AMA with Monte Cook (Numenera, D&D, Monte Cook Games, Malhavoc Press)

[Monte At Home]

Hi, Monte. I have heard that you were the creator of the Planescape NPC character, Tarsheva Longreach.
This NPC never received a write-up for stats, class, level, alignment, Faction, etc. However, if you are indeed the creator of this NPC, I thought you might have statted her and thought I'd ask. Or if you never did, you could do so NOW and post it! I'd be eternally grateful. (I don't care if they are 2nd Edition stats - that's fine...)

(P.S. If you are not her creator, maybe point me in the right direction as to who to ask?)

I did create her, in the Planewalker's Handbook. I wanted to have the voice of someone who had really been all over the multiverse--the quintessential Planescape character. She never had stats. I never wanted to stat her up because if she was meant to be the voice of knowledge, not someone you could fight or even partner with. A character without hit points can never die, if you see what I mean.

That said, in Ptolus I created a character called Sheva Callister. Sheva really was Tarsheva in every way. That means Tarsheva was probably about a 12th level fighter and is the very epitome of the Neutral alignment.

Sheva was also the main character in the Ptolus comic book series I wrote for Marvel. She carried a really evil, really powerful greatsword that she managed to master without being evil herself.

 

[Monte At Home]

Hi Monte, Thanks for all the games. I appreciate the fact that your game products are often the result of at the table play and you haven't rested on past ideas, but have moved onwards to interesting territory.

I've been debating running Masks of Nyralathotep, which you've mentioned you are as well. I've been debating which system to run it in: I lean towards Trail of Cthulhu instead of Call of Cthulhu as it is, but I'm also tempted by the Cypher system. I think the GM-freedom and the lack of skill "pressure" in the system could free up investigative play. I also think the rewarding of discovery through XP works well for Masks.

But I really like Trail of Cthulhu's drive mechanics. I'm tempted to port them over, and here's where I am of two minds: I could add an extension to the Cypher sentence, essentially making characters an "adjective noun who verb who believes in noun," but I wonder if adding the additional step is necessary. I think it would be quite reasonable to ask players to define a quality related to the Descriptor or Focus and use that as a mechanic in tandem with the horror options in the Cypher book.

So I thought I'd pick your brain: if you were running Masks in cypher, would you make alterations?

I think any of those three systems would be really cool. I think the Cypher System Rulebook has a lot of horror-specific tools and mechanics that would make Masks pretty fun--specifically the Horror Mode mechanic. I've already begun mulling over the places I'd use that in Masks.

Your idea of adding to the Cypher System's sentence is pretty cool. Probably not specifically necessary for Masks, but a fun idea for any setting, really.

 

[Monte At Home]

Hey Monte,

you've mentioned a few times here that you prefer to do new settings instead of revisiting old material, but have you considered redoing the old Dark Space Setting you wrote for Rolemaster/Spacemaster? It was one of my favorite books of yours, and I'd love to see it done for the Cypher System.

Also, we once talked breifly on Livejournal about the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, just after The Runes of the Earth was released - did you read the rest of the Last Chronicles as well, and what did you think? I admit I found Runes too depressed and too deep in self-pity, and never picked up the rest.

Greetings from Germany, we#re all just waiting for the translation of Numenera to get released

Concepts from Dark Space have creeped into my work here and there, but I don't currently have a plan to redo the book.

Sadly, I couldn't bring myself to finish the new Thomas Covenant books. They just didn't appeal, as difficult as it is for me to admit that. I read Runes of the Earth and the one after that, and I just couldn't get up the enthusiasm to keep going. Very sad.

 

[Monte At Home]

Mr.Cook
I want to design games. How can I safely spread my ideas around, without worrying someone will steal them? Do I need a contract first? Am I just worrying too much?

It all depends on what you mean by spreading your ideas around. If you mean submitting ideas to publishers, then yes, you're worrying too much. A real publisher wouldn't do that. Even if you don't want to believe in their good nature, it's simply not worth the time or trouble. If you get hired to write games, you're getting hired in part because of the ideas but just as much if not more to do the work--that is to say, create a publishable manuscript. Why would a publisher steal your ideas and then go through the work of writing them up themselves when they could just get you to do it and get both?

If you mean putting them into a blog or something like that for free, then yes, players and other bloggers will use them and spread them as well. That's the nature of the Internet. But that's actually what you want to have happen, because people take note of creators who generate that kind of interest.

It also greatly depends on the kind of game design you want to do. RPG design is pretty different from board or card game design, for example (the latter, where you create prototypes and shop them around, has its own "rules" but I'm no expert in that field).

 

[Monte At Home]

Okay guys! Thanks!

I'll stop back in later in the day tomorrow and wrap things up. So if you've got questions, get them in now.

And if you are interested in Numenera, whether you're a current player or someone who's just curious, please check out our current Kickstarter called Into the Ninth World. It's going really well and we're adding new material to what you get on a continuing basis. New players have the chance to get on good deals too, by selecting some of the bundles of past products at a discount as well as getting in on the new deals.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/montecookgames/numenera-into-the-ninth-world

 

[Elderbrain]

I did create her, in the Planewalker's Handbook. I wanted to have the voice of someone who had really been all over the multiverse--the quintessential Planescape character. She never had stats. I never wanted to stat her up because if she was meant to be the voice of knowledge, not someone you could fight or even partner with. A character without hit points can never die, if you see what I mean.

