Secrets of the Dread Realms
Author's Notes
The Dark Duo
DarkDuo posted the following information in Dec 2004:
One clarification I'd like to make. Nicky and I are NOT in-house employees of Arthaus or White Wolf. We are freelance developers who get paid by the job. We do not get salaries or benefits from White Wolf, but do this on a "for hire" basis.
Because we are freelancers, we also have day jobs to pay the bills (or try to pay the bills). I work in a library; Nicky works in a movie theatre. Other line developers and freelance writers are teachers, tax preparation specialists, call center employees etc. Our primary responsibility as freelance developers consists of coming up with a list of proposed titles for the year (pending approval by higher ups at Arthaus), preparing an outline for the book for manager review, assembling authors & supplying information for contracting those authors, sending outlines to the authors and letting them know what the deadlines are, overseeing their progress & granting extensions as necessary, putting together a final draft for editing, finding an editor, sending the manuscript to the editor for copy editing and sometimes rules checking, sending the edited manuscript to the art developer for layout and sending artnotes for the chapters to the art editor (who chooses artists), and finally reviewing the proofs in .pdf.
All this is done on a very tight schedule. If someone drops the ball, we either have to find another author to pick it up, or write the material ourselves. And we do this after we get home from a full day's work!
Then, when we have some spare time, we try to visit the forum and listen to your complaints -- which is why we're often online during the wee hours of the morning (for us) when any sane individual would be getting some sleep to power up for the next day's work.
Those who have questions about web enhancements for Ravenloft, the number of titles produced, the type of titles produced, Ravenloft fiction, Ravenloft adventures or other policy decisions should write a landmail letter to:
Arthaus/Sword & Sorcery
1554 Litton Drive
Stone Mountain, GA 30083
Questions regarding rules, content, etc. should go to us either on this form (we get notified by email) or at the following email address: JHavana@aol.com. We'll answer you as best we can as quickly as we can.
Complaints can go to us as well or to Arthaus.
So, hope this helps clear up who to contact about what.
Take care,
J&N
Andrew Cermak
I did the text, but not the stat conversions, for: Gabrielle Aderre, Anhktepot, Ivana Boritsi, Dominic d'Honaire, Ivan Dilisnya, Vlad Drakov, Hazlik, Harkon Lukas, Jacqueline Renier, Alfred Timothy, and Strahd.
I also wrote the infamously missing DM material for the book, which was cut and ended up in the RL DMG instead.
Well, SDR came quick on the heels of the RCS, so we were preparing for it before we got contracts or word counts. We were told that it would be a Dungeon Master's book. From our D&D roots, we naturally associated "Dungeon Master's Book" with something of substance, not realizing until too late that what they had in mind was more of a "Book of Storyteller Secrets," a la the WoD line. Cutting back our material once we got the actual word counts was painful. Then what we submitted got cut even further. It was pretty disappointing compared to what we had envisioned, but there wasn't much to be done about it.
The characters I wrote that got cut for space were Anhktepot Malocchio, Tristen ApBlanc, Arijani, Diamabel, Elena Faith-hold, and Yagno Petrovna. And that just accounts for my half.
(Note, when I speak of "my half," I'm just referring to text write-ups. Andrew Wyatt did the stat conversions for nearly every lord, John and I handled the text write-ups and a couple odd stat conversions apiece.)As you can see, we had much bigger hopes for SDR than reality could provide.
John W. Mangrum
As AC said, the Andrews and I split up the darklords. While Wyatt constructed the game mechanics, Cermak and I divided the text entries between us, perhaps adding a few stats here and there. We used the old schoolyard system of kids naming teammates to make our selections; I don't remember who got "chosen last" by each of us (Andrew Cermak: Easan was your last pick. I got stuck with Maligno). I also wrote up a bunch of spells, magic items, and PC rules, all of which has now appeared elsewhere. Did "shadow developer" duty again.
