Neal Hallford on The Making of Betrayal at Krondor

[nealiios]

I am referring to the combat graphics. Is the remake going to feature an isometric view? Because the original did not.

Still to be determined. Lot of other systems for me to tackle in advance of that.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Just finished BaK, some o them fuckin riddles, worst one were about someat goin along wi a wagon, took me three days to work out it were "noise." I feel exhausted, satisfied an a bit disappointed its over, like after a good long ard screw in summer. One o best games o all time, thats for fuckin sure. Never could get them mercs up near Northwarden to tell me how they fight goblins, bit pissed off about that.

Are you talking about the goblins you need to handle when Locky, Jimmy and Patrus do their thing breaking into Moredhel lands and what not? Cause I just paid those buggers off.

 

[Wyrmlord]

I could be wrong about this, but art seems to attract more narcissistic types, as well. Or, at the very least, the narcissistic qualities emerge in a more spectacular way when their "true genius" isn't appreciated. There were some serious lulz back in the day on CA.org when overconfident amateurs would put their pieces up for critique and didn't get the responses they liked.

I have had some limited experience living with or working with these artistic/narcissistic/introverted types. My cousin, who went through a long period of depression, some of my coworkers, and some of my classmates. Et cetera.

I am not an expert on them (because I am not one of them), but I have developed some simple tricks to coexist with such people.

1. Understand that these people get their energy from things they do. They live inside a human sized hamster ball and everything they do inside this ball is the source of their energy.
2. Attempting to infilitrate this hamster ball makes them feel like their energy is being taken away from them. It is probably best not to infiltrate it.
3. Basically, leave such people alone, but show them you acknowledge them and approve of them and the work they are doing when you pass them by.

This way, they will start inviting you inside their hamster ball and cooperate on their work. But after some time.

Again, not the best strategy. I am basically suggesting that with such people, leave them alone until they come to you. Can't think of any better.

 

[Ninjerk]

Well, if you're not working directly with them, you can resort to giving extremely mild praise if you're forced to see their work (whether it's good or bad). If you're ever pressed to elaborate or give a more in-depth critique, use some really milquetoast words like "nice" or "interesting" and if you're STILL further pressed then just shrug your shoulders and say, "I can't even draw a stick figure!" It is very important not to appear praiseworthy, or they will become addicted to the positive feelings they can leech from you! It's strangely similar to what Dreaad should have done about his Maorian beaus.

 

[Neanderthal]

Are you talking about the goblins you need to handle when Locky, Jimmy and Patrus do their thing breaking into Moredhel lands and what not? Cause I just paid those buggers off.

Nah theres an house in Dencamp on Teeth (or is it Wulfram?) where some mercenaries are holed up who've been scrappin wi Goblins, a neighbour tells you a password but it dunt work, an quest just seems to stall there. Sounded like they could offer trainin or someat, but I think I might have gone up there too early doin it in chapter 1.

 

[Infinitron]

Neal on his days working at a local radio station after high school: http://nealhallford.com/post/144181901043/ktow-the-shadow-of-the-bulldog-man

 

[LESS T_T]

Sixth Confidential: http://nealhallford.com/post/145141694293/krondor-confidential-part-vi

Krondor Confidential - Part VI

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 go, I seem to find evidence that the universe was running an inside job to involve me even before I became a game designer. The Midkemian conspiracy against me is deep, running all the way down into my very DNA.

In March, my wife Jana and I made our way up to Los Angeles for WonderCon, our annual convention where we tend to focus on relaxing and having fun rather than it being a “working” convention for us. We shuffled through the Pro-Reg line, playing “identify the cosplayer” 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. The girl processing mine 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 Halford they’ve ever heard of (and most don’t realize he spells his last name differently than I do.) It’s debatable about which of us wears more leather…

“…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 then 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.

(my cousin Dean, during his reign as Baron Talanque)

——————–

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 someone else 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 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 grand-fathers.

