GMBC ep33 - Crimes, Competence, and Clever Banter: Insights from Scott Lynch at Rising Phoenix Game Con
Scott Lynch
The Lies of Locke Lamora
Speaker A
00:00:05.440 - 00:01:30.660
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club where great fiction becomes your next great tabletop role playing experience for the next four weeks. We're coming to you from Rising Phoenix Game Con in Milford, Massachusetts.
This is the con's fifth year providing fantastic tabletop role playing experiences along with board games, amazing panels, great vendors and an immersive con experience.
Game Masters Book Club was invited to interview both of the guests of honor, Hugo nominated authors Elizabeth Baer and Scott lynch, as well as two other amazing local authors attending the convention, Tricia Wooldridge and Monocwil Black Goose. In this episode we talk to Hugo nominated author Scott lynch and discuss the first of his Gentleman Bastard series, the Lies of Locke Lamora.
On our panel we have not only Mr. Lynch himself, but three veterans of the Game Masters Book Club podcast. Chris Grannis, Sean Murphy and Ian Ellet.
We discuss crime, competency, porn, crime, layered world building crime, economic theory and magical medieval worlds, crime, gurps characters, crime, sci fi, writer snobbery, and well, crime. Let's get into the conversation. All right, fantastic. Okay everybody, one more time. Welcome to the Game Master Book Club. My name is Eric Jackson.
This is the host. I told you, I'm the worst speaker on my own podcast.
I'm the host of the podcast and I am here today with a bunch of really lovely people to talk about the Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott lynch. Including Scott Lynch.
Speaker B
00:01:30.660 - 00:01:32.340
Yay, Scott Lynch.
Speaker A
00:01:33.220 - 00:02:00.080
That's fantastic. I'm going to have all the rest of our game masters introduce themselves.
We're going to start all the way at the end and when we do, they're going to tell us who they are and they're going to tell us about the criminals, mafia, things that have happened in their game, Anything at all, it's all fair game. Talk about anything that involving any sort of organized crime that's happened in your tabletop role playing game.
So all the way down at the end, Ayin Ayan, go right ahead and kick us off.
Speaker C
00:02:00.080 - 00:02:27.940
I like to think of this as the beginning, but fine, fair enough. I'm Ian Eller. I am a freelancer writer for RPGs. Been doing it for 25 years. I have a couple of novels.
In addition, I love crime and my current game that I am running at this very con is about C list supervillains that are trying to make their way and it's hard. Last session they pulled off not Batman's head. So there we are, we're doing good.
Speaker A
00:02:28.260 - 00:02:29.620
All right, fantastic. Chris.
Speaker D
00:02:29.780 - 00:02:38.900
I'm Chris Grannis, formerly in publishing as a dictionary publisher and now doing other things because, you know, But I am.
Speaker A
00:02:38.980 - 00:02:40.180
Words stopped mattering.
Speaker D
00:02:40.500 - 00:02:41.940
Words have stopped mattering.
Speaker A
00:02:41.940 - 00:02:42.380
No one.
Speaker D
00:02:42.380 - 00:03:05.410
No one knows what anything's defined as. It's a mess. I am. I am currently playing in a game where I am playing a thief and a. I'm playing Aladdin, actually. Pre Genie Aladdin.
And yeah, that is where I am causing much, much havoc. Mostly to poor Sean here who's sitting beside me as the gm.
Speaker E
00:03:06.370 - 00:03:30.320
I'm Sean Murphy. I'm a longtime gamer of various genres and characters.
I think that most of my heist situations have been blessed by the dice gods in the sense of every time my group makes a really good plan, they inevitably fail their stealth rolls. Every time they sort of wander into a situation, they can only get nat 20s. I'm looking at you, Dave.
Speaker B
00:03:30.320 - 00:03:40.800
I'm looking at you, I guess. My name is Scott Lynch. Is this. Sorry, is this video or audio only so we can lie about shit?
Speaker E
00:03:40.800 - 00:03:41.840
Yeah, we totally can.
Speaker B
00:03:42.160 - 00:04:00.620
I'm so glad to see so many hundreds of you here on this opulent outdoor garden balcony that we've been for this podcast. It's fantastic. And this is great, great whiskey. Oh, yeah. Peacocks. Subpar peacocks, I must say. I mean, those are not gen con peacocks.
Speaker D
00:04:02.140 - 00:04:03.820
And Dave was responsible for those.
Speaker B
00:04:04.460 - 00:04:27.640
Yeah, apparently I wrote some books once upon a time and some people liked them.
And I've now lived long enough to see myself become part of the appendices, which is kind of surreal, but no, I've been a gamer for an increasingly vast number of years and it absolutely feeds into so much of the fabric of basically everything that I write. There's no denying that.
Speaker A
00:04:28.200 - 00:04:32.280
Absolutely. That is good to know. But can you tell us a little bit about crime?
Speaker B
00:04:33.320 - 00:04:35.960
Crime? Well, it's fun. It's remunerative.
Speaker E
00:04:38.920 - 00:04:40.080
In your game, perhaps.
Speaker A
00:04:40.080 - 00:04:42.640
I'm sorry, I didn't need to make that more specific.
Speaker E
00:04:42.640 - 00:04:43.400
I apologize.
Speaker B
00:04:43.480 - 00:05:18.490
Fiction.
You know what's really interesting is that if I'm playing like a single person role playing game, like if I play Morrowind or Oblivion or Skyrim, of which I played entirely too much or that sort of thing in my life, you know, I will rogue it 100%, but typically, if I'm actually playing tabletop with other people, I very rarely play the sneaky stabby sword. I like playing healbots. I like playing magicians. It's kind of weird. I'm simultaneously very nurturing and very nefarious. I just.
I express them in different ways at different times.
Speaker A
00:05:20.150 - 00:05:43.430
That's fantastic. And in fact ties in with my Quick Mafia piece. I am Eric Jackson, the host, in case you hadn't you've forgotten who I was at that point.
