At about the same time, I was reading Mikhail Gorbachev’s autobiography and thinking about the challenges to a fundamentally decent man trapped in an utterly corrupt society. For Gorbachev, that society was the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t long

Well, I didn’t then; I really hadn’t looked back after we stopped doing TW. But by the next morning I had mental images of a man trying to study magic in a raucous bar and so I called the editor back and asked him to send me the background material.

One day, sev eral years after Bob Asprin and I had put Thieves’ World® into “freeze dry mode,” I got a call from an editor at TSR -- then the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons®. It seemed they’d put together a new gaming milieu and were looking for authors to write stories set in it. I was reluctant at first, then the editor asked if I didn’t have a few unpublished/unwritten TW stories rattling around in my creative compost heap, because the DarkSun® milieu was the grittiest, down-and-dirtiest world TSR yet..