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 give their own account of how it all happened. For my nutshell version of things, all you really 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), they begin writing sourcebooks set in the world of Midkemia (a name coined by a fellow named Conan Lamot (sound familiar? Like LaMut familiar?), a young starving student at the University of California at San Diego named Ray Feist is invited to start writing stuff for their sourcebooks, and not too long after Ray asks permission to break off and start writing novels set in the Midkemian universe. The rest of the story you already pretty much know. The upshot of all this being that when we speak of “Ray’s universe,” we’re actually talking about a communal creation that was the product of a bunch of guys and gals in San Diego who called themselves the Thursday Nighters.

In an effort to help further familiarize me with the pre-existing Midkemian universe, they began to send me the scenario and rulesbooks from Midkemia Press. The versions of their sourcebooks for Carse,Tulan, and Cities had all been adapted for Runequest and published through Chaosium, so I at least was familiar with the set up for those books (since Runequest shared DNA with Call of Cthulhu, upon which John and I’s system for Betrayal had been very loosely based). Unfortunately, there was little I could do with any of the actual content. Set thousands of years after the events of first Riftwar – i.e. the time of our game – they 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. 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 Krondorpurely 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 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 produced 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 later 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.”

——————–

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 hadalways 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 God’s own gospel itself. At the time I remember thinking that my father had missed his calling, that he should have been a salesman or a reporter. 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.

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 wheel chair 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.”

———————————————–
If you’re enjoying these histories on my experiences in the computer gaming industry, please subscribe to my #Patreon to help support this and other creative projects.http://www.patreon.com/nealiios

 

[Neanderthal]

Surprisin how many times you'll find SCA behind RPG stuff, all that Quegan stuff wi Devon an that makes sense now an all.

 

[Arrowgrab]

Nah theres an house in Dencamp on Teeth (or is it Wulfram?) where some mercenaries are holed up who've been scrappin wi Goblins, a neighbour tells you a password but it dunt work, an quest just seems to stall there. Sounded like they could offer trainin or someat, but I think I might have gone up there too early doin it in chapter 1.

I don't recall what they tell you exactly - it's been ages since I last played -, but I can tell you that the way to kill goblins easily is to

Spoiler

use the Mind Melt spell (or the magic ring with the same effect), as they take extra damage from it.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

way to kill goblins easily

It's been near a decade since I got to that part, but there are Keshian tapirs that weapons store sell: "One good swing and you can take off a goblin's head with it." Works exactly as advertised.

 

[Arrowgrab]

way to kill goblins easily

It's been near a decade since I got to that part, but there are Keshian tapirs that weapons store sell: "One good swing and you can take off a goblin's head with it." Works exactly as advertised.

...if you hit with it. It's one of the least accurate swords, plus it only really does decent damage on a swing, which reduces your stamina. The Galon Griefmaker is much superior.

 

[Neanderthal]

I don't recall what they tell you exactly - it's been ages since I last played -, but I can tell you that the way to kill goblins easily is to

Spoiler

use the Mind Melt spell (or the magic ring with the same effect), as they take extra damage from it.

I think I remember that spell from previous runs, but dint catch hide nor hair on it this playthrough, an I were fucking thorough. Ah well cheers anyway, they weren't really a problem anyway.

Cept for bloody Patrus o course.

 

[Arrowgrab]

According to this page, it's a version-specific bug. You're supposed to get the spell in the house in Dencamp, but in 1.02 you can't unless you hex-edit the game. Or the savefile, it's not quite clear.

 

[Sceptic]

This is a good page, and I'm glad to finally have a way to fix the 1.02 bug with Mind Melt. However it mentions a lot of "This Spell is unavailable to Patrus" even when it IS possible for Patrus to learn these spells. Namely, have Owyn leave a copy in a chest with a lock. In 1.02 lock chests are never stolen from, so any item you store there is perfectly safe. I use this trick on replays to get Skin of the Dragon to Patrus, which makes some fights in chapters 5 and 7 MUCH easier.

