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| Author Richard Dansky And Friend... |
This guest post is by Richard Dansky, the writer behind much of the Wraith RPG from White Wolf, and author of the new novel Vaporware.A decade ago, I turned in my last bits of writing for White Wolf. It was sort of a grand farewell tour of freelance, closing out with some
Wraith-related stuff (
Abyssals and
Orpheus) and a chaser of
Corax (
Book of Changing Breeds).
I knew then that the folks down in Clarkston were going to be making like Daffy Duck in that one cartoon (
the one where his punch line is “But I can only do it once") and blowing the whole thing up.
I also knew that at that point I had a fiction writing career that was growing in fits and starts, and a burgeoning video game writing career that was about to start taking me places like Paris and the front of the room at GDC.
So I said goodbye to game writing, and to the
World of Darkness and its blood kin in particular, with a little regret but no second thoughts. I’d said what I needed to say, done what I thought I needed to do, and played my metaphorical Last Waltz.
I mean, it’s not that I wasn’t proud of the work that I had done, as a writer or as a developer.
I still have what may be the only
Wraith fridge magnet that Henry Higgenbotham ever sold, going strong and guarding my kitchen from the forces of Oblivion. I still have art by Andrew Ritchie and Ron Spencer and Heather McKinney in my office at home, right where I can look at them any time I need an extra dose of the spooky for inspiration. I still get
nachas when someone mentions
Wraith fondly online, and I remain endlessly appreciative for the opportunities that working on the
World of Darkness brought me.
But ten years is a long time. Memories blur. Things change. The stuff that seemed so very vital, so worth laying down on the train tracks for then starts looking like small change when viewed from sufficient distance.
And so I found myself talking online with a friend who also happened to be a White Wolf fan from back in the day.
We were talking about the differences between working in tabletop and working in video games, and that got me reminiscing about some of the wackier stories from back in the day.
You know, stuff like the time layout artist Katie McCaskill’s computer kept crashing while laying out a
Wraith book until I stuck a pendant with the Tetragrammaton on it.
Or the time we had to set up a LARP in the office for a tabloid television show, one that ended with the reporter shaking her head and muttering sadly to herself “they’re just nerds”.
Or the way walking around a convention in Kansas City – my first official con as a Wolfie – had led to
Laws of the Night through the simple expedient of my arm getting too damn tired from hauling around all those damn books.
You get the idea.
I went through the anecdotes and the good times and the bad times, the times people left and the times there were moments of what felt like transcendent creation.
And at the end of it, I said to my friend
: “You know, the thing about doing all that – all the late nights and the last minute scrambles to fill in the missing ten thousand words layout needed and all the other insanity – was that it really felt like we were doing something important."
Left unsaid, of course, was: "Maybe, in retrospect, we weren’t."
Maybe the passion we put into arguing over whether a particular book would be 128 pages or 144, whether John Cobb was the right choice of cover artist for a particular book, whether Rasputin was,
hell, we’re not even going to touch the Rasputin thing here... But over the years, perhaps a hint of doubt might have crept in.
And then my friend said: "To an awful lot of us, you were."
Which humbled me. And it reminded me as well that the work we did, as much as it was for us – and it was for us, as we threw every bit of creative energy we had into those books – it was also for the folks who’d be picking those books up, and reading them, and playing with them.
That, all hokey sentiment aside, it might have brought some joy to some people’s life, might have given them help expressing themselves in a way they hadn’t before. Just a game, sure, as I kept writing in every
Mind’s Eye Theatre book I did, but also a part of our lives, and a part of theirs as well.
Like I said, humbling. But also refreshing, and a reminder, as I move forward into new creative endeavors – games like
Splinter Cell: Blacklist, novels like
Vaporware – that if the work I do is important enough to do and do well, then it just might be important to someone who picks it up, reads or plays it, and makes it a part of their life.
That the passion I put into it can find an echo in someone else, which means it’s always worth digging deep for that commitment, that energy.
Only took me ten years to learn it, too. But then again, I was always a quick study.
Biography: A 14-year veteran of the video game industry, Richard Dansky is the Central Clancy Writer for Ubisoft/Red Storm. Named by Gamasutra as one of the top 20 game writers in 2009, he has written for games ranging from
Outland to the upcoming
Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Richard is also the author of six novels, including the critically praised
Firefly Rain. He lives and works in North Carolina with his wife and their statistically improbable collections of books, scotch and cats.
Richard and his works can be found online at:
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