That said, in Ptolus I created a character called Sheva Callister. Sheva really was Tarsheva in every way. That means Tarsheva was probably about a 12th level fighter and is the very epitome of the Neutral alignment.

Sheva was also the main character in the Ptolus comic book series I wrote for Marvel. She carried a really evil, really powerful greatsword that she managed to master without being evil herself.

- O.k. Thanks, Monte! I really appreciate it. I'll have to go look at your other stuff, now! - Elderbrain

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Awesome. Love to hear that.

1. Not a lot. By the time I'd written that book, I was in the middle of running my third Ptolus campaign, so I had a lot of material to draw on. Some of the stuff in the book, of course, never got the focus that it did in the book. You know how PCs are. Sometimes they ignore plot hooks or turn left when there was something really interesting to the right.

2. I never developed those areas because I made it pretty clear to my players that--for all the reasons given in the book--Ptolus was where the action was. I always envisioned the rest of the world to be very low fantasy but not very D&D like, actually, because all the D&D-isms (dungeons, lots of monsters, lots of demons and undead, high level people running around) are crammed into Ptolus with explanations for why those--sometimes kind of weird--tropes actually exist there. That said, I think you are free to do with the rest of the world as you wish, of course.

I'm one of the DMs/players in the campaigns Emus is participating in. Love the book and the setting.

1) Beyond the Emperor of the Church declaring himself the Emperor of the Tarsisian Empire, how did the succession crisis play out in your campaigns? I'm ramping up the church intrigue in our campaign, with a push-back over the Emperor of the Church's move coming in our next adventure.

<strike>2) Obviously, the Big Book is VERY big, and there's Secrets of the Delvers Guild and more Ptolus stuff sprinkled through your other Malhavoc works (all of which I think I've tracked down) and some modules for other companies. Is there any chance of additional Ptolus stuff coming, even if it's just a data dump of your old setting info, either in a commercial format or on a blog or the like? This many years in, we've had a lot of fun making the setting our own -- as Emus said, we've had a lot of fun with Uraq and I've run a long-running campaign based on the Prustan Peninsula -- but we'd love more content.</strike> (Asked and answered, sorry.)

3) The Castain/Lothian stuff is great. It offers pseudo-Catholicism for those who want to run medieval church plots without, I think, offending too many players. But it's also VERY dark once you start looking at all the aspects of the story. Is there a definitive "truth" of who Castain is/was and how Lothian factors into it? Likewise, if most of the Castainite clergy just flipped over to Lothianite clergy, does that mean anything about the sincerity of their worship or the possibility of a Castanite heresy within the Church of Lothian?

4) Beyond Countless Doorways is one of those books that has links to Ptolus. Is it intended to be the official cosmology for Praemal, or was that just a fun thing to add on after the fact, when you were assembling that book?

Thanks for doing this. Ptolus remains one of my most prized possessions of my D&D era. I've always been sad that there were no additional volumes of the Year's Best D20, as that book is wall-to-wall greatness. (And, sadly, a number of the books that it reprints material from are impossible to find, even in PDF form now.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Ooh, thought of another one: There's one or two references in Ptolus to giants being "from the west" and the like, and their realms there, which I've interpreted as the Lands of the Diamond Throne being located in the distant west, beyond Cherubar. Is this intended, or was it just a nod to that other setting, but not actually how things worked in your game?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I never developed those areas because I made it pretty clear to my players that--for all the reasons given in the book--Ptolus was where the action was. I always envisioned the rest of the world to be very low fantasy but not very D&D like, actually, because all the D&D-isms (dungeons, lots of monsters, lots of demons and undead, high level people running around) are crammed into Ptolus with explanations for why those--sometimes kind of weird--tropes actually exist there. That said, I think you are free to do with the rest of the world as you wish, of course.

I've always been somewhat surprised by this. Even leaving aside the possibility of locally interesting stuff happening, you've got the wasteland of a wizard war in Kem, you've got an empire ripping itself in three with violence possible at any moment and, heck, a giant necropolis full of undead under Tarsis, which itself has recently been sacked by barbarians. Right there, that's more interesting stuff going on in more than a few published settings.

We ended up starting in the Prustan Peninsula because the Big Book literally wasn't available at that point, but even there, there's more content for that setting than we've ever fully mined in all the years we've been playing. (The tension between the Old Gods of the Prustan Peninsula and the Church of Lothian is a pretty rich vein, and we've only had one real foray into Kem, for instance.)

Did your campaigns set in the modern day of Ptolus (as opposed to the 2E era of Praemal) never stray beyond the city that much?

And, for what it's worth, the setting works well under both Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades, for all that it's built around 3E assumptions. Good stuff. Even design decisions I thought I disagreed with years ago end up, in the fullness of time, to have been really good instincts on your part (likely because they came out of actual play and not just theory).

 

[camilaacolide]

Silly question I know, but wouldn't you happen to have a copy of the original Ptolous with textured cover and cloth bookmark laying around near you? I just discovered Ptolous in recent years, and I love everything in it. The original version has become kind of a dream book for me... even more so if it comes with your autograph! I'd pay for postage and everything of course, please say yes!!! =)