So,
Curtis, introduce yourself to folks, if you would? What's your background?
How'd you get started, both in general and with Interface Zero?
Hi… I'm Curtis Lyon. I've been a gamer
(particularly of RPGs) for a good thirty-five years – ever since I first
discovered D&D as a teenager. Being something of an introvert, I loved to
create worlds or live vicariously as my character, and I started eating up
almost every setting or gaming system that caught my eye. Rather than try to do
an exhaustive list, let's just assume I've tried a lot of them.
The Savage Worlds engine is one
that caught my eye, when Pinnacle published Pirates of the Spanish Main.
Yeah… I've got a thing for pirates. Anyway, the
system was easy and clean (even before they made it easier and cleaner).
Perhaps more importantly, my wife, Sarah, got it. She always played when
we were doing other systems, but she usually drifted along letting the
'experienced' players tell her what she needed to do mechanically. Savage
Worlds was different – all of a sudden, she was explaining the rules to me.
About four years ago, Savage Mojo
(it was Talisman Studios back then) put out a beta version of their Savage
Suzerain setting. Since I'd bought several of their products, I got the
email inviting me to download it, so I did.
Sarah and I played around with it.
We loved it, and we offered some constructive feedback on it. One thing led to
another, and it was a few months later that Miles (Savage Mojo's CEO) offered
us a chance to work on one of the first setting books for Savage Suzerain.
That would have been Noir Knights. Suffice it to say we took the offer,
and have been regular writers and editors for Savage Mojo ever since.
It was about a year after starting
up with Savage Mojo that Dave Jarvis (Gun Metal Games) released the Savaged
version of Interface Zero. I was impressed with the setting – especially
since I'd seen a void in the cyberpunk genre ever since Cyberpunk 2020
went out of print. Some people point to Shadowrun, but that's really
more of an urban fantasy setting than classic cyberpunk. Don't get me wrong – I
like the urban fantasy motif, but it didn't grab me like cyberpunk. And while
there were a few halfhearted attempts to fill that void, none of them quite
worked.
Until Interface Zero. When
Dave put out a call for any writers interested in doing work for IZ, I crawled
to him on my hands and knees and groveled. He must have liked the groveling
bit, since he gave us a shot. We've been doing work for him ever since.
If I remember right, you said
that your wife, Sarah, offered some encouragement? Also, did you say that the
two of you have worked together on projects before?
To say that Sarah offered me some encouragement is
something of an understatement. It was more like she dragged me kicking and
screaming into freelance writing.
Actually, I've always been introverted and creative,
but my family had instilled in me a strong sense of needing to have a 'real'
job. So, while I've sold artwork, recorded music and have generally been
creating and performing all my life, it always ended up by taking a back seat
to a 'real' job.
Well, my last 'real' job was (literally) killing me
with the stress, so Sarah told me I needed to quit and start writing (she was
already a big fan of my unpublished fiction). When I tried to argue the point –
something about money and bills – she told me to put a sock in it and do what
she said.
Ironically (we were both working for the same
company), when I put in my notice our employer apparently decided I'd somehow
duped poor Sarah into letting me quit working so I could sit around while she
brought home a paycheck. So she fired Sarah, and then asked me to stay on.
That's more or less how Sarah became my partner in
crime.
Almost everything we've done to date has been done as
a team, and credited to 'Curtis and Sarah Lyon'. It's led to a little confusion
here and there – some people seem to think we're a single entity, and it's hard
to look up 'Curtis Lyon' in places like RPG.net… You
can look up 'Sarah Lyon' or just plain 'Curtis', but 'Curtis Lyon' is
apparently something of a myth.
Anyway… I tend to be good with the creativity, while she tends to be good with
the mechanics. Our typical modus is to brainstorm until we get the kernel of
what we want to write, and then Sarah writes an initial bit and passes it to
me. I trim, graft, shape and mold until I get something I'm satisfied with.
Then I pass it back to Sarah to do an edit of what I've written and to put
stats in for any creatures or characters, then she passes it back to me one
last time so I can double-check stat blocks and do a final proof.
As a backer of the project, I'm
curious as to your thoughts on the current kickstarter for Interface Zero?
I was happy with the original version of Interface
Zero, but there were 'clunky' bits in it from the get go. IZ was ported
into Savage Worlds from what were essentially various shades of d20 mechanics,
so it didn't quite follow the format veteran Savages expected from a
product.
As a result, it's been evident from almost the
beginning that there would eventually have to be an updated version of IZ that
streamlined some of the mechanics and eliminated some of the confusion people
had over various parts of the rules – particularly in the area of character
building.
Gamers being who they are, there may be a small-scale
version of 'edition wars' (since some elements of the mechanics are being
entirely reworked), but I, for one, am happy to see a cleaner, updated edition
come into being. In fact, I think the Kickstarter speaks for itself in terms of
desires and popularity – I was much less surprised at the response than Dave
was, but it still made me all warm and fuzzy inside when the initial funding
goal was reached in less than twelve hours.
The bottom line is I think you made a good choice in
backing IZ 2.0.
What projects within Interface
Zero have you worked on before? Where can we find your fingerprints, so to
speak?
The first one was Zeeks: Psionics in 2088.
Zeeks had been mentioned in the core book, but weren't really given any kind of
a treatment. I also had an idea for a psychic mechanic that would take the core
of the Savage Worlds rules and expand on it a bit so Zeeks could tire
themselves out while doing their thing. I pitched the idea to Dave, who let me
run with it. Zeeks was technically the first project Sarah and I did
that wasn't handed to us by the publisher.
