In 2019, that changes. Here’s what I’ve got coming:

Violet Dawn

The Last People fled the legendary “world beyond” long ago; now, a young guardian leaves the only home he knows and discovers the true nature of an alien and wondrous land...

This one’s been in the works for ages. Launched in 2018, Violet Dawn is a reader-supported webcomic updating Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays telling an epic fantasy story in the realm of Avadnu. This is weird fantasy with a character-driven focus–there are swords and bizarre creatures but what matters most is the souls and scars of the beings who inhabit their strange, magical world.

If you’re feeling very generous, call it The Dark Crystal by way of Michael Moorcock, or the three-way child of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and Ursula LeGuin. Look to role-playing games like Skyrealms of Jorune and Empire of the Petal Throne for influence, along with the comic book works of Moebius.

I’m enormously proud of Violet Dawn, and penciller Louis Sollune has done brilliant work bringing Avadnu and its inhabitants to life. Louis has been a fantastic creative partner throughout, and I can’t imagine what the comic would be without him. Editor and letterer Jeffrey Visgaitis has been a dear friend and colleague for years, and Violet Dawn is his vision more than anyone’s. Gaston Zubeldia and Frank Walls can never receive too much credit as our fantastic colorists, and Laure Henri-Garand has, with thought and artistry and diligence, translated the whole thing into French.

Violet Dawn is a project close to my heart–my history with the setting goes back decades, to when I was a freelancer hired to write for a series of Violet Dawn role-playing game books. The setting’s developed quite a lot since then, but it retains an element of wild imagination that appeals to me.

Go give it a read–after all, it’s completely free. And if you enjoy it, I urge you to click on the Support link and find a way to send us a little money to keep the comic going. We can’t do it without you, and we really want to keep going.

Violet Dawn is available to read now at violetdawn.com.

Anthem (the game) and Anthem (the comic)

On a world left unfinished by the gods, a shadowy faction threatens all of humankind. The only thing that stands between these villains and the ancient technology they covet are the Freelancers.

BioWare’s latest video game is Anthem, a multiplayer action RPG in which the player characters don suits of “Javelin” power armor to protect outposts of civilization on a mysterious world.

I spent a number of months consulting with the Anthem writing team, offering editorial feedback as well as designing and writing portions of an early iteration of the storyline. Ultimately, on a project as vast and long-running as Anthem, my contribution was a small one. Nonetheless, I’m proud to have had the chance to work with the team and hope I managed to kindle a few creative sparks here and there.

When Kismet’s family is ambushed while traveling between settlements, the young boy is rescued by one of the exosuit-clad warriors known as Freelancers. Now an orphan, it’s up to him and his adoptive sister, Jani, to build a future for themselves–and humanity–on a planet filled with danger.

When it comes to the Anthem tie-in comic (a 3-issue miniseries from Dark Horse Comics), my contributions are more immediately visible. The comic was plotted by Anthem developer Mac Walters; I worked off his story outline to create a detailed comic script for artist Eduardo Francisco and colorist Michael Atiyeh, similar to my work as scripter on the Dragon Age comics in collaboration with David Gaider.

While the comic story feeds directly into the game’s narrative (it’s a prequel, introducing characters and events seen in the game proper), it’s intended to be a relationship-driven adventure tale exploring “ordinary” life in the world of Anthem in a way that the video game can’t. My hope is that we created something fans will enjoy.

Anthem is out now for PC, Xbox, and Playstation 4. The Anthem comic book releases monthly (for three months) starting in February.

Alphabet Squadron, Book 1

On the verge of victory in a brutal war, five New Republic pilots transform from hunted to hunters in this epic STAR WARS adventure. Set after Return of the Jedi, Alphabet Squadron follows a unique team, each flying a different class of starfighter as they struggle to end their war once and for all.

It’s been a little while since my last major Star Wars project–if you don’t count my short story in From a Certain Point of View, you’d need to go back to the Rogue One novelization in 2016. But every time I wonder if I’m done with the Star Wars galaxy, something new comes along. It’s an honor and a privilege every time.