But my current camp, in my current campaign that I am playing with Dave, I am playing an ex mafia guy who is now a healer. And so Way of Mercy Monk in five E, D and D. So I'm doing this whole thing where I punch people, but I heal them. So it's very exciting stuff.
Speaker C
00:05:43.510 - 00:05:44.950
Get up right now.
Speaker A
00:05:44.950 - 00:06:01.890
Yes. Normally, at this point, I would normally summarize the book because I love to read and I love to talk about the books as much as I can.
But I have the author right here, so I see no reason other than to say, Mr. Lynch, would you be so kind as to tell us about this book, the Lies of Locke Lamora,.
Speaker E
00:06:01.890 - 00:06:02.850
And what it's about?
Speaker B
00:06:03.170 - 00:06:05.810
Oh, damn it. You're gonna. You're gonna make me. That poor guy.
Speaker E
00:06:05.810 - 00:06:08.690
He hasn't read it since two babies. Hello, Arthur.
Speaker B
00:06:08.770 - 00:09:48.680
Explain yourself. Explain yourself, Arthur. Tell us what this is.
Well, I mean, interestingly, like, you know, you do reach a point when you're writing a book where, you know, you've worked your way through the first draft, and then you get copy edits, and then you get your proofreads, and by the time it goes to press, like, you are so sick of it, you never want to see a single word of it again. But then time offers you the blessing of memory loss and you can someday pick it back up.
Working on the fourth book in this sequence, I have reread all three of the previous ones, and, you know, either I'm going senile or, darn it, I'm just that good. But there are points in each book where I'm laughing out loud at my own jokes.
So if you just write something funny, set it aside for 20 years, you will eventually come back and it will entertain you again. But the Lies of Locke Lamora. What went into this and why did I write it? I was. I mean, when I was. Okay, so I will give you the.
Hopefully the not TL Dr. Version, but, you know, close to it. When I was a teenager, I was kind of a science fiction snob. It didn't mean anything by it.
It just kind of happened that way. Most everything I was reading, I was reading a lot of Asimov, Joe Haldeman, a lot of cyberpunks.
I trip very heavily over William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadogan, et cetera.
And one day in the hall at school, one of my little buddies from the LARP that I was in just walked up at random and handed me Ray Feist's magician, tattered paperback copy of this. He just said, dude, read this. And I said, I'm not gonna read this. This is fantasy. I don't read fantasy. I read science fiction. Don't. You know.
And he wouldn't take it back. He walked away, and he just said, dude, read it. And, you know, show me the back of his hand. I'm like, I'm not gonna.
Well, long story short, two days later, I was at Barnes and Noble buying the second book in Ralph Feist series and the third book and the fourth book. So essentially, that kind of knocked me out of my intended life path. You know, I.
Previously, I'd been intent on I was gonna be a science fiction writer, a proper cyberpunky science fiction writer. And from that point on, I was doomed to be a damn dirty fantasist.
So when I finally started writing Lies, I guess, you know, the whole design, the priestess was, you know, I want to write Ralph Feist novels, but I want to write them as I would write them. I want to get into the things that I really like.
And I was also, like, the closest thing I had at that point to a mentor in the writing world was a guy named Matthew Woodring Stover, who is the author of, among other things, the novelization of Revenge of the Sith, Several Star wars books which are excellent heroes Die, Blade of Tychell, the Axe of Kain sequence.
He's a magnificent and underrated writer, and I was fortunate enough to be on a forum with him and a couple other writers, but he was the one who had the biggest influence on me. And one of the things about Matt's work is that he is really, really vigorously into grit, blood, and swearing.
He's kind of where I learned all of my bad habits. But this is more than 20 years ago, and as ridiculous as it seems, you know, it felt a little revolutionary. It felt a little.
I mean, that sounds so grandiose. But to me, in my inexperience, it felt amazing. Like, oh, my God, you can put swears in a fantasy book. Wow, amazing.
So I kind of built everything out of. Out of that tapestry. I wanted.
You know, I wanted a Ralph novel, but I wanted it a little dirtier and a little grittier and a little swearier, and I wanted to be as good as Matthew Woodring Stover, and I'm not, but. But I wanted to try. So don't you roll your eyes at me, Ms. Woman who is married to me.
Speaker E
00:09:51.480 - 00:09:53.000
I wasn't working out for you so.
Speaker B
00:09:53.800 - 00:10:40.260
But you know what. But I blasted all of that ambition into it. You know, I reached very hard on this one.
I didn't always hit what I was aiming for, but you know, I held nothing back mentally and emotionally. Everything in the kitchen sink is in this book. And I just, you know, I wanted a landscape that was vivid.
I wanted the city to, you know, I wanted people, you know, flipping through the pages to be able to smell it, to feel it, to get that impression of a lived in place. So you know, I had a lot of wants, I had a lot of desires and you know, only six or seven hundred pages to squeeze them all in.
So, you know, like I said, you don't hit every target that you're aiming for, but you hit enough and you don't have to be ashamed of it. So that's lies.
Speaker A
00:10:41.220 - 00:10:56.260
A fantastic summary. How about you guys down here?
If we were talking about themes from this book and stuff that we learned and stuff that we enjoyed, what are we going to go with? I'll start with you, Sean.
Speaker E
00:10:56.260 - 00:11:18.630
So what I really.
And it's interesting to hear that your science fiction background because there's so much of this book and it'll make it difficult we get into trying to apply this to game system that could be in pretty much any genre by moving things around, the whole magic, science relationship, etc. There's and I was thinking Stainless Steel Rat a lot of Harrison coming through.
Speaker B
00:11:18.630 - 00:11:23.030
I got into so much trouble as a teenager influenced by Stainless Steel Rat.
Speaker E
00:11:23.030 - 00:11:43.960
Books because there's so much of the sort of twist. But there's a, you know, there's also to. Of other books where the characters have twists going on all the way through it.
And I handed this to my significant other saying, you'll love this. There is so much detail on every page. That's the kind of writing that she just loves.
And she's over there nodding her head saying yes, she does love it.
