Worldbuilding in Famous IPs: Turning Constraints into Storytelling Opportunities with Graham McNeill

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back to another episode for the corner of story and game. Podcasts were storytelling and game meet at the hearth fire. Today's guest is no stranger to legendary worlds. From Warhammer 40K to Arcane to Marvel's midnight suns, Graham McNeill has carved out a career shaping stories inside some of the biggest IPs in games and fiction. But the question I have for him is how do you stay creatively original while working within someone else's universe? And that's exactly what we're talking about today, writing and design inside of large IPs, the challenges, the opportunities, and how to leave your mark without breaking the law or pissing off your audience. So let's get into it. Graham, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me on. You are a man of many talents and a very interesting background. So before we dig into the core topic of the day, I would love to hear your origin story. How did you fall in love with gaming, writing, creating, designing, the whole world, and your journey to get to where you are today? Yeah, sure. I mean, that's a long and involved story. But so I'll try and keep it as succinct as possible, which is not any of my editor's hotel. He is not my strong suit. Yeah, I mean, I-- I-- it's an only child. So I grew up reading devouring books all the time, comics as well. And I started designing little board games based on Judge Dread, Rogue Trooper, and Robohunter, and that was the one I did. And it was a great fun exercise. I love doing it. And that led me naturally into telling stories through the games. How can I capture what it is to be Judge Dread, or Rogue Trooper through the mechanics of the game, and so on? And from there, I started playing, as a lot of us did, like the choose your own adventures, that led into AD&D, and so on, played a bunch of that. And my natural instincts tell bigger and bigger stories meant that it was eventually fate of nations at stake, and so on. And AD&D, you know, role-playing games as a whole don't generally cater too well to mass combat, and so on. So that led me to Warhammer, and I loved the scale of that. But again, I didn't want to lose the storytelling aspect of it. So every game we played had a reason why we were playing it. Who were the characters? What was the outcome? And how did that feed into the next game? And before I knew that, that's where these things were. I was doing narrative campaigns and writing them for the group that we played with, and so on. And I eventually had a very thick, thick folder of stories of bios for the characters, stories of the battles, and so on. And I was like, I think these are all right, man. And from there, I ended up just deciding, you know what, I'm going to write a novel. I'm going to write a 40K novel, because I'd love this IP so much. So during my dad brought me on the typewriter from his work back in the day, which tells you how old and long ago that was. And I ended up writing a novel when I was like 15 or 16 or something. I can't remember exactly, but it was young-ish. And I loved the process, building the world out to play the game in. How does this world work? Where does magic do other creatures? How do the nations work? Yeah, yeah. So it's something I got grounding in very early on. And then from there, you know, I was 17, 18, and Glasgow at the time in the '80s. And I was like, I want to be a writer, but how do you even do that? But people like me back there. And they just like, you don't become writers. Your writers are stuffy academics. Or people had done another tier of existence. So I never really figured out how to do it. So I went to university. I didn't got my degree in architecture, but I was still writing, you know, in my spare time and so on. And probably a lot of time that wouldn't, and shouldn't be class-nidispear time, which might explain why I'm not an architect right now. Wrote another novel while I was at university. And then when I was out in the workplace, I got to the stage where I was like, I don't know that I really like this as a thing stretching ahead and moving for the next 40 years as someone. And I figured, well, the only thing I didn't come any good there is writing stories about wizards and goblins and stuff and spaceships and who's going to pay me to do that. And literally that same day I went down to the little news agent underneath our office, picked up a copy of that month's "White Dwarf," which is "Game's Workshop's hobby magazine." And there was a little quarter page ad for a staff writer at the "Game's Workshop" design studio down in Nottingham. And I'd had a hell of a day at the office at that point. So I was like, "Screw, I'm going to apply. What's that going to happen?" As they say, no. A couple of interviews later down in Nottingham, they did not say no. And in 2000, I went to work in the design studio as one of the staff writers. And originally, they'd had me pegged more for journalistic kind of articles like "How to paint this model and report from this grand tournament and how this sculptor designed this miniature and so on." But very quickly, I think to everybody became apparent that that was not a, my strong suit and be what my interest was in. I was a little bit stories and characters in the world, some stuff like that. So I moved in more in that direction right in art background articles for "White Dwarf," stories for the Codex's. And then eventually went on to become like a full games developer for workshop working on a number of the Codex's for Warhammer, Forty-K and Lord of the Rings and so on. Novels came, I mean, I did a bunch of short stories for "Inferno Magazine," which again, the time was sort of monthly, semi-regular as a fiction magazine. And from that, people responded to the stories. The Black Lives Matter staff asked me if I wanted to do a novel for them because a lot of the space marine novels they had at the time were the more left of center, right of center, you know, space rules, blood angels, the the weirder ones with funny, strange