In this case, the “something new” isn’t just one book but a trilogy of novels chronicling the rise (and fall?) of the titular Alphabet Squadron of starfighter pilots. Book 1 is scheduled for release in June of this year, and while I can’t yet add a lot beyond the description below I hope folks who enjoyed my previous Star Wars novels will find something appealing here, as well. Alphabet Squadron isn’t exactly the same as tone and style as Battlefront: Twilight Company, but it’s fair to say it exists in the same tonal world.

Here’s the remainder of the description from the official website:

The Emperor is dead. His final weapon has been destroyed. The Imperial Army is in disarray. In the aftermath, Yrica Quell is just one of thousands of defectors from her former cause living in a deserters’ shantytown—until she is selected to join Alphabet Squadron.

Cobbled together from an eclectic assortment of pilots and starfighters, the five members of Alphabet are tasked by New Republic general Hera Syndulla herself. Like Yrica, each is a talented pilot struggling to find their place in a changing galaxy. Their mission: to track down and destroy the mysterious Shadow Wing, a lethal force of TIE fighters exacting bloody, reckless vengeance in the twilight of their reign.

The newly formed unit embodies the heart and soul of the Rebellion: ragtag, resourceful, scrappy, and emboldened by their most audacious victory in decades. But going from underdog rebels to celebrated heroes isn’t as easy as it seems, and their inner demons threaten them as much as their enemies among the stars. The wayward warriors of Alphabet Squad will have to learn to fly together if they want to protect the new era of peace they’ve fought so hard to achieve.

But there’s more! The Alphabet Squadron trilogy also has a sister series: Marvel’s TIE Fighter comic books, written by Jody Houser, tell the story of Shadow Wing from an Imperial perspective. Both the novels and the comics stand alone perfectly well, but add up to a greater whole. Jody and I swapped many late-night e-mails making sure we were coordinating, and I expect the final works will complement one another nicely.

Alphabet Squadron, Book 1, releases in June 2019. Issue 1 of Jody Houser’s TIE Fighter releases in April.

Storyscape and Eternal City

A single choice can change everything. Enter Storyscape, where world-class writers bring you tales of romance, intrigue, and adventure and every decision you make transforms your story. Discover love aboard James Cameron’s Titanic or confront the unknown with the X-Files. Find romance in a new city or explore a magical realm as a slave-turned-revolutionary leader. New shows and seasons drop often, so there’s always something exciting to play.

Last but certainly not least: In 2017, I joined a new company called Fogbank Entertainment as Studio Writing Director. Fogbank began as part of 21st Century Fox’s FoxNext interactive unit, and since the start we’ve been quietly working on Storyscape: a free-to-play branching narrative story platform for Android and iOS. Or, in less jargon-y terms, we’ve built an app packed with a whole bunch of interactive stories in the tradition of a BioWare or Telltale game.

This feels very much like the next stage of the branching work I’ve been doing for over a decade–a chance to apply the tools I’ve developed in branching narrative to a more “pure” story-focused experience, stretching into a variety of genres (more “mainstream” content–romance, drama, comedy–along with a mix of the usual science-fiction and fantasy work). I’ve had the privilege to build a team of tremendously talented writers and edit them on projects I could never, ever write myself. I feel like the editor-in-chief of an ambitious publishing house bringing unique voices to the world and pushing the boundaries of the medium.

Storyscape is already live in Canada with a limited slate of shows and a small selection of episodes from Meg Jayanth’s Titanic (based on the James Cameron film), Laura Jacqmin’s Life 2.0 (an original romantic comedy), and Eternal City (more on that below). It’s very much early days, and we’ve already announced Sean Kelley McKeever’s The X-Files (based on the classic paranormal investigation franchise), Drew Karpyshyn’s Edge of Extinction (a science-fiction survival story), and Meghan Thornton’s Ageless (vampiric horror) as “coming soon.” That’s just for starters.

