Interview: An Afternoon of Terror With Jim Zub

Robert Mackenzie and David Walker Interview Jim Zub about his upcoming Dungeons & Dragons comic, using Ravenloft and tying in with Curse of Strahd

Jim Zub is the award-winning author of Wayward, Skullkickers, Marvel’s Thunderbolts, Samurai Jack and a host of other books for DC, Valiant and others. He is also the writer of Legends of Baldur’s Gate, a 5 issue miniseries from IDW based on Dungeons & Dragons, and the new upcoming Dungeons & Dragons ongoing series – the first arc of which, at least, is set in Ravenloft, Dungeons & Dragons’ classic gothic horror setting.

Robert and David are lifelong D&D players and Ravenloft fanatics, as well as followers of Jim’s comic work. When the announcement was made, an opportunity to feast on his brain (in true Ravenloft style) about the upcoming series was too good to pass up. Even if it meant waking up at 5:00am on a Sunday (Australian time) to sync up with the Toronto based writer.

The following is a transcript of that conversation. Night is falling. The mists are rising. Embrace the darkness.

Robert: Let’s start with the basics: You have a new Dungeons & Dragons comic from IDW this year.

Jim: That’s right, my second D&D story. I did the Legends of Baldur’s Gate miniseries last year.

Robert: That is, to an extent, to tie in with Curse of Strahd, a new Ravenloft adventure that’s coming out for the 5^th edition of D&D.

Jim: Well, what happened was they told me they’d be going back to Ravenloft, and I said “Wow, that’s awesome – I’d love to have our crew adventure there too.” So it wasn’t some kind of corporate mandated thing where they said “You must tie into our product!” It was really something where I said it because Ravenloft is one of my absolute favorite adventures of all time. It just was a good fit.

Dave: So, when you go to Wizards [of the Coast, Dungeon & Dragons’ publisher] with a tie-in pitch, do they say “well, that’s great, go crazy”, or do they sit you down to vet things, start you through a corporate checklist?

Jim: Working on the D&D comics so far has been really great. There hasn’t been a lot of intense corporate oversight. When I get feedback from the developers or writers working on the game property they’re really quite solid – they’ve got good feedback. It’s just nice to get another set of eyeballs on the setting/adventure front. They’re not trying to get in the way or overwhelm any of the storytelling. Over the long term, we’ve all got the same goal. The best advertisement for D&D is a fun, engaging comic, not some weird corporate mandated checklist. They understand that, I understand that, so that’s really our goal: making a great D&D story, a great fantasy story, even more so. Obviously fans who are fans of the gaming property are wanted, but that’s not all there is to it. You want other people who are just trying the comic, and you want the story to appeal in that broader way as well.

Robert: You’ve done a lot of “action-fantasy” stories before this. Skullkickers is pretty D&D-esque.

Jim: Absolutely!

Robert: You had [eminent game designer and 4^th edition co-creator] Robin Laws actually throw in 4^th Edition “style” stats to the back of one of those?

Jim: Not official 4^th Edition stats, but yeah. Skullkickers was really a love-letter to that kind of sword & sorcery storytelling and gaming as a whole. It was such a big influence on me growing up. That’s why every volume’s got an introduction from some sort of gaming luminary. The first one was Robin Laws, the second one was Tracy Hickman [adventure designer, including of the original I6:Ravenloft, but also co-author of the core line Dragonlance novels, and many other fantasy novels], John Kovalic did an intro for one, Erik Mona, the developer of Pathfinder [Note: Mona is currently publisher at Paizo]…my love of gaming is a pretty open book as far as that goes. Getting a chance to work on the D&D title is a thrill, and I’m already pretty well primed for it.

Robert: You did Pathfinder comics for about 12 issues?

Jim: Actually I did 18! Three story arcs and an annual.

Robert: Oh, my mistake.

Jim: Don’t worry about it.

Robert: Is there a distinction between doing numbers-filed-off adventure fantasy, and something under licence, or is it all part of the overall “Zub’s table” vibe of gaming stories?

