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Episode 21: Bryan Young - Space Wizards and Giant Robots
74 Plays11 months ago
Host Alan Bahr is joined by Bryan Young, of Star Wars, Battletech, Robotech and more! We talk about IPs, movies, reviews, feedback, and how writing in others sandboxes goes.
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Transcript
Introduction to Radio Free RPG
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Alan Barr, and this is Radio Free RPG. Hello, I'm Alan Barr, and welcome to Radio Free RPG.
Meet Brian Young: Author & Media Commentator
00:00:32
Speaker
Today I'm joined by my guest, Brian Young. Brian is an author of fiction, both gaming-related and non-gaming-related, as well as a media commentator and general all-around literary get-about. Hi Brian, how are you today? I'm splendid, how about yourself? I am doing well. Brian is laughing at me because he has not experienced my, as we call it, NPR voice yet, and he was having a brief chuckle there. So.
00:01:02
Speaker
All right, Brian, let's talk about what you've done. So why don't you give us a rundown of what makes Brian Young, Brian Young? In a general sense or in the intersection between fiction and gaming?
Star Wars and Filmmaking Journey
00:01:14
Speaker
Because those are two huge different questions. Let's do both. So obviously I know you primarily as a writer from our connection there, but you also do quite a bit of other stuff. I know you've worked with Lucasfilm on Star Wars.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, no, right now I'm having a lot of fun. I've done a lot of different stuff in the Star Wars realm, whether that's in the journalist space doing... I wrote for StarWars.com for a long time. I write for Star Wars Insider magazine.
00:01:47
Speaker
I cover Star Wars for other outlets. Right now, if you've picked up any of the top movie trading cards that they do for Star Wars, if you turn those over and look at the backs, I've written a lot of those over the last few years. Okay. So that's some of the stuff I do. I also do a lot of filmmaking and that sort of thing. That was my day job up until recently, until I've gone full-time artist.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I do documentaries and features and short films and things like that. And gaming is always something that's been very close to me and so is being a fan of things and that was how I
00:02:29
Speaker
got to step into working on the robo tech role playing
Role in Robotech RPG
00:02:33
Speaker
game. Sure. And I didn't actually write any of the game mechanics like I'm not a game mechanic person. I'm a game master. And so they brought me on because I was a fan of robo tech, and know how to run games. So they asked me to break down the story for
00:02:54
Speaker
you know, break down the story of the show to include four game masters who might want to run that stuff. And I wrote tons of fiction for it. Sure. So I just I kind of do a little bit of everything. I like to say I'm a storyteller, regardless of the medium, because that's really what I like doing, whether that's a story on a tabletop or a story in a novel format or a short story, or
00:03:22
Speaker
film or whatever, I just really like telling stories. OK. Well, that's wonderful.
Writing for BattleTech
00:03:28
Speaker
So you also have worked on BattleTech, the catalyst game, mostly in the fiction side for materials adjacent to their war game and RPG. Yes, mostly. Yeah. So I've done a bunch of stuff. I've written two full length novels for them.
00:03:51
Speaker
And I've done some other collections of novellas and things. If you take a look at their Alpha Strike box set, though, they asked me to write a novella of fiction that comes with the box. But all of the characters I included in the fiction, I got to write all the game cards for them so you can play all those characters in the game. And I think I've probably I've probably written
00:04:18
Speaker
a quarter of a million words of fiction for them. Wow. You know, it's it's a lot. I mean, that's half of that is just the one the one book. My most recent full length novel, A Question of Survival is it's a big book. It's about 100000 words. But yeah, I've been working with them to advance the universe. And the story that the universe has been going, it's it's weird, like BattleTech. I was familiar with it. I played the video games and stuff, but I'd never played the tabletop.
00:04:48
Speaker
And I didn't realize when I got sort of asked to step into that world how much history in the fiction that world actually has. So it was quite a steep climb to figure out how to actually start creating in that universe. It's a immense universe with a lot of detail and nuance to it.
00:05:09
Speaker
almost impenetrable in some stages to a casual observer outside. And that's really one of the tasks I took. No one assigned me to do it, but that was something that I kind of took on myself is that I want to make sure that all the stuff I'm writing
00:05:24
Speaker
for BattleTech for them is stuff that doesn't have that steep climb to get into, that anybody who wants to check out a book just because it's for me or they're interested in stepping into the world is going to have that easy way in. I did an interview once with Max Allen Collins, who he wrote Batman comics for ages. He writes all kinds of mystery stories. He's finishing up the Mickey Spillane books that were unpublished now.
00:05:54
Speaker
He's just a huge like Titan in the industry of writing generally. And I did an interview with him and he told me that the advice he got when he was starting out was when he was writing comics to make sure that every comic book was capable of being someone's first comic book, right? That they would have all of the context and knowledge they would need to step into the world from there.
