Julia Rios, writer, editor, narrator, podcaster. The OMG Julia Podcast explores creative lives and processes. Worlds of Possibility collects stories and poems by others.
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Transcript for Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel

This is a transcript for the podcast episode, which you can find at https://www.juliarios.com/erin-roberts-and-mario-ortegon-talk-d-d

Welcome to the OMG Julia! podcast where we discuss creative lives and processes. I'm your host, Julia Rios, and today I have two very special guests: Erin Roberts and Mario Ortegon, who both worked on the Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel Dungeons & Dragons manual. I'm so excited to talk to them. Welcome, Erin and Mario.

00:24.68
Mario Ortegon
Thank you for having us.

00:26.27
Erin
Yeah, thank you.

00:27.81
juliarios
So would you like to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got into writing for Dungeons and Dragons? Mario, do you want to go first?

00:41.98
Mario Ortegon
My name is Mario Ortegon. I am a writer and game designer from Mexico. I live in the city of Monterrey which is to the north of the country and um. I started writing for D&D after basically I started creating my own content for a world that I was streaming. Ah you know, creating a world for a game that I was streaming, and I started publishing that content through Patreon at some point because I unfortunately lost my job in the 2020 pandemic so I basically started doing that as a way to make extra income and try to get myself out there and you know it eventually got to the hands of Ajit and Wes, who very gracefully invited me to write for Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, and that's basically how it all started. I had been doing it for about a year before that. So yeah. That's how I got my start.

01:55.89
juliarios
Wow that sounds awesome. Okay, and Erin, do you want to introduce yourself?

02:03.72
Erin
Sure hello I'm Erin Roberts. I waved even though this is a podcast. I've waved at all of you. I'm a writer and I like to write all the things. I got my start writing short fiction science fiction, fantasy, horror, that sort of thing, and just started branching out into game writing – both ttrpg (tabletop role-playing game) writing and also interactive fiction. And met Ajit George when I was actually helping to plan Nebula programming. So volunteering: it's good! And so we met. We totally hit it off. He knew that I was moving into game writing and offered me this amazing opportunity to be part of Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel.

02:49.77
juliarios
Yeah, ok, so you've both mentioned Ajit, who was the lead on this project, right?

02:56.31
Erin
Yeah, the big cheese. There are 2 leads, so one of the 2 big cheeses. Cheesi? Cheeses...

02:56.69
Mario Ortegon
Yeah, yeah.

03:07.91
juliarios
I Know when when it's cheesi, is that latin?

03:10.91
Erin
Yes, obviously.

03:15.25
juliarios
Ok, so had both of you played a lot of D&D before you started writing for it?

03:25.00
Mario Ortegon
I have been playing basically since I was in high school, which is around the start of the 2000s, which is when third edition was launched, and you know, it doesn't seem that long ago. But you know it actually is quite a long but long time ago. So I'm not one of those people who who are like oh I've been playing since the 80s, but I basically started with third edition. So it was about 20 years before I started actually producing and creating content for it.

04:08.62
juliarios
Wow, yeah I think I think I also started playing in the third edition when I was in college, so I didn't really play before then, but you say it's not that long ago and I'm like you. Simultaneously, it's not that long ago, and also I was a very different person twenty years ago.

04:23.60
Mario Ortegon
Yeah, totally yeah.

04:31.90
Erin
I feel like I'm a little bit more of like a fly by night player. Like I play sort of sporadically, and have over the years, and I've also played in very like unsanctioned ways. My earliest experience was when I was in junior high school and I saw a D&D book. I really loved it. I didn't have it, and the DM who had it had his own game already. So I made up my version of D&D based on 1 time looking at the book. And me and all my girlfriends would play in the closet of our junior high school. I did not understand it at all, so I was just like making up mechanics. So I feel like that spirit has been part of my kind of D&D experience.

05:10.31
juliarios
I Love this.

05:25.50
Erin
And over time I've gotten to know more, but I still think at at heart I'm that girl in the closet kind of making it up as she goes along.

05:31.92
juliarios
Wow that that's Amazing. So I think one of the things that's the most exciting for me, and for a lot of people that I've seen get excited about this book, is that it is a whole D&D manual that, as far as I can tell, like everybody who worked on it is some kind of bipoc writer, creator, artist, etc and it has just like all kinds of representation that I think we tend to think of as not usually being there in D&D.

