When I approached the completion of the Wrath of Order, I reached out to my friend and fellow designer, Josh Mandel, to help me with a section I couldn’t do alone: the foreword. Luckily, he agreed to provide one.

When he delivered it, I was stunned.

It was an amazing piece that explored how my (and our shared) history designing computer games–but especially those that were all about storytelling–influenced my writing.

I won’t go into it a lot more, but I will make the entire foreword available here for those of you interested but not yet up to the latest book release. Enjoy!

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Foreword 

I AM ACHINGLY jealous of Glen Dahlgren. To be specific, I am jealous of his talent. There, I said it. Can we please move on now?

Glen and I first met in 1994, at the respected computer game company Legend Entertainment. I was transferring from another game company, Sierra On-Line, but I had played many of Legend’s games, and its designers were admired–by me, and by everyone who played their games–for their seamless designs and evocative, meticulous writing. Legend, more than any of its competitors, was the adventure game company with literary roots and aspirations.

When I joined the company, Glen was just releasing his game Death Gate, based on Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s fantasy book series The Death Gate Cycle. Both the books and the game were unknown to me at the time. And it was a new job. So I set to work on my first assignment, creating a game design based on The Belgariad series by David Eddings. I had five monumental books to read before I could even start designing.

Despite my desire to focus on the task, I took a detour to play a computer game. I booted up Death Gate the moment it was available to me.

I was blown away. It was a jewel in Legend’s crown.

Here was a game that did everything right. Strong, memorable storytelling. Vivid characters, logical puzzles (with plenty of hints available by examining the surroundings), an intriguing system of magic. A fully fleshed-out mythology. Sure, it made me want to read the books, and sure, it made me want a sequel to the game (I’m still waiting, but it’s been thirty years now and I’m starting to get the hint). But more than anything else, I wanted to emulate this disciplined approach to game design, one that Sierra games, for all their perceived qualities, only rarely achieved… including, I freely admit, my own.

Playing Death Gate, I realized that even after four years at Sierra, I still had a lot to learn. In retrospect, I can now acknowledge that I developed more solid design skills–from the Legend process itself, but from Glen especially–in one year at Legend than I learned in all my time at Sierra. How to structure my games for greatest impact, how to construct and clue intelligent puzzles, how to balance interactivity with exposition, and more… taught as much through observation of Glen’s process as through discussions, meetings, and conversation.

Did you know Glen also designed arcade games, early in his career? I dunno, he might not want me telling you that. But it’s relevant, so I’m putting it out there, and we’ll get back to it.

Glen has now transitioned from designing games to writing books, seemingly effortlessly. I can’t profess to know what sort of agonies and ordeals he had to go through to make that leap, because I haven’t made the journey myself, but I know that he has made it look easier than it undoubtedly is. His books vibrate with drama, detail, and momentum, just like his games. They carry his readers, like his players, on incredible journeys, high-speed adventures where delights, traps, and revelations lurk around every corner and magical conflict is never far away. The forces are volatile and hazardous, and cast their shadows over every aspect of life. We’re gambling with the fortunes of a civilization here, but the stories are personal and familial, the characters are tightly interconnected, and we’re not dealing with royalty and upper crust, we’re dealing mostly with common people who quietly affect the flow of history.

Yet, apart from the stories themselves, and unsurprisingly given our shared history, what’s been most enjoyable for me as I’ve followed along in the Chronicles of Chaos is how clearly I see Glen’s game design ethos reflected in the way he approaches his books.

Great graphic adventures, for instance, offer an ever-changing array of environments in which to imagine yourself. These are environments you love, or fear, or both simultaneously. Glen’s games typify this, but the books take it to a level unconstrained by budgets and schedules, with new places to explore that stretch your ability to envision, presented in swift procession that keeps the reader in a constant state of extreme curiosity. (I mean, who thinks to drop a main character into the center of an Evil God? What kind of twisted imagination comes up with things like that? But once you’re there, who wants to leave?)