Jim: Ha! I think when I came into do Pathfinder and D&D I wanted both books to have a feeling of a fun and engaging gaming session, and that’s similar to what I wanted to do with Skullkickers. Skullkickers is more irreverent. I describe the D&D book or the Pathfinder book as the best gaming session you’ve ever had with your friends, and Skullkickers is the typical ridiculous gaming session, where they’re just being total jackasses, despite your best planning. So they’re both gaming related, it’s just one is more idealistic. I always run with the same sort of approach: character first, story first. That means a lot to me, and it’s helped me with all the writing I do. If people care about the characters and their goals that’s going to help create momentum in the story. That’s not to say the plot doesn’t matter, but you can find ways to make sure everything is “correct”, that you’re using the right terminology and the reference material is proper, but if no one cares about the characters, it’s all just extraneous. They’re always character stories, they’re always engaging on that level, and I think that’s why they work.

Dave: To borrow a bit of a gamer cliché, following on from that, tell us about your characters.

Jim: Well, what’s really interesting is for the Baldur’s Gate comic, we put together an adventuring party and we wanted to use some of the characters from the original video game, but over one hundred years passed since the time of the video game and a lot of the original characters aren’t around anymore. So we came up with a bit of a plot contrivance to make that happen-

Robert: Minsc the statue!

Jim: That’s right. These fan-favourite characters everyone loves and we wanted to be able to utilise. Then we took the other characters, and I didn’t want to do the kind of “classic” adventuring party where you have one wizard, one fighter and one cleric or something like that. I put together this weird group where we’ve got two rogues, a wild mage and Minsc who is “technically” a ranger, but acts like a berserker half the time. It’s a really odd mix, and that felt more like a gaming group to me, instead of the perfectly balanced group you’d typically get in a “tie-in” product. I think it made it a little bit more unique, a little more down and dirty. Instead of being “Well, we need to make sure we cover every single base in terms of “core classes” or something like that. Each of those characters has flaws and goals and purpose to them in the way they spark off each other. That’s what I enjoy.

Robert: I guess it’s very true to – life is the wrong term – but let’s say very gaming apropos that a party doesn’t have perfect balance and everyone wanting to do their own thing.

Jim: Yeah, it just feels more genuine to the gaming table when you’ve got a group that’s like a pack of wild dogs instead of finely tuned party.

Robert: To come back to a point you were talking about before, Minsc as the statue of “The Beloved Ranger” brought to life to circumvent a precise time and a precise order of events for his life, but there was some other stuff – deeper cuts – in addition to Minsc (and Boo!) who are big fan favourites in the community, generally known by fans of the gaming property, there’s some deeper dives in there. There’s Coran on the City Council, and the Flaming Fist…

Jim: Yeah, there’s deep cuts so if you’re a fan of the material you’ll catch those, but I wanted to be sure you could read the story as a casual reader. Anyone can pick it up and have an understanding of events even if you haven’t played the video games.

Robert: Are we going to see similar sort of deep cuts is this upcoming Ravenloft story? We will see Tatyana von Zarovich? Or the Grant Conjunction?

Jim: Ravenloft is one of my favourite adventures of all time. It’s a difficult thing to try and strike a balance. When I sent the pitch in to Wizards about what I wanted to do, one of the things I specifically wanted to avoid was having our party just go through the “classic Ravenloft adventure”. That feels weird and oddly definitive. That shouldn’t be the case. That adventure should be your adventuring party, not mine, if that makes sense. As cool as Ravenloft is, I had to give the characters a slightly different goal. I couldn’t just have “Man, there’s a big bad vampire. We’ve gotta go kill that dude.” We had to do something where we were putting them in Ravenloft, but not have them go on the Curse of Strahd/I6:Ravenloft module adventure. That forced me to think differently about the setting, and how our characters react to it. What sort of toys we can play with in the setting, and like you said, some of those deep cuts which you can show, but not necessarily deal with them in the expected way? If you know the Ravenloft adventure, you’ll see things you recognise, but not in the traditional way. I don’t want them to just go on the “same-old, same-old”. I think it’s fun to tweak reader and player expectations.

Dave: You mentioned Tracy Hickman before, having introduced a volume of Skullkickers. This has obviously come full circle in a way, because now you’re playing around in one of his worlds…

Jim: Tracy is at Gen Con every year, and we usually split a booth. He’s a friend. And 12-year-old me would have lost his mind.