06:10.24
Mario Ortegon
Yeah, totally. One of the things that I keep going back to is that this is there have been a couple of adventure anthologies in D&D, and this is the first book that is not only an adventure anthology but also an anthology of cultures and settings ah for D&D, and those cultures and settings borrow from real world places and experiences that all of the writers brought with them. With us. And I think that makes it very valuable in that regard.

06:53.32
Erin
I agree, and I think it's part of like just an overall sort of changing of what we think of when we think of fantasy and high fantasy. So you know D&D, like kind of traditional high fantasy, has a very Tolkien feel to it, a very medieval Europe feel to it. And so this was exciting because you know not everybody has all their cultural references from medieval Europe, and so what we were given the opportunity to do is to say okay well where are your cultural references from? What are the things that you're bringing with you? What are the stories you tell? What are the ways that things happen in your cultural mindset? And then how can you use that to create a cool fantasy world that other people can play in?

07:39.31
juliarios
Yeah, and I think it's really very cool. So I have the I have the book, but I haven't had a chance to play any of it, and I think this is a really good time to get into one of my subscriber questions. I Always give my paid subscribers a chance to ask questions ahead of time if I know who I'm going to be interviewing, and one of them asks if either of you has a specific favorite adventure in this book.

08:07.89
Mario Ortegon
Oh I mean I suppose that's besides our own...

08:15.64
juliarios
I think it's perfectly reasonable to talk about your own, because it's is something that you have to have loved or else you wouldn't have created it, right?

08:27.14
Mario Ortegon
Right? right? Yeah, I mean definitely. It's definitely an experience to create something and see it brought to life in the page with the level of art and design that WotC brings to their books, right? You know, I fell in love with the setting when I wrote it and then I fell in love with it again once I saw it brought to life by the art in the book. But it's very difficult because every single setting has that bit of soul on it that you don't really see in other products, but it's very different. It comes from a different place. You can definitely see every single adventure in every single location, the love and care that was put in creating them, and I think it's so unfair to pick one. I mean, obviously mine, but like you know I can't pick any other one.

09:45.77
Erin
Okay, so obviously my favorite is my own, and it's the one I'm the most familiar with, which is Written in Blood. It's horror. It's Black Southern Gothic, which is all things I love, which is why I wrote them.

09:46.14
juliarios
Yeah.

09:51.30
Mario Ortegon
Ah, yeah.

10:01.62
Erin
But I will say that I have like two second favorite things. So Mario's adventure is right after mine in the book, and so whenever I finish looking through it, Mario is staring at me. The Fiend of Hollow Mine! I'm actually gonna be doing an actual play where we play through it. So I can't read it because it will spoil it. So I feel like Mario's will be my favorite, but I can't verify it, and I have been trying so hard! I have been very good, and I have not read it.

10:30.34
Mario Ortegon
Right.

10:40.30
Erin
So I think part of it's like I'm so excited about all these adventures that I want to play them all and so I just kind of tried not to look at ones where...  There are some that I really looked at really deeply because we kind of were grouped up and we would read other people's adventures and get comments and they would give comments to ours, but Mario wasn't in my group and so that's exciting because I am so thrilled to actually experience his adventure as a player.

The other one that I will touch on is one that I did get a lot of time with. Which is The Nightsea's Succor, which is really cool because it takes place both on land and in an underwater civilization, and I just always think underwater civilizations are super cool.

11:27.85
juliarios
Yeah, okay, very cool. So if you're supposed to do an actual play of Mario's adventure I don't know if we should have Mario tell us about the adventure or not.

11:41.78
Erin
No, it's okay. I'll just like do that thing from Men in Black after this conversation and erase it... or I'll just be the best player ever. They'll be like wow you figured it all out immediately like what.

11:53.99
Mario Ortegon
Yeah I do and I'm actually doing the same thing with Aon Adventure right now we are we are we are in an actual play where they're having us play the other the others adventure.

