being powered down and, unless the reader is looking for a unique way to punish their children—“Now sit there while I read you more of Anspach’s book.” “Daddy, no!”—they’re unlikely to go back. Let alone buy the sequel (available now).

Role playing games give me a tremendous opportunity to test out my writing with real people. One I haven’t had since they threw me out of the retirement home.

Does the party break out laughing? Keep the line. 

Do they repeat it like a catchphrase throughout the session? Put it on the cover.

Do they respond with silence before someone audibly sighs and says, “Soo…”? Send in a Beholder for a total party kill. 

That’ll teach them.

Jason Anspach is the author of the 1950’s Paranormal Noire Comedy Series ‘til Death: The Rockwell Return Files. He’s also a cast member on the hilarious podcast, SciFi Writers Playing Old School D&D.

You can pick up ‘til Death, a book readers have called “Hauntingly Funny,” “a fun romp through a supernatural hard-boiled adventure, with plenty of laughs and adventure along the way,” and “not quite as funny as I was expecting it to be.”

This post is part of Blaugust 2016, an initiative to Blog throughout August. For more information visit the Tales of the Aggronaut Blog