As with the exemplary assortment of environments that stir the imagination, so, too, are we treated to a world of characters of infinite variety, with abilities, histories, and quirks that defy expectations. Games are almost universally plot-driven, so characters are often stereotypes, instantly identifiable so the writers can get right on to the business of the story. There is a never-ending supply of these two-dimensional cutouts in fantasy games and books. But Glen’s characters are real, they’re shaded, they defy easy categorization, and what they present to the world on the surface is only a starting point, never the full story. I love that they’re all at least a little self-centered, and they’re brimming with ulterior motives revealed only over time. Still, they’re brought to life in such a way that we immediately feel strongly about them (and we may be misled). Then Glen peels back the layers of these characters, not just in pages, but over the course of volumes, and they are gifts that keep on giving.

But The Wrath of Order, and the whole series, defy simple labels such as plot-driven or character-driven. They’re on a level of Glen’s own devious design. They’re interactive; there is so much lore and history, refocused here because we jump ahead in time, that you are engaged on two levels: the present and the past are equal parts of the game, and they are always intersecting. To get the most achievements, you want to remember the most past details. The strength of your recall will help you anticipate wisely. While you can’t avoid nasty surprises, at least if you can sense they’re coming, they stop being jump-scares!

A particularly tricky area of game design is pacing. How do you maintain dramatic tension, but still turn control over to the player? How do you manipulate the interactivity so that you keep events moving along, but without leaving players frustrated, feeling that they are being forced along rails? In Death Gate, Glen demonstrated mastery of the black art of pacing. With his books, even though pacing is now entirely under his control, he approaches it with confidence and expertise honed under much harsher conditions. These are the heightened sensibilities of an author who knows what’s like to come under the scrutiny of the gaming community (yikes!). The flow of the story is never less than brisk, never more than breakneck, and Glen ensures, gleefully and perhaps a little sadistically, that at no time should the reader get too comfortable.

The world has so many wrinkles, crevices, and twists, coming fast and furious, and the twists are often clued well in advance. This calls to mind another important game design strategy that I learned from Glen, involving hiding hints and how one allows them to be slowly, tauntingly revealed. The Wrath of Order has a vast number of secrets; indeed, the entire world of Chaos is cunningly realized beyond our awareness at any one time, and searching for clues is part of the fun and interactivity.

While the world is alive with secrets and conflicts that Glen uncovers with the exquisite timing of a professional interrogator, I am particularly enamored by other elements of the storytelling. In particular, I love that the theme of family duty underpins so many of the threads, and I get great satisfaction from the way karma is like a living, breathing thing in this world. It lurks around every corner, just waiting to bite you in the assumptions.

So! Recall that Glen’s early creations were arcade games, not adventure games. I hadn’t known that when I went to Legend, or even when I first wrote about The Game of War several years ago and pointed out the no-holds-barred action sequences. But it makes perfect sense, in retrospect, that these rollicking, Spielbergesque whirlwinds where magic, quick thinking, and/or agility either save the day, or inadvertently leave one more imperiled than before… they’re straight out of AAA open-world platformers. Yet again, I think Glen the game designer is whispering in the ear of Glen the author.

I could draw more comparisons, but I think, at this point, I’ve made the case to everybody’s complete satisfaction. See? You agree that I am right. The secret is out. Glen may be a successful fantasy author, but he undoubtedly owes at least some of his abilities to the habits and skills he developed as a game designer. And get this: in pointing this out, I have, in fact, mapped the various intersections where, in The Chronicles of Chaos, Glen’s past intersects with his present.

But… reading The Wrath of Order, and then analyzing it, hasn’t helped me. I’m still insanely jealous. But I’m used to it. It’s just “now, more than ever.”

–Josh Mandel, Award-winning Game Designer of Space Quest 6, Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded, and Callahan’s Spacetime Saloon