Robert: I am sitting here quietly saying “Tracy Hickman” in a prepubescent falsetto.

Jim: Oh, it’s crazy. I mean, people come up to him at conventions and of course they’re freaking out. Tracy was already working on [Curse of Strahd], and I was talking to Wizards about doing a D&D book with them, and the conversation had already begun. It was kind of funny saying to Tracy saying “Hey, I know you’re doing Ravenloft, and I might be too!” Secrets! It was fun to have a little secret during last Gen Con, and being able to chat about it. I’m really, really happy for him. He’s been able to go back and add so much material to it, and it just looks great.

Dave: You’ve talked about the original Ravenloft adventure. The first of the “weekend of terror”, where adventurers get whipped up from wherever they were, and get to run through something that looks like a Hammer Horror film, and then end up back home traumatised for the fun of it. Whereas a lot of your fantasy stuff, as you’ve noted, has come at it from than angle of irreverent humour. Is horror a theme you like to dive into, or is this going to be through a lens of adventure comedy?

Jim: I think it’s a bit of both. Generally speaking, Skullkickers is very, very silly comic. A lot of the other stuff I’ve written can have tongue-in-cheek elements, but that doesn’t mean there’s not dramatic elements. I think you can contrast them against each other and that creates dramatic storytelling. At first I was worried, because I thought Wizards would say “we don’t want silliness happening in Ravenloft”, but you’ve got to have that contrast. Having characters react to it in funny or interesting ways proves how robust the setting is, that it’s not only one particular atmosphere. That was something I was very passionate about, and luckily Wizards got it. There are, even within the Ravenloft campaign setting, there are comedic elements or dark humour, or sometimes just the weird that pops into it. So, that’s all fuel for the fire.

Robert: It’s very hard to suggest it’s all terror all the time where, amongst other things they had a country de-facto ruled by a psychotic Pinocchio expy.

Jim: [laughs] Right!

Dave: Are you suggesting puppets aren’t inherently terrifying?

Robert: Figlio is perfectly natural! Just misunderstood!

[Note: Some deep, deep cut Ravenloft chatter here. We resume…]

Jim: Here’s my thing: we want to have the freedom to tell a fun story. And even if you haven’t read the Baldur’s Gate comic, you should get a sense of who these characters are, what their goals are and what they need. But the more you know about the setting, and the material, hopefully you’ll see those little bits and pieces popping up in fun ways you can enjoy. And also, little tips of the hat to the new Curse of Strahd as well. Because the new one is over one-hundred pages, and the original one is what, like, thirty?

Dave: Give or take.

Jim: So to flesh it out, and do all these new things…I received a copy of Curse of Strahd very early on, and I was able to sort of integrate some of that. New characters, new encounters.

Dave: Awesome.

Jim: You’ll read it, and think “this is some new thing that Jim made up?” but then when you pick up Curse of Strahd you’ll realise it’s something from the new sourcebook. That was a fun experience too, to play with some of the new toys Tracy made up.

Dave: I hope they don’t say “that’s something Jim made up” in that vaguely derisive tone. I mean, it’s got your name written on the cover!

Jim: [laughs] It’s all good. They’ve been really good about me introducing new characters and new things, and just – in the same way if you were a Dungeon Master saying “this works well for my adventure, this is fun, this creates entertaining conflict”. They’re not being really stuffy about it. These games are meant to be flexible, they’re meant to create drama and conflict. That’s what I’m sort of doing. It’s like a roleplaying game where I’m playing all the characters and the DM. Just crashing the toys together.

Robert: In addition to the party from Legends of Baldur’s Gate, and I understand you’re adding a cleric of Kelemvor as well, also from the Forgotten Realms.

Jim: This is a new character we created. That’s a ton of fun, being able to add new characters to the D&D mix, and expand that dynamic.

Robert: You’re not adding necessarily any Ravenloft natives for this? To the party?

Jim: I don’t want to give away too much plot. There are new Ravenloft NPCs and characters who are going to be interacting with our party. The stuff that takes them to Ravenloft in the first place is built around a new quest, a new group of characters who are up to no good. So, yeah, we get to build in some new Ravenloft-specific elements.

