Hello, and welcome to snows return a tabletop role playing podcast. My guest today will lead you through the hidden holes of has a core and onto the mystery of Milan. He has worked with the fantastic and wordsmiths on the greatest, you may have held his work in your hands or referenced it off the screen, but not to realise it is not a cardinal sin, for he has been working on a project, which is all for one, and that one being you, my friends. And that one is for all Joining me today is a writer, editor and insane Angel. Mr. Scott Fitzgerald grey Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Hey, Adam, thanks so much for having me.
Snyders Return:It's an absolute pleasure. So Scott, before we go into all the things that I touched on the intro, would you mind tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you got into tabletop role playing games, please?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yeah, for sure. Um, I started gaming back in the early to mid 80s. Starting off with a d&d and traveller. Gaming was a really huge part of my life for a number of years through the sort of late High School University era. And then it kind of fell out of it for a while. And I got back into it at about the same time that I've realised or was kind of tripped across the information that it's possible to actually do this as a job. I've been working in publishing for quite a while up to that point. And I'd heard that was as close was looking for freelance editors, for d&d version 3.5 at that time, so took a shot at that and wound up doing some work for Wizards of the Coast. This was back in 2004 or so and have basically been working, working pretty much full time on RPG stuff and other stuff. Since then, I kind of split my I split my work time about sort of in thirds, I spent about a third of it doing RPG work, I do a fair bit of just traditional editing for novels. And I do a fair bit of story editing, both for novels and for film. And then about a third of the time I like to just spend working on my own stuff, both fiction and RPG work.
Snyders Return:Alright. That's that's a lot going on. To be fair. Before we get before we move on, then just so people can go and find you and engage with you directly. How can people are where can people find you on social media? And on the internet, please?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yeah, I'm on Twitter at Scott F. Grey. I'm on Facebook as Scott Fitzgerald grey. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one of those in the world. So I'm pretty easy to track down. And I have a website which is only very occasionally updated, which is insane. angel.com.
Snyders Return:All right. Well, links to that will be in the description below. Please go and have a look. There's some beautiful quotes across the top of each of the pages. The the Mark Twain quote sort of tickled me some.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yeah, thank you.
Snyders Return:So with respect to your ttrpg stuff, you said you started in 3.5 now we're in fifth edition what has been what's been your favourite project to work on so far?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Oh, boy. It's really hard to come up with a shortlist I was actually thinking about this, because I think about this every time I talk to people, every, this is gonna sound like a like a like a, it's gonna sound like I'm dodging. But literally every project that I work on while I'm working on it is kind of my favourite project at the time, there's always one of the great things about RPG work is it's never the same. There's always something really cool. There's always something really interesting, in every new thing that kind of comes across your desk. And that's a big part of what I think let me do it for as long as I've been doing it and still really enjoy it. It's not just a job. It's, it's, it's a really, really cool part of my life. And I'm just I'm very, very fortunate to be able to say that probably some of the favourite things I've worked on are things that I've worked on as a designer because I do less design in our produce that I do editing. So the stuff that I've worked on as a designer, kind of like few of those things sort of pop. I worked on two different adaptations of the tomb of horrors for fourth edition d&d, both of which were extremely cool one, I wrote about half of the big hardcover, Tomb of horrors super adventure, which was a lot of fun. And I also did a straight conversion of the original ad and D module to fourth edition, which was never released to retail. It was done as a special giveaway for the RPG The role playing gamers Association back when that existed. So that's something that you can't actually, you couldn't actually buy it at the time you got a copy if you're in the RPG a and it occasionally shows up on eBay and places like that. But that was a lot of fun because that was sort of like a straight, a straight conversion of the original. It wasn't like a new story based on it. It was just the original one and I had to update it to the fourth edition had to figure out how to make it work for fourth edition, and wound up doing a lot of really cool stuff with it. I thought it was it was a huge amount of fun to work on. And part of the reason that both of those projects were cool is both was was just that, you know, having come from having started gaming during the era of Tomb of horrors, and having played the original one, it's such a, it was a really cool thing to go back to as a designer, and to get to mess around with it.
Snyders Return:Wow. Okay, well, I'll lead on from that particular question that if you were able to bring a different old module to light Have you got another favourite that you would love to bring up to, to sort of currency with with fifth edition or whichever slash edition follows fifth?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Excellent question. Um, I think any question like that, it always probably comes down to just what your own personal favourites were. A couple of them have already been done, keep on the Borderlands has been updated to fifth edition a couple of different times. One adventure that I really love, which of course, as for many people of my of my era was the first adventure I ever played in the first pre bought one I ever played in the first module, which was in search of the unknown. I'd love to see that updated just because it was such an interesting set up. It was an adventure. If you don't know what that gave you the framework for the adventure gave you all the description all the text and then allowed you to put your own adventure in it, you set up the creatures, you set up the challenges, you decided what was in what particular room, it's a straight up dungeon crawl. But the fact that you could stock it any way you wanted to made it really really interesting and a good a good learning tool for first time DMS a lot of first time DMS you know who are of an age with me that was their first real experience of putting putting an adventure together, I'd love to see that done. I also really really loved the a series of at&t modules, the slave Lord series, which was quite which I thought was a really good, one of the very first really solid marriages of sort of like straight up adventure story, but also with a little bit of a narrative through line to it. And that was something that I really enjoyed. That's that's something that I really like adventures that also have a strong story in them. Not a strong story in the sense that that the adventure is telling the DM and the players what's going to happen. But just the sense of there's some strong narrative connections that you can establish between the characters in the world. That's always kind of my own personal favourite approach to adventure writing. So I like I like the a series for that reason, it would be fun to see fun to see something happened with that.
