Souragne - interview on Dance of the Dead

[Joël of the FoS]

Ladies and gentlemen,

We have the pleasure to open this online interview with the lovely Christie Golden, author of some of the greatest books in the Ravenloft novel line. Christie won many awards and wrote over twenty-five novels, and several short stories in the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She has over a million books in print.

Christie can be credited also for breaking the glass: she launched the Ravenloft book line in 1991 with her first novel, the highly successful Vampire of the Mists. She followed up with Dance of the Dead and The Enemy Within.

In a grand conjunction with the FoS current Souragne project, Mrs Golden agreed to make an interview on the Dance of the Dead novel, a great novel based in this swamp domain.

This thread here is devoted to this interview: post your questions and Mrs Golden will jump in once in a while to answer them.

Mrs Golden’s agent asked us not to discuss about that controversy about Anton’s new drawing with a moustache and the reaction of the Souragne people to it Please keep this discussion about the Dance of the Dead novel!

We'd like to thank again Jim Sowter, aka Strahd from the web site Worlds of D&D, to help us orguanize this cool event.

Joël

[ChristieGolden]

An early "hello," I am looking forward to talking to all of you about DANCE!

Christie Golden

www.christiegolden.com

[Joël of the FoS]

The thread is opened!

[Joël of the FoS]

Allow me to start!

When I made researches for our Souragne Gazetteer, I found the name Bouki often related to a rabbit in the créole folklore, as it is in the DoD novel.

What kind of research / knowledge did you have of (the fascinating) créole folklore when writing this book? Other similar Bouki trivia in the book?

Joël

[Nathan of the FoS]

I've always been curious as to the link betweent the Green Maiden (is that her name? Dagnabbit. The loa who instructs Anton Misroi) and the Dark Powers. Anton ends up with a surprising amount of power over his own domain (being able to isolate it in the Mists, for example) after her instruction, because she taught him "things mortals weren't meant to know." Does that mean that she's privy somehow to the inner workings of Ravenloft?

[Joël of the FoS]

*cough* Maiden of the Swamp! *cough*

[Jasper]

Ms Golden,

Before you wrote Dance of the dead (and Vampire of the mists before that) how much exposure did you have to the Ravenloft setting?
Your novels have the feel of Ravenloft down pat but I can't seem to tell if your a gamer or not.

[ChristieGolden]

Wow, some great questions, I will have to be on my toes with you guys!

First, Bouki. I am a great lover of mythology and folklore, and I have this wonderful book called, appropriately enough SOUTHERN FOLKLORE from which I drew heavily. Bouki and Lapin are rather famous mythic characters, hailing in their origins from Africa. Usually Bouki is a rather dim donkey and Lapin (French for "rabbit") is a clever rabbit. This is likely also where the slave stories of Brer Rabbit came from. Rabbit has always been a "trickster" character, and I wanted to use them in the storyline. I made them both rabbits to keep things simpler

Also from this wonderful book I learned about the will-o-wisps, or "willens," and that some of them were not necessarily evil beings.

Unfortunately, this is the book where you'll start to see some of the clashes I had with "upper ups" who kept insisting that Ravenloft be "darker" than I originally wanted to paint it. I think it no coincidence that VAMPIRE, which has the most hope in it, is my most popular Ravenloft book and ENEMY, which is the darkest and most depressing, is the least popular. Because of this, I was allowed very few "good" characters; hence the fact that my bunny loahs are flesh eaters.

[ChristieGolden]

Ah, the Maiden of the Swamp. What I was trying to do with her is illustrate the incredible power of Nature (and your "green maiden" guess isn't far off, she does have a lot in common with the mythic Green Man!). The contrast between "fruit and flower" magic versus "bone and blood" is natural versus unnatural. Perhaps in Ravenloft it's hard to find anything really "good," but it is such a lush place, even with all the decay, that nature/growth really is very powerful there. Much more so than in, say, a desert climate or an arctic realm. Things are always dying but things are always being reborn, perhaps even nourished by rot. That's not "good", that's simply nature and the balance. So a "nature goddess" might be able to root better in the dark domans (sorry, bad pun!) than say a goddess of "light".