Dave: You mentioned length before. How long is this going to run for?

Jim: This Ravenloft-centric story arc is going to be five issues, and then we’re plotting already past that. So there’s an assumption we’re just going to keep it rolling. I don’t know if they’re going to number each story arc, or make it a miniseries like Legends but in terms of storytelling we’ve already got plans to take it beyond this.

Dave: To weirder and farther afield places?

Jim: I can’t really say anything, because that’ll tip some of the future plans. It’s worked out really well. When Legends of Baldur’s Gate happened, they were doing Tyranny of Dragons. I said “well, it’s Dungeons & Dragons, so having a dragon in there just makes sense!” Then Ravenloft, which I totally wanted to get in on, and the next thing they’re doing is something I’m excited about as well. I can’t say for sure because we’re still hammering it out. But it should have some sort of tie-in to what’s coming down the pipe, and the flexibility of our party, and the bull-headed heroism of Minsc and Boo give us possibilities to just go forth and adventure, in all sorts of fun spaces.

Robert: It’s interesting that you mention that, because I wanted to touch on something you mentioned before. For this run you’ll be seeing the setting through the lens of the characters you put in it, but conversely, Minsc has seen some pretty horrifying stuff, and come out pretty mentally similar to how he went in…

Jim: Well, crazy isn’t the only reaction to bad things!

Robert: No! And that’s my point – will you change him? Will he be different when he comes out? Will you leave “the mark of Zub” on him?

Jim: [laughs] Yeees? The short answer would be yes, because as a writer and a storyteller I think it’s important that you’re not just trying to keep the character in amber and not have anything affect him. There are characters where they do that, where they just constantly roll back the clock and reset their paradigm or whatever, and I think Minsc is a character who can just be a one-note goofball. That’s totally valid but it’s not all that’s there. Even beneath that surface of insanity and weirdness, I think there’s a real desire for heroism, for simple solutions to problems. Ravenloft by its very nature is complicated and difficult, and there are things that don’t have simple solutions, and the ramifications therein. All the different Darklords that run those areas of Ravenloft are there because they’ve been corrupted, they’ve made bad decision, they’ve been cursed. Taking someone who is this weird, almost savant-like, sort of maniac and putting them into this place where goodness is not supposed to flourish, I think it’s really an interesting story, and will have an effect on Minsc. I think it’s something we can explore a bit and have fun with.

Robert: I think it’s very true what you’re saying that Minsc is a character who is about facing things down, “sword meet evil” is pretty much the defining modus operandi.

Jim: He is pretty much the archetype of that “kick down the door” style of character, and there’s a type of player that’s like that. As much as those characters can be really annoying at times, damn if it doesn’t get things moving, if it doesn’t drive the story forward and keep people from being boring and not doing things. There’s an element of momentum in those characters, they make decisions that makes things happen, and that’s valid. I think there’s something interesting and fun about that. Ravenloft can be big Hammer Horror kind of creepy, but there’s also a psychology and a subtlety to it. Mentally breaking people down and tricking them, and Minsc is known for “Bad guys over there? Point me towards them! Once he’s dead we’ll party, because we’ve won the day. We’re heroes!” This isn’t that kind of simple story, and those simple answers are not going to get him what he wants. I think that that’s going to be fun. To put him into that sort of place, where his natural tendencies are going to work against him.

Dave: I think you’re right that Minsc resonates not just with your proactive gamers, but also with your horror fans, the ones yelling at the screen or throwing the book across the room: “Why are you going in the basement? You’ve got an axe!” Or whatever.

Jim: Yeah!  “If he mouthed off to me, I’d just kill him!” or whatever. And Minsc is the kind of guy who would do that. That’s the fun of that. For those horror tropes, that’ll be a really neat dynamic.

Dave: It’s part of the tradition of horror as well – Dracula gets killed by a cowboy with a bowie knife.

Jim: These stories have a lot of flexibility. There doesn’t have to be one story, or one kind of answer. We’re taking these more irreverent, but not Skullkickers irreverent, characters and we’re going to put them into this bleak world. It’s the “Demiplane of Dread”! It’s got dread in the name for crying out loud! It’s as bleak as it gets. We get to see how their goodness is tested by that.

