Krondor Confidential - Part VI
The Midkemia-Hallford Conspiracy
When looking at everything that had to happen in order to put me into the path of Betrayal at Krondor’s creation, most sane people would dismiss the facts as simple matters of coincidence. Anyone with the right set of skills could just as easily have ended up in my position at Dynamix, but the fact of the matter is that someone else didn’t. Wherever I look, I seem to find evidence the universe was running an inside job to involve me even before I became a game designer. The Midkemia-Hallford conspiracy is deep, running all the way down into my very DNA.
A few years back, my wife Jana and I made our way up to WonderCon, the big pop-culture convention where we tend to focus on relaxing rather treating it as a “working” convention. We shuffled through the Pro-Reg line, playing “identify the cosplayer character” as we drew closer to the registration desk. When at last we were called up, we produced print-outs and IDs, handing them over for inspection (thankfully this process has been streamlined into a much faster experience these days). The girl processing my materials looked at the name and stopped, glancing up at me.
“This is going to sound really weird,” she shyly began, “but are you related to...”
...Rob Halford, I mentally finished for her. For many people of a certain age, the notorious rock god from Judas Priest is the only other Hallford they’ve ever heard of (and most don’t realize he spells his last name differently than I do.)
“...Dean Hallford?” she actually finished. For a moment I was stunned, not only because the registrar had the audacity to deviate from the usual script, but also because of the powerful impact on hearing Dean’s name spoken after so many years. We’d lost him to complications from pneumonia in January of 2003, and a part of me still hadn’t gotten over the loss.
“I’m proud to say the good Baron was cousin of mine.” I finally managed to say. “Did you know him?”
Our registrar began to spin out her own touching story about Dean and his long reign as Talanque, Baron Calafia in the Kingdom of Caid, how he was one of the best men she’d ever known in the Society, and how he had been the greatest Baron Calafia. Her story was familiar. We’d heard so many similar stories from his friends and loyal subjects at his memorial service, but even before that we’d known how well he’d been loved, and how much of an impact he’d made on fan culture. Six years before I ever met the Baron in person, Raymond E. Feist had asked me if I’d ever heard of Dean, and pointed to a little spot on the map of Midkemia, an island called Queg. “The capitol is named after him. Palanque is a play on Talanque, his name in the SCA.”
Long before I’d arrived on the scene, the Hallford family had already put a thumbprint on the world of Midkemia. What I didn’t fully comprehend until early 1992 was how much of Midkemian lore and history predated (or as the case was, postdated) the events of the Riftwar Cycle.
BARON TALANQUE - Known to my family (and to the faculty and staff at SDSU) as Dean Hallford, my cousin was the longest reigning baron in SCA history.
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As the wheels for production began to churn on Betrayal at Krondor, and the initial drafts for the story got the stamps of approval both from Feist and the management teams at Dynamix and Sierra, I was surprised to begin receiving feedback from another fellow named Steve Abrams. At the time I had no idea who he was, or what his relationship to the project would be, but in very short order I began to understand that Ray’s books were rooted in a world that had its origins with yet somebody else. I was about to engage in a computer adaptation of a literary adaptation of a pre-existing tabletop role-playing game set in the world of Midkemia. While Feist was would be Krondor’s most recent antecedent (and its ultimate arbiter of what was acceptable), it seemed that I was about to inherit a great number of grandfathers.
Now if you wish to get the full, detailed backstory of the origins of the Midkemian universe, the best thing to do is to visit the website for Midkemia Press where they account for how it all happened. For my nutshell version of things, all you need to know is that a group of gamers in San Diego led by Steve Abrams and Jon Everson discovered Dungeons & Dragons, liked the basic idea but were dissatisfied by the emphasis on smash and grab, decided to create their own RPG system based on their experiences with the Society for the Creative Anachronism (which is presumably how my cousin Dean comes into this story). The group began writing sourcebooks set in their homebrew setting of Midkemia (a name coined by a fellow named Conan Lamot - sound familiar? Like LaMut familiar?) and invited a young starving student at UCSD named Ray Feist to help. Not long after, young Ray asks permission to break off and start writing novels set in the Midkemian universe. Ray writes “Magician,” kicking off the Riftwar series, and that is the universe which Jeff Tunnell later licenses for BAK. The upshot of all this being that when we speak of “Ray’s universe,” we’re actually talking about a communal creation which was the product of a bunch of folks in San Diego who called themselves the Thursday Nighters.
In an effort to further familiarize me with the pre-existing Midkemian universe, they began to send me the scenario and rulesbooks produced by Midkemia Press. Their sourcebooks for Carse, Tulan, and Cities had later been adapted for Runequest and published through Chaosium, so I at least was familiar with the set up for those books (Runequest - like Call of Cthulhu - was based on a tabletop role-playing system from Chaosium called Basic Roleplaying, and John and I had very loosely based Betrayal’s skills on CoC). Unfortunately, there was little I could do with any of the actual content of the original, pre-Magician lore. Set thousands of years after the events of first Riftwar -- i.e. the time of our game -- the sourcebooks weren’t of much help with filling in details about the world, outside of a few hints about geography that wouldn’t have changed over that timescale, and a bit about the world religions. Nonetheless, after looking over the books, I realized there were some questions about how the world worked in general which might only be answerable by Steve rather than Ray. Before we pushed on further, I felt like it would be a good idea for me to call a grand council with Midkemia’s handlers.