12:12.35
juliarios
Okay, so I think that Erin what you said about yours is not a spoiler like it's not going to ruin the adventure for anyone. It's just going to get people excited because you just said it's southern gothic which is very cool but that gives away the genre but not what happens in the actual adventure. Mario, do you want to give us like the teaser? The the thing that would entice someone to want to assemble a group and play through this.

12:41.61
Mario Ortegon
Yeah, totally. First of all I'm going to say that I was very fortunate to have my adventure be showcased on D&D Beyond. It's basically out there, played by an amazing group of players and DMed by an incredible DM called Eugenio Vargas, and if you're curious about my adventure, I have the luxury to point people to that like go in D&D Beyond and and see that video because it is beautiful. They basically went all out with decoration... but you know in giving a summary, it is basically a mystery surrounding a location called San Citlán, which is an industrial city in the middle of the of a very harsh, semi-arid location. Players investigate a strange ailment that is affecting the people in the rural areas around the city, and this investigation happens during a festival that celebrates the dead being able to come back to visit the living for one night, which is called the Night of the Remembered and it's very much a homage to Día de Muertos. So yeah, that is pretty much an investigation during Día de Muertos inspired festivity.

14:21.33
juliarios
That sounds so cool. Okay, so let's talk about the bigger picture, and I know that you're obviously not Ajit, so you can't talk about what it was like to lead a project like this, but tell me from your perspective as part of the group that made this book happen: What was the process of putting a manual together like for you?

14:47.13
Erin
I'll say it was really, really fun. Also kind of scary, and it's a lot of things at once, like there's such an amazing opportunity to bring something that I feel like is unique to D&D is like the best opportunity and the scariest opportunity at the same time. You really want to represent your people well and create something really interesting that people will like and that people can play who are familiar with this type of setting, and who aren't. Because of that, I think they really gave a lot to the process. They did so much. Ajit and Wes, the co-leads, did so much to like make sure that we had time to work on this, that we could get feedback from each other, so you're like is this working? And somebody else could say yeah I think it is or maybe switch this up a little bit. And so I think that that having that and feeling like we are part of community and like community's such a huge part of all of these adventures, like Mario mentioned that his starts with a festival... mine also starts with an attack at a festival. And I've seen in reviews, there's so many festivals, and I'm like festivals are better than taverns for starting adventures because there's more people and there's a community and you get to know a lot more folks? But I think that sense of community happened both within the actual book itself and also in the creation of it and those two things kind of fed each other in an amazing way.

16:19.50
Mario Ortegon
Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. And the part of the festivals being a recurrent theme in the in the adventures, I think that is very much a part of the idea of, if a group is going to play the adventures, you know from the first one to the last one which is something that they can do but they don't have to because they are they are self-contained. Um. It feels like you're traveling from one place to the other experiencing that place's culture and that place's most revered holidays and seeing what happens there. And how the people there interact with the others who who might come to aid them and and who might come to engage with them, and that is part that is very much part of the invitation of this book.  

It was created with both the intention of like people in these communities feeling that these places are home to them for people who are part of the cultures that we use as inspiration, but also for people who are not to feel welcomed as guests and I agree with everything that Erin says. It was very much collaborative in every step of the way from the beginning to the end. We had co-writing sessions. You know I think Erin touched upon it before, we were grouped in in several small groups and we would give feedback to each other, and that helped us create a lot of beautiful connections in the book.

One example that I can give is that my adventure and setting is connected to two other settings, one which is what one is inspired in Ancient Mexico so basically my settings has roots with that setting and there's another setting inspired in Venezuela, which also has the Spanish colonial inspiration. So we basically have that sort of connection there. It is subtle. It is mentioned in the language, like you know, it says that both of our places were colonized by the same presence at some point, and that was also something that came up while we were creating all of this. It was a challenge, like how do we create these post-colonial um cultures that feel vibrant and relevant and real without focusing on the colonial parts? And it was a blessing to have a group of people to bounce that off of.

19:34.23
juliarios
Yeah, definitely. I think that's very cool, and it's very cool to be able to have that community feedback and to make the connections with each other in the actual text of the book. So, speaking of the community, it sounds like you did talk a lot with the other people who were also writing adventures for this. Did you have some sort of like online chat about that, or were you all just communicating via email? How much did you communicate with each other?