quirks to them. They didn't have one that was like your core space marine stories. So I said, yeah, OK, I'll do an ultra marine one. It's I had a real bean my bonnet about them and people responded to that novel. And then the next and the next and so far. And then here we are today where when I left workshop after seven years, because I was getting to, I had like, seven or eight novels done by that point. And I loved the challenge and the thrill and the, you know, just the work of doing a novel. I really enjoyed that. And I didn't know that I wanted to spend the next, you know, ten years from now, be doing the 17th edition of the space marine codex as fun as that would be. And I love it. I felt this one was the right path. And if I didn't do it now, I was never going to do it. So I then spent ten years in the freelance trenches writing everything short stories, comics, novels, video game cutscenes and so on. And that ultimately led me to come to the states in 2015 to work for right games. And I spent eight, eight a bit years working with them helping build up Runeterra, the world that they're getting the allegiances set in because previous, it had been a fairly loose collection of archetypal cultures that didn't have any real relation to one another. And it didn't feel like a living, breathing world, which is part of the world building team myself and some other writers and artists and editors. We spent a lot of time building out the world to make it feel cohesive and that these cultures could exist in the same place and had relations with one another, good and bad and so on. And I'd, at the last part of that was where I worked on, I worked on our cane, the TV show that's on Netflix. It was one of the writers for that in season two. And after that, I went to work for People Can Fly for a while before our project got cancelled. And you know, right, back in the, back in the trenches, freelancing with probably more jobs than his healthy. But that's kind of the way I like to work. Wow. Now brings us to today. That is a hell of a ride. Wow. It's sort of the strangest life I've ever known as Jim Morrison said. I'm just out of curiosity. Are you still playing stuff today? Like, obviously, there's some minis going on behind you there. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Definitely. I'm gamer first and foremost, always have been. The moment I'm still playing, I'm playing a lot of 4K, a lot of kill team, because that was the, what I was mean, my oldest for started playing games, I wanted to introduce them slowly to the world rather than like, here's 100 more. You need to paint. And I was like, no, actually, you're a CS5. A lot of board games and the trench crusade, miniatures are getting a run out these days. So yeah, lots of games, minis on the table top. It's always been my first passion as games. I love games, you know, working on them, rising about them, reading them, playing them, designing them. Love it, guys. All right, well let's dig into the core topic of the day. Now, I have talked to a number of people about writing and working on content for IPs, established worlds and universes in various formats from comics to film to video games to TV shows. But I want your take on it because I want to learn more about how you creatively add to a universe in a way that honors what's there already and uses the constraints to create that creative spark. And you're the person for this because I didn't really know much about Runeterra before arcane. But in my opinion, arcane is the most brilliant thing to ever hit a screen period and a fight for it. So you know, you would plan to fight me. The world building now that I've taken the time to go back and learn about what happened and how you guys developed and all this world was created, I really want to know more about how did you do that. So just to start us off, I guess, what's your personal approach when you first enter that situation? When you're coming into a new IP and you have to create and still honor? I mean, that's the key. I mean, you've given a lot of how I approach it in the question itself there. Because there's a couple of projects that I'm working on now that have. I know of them, I've played them and I enjoy them, but I wouldn't have felt necessarily that, sure, I could just pick up a pen and paper and go tell a story and write a caption. It sounds glaringly obvious, but you'd be surprised at how many people coming into work in a ceremony and don't do it. It's like I spend a lot of time just immersing myself in what is gone before because anytime you enter a new IP to write for, you're standing in the shoulders of giants essentially. You've got to earn your ability and your right to be at the table, so to speak. Understand the world. I mean, you don't have to know every single facet of every single faction and character. So nobody can do that unless you've been in there since the year dot and have done nothing but that. But I think what's important is you understand enough about it that you feel comfortable talking about. You understand the essence of what is this? What's it actually about? What are the underlying themes of this world or this IP? And what is it about it that people love? Because that's what you're tapping into because if you come into some IP and it's like, well, I think it's this. But everybody who loves it goes, no, we think it's this. You're kind of swimming against the stream at that point. And that's not to say you just go with the flow of what people out in the world like because a lot of times the readers and the viewers, you know, often not especially don't know what they want. But what they need out of a show is not necessarily the thing that asking for upfront. You know, it's to use a crude example in some ways. You know, like Ross and Rachel, the viewers wanted them to get together. But if they had got together like three episodes into the show, you'd have been like, well, that's just rubbish. You know, you're throwing all these obstacles in their way to it happening. So when it does happen, it feels air and the live studio audience goes nuts when they finally kiss sort of