00:06:24
Speaker
And when I'm working in IPs, whether it's, whether it's your stuff, which I've done a couple of stories in or whether it's battle tech or robo tech, my charge personally is really to make sure that people can understand the universe without it feeling
Creating Mechas and Monsters Novella
00:06:39
Speaker
impenetrable or, or a, you know, an inner circle sort of club that they're not a part of. Right. So.
00:06:47
Speaker
I mean, as you brought up, you've written Welcome to Paradise, which was a mechas and monsters evolved novella for my company Galen in games. Yeah. You seem to have a thing for giant robots. That seems to be where where I've gotten the most where I didn't necessarily have that. I just I'm a big fan of that sort of stuff, whether it's in video games or robots are very cool. It's hard not to be a fan. Yeah, no, it's it is cool stuff. And the fact that I can get paid to write about them
00:07:17
Speaker
is delightful to me. Right. Yes. There was a reason a giant robot game was my second project ever. So it's hard not to love them. Yeah. So it's interesting. You brought up something I want to touch on. You said every fiction piece or comic in this case should be some able to be somebody's entry point.
00:07:41
Speaker
Now, that, to me, as an RPG publisher, that seems like an impossible task. There is no way for me to turn a supplemental splat book into someone's entry point because it usually doesn't have the core book, which would be the default entry point. Now, as somebody who is primarily a storyteller, because I come at this from a rules perspective, if you hand me a book, the first thing I look at are the rules.
00:08:08
Speaker
Can I play out of this book? If no, it's not an entry point. But as a storyteller, how would you approach turning some supplemental like a setting book that goes adjacent to the core book or an adventure into somebody's first entry point? What would you process that like?
00:08:24
Speaker
So for me, one of the things like I collect RPG books, I love RPG books, and it doesn't matter if I've played the system or not. Sure. The storytelling elements, even if the stats don't match whatever game I might be playing, I can go through and look at those storytelling elements and find things that I want to use for my game. I'm the sort, though, who I have. I struggle with like printed story supplements. OK. Right. Like I.
00:08:56
Speaker
I struggle to run them. I don't struggle to buy them. Trust me, I don't struggle to buy them. But I struggle to play them completely as written. I tend to go through them.
00:09:08
Speaker
read them, which feels like a very easy way to be an entry point, even if I'm not involved in the game and sort of take out all the best stuff that I might want to use in my game and adapt it to my players. I think there's so much adaptation that goes on that any of those supplemental books are valuable for somebody, even if they don't have the core book.
00:09:31
Speaker
Regardless, so so if I were approaching that, it would just be to put the best story possible in there regardless of the mechanics around it. And it's interesting because as a publisher, my goal would be to get somebody buying into my rule set, not taking it and applying it to somebody else's game because I want them to stick inside my ecosystem. Right. And that's an interesting and interesting angle to come at it from. And I'm going to be mulling over that one for a bit, I think. So.
00:10:01
Speaker
as somebody who collects RPGs, what are some of the ones that have had a big influence on you and your writing and storytelling?
Influences and Storytelling in RPGs
00:10:11
Speaker
Naturally, my first RPG was the West End Games D6 Star Wars game. And I played the hell out of that. I still have shelves full of that. And that's helped me professionally, too, since I write so much about Star Wars and so much of the Star Wars universe that we know is predicated on
00:10:29
Speaker
that RPG and all of the stuff that Bill Slavosack and all those other guys put together for that. Like the vocabulary of Star Wars was built in that RPG. So that one's very influential for me. All the Palladium books. Sure. Right. Like I thought it was
00:10:48
Speaker
It was really poetic for me to be able to get to work on the new version of the Robotech RPG, because I still had all of the Palladium books on my shelf. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game was probably the most played amongst my friend group, more than D&D, tied maybe with Star Wars, but like more than D&D, we'd play Middle Earth role-playing the
00:11:14
Speaker
the role master version of that. But that whole Palladium ecosystem was something that we got brought up on. Looking back at it now, Palladium doesn't feel like the most intuitive system. And I realized how much we were like home brewing the rules to make sense of them.
00:11:34
Speaker
But I still can't think of anything more fun than than breaking down all the bio we have a mutant animal and making a character like that. Like even if you don't play the game, building a mutant animal is just fun. I have all of the the after the bomb books on my shelf, as well as several copies of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other strangeness that I quite like. That game is definitely one that hits the table more than I
00:12:04
Speaker
more than most people would probably think at my house. Yeah, no, and it's it's I feel like there's actually sort of like a missing hole in role playing right now.