[ChristieGolden]

Ravenloft had only just come out--they sent me the First edition as research for both of these books. I'm not sure when the second edition came out. I have never actually played it, although I have done lots of tabletop RP in my day (and currently do lots of RP on the MMORPG World of Warcraft). What I tried to do with each book was delve into the origin behind the land--in this case, voodoo, Southern folklore, New Orleans culture. I even made a trip on a riverboat to NO for research, and it was invaluable.

Fortunately also, this world wasn't really fleshed out very much by the time I got my hot little hands on it. So I was able to create a lot of it myself. Misroi, for example, was only termed the "zombie lord"; I originally did him as a zombie himself, but my editor, Jim Lowder and I talked about it and I recast him as an extremely handsome Gothic anti-hero. Think Timothy Dalton in his prime. Much nicer than a zombie--and evil doesn't have to be phyiscally rotting to be rotten.

Keep 'em coming!

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

One question I have, which could be applied to Vampire of the Mists and The Enemy Within (one of my favourite Ravenloft novels, I admit), is how much information on what you have to write are you given for a RPG novel?

Are you given a chapter breakdown or a synopsis you have to work from or are you given a loose outline and free reign?

I've always thought the novels of Ravenloft can be overlooked when it comes to the setting, so how does it feel when you've given the setting two great characters? (I'm referring to Jander Sunstar and the take on Anton Misroi you have in Dance. It's my opinion that if it wasn't for the way he was depicted in Dance that he wouldn't be as interesting as he is today.)

[ChristieGolden]

That's a very good question, and it varies from project to project.

For VAMPIRE, I actually answered an audition. They had the title and the basic idea they wanted to see, which was that Ravenloft was new and that an older vampire from the Forgotten Realms comes to Raveloft and teaches Strahd in the ways of vampirism. I submitted an outline and the first chapter, the work was read "blind" (without anyone knowing who the author was when evaluating the work) and suddenly at 27 I was launching the Ravenloft line.

When I created Jander, I tried to think of the icons of both horror and fantasy--of course he had to be a vampire, but what is more "fantasy" than an elf? Ta-da--the world's first elven vampire. I play WarCraft and on my server there are a lot of elven vampires, I keep wanting to apologize and say "Sorry, my bad!"

So pretty much everything other than Strahd's history and the fact that Jander was an older vampire was my creation. I remain very, very fond of Jander, and you all might like to know, if you don't already, that VAMPIRE is going to be rereleased in September as a trade paperback, with Jander on the cover!

I pitched everything for DANCE, I liked Souragne and Richemulot the best; I understand there was a family of riverboating werewolves that got killed off. Heh, that would have been fun to play with as well.

I am very glad I went with the handsome Misroi, it was much fun to write someone so charming and yet so thoroughly despicable. His mansion was a blast to create as well; I took thigns I had seen in old New Orleans homes and made them creepy. Like the skeletal hands that held back the drapes--those were modeled on brass children's hands that did the same thing. And the woman trapped in the bone piece who was writing? Based on an actual Victorian piece, the candlelight made the image carved into the ivory flicker.

[Lucius]

Did you ever imagined the possibility of a sequence for Dance of the Dead? In case of a positive answer did you put some thought into this idea?

Thanks.

[ChristieGolden]

No, I never really thought of a sequel, nor did TSR at that time seem very "into" doing more than one book on a subject or a character. I did hope that folks might incorporate Larissa and her showboat into their campaigns. I kind of sent her off with that being "open."

[cure]

Your work on watery Souragne and on a riverboat plying the watery arteries of the Core and beyond stoked my interest in the rivers of Ravenloft. In so far as you mention Richemulot with all its (water loving wererat infested) cities dominating the Musarde and the idea of werewolf riverboaters (likely with loyalties to Verbrek), did you ever ponder (perhaps in a flight of fancy) a novel spanning the Musarde River? And what elements gothic or fantastic might you suggest for fleshing out this key, yet underdevelopped, artery of the western Core? For example, did you conceive of your riverboat as being completely unique, or one of many albeit far more magical, and did you conceive of its captain being a loner on the waters, or part of a community plying them? Any background on your conception of river trade and commerce in Ravenloft would be greatly appreciated.