Snyders Return:I have to send some emails to some people, you know. So you mentioned you mentioned through there, one of the modules was was dmws toolkit effectively, and we've had a couple of sort of tries on that with things like Zanna Thor's and ghosts of salt marsh had some dm tools in it and most recently, touches cauldron of everything. Yeah. Where, with respect to dungeons, dragons, or tabletop role playing games in general, do you want them to go next? Where would be your your next progression for the game? And where would be the setting that you would like to see come out next?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Oh, wow. It's a really tough question. Not to be not to be vague about it or not to waffle on the on the response. But one of the one of the things that becomes clear, when you start talking about d&d, right now, we start talking about fifth edition and the way the game is being played. And the people that are playing it, is that it's almost impossible to come up with a single concept, or a single book, a single idea that will work for everyone who's playing the game, because everyone plays the game in a slightly different way. There's a huge difference between people who've been playing the game for years, and people who have just come to d&d for the very first time with fifth edition, you know, they have different outlooks, they have different approaches to how they play sometimes huge difference between people who have come to the game from other role playing games as an example. And people who are coming to the game for the first time, from streaming from having watched other people playing d&d online, you know, on YouTube, and watch what they do and saying to themselves, that looks like a lot of fun. I want to try that. And that's something that never existed before. So that whole population of players who are new to the game, who are loving the game, who are playing the game in amazing ways, right? But they're not necessarily going to connect with the game the same way that someone like I will who've been playing it for literally, you know, More than 30 years, right? So the tough part of answering that question is, you know, how do you come up with something which will appeal to everyone? How do you come up with something which is going to have something that everyone can take something from that everyone will enjoy in some way? Right? I think books like Zanna Thorson, Tasha has a really good approaches to that, because they play creating a kind of a toolkit approach, you hope that you can get something in there that that will appeal to lots of different types of players, right. One of the things that Wizards of the Coast did, which I think was a really cool decision was when after the first three core books were out, instead of coming out with like a monster manual to write, we've seen the monster books come out in a slightly different format than they've ever been done in previous editions, right, Volos guide and more than qanats, which are both books that have plenty monsters in them, but they focus on other things as well. They dig into story they dig into world building, they dig into sort of the lore of monsters, right. And as well like more than kindness especially there's there's other off there's there's there's more character options and things, it's a real kind of a grab bag, right? I think it's a really cool approach because it establishes that, you know, as a company, you know, wizards wizards is is cognizant of the fact that, that everybody is approaching this game in their own way. Right, and that you can't sit down anymore and come up with one single product, one single project which will appeal to everyone. And exactly the same way. Just because the fan base is so is so much wider than than I think it ever has been in previous editions. And it's so much more vibrant. And I think like from from my perspective, just just as a player, you know, this is all a good thing. You know, it's really, really this is a, this is a great time to be working on RPGs in general, just because there's so much there's so much enthusiasm, and there's so many different approaches to playing games right now that we never had before. And a lot of what comes out of that in terms of how people are playing and the things that people are writing, designing is just so cool.
Snyders Return:Yeah, definitely. And you yourself along with with others that we'll get into in a second have tried to release something, too short of cater to too many with fantastic layers and other projects that will we'll move on to so how's it how's it been collaborating with others, such as yourself sort of looking to open up the game and offer something new and accessible to to play or DMS gems?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yeah, I think I mean, fantastic layers is a really is a really great example of that sort of thing. This is a book that I'm working on right now. Like literally, I was working on it before I started talking to you. And then I'm gonna keep working on it after we're done. Which I'm working on with Mike Shea, and James enter caso, who are both people who, like most people, if you're playing fifth edition, you'll you'll know who they are. If you're, if you're on Twitter, certainly or on any other social media, you've probably tripped across them from time to time. And it was a book that that it's a book, it's a book of boss battles and layers. So this is a book of adventure components. It's what one part of an adventure. And the idea is we're giving it out, it's in the book, and it's not something that you're going to take and just use wholesale. It's something that you're going to take and build your own thing around it. And that was a really cool idea. So as we were sort of workshopping the book, and as we were coming up with, you know, thinking about what it was going to be the idea of intentionally creating something that that required sort of a maximum amount of input from a GM like that they would have to make really, you know, solid decisions on in terms of how am I going to integrate this into my game? How am I going to use this as inspiration for what I'm doing? That was a really cool idea. We all thought it was something that we hadn't seen specifically in this forum before. So we thought it would be a fun thing to put together. And, you know, lots of people seem to like it. The Kickstarter was quite successful. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun to work on.