That said, while my most important role on Storyscape has been an editorial one, I’ve also contributed as a writer…

In an ancient metropolis ruled by power-hungry factions, magic, and secrets, a single life will change everything. The City once provided for its citizens richly, but corruption lives at the heart of the Garden and the people are growing desperate as food grows scarce. From child slave to powerful elder, you will live an entire lifetime and your choices will shape or destroy this world.

Eternal City is my own Storyscape show–a fantasy epic drawing inspiration from the likes of Gormenghast and Twin Peaks. This is a very different flavor of fantasy from Violet Dawn–while Violet Dawn uses bizarre visuals and action sequences to intimately chart the course of one soul, Eternal City is about the impact of interpersonal relationships over time on a volatile world.

I’m being intentionally vague (as I trust my marketing department), but I think the project is every bit what a person would expect based on my past work. For better or worse, Eternal City is the closest I’ve come to publishing an original fantasy novel, more intricately branched than my work on Star Wars: The Old Republic, massive in scope, and with a flavor and identity all its own.

Storyscape is available in Canada now on iOS and Android. A worldwide release date has not yet been announced.

The good news is, I’ve been keeping busy–I’ve worked on several upcoming games since that last post, and as of today released my second novel: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It’s the prose adaptation of the film, chock full of new and expanded scenes.

At some point I’ll probably write a bit about the process of adapting a film script into prose–it was a fascinating challenge, turning a fast-moving spectacle into a novel-length interior piece, and examining how to play to the strengths of any given medium is always an interest of mine. For the moment, though, this announcement will have to suffice. (I’ll likely update the Bibliography entry once some reviews come in.)

If you want to nag me in person about game writing or anything else, however, I’ll be attending Comicpalooza in Houston June 17th and 18th. (The convention is Friday through Sunday, but I’m departing Sunday morning.) I’ll be participating in a number of panels, as follows (full details, including locations and other panelists, at the official schedule):

Friday, June 17th

8:00pm: Monster Design 101. No roleplaying game is complete without some monsters. Find out what makes a truly effective monstrosity, and work with our panelists to brainstorm ideas for a cool original RPG monster.

Saturday, June 18th

12:00pm: Player Agency and Designer Authorship. In video games, especially when you’ve got a designer-authored experience rather than a purely emergent or procedural one, you’ve got to give the player a reasonable sense of agency over their experience and the feeling that the bad things that happen to them are fair and consistent–no one likes shooting through a room full of baddies only to be disarmed by one guy with a pistol in a cutscene, for instance.

2:00pm: What Makes a Good Villain? This panel takes a look at the characteristics of a good villain for your RPG campaign. Whether a tragic figure or a relentless force of nature, a memorable and compelling villain can add depth and vitality to any game. Come find out some tricks you can use to enhance your bad guys!

6:00pm: Cutscenes Within Video Games. Lots of people have strong feelings about them! What makes a cutscene good or bad? How can they be used well?

The rest of the time I’ll very likely be wandering around the con, so feel free to say “hi.” I’ll almost certainly show up at at least one of the roller derby exhibition bouts going on! If you can’t catch me at a panel but still want to chat, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter during the day and see if I’m in shouting distance.

On an unrelated note, the paperback edition of my novel Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company will be out June 28th. It’s the same as ever, but the paperback includes Janine K. Spendlove‘s short story “Inbrief” (previously published in Star Wars Magazine insider, starring Twilight Company’s resident bounty hunter Brand) as well. Bonus!

I won’t reiterate my pitch for the book here, but there’s more on the Bibliography page as well as a lengthy excerpt, synopsis, and blurbs over at the official Penguin Random House site.

Meanwhile, I’ll be attending New York Comic Con this week! I’ll primarily be doing promotion for my novel Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company, which comes out November 3rd, but I’m happy to chat about writing, games, past projects, roller derby, or whatever else. Come by and say “hello!”