 

[Infinitron]

Krondor Confidential - Part VII
For the first several months of development, John Cutter and I had metaphorically lived on a small island, isolated in the heart of Dynamix away from the rest of our team. In many ways it was a boon because I had a great deal of “think” time to work on the project, unmolested by what would become the daily demands of a leadership role. It was also a time when I remember a fairly steady stream of visitors coming to John’s door, superstars of the gaming industry who’d previously only been names in the credits of much-loved games. I was lucky enough to get a ringside seat as they drifted in and out of his office.

As pleasant these initial months were, however, it became clear by the early part of 1992 that we couldn’t work effectively as a team with everyone spread across the second floor of the Atrium building. Our programmers were mixed in with the developers for the Aces Over the Pacific , and our artists were similarly scattered between different teams. Meetings involved a lot of walking back and forth between suites to quite literally run down a problem. It was time to come together and get a place of our own.

Our new digs were a suite located in the corner of the Atrium building facing 10th street. John, and Nels Bruckner, and Mike McHugh all scored offices while I got a cubicle with the unfortunate placement of being directly outside Mike’s door. In the months since the start of the project, Mike’s rocky relationship with the rest of us had not improved much since our first meetings, and putting me in even closer proximity to him did little to ease my discomfort. While before I never had to see him unless absolutely necessary, I now daily found myself in the path of his mercurial moods. He had opinions on everything about me. He didn’t like the way I dressed. He complained about my music being too loud (he had a door, I had headphones…still didn’t matter). He complained about my choice of cologne. When he wasn’t complaining about me, he would tell me long, horrifying, fearfully masculine stories from his youth about bar brawls with his biker buddies. At times I wasn’t sure if he was simply sharing stories…or if he was telegraphing some kind of message to me about not crossing him. I became very thankful that he frequently kept his door closed from the rest of the suite.

Although the move did nothing to improve relations with Mike, it did wonders for the communication between the other members of the team. Now when any of us had questions, all we had to do was peek over the walls of our cubicles, or convene at the long pair of pushed-together tables in the center of the suite. All of us, to one degree or another, were lone wolf personalities, so it suited us to call a full meeting only when everyone was absolutely needed, and even then we tried to keep things short. More often than not, however, the tables served as a sideboard for our impromptu food deliveries.

Pizza, of course, was a regular staple for our team, with pepperoni, BBQ chicken, Hawaiian chicken, or pie-with-everything being the usual choices. On Mondays, carbohydrates were on order with each of us taking turns to bring in donuts, or muffins, or croissants, or bagels. Because I was an Okie kid from the suburbs of Tulsa, these last things were a novelty to me, and at first I had no clue what bagels were, or how they were meant to be prepared. (Years later, for the brief period in which I lived back in Oklahoma, my father discovered a bag of my onion bagels on our breakfast table. I found him in the dining room chewing determinedly on one like a dog gnawing on a rawhide bone. He paused in mid-chew, one eye open as he fixed me with a disapproving scowl. “Worst goddamned doughnut I ever had.” Patiently I extracted another bagel, demonstrating that they were meant to be toasted and lathered with cream cheese. Dad was dubious until he had the properly prepared bagel, and then thereafter became quite a fan. On future trips to the grocery store he’d ask me to bring home more of those “weird donuts.”)

The rhythm of the team quickly established itself once we were all in the same place. John was usually the first in, around 9:00, with the rest of us filtering in between 9:30 and 10. Lunch was pretty much whenever anyone decided, though for me I usually opted take mine at an off-time in order to avoid crowds. There were several places within easy walking distance, but I tended to favor the Jewish deli Rosewater’s on the downtown mall for BBQ sandwiches and cheese soup. Across the road in another direction was a cheap joint that made a decent Egg Foo Young, but otherwise was a poor substitute for the Chinese restaurants I’d gotten used to in Los Angeles. Sometimes I’d venture a little further out to hit a corner bar for fish, or the 5th Street Public Market where I discovered the magic of bangers and chips.

(5th Street Public Market, Eugene, Oregon)

As much as I loved most of my team mates, I needed the time during lunch alone so that I could recharge my batteries before the afternoon grind. By our fifth month of production, John and I’s design duties were beginning to become more than we could stay ahead of. Fortunately for us, there was someone at Dynamix who was itching to climb out of the testing pool, and was willing to do whatever designer grunt work we handed him.