Snyders Return:Yeah, I backed it. So I'm excited to see what what the product is. So and it's not the only Kickstarter project you've you've worked on. Would you mind taking us through a few others of note, should we say,
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:um, yeah, I've worked on two successful Kickstarter campaigns of my own one was an RPG project. One was a fiction project, which was actually just a couple of months ago. I've worked on a number of other Kickstarter projects. for other people. Mike Shea is someone I've worked with on a number of books. The first Kickstarter ran on my own was for an adventure called the hidden halls of has a core, which was an adventure, fifth edition d&d Adventure specifically written for young first time dmws. So people, kids, ideally, you know, 12 years old 1410, that sort of general age range, who have played the game a few times, they love the game and they're sitting down and they want to sort of run their first games, and it kind of grew as an as an outgrowth of winning was running an RPG club at the middle school that my daughters were out at the time and where my wife is a teacher. And it as I was sort of thinking back to when I first started playing the game, I wasn't I definitely wasn't 12 years old when I started playing. But even when I started even even even being slightly older than that, it's such a daunting experience. It's such a daunting task sitting in the dentist's chair for the first time, because there's all these things that you you're like, you're not entirely sure what you're doing, right. It's there's, there's, there's things that you're always worried about messing up on, you know, you're trying to focus on way too much information, you try to keep too much stuff in your head at the same time. And I remember thinking back and wishing that I'd really had sort of just like a solid little, you know, solid Little Book of advice, that was something that was sort of teach me what to do, show me how to do things talk about the options or the possibilities. And that's what the adventure turned into. It's it's a kind of a straight up dungeon crawl. And in addition to that, which is pretty it's it's fairly easy to run, it's it's written in a very sort of like a friendly, a friendly, easygoing style, which I hope is something that younger players can read and not get too overwhelmed by, in addition to the adventure, it's got sidebars, all throughout it, talking about how you handle things that come up in the game, you know, and sometimes those are just your basic mechanical things like, you know, in this sort of encounter, what do you do? When this happens in the game? What do you do when the players do something you didn't expect? What do you do, because things like that are some of the toughest things for a new GM to handle. Just because there's, it's really, really hard to improvise as a GM. First off, when you're first starting out, that's, that's something that even experienced GM is have a really hard time dealing with sometimes. So getting the framework for that, getting some guidelines for that and talking about, you know, how to, how to keep things going, even when things go completely out of control, is a really, really useful lesson for gms to learn. It talks a lot about sort of table stuff as well, especially for younger players. And this was something that, you know, I from running the RPG club for a few years, became sort of a point of observation, dealing with problematic players dealing with players who you know, consciously or otherwise start to engage in bullying. That's a big thing. I mean, certainly, it's, it's certainly not something that only affects kids who are gaming. Dealing with character death is another one, you know, and that's something that especially like a first time, dm, especially a young GM, that can be a really tricky thing to deal with. So the book just gets into literally everything that when I was starting out, I thought to myself, I wish I'd known this before I started playing or while I was while I was running my first games, the book kind of explores that and it tries to go into detail on that as a, as a kind of a learning dungeon, I guess. So you're learning the game, as you're running it. As you run, the adventure gets more complicated towards the end. So you get comp you get, the DM kind of gets comfortable and gets more confident with with with dealing with more complex issues, more complex encounters, right. And by the end of it, you know, it's a it's just it's it hopefully leaves young players young dmws in a position where having sort of learned some of the basics, they can then move off into the much more cool stuff of you know, coming up with your own adventures, and learning how to do more freeform stuff after that.
Snyders Return:Yeah, so there's sort of, as well as player progression, there's dm progression and development, should we say as the book sort of guides them through?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yeah, very much. So very much so.
Snyders Return:And then the follow up.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:The follow up to that is an adventure called mystery of mill Warren, which I am still working on, and which a lot of people have been waiting for for a while. So thank you for your patience, if any of them are listening. Yeah, it's a project that I've been trying to find the time to work on one of the I talked earlier about how I sort of like I try to split what I do into sort of thirds, like like a pie. Like a third of the pie is my own stuff. And a third of the pie is other people's RPG stuff. And a third of the pie is other people's fiction and film stuff that I work on. And the first slice of the pie The my stuff slice has been dangerously thin for about a year and a half now, just because I've been very, very busy working on other people's stuff, which is not a bad thing. I mean, that's the that's the it's the best problem any any freelance person can ever have, really. But um, it's been longer to put this other adventure together than I've done, I would have liked, it's getting very, very close to the point where I'm gonna be able to start sending out some stuff for people to look at now finally, thankfully, but it is definitely overdue. It's a sequel to has a core, and it's set up basically to take dems to the next level. So in the same way that the first book, The first adventure, has a core talks a lot about how to you know how to run like a sort of like a straight up dungeon crawl, which can be very linear, you've got sort of a real sense of, you know, here's a door and there's two ways that the adventure can go simply because there's two different directions that the party can go in. mill Warren talks a lot about running a more freeform adventure where there's a lot of different options. There's lots of stuff going on, talks a lot about how to run things without using a map. Because when we start out running dungeon crawls, they're all very map based. And it can be a real change of gears mentally to switch up to something where you're just doing theatre of the mind. So it talks about how to do that it talks about how to run sort of like a as as, as the title would suggest more of a mystery campaign more of a problem solving thing talks a little bit about you know, how to make how to be more evocative with description. So just just like another another layer of advice for DMS things that all DMS need to pick up on at some point in the book sort of tries to tries to sort of dump a lot of them together in a kind of an easy to digest way.