Then came Boston: Broken Cradle of Liberty.
Originally, Boston was going to be part of a larger supplement that was going
to give a treatment of something like five cities on the North American
continent, but due to both time delays and the fact we were getting so much
material on Boston alone that the final book would have been in excess of 300
pages, the decision was made to give each city it's own treatment.
We also did San Francisco: Ruins by the Bay,
which hasn't quite made it to print yet, but has been available in PDF format
for a while now. San Francisco was also going to be in that original North
America book.
The last project I worked on was Road Rage… That one was handed to me by Dave when he wound up with an incomplete
set of rules, and he patiently waited for me to fluff and pad it. I've always
been keen on the street racing genre, so I had some fun with it as well.
I kind of downplay my role in the
IZ 2.0 material, but that's only when compared to work like Zeeks or Boston,
where almost the entire text was my writing. The Zeeks mechanics will still be
in the new book, for example, and I've written bits to update areas like Boston
and San Francisco (since the calender is being moved ahead two years, to 2090).
In terms of new material, I've done
a brief bit to expand and clarify the Techno-Shogunate of Japan which will
appear in the book and act as a launching point for the supplement Stan! Brown
will be writing. I'm also covering South and Central America (outside of New
Brasilia), and Sarah is doing a treatment of Las Vegas.
So we'll definitely be present in
the New World Order.
What sort of encouragement would
you like to offer to potential backers? How about for current backers, what
sort of things are there now that they might like to increase their pledges
for?
Hmmm… Well, obviously anyone jumping in to
back at this point is jumping into a win-win situation. The Kickstarter is
already funded (at this moment, it's at something like 481% funded), and Dave
has done a great job of providing perks and bonus material for backers, as well
as a plethora of options.
In fact, I need to
remind Sarah that we have to go back and do some add-on funding ourselves.
Basically, if someone
wants to come in and fund at this point, they can pick and choose from a lot of
material and how they want it done (one thing Sarah and I want to add on is the
digest-sized versions of the printed book). It's almost as good as a Mal*Mart
Catalog (which I'd also like to see get funded in the stretch goals)! Custom
dice, bennies, cards… In fact, there are goodies that are available to backers
from the moment they pledge – like all the original IZ PDFs.
On the other hand,
anyone who's already pledged but hasn't bothered to go back in and check out
what's going on might want to do it. Adventures, sourcebooks, novels… All sorts
of things have been unlocked that can be added on for a few more dollars (and I
mean a few, not a lot).
Where would you like to see
Interface Zero go? Are there any future projects or ideas that you have in
mind?
Wow. You actually kind of caught me by surprise with
that one.
I hadn't really thought about it much beyond my
current obligations – if we reach the stretch goal, I'll be looking at doing
the Mexico City sourcebook.
But what I'd really like to see is more of a
treatment on the frontier of space. It's a segment of IZ that was left almost
entirely unexplored in the original book other than the brief statement that
humankind was exploring and colonizing out in the solar system. There's
currently a stretch goal to unlock a book covering that – but I'd like to see
it happen regardless.
How about other work out there
that you've worked on or are about to work on?
Well… As I mentioned, we've done a lot
of work for Savage Mojo. We've got credits for doing a great deal of work on Noir
Knights, Shanghai Vampocalypse, Caladon Falls and the Suzerain
Adventure Deck. We've also had a hand in Dungeonlands, which was
recently funded through Kickstarter. Millennium Knights (a
sequel/prequel to Noir Knights) is imminently being released as a
single-book supplement (including a Plot Point Campaign), and our next big
planned project is Untamed Empires.
We've also done a fair bit of work
for Mystical Throne Entertainment, largely in contributing articles to both the
regular Savage Insider publications and the premium editions of Savage
Insider. Sarah has also helped with
the editing on most of the Ultimate Guides MTE has recently put out.
Our big project with Mystical
Throne, though, is Twilight Continuum. It's just started as a
Kickstarter, and is designed to be a complete adventure campaign that takes
characters from Novice through Legendary Rank. If the project is funded, I'll
be writing the first book, and overseeing the creating of the remainder. This
one's kind of a pet project, since I first created the Twilight Continuum
campaign twelve years ago, when I ran it with the BESM engine.
Lastly, Sarah and my own company,
Three Sages Games, is ramping up to create a new setting called Dragons of
Avalon – sort of, but not quite, a steampunk-ish fantasy setting – for the
Savage Worlds engine.
Lastly, is there anything that
you'd like to say in closing or share with folks?
Gaming is all about social interaction and using your mind for entertainment. Have fun with it. If you pick up Interface Zero, or any other setting Sarah or I have been involved with, we'll happily answer questions about what we had in mind, but I encourage everyone to take those settings and make them your own.
If you're curious
about what Sarah and I might be up to, we have a fan page on Facebook (Curtis
and Sarah Lyon… go figure), as well as a page for Three Sages Games. You
can also find blogs and bios by and about is on the Savage Mojo website
(savagemojo.com).
Three Sages Games also has its own website (threesagesgames.com), as do
Gun Metal Games (gunmetalgames.com) and Mystical Throne Entertainment
(mysticalthrone-ent.com). They all also have Facebook pages, usually for both
their company and individual product lines.
Thanks for putting up with my ramblings… and Great Gaming to everyone!
