Krondor Confidential - Part II

Breaking New Narrative Ground In Midkemia

“Marvelous wonders don't have to happen of a sudden, the way they do in the Arabian Nights. They can also take a long time, like crystals growing, or minds changing, or leaves turning. The trick is to keep an eye peeled, so they don't slip by unappreciated.” ― Ken Kesey, Sailor Song

The move to Eugene, Oregon to start work on Betrayal at Krondor was a great deal more than just a shift in geography. It was also a change in tempo, in mindset, in time. In Los Angeles, I had only marginally adapted to the pace of mega-city living. Every day, sitting in rush hour traffic on the 405 for the hour-long crawl between New World Computing and my apartment only 20 miles away, I’d blast classical music at full volume in order to block out the roaring zombie apocalypse around me. While there had been many things about living in the city of angels that I’d come to truly appreciate like Griffith Observatory, Hour 25 on my radio, close proximity to the ocean, a plethora of cool bookstores (including Forbidden Planet, Dangerous Visions, A Change of Hobbit, now all sadly lost) -- L.A. had never become my home in the two years that I’d lived there. Eugene would be an altogether different story.

Right from the beginning, Eugene felt familiar, like the place I was always meant to be. For a town of only 100,000 people, it sported several bookstores, its own symphony, and was home to the University of Oregon. Every Saturday a farmer’s market appeared in the center of town like some bohemian Brigadoon that was more like a weekly arts and music festival than anything else, complete with jugglers, buskers, and people selling Renn Faire-style garments and crafts. For those who liked a larger show, the Oregon Country Fair was an annual traditional that was one part Hogwarts and several parts Woodstock, complete with half naked people fragrant with Patchouli and weed, all hoping that the Grateful Dead would materialize for another one of their frequent, legendarily unannounced concerts. Eugene obstinately refused to conform to the expectations of the outside world, and in retrospect I think there could have been no better place than here to muse upon the fantasy world of Midkemia.

On my first day in my new hometown, I awoke to a world wreathed in fog. It shouldn’t have surprised me given that it was November, and I was living in a valley encircled by large mountains, but nonetheless it set a mystical, transformational tone for the day. The drive into the office was short, less than five minutes. I could easily have walked (and often did in the months and years ahead), but I didn’t want to be late getting into work. John Cutter and I needed to produce a first draft outline for Krondor’s main plot, and there was a lot to discuss about what form the final game would take. I still recall that time as one of the best weeks of my life. 

Over the course of Betrayal at Krondor’s development, our team would migrate between three different locations as the project -- and later the company -- grew. To start, it was just John and I in a corner suite of the top floor of Dynamix’s Atrium building. John occupied a regular office, while I had one of the two cubicles just outside of it. A conference room, barely large enough for six, was off to the right of me, but for the majority of the early phases of the project, we did most of our talking and planning in John’s cozy little office. 

The original idea, as pitched by Dynamix’s CEO Jeff Tunnell, had been to take the novel Silverthorn from Raymond E. Feist and adapt it into a “playable” novel. I’d had serious reservations about this approach, not because of the novel, but mainly from the standpoint of a theoretical fan of the Riftwar series. My view went something like this. The value of having a license was that it would attract existing fans of an intellectual property to a new medium. If players had already read Silverthorn, they’d already know where to go, who to talk to, and what the cure for Princess Anita’s condition would be. There would be no big dramatic surprises at all without making major alterations to the narrative. And if we were to make changes to the story large enough that the experience would no longer be predictable for our fans-turned-players, what would be the point in holding on to the main narrative of Silverthorn if it was completely different than the book -- which would make fans hate us anyway for our lack of “faithfulness” to Ray’s work.

As John Cutter will attest, this devotion of mine to looking out for Ray’s fans bordered on the pathological and continued throughout our development of the game. At Dynamix, I was the gatekeeper for all things Riftwar, and I did all I could to ensure that we got as close as possible to replicating the feel of Feist’s world. There’s some small irony in this, however. Three weeks before my interview at Dynamix, I had no idea who Raymond E. Feist was. I’d never read any of his novels... well, that’s not entirely true. Time for a tiny digression. 