Snyders Return:You know, once once it gets pushed out and then then released. Is that available? through your website through drive thru work? Where is it people can buy the first book and soon the mystery to more
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:people get them through drive thru RPG, that's the easiest place to go has a core is is available in PDF and print. As as no one will be as well when it's out. Got a couple of other smaller things on Drive Thru RPG, but like I said, like I, I spent, I spent most of my time working on other people's stuff, which is very gratifying. But it means that I don't have as much of my own stuff out as I would, as I would often like to have. That's something else that I got to I got to continue to keep working on,
Snyders Return:I think. Yeah, that's fair enough. But you have worked recently on someone else's big project, the setting in a major European city.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Oh, yes.
Snyders Return:I'll let you fill in the blanks. But
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:I did a Kickstarter, just recently, for an updated version of the classic adventure novel, The Three Musketeers, which is a story that everyone knows everyone is most most people I think, have seen some version of it, they've read some version of it. You know, there's been so many film adaptations, so many television adaptations, cartoons, comic books, you know, different stripped down versions of the novels for young readers, different people, rewriting books inspired by The Three Musketeers taken that sort of that whole meal you and that feel of of kind of historical, swashbuckling adventure. And I wanted to do something a little bit different with it. And it was a weird, sort of a weird sort of chain of events that led to my wanting to do the book, what it is, is it's an updated editing of the original novel. So it's not a new book, it's not me writing a story based on or inspired by The Three Musketeers, it's the original Three Musketeers, one of the earliest English translations, which happens to be by by a translator named William Robeson. And it's been edited, it's been updated, it's been cleaned up, because like most books of its era, you know, there's the style of the writing the style of punctuation certainly is a lot different than we do now. But at the same time, I was doing that. And actually, you know, the, the updating the editing was, was only the secondary thing that I was trying to do. I've wanted to take the book, and I wanted to expand on the types of characters who are in it, I wanted to make a version of The Three Musketeers that was sort of unapologetically non colonialist. And as a result of that the characters in the book are a very wide range of people, there's easily half the characters in the book are now women, including two of the Musketeers. Most of the characters are people of colour. They're no longer all straight white men, as was the default. For literature for Well, I want to say for a long time, but really, it's up till now. Anyway, so it's an ongoing process. But it was an interesting project to work on, it was a strange thing to work on. It's not it's not it's, it felt very different from anything I've done before. Because it wasn't the novel that I've written, it's not a book of somebody else's that I'm editing. And the Kickstarter really was primarily about getting the art budget together. Because there's, there's a certain amount that I can do in terms of just, you know, altering the text to describe characters in different ways. And to establish that, for example, in this version of the book, dar tonyan, the main character and the the hero is a young woman, right? That's easily done in words, but it doesn't get the point across as well as you can with pictures and with images. So working with an amazing illustrator named Abby vor, who was out of England, and she's putting together even right now as we speak, putting together the art for the book based on the successful Kickstarter, which was very very generously backed by number of readers who were interested in seeing this particular version of the book kind of come to light
Snyders Return:and the artwork is fantastic from why even your profile picture on Twitter is is taken from the the updated three months it
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:is yes, yes, it starts happening right now. Yeah.
Snyders Return:And some of the the other images you put up of love look beautifully illustrated.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yes, I've even I've even a wonderful eye worked on. I knew of Eve's work before, but I know it primarily from from the work that she's done with acquisitions incorporated with Penny Arcade. I was the managing editor on the acquisitions incorporated book for d&d that that was the coast and Penny Arcade put out a few years ago now. So I kind of like I saw like a lot of Abby's art in that book and was working with, with the other folks at Penny Arcade with her and then met her when I was at PAX last year, I guess, a year and a half ago now. So yeah, sort of, she was somebody sort of had in the back of my mind is saying, you know, this is a person I would love to work with, again, at some point. So when I started pushing closer to the point where I was ready to get this book out and was looking for an illustrator, she was, she was somebody who popped to mind and I was very grateful that she said she would be that she was interested in working on it.