My schedule is as follows, though (of course) subject to change:

Friday, October 9th

11:00am – 12:00pm: Star Wars: A Galaxy of Fandom panel (Room 1A24)

2:00pm: Signing at Del Rey booth (#2205); free giveaway of Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company posters

Saturday, October 10th

11:00am: Signing at Del Rey booth (#2205); free giveaway of Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company posters

Sunday, October 11th

12:00pm – 1:00pm: Lucasfilm Presents: Star Wars: A Galactic Reader’s Theatre panel (Room 1A21)

2:00pm: Signing at Del Rey booth (#2205); free giveaway of Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company posters

Other Information

I may pop in briefly to the Star Wars: The Old Republic community event (and cosplay contest!) to say hello to old friends and colleagues, but I won’t be there in any official capacity or representing BioWare. Nonetheless, feel free to say “hi” if you spot me.

In addition to the poster giveaways, the Del Rey team will be giving away nifty Twilight Company patches to anyone who swings by the booth and shows a pre-order confirmation for the book (just show an e-mail confirmation on your phone). You can get the patches at any time, not just during the signings.

I’ll sign anything I’ve worked on–if you want to bring one of the Dragon Age comics or whatever else, feel free.

Twilight Company Excerpt

Finally, there’s now a 70-page preview of Twilight Company up at the official site. If you’re interested but not completely sold or just want an early peek, go take a look.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing for Star Wars projects recently. Or maybe I should say “a lot of Star Wars projects I’ve written for have been announced recently”–some of these have been in the pipeline longer than others. For those interested, let’s run down the list!

As previously mentioned, my novel Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company is scheduled to come out in November. It’s connected to the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront video game, but it’s an original story and not a novelization. I’m told an excerpt may appear at the back of the upcoming novel Star Wars: Dark Disciple, though I haven’t seen it myself.

Star Wars: Uprising is a new free-to-play mobile action RPG from Kabam scheduled to be released sometime this fall. I helped develop the overall story with the project lead, Daniel Erickson (who I previously worked with on Star Wars: The Old Republic) and wrote the game’s script. Uprising takes place shortly after Return of the Jedi, but the trailer sets up the premise best:

Speaking of Star Wars: The Old Republic, its next expansion–entitled Knights of the Fallen Empire–arrives October 27th, bringing massive story changes to the setting. The first nine chapters of episodic story content will be released all at once, but I’m the writer for chapter ten, “Anarchy in Paradise” and one later chapter that will appear in 2016. While the larger storyline is in the capable hands of the BioWare Austin writing team, I’m grateful to BioWare for inviting me to play in a small section of the SWTOR sandbox once again.

For anyone interested in hearing me talk about my past Star Wars work and the art of writing in the franchise, I was interviewed for the ForceCast podcast a few weeks back by Justin Bolger. I very much enjoyed the experience and thought some interesting lines of discussion came up.

And that’s it! That’s all the Star Wars projects I’m involved with this fall and winter. All the secrets have been revealed.

(All those secrets, anyway.)

One thing I can announce, however, is my first novel: Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company was unveiled at the Star Wars Celebration convention and is scheduled for release by Del Rey in November 2015.

Battlefront game art from starwars.ea.com; no cover yet available for the book

The book is, of course, part of the Star Wars franchise. While it’s connected to the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront video game, it’s an original story and not a novelization–it’ll hopefully satisfy both rabid Battlefront fans and non-gamers alike. (There’s a long tradition of Star Wars novels that link to video games without retelling their stories; it’s not a bad tradition to be a part of.)

I can’t reveal many other details at this point. As mentioned at Celebration, the book focuses on front line soldiers in the Rebel Alliance, but it’s too early to talk specifics about characters and plot and theme. Nonetheless, folks who’ve enjoyed my approach to the Star Wars universe before should, I think, enjoy Twilight Company. If there’s interest, I may do a post on specific literary antecedents and military science fiction generally down the line.

Of course, just because a project is announced doesn’t mean life’s less busy for me, so it’s back to the grindstone for now. Expect a trickle of additional announcements as time goes on. I’ve also got a number of new game writing articles outlined, ready to be written, polished, and posted (likely both here and over at Gamasutra); suggestions for topics for future game writing articles, however, are always welcome.