Whenever I think of Tim McClure, I always picture him in the same moment. He’s young and frightfully thin, scarcely more than a skeleton. Long, straight brunette hair frames his pale boyish face that’s sprinkled with almost imperceptible freckles. There’s an impishness in his eyes that gleam behind a pair of round Harry Potter-style spectacles. Perched on the top of a desk like a crow, he thoughtfully stares out of our office windows streaming with water. “I f@#%g hate rain,” he says to me. He gives me a look like there’s something I can actually do about it. “It’s AWFUL.” I helpfully point out to him that rain is kind of Oregon’s schtick. “You really shouldn’t hold your feelings in all the time,” I tell him. “Honestly, how do you REALLY feel?”

Tim was not a man that was shy about expressing his opinions. He had many. After weekends he’d come in to talk about a movie or a TV show or a game he’d played, and we’d all get a critique about everything that was wrong with it. He loved Fist of the North Star and hated J.R.R. Tolkien. He seemed to be passionate about everything he came into contact with, and he was either your mortal enemy or your fiercest friend. Thankfully for me, I fell into the latter category. I always saw him as a little kid who simply hadn’t learned how to lie like an adult. If I needed an honest opinion about something I was doing, I could always rely on Tim for his unvarnished answer.

(Betrayal at Krondor’s turn-based combat system)

By March of 1992, the team had resolved a great deal about the direction of the project, but there were a few critical issues still up in the air. While John and I had established the basic parameters of the gameplay, some details like the actual functionality of the combat system were still being hammered out as we experimented with different approaches. One guiding principle though remained the same, virtually unchanged since the start of the project. Combat would be turn-based, and would feature a chess-like interface.

Turned-based combat was certainly no great innovation on our part. Every other RPG on the computer gaming market that had come before us was turn-driven, a feature inherited from the turn-based combat of the original Dungeons & Dragons. The real-time combat that would slowly creep into the genre wouldn’t hit full force until Diablo, and even the first popular mass market real-time strategy game, Dune II, was only just hitting the market. Where we decided to innovate, however, was to take a very simple step towards factoring in terrain in a role-playing environment.

Before Krondor, encounters with monsters in CRPGs were much like early medieval and revolutionary war battles. The player’s party and the monster party were always lined up nose-to-nose, then a simple hackfest would ensue where party members just beat on whomever was in front of them until all the attackers or all the player’s party were dead. “Auto-fight” had become a staple of games like Wizardry and Might & Magic, which largely turned many combat scenarios into tediously undramatic spectator events where the player was employing very little thinking or strategy. Being the bastards that we were, John and I wanted to put a stop to all of that.

Admittedly, the combat traps in BAK were an experimental oddity. Players had to stop and think about moving their characters around in such a way that they could slip through the mazes formed by the traps. John leaned heavily on inspiration from old-fashioned “slider” puzzles, limiting the player’s options so they’d have to be strategic in their maneuvering. Although it was nothing so sophisticated as dealing with the effects of height differences or even cover, it was a rudimentary way to make player positioning more interesting, and also more dangerous.

As proud as we were of our various design innovations, our team was keenly aware that we were in a race. Although a number of RPGs were already using pseudo-3D environments (which were really just 2D games using depth-based tiles), we had great ambitions of being the first role-playing game to market with a true 3D engine – called 3Space – a factor which we hoped would help set us apart from other computer RPGs. But late on an evening in March of 1992, as most of us were preparing to head home for the night, our lead programmer, Nels, stuck his head out of his door. “Guys, I think you need to come look at this.” So all of us piled in, gathering around his monitor. On the screen was what was clearly a role-playing game running in a true 3D environment: Ultima Underworld. We’d been snaked by one of the best known RPG developers in the industry. Tim summing up with his traditional eloquence what the rest of us had been privately thinking.

“F%$k!”

 

[Berekän]

Is this dead? I enjoyed reading it. nealiios

 

[Rhuantavan]

He just posted on his FB profile that he's "Cooking Krondor Confidential VIII.".