Snyders Return:It looks like it's, it's not only going to be a success, but a very wonderfully illustrated success. So
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:I hope so. Yeah. literally everyone who I talked to about the book, literally everyone who who, you know, expressed an opinion on it was very, very enthused about it, which was really very gratifying. Because it is an odd sort of a thing. And it has, like, it occupies a weird space that I've never, you know, that nothing I've worked on has ever really fit into before. So I was a little bit worried at the outset of it were, you know, what kind of reaction there might be to it and what, what what people's takes on it was going to be
Snyders Return:on it seems like it's all positive. So I hope that continues through releasing and as it keeps getting picked up and, and read and, and enjoyed by countless I was going to put a number on it. But that doesn't seem fair, countless people out there.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Snyders Return:I was just gonna ask you, you mentioned there about editing for acquisitions Incorporated, and you've edited a slew a tonne of other indie books. What is your? What is your writing or editing process? How is it useful to get yourself in that sort of mind space and sit down to do your work?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Right? It's really different for writing and editing. I mean, I think that's anybody who does both or anybody, like all all writers understand that when they're writing, you know, there's a point at which they start editing their own stuff before it goes to another editor. And it is a really different frame of mind. I guess the one thing that both processes share, for me, the one thing that I think is most important for anyone who's trying to do any sort of creative work like that is just make sure that you have the time schedule, make sure that you, you basically sit down and are ready to do it. And that you do it, when you tell yourself, you're going to do it. Editing is certainly easier in that regard. Because usually when you're editing, you have somebody who's paying you to do it, and they have a deadline, and you look at your schedule, and you say okay, if I'm not working on this, this many hours a day for the next x days, I'm not going to meet that deadline, you know, so that's a, that's a great incentive. On the design side, on the writing side, it's tougher, and everybody who's you know, done any writing knows this, it can be very difficult to kind of get going sometimes as a writer, that the one thing that I find, which is most important, the thing that's made the most difference, to me, the thing that that really has has allowed me to become a writer after you know, spending the usual number of years trying to write and kind of stalling out and have finishing things and working on stuff that never really worked out is just the idea that you always have to constantly be moving forward on stuff. And for me, that translates to one very specific piece of advice, which I give to lots of people lots of the time, which is if you ever find yourself getting stuck on something when you're writing, just move past it. Okay, don't be afraid to skip over stuff, knowing that you will come back to it. Because one of the biggest problems that writers have is we have a specific thing that we want to write and we get stuck on it. Because we can't quite wrap our heads around the parameters of a particular scene, or a particular set of characters or some some little thing that has to go on in the plot, right. And very often simply putting a note in your draft saying, you know, this is what's going to happen. And I'm going to come back and fix this later. And then moving on to what happens after that. Right is the best way to keep moving because it means you're not stopping, you're not actually wasting any time you're not stalling out and sitting staring at the screen for five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour or you know, however, however long it might turn out to be. And the other thing that's really cool is and this is something that most most writers experience at some point as well, is that if you're stuck on a problem in a story, if you're trying to figure out how to do something, you will very often have an easier time solving that problem when you're not working on it. Like if you got to pick We're in chapter one that you can't figure out, leave the bid in chapter one, start working on chapter two. And you'll find that halfway through chapter two, the idea for fixing what's going on in chapter one will just kind of pop into your head in a really, really weird way. I have no idea how this works. But I noticed it, it just does. Yeah, it's sort of part of it, I think is is like a little bit of a lateral thinking approach, right? If you're, if you're not focused on something, there are certain subconscious pathways in your brain, which are, which are always sort of working on problems, and which are trying to fix things. And they will never really get around to it. But they don't necessarily do it on your schedule. So just letting them work on their own schedule is fine. But you don't want to be getting off your own schedule. While that's happening, you want to always be able to keep working, you want to always be moving through things. And so just just forcing yourself to start writing is the first step in that and then forcing yourself to skip over stuff that isn't working, I think is a really necessary second step. But the second step that that process of skipping over things isn't necessarily natural to a lot of writers. And I think a lot of writers, you know, feel feel that that's kind of like they have to know what's going on before they move into the next bit. And you don't always have to, and it can be really useful sometimes to just sort of plough through and see where things go, and then come back and finish what you started, you know, after, after what comes after it has has has kind of settled itself in
Snyders Return:both and that's great advice. And thank you for sharing that. So with respect to working on other people's projects, work on your own projects, writing, editing, and things like that, what is it you do for downtime?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Um, the dangerous answer to this question is for downtime, I often will just end up working more on my own stuff. And this is not a good answer, because it's not necessarily a good thing to do. There's a certain type of writer who likes writing so much, they enjoy the writing so much, they love the process of sort of how, you know, words a story come together, that they would rather write than read. And I will occasionally get to that point, especially if I'm busy, especially if I've got like a lot of other stuff I'm working on for other people. So I've got multiple deadlines and stuff sort of stacking up. So that if I get to the point where you know, I've, I've, I have a few hours free of an evening, I would rather work on my own stuff, then, you know, watch something or read something. And it's great for productivity, you know, you'll really get stuff done, you'll get a lot of words out. But it's very bad creatively for you in the long run. Because reading stuff and watching stuff and playing stuff is how we kind of creatively recharge. And so for me, personally, I have to very consciously keep an eye on that. Because if I'm not very careful, I will be working on stuff and I'll be doing great work and I'll be really enjoying, you know, that particular like a novel or a game project that I'm that I'm putting words down on. And I'll look up and I think to myself, I haven't actually read, you know, a novel in a month and a half, right? Or having watched TV and like in like, you know, three weeks or something. So it's Yeah, and it's, it's, you will at some point, start to stall and flag if you do that, you'll just you your your mind, will stop being able to come up with fresh ideas, because you're not constantly replenishing it as you really need to