00:12:15
Speaker
because, you know, Palladium lost the Turtles license, they lost the Robotech license and the Turtles games that have come out since Palladium, I don't think come at it from the same direction. Sure. And I feel like,
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, no, I just I really love that game. I've got mutants down under and transdimensional are two of like the best books ever. And I just still flip through them. As a note for listeners, the After the Bomb Deluxe hardcover edition that Palladium has on their website does contain the original printing of both the core Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, as well as the GM screen adventure in the back of it in full. So you get the new book and you get a reprint of the original.
00:13:05
Speaker
Does it have a lot of the like TMNT specific stuff stripped out of it, though? No. Oh, it's a straight reprint. It's all there. Cool. I'm going to have to get one of those. I now that I've said this, I don't know if I'm going to get them in trouble. So rush out and buy it. But yes, I ordered a copy just for myself and I was pleased to find that at the back. So. All right. So, oh, man, I love that game.
00:13:33
Speaker
Eric Wojcik's work in the industry was, I think he's underappreciated for how monolithically influential his work was to a lot of people in that era. Between Amber Diceless, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and all the stuff he was doing around Palladium. He really was making a big impact.
00:13:57
Speaker
you like playing games, you like writing fiction for games, what is it like to adapt a fiction that comes primarily from a gaming space into
Adapting Games to Literary Works
00:14:07
Speaker
a literary sense? Unlike adapting Star Wars is different in some senses, I would say, because Star Wars is governed by a core committee who kind of oversees the universe and maintains a level of continuity or canada.
00:14:23
Speaker
canonical foundational material, right? Whereas a lot of gaming space names like BattleTech or Robotech, while they have a core material, the gamers are so used to iterating upon that to make it their own at their home table, that you are sort of selling to an audience who is used to being at least partially the author of the medium. And how does that make you approach your work?
00:14:50
Speaker
So with BattleTech specifically, why don't we start with Robotech, actually? Robotech's a little easier. So the way I approached Robotech is for the Robotech RPG, I was tasked with creating all the scenarios for GMs based on the episodes. Each episode, with a few exceptions, across season one, and then the book for season two should be coming out, season two and three should be coming out this year.
00:15:20
Speaker
And I did all the scenarios for those as well. I approached it with like, if you want to play the episode, if you want to place your characters in this episode, here are the things that I think make this episode tick that might be interesting for your characters. And then I would create fiction around these moments to support those ideas or to give players and gamers ideas about where they could take their game.
00:15:50
Speaker
And Robotech is a little different in that where the fiction I was writing is stuff that is really built to raise ideas, right? To create ideas and to spur ideas.
00:16:04
Speaker
know, speaking of the the old Palladium books, right, like some of my favorite things in the Turtles books were the comics that they had in there of the stories where it was like, wait a second, we can play things like this Halloween party, right, or things like that. Like, you can see immediately, like one of the turtles dressed up as an HR Giger alien, because it's so like,
00:16:28
Speaker
imprinted in your memory in that comic in the book. That is a great episode of the animated cartoon with the magic meatballs that turned them into monsters. Yeah. My wife was shocked when I watched that the other day and could still quote it line for line. I think she realized how much we watched. But with but and so it was also to kind of use the fiction to give character give players ideas of what the inner lives of characters might be like.
00:16:59
Speaker
But Robotech, I had to create all the fiction that would that would be contained in the book itself in the rules. And that's like half the book with BattleTech. There is a very long it's more like Star Wars than that, right, where there is a large continuity and it's very meticulously plotted by a committee. I mean, I I can't say much about what we discussed, but right just a couple of months ago,
00:17:28
Speaker
I was invited with a number of other writers to go to Seattle to plan the next few years of the overarching narrative of BattleTech. And it was a lot of fun. And part of what we held was, where can players find somewhere to play? Where are these places that players can find?
00:17:54
Speaker
That's a lot of my philosophy is like, where can I create cracks for players? Where can I create ideas that if players want to jump in on similar ideas, they can do so. But I still think with role-playing games like BattleTech or like Star Wars, they understand that there's the cannon that runs in this direction, but I can take all my stuff in that direction if I want to.
00:18:21
Speaker
But the other the other interesting element of it, though, is to make it feel as though I'm respecting the rules or respecting things that they can do in the rules. Like if I were to if I were to have the mechs do things that they can't accomplish in the rules, it might frustrate those core readers. But in some cases with BattleTech, I'm told that like
00:18:45
Speaker
Half the readers don't play the game, and half the gamers don't read the books. So it's like, how do I make it interesting for the people who don't play the game? How do I make it understandable to people who don't play the game? And how do I make the game elements feel accurate and true to their experience? So part of that is playing. Part of that is going through the rules and figuring out what's possible. And part of it is getting, I mean,
00:19:15
Speaker
Battletech is exhausting and how many mechs there are, and how many different loadouts to mechs there are, and which factions might use which mechs. And making sure I get all that right is important. It's not always something I do get right, and that's why there's a fact check team. But it's... I imagine that's daunting. There was a lot of data there to sift through.