 

[nealiios]

As I often say, if a tree falls on my Facebook page, Gorath dies again on the Codex. Yes, it's true, I have Krondor Confidential - Part VIII almost ready to fly, and it'll go live on my NealHallford.com blog later this afternoon / evening. If you've been wondering where I was last month, you can check the "Kevin Saunders Has Joined Nexon" thread for some more illumination there.

In other news, there's this teaser about a panel I'll be appearing on next month about Worldbuilding and Magic Systems.

And now, back to the salt mine...

 

[Rhuantavan]

Krondor Confidential - Part VIII
“A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.”

Swami Sivananda

It’s the afternoon of October 9, 1995. I’m seated in a derailed passenger car in the middle of the baking Arizona desert, trying to catch my breath. For the past fifteen minutes I’ve been sobbing almost uncontrollably, coming to grips with the catastrophic events of the past twelve hours. It’s hard enough to wrap my brain around the idea that I’ve just survived a train wreck. Harder still to comprehend that someone had wrecked the train on purpose with an intent to kill me and every other passenger aboard the Sunset Limited.

For hours I’d had to hold up a brave face to my fellow passengers and pretend that I didn’t know that the wreck was an act of terrorism, that I hadn’t been the one to find two critical pieces of evidence left behind by the bastards responsible. But the truth was out now, and the rest of the passengers had gone, taken away by Amtrak. Outside the doors of the car in which i was having a mental breakdown, the good men and women of the ATF, FBI, Arizona state police, and other agencies were all patiently waiting for me to be able to pull myself together enough to tell them about the notes. Soon they would be peppering me with questions not only about the discovery, but also about me, about why I was on the train in the first place.

The immediate answer was obvious, that I was on the way to San Diego to meet with my new girlfriend Jana and see the city that would very soon become my new home. The bigger question was why I’d chosen to come by train rather than by plane or car since either option would have been faster or cheaper. Certainly I was attracted to the idea of traveling by rail, of watching the ever-changing and dramatic landscape of the American Southwest slowly drift by my window. The truth, however, was something far less prosaic and romantic, rooted in something that had happened during the production of Betrayal at Krondor that left me with psychic scars for years thereafter.

———————————————————————-

Almost from the day I signed up with Dynamix and learned that Sierra Online was our “parent company” (thus by extension making me a Sierra Online employee,) I’d wanted to make a pilgrimage south to their picturesque headquarters in Oakhurst, California. Founders Ken and Roberta Williams were already legends to me, and I’d remembered as a kid ooh-ing and ahh-ing over a display of their adventure titles in an electronics store window. But Sierra Online employee or not, during the early phase of Betrayal at Krondor’s production, I figured I was too small a fish in the pond to ever warrant an invitation to the home office. It certainly didn’t occur to me that they’d not only invite me down for a tour of the HQ, but they’d put John Cutter and I up at a ritzy resort on Bass Lake while we attended an all-expenses-paid, three-day writing seminar with a big-shot Hollywood story consultant.

Needless to say, I didn’t refuse the invitation.

On the day of the departure for Oakhurst, we had a nice-sized delegation to represent Dynamix flying out from Eugene. In addition to John and I, writers from the teams for The Adventures of Willie Beamish and Space Quest V: The Next Mutation all chatted with each other in the tiny terminal. It was one of the few instances I can recall when most of Dynamix’s various writers were all hanging out together, other than at official full company meetings. Since joining Dynamix with its staff of over three hundred people, most of my interactions were usually only with members of my own team, so I enjoyed the chance to get to know some of my fellow scribblers a tiny jot better.