Snyders Return:burn off. And so and you mentioned there, or maybe not playing a game when you get the chance is there games outside of dungeons of dragons that you would like to play or sort of things mechanically, or thematically that sort of inspire you to do Where do your inspirations come from? That was about four questions in one. So I do apologise,
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:oh, that's okay. Um, inspirations come from just about anywhere I love I'm I'm sort of the epitome of the person who buys and reads far more game systems and settings than they'll ever have a chance to play. You know, I like reading other games I like I like seeing what other people are doing in in the space of gaming, I like to see what kinds of ideas other people are coming up with, I find that really, really invigorating. Right? Even if it's a game that I can look at and say, you know, I don't think I would play this game because it's not really my speed. It's not it's not a genre that I'm really into just seeing what people are doing mechanically seeing how people answer the question of how am I going to translate, you know, character action into mechanics, how am I going to translate what players want to do into what the characters are able to do? It's it's a fascinating process. I think partly because I mean, RPGs are still generally a very, very young genre, right? I mean, RPG has only been around since the early 70s. Even given all the the different numbers of games that have existed since then, there's still lots of exciting things to do. Like every, like literally every month, somebody will come up with some idea, which you know, it may not be 100% original, it may not be something that's never been done before, but they're putting a spin on They're doing it in a way that's never quite been attempted before. You know, and I find that fascinating. So I love I love reading other people's games that I get huge, a huge amount of of energy out of that. Even if it's games that I know I'll probably never get a chance to play. Talking about games I'd love to play, like literally anything. I play mostly d&d myself, I run I run one game a week right now. I was playing in a second game before that. But COVID kind of took the took the in person option off the table for us up here. Literally, yeah, sorry. It's it's a nebulous answer. But you know, literally anything. I'd love to I'd love to play more games like Shadow the Demon Lord. I mean, I've actually worked in shadow of the Demon Lord a few times, I've never played it. Because I've never had the opportunity to I've never had anybody who was running a game at the time that I was around and available to play, right? I live in a fairly small city, like I said, In Canada, so we don't have a huge gaming scene here. And certainly, you know what there is again, COVID certainly has taken a toll on that, right? The new alien game, I've heard amazing things about, I would love to check that out. cortex prime is something that I just bought, and I'm just about to start digging into. And I like, I'd like the ideas that it presents, in terms like what I've heard about, about, you know, how its how its system is set up, I'd love to see how that actually plays out. So yeah, I mean, any, anything that I have the opportunity to play, I'll jump out. And if I've got the time, I guess is the shorter answer to that question.
Snyders Return:And the long and the short of it. Yeah, now I've I've been excited to play in a alien game. And just a few of the other systems you mentioned that cortex is pretty new. And as you say that they put a spin on things. So moving beyond your, your work with d&d and and your work for the bit where it sounds like a very, I don't know, grade school counsellor, Where, where, where are you looking to take insane angel? And, and, you know, what, what's the future hold for? For you? Mainly?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:That's a really interesting question. I'm, I'm kind of, part of me doesn't like to sort of, you know, make hard plans, just because most of the interesting things that have ever happened to me in my life have happened by accident. So I'm happy to just sort of ride that train of, you know, seeing what happens. Because Because I like I like kind of, I like doing things that I wasn't expecting to do. I mean, fantastic layers is a good example of that. That was a book that Mike Mike and James came up with a concept for it. And they asked me if I if I wanted to work on it with them. And of course, I absolutely jumped at the opportunity. But it's not necessarily something that I would have thought about doing on my own, if I'd been, you know, making up a list of, you know, top 10 things I'd like to work on or top top 10 types of books, I'd like to I'd like to put out at some point. Yeah, um, I like working with other people. That's one thing, that's a really strong part of what I do. Part of the reason I think that I'm happy splitting my time between doing editing work and design work is that as much satisfaction as I get from coming up with my own ideas, and writing my own stuff, I get the same amount of satisfaction from working with other people. And I think that's true for most editors, I hope it's true for for most editors. But I know for some people, you know, people that I've known in my life in the past, it can be frustrating, because they feel like you know, while they're working on other people's stuff, they're not having the opportunities to do their own stuff. And that's part of the reason why I like to sort of split my time equally, so I so I always have time to sort of try to address all the all the many different things that I like to work on. And try to make sure that they all get that they all have a little bit of time, at the end of the day. That said, I've got some game stuff that I really want to do something with I've got my I have my own RPG sort of rule set that I've been working on in playing for quite a few years now. And it's a good starting point was basically just, you know, this game that I wish somebody else had written, I was waiting for someone else to write it and no one else did. So at some point, I just said, Okay, fine, I'll just, you know, cobble together some house rules myself that will let me do this thing that I've wanted to do. And then that sort of grew into something else. And the more I played it with different groups, the more it kind of evolved from just house rules into something which is like a, like an actual game, or at least you know, it is at this point, effectively a game that I that I need to do something with, and I'm still sort of trying to sort out what, what possibilities there are there and what things I might do. So we'll see how that goes.