Speaker D
00:11:45.480 - 00:12:06.370
Chris mine, who isn't here actually was the one who handed this to me saying this is too violent for me, but you're going to love this. But yeah, she, she picked it up. We saw you at Boscone this past, this past year.
So she picked up the book and she ate it up and said read this and okay, great. And doing a panel with him.
Speaker B
00:12:06.370 - 00:12:06.690
Great.
Speaker D
00:12:08.370 - 00:12:40.150
We, I really loved the sense of place. I mean other than, you know, there's some stuff that we're going to talk about.
We're going to steal from it later and I'm going to talk about stuff we're stealing from it later. But I loved the city. Felt alive to me in the book and I think that really helped. Felt like a fantasy Venice.
I'm hoping that's what you were going for because that's what I got out of it. And it was just, you could see the places, you could feel the places, you could smell the places.
I like that about a world that you can sort of immerse yourself in. As all of the industry goes through.
Speaker E
00:12:40.150 - 00:13:04.560
Let me add to that. There are lots of places that you didn't see either. Like the other member of the. Of the gentleman.
She's there, she's mentioned, she's a clearly important character. We never meet her. You probably don't put in more than 20 sentences to her. And she looms throughout the book.
There's a lot of places too where things are mentioned. You're like, that sounds really interesting. Oh, we're not going down that alley. We're going over here instead.
Speaker D
00:13:05.360 - 00:13:12.160
Just well constructed world was what I liked about it. It felt real. You felt, you know, the grittiness.
Speaker B
00:13:12.370 - 00:13:21.330
Thank you. It feels a little odd sitting here receiving the praise. Like, you know, okay, and now everyone praise the leader before we begin the cabinet meeting.
Speaker D
00:13:21.650 - 00:13:24.290
I did say it started out too violent for my wife, so, you know,.
Speaker A
00:13:24.770 - 00:13:25.730
I got some criticism.
Speaker E
00:13:26.930 - 00:13:27.890
We'll take care of this.
Speaker C
00:13:29.490 - 00:14:15.610
I am known for my opinions. Anyway, I find it actually super interesting that you talked about how cyberpunk was a major influence on you prior to this.
Because I also find cyberpunk to be an interesting genre because it is not actually a science fiction genre. It is a social genre. And therefore you can do cyberpunk in fantasy. If you are talking about wealth disparities and access to power.
And sometimes magic is tech and sometimes tech is magic. But that's really what we're talking about, right?
So the question in lies about who controls access to these tools that make people rich is a cyberpunk story. And that comes through very, very clearly. Also, I love Feist Serpent War Saga. It was a formative book for me.
Speaker A
00:14:16.570 - 00:15:07.750
All great stuff. You guys have covered just about everything that I was going to. Was going to talk about. I'm a fan of competency porn.
And all of your characters come across as these, like, very well crafted characters who are excellent at what they do. Even the bad guys. Even the, you know, there's no, there's no. There's very few. Like just, ho, ho, here I am kind of guys.
It's all really super awesome. And that is one of the reasons why I reread it over and over and over again because I just.
When I want to see competent people do competent things, this book is what I go to. So that's why we're here.
So now that we've talked a little bit about what the book is and we've talked about what is in it and all of its themes, what if we wanted to put this in a tabletop role playing game? Right. If we wanted to run this thing, what would we run it in? How would we evoke the best possible parts of Lies? Ayan, you want to start us off?
Speaker C
00:15:08.470 - 00:16:15.970
My go to almost always, unless I want something very, very specific, is Savage Worlds. And the reason for that is that it has dials that you can tweak. Right. And because the violence can be scary in both this book and Savage Worlds.
That's a good choice from a like, oh, things have gone really bad very quickly in a circumstances. Right. Obviously there are games that are built to be heisty, whether it's the leverage RPG that came out years ago from Cortex or whatever.
But I think it's more important if you're talking about playing a game in which grit matters. What you really want is for things to be able to get dangerous by accident quickly. Right.
And then when we're improvising, because that's what we do at the table, that sudden shift to oh, shit, right, is something that's important. And you get. You get that in a game because you didn't know what was going to happen when the dice were rolled.
And a game like Savage Worlds that's very swingy gives you that in a way that I think a lot of games that are sort of curated toward a specific experience don't Sean Skip crispr.
Speaker E
00:16:15.970 - 00:17:04.920
And you're never going first. It's real rough. I was thinking 7C precisely because it's the mechanics of it. You know, swords and such.
There's certain classes that have access to magic. There's definite sort of within the sort of. There's divisions within there. There's societies.
There's a structure in there for nobility and for class structure that works in there.
And there's enough uncertainty to how things action that you could sort of find ways to have the sudden turns that happen in this book work out well in terms of, as you said, sort of the unexpected sort of twist.
Seven Seas provides enough mechanics for the players to be like, oh, I'm going to do this thing so I can get out of what seems like an impossible situation.
Speaker C
00:17:05.240 - 00:17:05.720
Chris.
Speaker D
00:17:05.800 - 00:17:39.770
I'm going to cheat and Save lives in the. The dark. Since it is one of the ones that is, you know, that cites this as an inspiration. So I love the. The rogueness of it.
The, you know, you are all out running around doing all of your. The group dynamics that are in there. The timer dials that they have for all of this. So you can check off as things are going.
It just really works for a system for it and it just really is built for it. My alternate, if that one didn't work because it's like, oh, Blades of the Dark,.
Speaker C
00:17:41.530 - 00:17:42.250
That's cheating.
Speaker D
00:17:42.490 - 00:18:04.470
The other one would have been. I would actually put it in Eberron for the feel of the city.
Put it in someplace like Stormreach in the Eberron city setting rather and just have that for just the immersiveness of it. I don't usually run 5e so stuff, but that would be a definite second choice for me.
Speaker A
00:18:04.470 - 00:18:09.630
Yeah, it definitely has that. That same sort of. That built on feel that it's good. There's a lot of. There's a lot of stuff happening.
Speaker D
00:18:09.630 - 00:18:13.070
The history. Without having to really, you know, build all the history yourself.