As much as I would have preferred a direct flight between Eugene and Oakhurst, the remoteness of our destination required some tedious triangulation in order to get there. First we flew south to San Francisco, then transferred to a puddle jumper that could easily have doubled as a flying Cuisinart (and I remarked as much to John.) After a mercifully short flight, our delegation arrived safely in Fresno and immediately split into two teams with John and I taking one rental car, and everyone else piling into another. Forming a small convoy, we began a leisurely hour-long ascent into the breathtaking beauty of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

For the new few days our little group would set up camp at The Pines Resort, a quiet lodge of a place located about 20 miles from the entrance to Yosemite National Park. Surrounded by towering evergreens and squashed against the shore of the impossibly blue waters of Bass Lake, it was exactly what I’d always imagined a writer’s resort should look like. The inside was deceptively cozy with rough pine paneling and deer antlers serving as candelabras. Toward the lake, our main meeting room was framed in with wall to floor windows looking out on nature in all her revealed glory, though how I managed not to simply stare out of the window all day is still a mystery to me. I was utterly bewitched by the place, and in some ways I don’t believe I’ve ever left it.

After settling in at the hotel, we learned that several Sierra Online employees would be coming over for the lectures as well, though I regret to say that I’m not at all sure who came over to join us. All I remember is that everyone was very nice to us, and that we were looking forward to this learning experience together.

Now in the name of full disclosure, before the seminar, I’d never even heard of our instructor Robert McKee. He hadn’t written anything I’d ever read, nor had he been the screenwriter of any movie I’d ever seen. All I knew was that he was evidently The Definitive Big Thing to writers in Hollywood at that time, and was well known for his talks on story structure. (Four years after our seminar, he’d go on to publish his best-seller Story which in essence is the same thing as we got in his lectures, but you can buy it for twenty bucks on Amazon rather than spending several hundred to sit through his lectures.) Lucky for us, we got to see the show for free.

Over the course of the next few days, McKee would take us through a self-guided tour through his theories about writing, both for good and for ill. On the upside, he was a knowledgeable speaker with a wealth of stories about the creation of several of my favorite movies. He analyzed Casablanca and taught us about using supporting and negating resonance within a narrative, and how the thematic conflict between two subplots could be used to create emotional tension for the viewer. He demonstrated the utility of the film’s central McGuffin while also pointing out the absurd artificiality of it (the Nazis would never have recognized the “unrescindable” authority of transit papers signed by General DeGaulle.) We danced with the psychology of Hitchcock, and cracked open the skulls of the writers behind Chinatown. Had we stopped there, I probably would have come away from the lecture a happy camper, glad to have had a peek at the inner process of other successful creators. It was when McKee decided to get truly abstract about his theories of writing, however, that he set an insidious time-bomb ticking inside my brain that would catastrophically go off many years later.

McKee was very fond of diagrams. You’ll find a few inside of Story as just a small sampling of how fond of them he was. I remember him drawing the story spine, and diagramming subplots, seemingly taking every opportunity he could to scribble on the portable white boards in the conference room. His analysis became brutal, clinical, and robotic, insistent that all good stories had the same base DNA.Every good story had to fit the pattern. In the back of my mind I remember flashing on Dead Poet’s Society with Robin Williams at the chalkboard as he drew a diagram of good poetry as defined by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard. A part of me was screaming that I should get up on my table and shout “My Captain! My Captain!” but I kept my seat and studiously copied his notes like a good little screenwriter drone. His marker kept moving, creating more and more little boxes, putting little pieces of my soul into prison cells. I had to accept it because he was a professional and there were long lists of people out there who considered him the expert. I wouldn’t realize what that lecture had done to me until long after my time at Dynamix.

Thankfully for Betrayal at Krondor, the main storyline had already been set in stone and was already well into production. There were no chances for me to do much of anything using McKee’s methods to go back and revise what I’d already done, and it would have little impact on the subquests that John and I were still to write. Today I shudder at the thought of the monstrocity I might have whipped up if I’d been under McKee’s spell at BAK’s outset.

With the seminar concluded and the group beginning to break up on our last day in Oakhurst, we finally got our invitation to head over to Sierra HQ. A few of our Dynamix crew opted not to come because they were worried about severe thunderstorms rolling into the region, and were not thrilled by the prospect of potentially getting caught in heavy wind gusts as they attempted to crawl down out of the mountains. John and I, however, opted to stay, hoping to get a better look at the legendary game company.