Snyders Return:Do you have a name for this framework?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Not not as such yet. I mean, it's got it's got a working name, but it's not. But it's not really it's just mostly just just for internal reference. What it is, I mean, it's a pretty straightforward concept. It's, it's, it's DND. Okay, it's nothing. It's not, it's not like a brand new groundbreaking thing. This isn't this isn't something that that. That is that is like a brand new thing. It's DND without classes and without levels, which is a concept I've always been fascinated by. And it's something I've always wanted to do. And like I said, I sort of, you know, was always waiting for somebody to do something like that. And there certainly there are lots of great classless games out there. You know, I've played I've played many of them, they're all very cool. But they weren't they, none of them ever did for me exactly the same thing that d&d did for me and all the different versions of d&d that I've played. So this sort of grew out of that it was just sort of just sort of an experiment to see if it was possible to strip you know, certain versions of d&d down to sort of the underlying core of them, and then rebuild them again, in a way that was a little bit more generic, and a little bit more free flowing. And a little bit more focused just on this is you this is your character your character can do literally whatever you want them to do. There's no restrictions, there's no pads, there's no, there's no sort of overarching sensibility to what your character is, aside from what you want your character to be. And it's been great fun playing it, it's been great fun working on it, it's just, it's just sort of been like a side project. Like when I have some time to put in, I'll just, you know, I'll go in, and I'll mess around with the rules a little bit. It's not something that I've ever taken seriously. But the number of people who I've talked to about it, who have said to me, You should take this seriously, and you should think about doing something with it, it's kind of reached a tipping point where I realise I do need to figure out what that might be. So that'll probably be something that occupies a big chunk of my time for next year. I'd like to get back to writing more fiction as well. writing fiction is one of the first things that sort of falls by the wayside when I get busy working for other people. And I know that's a bad state of affairs, and I'm trying to do something about that. So yeah, I mean, those those two things, sort of on the personal like in that personal 1/3 of the wedge, those are the two things that I would like to occupy my time. On the other stuff. I mean, you know, just to keep working with cool people. Because like I said, I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of RPG work, it's for me, it's, for me, that aspect of it is just as exciting as as the work itself is the content. working on a book like fantastic layers with Mike and James has been a great project. And I'd like to do more projects like that, just because as an editor on RPG stuff, and I don't know how many, I think most people know this, but I'm not I'm not sure how widespread the knowledge is. Like, if you're like, as an editor working for Wizards of the Coast, I very rarely get to interact with the designers who are working on a book that I'm working on, there's usually always a very long length of time and a long process of internal development and story development that goes on before I get stuff. So for example, James into Casa who I'm working on, fantastic layers with he and I have credits on a number of different watse books together, you know, we've you know, he's there as a designer on there as an editor, we, but we never worked together on those books, right? James did his stuff, his stuff, you know, came in, and then eventually comes to me, by the time I'm working on it, if I have any questions or anything, or I want to talk about what's going on, usually, just the constraints of the schedule mean that those questions have to be fielded by the managing editor or the design lead at you know, you know, at the at the publishing company, right? Occasionally, very rarely, if time permits, will you be able to come back and actually talk to the original designer, to see kind of, you know, what they had in mind or to pitch them on, you know, like, a slightly different take on it, or that sort of thing. And it's, you know, I understand why the process exists. I understand, you know, like, like, like a company the size of watse doing books that are the scope and scale of the books that watse does. This is absolutely the best way to do things. Right. It's it's the most efficient process. But I really love working on things like fantastic layers where I can sit down and you know, Mike and James and I have like a, we have like a Google meet call every Friday and we talk about what's going on in the book, we talk about what we're each working on individually what the next stage is, right? And that, for me is a really gratifying process as an editor, being able to work in real time with the designers that I'm working with is an absolutely amazing feeling. And that's something I would definitely like to like to do more of going forward.
Snyders Return:Yeah, definitely. I always pitch it It probably fallen into the same level as many others. We just assume everybody sits around the same table and slides sort of documents around the desk and confers Withings
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Yeah, I mean, that does happen internally. Like Like, like that's the process. Definitely. The company is like Wizards of the Coast us like when you're working on stuff, right? as a freelancer whether that's a freelance designer, you know, right reading, writing some section of a book or whether that's me being a freelance editor working on the very last stage. You Usually we come in before and after that process, though, you know, so we have sort of like a special place and things. And there's always sort of like an insulating barrier between between the work that a freelance designer is done and the work that I can do as a freelance editor at the end stage. Beyond that, a big part of it is, is just the schedule as well, you know, it's big books take a huge amount of time to get done. You know, it's a huge process. It's a huge undertaking. And you've usually got a pretty tight schedule. And oftentimes, you simply don't have the opportunity or the time to go back and think about, you know, large scale revisions, right. It's usually usually by that point, it's it's all about small changes, and Small changes can usually be handled by somebody in house. So that's, that's usually what happens.
Snyders Return:All right. Thank you for setting my vision straight. But couple questions off of one, I will join those who are tipping the scales because that your revised or different take on on d&d and the classless system sounds like the kind of game that I would like to run, to be honest. So I'm excited to see if or what comes out of that process at the end.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Me too.
Snyders Return:However, we'll all be along for the ride. Yeah. With respect to your home game, yeah. Is that is is that based off of any one of the modules? Or is that all homebrew?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:I mostly I've been reading mostly homebrew recently. Not Not that I have not, not for any particular reason other than I just really like, you know, coming up with my own stuff, and sort of doing working with my own ideas. Working on. Yeah. The last big campaign I ran, ran for just about four years, like in real time. So that's another thing like I like, I like a long kind of a, like a long, slow progression campaign. That's, that's kind of, you know, my, my speed for D and D. Which, which was sort of lends itself well to kind of doing your own thing, because you can just sort of build in as much stuff as you want to, to, to sort of, you know, stretch things out and to spread things out. I would love to play more of the more of the Wizards of the Coast hardcovers part of the problem with that is up until up until Rama frost mate, I've worked on so many of them that I can't play them, right, because I know I know what's going on in the story. And I find out, I had a sort of a saturation point with how many games I can run on a weekly basis. I'd love to play in more games like that actually, would have been the answer to a better answer to the earlier question, which is I will play literally any game anyone asked me to be a player in just because inevitably, I end up having to having to run games, more often than not, and I love running games. But there's a limit to sort of how much I can throw myself into that sort of thing. Before before I just sort of run out of run out of time and energy.