Speaker E
00:18:13.390 - 00:18:13.750
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:18:13.750 - 00:19:06.120
Which is great. Before I pass it on to Scott to tell us what the real answer is. I also, I also put.
I also had talked about Savage Worlds was what it was originally thinking. But I'm more comfortable in the Cortex Firefly sort of universe.
And I like that mostly for the flashback mechanic because it is the sort of thing where you can. If you can say, you know, it's like, hey, remember what happened in Budapest? Kind of a thing.
And that feels very much like a way that you can get out of those situations when things get really terrible. You've got that idea that. And you've got this long standing crew where you've got all these. Where you've got this.
That you know what you're going to do, you know what our. You know, we know what A, B and C is and we can make that happen. So that was where I was going.
But Mr. Lynch, would you care to tell us if you were going to run your own book, what would you run it in? This is not an official endorsement of any particular game, but.
Speaker B
00:19:06.520 - 00:19:35.120
Oh dear. All right. So back in the day, I will date myself. I will. Back when Lies was first in gestation. So this would have been around 2001. And actually the.
The first notes that I started sketching down in any constructive fashion were for what would eventually become the Thorn of Emberly. And I started writing book four in the sequence. And then decided that I didn't feel like I'd spent enough time with the characters. So essentially.
Speaker A
00:19:35.120 - 00:19:36.559
So we've just been reading backstory.
Speaker B
00:19:36.559 - 00:19:43.840
Well, yeah. What you've read so far is actually me spending time with the characters to get to where I started that level of backstory.
Speaker E
00:19:45.360 - 00:19:48.110
18,000 Zero pages of session zero.
Speaker B
00:19:48.430 - 00:21:48.170
So somewhere in my papers, there are the characters statted out in Gurps, because that's what I had back in the day. GURPS is marvelous because so many people are enchanting. Gurps has a very enchanting promise. Like, yeah, it'll be fun to create characters.
You can do anything. And then you create the characters and find out that you're dealing with the GURPS system.
And so you create the character and then don't play it because it's and gurps. But I did enjoy making GURPS characters. Also. Ars Magica. I scored a $5 copy of a secondhand.
There was a whole pile in my local game store one day in the 90s first edition, the Masquerade soft covers and like the outdated edition of Ars Magica. And that again, is a game I've never had a chance to run. But, boy, that is a fun system. And that is an extremely fun system to create characters in.
I could actually see running something lies ish in Ars Magica because it is. It is gritty enough for my tastes, but it is also, like, specifically written to be in an archaic, fantastical world.
Like, the flavor is baked into the mechanics. It's not just like, we're gonna build a generic system that can go anywhere, do anything. I really like Blades in the Dark.
I have no complaints with it. We play Swords of the Serpentine every two months or so, we. With some friends of ours. And I really, really like it, which is.
Which is not a guarantee because I'm not always a huge system, light rules, like, kind of guy. I'm not a big proponent or enjoyer of the sort of game where it's like, tell the GM whatever you want and then vibes happen. It's like that.
That to me is less a game and more just sitting around bullshitting with your friends, which is awesome. I love sitting around bullshitting with friends. But that's not a game, by my lights. And there's just enough resource management and.
And so on, so forth in Swords of the Serpentine, Blades in the Dark that my. My brain registers it as a game and I really enjoy messing around with it.
Speaker C
00:21:48.250 - 00:21:51.089
Well, and then Swords of Serpentine is a gumshoe.
Speaker A
00:21:51.089 - 00:21:51.250
Game.
Speaker C
00:21:51.250 - 00:22:02.330
And, and that dovetails with the idea of the competence porn. Right. You are good at what you are good at in gumshoe games. Right. You don't have to roll to be good at it.
Speaker B
00:22:02.330 - 00:23:18.810
The gumshoe system, like as you said, I was really intrigued by that thing you said, the curated experience, like that metagame aspect where there's a resource or there's some sort of intentionality where like you say we want to have a swashbuckling pirate experience. So if something happens contrary to that, I spend a swashbuckling pirate point and swashbuckling stuff happens. I don't necessarily enjoy that.
I sympathize with that approach.
I appreciate a game structure that rather incentivizes the sort of play in the direction that you want it to rather than like, I do understand that like sometimes you just can't get away. Like the James Bond role playing game is the first time I ever encountered the old Victory Games game from the early 1980s.
The first time I ever encountered that, that aspect of design where, you know, players get action points or hero points or whatever it is. We're like, no, I don't like that outcome. James Bond doesn't get punked like that James Bond does James Bond shit.
So let's ignore that death in a, in a death trap.
So, so yeah, so I, I, I enjoy systems that, that in incentivize toward the behavior that you want rather than sort of just giving you the ability to scrub mistakes. If that sense makes, makes sense.
Speaker C
00:23:19.530 - 00:23:31.290
Yeah. And when I said curated experience, I was coding but not saying Blades in the Dark. Right.
Like Blades in the Dark is a great game for the thing that it wants to be, but it really kind of only does that thing that it wasn't.
Speaker A
00:23:31.530 - 00:23:31.930
Right.
Speaker B
00:23:32.170 - 00:23:45.150
That's like the genius of the gumshoe system. Like Trail of Cthulhu. That whole idea of like, what if we just eliminate that whole thing where search for clue, don't find clue, get stymied.
Speaker D
00:23:45.230 - 00:23:45.630
Right.
Speaker B
00:23:46.670 - 00:23:55.150
And just build in the assumption that you're going to find the clues and the roles just kind of tell you how you get there and you know what misadventures are going to occur along the way.
Speaker C
00:23:55.150 - 00:24:06.310
You get to pick whether or not you're going to spend resources to know more. But the basics you can get, you know what to do next. Right, right. As opposed to just stopping people you.
Speaker D
00:24:06.310 - 00:24:11.440
Started assuming competence and not dirt from have no idea what they're doing.
Speaker B
00:24:11.440 - 00:24:37.010
Yeah, I have.
I'm very, very fond of one of the coolest game Ideas that I've ever encountered knights, black agents, which is, you know, vampires and so forth in the Cold War. And it's.
