The End

"Why," you ask, "would Melissa and Mike leave Carl in charge of the temple like that, especially since he told them exactly what he was going to do?"

"That's a very good question," I reply. "It's basically because they didn't believe he was actually going to do it. Over time these three players have built up a certain level of trust in each other."

"By which you mean Melissa and Mike trust Carl," you interject.

"Yes, exactly," I reply. "Carl has done some acts of minor evil over the course of the campaign, like torturing the cultists, but he has until now always worked with the party, and not against them."

"They thought he was joking when he talked about sacrificing them," you say.

"They didn't believe that he would actually go through with it," I said.

"So the campaign is over now?" you ask.

"For the purposes of the story I am telling, yes," I reply. "There are of course parts of the campaign that I haven't set down in writing, as I have explained before. The final battle does actually take place, but you can decide for yourself who you think wins."

"What's next?"

"I want to continue using the characters of Mike, Melissa and Carl, but not in the same kind of setting. I have an idea which I call 'DM Describes', where I take iconic scenes from certain published modules and describe them in the same style as I have done here, as a dialogue between players and DM."

"That will definitely refer directly to Wizards property though, right?"

"Yes," I reply. "I'll have to be a bit careful about that."

"Sounds like fun," you say.

"You know what's been fun? Watching the way my three players have dealt with this campaign, and with each other. I think it's important to note that though in the end Carl set himself against Mike and Melissa, they are all still good friends and don't let in-game antagonisms affect their real life relationships. Everybody understands that Carl is playing a character and isn't truly evil."

"Okay," you say. "I think that about wraps it up. Thanks for talking to me today."

"It has been my pleasure," I reply.

Fantasy Theology

"We're getting into some pretty dark territory with the latest story," you say.

I agree. "Yes, but it's important to say that this is a fantasy setting we're talking about. It bears no relation to, and it is not intended to bear any relation to, the real physical world."

"Okay," you say. "I agree it's important to get that out of the way. I particularly liked the fact that this one is a dialogue that takes place almost exclusively between the three players. You - the DM - has, what, three short lines in total?"

"Yes, I've written these characters such that they have basic fundamental disagreements in their respective world views," I say. "So it was really inevitable that they get into a big argument like this. I'm going to say that Carl here is only mostly right about the disposition of souls after they die in this particular fantasy setting."

"Oh?" you ask. "In what way?"

"Carl has little or no knowledge about the Good gods. He's mostly speculating, and letting his bias towards evil colour his opinion of them. Essentially he treats the Good deities with contempt, and considers them unimportant."

"Is that going to come back on him in some way?" you ask.

"Maybe," I reply. "I'm pretty deep into the tale at this point. I'm going to need to bring it to a climax of some kind soon, or it'll seem like it's just being strung out for the sake of being made longer. It doesn't help that I started the whole thing with a world-ending apocalypse, so it's hard to go up from there, without getting into Buffy territory."

"Apocalypse after apocalypse after apocalypse?"

"Yes. An apocalypse should be a unique event. They're not something that happens routinely. Too many of them devalues the idea of the end of the world."

"Perhaps you could base Season 2 on Carl's agenda to destroy existing power structures and bring his dark god into the material world to rule in fire and destruction," you suggest.

"Now there's an idea," I say.

A Recap

"Let's recap," you say.

"Okay," I reply.

"We have two people on missions and one just along for the ride. They've discovered a cult that is plotting to release a dark and destructive god from the prison it's been trapped in since before the world was created, and they're trying to get to the bottom of it."

"Sounds good so far," I say.

"One of them is an evil cleric bent on summoning his own evil god to the world to destroy civilisation and rule in fire and blood. Another has dissociative personality disorder."

"That would not be inaccurate."

"And they have managed to arrive in another plane of existence, through a teleportation gate the location of which they got by torturing a guy with one side of his head caved in, whom they subsequently killed and raised as a zombie, telling it to bury itself in ice so that the cult can't raise him again."

"That's one hell of a sentence," I observe, "but also true. Astute readers will recognise the character of Lareth the Beautiful from Monte Cook's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil."

"I thought he looked familiar," you say. "Can we assume that our heroes did not murder someone in order to enter the realm?"

"That was one way to enter it," I replied. "You can safely assume that there are others without requiring me to actually detail them."

"Does that mean that you haven't thought of them yet?"

"Absolutely."

"And then the... cube of gelatinous... ness," you say, somewhat awkwardly.

"I don't know if actually naming the monster will get me into trouble with wizards, so I chose not to."

"Probably a good idea," you say.

"I thought so," I reply. "No-one wants to get into trouble with wizards."

More on Characters

"Are your characters based on any specific players you know?" you ask.

"No," I reply. "Well, maybe Carl is based a little bit on someone I know, but not really. The bit in The Village of Retired Adventurers where he suggests approaching at night is fairly reminiscent of him, but otherwise I don't think I'm good at writing characters that already exist in the real world. Real people are just too unpredictable."

"And their names? Where did they come from?"

"Just out of my head. I'm pretty sure I picked them at random. I know plenty of people named Mike and Melissa, not very many named Carl, but my use of these names is not intended to refer to any of those people."

