The Mortality Radio broadcast was part of a fine afternoon in the South End near Malhavoc World Headquarters. I finished a major project at work around 3, then drove down early to avoid the commuting madness of 405. I stopped by the Renton library for a few minutes writing time and a view of the late salmon run. The fish swim right under the library, in the Cedar River, and seeing hundreds of them spawning is always impressive. But I digress.


Visiting with the Malhavoc power couple was pleasant, and Chris Perkins dropped by to show off a copy of the new, leather-bound PHB (in stores any time now, and loaded with all of the latest v3.5 errata). Black leather, silver foil, looks damn good for $75. We talked shop.

The interview kicked off more or less on time. Monte, haetmunky, and I all got in a few good answers about this and that point of TSR history, game design, and a few plugs for unrelated projects. The hosts were nice guys but mostly lobbed softballs, as you might expect from hardcore game fans. Their rather rambling interview style dragged out the interview to about 90 minutes, but it was nice not to feel pressured.

The tangents visited topics from the fate of Gaslight Games, to fiction, to everyone's favorite games, and so forth. There was a lot of discussion of the Mortality guys' recent losses to the Florida hurricanes (pretty serious). The main geekish subjects — namely Beyond Countless Doorways and Planescape — got lots of questions from the listeners, some pretty obscure, some right on target.

I confessed my fondness for Assassin Mountain and all the old Al-Qadim projects I worked on, though I know anything Arabian is no longer even the least bit fashionable these days. Makes me sad, since those were the first stand-alone books I wrote. And I still like the Arabian Nights style. I get a tiny wry kick every time I hear about the Iraqi pidgin for looters and thieves: "Ali Babas". Sad that the romantic, Ray Harryhausen, Thief of Baghdad view of the Middle East is completely shot to hell.

I drove home listening to some killer blues tunes at high volume, prepared to arrive in triumph. Unfortunately, didn't get the broadcast working at home, so I don't really know how the interview came out from the listener perspective. Can someone fill me in? Was it clear? Lots of glitchiness? Boring? Funny? It's remarkably hard to tell how your doing when there's no live audience and everyone's on speakerphone from coast to coast.

The archive of the show (#67) will show up in a couple hours or days, I suspect is available now.

Finally, some people asked when there would be rogue follow-up to the "Book of Iron Might," so Monte and I gave the Mortality guys a scoop on an upcoming project. Yes, the Ω project mentioned here is really a Malhavoc class book called The Book of Roguish Luck, written by your own Monkey King. We joked around about it a little, and "let slip" that it would ship next year in the summer, probably around June. I'm delighted to share the scoop here as well, but that's about all I can say about it for now. More details in about 2 weeks time.