Nearly all of what we wrote for Secrets of the Dread Realms has already been recycled. (The Kargatane never throw anything away.) Spells and items written for that book are scattered through Van Richten's Arsenal, the Gazetteers, the RL DMG, and the RL PHB. This is partly because including those items in those books was simply appropriate, and partly because we had to use those books to play catch-up with the lost information. With the exception of the remaining "lost" Island of Terror and Cluster darklord entries, I believe that the Ravenloft Player's Handbook marks the appearance of the last stragglers of that cut material.
Part of the reason SotDR ended up so overwritten is that our developer at the time initially gave us a page count that, due to a technicality we didn't grok, sounded longer to us than it really was; we didn't get more definite numbers until much later in the process. While not a major reason overall, that disconnect between we (relatively inexperienced) authors and our developer was what set our expectations down the wrong track.
Our space in the Ravenloft Campaign Setting was exceptionally tight; the reason all the specific spell entries in Chapter Three refer back to the General Guidelines whenever possible rather than spelling out alterations individually was done late in the process, simply to carve out about six pages of text better used elsewhere). Those space considerations meant we'd had to make tough choices about what to include in the RCS. We designed the RCS under the naive assumption -- entirely our failing -- that, since the info being shifted to SotDR was so vital, even if the word count came in long Arthaus would bump up the page count rather than just leave the data stranded.
(Darklords were the only element we were specifically instructed to save for SotDR, for posterity. Right up to our last book, we were also still following our first developer's order not to use the word "demiplane.")
Then, of course, as AC said, we started hitting inflexible numbers and realized that our plans weren't going to happen. The Ravenloft Dungeon Master's Guide is reasonably close to what we were pushing Arthaus to make SotDR into at the time, so most concepts intended for that book have since reached print. (Of course, the DMG isn't just a SotDR clone; it has a lot of original material never intended for SotDR.)
At any rate, this is the root cause of why the upcoming SotDR that Arthaus publicized ended up so different from the SotDR that actually appeared on shelves. I have no idea what happened to the poster map that was briefly (and unofficially) promised. I suspect that Arthaus simply had no idea of the extent of the info they'd instructed us to hold for SotDR; in the era of 3E, when just a darklord's statblock and portrait eat up at least half a page, I truly believe that our developer's expectations of what SotDR could include were as misguided as our expectations of what it would include.
Our main SotDR plans -- make that pipe dreams, honestly -- that still remain orphaned, however, were our intentions to include full NPC entries for the darklords of every domain included in the RCS, simple rules for adventuring in nightmares, and a chapter reintroducing a slightly reinvisioned take on pocket domains, including several examples and their darklords (including the Nightmare Lands). That's why there's absolutely no mention of things like pocket domains or the Nightmare Lands in the RCS. We wrote the RCS knowing we wouldn't have space to do them justice and expecting to be able to cover them fully in the next book.
Most of this had to be abandoned so early on that they never progressed past the notebook-jotting stage. We did write up many, many more darklords than appear in SotDR, however. You can tell which ones were written but not included because the sidebar at the beginning of SotDR offering one-liner descriptions of all the darklords only list names for darklords we'd hoped to include.
On Azrael
For the record, the reasons Azrael was in SotDR, as opposed to Inza, were threefold:
- 1. Right from the outset, we knew that at best we only had room for one or the other.
- 2. 2E stats existed for both Inza and Azrael, but we wanted to modify Inza quite a bit to reflect her new state as a darklord, and collaborating with Jim Lowder to determine the specifics of those changes would have taken more time than we really had. Azrael, on the other hand, was really just grown a few years older since the events of SotBR.
- 3. At the time, Inza was gathering power deep in the earth, as the domain subtly adapted to its new lord above her. She was very behind-the-scenes. Azrael, meanwhile, was and is an extremely active (ever hyperactive) villain. Of the two villains, folk in Sithicus were much more likely to encounter Azrael, so he was deemed higher priority.
And no, Azrael was never intended to be the darklord[1]. That he was labeled as such next to his name was an error that slipped in sometime after the book left our hands.
[1] At least, not officially. Way back when TSR made the decision to send Soth back to Dragonlance, Stu and I submitted an adventure proposal that I believe did end with Azrael as our first pick for darklord. That proposal was unused, obviously, but many of its ideas -- such as casting Azrael as Iago to Soth's Othello -- ended up being quite compatible with SotBR.
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