20:07.52
Erin
We communicated a lot. We had an online like you know Discord type – not actual Discord – but a type of server where people could chat and get feedback from each other. Then there were also, like Mario said, co-writing sessions like on Zoom where people would come together and... I feel like we should now be sponsored by all these people. Um, so Zoom do it.

We would have all those things come together and then also email back and forth. So it was a little bit of everything, like all the different ways to collaborate. We had people spanning like a broad span of time time zones, so having multiple different types of communication helped so that you know maybe not everybody can all get on at the same time because it's 2am one place and 2pm somewhere else, but we can still all communicate asynchronously through online platforms. So that was really really cool.

I also just wanted to touch on one quick thing that Mario said that I think is so important, which is the idea of creating settings that are post-colonial or in my case, my setting is based on Black diaspora but without the colonial power or you know without the actual kind of forces that set that in motion, and I think that was so exciting and so important because you know I think in the lead up to the product being released you know I would say hey it's the Black south! And I think a lot of people were like oh it's going to be like slavery, and I'm like nope no slavery here! This is just like rural south Black people living and thriving and doing their thing and dealing with monsters and horrors and all kind of other stuff, but those horrors are monsters, like monster monsters. Not people monsters.

And I think that was really important in all the settings. And having all those ways to communicate made it really easy for us I think to bounce off each other. How are we going to tackle that? Ooh you tackled it one way in your setting. I'm tackling it another way in mine! And these are all really cool ways to approach the same sort of challenge / opportunity.

22:20.52
juliarios
Yeah, one of the things that I find really cool about the manual in general is that in the beginning before any of the adventures. There's an introductory section and it actually gives a little bit of a guideline for how to play sensitively. And like for instance, how to introduce your character, and what sorts of things to notice and how not to fall into stereotypes, and I think that just kind of sets the tone for the the way to approach this, which is a very sort of like decentralizing the oppressive powers that might come into play in the source cultures and instead really centering the narratives of the people who are actually in those cultures.

23:17.00
Mario Ortegon
So yeah, that was very much the purpose of it all. At the end, we tried to center the stories on the people. That was something that was at the forefront of everything. You know we we did multiple drafts of the writing and, you know I can kind of like see that, trace the steps that I went through to basically reach the the final one that ended that ended up in the book. We were lucky to have a story consultant, Whitney Beltrán – "Strix" on the internet – she helped us with you know, identifying some elements that might seem problematic, or that might not make sense or focus on a different thing narratively, and through the different drafts we were able to refine that.

One of the things that I can think of in particular for mine that was a pain point is that I was thinking the whole time while I was writing it that it would it would be people from Mexico or mexican descent playing the adventure, and you know I needed to be reminded at some point that there's going to be a lot of people that don't know this culture and need to you know, be introduced to it and also given an opportunity to engage with it without, you know, falling into dangerous tropes such as like the heroes intervening and just changing everything as usually in eurocentric fantasy. So that was good. It was good to have that resource and that help to craft the adventures that ended up in the book.

25:36.55
juliarios
Yeah! So do you think it was tricky to strike that balance between making something that would play well to people who are coming from within that culture and do understand the references vs. something that will play well for people who don't understand it at all and need a little bit more handholding?

25:58.85
Mario Ortegon
It was a tricky balance. We definitely had to think at some point that you know there's how do I make this feel familiar to people who are part of this culture, but also welcoming to others? And how do we make these stories the stories of the people who are here, for the heroes that are playing it?

26:38.67
Erin
Yeah.

26:39.60
juliarios
Yeah, definitely. Erin, did you run into any kinds of similar issues with your own adventure?

26:48.35
Erin
I don't know if exactly the same issues. I think one of the things that I kept as like a personal mantra during the writing of this is actually a concept that I borrowed from the writer Mary Robinette Kowal, which I think she was actually talking about how to make virtual events work during the pandemic, but she talked about the difference between the essence of something and the expression of it. So like what it is at its core, and then how you know we actually do it?

