Elemental: War of Magic Lore Q&A

To clarify what Stardock’s partnership with Random House on Elemental: War of Magic is all about, Gamasutra caught up with CEO Brad Wardell for a brief Q&A about his Elemental: Destiny’s Embers novel, the contributions RH is making to the game’s lore, and more.

It seems odd that you wrote the external book, and then Random House editors wrote the in-game fiction. Isn’t that the opposite of what you would expect?

BW: It turned out that it was a lot harder to do the game than to do the book, because the game has so much lore — every city, every monster, every character needs background. I’m not as strong at that.

The whole book has maybe ten characters, whereas the game has a hundred characters, and all the various [fictional] technology you run into. If you ever played Galactic Civilizations, you know the kind of stuff I come up with there — “Laser 4.” They can come up with stuff that’s a lot richer.

The book was more of an arc — ten or so characters, things happen to them. [Random House] provided a heck of a lot of editorial help to keep me away from hackneyed cliches. You know, “Be careful here — what you think is subtle is not as subtle as you may think.” My idea of foreshadowing tended to be, “Boom!” Right over the head. In chapter two, you’d already figured out what a particular character is all about. They helped with that kind of structure.