Robert: I think it’s certainly an asset that you were able to go from that kind of “slam bang” action of Legends of Baldur’s Gate, to something like Ravenloft which is a little more moody, more contemplative, where you can get into the psychology more. 

Jim: There’s a scene that’s going to be in issue #3 that’s going to be so unlike anything in Legends of Baldur’s Gate. The group is forced to slow down, and they’re unsure of what to do next. That’s never a problem in the first story. In the first story we’ve got to “do this, get here, stop this person, beat this thing up!” In this story, they need to pause and consider how they can even be effective here! That’s something cool to explore that isn’t just the same pacing constantly throughout the whole thing.

Robert: Particularly if you’re sticking with these guys for a while – and to be clear to Wizards here, without you disclosing anything or spoiling us in any way – if you go on to travel somewhere else, go on to do Spelljammer, or Mystara, or Al Qadim, or some homebrew setting of yours, the Zubverse that you put together when you were fifteen, you can change up the tone, and the pacing and the storytelling and come at it from a fresh angle every time. That’s the great benefit of doing something like this, you’ve got an opportunity to take characters in unexpected directions.

Jim: Absolutely. I think that that’s what’s going to keep it entertaining, rather than just generic. That need to progress as a storyteller, to challenge yourself, it changes over time. Sam Keith did a comic in the ’90s called The Maxx, and then he went off to do fine arts. And people would keep asking him in interviews “when are you going to come back and do more Maxx”? And he said “You don’t really want that. You think you do, but I’m not that person any more. I’ve changed so much that I can’t go back and write that and have it be the way it used to be. It’s there, and I’m glad I did it, and it makes me part of who I am, but I can’t just turn everything else off and go back to drawing that way and creating those stories again.

Robert: You can’t go home again.

Jim: Right. You can’t go home again.

Robert: It’s interesting. Obviously I love comics, but there is a sense that for some – not all, but a certain percentage – they can sometimes be backwards looking.

Jim: Oh, absolutely. You’ve got to keep in mind that when people got into comics – usually superheroes, but whatever they got into – there’s usually a period of time, usually quite formative, when they got into it, and they’ve attached an emotional intensity to it, and they want that feeling. They want that discovery, they want that to never end. The easiest way they can envision doing that, not always consciously, is to recreate those stories, to go back to the well and do the same thing again. Redo the origin story, do a classic, but “we’ll do it right, we’ll do it better!” But in a lot of ways there are diminishing returns, and you can’t recapture it.

Robert: One of my big axioms about comics is that fundamentally what people are looking for when they sequelise or reboot or anything else is that feeling that they had when they read the property when they were twelve. But you can’t recapture the feeling of being twelve. You can allude to it, but you can’t reproduce it.

Jim: Jon Stewart had a great thing where he spoke about politicians, and how politicians will talk about how things were better when they were young. How the world was simpler, how the morals were less complex. They talk about it in a very powerful, nostalgic way.  They say we should go back to those halcyon days. But every single generation, when they were growing up, things were simpler because you were a child.. You didn’t have those responsibilities, you didn’t have that understanding of the rest of the world. It was easy to look and say the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad, and that you know where the world stands. And the same thing is true of kids now. If you go along to them in twenty years and they’ll say “Oh, I wish we could roll it back to the 2010s”, that’s when things were basic.

Dave: A simpler time, when we only had iPhones…

Jim: Just an iPhone 6! I teach at an art college in Toronto, and the students all have this heavy duty ’90s nostalgia right now and they talk about how simple things were. And I think “Geez, I was already in college” and everything was complicated and difficult and stressful. To me the ’80s were that time, and to my parents the ’60s were that time. That’s the nature of growing up. John Byrne would talk about how in superheroes, whatever era you grew up on, those are the ways you expect your heroes to be. For me, Spider-Man in the black suit, all that stuff is awesome and cool, but people reading the books in ’60s hated that. You have writers who come along, and from their nostalgia, they bring in characters who for them were special and important. Which is not to say it’s not written well. It is! And there’s lots of cool plotlines. I mean, I’m doing that right now, I’m writing Ravenloft, which is that nostalgia for me on display.