thing. So you're looking at that kind of vibe is like, what is the promise of this world that people maybe don't even know that they want yet but that will blow their minds when you deliver it to them. So it's getting down to the, you know, under the roots of the thing and figuring out what this IP is, what this universe is, what the characters are, how they live and breathe it. And how you can, as you say, add to it while still honoring what has gone before and arcane is a very good example of that because a lot of, well, not going to say a lot, but certainly some aspects of the characters or the world. We're not an exact one to one match of things that we had said in either short stories or character bios and stuff like that. And you know, and that's fine because, you know, you're writing to a different medium and different medium have different strengths and weaknesses and so on. So the weaknesses are different things they can do or can't do as well as one another and the visual aspect of our came coupled with what for T. She was doing with the animation style and the painterly visuals of it were astonishing. And the things that we had written previously in the world building stuff that filed very cool, I think, maybe wasn't the most cinematic of thing to represent. So there was changes we had to make that we still had to look at everything we were putting together and make sure it fit. And does this feel runter and does it fit that kind of punkish vibe of zone and piled over mashed together and you could take what we'd created in the show and drop it into the written and comics in the game world and it would still feel, yeah, that's runter, you would get it straight away. So it's understat because one of the things we talked about a lot in the world building side of things was we didn't want anything to feel prescriptive like when you build this culture, it must have X, Y and Z and everything they must be blue and everything here must be green and it was like, no, no, that's. That we that denies the other teams within the company there agency to be part of the creation of this thing and that's something that was very important to us. So we tried to build cultures with and present our, you know, final decks and what have you as the DNA, you know, if if you're building if we build out the deck of DNA for domestic, I say that any other team can take that and they'll build their own things and we'd like, wow, I did not see that coming. I didn't know you could build that, but yeah, I get it. It's demassing. It's got the same shape language, the same tones. It works in the same way, but it's your own creation and that's awesome and that's to me, a lot of the internal world building you do for IPs is all about crafting something unique for that culture, but in a way that allows other teams to be part of that creation. That's beautiful. The collaborative nature of both screen and games, it sounds like that would be a big part of coming into a fresh IP is working with other people and, you know, the novelist, you kind of, you know, obviously that our other people in the mix and so on your editor, the IP holder, yadda and so on. But for the large part of it, you are master of all you survey, you know, as the novelist create the dialogue, the costumes, the cultures, the weather, the look of the buildings, the animals, the floor or the fauna, whatever. And sure that goes through various filters and so on before it hits the shelf. One of the things that was hardest, I think, for me to adjust to when I went back into the belly of the corporate beast was instantly a video game was just how collaborative it was. I mean, the dependencies that, you know, I want to add this into the game and suddenly like 15 other teams and like, well, yeah, you need to talk to us for the effects, for art, for concepts, for gameplay, everything. And that was tricky to adapt to, but actually one second I got the hang of it. It was brilliant because you got to touch so many little bits of the way you bring a story to the screen because a lot of the work that I touched these days is a lot of like not just writing but the narrative design and a lot of that work is about how you transmit that material to the player and what you want them to feel at the end of it and how do we do this in a cutscene through environmental storytelling through level design, through lore nuggets, audio logs, cutscenes, whatever it is, you know, and that I love being able to work with super talented people and disciplines that I could never, you know, be part of, but I can chat to them and they can chat to me and we get something at the end of it is like wow, that took a lot of work and a lot of people but that's bloody cool now, isn't it? That sounds amazing, sounds amazing. When you come into that fresh IP, you mentioned giving people what they need not just what they want and obviously honoring, you know, what's there already I'm curious when you came into something like our cane where you have so many characters to pick from and so many settings and storylines that you could have played with how do you go through the process of figuring out what it is they need what it is you're going to put forward is there a consultation with the audience or is there just internal conversations or a mixture of both obviously well with our I mean our cane has was a project a long time in gestation I mean when I've I joined right back in 2015 and like within the first few weeks of my being there I was chat to Christian and he was showing me some scripts that for draft scripts for episode one and the pilot so that been a lot of time coming so that was very much Christian and Alex Alex ye that was there baby you know how you can put a long time so that's what I'm having for a long time so they don't they don't ready can have figured we want to tell story about jinx and Vi and piltover and so on. So a lot of the early groundwork to decide what the show was going to be had already been discussed at least between them and some, you know, Brandon and Mark and the others and so on at Riot. So when I came, I mean, I was, I was still in the world