And so a lot of times as I was working on the adventure in the setting, I was like what's the essence of this? The expression can change, but like what is the essence that I'm really trying to get at? So in Godsbreath, which is my southern setting, you know it was really about community and storytelling. So once I decided that was the essence, I came up with lots of different ways of expressing it, some of which worked, some of which didn't work. But by reminding myself of what that essence was, and that I wanted that to be what carried through, I think it was able to help like keep me grounded. It also helped and I have said this in many an interview that my great uncle wrote a whole book about growing up Black in rural Mississippi, which I use as a touchstone throughout my writing, and so I felt like when I was trying to decide what to do, I'd be like what would my great uncle – may he rest in peace – do? What would he want to see? and I think that really also helped to keep me grounded.

Because you're trying to make all these different things work, like Mario's talking about. You're thinking about players you don't know, and that's a thing, like we're just presenting this and people can do with it what they will. You know it's not like a story or a video game where you really control the experience that people have. You're just giving them the backdrop and then they get to play with it and break it and reconstruct it and make something bigger and exciting if they want. And that I think was really the exciting part. When I felt like oh no, you know I'm worried about how I'm doing it, I would think if I stick to the essence, then other people can take that essence and they can build something even better and express it in an even more exciting way than I would ever think of, and the fact that they can do that is what makes this book so special.

29:02.36
juliarios
Yeah I mean I think that's something that's really cool about D&D in general is that it's always sort of a collaborative effort with people that the writers have never met because it's all about the GM and the players. Who are deciding what story they're telling with each other and I think that's one of the coolest things about role-playing games in general. So I'm going to jump into another of the subscriber questions here, and that is: How much did you write things versus play testing things? And I'm curious. Did you did you actually do any play testing of your adventures?

29:45.46
Mario Ortegon
We did, but at that point basically during the play testing phase, our adventure was basically out of our hands. So the way that it worked we handed in the draft and it you know it went into the next step of the process, which is the developmental editing, and then that after that phase, the iteration of the play testing feedback that WotC does, it's you know applied by the dev editors. But I did a little bit of of play testing of my own adventure you know with my personal group, obviously without telling them what it was because we couldn't say anything? It was basically just me trying to sus out the pacing in how it felt, if it could be played as a one shot. Things like that.

30:50.86
juliarios
Yeah.

30:53.45
Erin
Yeah, yeah, I think it's a little a lot of the sort of Baker play testing like Mario's talking about happened at WotC, at Wizards of the Coast. Because you know if you do it on your own... I don't know, I was always afraid during this entire project that like I would say the wrong thing and like a WotC lawyer would just like appear like I don't know, swing in from nowhere, like transporter in Star Trek style, and like whisk me off to some sort of lawyer dungeon. And so like I will say like I did a little bit of things here and there, but really wanting to be careful and not able to kind of fully run it because you obviously don't want to say what it is and break your NDA. But they did a ton of play testing. They do some really good stuff, cool stuff in-house, and it was interesting. Cool to see like how the adventure was shaped from what we turned in to what the playtesters found, and how it was kind of adjusted to make sure that it actually works as a playable piece, because you find out in the playing.

32:01.68
juliarios
Right. So when the in-house playtesting would happen, would you get feedback or were the editors adjusting things? How did that work out?

32:14.27
Mario Ortegon
So that would be the editors. Yeah, that would be out of our our hands at that point. So we did occasionally, I mean at least I did. I don't know if this is true for Erin too, but like I would get like a check in of like, hey you know we got this feedback. We are thinking of changing this. What do you think? But you know, at that point it was more like small check-ins and changes and it wasn't like the draft was handed back to us to rewrite or anything like that.

32:46.33
Erin
Yeah, that's the same here.

32:46.13
juliarios
Ok, all right. That's cool. This is fascinating, because as someone who has I've played D&D for twenty plus years, but I have never been on the other side of it, it's sort of an opaque mystery how any of this comes into being.

So another subscriber question is: When you write NPCs, do you imagine yourself role-playing as them in a session?

33:16.16
Mario Ortegon
Oh I do. I don't know how you do it, Erin, but I definitely, when I'm writing I am like you know, speaking in their voice and like being sassy if that's if that's what they do.

33:33.45
Erin
Is there video of this? Just asking for a friend.

33:39.77
juliarios
Ah, do you want to give us a demonstration, maybe?