• My short story “One Thousand Levels Down” was published in Star Wars Insider 151, available on newsstands and in electronic format.
• BioWare announced Shadow Realms, a multiplayer action RPG. As I was Lead Writer in the very early days of the project, I’m both excited to see it reach the public eye and interested to see how it’s changed and evolved since my departure.
• Marvel Comics announced that my Star Wars: Purge – The Tyrant’s Fist comics will be among the comics reprinted in STAR WARS LEGENDS EPIC COLLECTION: THE EMPIRE VOL. 1.
• I continue to take on new video game projects (and continue hammering away at old favorites) which I can’t yet talk about. Sorry. I’m hoping to mention some soon.
• Lastly, I’ve become enamored of the CRPG Addict blog, in which one dedicated player is working his way through virtually every computer role-playing game ever published. It’s a fascinating history of the genre.

Hoping to get back to a semi-regular schedule upon my return. In the meantime, a few bits and pieces:

I’ll be attending New York Comic Con from October 10th through 13th. Not currently planning any signings or events, but feel free to say “hi” if you see me on the show floor or ping me via e-mail or Twitter if you’d like to meet up.

Game Update 2.4, “The Dread War” is coming out soon for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Quite a lot of the writing for the planet Oricon is my work–my first (though not last) work for BioWare as a freelancer instead of as an in-house employee. It’s short and focused (and leads into the update’s Operations), but I think fans of story-based content will enjoy it.

My third Dragon Age comic book miniseries, Dragon Age: Until We Sleep is out in a lovely hardcover edition. The trilogy is now complete and bookshelf-appropriate! My latest Star Wars comics (the two-issue miniseries Star Wars: Purge – The Tyrant’s Fist) have also been collected in Star Wars: Purge–a trade paperback that also includes stories by John Ostrander and Haden Blackman.

That’s it for now. Once again, forgive my sporadic posts, and I’ll try to get some new content up after NYCC!

Suicide Squad (John Ostrander and Kim Yale)

Cover images are courtesy of the Grand Comics Database, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

I expect many readers are familiar with John Ostrander from his work on Star Wars comic books such as Legacy, Dawn of the Jedi, and Agent of the Empire (to name just a few–and we’ll get back to two of those shortly). But while I’d never downplay the significance of his Star Wars work, I still think of him as the man behind The Specter (what can only be described as a theological horror superhero comic), GrimJack (multiversal noir) and Suicide Squad.

Suicide Squad ran for 66 issues (plus annuals and specials) in the late eighties and early nineties. Set in the DC Comics superhero universe, the comic tells the story of a secret department within the US intelligence community that uses imprisoned supervillains for black ops missions. In return for furthering American interests in Colombia, the USSR and occasional alternate dimensions, prisoners receive reduced sentences. The team is overseen by a small group of support personnel and less-than-squeaky-clean superheroes, along with Amanda Waller–“the Wall”–the non-superpowered, middle-aged, overweight woman who was tougher than the rest of the team combined and who spent half her time fighting bureaucrats and congressional investigations.

Suicide Squad remains the single best work of superpowered espionage I’ve encountered. Ostrander–and starting around issue twenty, his co-writer (and wife) Kim Yale–built a morally gray world where psychiatrists and prison wardens worked alongside chronically depressed commanders and superhuman sociopaths. While the squad’s mission objectives were usually respectable (rescuing political dissidents or stopping superpowered terrorists), the squad itself was a corrosive environment. Squad members died or dropped out on a regular basis, as many due to betrayals, psychological problems, and ethical qualms as enemy fire.

While the relationship between non-powered individuals and superhumans was never a focus of Suicide Squad, the book painted a picture of a world where gods roamed the Earth but someone still needed to do the dirty work. The Imperial Agent influence should be obvious.