00:19:40
Speaker
I'm often impressed, you know, I will see things in, for example, The Mandalorian. They had one of the troop transports that had first debuted in a Western Games book. Yeah. And it never really showed up again outside of that. And they just had it in the background going by. And I'm sure that was the work of Pablo Hidalgo, who came up through Western Games into Lucasfilm as sort of their
00:20:02
Speaker
What would you he's their story manager. His title I think is a creative like creative executive or something like that. It's responsible for maintaining sort of the lore and the canon and ensuring all these pieces fit. I think Pablo's job has shifted a little bit and don't quote me on this but I know we're being recorded but I think
00:20:25
Speaker
a lot of what he does now is sits with the creatives and says, here's how you can leverage what we've already got. Rather than create a new planet, this one is really unused and it already fits and exists. Let's just use this. That's how we got Sagarera in Rogue One. He was sitting there with the writers and they were going, we need this real Che Guevara character. He's like, well, we have one.
00:20:51
Speaker
And here he is from the Clone Wars TV series, and here's how you could use him, and here's how you could change him. And they're like, this is perfect. And they plucked him. They plucked him out of the cartoon and put him right in the movie. And it creates that inner connection. Sure. And he's really good at that. And BattleTech, all of these big franchises have people that are really good at that. Right. Hopefully. Yes.
00:21:19
Speaker
that you mentioned the cracks in the space for gamers and that is something that I think the Western games are PG for Star Wars into great effect with books like Lords of the Expanse, right?
Crafting Content Without a Default Setting
00:21:31
Speaker
Which is this fantastic new area to explore that has a very Star Wars, but still distinct from the core Star Wars feel to it. But as Star Wars has grown bigger, that is a little bit harder to produce because there's already so much to work with.
00:21:47
Speaker
And there is an expectation of the familiar to a degree, I think. Which can be good and bad, because it can make the universe feel small, but it also makes it feel accessible. But by contrast, when you wrote Welcome to Paradise for Mechaz and Monsters Evolved, there is no default setting in that game. There is no established
00:22:08
Speaker
canon other than the rule chassis that the game presents because it presents a myriad of settings to play in an experience. What was that like? Because you were functionally given a writing assignment that said make it feel like the game and you can either use any of these settings that you want or you can just make a new one. It felt a little bit
00:22:33
Speaker
Like, I mean, if I mean, obviously you've read it, it feels it felt to me like the sort of game I'd want to play. Right. And that's kind of how I approached it. And I approached it like if I were game mastering this, if I were in charge of this game, what would I put? What pieces would I put on the board? But to tell a really fun story. Sure. And you know, it I went through all of the scenarios and picked stuff
00:23:03
Speaker
that I thought I could work with. And again, it was that same feeling I find when I'm a game master going through the book going where the cracks I can slip into. Sure. But I wanted to make it feel like the game and the game is very much like
00:23:19
Speaker
you're gonna get to punch some monsters and you're gonna have really huge mechs. But the kind of games I really like playing are all those sort of snarky, not that I like playing them, but that's what they all descend to that snarky sort of like group of people who are kind of good, but like bad enough that they try to pull one of these schemes.
00:23:45
Speaker
The lovable rogues. Yeah, exactly. The lovable rogues. And taking that and going like, how would I do Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but with giant mechs and monsters?
00:24:00
Speaker
That's really that that was. That was really fun to do. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, because when you pitched the pitch to me, I immediately mentally likened it to the Brothers Grimm movie, but with meccas and monsters.
00:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great movie. I mean, Terry Gilliam. Yes. Does that in a in a really great way. I really like that movie. But I mean, we all have we all have different touchstones for that. But but if you go back looking at Butch and Sundance and the relationship between the two main characters, you're going to see a lot of Butch and Sundance there. But I can see the Brothers Grimm now that you say that.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because I own Butch and Sundance and I've seen it a dozen times. I do not own the Brothers Agreement. I've seen it once. But for some reason, that was the reference my brain went to. It's always interesting what sort of twigs those mental connections for us. Yeah. So you work a lot in established lore, but what about sort of implicit or anti-canon settings?
Challenges of Writing in Conflicted Settings
00:25:05
Speaker
So, for example,
00:25:07
Speaker
Galanine Games just released one of my games, which, shocking, they released my game because I own the company. I can make them do that. Called Shadows of a Dying Sun, and it's a dying Earth genre role-playing game, but the game is explicitly anti-canon. So there are tables that allow you to generate world details, but they deliberately contradict with each other.