33:41:25
Erin
Yeah, sassy it up!

33:44.94
Mario Ortegon
Ah, no I do a lot of my writing with like, when I'm imagining a character, you know speaking in their voice helps me sort of you know, get the tone of of what they're trying to convey. You know, using an example, one of my NPCs in my adventure, Paloma, she's a very old and wise gnome who has gone through a lot and she's basically a Mexican nahualita who takes nothing from no one. And you know, I basically started thinking how my own Grandma would you know scold me or stuff like that, and that's the tone that I went for with the character.

34:45.70
juliarios
Yeah, oh man I don't want to be yelled at by anyone's Abuelita. I know the tone, and I don't want to have it directed at me.

34:47.42
Mario Ortegon
Yeah.

35:01.19
Erin
I will say I do not act it out out loud. I think I more like do it in my head. So I think this speaks to my sort of origin story as a prose fiction writer.

35:01.32
juliarios
Ah.

35:18.49
Erin
So it's like when you're writing different characters in prose fiction, like you're imagining them and you're really trying to speak the way that they do. But I at least do not usually do it out loud. So I don't do as much acting out, but I do do more kind of just thinking it out and making sure that they do feel different to me. So like I can completely envision them, and seeing the art is amazing because you're like yes, that's exactly it. That's what Aunt Dellie is! That's what she looks like!

I will say, though, speaking of this mysterious actual play that Mario and I are both in, I think the current plan is that I actually am going to play one of my NPCs who joins the party for the next adventure.

36:01.66
Mario Ortegon
Ah, that's cool.

36:09.40
Erin
And so I will get a chance to act it out. So it's like you know you can't avoid it and so I've thought a lot about her, but I've never done it like for other people. So I'm very nervous but I'm very excited about the chance to kind of bring a particularly complex character to life.

36:27.38
juliarios
Yeah, that's very cool. Okay, so the last question that I have, this is a question that came in a few times from different people in slightly different ways, so I'm just gonna kind of like mash them together and paraphrase. But the general gist, the essence if you will, going back to the essence versus the expression, is: What, if you've written in other formats... So like Erin, we know you've written short stories. Mario, I don't know if you've written other formats because I know that you said that your origin story was writing specifically for your game streams. But if you have written in other ways, how is writing specifically for a gaming adventure different from doing the other writing? And then the sort of like B side of that question is: What specifically made you want to do this kind of writing versus another kind of writing?

37:24.60
Mario Ortegon
Well I do think Erin has more experience in this so I don't know if you want to go first, Erin. Please do.

37:32.29
Erin
Sure. I will try not to ramble endlessly. I feel like I've been on whole panels about this. Each form of writing does something a little bit different, and so prose writing is the type of writing where you have the most control over the way the story unfolds, the way that the reader even ideally hears the story in their own head. That's why we use so many em dashes – if we're me – you know, to try to make people even get in the rhythm of the way that you're telling the story. You control everything; the setting, the characters, the plot. So that's really exciting, and people can get very involved in that.

But I feel like in interactive formats like TTRPGs and interactive fiction, which I've also done, people are putting themselves into the story. So you lose the control over the way that the story develops, and a lot of it is like providing tools more than directing the action. You know, you're you're the scene designer, not the director. But because of that, people really get invested and they add things. It's sort of an additive format. So people put things in that you wouldn't have anticipated. And that I think is the excitement, seeing people build from it. It's like people will say I want fan fiction of my work. When you write for tabletop games, it's like everyone is playing with your work all the time and that's what's exciting about it, like you get to see what they create.

I'll also say like some silly, minor things that I learned when going from one to the other. In short fiction, especially, I'm a big fan of suggesting things that I don't explain. So I'll be like and then in the mines of Morgulia, they met... and I don't explain what are the mines of Morgulia. No one knows; they're just there. But in tabletop people will be like trying to go there. They'll be like well that sounds exciting. Maybe we should go to the mines of Morgulia! And you're like I didn't write that out ...

