Krondor Confidential - Part XIII

Go East, Young Man

(Due to content from this series being cut and pasted into the forums at RPG Codex without my consent last week, the full remaining chapters of this series will be available ONLY to paid subscribers. As I stated at the start of the first Krondor Confidential, the intention of this content is meant to be viewed HERE on my blog or through subscription to my newsletter. I’m very glad to have people share links to http://nealhallford.com , but any cutting and pasting of original content from my blog is expressly prohibited.)

After the success of Betrayal at Krondor, we were all conscious of the place we were in. On the first time out, we’d caught lightning in a bottle. Now our fans - and our masters at Sierra Online - wanted us to do it again, but to do it faster and on a budget. I’d had grand plans about where I wanted to go next, but as I discovered, when you’re part of a large corporation, or a large team, or if you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox, other people can say no, and you have to live with their decisions. I’d been covertly setting up some version of Betrayal at Kelewan even from the early stages of planning Betrayal at Krondor. My inclusion of the machinations of the Six and the Rift Machine were planned to be the opening shot of a larger conflict between Pug and the Assembly of Magicians…but it simply wasn’t to be. With no chance of us being able to pick up the rights to the Empire books – and therefore most of the universe I was hoping to exploit – the idea was dead on arrival. Thankfully I hadn’t put all my eggs in one basket, and tossing out the Tsurani didn’t mean starting over from scratch. I still had some building blocks with which to start constructing a sequel, it just meant moving around some of the lines of the original blueprint.