It's one of those games where I just wish that they had some graphic design applied to the book because the layout, it's a brilliant, brilliant game, but, like, you can't flip through it for fun. So many of those way that I did with so many games back in.
Speaker C
00:24:37.010 - 00:24:41.130
The day, Alas, it's almost like writers are not necessarily great graphic designers.
Speaker B
00:24:41.130 - 00:24:45.570
No, I put myself in that category. Like, I, you know, graphic design is not my passion.
Speaker A
00:24:47.090 - 00:25:08.100
All right, well, since we're focusing now, moving towards some more graphic y kind of things, that puts us into the idea of stuff that we're going to. That we're going to take from the system. We're going to find.
What are the images and ideas that you want to pull from lies and drop directly into your game? Chris, do you want to lead us off on that?
Speaker D
00:25:08.100 - 00:25:11.140
No. Since it is a thing about stealing. We're going to steal stuff from.
Speaker E
00:25:11.140 - 00:25:12.180
Yes, that is.
Speaker A
00:25:12.180 - 00:25:12.620
It is.
Speaker D
00:25:12.940 - 00:25:37.620
I would actually steal the Bond ma J. I think that whole idea of this society of all of the wizards have gotten together and said, we don't want to get killed. So if anything happens to any of us, all of us are going to destroy everything about that person.
So we are pretty much clear from any danger for the most part.
Speaker A
00:25:38.020 - 00:25:39.420
So we can do what we want afterwards.
Speaker D
00:25:39.420 - 00:26:13.820
We can do what we want. We'll just, you know, pretend that, you know, we'll take commissions for ridiculous amounts of money.
You know, if anyone does anything against us, it's going to wipe out them, their family, their friends, their pets, everything. And, you know, possibly their city, depending on how much they pissed us off. Loved them. Loved their scorpion hawk.
The whole, the whole thing about them just. It tickled me. And it's something that would be easy to drop into anything else.
I have a second one, but I'll let someone else speak if they don't have it, because I like it.
Speaker A
00:26:14.060 - 00:26:14.780
We'll get it.
Speaker D
00:26:15.100 - 00:26:16.540
There's a bunch to steal from this.
Speaker A
00:26:16.540 - 00:26:18.910
We'll get around. We'll get around. Sean, you want to go next?
Speaker E
00:26:19.460 - 00:27:41.690
So, you know, my problem with lots of my games is that my players want to do things. And then I create what I think are fun challenges. And they go. They're insurmountable. And like, you got to be at two places at once. There's no way.
You've got to both be this guy and this guy in the same meeting. And if you don't show up, you're doomed. I think those are fun to put from players, but I don't. But they often don't know how to do it.
And I feel like the idea of trying to figure out how to give that option and bring that into play is something I'd like to try to bring into my games.
And Chris, I am looking at you with this of the impossible choice and giving them and assuming expertise enough to be able to get through the other side of that in a way that the book is quite forgiving in the sense of how they get through. Like the guy, he takes a sickness thing in a world with magic and potions and such.
The GM of that, if there's a gm, if this is a story from a game, the GM went, sure, go ahead and roll performance and see how that works. Oh, you rolled reasonably well. Great, that works. And that's how you get on the other side.
So the idea of the impossible choice and it happens a lot of times in the book, like how can you do these things? And he solves them and the book allows those solves in a way that I as a GM often don't. So that's the thing I'd like to bring in.
Speaker A
00:27:43.130 - 00:27:43.770
Ian.
Speaker C
00:27:44.330 - 00:27:46.010
Sean is a no gm.
Speaker E
00:27:46.010 - 00:27:47.930
I am really. It's a problem.
Speaker C
00:27:48.490 - 00:28:33.750
I like the layers of lies and I would, I wish I could figure out a way to employ that in game. In other words, the idea that they are lying to their marks, they are also lying to their bosses. Right. They're lying to society about who they are.
They're the small time robbers. No, they're not. They're like advanced con artists.
Right, but, but the, the layers of lies are a thing that I think would be a really interesting way to play a game where the PCs, their job is to maintain these fictions in order to do what they want to get done. I don't know how you do that in a game, but it's super intriguing about a way to play again, you know.
Speaker A
00:28:33.750 - 00:28:34.350
Agreed.
Speaker C
00:28:34.350 - 00:28:35.510
I see you thinking, Sean.
Speaker E
00:28:35.510 - 00:29:12.640
I am thinking. I mean, because you're, because you're right in the sense of they only pay a small amount of money every week.
And I think the difference is they have a big vault, they're getting away with this and they don't have anything to do with that money. Like that's the problem is that players, if you give them big fault of big vault of money, they're going to want to buy something big.
Like just people that if you could get to players to say like I'M just doing this for the fun of the adventure more or less to sort of live in a certain lifestyle with my friends. If you could get them to do that, I'd be a lot more open and stop saying no so much to that.
Speaker D
00:29:12.880 - 00:30:18.420
That's what I like. That was the second thing that I was going to put in there or leads right into that. I love the fact that their stealing was a religion.
I love, loved the idea of this whole cult, this 13th God cult there that the reason they were stealing was for the holiness of it. Essentially this is what we do. We have to discard thousands of gold to cover the deaths that have been caused there that were accidental.
Or if someone else has harmed a member of our crew, they have to be paid in the destruction of this wealth.
And that being an organized religion of thieves within a game, either as a PC or an NPC group, that feels really visceral and cool to add in there that it's not something I'd seen done before in terms of this holy thievery, so to speak.
Speaker A
00:30:18.580 - 00:31:15.020
I've stolen so much from your books. I cannot tell you the number of campaigns that have been based around various ideas. The glass towers from the Ancient people.
I played a thief in somebody's game who was basically a member of the 13th. The one that I think I did and actually worked the most successfully actually was the teeth shell.
I love this idea of like there being like creatures in the water and having a whole water based city and then because you live there, you have these really cool creatures. That was, I think one of the most exciting combats I've ever run in a 5e game was based off of my characters trying to survive a teeth show.