building team when they were doing season one. So we would, you know, quite regularly raise with them and have sit down chats about where would be a cool location for this scene to happen. What would it look like and so on? How would that, what opportunities is that office for storytelling? If this is, is a vertical space? Is that obviously, or we could do a, you know, vertical chase scene or whatever it was. But by, you know, when season two came around and I was, you know, in the room with other writers, you know, I had to a degree leading Christian and Alex aside, I quite an advantage or were about the other writers there because I'd been immersed in that IP for the last, by that point, like five years. So again, one of the things that I thought was really great about how they and we approached that was that we were, it wasn't just we were storytellers and then bolting on the runeterran aspects to the story, which I, you know, I can, you can spot that on my hill often, you know, I write a, you know, they've written something and don't maybe know the IP as well as they should and then, you know, parts that get stuck on afterwards and where what I thought worked really well with our cane was that we all knew it so we could find organic ways to bring the IP into it or build on that in the story without it feeling like we were just throwing like proper nouns at the screen. It was like this, oh, I've got this site because Jana for one was one of the ones being where, because I was like myself and Anthony Birch had done some stuff with the champion Jana and we were looking at the story about what we need to clear the the fumes out of zone and I was like, well, why don't we use Jana because I just use like this portrayal as goddess of the wind and stuff like that and maybe that's part of a shrine and the explosion happens there. So again, it's not something that's overly explained in the show, but if you have any familiar, if you've got familiarity with IP, you can see stuff in the background and go, I know who that is and that makes a lovely thematic sense, which is the kind of thing you only really think of those when you have that level of respect and understanding of the IP that just comes with time and, you know, reading and writing it and so on. Yeah, 100% have you had the opportunity and maybe not to work on an IP where you're at that stage where you get to make those macro decisions at the beginning? Um, I mean, the Horus Heresy project is the one I would say we had a lot of opportunities like that because the first meeting we had about the Horus Heresy, which is, you know, the prehistory of Fort decay, the creation myth, origin story of how the grim darkness of the far future came about. We, you know, we all sat in the room and through ideas around and refreshed ourselves on what it was, but one of the first things that we articulated amongst ourselves was that this series has to feel different, you know, from like page two at the latest, you're already aware, even if you'd ripped all the covers and everything off and you just somebody just handed you a book, you would know this is not Fort decay, there's something different about this, the tone, the themes are different. And it's Dan Abnet wrote the first book in the series of that Horus Rising and he had a lot of heavy lifting to do in that book to really set that world up and build it in a way that felt familiar like the space marines as the emperor, there's aliens and so on, but it's not Fort decay and we had lots and lots of discussions about ways to do that, ways to make it feel. This is sort of Fort decay and like you know it, but it's really not in ways, you know, both subtle and, you know, sledgehammery. So yeah, that one was a great one because we had real opportunities to do interesting things that you would not be able to do in Fort decay, even how the times have changed since those two events or those two timelines. Yeah, that's very cool, very, very cool. Okay, I've asked other people, you know, what are the, what are the constraints of working in an established IP or what are some of the boundaries or problems you run into and we could hash over that, but I'm actually more curious, what are some of the obstacles or restraints you run into that are actually good that actually can be turned into a strength or used? I mean, I've had this conversation with a lot of people about how constraints are actually a good thing, you know, it's like when you have the massive blue sky and everything is there and you know, don't worry, don't worry, there's a stage in development where that's good, that's useful. When you're actually, you know, like on the treadmill, in the trench, doing the work, I think, you know, because they, they act in the best sense the world, like, crutches in a sense, that they support you while you're figuring out what the story is, like, I know that I'm not going to tell an orc space marine romance story because that just would not fit with the IP and so on. So it gives you guidance and guardrails to know, okay, I can't go over that fence because that's just stupid. So I'm going to stay within this road. But at the same time, I think constraints, for me, they spur that creative, you know, part of the brain because like, okay, these are the tools I've got to play with. How do I take, arrange them in the right order that makes something cool that isn't something we've seen before because, you know, it's like, we have 26 letters of the alphabet, but that allows us to make a millions of words, millions of stories of someone with just 26 letters. So one of the analogies I often use is like the the scene in Apollo 13 where the air filters are damaged and the ship and the engineers on the ground, the big senior engineer dumps a lot of stuff on the table and says, this is what they have up there. You guys, your job is to figure out how to fit square pipe into round hole with this stuff. Go. And I like to think that working in shared IPs is kind of like that. You know, you're, you're given the pieces and the tools and it's up to you to figure out cool and interesting ways to fit it together that