Although I will admit I’m a little fuzzy on the exact timing, I believe that Ray and Steve finally flew into Eugene in early 1992. It was a great opportunity for us not only to meet socially, but also for all of us to get a better handle on the mindset of the people on the other side of the messages that were flying back and forth. It would have been very easy for us to conduct the production of Betrayal at Krondor purely through the mail, FAXes, and by phone, but we all agreed that things would go better if we all understood where everyone else was coming from.
The principal site of our Midkemia Summit was held at the Steelhead Micro-Brewery, a place locally famous for wheat-crust pizza as well as its beer (and conveniently only a few minutes’ walk from the Escape While There’s Still Time Bookstore which was Eugene’s ground zero for finding Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Mystery). For most of the dinner, Ray did all the talking as John Cutter and I peppered him with questions about the different aspects of the story and the characters. Ray gave the names of real-world actors whom he would have cast in a movie version of his novels. We talked about Nighthawks, and Arutha’s dealing with the thieves under Krondor. The technical questions all ended up in Steve’s lap, particularly in regard to how the rifts work or magic in general. I particularly remember a long digression between Ray, Steve, and I going over the functionality of the Truth Staff, and whether testimony gained from its use would be admissible in a court of law (the answer to which became a critical plot point in the never finished BAK sequel, Thief of Dreams).
Another product of this meeting was that Ray told me all about “the Eugene Elves” -- a collection of very talented and well-respected science fiction and fantasy writers who also lived in Eugene including Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman -- all wonderful people who would befriend me during my time living there. Before it was over, I still remember Ray and Steve talking about the role that SCA had played in their earliest views of the gameworld, prompting the question “Are you related to Dean Hallford?” At the time, the only answer I had was “I don’t honestly know.”
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The fact that I didn’t know Dean would likely have embarrassed my father, had he known about it at the time. In my local branch of the family, my dad was regarded as the expert on all things Hallford, and had devoted a great deal of his spare time to tracking down the details of our lineage. Although he hadn’t thrown himself full bore into his genealogical research until after his retirement, the bug had always been there. Even when I was a child, and we went on our long, often meandering family vacations, the evening often ended at a Best Western motel in the middle of God Knows Where. As my brother, mother, and I sank into our beds, my dad would open the nightstand, find the telephone book, then browse through the listings for any instance of our surname. If he was lucky enough to find someone, he’d lift the receiver and dial, introducing himself to anyone who would pick up.
“Hi there, my name is Henry Gene Hallford. Do you know anything about your family history?” The introduction was almost always the same. Over the years I’ve tried to imagine the dozens of unwitting families that got my father’s call out of the blue, without any idea of who he was before the phone rang. To this day I don’t know if I’m more astonished by the fact that he made the phone calls in the first place, or by the fact that everyone he ever called actually gave him exactly what he was looking for. Birthdates. Weddings. Deaths. Burial locations. Family scandals. They gave it ALL to my father, and he wrote everything down in his notebooks like it was God’s own gospel itself. At the time I remember thinking that my father had missed his calling. It seemed he could get anything out of anyone, and I envied him the ease with which he could approach complete strangers with his probing questions. He should have been the one with the degree in journalism, not me.
Years later, after Betrayal at Krondor had shipped, after my father had passed away, and after two moves that took me first from Oregon back to Oklahoma, then from Oklahoma to California, I found myself feeling lost without any Hallford kin living near me. On a whim I decided to try my dad’s old trick, and I picked up the San Diego phone book, scanning it for Hallfords. The first number didn’t answer. A second individual that I found picked up but had no interest in talking to a stranger. The third individual, however, had a familiar name. At the time I didn’t remember the association, but Dean was ringing the bell. The man that picked up the phone on the other end of the line had a deep, slightly gruff voice, listening patiently to my clumsy attempt to introduce myself. He suggested that I should come and visit him in his office at San Diego State University, and he could share what he knew about his family’s history.
A few days later, I made the drive over to Dean’s college, winding my way to down to the small office in the I.T. department which was his kingdom. Knocking on his door, I found myself invited in, discovering a decor that could just as easily have been my own. A calendar featuring gargoyles hung over his Macintosh computer, and a stack of technical manuals was piled close by. He noticed my browsing his bookshelves, noting the titles on medieval history and a couple of works of fiction. There was also a photo of Dean, dressed in full SCA finery, seated on the wheelchair that also served as his throne.
Then finally it clicked. The name came back to me, along with the details that Ray had shared about the long-serving San Diego baron who had been confined to a wheelchair for most of his life due to a childhood accident.
“You’re the King of Queg, aren’t you?” I asked.
Dean smiled, his eyes that were so much like my own sparkling mischievously back at me. “So... you’ve heard of me then.”
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