Robert: I suppose that there’s a degree of benefit in that position in that people bring the things they love back into the public eye so a new generation can experience it. I mean, something like the X-Men roster, there’s characters who you’d never see if someone didn’t come back and put them at the forefront again.

Jim: That has a kind of feedback, too, where those things sync up in time with the stuff that they’re looking to introduce into the movies, and then they end up with a whole new audience, and that’s how they survive.

Robert: You end up with this great melting pot of these disparate influences coming out of one source, where things dive below and then resurface periodically. And I think it’s one of the great things about both comics and RPGs, that you’re forced to share your creative energies. Comics are an inherently collaborative medium, because even if it’s creator owned, there’s got to be a dialogue between the writer and the artists to put a product together. There’s rarely a single authorial voice at any point, and that makes them interesting as an art form.

Jim: And readers will bring their own things to it, and see it through the lens of their experiences.

Robert: One of the things about both comics and RPGs is that they’re both industries that draw a lot from the fan turned pro. For all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that they can be quite hard to monetize, it’s often a passion project for people who pursue them as a career. And they usually do them as passion projects because they were fans of them somewhere to begin with.

Dave: I think it’s a fine starting impetus. I think “I love this thing and I want to write about it” is one of the key qualifications to start writing it or about it.

Jim: Yeah, as long as you’re not frozen with it. If you’re not willing to push forward with it, if you’re not trying to tell the same story over and over again.

Robert: I think if you make anything too much of a sacred cow from a storytelling perspective you cripple yourself. Because on the one hand you make it incumbent on yourself to preserve the thing in amber, and on the other hand you need to provide the sense of progress the reader’s going to want. And you can’t do both. You can’t keep everything perfectly frozen in lucite and moving forward.

Jim: And this is where some superhero continuity guys go crazy. Because the further we get from World War Two – clearly the Fantastic Four couldn’t have launched their rocket during the Red Scare and also have iPhones and also have only been married for ten years. You can’t reconcile all of that. And it’s compounded by the fact that there was, when these things were being written – like Archies or whatever – this expectation was that there was a reading audience that would change about every ten years.

David: The cycle repeats itself.

Jim: Right, that you could sort of roll things back and no-one would notice. One of the things that we’ve now got with the internet – and this is one of the most difficult things in entertainment in the 21^st century – with digital archives, nothing is lost. I’m not just competing with every comic on the market now, I’m competing with every comic that’s ever been published. If you don’t like the current D&D comic, you can go read the old ones digitally.

Robert: Oh, I’ve got all my Forgotten Realms Classics digitally. So don’t disappoint me, Jim!

Jim: [laughs] You joke, but it’s true. You’re literally competing with everyone all the time.

Dave: And the older it is, the cheaper it gets.

Jim: Yeah. And they put it in these huge bundles.

Robert: It’s interesting to watch the market fight itself, in that sense. I think it’s true for both comics and RPGs, that there’s often an attempt when new stuff is happening to get the old stuff off the table. Because, exactly as you said, they’re competing with it.

Jim: Roleplaying games is a weird one, because some people only want to play what they’ve always played, and some people only want to play the newest thing, because they assume, being the newest, that it’s the best. So you end up seeing these player bases who get into “edition wars” – arguing about things having changed from what they want! But you can play these games any way you want with any rules you want, so don’t freak out about it.

Dave: At the end of the day, it is a storytelling thing, with five or six friends as your audience. You’re creating the story, the art, the dialogue, and the rules are there to help, so they don’t expire. No-one’s going to kick in the door and take your rules away from you.

Jim: Well, with the internet, it’s the same problem. You’re not just competing with the current games, you’re working with every game that’s ever existed.

Robert: I’m always very gratified to see the degree of overlap between, for professionals, RPG professionals who are comic book fans, and comic book fans who are RPG players to a greater or lesser degrees.

Jim: When I talk about gaming stuff on my Twitter feed, I get a lot of pros coming forward to talk about their favourite games. And a lot of games too, they don’t just talk about playing D&D in high school, they talk about Call of Cthulhu or a Kickstarter for a new release of one of their favourite old games. It’s a really passionate fan base.

Robert: Have you played much 5^th Edition yet?