In retrospect the visit was something of a let down. I was expecting it to be bigger, and brighter, and somehow more amazing than Dynamix. What we got to see, however, seemed more like a dungeon out of Terry Giliam’s Brazil than the hippy fantasy castle I’d been imagining before.Everywhere we went, I remember people stacked five deep in rooms that wouldn’t have qualified as utility closets back at Dynamix. Everyone there was terribly nice, but I still couldn’t shake the crushing sense of the place as a suffocating bunker. It’s possible that my mindset was off, still colored by the oppression I’d felt in McKee’s lectures, and perhaps that affected the way I saw Sierra as well.

As time approached for us to head for Fresno, I remember feeling disappointed that we weren’t going to get the chance to meet Ken or Roberta, but the schedule was the schedule. We needed to leave if there was any chance of getting to our flight on time.

Speeding down out of the Sierras, we beat out way through rain and gusting wind to finally reach the Fresno airport with only minutes to spare before we needed to board our flight to San Francisco. By the time we’d boarded the puddle jumper, the rain was pounding so hard on the roof of the plane that it sounded like hail, but the stewardess assured us it was all perfectly normal and that the tiny plane could handle taking off under even more severe weather conditions.

Once we were airborne, the tiny plane struggled. Sheering winds shoved us around like an air-hockey puck, and the frame of the plane moaned and groaned like it was about to fly apart. John didn’t seem to notice, having dropped into a catnap while we were still on the runway. For me it was another story. I tried desperately to find my place of Zen, a place where the world wasn’t shaking like the insides of a paint mixer….

…and then the bottom fell out of the world. Plummeting sharply into a nosedive, our plane lost what must have been at least a hundred feet almost in an instant. White knuckling the armrests of my seat, I looked to the crew for reassurance that everything was going to be okay, that I was just imagining things…but the stewardess’ expression was one of stark naked terror.

After an eternity in which it had sounded like the world was full of angry, washing machine-sized bees cloaked in thunder, we finally leveled off. That I hadn’t somehow emptied my guts all over John I still consider a miracle, and he never knew what he’d missed since he’d somehow slept through the entire episode. For me, however, it was a nightmare that would take me years from which to reawaken.

Safe on the ground at San Francisco, I seriously considered renting a car and finishing the return trip to Eugene overnight, feeling much more trusting of my chances in a car than anything that left the ground. Nonetheless, I swallowed my panic and followed John aboard, certain that every air pocket or bit of turbulence on the way home was the herald of my imminent doom.

In the years to come, plane trips became increasingly impractical for me. Hours and sometimes days before a planned trip, I’d break down with debilitating nightmares as I’d flash back to that Fresno flight. Trips to the doctor to pre-medicate my anxiety would do nothing to alleviate the problem, only adding an extra layer of unease at being groggy while still being utterly terrified during flights. For a while, the only relief was to try and avoid air travel altogether, but it would come at the cost of losing many opportunities for work where frequent air travel would have been mandatory. And it would put me on a train to San Diego in 1996, leaving me at the center of the worst act of domestic terrorism between the Oklahoma City Bombing and the attacks of 911.

After years of struggle, my battle with my fear of air travel came to a sudden and unexpected end. In 2011, my good friend Larry Nemecek asked me if I could film a documentary project that he was producing called The Con of Wrath. Because I’d geared up for an independent film production in 2009, I was in a unique position to be able to help him make it happen for a significantly lower price than if he’d gone off and hired a indie film crew. Part of the gig, however, would require a number of plane trips to Houston, Texas for key interviews.

I debated the issue fiercely with myself. I wasn’t sure if I could do it. After many years of rarely stepping foot on any airplane, I at last decided that I had to try, not just to help myself, but also to help my friend. I loaded up my gear and went to work…and strangely, the fear started to go away. On the first trip I was anxious, but I could deal with it. On the second, it was more of an afterthought, something that occurred to me after the trip was already over. By the third trip, however, the fear was nothing but a memory. When I talked to my wife Jana about it, she had a good insight about it that hadn’t occurred to me. “I think this just means you really, really want to make films, Sweetheart,” she said. And she was right. The secret had been there in the back of my head all along. The trick to slaying my dragon had been to follow my creative self, to follow my better instincts to drive out the fear.