still works and serves the story, the IP and gives the readers partly what they expect and partly what they didn't even know they wanted and needed for a story. So I think there's, there's room, there's room for going off of peace and doing something interesting, pushing the boundaries, but moving on, shattering through them, but you're like, okay, maybe push that a little bit. Yeah, yeah, you like that. That was cool. That works. Okay, that maybe now gives us room to push somewhere else now and so on. And like Dan and I did a podcast many, many years ago about this very thing about constraints and so on and how they, they actually are good things because they help focus you. They help sharpen what you need to do and how you need to do it in a way that is original as much as you can be and still deliver something unexpected even though it's still in the box because it's most IPs, you know, it says, oh, you're in a box outside, but most of these boxes are huge. You know, there's, oh, especially something like 4K, you've got a whole galaxy to play with, trillion cultures, planets, ideologies, spaces, environments, people, you know, if you look at that and think, oh, it's a bit constrained. You're like, well, you're just not trying hard enough then. When you're pushing at those boundaries, is there space to like subvert expectations and surprise the audiences so used to that world? Absolutely. I mean, those are the kinds of conversations you have with your editor, you know, beforehand. You know, if I'm going to suddenly invent this brand new thing in the world that would expect it to be permanent or something that, well, why don't the space means no about that or whatever it is, you know, that's certainly a conversation you want to have before. You expend a lot of time, effort and money and words to tell a thing only to have your editor go, yeah, that's not going to fly. So it's as a lot, I think the the razor I always applies like, does this deepening and enrich the IP? Does it allow me to tell a really cool story here and now? And possibly more important, is this a cool tool? The other writers might come in and go, that's awesome. I want to use that or I can riff on that in another way in my story later on and that that that connective tissue between stories just helps give whatever it is you've added to the story. It gives it that extra weight within the universe that you're playing in. I mean, you've got to exercise a level of restraint in that because, you know, if you're continually doing that process of, here's new thing, here's new thing, here's new thing. It can rapidly outpace the ability of the writers in the audience to care about or, hey, you know, you drift incrementally away to the point where you've gone so far that you're not actually telling the stories of this world that you're supposed to be telling in. So it's, you know, it's like all things. It's a mixture of, I want to do cool new things, but I'm working in a shared environment where I have to respect that other people have to work here and sometimes, yeah, you just have to put the toys back in the box and pass it on to the next writer. If the new thing you're adding is a character, reserve specific considerations to make sure their narrative feels like it belongs in that universe? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I mean, you have to always make sure that whatever you add does it thematically match, not match, that's a bit restrictive, saying a bit. It feels like that character could walk into that universe. If I, you know, if, say, for example, the terminator walked into a scene in Lord of the Rings, you'd be like, what the hell? I mean, it might be a cool moment, sure, but does it fit Lord of the Rings that there's a cybernetic organism with the machine gun, right? Moin down people in Rivendale, probably not. So yeah, there's all sorts of razors you apply to these things and there's a level where the creative and you just want to be just this cool new thing, but and which, if it's your own story, your own universe, go nuts. Do what you want. But then even then, having said that, your own story has to have its own internal logic, you have to have its own consistency to the world that which when you break it and you can do, and you should do from time to time, it has to feel air and it has to feel that the audience is going to go, okay, that's weird, but I kind of like it. And I can get why that is the way it is. And I'm not going to spoil it here, but if you've seen the ending to the movie 28 years later, the the tonal whip lash in the last two minutes of the movie when you're watching going, what, what am I, what is happening here? I don't get this. What? But then when I sat in it for a little while, I was like, I love it. It makes that makes perfect sense knowing who that character is, what they've been through, who they were beforehand. It's weird and it's a big swing. But when you think about it, when I thought about it, I was like, actually, I really like that, that really works. And it comes out of wildly out of life field in many ways, the visual of what you're seeing. But I was like, yeah, that actually, I'm intrigued to see how they deal with that in the next one. So it's the same sort of idea as like, take your big swings, do the weird and wild wonderful thing, but ask yourself, is this adding anything? And as characters are generally easier, because a character, you know, there's certainly in a say a world like 4K or any, there's billions upon billions of people and having this one outlier, sure, that's absolutely fine. You know, as long as it doesn't, that character feels that they could exist in that world, doesn't wild increases they are, I would not be surprised to see that person in that particular world. So there's, you know, there's your creative urge to do these, but your professional responsibility to make sure, am I doing this for my sake, or am I doing it for the sake of the story in the world I'm working in? It's a hell of a dance. It can be, it can be, but that's why, you know, good relations with your editors, your publishers, your fellow team