"Is there anything else you want to say?"

"Actually there is. The latest installment - The Staff and the Book - contains a scene that I had a lot of trouble expressing properly. I think I ended up with something that conveyed the meaning fairly well while avoiding actually describing it."

"You're talking about the bit where Mike's 'other guy' takes over," you say.

"Yes. There's an implied attempted sexual assault there, driven by the cap and by Mikes failed Charisma save, and I wanted to convey the event without actually needing to describe what Mike's character does. I think I succeeded, but I'm still a little anxious about it."

"So what's next?"

"I don't know. I have been stalled on this story for about a month now. I need an inspiration to start on the next thing. I have a scene that I want to use, but I need to put it into the context of an episode, and I'm not sure how to do that yet."

Characters

"So do you keep character sheets for all your characters?" you ask.

"No," I reply. "Except of course for Carl's character, but that's because it was a character I was actually playing in a tabletop game. In general I don't want character sheets, because I don't think they're important for telling the story. They'd be important for a game, but not for this story. We know the race and class of each of the characters from the Origin story. That's enough detail to be going on with."

"Is that because you want to keep action scenes off-camera?" you ask.

"Essentially, yes. But there are always on-camera actions that are rolled out of initiative, so I wasn't ever going to be able to avoid those. In situations like this I have characters speak very matter of factly, as though this is the most normal thing in the world to be talking about, and I leave out all discussion of how a roll is generated, what the modifiers are and so on."

"But you do discuss those things sometimes," you point out.

"Sure," I say. "Try doing what I'm doing without it. Ultimately I'm trying to present an example of play. Lots of roleplaying games have this little section in the front entitled what is roleplaying, and a lot of those give an example of play in dialogue form. There's one in the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. The problem is that the players in the examples don't talk like real people talk. They talk as though they are artificial constructs given existence solely for the purpose of demonstrating how to pick up and roll dice at an appropriate time."

"Their dialogue is stilted," you offer.

"And unnatural," I reply. "I've already said that my characters - those being the players, each of whom plays a character in the game - are idealised. They have complete knowledge of the rules, instant recall where necessary and think faster on the fly than any player I know. But I hope that for the most part they speak naturally, the way real people speak."

"You've already described one multi-round combat scene, under the church. Do you plan to do more?"

"Only where dramatically appropriate. I still want to keep most of that sort of stuff off-camera, for the reasons I've stated already. One day I might find that I need character sheets to keep it all straightened out, but not today. One thing I will say," I add. "Carl's character's Intelligence score isn't as high as he likes to pretend it is."

On "Sacrifice"

"Sacrifice is actually the first ATPK story I wrote,” I say. “And it differs stylistically a little from the later works.”

"So your first intent was to explore the evil nature of Carl’s character,” you say. 

“Yes, “ I replied. “Carl’s character is actually a character I made up for myself in a game, which unfortunately didn’t last very long. He is also the inspiration for a short story I wrote some time ago which actually got incorporated into a chapter of my novel. I wanted to try to play an unrepentantly evil character, essentially to see how long he would last. I felt that I could play such a character in such a way that he would be both not murdered by the party and not creepy or disruptive as a player. And that’s Carl.”

“And the sacrifice scene was part of that?”

“Exactly,” I said. “I wanted to demonstrate how it was possible to have such a scene, with sufficient details to be compelling, and still for it not to become gross and creepy and the sort of thing you don’t want at your gaming table.”

“I liked how Carl the player asked the table how much detail to go into,” you say.

“Yes, that’s very important,” I reply. “Bringing things to the table without the table’s consent is a great way to be a really shitty player. You always establish boundaries. Some groups will have boundaries in different places from other groups, and what is acceptable among one group may not be acceptable for another.”

“And when it came time to describe the deed itself, all Carl said was I sacrifice her,” you observe.

“Yes,” I reply. “That’s a level of detail that the table really doesn’t need, no matter how much enthusiastic consent is expressed. If you want to know exactly how and from what angle the knife enters the body, and what the blood looks like as it wells out, go watch some 80s slasher horror film.”

“So where does this fit into the greater story?” you ask.

“Well, like Origin, this is not technically part of the story, though it is canonical. You notice that the event is referenced in Under the Ruined Church when the party returns to the death house.”

“Is that the Death House from Curse of Strahd?”

“Yes, even to the extent of accompanying the Burgomeister and his sister out of the town, which I think is something that happens in Curse of Strahd. This was very early in the production of stories, so at this point all I had was a vague idea to write isolated vignettes from multiple adventures in a particular group’s campaign. The story wrote itself later.”

“So in terms of the story?” you continue.

“Oh yes,” I reply. “I guess that this would fit somewhere before The Ring, since Carl got the dagger from the death house. It might be before or after the Village of Retired Adventurers.”

A Different Story

"One thing that's noticable about your writing," you say, "is your sparseness of description."

"Oh, you mean the way I leave most of it up to your own imagination to fill in?" I ask. "Yes, that's how I DM, so that's how I write. If you want a writery quote, then say that I like the way everybody gets a different story."