Das ich mich für die Vampire in Warhammer-Online interessiere, hat sicher jeder meiner Stammleser gemerkt. Schaut nur bei Keine Vampire in Warhammer Online? und Interview mit dem Warhammer-Roman-Übersetzer Andreas Decker, bei Praag, die Stadt von Tod und Wahrheit oder die Liste aller Vampir-Beiträge ;)

Egal...

Ich bin den Vampiren in der WAR-Welt auf der Spur. Nach meinem deutschen Interview mit dem Übersetzer der Warhammer-Vampir-Triologie heute das angekündigte englische Interview mit dem Romanautor Steven Savile. Es ist, logisch (of course), auf Englisch. ;)

Steven Savile

Steven Savile-Potraitaufnahme

Viel Spaß beim Lesen - und Lachen.

Yitu

I wrote my first short-story at the age of 12. In these story a boy in the States was part of a bionic-experiment and tried to escape from the labor. He succeeds, escapes over the near border to Mexcio and... lands in a Mexican prison / labor and is becoming part of "their" experiment. Story starts and ends with the same sentense, a wake-upcall - which was the title of the story.

Well, it was a very dark setting, several years before I read my first Shadowrun-Novel. (My story was for a children-writer contest, but I didn´t won any price. Well, maybe the jury was looking for a more... gentle story. ;))

As far as I know, you also started very early...

I did, really. Most writers will tell you about writing from a really age. My first 'story' that I remember, I will have been about 10, and while everyone else in the class was writing 'what I did on my summer vacation' I wrote a story about a killer who walked down into the London Underground and pushed a woman in a wheelchair under an on-coming train. This was right around the time my parents divorced, and as a result my teacher decided I was deeply traumatised by the event and needed to see the psychologist. No one seemed to understand that it was just a 'neat' idea I had.

My father will tell you a different story, going back to about age 7 where on the first week back at school we had to write that exact essay, 'what I did for my summer holiday'. Apparantly I decided to make the entire thing up and invented a summer vacation in Hawaii. I was busted at the parent teacher conference when my teacher started going on about how it must have been a wonderful holiday.

Ahem.

Seems I was always a little creative.

The Warhammer-Triology was you first "full-time"-Writer-job. How did you get the idea for this first story?

Warhammer was an odd one for me. I was working as a full time teacher in Stockholm and just couldn't take anymore. There comes a point when I think as a teacher you owe it to the kids to get the hell out of there. I hit that point, the one where I really honestly didn't care if they turned up, if they studied or did the crossword, so I went up to my headmaster's office and quit. I am pretty impulsive like that...

I went home and realised I had no job and no way to pay the bills, so all of a sudden it became a matter of writing or starving. A friend of mine was friends with Mike Lee, she pulled a string, got Mike to introduce me to Lindsay Priestley, and Lindz and I hit it off immediately. She asked what I'd be interested in doing, and sent me five or six possibles, including taking over the Space Wolves as Bill King had already left but no one was telling the readers, doing a novel based around Dan Abnett's Titanicus, and some other 40k ideas, and the last one on the list was the Von Carstein stories. I've always had a bit of a think for the old Hammer House of Horror vampire movies, so I said 'oooh this one sounds like fun'.

I wrote the prologue as a sample so Lindz could see whether I could write in the Warhammer way... And this in itself became rather interesting, because I turned in the fitst draft, she read it and had maybe a dozen editorial changes she'd like, so I did those and turned it in, and again there was maybe a dozen changes she'd like - now the thing to understand here is it's like a test to see whether you'll put the 'artist' aside and just do what the editor wants, or if you will be awkward to work with. I happened to show my friend who did the introduction with Mike because she wanted to be a writer, what I didn't expect was her to reply to the editor and not to me - the mail went something along the lines of 'how can you work with this woman?

She's an idiot! oh my god this stuff is ridiculous...' etc.