‘Twas creation that slew the beast.

 

[SwiftCrack]

Interesting read, that Hollywood dude seems like the antithesis of creative writing. I gotta say traveling by train is my second favorite mode of transportation (after big ships). Just love being to get up and walk around semi-freely. Sure, you can do it on some of the bigger long distance planes too, but it's not the same.

 

[Ninjerk]

nealiios Will you write more about your thoughts and feelings about McKee?

 

[nealiios]

Interesting read, that Hollywood dude seems like the antithesis of creative writing. I gotta say traveling by train is my second favorite mode of transportation (after big ships). Just love being to get up and walk around semi-freely. Sure, you can do it on some of the bigger long distance planes too, but it's not the same.

Here's the crazy thing about the train wreck. I STILL love train travel, and if I had my druthers, I'd probably still do most of my traveling that way if time and finances allowed. I did have a period of time right after the wreck that I'd be edgy on train trips (and couldn't fall asleep on ANYTHING that was moving for nearly a year). But that resolved pretty quickly on it's own. I do love being able to see the countryside and not being in a rush all the time. The downside though is that in the U.S., trains are almost never on time. Part of the problem is that passenger rail shares the same lines as the industrial rail, and industrial rail gets priority, so it causes real scheduling problems. Every long haul train trip I've ever taken here has run late, anywhere from a hour or so to in one instance to a full day and a half behind schedule in another. It's not the mode of transport if you urgently need to be somewhere on a specific day or time. But I do love 'em. I even applied to Amtrak's guest writer program where they'd let you travel for a month on their trains for free if you wrote about them, but they never contacted me back.

 

[nealiios]

Will you write more about your thoughts and feelings about McKee?

Probably not for a bit, but I do intend at some point to write up something not only about McKee, but also Vogler (The Writer's Journey) and Blake Snyder (Save the Cat!), all of whom have beneficial things to say, but when they get dogmatic they can unintentionally straight jacket the creative thinking of some writers who read them. Whenever Jana and I wrote "Swords & Circuitry," I was very careful in saying up front that what I did was not THE way, it was just one of many different ways to make games.

 

[SwiftCrack]

Here's the crazy thing about the train wreck. I STILL love train travel, and if I had my druthers, I'd probably still do most of my traveling that way if time and finances allowed. I did have a period of time right after the wreck that I'd be edgy on train trips (and couldn't fall asleep on ANYTHING that was moving for nearly a year). But that resolved pretty quickly on it's own. I do love being able to see the countryside and not being in a rush all the time. The downside though is that in the U.S., trains are almost never on time. Part of the problem is that passenger rail shares the same lines as the industrial rail, and industrial rail gets priority, so it causes real scheduling problems. Every long haul train trip I've ever taken here has run late, anywhere from a hour or so to in one instance to a full day and a half behind schedule in another. It's not the mode of transport if you urgently need to be somewhere on a specific day or time. But I do love 'em. I even applied to Amtrak's guest writer program where they'd let you travel for a month on their trains for free if you wrote about them, but they never contacted me back.

I've only had experience with Amtrak Cascades-liners which seemed to run a pretty tight ship (probably due to having to cross the border?), but even here in small Euro-land countries where trains are very common the schedule can get fucked up pretty easily. I heard about the Amtrak residency writing stuff, but I think they only contacted the winners. They actually have blogs and stuff from previous winners here: http://blog.amtrak.com/amtrakresidency/. Pretty cool stuff really.

 

[nealiios]

Update on the panel for Long Beach Comic Con. New deets:

"Worldbuilding and Magic Systems: A Character of Their Own," Sunday, September 18th, 11:00am-12:00pm, Rumble Room, S7" Sent an invite to Chris Avellone to come and play as well, but don't know whether or not he'll be able to join us yet. Will update you when I hear anything definitive one way or the other!