So I can definitely say that was on my list. So maybe not quite as filled philosophical some of my friends here, but definitely incredibly practical. Really great stuff. All right, anybody else?
More stuff. There's tons in this book. So is there anything else you guys want to add?
Speaker C
00:31:15.900 - 00:31:21.420
Well, it's a. It's a great city that's super fun. Like you can drop that in any fantasy world. It'd be awesome.
Speaker A
00:31:22.220 - 00:31:36.170
Yeah, you could. Absolutely could. Anything else you want to tell us about this game wise? You.
I know you said you were playing Gurps, you've made characters and is there any other inspiration that you want to drop in here that you haven't already mentioned?
Speaker B
00:31:37.290 - 00:35:49.800
Well, you know, as I said, you know, I mean all the inspirations that actually fed into it would have been stuff that I'd read or played, you know, prior to 2004, 2005. So, you know, I mean, I played a lot of stuff since that, you know, did not exactly feed into it in a foundational design sense.
But I mean, commenting on some of the things that you guys just said, I mean, I mean, one of the other things I did not mention is that there's a lot of economics in the book.
Because one of my weird fascinations is archaic economics and just the practicalities of currency and currency exchange and wealth exchange and so on and so forth.
And the thing you mentioned where these guys are sitting on a generational pile of wealth by anyone's standards, but they don't have any legitimate means to do anything else with it.
It was deliberately written because one of the things about real world con artists is that distressing amount of the time, so many of them don't have escape plans. It's a recurring thing that people will pull off. Incredible, incredible multi million dollar scams.
There was a guy in the 80s who basically posed as an art dealer in Manhattan and picked up clients on a fraudulent basis and decorated an apartment and took in millions and millions of dollars and then just kind of sat there like a deer in the headlights, like stuffing the money in the bag and running off to Canada was never a part of the plan for him. He just sat there and didn't have an exit plan. Not having an exit plan is one of the recurring themes.
I mean, it's one of the essences of the Locke and Sabbath dynamic that comes up, you know, later in the series that has been sort of talked about in the Republic of Thieves, which is, how did you think this is going to end? When were you going to do something with this?
You know, you've got to have more than just squatting atop this pile of treasure the way we always squatted. You've got to have a plan, man. But also part of it is like, there's just no laundering this stuff. Like there's.
There's no legitimate way in this society for people who don't have any background or pedigree or status or, or legal right to this money to just go buy stuff. There's no investment opportunities, there's no banks, there's no laws about this.
I had a conversation at a convention with a poor kid in the audience who was so close to getting it. He's like, but it's not fair. What do you mean? It's weird for people to have large amounts of money. There's no way for them to save and buy houses.
And it's like, yes, it's not fair. You're getting it. It's profoundly unjust. There's no economic mobility, there's no economic freedom.
That's part of how I kind of reconcile, you know, a lot of the criminal aspects of this book, which is like, these guys are not just criminals, they're criminals in the society that has no legitimate outlets for people like them. You know, there's no way to build an empty. You can't buy a chain of 7/11. There's no American dream in commodity.
You know, you will be beaten, your money will be taken from you. You're not supposed to have it. So, yeah, they've amassed something, but they can't do anything with it. So. So, yeah, so there's.
There's so much economic commentary and so much economic nerdery hidden in these books and I enjoy doing that in games. I mean, I deliberately also like, you know, in games for very good reasons. You know, monetary systems generally make sense.
You know, ten copper makes a silver, ten silver makes a gold, and one gold buys soup. Because you're in fantasy land.
I deliberately set out to obliterate that and get back to, you know, I mean, if you look at like authentic medieval, you know, reckonings of coinage and notional coinage, they're incomprehensible, they are madness inducing. 240 Corbetts makes a bizongo, 10 Bazongos makes a dingus. But the dingus doesn't actually exist.
It's not a coin, it's just a figure of note only used in Florence. And I wanted that. And I, I treasure the notes that I get from people where they're like, I can't make heads or tails of the monetary system.
Yeah, I should, you know, put notches next to my desk. Got another one. I love it. Yeah. So, yeah, sorry, that's, that's my, my random ass commentary going off.
Speaker C
00:35:49.800 - 00:35:56.490
What you started with, though, theft is often pathological. Like people, people who are con artists don't do it because they want money. I mean, they do.
Speaker D
00:35:56.490 - 00:35:57.730
It's the love of the game.
Speaker C
00:35:58.050 - 00:36:11.690
Well, they're sick.
Like, like legitimately, like when we say Ponzi scheme, that was a real guy who did a thing that he could have walked away at any time during that process and he didn't because he just couldn't stop people who, most of.
Speaker B
00:36:11.690 - 00:36:15.970
Them stop lying even when it doesn't gain them anything.
Speaker E
00:36:16.310 - 00:36:56.930
Even when people know, sorry, you said they, they can't leave.
And I was like going through my head like, no, I think they could have, they have all the way of dressing up like the people that could invest and put it into a boat and they don't. And that's the story for me. And that's what I wish I could get my players to buy into.
Is that getting the wealth, the endorphin rush from getting that. Like, they talk about leaving and he just says, no, I think we can make it through. I think we can keep rolling the dice.
I'm not gonna argue with you because obviously you are the author. But, but I do. But I do think it's interesting you say that because now it's making me rethink like, oh, maybe they could.
Speaker B
00:36:56.930 - 00:37:17.180
Well, no, I mean, and the thing is, is, you know, a strong enough won't becomes a can't. You know, there is that whole thing where it's like on a practical, like. Yeah, on a basic practical level, sure. They could put all the money in a.
And go elsewhere. Elsewhere. You know, you live in, you know, a horrifying. Oh, my wife is giggling.
Speaker C
00:37:18.460 - 00:37:19.020
Okay.
Speaker B
00:37:19.740 - 00:38:20.840
You live in a horrifying, unfair, plague ridden, evil, shark ridden sea monster, haunted, you know, hellscape written by this jackass who's out to kill you. But it's yours. You know, like, you don't, there's no Internet, you don't have maps.