Now bear in mind I hadn't signed any contracts, and indeed the original writer they had in mind for the Von Carstein books was currently hiding from his telephone, there was every chance the entire deal could fall apart right then and there... I mean it was was a pretty offensive mail to the editor... so I had a bright idea, I wrote to Lindz and said 'Hey sorry about that, can we have some fun here and
make out that you just fired me because of this? I reckon she'll be mortified for a month or more, which has to be fun, right?' and dear old Lindz was suddenly feeling sorry for the idiot friend who mailed her, and not angry at her at all... but she wouldn't go along with pretending to fire me either.

I´m very curious in this part of story-design.

You explained that you had several discussions to work the final story out. How far was the start of the story based on table-top-reports? (Book 1 seems to be in some parts a tabletop-report). Or did you write these parts espacially to give readers with a tabletop-background more stickyness? In which extend was the charactergeneration based on roleplay-stuff?

Or did you start "from the scratch"?

Man, that's actually a difficult question.

In truth, I never saw any of the table top reports. What I had was conversations with Rick Priestley and Lindsay about the nature of the vampires, about the Von Carstein story and such. Then I would throw in some ideas and they'd either like or dislike... Dominion suffered the most changes. Here's the secret, I can talk about it now but back then I couldn't... that last line in Retribution that says…
'My name is Skellan . . . Jon Skellan...'

…originally said…

'My name is Skellan. . . Jon Konrad Skellan . . . you can call me Konrad.'

…and it was the birth of Konrad von Carstein. I always felt he was a rather 'silly' character in the background with stuff like sueing his own mother for giving birth to him, and assumed that was down to the world's historians painting him in a bad way... so when I created Skellan I had him do a lot of things that Konrad was supposed to have done, like burn down villages and such... the day before the book was due to go to print someone in Games Development got into a twist and said 'if he's doing this then he has to sue his mother and torture cats and blah blah blah' so the entire outline for Dominion was trashed, and that one line cut from Retribution. That was SUCH a shame because it would have given an amazing burst of life to a rather two-dimensional mad vampire.

I had more plans for Felix Mann as well, I wanted him to have a more vital role in Dominion - heck I developed an entire novel just for Felix, he was such a great character, but none of that saw the light of day.

Okay, back to the real question... I was sent back to the first edition history of the vampires, and given photocopies of the vampire codex and bits like that, was told explicitly to ignore the material in Liber Necris because it was all wrong, and given a lot of space to invent stuff - but of course, that's easier said than done when you've got ten new vampire count products on the way and they're each going to contradict the other if there's no co-operation. In the end I am quite happy with the 'Vampire Wars' books - though I noticed that the German translation of Retribution has the 'lousy end'. I rewrote the final chapter when Black Library did the omnibus edition of Vampire
Wars, and that's a much more satisfactory end. The one in Retribution always bugged me.

So sorry folks...

(Das erklärt´s Andreas! ;) )

In Germany i read part 1 and 2 of the Triology (Part 3 was published a few weeks ago) You spin a storyline, which starts more than 20 years ago. How do you manage this storyweaving? Did you produce an exposé?

How do handle these part of the development?

In truth it was a nightmare!

Vlad should have had his own trilogy, Konrad the same, and Mannfred, because what you're left with is a 400 page story that is supposed to span 400 years... Initially I suggested a much more focussed story, picking the key event such as the fall of Vlad, and do Inheritance all about that, while feeding in some bits of the history...

Another idea was to kill Vlad in Dominion, having his reign bleed over into the first third of the second book and make them less 'separate' books, if that makes sense?

In terms of plotting, I did it the old fashioned way with pen and paper and lots of scribbled lines going from A to B and this became a huge spiderweb like a mind map. Then chapter by chapter I worked out the key events, what was needed, and what years the story had to be in for that to happen, then jumped... you'll notice in Retribution the dates simply stop - that's because I made a conscious choice that events needed to FEEL close together when in fact they were a hundred years apart...

The timeline also meant a lot of tough choices, because all the way along Lindsay was keen that we have a human perspective, what are the good guys thinking / doing but it's really hard to keep interest in a crew of good guys when during the course of 400 pages they have to go through about 6 generations... hence Kallad.