members, that's, you know, paramount in any of these endeavors just being able to, because if you take the wild swing or pitch the wild swing and there's not that level of trust between teams and people, it's a harder sell. But when you, you know, you've worked with these people, you've gone back and forth, there's a healthy respect that you both and all know, we're here to do cool shit and make things work together. When you pitch that big swing, people are far more likely to lean in and go, I, what? But okay, how, you know, that yes, and thing that we get in collaborative storytelling, um, the trust you get from working with people and being the person they want to work with again, that absolutely will stand in good stead when it comes to those stranger things that you want to introduce to the IP. Brilliant. With something so big, like Bordecai, Warhammer and such a devoted, um, fandom audience, how do you balance working with something so robust and crunchy and large and making sure that they're happy, but still making it somehow approachable for new players or a new audience or new readers. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a tricky back dance at the moment, um, because a lot of the, a lot of the earlier books I, I wrote was had a lot of every time, like a spaceship appeared and you traveled through the warp, I would do paragraphs in the book about explaining how warp travel worked or what a boat gun was and so on. Um, but I kind of sort of fell away from that a little bit because I was like, by this point, most people who pick up one of these books, they know these things. Um, but then when, once we start sort of getting more of an appreciation of the sort of cyclical nature or readership and how you've always going to be trying to be bringing you people into your, your stories and so on, we started occasionally having like, uh, not our, not our off-ramp or on-ramp rather, but a sort of a moment where, okay, in this series, we're going to take it back to basics so that it's a simpler story, but a simpler story doesn't mean a dumber story or, you know, babies first space marine book or whatever. Um, it's just, you know, a simple story well told that deals with the, the archetypes that you're telling these stories about that gradually introduced more complex, uh, layers of the IP and history to it, you know, not every book has to be, you know, a war and peace dense, tomb of layers upon layers. I mean, you built to that and every, you know, it's like, every night again, we'll come back and sort of take it down a notch and so on. And I, and I try and tell my stories in a way that does not shut people out of the room, you know, because I'd, I would hate to think that somebody had picked up one of my books and gone, I just don't get this at all. And then he puts it down or they feel excluded because they haven't read 30 years worth of canon and read that book and seen that film and sort out these 10 articles on Wikipedia or whatever. You know, I like to think there's enough in most of my books that if you have done all that, you will get deeper and deeper and catch references and riffs and themes and so on. But if you haven't, you're still going to enjoy a good story with good characters because ultimately that's the crux of everything we do is a great story well told with cool characters in an interesting world. And that should be universal to all of our stories, regardless of all the, you know, the bells and whistles of whatever IP you're setting your story in. If there's great characters, people will come along for the ride and good relationships between them, you know, I want to murder you, I want to get with you, whatever it is, they'll come along with you because that's that's what we all love. Good characters and seeing them come apart come together. Wonderful. That is good advice. I've pulled a lot out of your brain today. Yeah, well, you've got the right, you picked the right time for it. I've had my first coffee and I'm ready to go. Well, we are kind of getting close to the end of a core topic. There was a question that popped in my mind though while you were going off there for a second about how your process has changed over the years and it made me start to wonder, are there other ways that you have changed from a craft point of view, changed how you approach creating inside of IPs? No, I don't know. Great inside of IPs, not particularly because the core of it is still the same. Understand it. Read it. Find out what it is that people love about it and riff on that while hopefully inserting your own unique spin or unique take or your voice on it without destroying what it is that people love about it. But as far as my creative process, how I how I plan out what I'm going to do, sure, that has evolved. I mean, a lot of the times I used to, I mean, I still do this occasionally depending on how firm the notion and the ideas that I want to tell are when I come to the page, but I would get like a big sheet of like A0 paper and I would just fill it completely at random with a line, a scene, a location, a plot beat, an emotional note, whatever it was and just fill the page with ideas and then they're like, okay, well this is the beginning. This is where I'm going to start the book. Okay. And that moment there is the end because I don't start anything unless I know, no one in verticom is because things change, but if I know where it starts and where it ends because I'm having your north star to navigate towards that end and what you're shooting for is to me vital for any kind of storytelling you can. And people have been very successful occasionally by doing just I'm just going to tell as it comes to me but I like that structure in it but I would take that opening bit and go okay, well that needs to lead into that and then just oh well this scene has to happen before it's that one. So I'll just draw lines from place to place, circling off the idea of the moment. And eventually I would have this horrendous like spaghetti-like sheet full of paper. And then I would just go back to the beginning and then start typing out, following the lines through it. And