I mean, one of the, one of the fun parts of the novellas that I'm working on at the moment, which bridge book three to book four, is that Locke and Jean are taking a long walk across hundreds and hundreds of miles. They don't have maps. They don't know what this continent really looks like. They flip through books, but they need directions.
Like they're taking a 16th century version of a walking tour. They don't know anything about anywhere else. Like there's, there's, there's nowhere else to go.
You know, they, they, they, they know of these distant, far off cities as notions. You know, they visited one of them when they were teenagers.
But like the whole concept of packing up and moving elsewhere is really fraught because, you know, elsewhere is a big dark place, which is very typical to.
Speaker A
00:38:20.840 - 00:38:32.450
The whole medieval concept. Yeah. Where like the worst thing that could conceivably happen to you is for you to be kicked out of the city because then what?
Like there's there, there, there. Outside there'd be darkness and dragons like that.
Speaker D
00:38:32.450 - 00:38:36.970
Exile. So much worse than death because you're, you're, you're bound to die and no one will know.
Speaker A
00:38:37.290 - 00:38:59.950
Okay, and on that light note, let's talk about. We've had Scott Talk about a great deal about influences, but let's talk about stuff that resonates with this.
Stuff that you guys have, that you guys have been through, that you think other types of media that would. If you were reading this and you were like, boy, I'd like more of that. And I've already read the books and the novellas. What else is there?
Ayan, you want to kick us off with that?
Speaker C
00:39:00.030 - 00:39:10.670
Yeah, I think that because we're talking about something that is, like, deeply rooted in crime, I think that everybody, forever should definitely watch every episode of Leverage.
Speaker A
00:39:11.790 - 00:39:12.590
Right? Fair.
Speaker E
00:39:12.590 - 00:39:12.990
Right.
Speaker C
00:39:13.150 - 00:39:40.160
Like just from the perspective, especially since it's. This is a gaming podcast.
The way you look at problem solving from that show's perspective, even if you're not playing a Blades in the Dark or whatever that gives you the opportunity to edit the past or do your prep or whatever, the way that it is clever will feed into the way that people come up with cool solutions at the table, which means it'll be more fun. And again, crime, crime. Every love crime.
Speaker A
00:39:40.160 - 00:39:41.720
And crime. And crime. Chris.
Speaker D
00:39:42.160 - 00:40:11.690
Well, I like lighter stuff.
Typically, you know, I do run most of the comedy games, so I would, you know, take this and I, you know, felt Dirty Rotten Scoundrels because it just feels, you know, if you want to take this and go to the silly. There you go. Matchstick Men again. The book or the movie? Catch Me if youf can again, if we want to get some real life con artistry and such.
And I would for a video game, the old video game Thief. I think it still holds up. I love that game. It's real good stuff.
Speaker A
00:40:12.810 - 00:40:13.290
Yeah.
Speaker D
00:40:13.370 - 00:40:26.010
And I just had the plug for the next book I'm doing for this, which is 6 of crows, which just sort of, you know, has a similar good thiefy background. Leah Bardugo. Yes, yes. Leah Bardugo. Six of crows.
Speaker C
00:40:26.410 - 00:40:29.130
Dishonored is like spiritual successor too.
Speaker B
00:40:29.130 - 00:40:30.410
Oh, I love Dishonored.
Speaker E
00:40:31.290 - 00:40:34.730
You know, it really is bad going. Third when we haven't talked beforehand.
Speaker A
00:40:35.820 - 00:40:38.260
You think that's bad? Wait till I have to go after all of you.
Speaker E
00:40:38.260 - 00:41:34.200
So what I will recommend is I just finished. I can't remember. It's Mrs. So and so. It's a book about a woman in the 1800s.
She came over from Eastern Europe to New York City and she started an advanced fencing operation. And so it was a time when there was. We did we just starting to have policing and people were going in and doing scams and.
Or breaking into banks by buying the office next door or digging in a hole.
In the one office and going to the next door and the whole process of her getting moving things through her network, thieves protecting thieves, the police being on the take sometimes until one person shows up and is going to show them and then doesn't for a while and then does and her eventual sort of finding a way to get out of the country with a good portion of her money and being miserable because there's nothing worse than being exiled.
Speaker A
00:41:34.440 - 00:42:29.260
So where I'm going with this is gonna be like I said, I like competency porn. I think that Locke and Miles Warkasigan have similar are genetically related in some way, perhaps in the deep future. So that is fantastic.
Almost anything by Alona Andrews has these really competent characters who do all kinds of really great stuff. The Magpie Lord fantastic series where you also have these really great folks. That's where I'm coming from on this.
If I'm looking for things that are similar, you guys have covered a lot of the thievery and I'm very much on the incredibly competent characters. So that's where I'm pulling my stuff from. We're at the end where we talk about stuff stuff.
We're going to save you the best for last, so we'll start with Sean. Sean, do you have anything you want to promote in this from the from your podium of power right now?
Speaker E
00:42:29.260 - 00:42:51.920
I did not how I got to be the best of last in this group.
But anyway, no, I will just say everybody who enjoyed this con, come again next year and then the other cons will I'll be at this year will be Katahdin Con, which is a new con in Portland, Maine. I'll be a total con in Medford, Massachusetts.
And there's probably one other one that I'll pop into because it feels like you can't go a month or two without seeing a con around these days.
Speaker D
00:42:52.640 - 00:43:13.520
Chris, I don't have much to promote. There is the Salem Game con, which is starting in July, which I'm going to attend and run, run something running what we do in the shadows type game.
That is my shtick. Other than that, I don't know buy a dictionary. It doesn't help me in any way anymore, but quite frankly know what words mean.
Speaker C
00:43:15.440 - 00:43:32.960
I am after many, many years of freelancing and writing for other people's games. I am working on my own and I hope to make that thing happen in the fall and we'll see whether or not I get to a point of playability at cons by then.
Also, the best book ever written is Called Eldrin and the Moon and it's by me.