Alas, the series is largely unavailable nowadays–approximately the first third of the series is available in collected editions and in digital format on Comixology, but I find the run from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties to be the most consistent (it takes a while before Ostrander fully finds his footing, around the same time Yale is credited). Nonetheless, even the early issues are worth seeking out, and–if you’re not sold–many other bloggers have written extensively on the series as well (some spoilers in the previous links).

Now, as for Ostrander’s Star Wars work… both Legacy and Agent of the Empire have Imperial spies among their cast. While these books both began after SWTOR development was in progress, I find it personally pleasing to see Ostrander tapping into some of his old Suicide Squad tricks….

The Lensmen Series (E. E. Smith)

Covers courtesy OpenLibrary.org

E. E. “Doc” Smith is commonly regarded as the father of space opera as a genre, and his Lensmen series–mostly published in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, later collected in six novels–is the grandest of his space operas. It’s fair to say that without Lensmen, there would be no Star Wars–or at least Star Wars as we know it would be unrecognizable. It’s the story of a galactic civilization policed by a force of highly trained, morally upright telepathic guardians drawn from hundreds of different alien races (many of which have utterly inhuman thought processes, but nonetheless share a common virtue) and battling an evil empire wielding an increasingly mad series of superweapons. (The Death Star would fit somewhere in the midrange of Lensmen weaponry.)

In short, it’s a must-read for anyone writing Star Wars. It may be a greater influence on space opera than Lord of the Rings is on epic fantasy, which should say something.

But while I could write thousands of words on the influence (and general wonderfulness) of Lensmen, this article is supposed to be about Imperial Agent-inspiring science-fiction espionage, not Star Wars or space opera generally. Espionage is a relatively small but important part of the Lensmen stories–protagonist Kimball Kinnison frequently goes undercover to get close enough to the enemy for mind-reading, and while his psychic powers make these infiltrations unconventional, they’re no less delightful for it.

Military intelligence-gathering and its associated gadgets also play an important role in the Lensmen novels, and it’s fascinating to see what concepts would eventually be reflected in the real world (stealth vehicles rendered radar-invisible and painted black to avoid visual detection) and which ones wouldn’t (x-ray telescopes).

Not pure espionage by any means, but well worth tracking down for those with any interest in the history of space opera. I recommend starting with the third novel, Galactic Patrol, and skipping over any prologue or summary of the preceding books–Triplanetary and First Lensmen, while entertaining, were written after the rest of the series, and as prequels end up spoiling some later plot twists.

Modern readers may resist E. E. Smith’s admittedly rather bombastic style of prose, but his mastery of it is complete–he puts together some of the most readable and engaging purple prose imaginable. One of my favorite moments in the series is a section where Smith parodies his own work–Kinnison, using a cover identity as a science-fiction writer to keep a low profile, produces some truly terrible writing:

Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the afterbulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…

Mercifully, that’s the only passage we see of Kinnison’s novel. But it’s always nice when authors have a sense of humor about their own excesses.

Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)

Cover courtesy OpenLibrary.org

From the origins of space opera to its modern incarnation: Iain M. Banks is the author of numerous novels set in the universe of “the Culture.” The Culture novels posit a galaxy with many of the familiar space opera tropes–hundreds of alien races, centuries-long wars, massive starships, etc.–but updates it with a layer of nanotechnology, transhumanist thought, and progressive politics (though whether one considers the Culture a utopia or dystopia is a matter of taste).

Use of Weapons is one of several Culture novels dealing heavily with “Special Circumstances”–essentially the Culture’s espionage agency. Special Circumstances agents frequently infiltrate alien societies in order to manipulate them to the Culture’s ends. Such agents often commit horrible crimes and suffer terrible psychological tolls in order to succeed at their missions–and those missions can be gruesome in themselves, if the Culture determines that an enemy civilization or race is essentially irredeemable.