That was my 'stroke of genius' to allow us to have a consitent heroic point of view... without the dwarf the second and third books would have been littered with the short-lived ones and become really confusing.

I hope it worked out.

In Warhammer-Online we have some Quests, which are focused on the Witchhunter Konrad. Are you involved in these storylines? Did you know that "your Konrad" walks around in the region "Talabecland" and players get a quest to kill him in the ChaosDesert?

Is that not David Ferring's Konrad? I'll happily take credit for it, and if I were a gamer you can bet the first thing I would do is go in there and kill my own creations!

Hah!

Damn – It seems you´re right!

Vampires in Warhammer are a „rare“ Species. Do you know more about their connections to the tomb-kings in the south?

Well, I know that in the time between Dominino and Retribution Mannfred travelled down into the Lands of the Dead and retrieved that ancient tome, a living book which in my story at least had traces of the consciousness of Nagash in it. Those traces may have helped make Mannfred the nasty piece of work he was, or made him nastier, at least... but as to the Tomb Kings, sorry. One thing with Games Workshop and Black Library is that the writers don’t have all the secrets, we’re told the bits that we need to do our job but it is like one big mosaic, and we are only seeing a few tiles at once.

It was a try to reveal some of these secrets. ;)

Any plans to write a new vampire-novel in the warhammer-setting?

None. To be honest, right now I don’t have any plans to write anything in the Warhammer world. A few years back, after Curse of the Necrarch, we knocked about a very basic concept for a Lahmian novel, Vengeance of the Ninth House, which would have been something like Gangs of New
York battling it out in one of the old world cities, with various factions of vampires pitted against one another, but it wasn’t to be. My next fantasy novel will actually be for the Guild Wars MMORPG, it
doesn’t have a title, but will be about the legends of the elder dragons – there’s a little exclusive for you.

In your last Email you mentioned a new, finished book. Could you please tell more about it?

I’ve just finished Silver, a thriller featuring the Ogmios team, who are basically a group of damaged special forces guys and girls who are pitted against a terrorist plot which seems to be about Judas . . .
well, here’s the back cover copy to give you an idea: Sometimes the truth is anything but honest.

Sometimes the stories everyone knows by heart are lies.

Sometimes lies are all we have left.

Two thousand years ago, thirty silver Tyrian shekels were paid to secure the most infamous betrayal of all time. Melted down by the grandsons of Judas Iscariot, Menahem and Eleazar ben Jair, in the dark heart of the Sicarii fortress, Masada, the silver was re-forged as a dagger. When the Sicarii zealots committed mass suicide in AD73 the dagger of Iscariot and the truth of his sacrifice were lost.

Until now.

A religious cult calling itself the Disciples of Judas has risen in the Middle East. Its influence is pernicious, its reach long. In thirteen cities across Europe thirteen people martyr themselves in the
name of Judas, promising forty days and forty nights of terror. They twist the words of ancient prophecies to drive home the fear. On the last day, they promise, faith will fall. Everything you believe in will be proved wrong. Everything you hold true will fail.

Day by day the West wakes to increasingly more harrowing acts of terror. Fear cripples the capitals of Europe, who will be the next to fall? London? Rome? Berlin?

In a race against time – and prophecy – believing the terrorists intend to assassinate the Pope as part of their plan to bring down the Catholic Church, Sir Charles Wyndham’s team of combat specialists,
codename Omgios, tracks a labyrinthine course through truth, shades of truth and outright lies that takes them from the backstreets of London to the shadow of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin all the way into the heart of the Holy See itself.

Forty days and forty nights of fear.

And today is day one!

Soviel von Steven zum Thema seiner Romane und Pläne. Leider keine Details zum „großen Plan“ des Vampirwesens in der Welt von Warhammer.

Aber ich bleibe dem Thema auf der Spur. Beim aktuellen Gang in eine Buchhandlung sind mir einfach zu viele Vampir-Romane in den Regalen. ;)