Jennifer Brozek | May 2020

Tell Me - Rusty Zimmerman

Rusty Zimmerman is a friend and peer of mine, working in the word mines of Catalyst Game Labs. Today, he tells me what he’s done to try to change the perceptions of Shadowrun fans (and wanna-be gatekeepers) about what “does” and “does not” belong in the Sixth World.

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The catalyst for my latest Jimmy Kincaid yarn, Chaser, came from the real-life political climate and how it all-too-often shows itself in geek spaces. I’m a moderator for a sprawling (8,000+ member) Shadowrun Facebook community, the Shadowrunner’s Union. While the vast majority of our users are terrific, and while we do everything we can to keep the place inclusive and welcoming, sometimes a little ugliness seeps through the cracks.

That’s what happened when someone posted some artwork of their character in this magic-rich, cyberpunk/transhumanist setting; a catgirl. Only a few people commented on the artwork itself, or asked our intrepid poster for more about his character. The majority of the memorable conversation was, instead, the dully predictable attacks of angry geeks against someone they thought was a little geekier than them. A pack of nerds descended on someone they thought was having fun wrong, and the joy of an artwork post was taken away as gamer after gamer insisted catgirls and furries have no place in ‘their’ game (and that’s without even mentioning that he was a male-presenting player with a female-presenting character).

First, I swung the banhammer around and took out the garbage. Next, I politely reminded everyone that Changelings—people affected by SURGE, Sudden Recessive Genetic Expression, who mutated due to a spike in magic—had been a part of Shadowrun since 2001, nineteen years ago in real-life and nineteen years ago in-universe, and that the first artwork AND first in-character lore about them both featured a catgirl. After that, I reminded people that furry-style cosmetic modifications had also always been an option in Shadowrun (and even in Cyberpunk 2020), literally for decades, even prior to Year of the Comet introducing SURGE.

But then? Then I decided to really show that catgirls belonged in Shadowrun more than gatekeepers. I messaged the original poster, and asked him to tell me more about his character.

I’d had the idea for a Kincaid story brewing for a while, you see, where our hard-boiled paranormal investigator shows that not all of the classic noir-PI tropes hold true. Like a lot of aging media, some of the original private dicks are, well, kind of dickish. Not every genre ages well, not every trope is the same almost a hundred years later, and maybe it was time to be a little clearer that Jimmy Kincaid—and Shadowrun and I—want readers to feel welcome, regardless of their gender, orientation, skin color, or, yes, even their other fandoms.

It was time for Jimmy to work on some hate crimes, and to tackle head-on the metaracism and bigotry that’s so often sidestepped in Shadowrun work. This submachinegun-firing catgirl from some artwork, then, was the last ingredient I needed. With my new friend’s blessing and a few new notes, I got to work making a bullied player’s favorite character into a canon character, and the final puzzle piece fell into place, completing the story I’d had idly bouncing around in my skull for a while.

I hope everyone will enjoy Chaser, not just because it’s an important reminder that Shadowrun has room for everybody, but because it’s a heck of a story, too. We find Jimmy racing all over his Puyallup neighborhood, staking out, interviewing, roughing up, and being roughed up by all manner of Shadowrun troublemakers—from troubled priests with dark secrets to racist cops, Humanis policlub bigots to the mutated shadowrunners they target.

It adds to the existing Jimmy Kincaid stories, Neat and Shaken (and includes the first chapter of Stirred, my next novel), and it does so in a way that I think readers will have a great time with.


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Rusty Zimmerman (“Russell” when he’s writing, so he sounds less like a dog) is a Texan who took the long way getting there from California, then Kentucky. He, his wife, and their princess-pupper Bodie can be found in the DFW Metroplex, slinging dice, playing Overwatch, and telling stories with their friends. When he’s not gaming face-to-face, he can be found on Discord and Twitch at all hours of the day and night, hanging out with his geeks and, as he insists on calling it, “researching for work.”

He is a full-time freelance writer in the gaming industry, known for credits ranging from the Warmachine and Spinespur wargames to the award-winning Satellite Reign PC game, but most of all for his work in role-playing games in particular. While he’s always eager for another game world to play in and another notch on his gunbelt, he’s still investing most of his word count into Shadowrun, particularly writing novels, novellas, and anthology fiction in the Sixth World.