Use of Weapons in particular and the Culture novels as a whole are an excellent example of space opera tropes used in the service of ground-level, human stories. In much of the series, whether planets or galaxies are at stake is largely irrelevant–what matters are the moral and psychological costs involved. (The incomprehensibility of galactic-level stakes for human minds, in fact, is a point that’s never directly addressed to my recollection, but certainly plays a role in characters’ decision-making processes.) For readers interested in dark science-fiction espionage stories set against the backdrop of a wondrous high-tech universe, Use of Weapons should serve nicely.

The Prisoner

Cover of Patrick McGoohan: Danger Man or Prisoner? courtesy OpenLibrary.org

I’ll happily argue that The Prisoner (starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan) is one of the great television shows of all time. It’s certainly some of the best science-fiction ever done in the medium. The Prisoner ran for seventeen episodes beginning in 1967 and centers around a British spy who, after resigning from his job, is captured and imprisoned in the mysterious “Village”–an apparently “idyllic” isolated community. The Village is occupied by other former spies and persons with sensitive information, and the people who run the Village (whose allegiance is unclear) use every possible means to dehumanize and break their captives. Villagers are referred to by number, not name–we only know our protagonist as “Number Six.” The leader of the village frequently and inexplicably changes, but is always “Number Two.” No one knows the identity of Number One.

Most episodes of The Prisoner deal with the wardens attempting some new way of breaking Number Six (using methods ranging from trickery to psychotropic drugs) and encouraging him to conform to Village life; or, alternately, Number Six’s latest escape attempt. Sometimes both. Themes of control and rebellion are ever-present, and virtue and conscience are the province of individuals, never organizations.

The Prisoner’s sense of humor is worth noting as well. Sly and sardonic, some of the most entertaining exchanges are between McGoohan’s Number Six and Leo McKern’s Number Two:

For its overall themes and its bizarre assortment of hallucinogenic technologies, The Prisoner easily wins a place on this list. It’s available, in full, on Crackle.com and on Crackle’s YouTube channel (though curiously, some episodes appear to be mislabeled in the latter). I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Aeon Flux

Take the mind games of The Prisoner and put them to use in the service of interpersonal, rather than political themes, then filter the result through a violent, sexy science-fiction world that wouldn’t be out of place in a 2000 AD comic book. Aeon Flux was televised first as a series of animated shorts, then as full-length episodes on MTV during the early 1990s. (Ignore the later live-action film version.)

The eponymous heroine is an amoral anarchist (of sorts) working against (usually) an oppressive regime. While the show’s conceptual depth is considerable, the weird aesthetics and technology are well worth attention as well–Aeon is cloned and killed, meets angelic beings, and keeps insect eggs in her boots in case of emergency. Creator Peter Chung develops a bizarre, fascinating, and horrifying world with a unique science-fiction flavor.

Much of Aeon Flux is available at MTV’s Liquid Television site, and while certainly not to everyone’s taste, it’s worth a look. If episode descriptions and title cards such as “Trevor attempts to shoot a ray that will end human evolution” and “Aeon Flux and the Monican resistance have captured the Demiurge, a powerful god-like being, and prepare to send it into space to rid the Earth of its influence” don’t at least intrigue you (and if you’re willing to give the show a chance to prove that Aeon’s outfit isn’t entirely gratuitous), give a few episodes a try. In any order, really–it doesn’t actually matter.

That’s not actually true, of course. There were other writers who were interested and willing to take on the task. But as it happened, they were more interested in other classes while I was most interested in the odd duck of the lot–the one class that didn’t correspond in a neat, one-for-one fashion with a classic Star Wars archetype.

The talented Fanny Holmberg created this fantastic poster based on the Imperial agent story. She was kind enough to let me reproduce it here. Full-size version available through the link.

Which isn’t to say that the Imperial agent doesn’t fulfill a role in the Star Wars setting. The agent is the Imperial everyman, representing every background officer and ordinary citizen who supports his or her tyrannical nation. The agent is the person hoping he or she won’t be choked to death by Darth Vader for someone else’s mistake. Of course, “average citizen” or even “fleet officer” wouldn’t make a very playable class for a game like SWTOR; therefore, the Imperial agent serves as a combination of this concept with the rich (albeit background) espionage plotlines of Star Wars.