00:25:29
Speaker
and it's put upon the GM to sort of resolve that conflict when playing the game. So in a situation like that, as a storyteller, how do you approach that idea that the pieces maybe don't fit together? So I kind of really like that. One of my favorite things to do, part of the reason I like Star Wars so much is that I love seeing those puzzles where I go, hey, that doesn't fit. Wait, how could that fit? And then reverse engineer reasons for it to fit. And I think that's what,
00:25:58
Speaker
writers and storytellers and game masters do really well. So that's kind of fun. My concern about if I were to sit down and go, OK, I'm going to write a story in this universe that people are going to read, would be worried that that people would start taking that as the canon because it's the published fiction.
00:26:20
Speaker
But no, I really enjoy working in those spaces and those contradictions and trying to come up with reasons to make that stuff work. And that's part of why I can't find plot holes in Star Wars. There aren't any, right? There's a logical explanation for absolutely everything. And anytime anybody has tried to test me on that, I've come up with something and they go, OK, fine. I can vouch for this, listeners, as I've tried that.
00:26:50
Speaker
So, you know, we've talked about your writing. Now let's talk about your freelancing in the sense of as a freelancer, you work in multiple IPs that you have to keep distinct. Some of them might share common threads and some might not. For example, you finished a tiny supers related novella for me recently that shares no similarities to this giant robot thing you seem to have going on. Probably felt refreshing to maybe not do a big stompy robot for a minute. It was. It was.
00:27:21
Speaker
As somebody writing in somebody else's universe, when you are approached by a publisher saying, I would like you to write XYZ in XYZ universe, what is the information you look for to get? You know, pitching you to write this novella was the first long form prose we'd commissioned. We'd done short form prose, you know, in our books, smallest chapters or whatever, to kind of set the mood or the theme.
00:27:49
Speaker
But with this long-form prose, it was the first time I'd ever done that. And I didn't really have a good grasp of what I was supposed to be presenting or asking or looking for. So what would you say you would expect to get from a publisher who had it together in that position? So I think you had it together just fine, actually. We sat down. You gave me both books I needed that established the setting and the characters. And you gave me
00:28:17
Speaker
the taste you had in your mouth for the stories, the kind of stories that you wanted to tell. And I went back and I've read a whole bunch of those comics. I mean, I'm a huge comics fan anyway, so that was no big stretch.
00:28:32
Speaker
but a list of stuff that has a similar flavor and the source material is really, really all I needed. And I mean, I sent you a pitch and you were like, that's great. Let's go with that. And I worked really hard to make it feel like, even though you were reading prose, to try to make it feel like issues of a comic.
Writing Across Different IPs
00:28:55
Speaker
And that was really all I needed. And I mean, I'll be honest, it was harder to start writing for something like BattleTech, not just because of the expanse of the canon, but because there's no solid answers about where to start to write. Every BattleTech fan that you run into has a different idea of where you should start and where you're going to get the best sense of the universe.
00:29:20
Speaker
And it really depends on, I mean, I kind of got thrown in the deep end with my first BattleTech novel because I was told I was going to be doing something in a certain era. And I needed to focus on this particular faction. And then I got told, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this faction that you've been researching in this bit of the world and this space, we're not going to do anything there. We're going to move you forward 100 years or 75 years.
00:29:50
Speaker
And you're going to be working with the Jade Falcons. What do you know about the Jade Falcons? And I'm like, what's a Jade Falcon? And so I had to start over with my learning curve all over again. And it was difficult that way because there's so many different flavors of BattleTech, right? And so when you're dealing with something like superheroes, like tiny supers,
00:30:16
Speaker
It has a very clear vision. You put in the book, like, this is the feel the stories are supposed to have that you're telling. Like, there's this feeling of hope that I want to imbue in all of these stories that you're going to be able to tell with this rule set. And, you know, I kind of leaned back on my Palladium Heroes Unlimited days too, right?
00:30:39
Speaker
being able to figure out, and you talked about when we spoke this idea of these young superhero teams, and you gave me the team that you wanted me to work with, and then reading them, reading all the data you gave me on them, and then reading all the source material that inspired you, and had been stuff that I'd read before and it had inspired me as well. I locked in, I think, I mean, I haven't heard otherwise, but I think I locked into what you were hoping for.
00:31:09
Speaker
I'm notorious for usually saying, that's great, thanks, and moving on. So I could do better at giving specific feedback, but I quite loved the novella. I didn't have any concerns or issues with it. I am terse at the best of times. So if I say that's great, thanks, that usually means I loved it. No notes.
00:31:32
Speaker
Some of my artists have given me grief about that over the years because at a certain point I have just started hitting the thumbs up button on Facebook when they sent me art. So I need to stop doing that.