I’m going to tell a secret now that I haven’t shared publicly before, but I think everyone will forgive me now that so many years have passed. The truth is, when I was in junior high, I did buy a copy of Magician at a B. Dalton’s bookstore in Tulsa. It was a large trade paperback, and for some reason it had a picture of a heron-looking thing on the cover. The blurb on the back spoke of it in glowing terms as a great fantasy achievement, so naturally I had to buy it. I got it home, cracked the cover, began to read...and discovered with horror that the protagonist’s name was Pug. PUG! PUG?!?! I was outraged. I was supposed to cheer for someone named after a small annoying dog? I literally threw the book across the room, and I never picked it back up, other than to put it on my bookshelf to be reconsidered at another time. I would only remember my earlier encounter with it during a Christmas vacation from Dynamix, finding that first bird-bedecked copy of Magician still sitting on the bookshelf of my childhood bedroom.

You Can’t Always Get What You Kela-wanted. Between my strong dislike of this ganky-looking bird and the main protagonist’s first name in Feist’s Magician, I missed my first opportunity to discover the magical world of Midkemia (and Kelewan!)

Although I hadn’t grown up being a Feist fan, I had grown up being a fan of Star Trek. I’d read my way through the Blish novelizations of the original series and the animated series with glee. Once Pocket Books began its line of original, licensed novels, I tore through them nearly as fast as they came out...until they got to that book. Yes, that one. The one in which it was patently obvious that the author had never even SEEN Star Trek, let alone done anything more than learn the names of the main characters. In it, when threatened, Kirk is said to produce a ray gun...not a phaser...a ray gun. Not since the days of Buck Rogers had any self-respecting science fiction author called any weapon a ray gun. That was just one of a long litany of non-canon atrocities committed by the author before the end of the book. For a long time it put me off wanting to read any other Star Trek novels, period. 

The point of this long digression is this. When it came time to start adapting Ray’s books, I was fiercely determined not to inflict upon the Feist-reading players of our game the kind of bitter resentment I’d experienced after reading that terrible Star Trek novel all those years earlier. Even though I was new to his universe, I wanted to ensure that everything looked and sounded exactly as it should. That meant I needed to undertake obsessive research into everything Feist. Before John and I’s first meetings on the plot, I’d read all of his available books -- from Magician to Princes of the Blood -- from cover to cover. I’d filled yellow legal pads with notes about characters, locations, and situations. I had loads of questions about lore, but getting the answers to them had to be put on the back burner. First we needed to know what story we were going to tell.

After selling both Jeff Tunnell, and then Ray in turn, on the idea that we would write a new story set in the Midkemian universe, the trick then boiled down to determining what this new story would actually be. Would the player be controlling characters from the novels or only visiting them as NPCs? How much of the known world of Ray’s books would it end up covering? To what degree would it potentially connect to the existing plot of the other novels? 

There were a lot of issues with which we had to contend which were a mixture of narrative, legal, and technical concerns. I had originally wanted to have a portion of the game set on Kelewan, even using characters that appeared in Ray’s collaborative novels with fellow novelist Janny Wurts, but there were licensing issues beyond what we could tackle at the time (And I’d revisit this idea during our discussions on the never-produced sequel, The Thief of Dreams.) John and I were both big fans of the idea of controlling Jimmy the Hand during gameplay so it was a certainty he’d be in the party, but we also wanted players to be able to meet Gamina -- which posed narrative problems with the official Riftwar timeline. 

All this went into the pot as John and I began our collaboration, but the one issue that we solved almost immediately was when we would set it. Between A Darkness At Sethanon and Prince of the Blood, Ray had left a twenty-year gap in the narrative. It was almost as if he’d circled the space between them with a big red marker, and I was anxious to take advantage of the obviously open narrative territory to roam. John and I drove a stake into the ground, exactly between those two novels. There Be Dragons, we thought. It became our team motto. Our adventure would begin there, and that’s when things really got interesting...

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