I won’t belabor this particular point, as I discussed it at length on the SWTOR website. Alas, the original article has been lost to redesigns, but is available via the Wayback Machine here–I encourage folks interested in how the agent relates to the larger Star Wars universe to take a look.

In any event, I wanted the agent for myself largely because of that lack of an obvious Star Wars predecessor archetype. It meant the class would appeal to fewer players, perhaps–but it also meant I had a freer hand in developing what the class meant. The Jedi Knight had to fight Sith and the Sith classes had to come into conflict with their masters–players were coming to the game looking for a recognizably Star Wars experience, and they’d be rightfully disappointed if at least some of their expectations weren’t met.

But with the agent, no one knew what to expect. Which meant we had plenty of opportunities… and plenty of rope to hang ourselves with.

(And I say “we” because, in the end, everything that went into SWTOR was a collaborative effort. In particular, much credit should go to Daniel Erickson–as Lead Writer from the start, he reviewed every plot summary and every line of dialogue. And if something wasn’t working, it didn’t make it past him.)

So we had our two halves, broadly defined by Star Wars without being all-encompassing. The Imperial half was, as mentioned, the Imperial everyman–with shades of Grand Moff Tarkin, the one non-Sith capable of “holding Vader’s leash” and an equal among the mightiest of the mighty. The espionage half was more ambiguous–we knew what spies in Star Wars did (steal superweapon plans, disguise themselves, snitch to stormtroopers), but not so much who they were.

The agent started out with a heavily James Bond flavor. Which makes sense, of course–Bond is the pop culture spy, and draws from the same over-the-top, pulp style of drama that Star Wars itself draws from. But Bond’s generally upbeat tone didn’t seem entirely right for a character doing dirty deeds for a morally abhorrent government. In the real world, international espionage tends toward moral ambiguity even for the most benevolent nation–portraying the Empire’s covert operations as a romp felt almost ghoulish.

We kept the agent cool, seductive, and laden with tech gimmicks–some of the spy traits most associated with Bond. We also took pages from more serious, “gritty” modern espionage works as well–24, the Jason Bourne films, Spooks, La Femme Nikita, etc. We looked to the real world Nazi SS and (perhaps even more so) the Soviet KGB.

(Fans of the Star Wars Expanded Universe will rightly point out that there have been a number of fleshed-out spies in Star Wars books and comics, too. This is true–and I’ll touch on those created by John Ostrander in my next post–but none, no matter how well-written they were, have penetrated the pop culture mainstream. Nor, I confess, am I as deeply familiar with the EU as some of my former colleagues–so I’m sure certain sources were left unplundered.)

I’m a strong believer in psychological realism–characters may perform unbelievable feats in mad circumstances, but they ought to react to those feats and the pain they endure in a relatable way. Which meant I wanted stories for the Imperial agent that took a toll; even in the best of cases, it seemed wrong that someone could work inside the guts of an evil empire and never be worn down or scarred. Living a life of lies, disguises, and treachery–for any cause, no matter how just–ought to change a person, and I wanted to to focus on that. An entirely light side agent would be possible, as would an entirely dark side one, but I wanted the story to challenge players who stayed true to ideals over pragmatism.

A fan put this trailer together during the game’s beta. I thought this seemed like a good excuse to post it.

But back to inspirations. The individual chapter storylines were designed to gently emulate different subgenres of spy fiction. Chapter one was the modern-day, gritty anti-terrorism story–24 or Bourne. Chapter two was a split between a Bond-style romp–big, flashy villains and mad science–wrapped in a psychological envelope in the style of The Prisoner and The Manchurian Candidate. Chapter three was the global conspiracy storyline–the sort seen in video games like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid. (That’s not to say the chapters were directly based on these particular works–rather, they’re examples of the larger subgenres the chapters fit into.)

Still, not every source we drew from for the Imperial agent was about modern day, “realistic” espionage. In my next post, I’ll run down some of the science-fiction spy fiction I took particular inspiration from.