I was like, "Okay, that kind of works. That's a rough structure." Then you move it around as you, you know, each stage you're like filtering it and distilling it into something that is presentable to an editor or a commissioning publisher, what have you. I don't do that as much now. I'll much more likely figure out my, because that way of working with, I liked it. It brought me a lot of cool ideas in the mix, but it didn't really, it didn't really help when it was coming to, "Okay, this has got to be this length of book, give or take." Oftentimes that would end up being something that was wildly over-scoloped in terms of what I wanted to do and what was capable of being published, you know. So like first a couple of my books ended up being, before I stopped got a verse, before I got that, it's an earned instinct for how long this idea is actually going to translate to in number of words. A lot of my books tend to run way over their target word count. And sometimes that was okay. You could just do a bigger book. Other times it's like, "No, this book supposed to be like 100,000 words and you deliver us 180,000. There's no profit margin building a book that big for the same price." So, you know, I've got better at doing that. And I usually sort of, I use a lot of index cards now, and I know if I've got more than this amount of index cards, I'm running law. So I've got a much better sense now of, "Okay, this scene where they besiege the city and capture the king." Okay, that's not going to be 500 words. That's going to be several thousand, that's five chapters or whatever. So just be careful when you're planning as your index cards, just how long that's going to be. So I use them a lot more. And I've used, you know, I'm talking to a lot of other writers and being in a lot of panels and discussions and conventions. You know, we always end up chatting about our processes and stuff like that. And, you know, if you ask 10 authors about their process for X thing, you get 10 different answers. And there's no right or wrong way to do it. It's like whatever works for you is the right answer. And I have, you know, shamelessly magpied from all of my favorite writers and how they do things and chat in a way to like Dan or Jim or Aaron or Gav. And just go, "Oh, that's cool. I like that. That's a good idea of how you approach this. I'm going to steal that." As I have this, you know, horrid Frankenstein's monster of a process of how I go about building a cool character, a cool setting, a cool story, beaten someone. And you say, "It works for me." So, screw you off. Do your own thing. I love it. That's one of the purposes of this podcast is to magpie from all you brilliant people. It's that, you know, like no one person can be the best everything. So there are lots of people out there who's work. I absolutely love their processes. I love and there are other people who's work. I adore and it's like, how could you possibly work with that? You're a mad man. But it works for you, not yourself. I wonder. Well, I think we're going to wrap up the main topic with that because that was brilliant advice. It's actually usable and actionable. So I appreciate that. We're going to move in. I have some fun questions and then we'll do a little bit at the end to wrap it up. But I do have a philosophical question. Then I ask everybody who comes on the show. So if you've listened to this before, you know it's coming and it's your turn to answer it. So in my opinion, there is a magical space at the intersection of obviously storing game, comics, film, TV, music, all these things where we all can just get together. There's a fellowship, shared language. If you agree with my little theory, and not everybody does, but if you do, what is the magic thread that would hold a space like that together? Yeah, I mean, like I say, yes, I've heard this question and a lot of the answers I've heard, I've been like, I've sort of been pointing the screen going, yes, yes, that's it. But from my, from a lot of my storytelling came out of playing Dungeons and Dragons, called Cthulhu and all those role-playing games. And the thing that I think is the glue that holds that all together is the shared experience. It's the collaborative storytelling that we do when we role-play, you know, the DM, that's one thing when I've talked to new players, that you're not trying to beat the DM. The DM is not trying to kill you. Sometimes that will happen, but that's not here to do that. We're here to have a shared experience of storytelling that we will talk about in years to come. Like when I left, just before I left to come to America, our PG group of the Wednesday gamer guys, we got together, and we spent a couple of hours in the pub with a few beers, just howling with laughter and telling stories of moments from our games when so and so died. Or when, do you remember when you were taking prisoner and this happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so on. And it was just one of the best nights of my life, just reminiscing about great stories we'd shared. And, you know, like every, every, you know, lots of psychological studies have been done that show you that things you do together with other people that shared experiences are better, just simply better. Look, why we love going to the cinema to see a comedy or role- Laughing our asses off at it, it's good, or we're all covering behind our hands if it's terrifying and so on. And we all come out together, and you're looking at everybody and everybody's had that experience together, and it's magically better because of that. And even though, you know, like, like games do that really well because they allow that participation, you know, the player is the active participant in the storytelling of the game, and sure, it's the developers and the writers' story that they're playing in, but the player chooses how they engage with it, whether they want to be, you know, the murderer supreme going through this game or a pacifist drawn or whatever choices they take on the game will affect the story. So that's certainly something that brings everybody to the campfire. And when you're