Snyders Return:Yeah, that's fair enough. I will be sure to keep your email on fire or should we need a player to step in? But no, it's been it's been really good. And speaking with you is Is there anything that we we haven't touched on any any topics you feel strongly about that you would like to mention? We've covered a lot of things in the interview but maybe there's something that you'd like to discuss that hasn't come up in conversation?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Nothing nothing specific. I mean, I think I I really love where gaming is right now. I love where d&d is right now. In particular I love I love fifth edition I think it's definitely far and away the best the best version of the game. I love the fact that there are so much there's so many other things going on outside d&d, there are so many cool indie RPG is happening. There's so many people working on their own stuff. There's so much stuff happening on Drive Thru and on DMS Guild, and just you know, it's, it's, it's such an amazingly vibrant era for RPGs right now, I can't, I can't imagine, you know, if I'd gone back in time and talk to myself, you know, like in 1984, and said, You know, this is this is where games are going, I absolutely wouldn't have believed it. Right, I would never have imagined the games would be this popular, I would never have imagined the games will be this mainstream. I would never have imagined that there'd be you know, the, the as wide a player base, as we have now. And it's an amazing thing. And I'm looking forward to you know, lots more, lots more cool stuff happening. I guess, one thing that I that I'm pretty passionate about in the RPG space, and in sort of like in the fantasy space in general and this this definitely ties back to the, to the three musketeers book and to you know, some of the other things that I've done in in terms of my own stuff recently. I'm a big fan of of diversity in gaming. I'm a big fan in. I'm a big fan of working with the idea that there are things going on in d&d, other things going on in RPGs, in general, but in d&d, specifically, that extend from the fact that since inception, and for great many years, d&d was primarily a game played by and built for white men. Right. And, you know, there's lots of reasons why that happened. It's, you know, there's, I'm not enough of a expert in sociology to even begin to talk about, you know, the the systems that are in place by which by which things end up slanted towards white men primarily. But now that we're cognizant of that, I think it's a really good time to try to put more emphasis in gaming on to making sure that the games that we're making the worlds we're creating, the characters that we're putting into those worlds are as representative of the people playing the game as they can possibly be, you know, because even if you want to make the case that, you know, historically, RPG is were mostly played by white men. And so as a result, that's why you know, the worlds of the game, you know, we're filled primarily with white man, you know, that that may or may not be the case, you know, there's, there's arguments to be made against that. But even if you accept that argument, we're not living there anymore. Right, we got to move past that. I'm an extremely white guy, right, like, you know, like translucent white, right? You know, like, like, if the sun is behind me, you can actually see through me on most days. And one of the, one of the easiest things I can do one of the simplest things I can do, like, you know, literally, the least thing that I can do, is to try to make sure that the games that I'm working on are representative of people, other than me, making sure that anybody who's playing this game, you know, has the opportunity to see themselves in the characters that are in the game in the cultures of the game in the world of the game. Certainly, the Musketeers book grew out of that the idea of doing a book came from a very, very weird sort of a specific moment where I came up with the idea of wanting, wanting to do something that would annoy people who are constantly screaming about historical accuracy and fiction and in gaming, because for them historical accuracy basically boils down to, you know, there should be more white people here, right? Because white people are the only people who are ever around historically. You know, and that's, that's, that's weird and frustrating for me. And guess what have two options, you can you can, you know, yell about it on Twitter a lot, or you can edit, you know, 400,000 words of an 18th century novel. So I took the I took the second approach, because it seemed it seemed like less work, I guess, in the end, I
Snyders Return:don't know, I'd say it's more long lasting. How long does the end the internet last forever? But how long does it tweet really stay in the mind? But how long? Yeah, the work of fiction? Probably more represent that will be more representative of of the time. Yeah,
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:no, definitely. It's in the hands. Yeah, I think I mean, that's really kind of what what this, what this idea boils down to, for me, as me, you know, everything that we make, everything that we work on is going to be out there, and it's going to be out there forever, you know, like, it may have an initial burst of interest, right. And then at some point, there's a bit of a long tail, you know, where things sort of fade off, but the work that we do is always there, and it's always going to be sort of representative of what we were doing. And as long as that's the case, I would like what I'm doing to be representative of, you know, as as as broad range of people as broader range of concepts as broader range of ideas as I can possibly make it. So that's something which is something which, which really kind of inflex most of what I work on these days, that's definitely a direction that my work will continue. And let's put it that way
Snyders Return:on long May your work continue.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:Thank you very
Snyders Return:well, Scott. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and and learning all the different projects you've worked on, and all the the things that are coming up in the future. And I'd love to have you back on the show. Again, if if you'd be willing to join Oh, anytime
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:at a great time. Thanks so much for thanks so much for the invitation.
Snyders Return:Oh, no, it's been an absolute pleasure. So I will let you get back to to finish on your current project. And we will speak again soon.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray:All right. Thanks so much, Adam.
Snyders Return:Thank you. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to learn more about the show, then go to WWW dot snows return.squarespace.com. Alternatively, you can find us over on Twitter. At Return Snyder, you have a link tree link in the description of this episode. And if you want to support us, come and join us over on Patreon. And we also have a Discord server. Please leave us a review because we'd love to learn how to improve the channel and provide better content alpha for those who are listening until we Until we speak again. Thank you