00:31:47
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, like, maybe that's something I really like it when I get some of that feedback to say, even even if it was like, like, I really love relationships with editors where it's like, this is 90% great, but this 10% is going to change that or here's how I wish it could be fixed because those fixes are actually usually pretty easy and
00:32:11
Speaker
Okay. I like hearing what works and what doesn't. We haven't finished editing it yet. So now you're going to get notes. No, I appreciate that. I'm going to redline it. Here we go. It makes a better, it makes better material. It absolutely does. No. And it's interesting because I'm very comfortable in the RPG space giving those kinds of notes because that's where I spend all my time. But my skillset as sort of a prose editor is far weaker.
00:32:37
Speaker
you were to send me the same story as like an adventure outline for tiny supers, I would be very adept at like, no, this doesn't work. No, I see where you're going. But let's try this instead. Or something that would fly off my brain. I wouldn't even think twice about it. But the minute you turn it into fiction, I freeze up and go wait, hang on. So one one tip for that is to think about
00:33:03
Speaker
the feedback of a reader and what's working and what doesn't is more helpful than actually saying, here's how you fix this, right? Saying the ending didn't land for me and here's the feeling I got.
00:33:18
Speaker
doesn't take any expertise, because the expertise is you as a human. And that's, and that's almost more helpful than than more prescriptive sort of notes. Interesting. And that is not how I would ever approach an RPG adventure. If somebody submitted one to me, I would say no, the linear narrative here is broken. Here's what you need to do to address it. Here's where it breaks. Here's where we fix it. Right? Because that is
00:33:44
Speaker
it has to be a skeletal framework that is handed off to somebody else to interpret. And so it needs to be as tight as possible. Yeah. Which I think is very interesting that they are very similar, but yet so different in how you have to approach the final product.
00:34:00
Speaker
Yeah, well, because they're they're being used for different things. All right. Like pros is pros is entertainment as in that's the end use for it. But a game module is the blueprint for someone having a really great night. Right. I'm fond of Caribbean and I believe it was Robin laws who said this and if I'm wrong, correct me. But that RPGs are the only or one of the only mediums where the author is also the audience.
00:34:30
Speaker
at the same time. You don't get that with video games or movies or comics really in the same way. And that's a different perspective to approach as we work in these spaces as creatives.
00:34:43
Speaker
So that's first of all that feedback was helpful and I think it'll be helpful for people listening and I think that's a great way to stop and think as we work through this because RPGs in fiction have been entwined since the days of you know Dragon Lancer earlier through White Wolf and their vampire and
00:35:01
Speaker
other World of Darkness fiction down to modern day Green Ronin's doing stuff. Galena Games has started doing stuff, you know, and it has been and I think will always be hand in hand in this space to a degree. Yeah, no, I don't disagree at all. Hey, girls, stop.
00:35:37
Speaker
We've had quite a bit of snow here and the snow plow just went by and my dogs were less fans of that experience for some reason, despite it happening every day for six months. Well, they, uh, they're just trying to protect you from the big scary plow. Yes. No, I'll have to edit that entire chunk out. All right. And let me just check the, I'm going to plug a timer in here so I know. There's my notes.
00:36:11
Speaker
Alright, so we were discussing, hang on, I lost my train of thought. What were we talking about? Stuff, whatever, okay. So discussing this blending of storytelling, do you practice your stories as you tell, before you write them in plain RPGs?
Avoiding Game-like Prose in Writing
00:36:32
Speaker
Do you kind of sit down and say, hey, we're gonna play and maybe I'll adapt some of that? Not really.
00:36:39
Speaker
One of the things like I went back and reread those early Dragon Lance novels and you can see the dice rolls and the GM railroading pretty clearly. The thing I use for inspiration in my role playing games is really allowing. I love being surprised by my players. I'm almost always the GM. I never get to be a player usually.
00:37:05
Speaker
I love being surprised by my players because I'll think of a situation and go, if I were a player, I'd go left. And then the players go, no, no, no, I'm going right. And working through that and trying to figure out how to tell the story best in a way that's gonna be fun for everybody with those right turns where I would have gone left has taught me, and every time I play, it teaches me so much about what I can do with my characters.
00:37:34
Speaker
So really the inspiration from the role playing games, it just sort of expands my horizons of what I feel like my fiction might be capable of. And sometimes there might be moments I might use or things like that, but for the most part, you know, I never want somebody to read my book and go, oh, I can see the dice rolls in the fiction. Okay. Do you, do you enjoy playing
00:38:03
Speaker
playing the games that you write in? Yeah, no, I've had a lot of fun in BattleTech. Robotech has been a lot of fun. It's a really interesting system. It's not something I can play a whole ton. I feel like. I wish I could play more. Part of my problem is is that my role playing group for the last 10 years has been my son and his friends and. They're all like 2021, 22 now, so they're all like.