Speaker D
00:43:34.000 - 00:43:35.680
You can find it on Amazon.
Speaker E
00:43:36.080 - 00:43:46.310
It is another really good book. And I've said this you before, that it shows you things but doesn't reveal all the things. There's still plenty of places to go.
So when are you going to get that next book?
Speaker C
00:43:46.470 - 00:44:03.510
Well, I like. I like single novels and I don't know. I don't know. I've tried to write the sequel a number of times and I. I don't read sequels often.
I like a good story and then a new good story. Right. So I don't know. But I think about it all the time. I do. I do think about writing the sequel all the time.
Speaker A
00:44:03.670 - 00:44:07.010
And. And speaking of good stories, Scotland, what do you have for us?
Speaker B
00:44:07.010 - 00:44:07.850
Oh, I don't do that.
Speaker E
00:44:07.850 - 00:44:08.530
Oh, okay.
Speaker B
00:44:09.170 - 00:44:55.810
I just write my crap. Okay.
So there is a company up in Canada called Conversation Tree Press, did a special edition of the the only existing gentleman bastard short story, which is Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent, which was published in two parts in Grimdark magazine over the last like 18 months or so, and that sold out in about six minutes. So we just did a deal to have them do an ebook too.
And that ebook should be available within a couple weeks, so people will actually be able to read that in an easier fashion and not have to buy the now extinct special edition. Also, this is. God, I feel like such a jackass. So I was recently nominated for my first ever Hugo Award.
Speaker E
00:44:56.360 - 00:44:56.680
Nice.
Speaker B
00:44:59.080 - 00:45:50.810
I'm not even gonna tell you why that was so nice. We'll just leave it at that. No, it's for a story called Kaiju Agonistes. It's a novelette which is free to read online. It's at Uncanny magazine.
And yeah, I was really touched by that. It's nice to be. I mean, I have no complaints in the literary department. I've been very blessed and very fortunate and.
And my readers are very generous. But it's nice to be noticed every once in a while. So I was very proud of that one. I think it's hopefully very amusing.
It's a dry, satirical cold war science fiction piece about what idiots human beings are.
It's about these struggles of a monster from the stars that is ostensibly here to teach us the folly of experimenting with nuclear weapons and discovers that we're really, really hard to. To deal with. So, yeah, Kaiju Agonistes.
Speaker A
00:45:52.010 - 00:46:11.770
All right, fantastic.
Officially, that's where we usually wrap up for this, but we do have an audience today, so it could be very Interesting to ask, folks, in our remaining five minutes, does anybody have any questions about games or Mr. Lynch's work or about the podcast or anything, please? Hands up.
Speaker C
00:46:11.930 - 00:46:12.770
Everybody's terrified.
Speaker A
00:46:12.770 - 00:46:23.530
Yeah. Thank you for starting it off. Scott lynch, how do you feel about. I want to say we were talking about. You got this, you got this.
Speaker C
00:46:23.530 - 00:46:24.170
Thank you.
Speaker A
00:46:25.850 - 00:46:54.490
The mob has a religious code, right? Or had a religious code. It's how they were able to stay consistent. For a while.
It was blasphemous to snitch, to rat, to talk about something, and then human greed got in the way, and I was like, how do you feel? Rectify that. In your books where we have this, you know, we have these feast following this religious code, but, like, aren't they sticking it out?
Why aren't they stomping on their own principles more often or all the time?
Speaker B
00:46:54.810 - 00:48:01.170
Well, I mean, one of the things you need for that is you need a concerted assault upon those institutional values. And that's one of the things that happened to, you know, the.
The mafia in America is that, you know, for decades and decades, there was a concerted federal assault to, you know, I mean, used to be a very rare and bizarre thing for someone to. To turn informer, and now it's. It's. It's so commonplace. It is, you know, lost, you know, any measure of distinction. I mean, it's basically it.
It went from being a very rare and difficult thing to achieve to basically just like, it's one of the available mobster retirement plans, you know, like, you basically, you either die or you go into the program, and it just. It happens on a continual basis. And no one in Camorra really has applied pressure from above to wipe out the right people in that fashion.
I mean, but that's what it takes is basically a carrot and a stick applied on a generational basis to break that code and to provide something else, if that makes sense.
Speaker A
00:48:01.250 - 00:48:09.530
All right, any other questions? That's a great one. All right, that's a great one to end on then. So we're fantastic. Okay, thanks.
Speaker B
00:48:09.530 - 00:48:10.370
You may all live.
Speaker C
00:48:10.450 - 00:48:11.010
Yay.
Speaker A
00:48:11.330 - 00:50:01.970
All right, clap so that Scott may get lunch. All right, fantastic. Thanks for listening to our talk here at the Game Masters Book Club. Tune in anywhere where podcasts are.
And thank you, Mr. Lynch, for attending. And thank you, Rising Phoenix Gamecon hosting us yet again.
And that was the Lies of Locke Lamora by Hugo nominated author Scott lynch, who was on the show along with three amazing Game Masters Book Club veterans, Sean Murphy, Ian Eller, and Chris Grannis. What a thrill. To have Scott lynch on the show.
As my obvious fanboy behavior may have indicated, I'm a long term fan of the Gentleman Bastard series, so this episode is is extra special to me personally. Thank you again Scott lynch for being on the show. Thanks again to Rising Phoenix Game Con for making this series of interviews possible.
Be sure to check out their website@rising phoenixgamecon.com and make sure to leave room in your gaming calendar in late April to attend the Con in Milford, Massachusetts. You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion as well as links to all of our podcasts at K Square Productions gmbc.
You can learn about upcoming episodes on our social media on bluesky@gmbookclub, bluesky social on Facebook at gamemasters book club, on Mastodon at gamemastersbookclub and on Instagram amastersbookclub.
If you've enjoyed the show, please like subscribe and comment on our episodes in your chosen podcasting space and be sure to share those episodes with your gaming community. You've been listening to the Game Masters Book Club brought to you by me, Eric Jackson and K Square Productions.
Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our music. Later, gamers and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising.