Welcome back to Part 2 of our interview with Anne K. Brown, author and game designer. Part 2 focuses on her time with TSR, being a woman in game development and more. To read about Anne’s thoughts on working on Ship of Horror click here.
If you’ve been keeping up with Big Fish D&D, you know that we recently did a playthrough of the 1991 “Official Ravenloft Game Adventure” that was Ship of Horror. At one particular moment of the session (namely when we began the encounter with Meredoth the Necromancer) one of us loudly proclaimed: “Who designed this?”
Anne Brown did.
About Anne and Her Career:
(Keith): How did you get into game design? It looks like you worked on Dragon magazine for just a few months before moving into the Game Division. Is that where you wanted to be? How different is the writing process between penning a novel or short stories and writing a game module?
Anne: My path into game design was fairly long. I interviewed for Dragon magazine in May, 1986, literally the day after my last college final exam. I didn’t get that job, but Roger Moore (then assistant editor) suggested that I talk to some of the Games Department staff about freelance work. I got some freelance writing and editing, which kept me connected to TSR.
Roger Moore (then editor-in-chief) hired me for Dragon magazine in May, 1989. By September, the Games Department (formally known as Research & Development) was preparing to expand. Jim Ward told me he wanted to pull me over into Games, and after some negotiating, I moved to Games. I loved working on the magazines, and working at TSR was so awesome that it didn’t really matter to me what department I was in. I stayed until August 1997, when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and moved it to Seattle.
The writing process for a novel, short story, or game module is really different. With a game module, the first task is to develop the story arc and figure out what the players should accomplish. Then it’s a matter of breaking the story into encounters and developing them, and also developing the nonplayer characters, villains, and monsters. Finally, the actual writing comes, which is mostly instructional passages for the dungeon master plus the read-aloud text. The writing for a game module is drastically different from fiction, and you’re trying to help the DM guide the players through the adventure, offer advice to the DM, and maintain choices for the players (not just lead them by the nose) so they feel that they have a chance to influence the outcome of the adventure.
Novels and short stories share the same development of a story arc and breaking down into scenes, but of course, the actual writing is drastically different. With fiction, the goal is to produce some really great prose that tells the story, develops the characters, and artfully explores the setting. With fiction, the author has complete control over every decision made by the characters, and is much more of a puppet master than with game design.
I do find writing game modules to be easier than fiction. In a game module, you’re pretty much dictating instructions to the DM, whereas with fiction, I’m working much harder on the narrative. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
A side-quest where a small contingent of our beloved heroes tackle probably the most critically panned module from D&D past: The Terrible Trouble in Tragidore.