00:38:32
Speaker
in college and too busy to play. So I don't get to play as much as I do anymore, which is the huge disadvantage. Like it was great. I was like, this is great. I just made my own role playing group. Like I've got my kid and he brought his friends over and we play and it's great.
00:38:48
Speaker
but I don't get to play as much as I'd like to anymore. And I need to find a group of adults other than them because they're like in college and busy adults. Yeah. They're, they're all children. We, uh, we had a lot of fun. We went and we went, I took them, I had a press screening of the D and D movie and I took them to go see it with me and it was, it was a really great experience. That's awesome. I imagine it would be a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:39:17
Speaker
It's interesting. Okay. So we're closing in
George Lucas and the Clone Wars Premiere
00:39:21
Speaker
on time here. So I generally have a few questions I ask at the end here. Um, the first one is, is there a question you've always wanted to be asked in an interview? And if so, what is it? And then I'm going to ask you, you know, it's, I really like talking about my, I really like talking about like,
00:39:46
Speaker
other stuff that I've done, but people tend to focus on this stuff. But like, I don't know, there's all kinds of stories that I have that nobody ever gives me an opportunity to tee up, but tell us one right now. Uh, so I'll, how about I give you a few options and you can pick which one you want. Okay. Sounds great. Um, I built a spaceship in my mom's backyard.
00:40:10
Speaker
I impersonated a television crew at Sundance to promote a movie, or the time George Lucas heckled my interview. I would like to hear that third one, I think that sounds amazing. So yeah, this is the first time I ever met George Lucas. And this was a really interesting time.
00:40:33
Speaker
Back when the Clone Wars was starting, no one was really covering it. And I don't know if you remember, but like 10, 15 years ago, websites didn't do reviews of every episode of TV the way they do now. And I was working, I'd created a website called Big Shiny Robot.
00:40:53
Speaker
because I was writing for Huffington Post, but they were like, I was able to sneak in a little bit of nerd stuff, but I really wanted to write about nerd stuff. So when the Clone Wars TV started, TV show started, I started reviewing every episode on Big Shiny Robot and Lucasfilm noticed because I was the only one doing that. So for season two, they started approaching me and I got to do like interviews and they'd send me clips. But for season three, they invited me to Lucasfilm to come to the premiere at the Presidio.
00:41:23
Speaker
And there were three press people there total. It was me. It was Eric Goldman who now runs fandom but was at IGN at the time and Cartoon Network's own camera crew was there and that was it. And they had the huge red carpet with the step and repeat and everything. And so we got to talk to everybody. And two of the people that were there were
00:41:49
Speaker
Seth Green and Matt Sennreich, who do Robot Chicken. And at the time they were developing what we now know is Star Wars detours, which is still sort of a canceled project, I guess, but they were developing that actively. This is before Disney had bought them and sort of canceled that. And I was interviewing them and sort of asking them information about it. And they were kind of hemming and hawing and giving me some really funny answers. And all of a sudden I hear over my shoulder,
00:42:18
Speaker
don't listen to a word these guys say. And then this voice leans over to them and goes, don't tell this guy a thing. And I look over and that's George Lucas. And George Lucas just he crashes the interview, he interrupts, he just starts making fun of Matt and Seth, he starts making fun of me. He's just having a grand old time laughing hysterically about all of this. And
00:42:45
Speaker
I'm not sure what to do at this point, because this is the first time I've met George Lucas. First words George Lucas has ever said to me is don't listen to a word these guys say in the middle of me on a red carpet interviewing Seth Green and Matt Sennreich.
00:43:01
Speaker
So they finally, like, this is the last thing, they, you know, sort of wave everybody along and say, OK, we're going to go into the screening now. And I was hanging out with the supervising effects director of the Clone Wars, a guy named Joel Aaron. And he and I were talking and we kind of go into the theater together and he's we're talking about the show and what's going on. And then George Lucas and Seth Green march in behind us, sit down right behind us.
00:43:29
Speaker
And then George Lucas proceeds to basically do an audio commentary the entire time of the season three premiere of Clone Wars. And I could not believe any of this was happening. I imagine. Yeah, no, like I was I was. After the screening, it was like there was cast crew, literally three members of the press and then a theater full of like kids from like the local like Boys and Girls Club.
00:43:59
Speaker
and they'd given all of these kids lightsabers and so at the end of the screening I'm sort of backing away and all the kids have swarmed George Lucas and he's just signing lightsabers and I'm literally backing away like I don't want to like end this I don't want to like stop looking at it but I still feel like I need to go because it can't get better than this and then the publicist
00:44:21
Speaker
that I work with a lovely woman called Tracy Canobio. And she's still there at Lucasfilm and she's amazing. Runs up to me and goes, Brian, you can't leave yet. Like, did you wanna meet George? And I'm like, yeah. So we go around and I'm glad I have pictures of this. Cause I have no idea what, I feel like we talked about Akira Kurosawa for about three minutes. As one should.