So you really have to think about putting things in the setting in a way that both suggests new adventure to the DM, but also doesn't like hang them out to dry so that they're working overtime trying to come up with stuff that you didn't give them the tools to kind of help build. So I think being a lot more specific and directed in the way that you put things in the setting, because people will pick up every rock that you put in the setting, so you've got to make sure you put it there on purpose, I think is a big thing. And the smaller word counts and the sort of very specific word counts help you do that as well. So that was a big difference in writing prose versus writing tabletop.

40:12.30
Mario Ortegon
Yeah I share most of that. Ah you know, mostly because my approach to game writing comes from – I have a background in programming and and UX design and I use a lot of that to basically shape how I approach game design and everything related to it. I've written a couple of the other things. I've written a few comic scripts. I've written a small screenplay style thing for an episode of a thing that I can't say what it is... but I've done some other forms of writing, and I've explored them. But everything everything basically to me comes back down to game design.

The way that I try to approach it is I try to think of the person who is going to be using it and how the information is presented to them, first and foremost. Erin mentioned the limited wordcounts and stuff like that. Like you have to sort of really be concise with what you're trying to convey, and you present it in an order that makes sense. There's a lot of narrative choices that go into making that a piece of fiction, but at the end of the day you're writing a manual to run this adventure, and that is the background thought process that guides the whole thing.

Because you wouldn't normally take a lot of space describing a single room, because you know that whoever is going to read it is probably going to get tired after the first two or three sentences, and you want the players to engage with this because this is a game. You don't want the GM, for example, like reading for a minute or two without anyone else getting any input. So that's things that you think about and that you sort of get a feel for once you start designing for games of this particular kind. You know there's definitely a lot more different game types, more narrative focused, that might be apt for that sort of thing, but particularly for D&D, that is something that you know you always have to keep in mind.

43:09.26
juliarios
Yeah, wow. That's a really good insight.

43:11.57
Erin
Yeah, I love that. I was thinking about it, I love that, and I was thinking about one more thing (like I didn't already answer the question, but I'm gonna come back), which is that, like I'm thinking about it like if  a character, or a group of characters come to a fork in the road when you're writing prose, you decide what fork they go down and what's there and what happens to them. When you're writing for video games or interactive stuff that has like specific choices or constraints, like you're playing a video game, yu might give them, hey this is what happens on this fork. This is what happened down that fork. A lot of what happens, at least for me, in interactive fiction and and video game design, is making sure that they feel like there's interesting paths on both sides and that they have freedom even though there there is a restriction on that freedom.

44:00.50
Mario Ortegon
Yeah, yeah.

44:02.18
Erin
And then in tabletop you're like here's two paths and also here's how people make paths in this type of this part of the world. So that they could go down one of the paths you lay out, their DM could come up with a totally different path that just like builds on what you're doing, they could be like there's no paths at all, and that's really exciting in its own way.

44:07.63
Mario Ortegon
Yeah.

44:21.89
Erin
And I think each of those has its joys and has its narrative excitement. But anyway.

44:29.74
juliarios
Yeah, no, that's a really good insight as well and I'm just remembering the time that I was playing in a Call of Cthulhu game and my group, who had been... this is like a year long campaign that we had played. And it was at the end of the year, we were at the end of it, and we got to a decision point and it was like we could hear something happening in this cave and the cave had kind of a cave in around it, and we were like yeah, we're not going to go investigate that. We're just going to go back to the city.

44:58.10
Erin
Hahaha

45:02.83
juliarios
And the poor GM, I think, had designed like a major boss climactic battle to happen down there, but because of the way we had played that caused this cave in, it was just like oh well I guess nothing ever happens with that and you're all fine.

45:20.55
Erin
Yeah.

45:21.45
Mario Ortegon
That's the beauty of it. I think Erinn mentioned before the possibility of people like taking the stuff we we write and like making it their own, and how that happens. Like, to me that has been one of the joys of creating this, because I've gotten to see a couple of people play this online and people have told me on Twitter how their game went, and it's it's beautiful. I mean, I love it. I love when people make this their own, and hearing about how something that I might not have even thought of comes up in their game. That's awesome.