Jim: I have played it, but not as much as I would like! One of the problems with my writing schedule is that I don’t have much of a chance. Before the [5^th Edition] books came out, I had them, and I was playing them here with my friends to make sure there weren’t any major things I needed to familiarise myself with again, but I noticed right away that it was pretty much the D&D I know with more elegant rules solutions. That gave me a lot of confidence when I came to write the stories.

Dave: The big gamer question, then – do you play or run?

Jim: I always run the game. When I was a kid, my brother would almost always be the Dungeon Master. I was the youngest person in that group, and it was a way for me to be one of the older boys, because every turn I would be asked what I was doing, and they couldn’t play without me, because my parents insisted that if my brother was going to play, he had to bring me along too. So there was this weird pressure to justify my being there, and on my turn, I would try to do something entertaining, something heroic. If I could make my older brother or my cousins laugh or be entertained that was like being one of the older kids, being an adult almost. Like I proved myself. So it gave me confidence, and gave me an audience. It was just a really, really fun thing to do.

Once my brother went off to university, I became the de facto game master for my group in high school. We would play D&D, but also lots of other games and get obsessed over different games at different times. That’s carried on through pretty much my entire adult life. I don’t get to play as much, obviously. Most of the time when we’re getting together now we’ve only got time for a board game, so you can be done in one evening – but there’s still usually something of that improvisational element. I learned so much from that, and in a lot of ways when I’m writing dialogue for scenes, I’m roleplaying it through in my head. What would they say, how would they behave?

Dave: I think that’s a good tone for being the standard bearer of 5^th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, something that feels a little more like throwing the doors open to the old TSR [Note: then Dungeons & Dragons’ parent company, now absorbed into Wizards of the Coast] days and the legacy of weirdness that was kicking around then. Why not? Let’s bring back some of the older things that no-one’s looked at for a while.

Jim: I can’t speak officially for Wizards, but the impression that I get when I speak to the guys or when we get together…we went for lunch at Gen Con and talked about their plans was that 4^th Edition, while being a very tight rules system, lost some of the setting and removed elements that made D&D feel like D&D. 5^th Edition was trying to marry those two together, how do we get a tight rules system but also getting back to some of those aspects that if you were making a brand new game from scratch you might not put in, but are too core to what D&D is to ignore?

Robert: I remember a note you had in Skullkickers, and I must admit it rings true for me, that when someone who is not versed in the tone of it tries to do “Ye Olde Englishe Professore” highblown metaphor, it becomes too stentorian and too reserved. Too dry. There’s an energy that comes from using a natural voice.

Jim: I think if a reader is trapped in the language, they’re not going to get a sense of tone. They’re not going to get the sense of playful energy in the storytelling. I’m never going to use full on colloquialisms, and have them say “modern” things, but at the same time if I’m going to use terminology, it’s going to sound like the attitude. If that’s instantly recognisable, I think that’s a better choice than making it obtuse in the language.

Dave: It’s fantasy anyway. It’s whatever’s in your imagination, not necessarily what people assume from TV dramas is appropriate for 1470 (even if that’s not how they’d actually sound in 1470).

Jim: Well – this is an aside, but it’ll circle back around to your original point – the Transatlantic accent from old movies in the ’40s; it’s not a real accent. It’s just a way of speaking that they thought would sound more dramatic to the audience. It’s an affectation in order to serve the drama. Now it’s become this cliché, but that’s not how people talk. Fantasy characters talk how we want them to talk. It’s my goal to deliver a sense of action and adventure and bombast, so that’s how I try to make them talk.

Robert: The British have a similar thing with “Received Pronunciation”, and even here we used to have “Cultivated Australian”, a completely invented dialect because we had cultural cringe about not being English.

Jim: It’s funny, in North America they have this accent called the “Newscaster’s Accent”, and that happens to be very flat, and basically is the accent from Ontario, where I’m from. So it wasn’t until I travelled that I realised not everyone sounded like me!

Robert: Check your accent privilege, Zub!

Jim: Oh, so privileged.

Dave: It’s funny, because when I was growing up, the Forgotten Realms [Note: The Forgotten Realms are arguably Dungeons & Dragons most popular game setting, including, amongst other things, Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter, locations that have been adapted into major video games, novels and comics, including Legends of Baldur’s Gate mentioned elsewhere in this interview] always sounded American, in my head. Because it never sounded English, and it certainly didn’t sound like here.