00:44:48
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think I thanked him. It was very much like thanks for Star Wars because it brought me to all of this other stuff that that I know you like and he seemed happy with that. And I couldn't like it was like I couldn't imagine a better end of the night. And when I got to interview him later, like maybe a year later, maybe two years later,
00:45:13
Speaker
it was hard because they gave me the, you're not allowed to ask about Star Wars. So I had 15 minutes to talk to George Lucas about anything but Star Wars. So I started gearing all my questions in a way that might prompt him to, but, and it worked, but no, it was, that was the most bizarre night of my life. Like you don't ever expect like to be interviewing somebody and then have George Lucas just come in and start like heckling you.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah, I would be shocked that that happened to me, mostly because I don't go to Star Wars events. So it'd be really surprising. Well, I didn't even know he was there either, right? So this was like, it was doubly shocking because we're at the Presidio. We're at Lucasfilm, but it's this weird press cast crew screening. You don't expect George Lucas to just be hanging around and then let alone
00:46:09
Speaker
Just show up and start making fun of people. That's a great story. I'm glad you shared that. Thank you. It's weird. I've done a lot of weird things. I've had a weird life. Better than being boring. Do you have any questions for me? When are we going to do something else? Okay. Well, you want to join one of my online RPGs so you can be a player?
00:46:38
Speaker
Maybe. All right. Well, we can do that. Yeah, we need to do a new project. We can talk about that. Man, that way to put me on the spot looking for work. No, no, no, right? No, it's no, no way. Put my feet to the fire. I'm okay with it.
00:46:53
Speaker
No, we should schedule another time to talk about it. We should. I would love to sort of get your feedback on Shadow of a Dying Sun. I think you'd have some insights. That would be really interesting. So I'll shoot you a PDF.
00:47:10
Speaker
of that, but I'd love to talk about that. And next time I'm in Utah, we'll have to play a game. I was out there in October for a writer's conference and I ran an impromptu cave person RPG where they could only say the three words they knew. So they had to communicate with only those three words the whole game. I love those games that have those really weird constraints. I did a book signing. I would let them draw cave person art to communicate if they wanted to.
00:47:40
Speaker
I did a book signing. Maybe it was it was in December, and myself and two other authors. We had a GM come in and we played a game where we were all ourselves as authors.
00:47:55
Speaker
playing a game, so we were essentially bards. And we each had one cantrip, but we could do no combat because it was us. And so we did this in front of an audience, and it was so fun to just do this all bards and no combat nonsense in front of people. Yeah, those can be very fun liberating experiences. Sometimes they can be very stressful. Oh, yeah. But I mean, it's fun.
00:48:25
Speaker
I think some of my most successful games that I've run don't have combat. Oh, no, no, no. Combat is not required to make an RPG industry. No, I think there's a lot of people who fall into that that feel like if they're not having combat, then what are the players doing? But I swear some of the best sessions I've ever had
00:48:49
Speaker
never got anywhere near combat. I think it's because combat is the most visually understandable form of conflict for people to approach. Yeah. As a person who loves action movies and fight scenes and spent a lot of time working on that and studying choreography and things like that, it is a very easy to understand on a service level. They're very difficult to attain mastery of sort of medium of communication.
00:49:14
Speaker
It's interesting, I teach a lot of writing classes and I teach a class on dialogue. And one of the things that I tell my students, and I should probably talk to players more about, is that everything, every word that passes through your character's lips is an action that's on par with a punch, right? It has to be as equally motivated as them punching somebody in the face.
00:49:43
Speaker
why they're saying that is something that is really important. And so those scenes of role play where characters are talking and interacting that way have as much excitement, for me at least, in what can happen as a round of fisticuffs. Absolutely. I think I might have to have you back and we can talk about that topic. I think we could probably do a whole episode on that easily.
00:50:13
Speaker
Okay. All right, we'll set up the time.
Where to Support Brian's Work
00:50:16
Speaker
All right, Brian, if folks want to find you or support you online, what is the best way to do so? They can go to swankmotron.com, which is my which is my
00:50:26
Speaker
my writer website, so there's a shop there so you can buy signed copies of books and things like that. I've got a Patreon where I produce a short story every month, and that's at patreon.com slash swankmatron. You can find me on just about any social media platform there is at swankmatron. So swankmatron is really the name of the game. If you Google swankmatron or Brian Young, you're going to get that stuff.
00:50:55
Speaker
Excellent. Well, Brian, thank you for coming on and sharing your insight and your stories with us today. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me. This was a delight. Good. Folks, I'm Alan Barr and this has been Radio Free RPG.