46:13.58
Erin
Yeah, and also people reaching out. This is like an appeal. Like, I have an email that I'm I'm working on now. Somebody asked me... so there's a big thing in the setting that I created, this Awakening Song, which is like a call and response song that tells the history of the the entire like since the founding of this region all the way through to the current day, and so I've had people ask me like song questions. They're like what kind of music like. Would this be and then I'm like oh yes, let me like put together a cool playlist of like things I think would be like part of the awakening song and then like I actually want to go on Twitter and say like other people add and like that is so cool like that is so cool. That's somebody engaging with your work like beyond what's on the page.

46:49.76
Mario Ortegon
Yeah.

47:03.19
Erin
And I think that like that's what they have to do in order to build this and and play and make it work at their table but when they reach out to me to ask me about it I'm like, oh thank you! That's really sweet and it gets me thinking I'm like oh I'm going to spend my whole weekend working on playlist.

47:11.89
Mario Ortegon
Yeah.

47:15.32
juliarios
That's very cool. Okay, well that leads us right into the final thing that I will ask you. If you have one piece of advice to someone who would love to get into game writing but doesn't know where to start, what would you tell them? And then of course, also where where can we find you? Where can we find more of your stuff, and where can we reach out to you to ask you about songs?

47:57.63
Mario Ortegon
I will tell everyone what worked for me, which is you know, work on things that you are passionate about and and release them in some form. Don't hold onto them forever until they're finished because they might not ever be. It's better that you start putting things out there and get your work seen and engage with the tabletop community either through Twitter or Twitch or whatever other platform of your choice. Getting your work and your name out there in such a vibrant community is crucial to start making connections and start getting people to see and appreciate what you're working on. And that might lead to opportunities. That is basically what happened for me, and I've seen it happen for a number of other folks. So, yeah, I guess if you want to reach out to me, I can – you know I'm not sure about songs – but I can talk about undead dancing in a city. I don't know, that's my setting for journeys.

You can find me as @elwarius on Twitter mostly. I do sometimes stream on Twitch, but when I do that it's most often in Spanish, but you can come and say hi and if I see you I'll maybe switch to English and chat for a little bit.

49:42.49
juliarios
Okay, awesome. Can you spell your Twitter handle for anyone who wants to follow you there?

49:47.59
Mario Ortegon
Yes, it's E L W A R I U S

49:54.21
juliarios
Okay, and Erin, it's your turn.

50:00.40
Erin
I do not think I have better advice than Mario's advice. I think, yeah, do things and share those things with other people. You can always start by doing things in a home game and sort of trying things out and then writing down the things you've tried out. I get a lot also from reading other people's written adventures and other people's written work. I love to kind of look at what's written and then maybe try to see how something was played that was written and I love seeing that because you can only be in so many games yourself. So It's nice to see what other people are doing and get a sense of it.

I just like to see what's out there. I Love to consume games cookie monster style, just as many as I can get of all different forms, and so I think the more that you're sort of engaging with the world of gaming, the more you're learning about it and the more you're able to be a part of it. I also think cheering other people on and being excited about what other people do is always great. It's good for your soul, it's good for their soul, and I just think it it helps get you excited, and I don't know just cheers up your day.

51:13.81
juliarios
Also we're all part of the same community, so cheering for other people is crucial to being a part of the community and knowing that, as a whole, the community's success is everyone's success.

51:34.32
Erin
Yes, beautifully said. I love this. I love hanging out with well-spoken, amazing people. And to find me, I am mostly on Twitter @nirele that's N I R E L E. It is el erin backwards because I am not good at Spanish.

51:54.63
Mario Ortegon
Oh wow.

51:57.10
juliarios
I'm glad that you anticipated me asking you to spell it out though.

52:04.18
Erin
But yes, feel free to ask me anything and I'm happy to answer our songs or no.

52:11.15
juliarios
Sweet! Everybody listening, if you haven't already gotten Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, I highly encourage you to do that. It's got beautiful art. It's got really cool adventures. If you get a group together, you can play them. And it's a very cool project overall. And thank you so much to both Erin and Mario for taking the time to talk about the creation of their adventures and this book! It was a delight talking to both of you.

52:41.65
Mario Ortegon
Thank you for having us. Yeah, it was awesome.

52:43.11
Erin
Yes, thank you.

52:46.55
juliarios
All right. Well, thank you for listening and I will catch you next time.