 

 

Tell Me - Marie Bilodeau

Today’s Tell Me comes from the ever fabulous, incredibly talented Marie Bilodeau. She is a storyteller, author, gamer, and so much more. She tells me how she borrowed from her gaming experience to write The Guild of Shadows series. Also, she seems to have a small obsession with baked goods.

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Roll for perception. Sneak attacks. Curse damage…after more than a year of playing our regular Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I didn’t want it to end.

Around the table, gathered by writer and podcaster Brandon Crilly, were some of my closest friends: Jay Odjick, Derek Künsken, Evan May, Nicole Lavigne, and Tyler Goodier. All of these people are writers and creators, so the creative energy around the roleplaying table reached stratospheric levels of high.

So much so that our campaign somehow built itself in arcs, and we knew we were in the final arc. My character Tira Misu was cursed. One of our good friends, the druid Gwriad, was gone. The Spider Queen was about to be reborn (deities are often bored in D&D).

It was all coming to an end, and I started blogging about it, wanting to keep our Sunday gaming sessions going for a bit longer. 

This wasn’t because the world was so amazing (it’s basic secondary fantasy), nor the gameplay mechanics unforgettable (I love D&D and many other systems, too). It was because the characters were so well fleshed out. Because the amazing group of creatives around the table were giving them motivations, thoughts, catch phrases…forming a ragtag crew of wanna-be-heroes.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so did our campaign.

But the characters lived on in my head. I wanted more of their adventures, their company and insanity. I decided to base a story on them, but didn’t want to fall into the trap of “writing my campaign.”

First thing I did was look at the setting, which is so important to speculative fiction, subgenres leaning completely on magic vs tech vs both(!). Not to mention earth vs. the plants are eating people vs. kingdoms warring all the time. Also now (leather) vs. future (jumpsuits) vs. past (hoop skirts). …I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea.

I looked at my main character, Tira Misu, and focused on her since I knew her best. I decided to import her into our world (leather!), but a different version of it. I quite literally imported her and her buddies via portals appearing all over the world, replacing babies in their cribs, a play on the old changeling stories.

So now it became urban fantasy, a comfortable departure from secondary world fantasy RPG.

Next were the arcs. Story and character arcs in D&D are flexible and at times messy, depending on character rolls and other players around the table to define characters and events. For a fiction book, which needs a strong narrative and motivations to entice the reader to flip the page, I needed to clean it up, pick a few traits of each character, and go from there.

I plotted and schemed even, and ended with a six-book arc. Some characters don’t show up until halfway through the arc. And not all will necessarily make it to the end. The central mystery pulls the characters along the whole way through, but there are side mysteries and adventures demanding their immediate attention in each book, too. So, six mini-story arcs all feeding one giant arc.

That one felt more like the game, in a way. Side quests on the way to the main reveal.

Because I already knew the characters’ emotional beats and personalities, the first book in The Guild of Shadows series, Hell Born, practically wrote itself. It kept me up. I couldn’t shake it. Same with the second book, Hell Bent, and now the third, Raising Hell (coming soon!).

Once all six books are done, I’m not sure what will happen. But I do know that we’re about to start a new arc in our campaign. Most characters are returning to the table. The players are all geared up. Characters have evolved and changed. New adventures await.

And, in their dusty, potentially bloody wake, I have a feeling that more books will follow.

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Marie Bilodeau is an Ottawa-based author and storyteller, with eight published books to her name. Her speculative fiction has won several awards and has been translated into French (Les Éditions Alire) and Chinese (SF World). Her short stories have also appeared in various anthologies.

In a past life not-so-long ago, she was Deputy Publisher for The Ed Greenwood Group (TEGG). Marie is also a storyteller and has told stories across Canada in theatres, tea shops, at festivals and under disco balls. She’s won story slams with personal stories, participated in epic tellings at the National Arts Centre, and adapted classical material.

Marie is co-host of the Archivos Podcast Network with Dave Robison, co-chair of Ottawa’s speculative fiction literary convention CAN-CON with Derek Künsken, and is a casual blogger at Black Gate Magazine.