telling, I talk to my readers a lot through Twitter, through conventions, through book signings, the stuff like that, and I just love hearing, you know, what they like, but they didn't like, what they would love to see, what they didn't expect, and so on. And that interaction, I make me a better storyteller. So yeah, it's to me, it's just the involvement of everybody, and we're all just here looking to be entertained, inspired, uplifted, emotionally affected. And that's, it's, that's, you know, why I talked about relationships with the characters, because that's, you know, the emotions they go through, we feel them. And if you can make somebody feel something through the power of your writing, your art, your music, your film, you've done something magical, literally magical. You've, I've typed words on a keyboard and they've been printed in squirts of ink on a piece of dead tree and somebody has read that and they've been emotionally affected. That is magic. Same with music. There's songs I can hear that just, just make me well up just the first few bars of them and there's, there's music that just makes me want to go out and overturn cars and so on. You know, it's like, what was it to, I think it was Tom Morello from "Rage Against the Machine" was talking about that. And you know, it was like a good song makes you want to get on the dance floor and get with the girl. A great song makes you want to burn cars. And that's what good art does, it affects you. It touches something inside you. You didn't know it was even there until that piece of art in whatever form it is, brings out of your touches you in a way that is literally magic. That is a brilliant answer. I love that. And you mentioned Tom in there too. That's fantastic. Well, you know, I'm Big Metalheads and Big Rock are here. I'm a huge rage fan so I'm right there with you. Well, that, that, that, that, what's a needle in that or a pin in that. I do like to open a little space for signal boosting. Is there something you're working on or have worked on? You want to mention that people should check out or conversely where can we follow you online to see what you're up to? Yeah. Well, the easy one first is you can follow me on Twitter at my handle is @GreyemMcNeil. Nice and easy to find. I might think I'm also on Blue Sky and Instagram but I don't really use them as much just because I keep forgetting that I have them basically. Twitter is where I do the bulk of my chat and talking and promotion and so on. But yeah, there's a couple of things I'm working on that I think are exciting to me. I'm working on the new Diablo RPG. I'm doing an adventure that's that. And that's that's it's on it's either on Kickstarter live. Is it live on Kickstarter now or they've started signups for it? So that's really exciting because Diablo is an IP that I've loved for a long time and finally get the chance to work on it is going to be really exciting. So check that one Kickstarter. But the one that is occupying the bulk of my time right now is a project objective mind called the wolves of winter, which is a graphic novel that we're working on to launch again on Kickstarter. We're launching signups for that at the end of this month. And that's going to be a beast of a book, you know, 200 plus pages full color art, Vikings versus demons. Great characters, great moments. It's going to be really exciting. We've got a great artist on board, Ricardo James. He's doing so he's done a lot of work on God's lap and he's doing a lot, he's doing all the art for the comic book and it looks astonishingly good and seeing the characters in the script come to life in his art is amazing. So if the thought of, you know, Viking warriors fighting demons from prehistory and the mashup of Celtic mythology and Viking mythology signs it's something you would like. Keep an eye out for that coming for signups at the beginning of next month and this month. Hell yeah, that's right up my alley. Love it. It's going to be great. I mean, I, you know, I'm biased. I think the script is good, but the art is taking it to another level. So I think it could be awesome. People are going to love it. Very, very cool. All right. I will make sure to include the links to all of that in the show notes or the description where you find the text that goes with this talking part. That's, that's it, my friend. We're going to wrap this up and I'm going to push you out the door. I like to give the guests the final words. So as you head out through the threshold, do you have any parting words of wisdom? It could be craft. It could be career. It could be life. It could be a recipe. Whatever you want to hit me with. Yeah, nobody needs my recipes. I'm a bit responsible for mass food putting through your listeners. Yeah, I mean, my main thing is that I think like every day I am extraordinarily fortunate to be able to do what I do that I get to tell stories about wizards and goblins and spaceships and people give me money for it. And I love it and I would not be able to do that if people didn't read my books if people didn't come along with me for the ride and I am eternally grateful that people have chosen to spend their time and money and eyeballs on my work. And that means more to me than I can ever express. So a heartfelt thank you to everybody who's done that and stick around because there's a ton more of it still to come. And that wraps up another episode of the corner of story and game. Huge thank you to Graham for sitting down at the table today. It's obvious the working and established IPs is a tricky dance between keeping your audience happy and being creatively original. But as Graham pointed out, this is also a place where storytelling can thrive. To you dear listener, as always, thank you for taking your seat at the table. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please leave a comment, a like, subscribe and a come join us over on Discord. Until next time, keep telling stories, playing games and creating worlds worth getting lost in. Stay safe, wander. Your chair will be ready by the fire. The next time you stop in at the corner of story and game. (dramatic music)