Chris Metzen Interview on Auroboros: Coils of the Serpent

Following his departure from Blizzard Entertainment, and some sufficient time to decompress, Chris Metzen started Warchief Gaming, a company specializing in tabletop roleplaying. Which later resulted in the creation of Auroboros: Coils of the Serpent, a D&D campaign setting based on one of Metzen’s early tabletop adventures.

When this project arrived to Kickstarter back in 2021, it was promptly funded to the tune of $1.2 million despite only asking for $50,000. This success eventually led to a Worldbook describing the setting’s world of Lawbrand and a novel entitled Auroboros: Under the Sun that’s positioned as a retelling of the tabletop adventure that started it all.

And with Metzen now back at Blizzard as a creative advisor for current and future Warcraft projects, Wowhead brings us this interview with the man focusing on the Auroboros setting, its origins, Blizzard connections, and future prospects.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

Looking at ways to enjoy the world of Lawbrand, we as World of Warcraft players took a particularly good look at the new species introduced with your campaign setting. One of the five new playable species in the world of Lawbrand is the Desert Dwarves of the Eastern Wastes. What differentiates them from the dwarves of World of Warcraft?

I grew up in the desert, riding dirtbikes and dune buggies, going to off-road races, this and that. While we started our campaign in a very typical D&D world, the Lawbrand campaign, which was the second of three campaigns, was supposed to be much more familiar and fun. When you look at the map of Lawbrand you’ll notice that it looks a lot like Southern California.

So when we created our characters back in the day, my friend Mike would try to come up with races and species that would fit into this landscape, and so the Desert Dwarves were born. They know how to survive in the horrible hot desert and how to do things under the most hostile circumstance – they are specialists. When we looked at possible new species for Auroboros, we found that the Desert Dwarves could become a pretty strong and flavorful archetype in our world.