Jim: Well, Ed Greenwood, who compiled his personal campaign notes into the Realms, is also from Ontario, he’s a Canadian guy as well. TSR noticed how smart he was and what a wealth of material he had, and they ended up buying the Realms from him.

Dave: Privilege again!

Jim: [laughs] Yeah! It really is a North American creation in that sense.

Robert: They call jazz “the only American art form”, but comics, of course–

Jim: –and even animation! Animation is a North American creation–

Dave: –but roleplaying games, even though they’re never thought of, belong on that list.

Jim: Absolutely. It’s so funny, because I try and explain…even when I was in high school, I was so obsessed with roleplaying games, because you could take on characters. “I’m not this person, but for the purposes of this game I can be this person”. And I think it promotes empathy, broadens your horizons to understand other people, other cultures, everything if you let it.

Robert: D&D has a long marriage with comics, going back to the late ’80s, the Jeff Grubb/Dan Mishkin sort of stuff–

Jim: –which I read, back in the day –

Robert: –and John Rogers did stuff a few years ago for 4^th Edition with Fell’s Five. Do you see yourself as the 5^th edition guy, while they do this portion of integrating?

Jim: Yeah. I mean, they haven’t got anyone else doing D&D comics at the moment, and even the way this came about… I can’t take all the credit for it or anything, but IDW wasn’t sure they were going to do more D&D comics. I had been doing Samurai Jack for them, and that was a ton of fun, and I knew the gang over at IDW. I was talking to Ted Adams, who is their publisher, and he asked if there was anything else I wanted to do at IDW. And I said, flat-out, “you guys don’t have a D&D comic at the moment, because if you did I’d be reading it!”. He said that they didn’t have plans, and I said that I’d love to do it. And from there, we went to Wizards a bit like a bull in a china shop. “We’ve got to do a comic, we’ve got to get people excited about 5^th edition!” I went to town on it, and they were just very, very gracious. I don’t know if I’ll be the only person to write D&D comics during 5^th edition, but so far they’ve been pretty open to my take on how to so the D&D book. You can tie it into events and things you’re doing, like this Ravenloft thing, like Tyranny of Dragons, but it can’t be just brand extension. That’s just a sub-audience of an audience. The people who play, then within them the group that are playing the event, and then the group within them that might buy a comic. That audience is too small. You’ve got to create a story that’s going to work for the vast majority of people, people who aren’t playing D&D. The nicest compliment I’ve gotten is people coming up and saying “I read Skullkickers, so I bought this D&D comic. I’ve never played the tabletop game or the video game before, but I just had so much fun!” Mission accomplished.

Robert: On that note, what would you say to comic book fans who aren’t familiar with D&D or who aren’t familiar with Ravenloft, but that you’d want them to know about this story, what you’d want to get out there?

Jim: What we’re doing with this story is taking classic heroes out of the classic Forgotten Realms fantasy setting, and putting them into this dark, bleak realm of undeath and Gothic horror, and we’re going to see how these two paradigms slam into each other. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun if you’re a fan of either setting, if you’re a fan of the characters, or if you’re a fan of fantasy storytelling in general. If you’re a Ravenloft fan, I think this is a no-brainer, because you’re just going to see a really different vision of the world and the types of stuff we’re doing there. I don’t think Ravenloft has ever been presented in a comic?

Dave: No, it hasn’t. I think if you’re Ravenloft fan you just have whiplash from the fact the book exists!

Jim: Having never been in comics before, it’s nice to see this sustained vision of the world. When we were compiling visual reference, I sent everything over to the Nelson and said “this is how Ravenloft looks, but anything that’s not there, read the descriptions and you get first crack at it”. That’s really fun. D&D as a game and as a storytelling medium is all about getting together with your friends having an entertaining time and building something collectively you couldn’t do as an individual. That’s always my goal when I’m writing these books, to tell stories that feel true and fun and worth reading.

Dungeons & Dragons debuts from IDW in April. Curse of Strahd is released on 15 March 2016. Images courtesy of IDW Publishing and Wizards of the Coast.