You authored the stellar Sea of Thieves novel “Athena’s Fortune”, and also had a hand in the Tall Tales- Shores of Gold, but could you give more background for our audience on your history with Rare and your role in Sea of Thieves’ world building and story telling?

My life with Rare began back in 2002 when the company did something I don’t think it had ever done before — it advertised, externally, for new designers to join the company rather than promoting from within. I was a huge Rare fan by that point, helping out on fansites, writing regularly into Scribes, creating Mr. Pants fan-games, and I’d been making a few tentative steps towards games industry jobs, although the entire profession was clouded in mystery back then. With a lot of trepidation I rattled off a CV and sent it through. As you can imagine, Rare was absolutely swamped with applications and it was months later when I got home to find a letter on my doormat with that blue-and-gold badge on it. I hadn’t been accepted for a design position but they had offered me an interview for the QA department, and even though I had absolutely no idea what the job entailed I knew I had to go for it. Before long I was sequestered in a tiny room above a local pub and risking my life and dodging speeding trucks while walking to Manor Park every morning. While working as a tester I tended to spot a lot of typos or outdated text and would often offer replacement suggestions for lines that didn’t seem to fit within the story, which led to me doing a lot of work on the script for Kameo’s Xbox version and ultimately joining the team itself, gradually picking up more design responsibilities. When the decision was made to release Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero on Xbox 360 instead, it was felt that Kameo needed full voice work to feel like a “next-gen” title, and that professional actors should be used rather than roping in Rare staffers as had always been the case before. That led to my first experience preparing scripts and working with actors and directors. Although I dabbled in pretty much every aspect of game design after that, words and story (and the localisation thereof) pretty much became the thing I’d always curate on any project I was working on, whether that was writing Peter Dickson’s quips for the menus in the second Kinect Sports game or the Rare Replay opening number. With Sea of Thieves around the corner, we knew that there would need to be more work done to help players understand what the game was about compared to an existing IP like Battletoads, so I worked with Adam Park and Peter Hentze to form an in-house marketing team. We started working with publishers, toy manufacturers and other partners to make sure that when Sea of Thieves launched there was a whole world of merchandise and extra stuff for fans to enjoy. As part of that, it was decided that we should move a lot of the lore outside of Sea of Thieves rather than foisting it upon players who were more interested in carving out their own legends rather than reading about other people’s adventures, so we started work on laying down the ground rules for the Expanded Universe. This of course meant working closely with the game team and establishing the roles and motivations of Trading Companies like the Merchant Alliance and characters like the Pirate Lord. In 2018 the opportunity for me to pick up the writing side of things as a full-time job presented itself, beginning with writing the Athena’s Fortune novel, and from there moving onto other Sea of Thieves work like the Tall Tales, which brings us to today! Whew.

Aside from Athena’s Fortune, the Sea of Thieves expanded universe includes the “Tales from the Sea of Thieves” book, several comic books, and an upcoming Tabletop RPG campaign. Did you have any role in shaping any of these other expanded universe projects, and what is it like working with the Rare team on expanded universe material?

With the early EU entries, my role was mainly focused on working with partners like Titan to make sure that things were correct, both factually and tonally. For the factual stuff, it was quite natural that writers who weren’t living and breathing the game would, for example, dream up a galleon crewed by fifty pirates, and we were very keen that we didn’t want to deliver anything in the Expanded Universe that didn’t tally with the kind of experiences players would have in the game. In those cases I would look at the problem and say “Okay, what if the reason there aren’t fifty-man ships sailing the Sea of Thieves is because any ship that big would draw the attention of a kraken and immediately be attacked, which is why galleons on the Sea of Thieves are relatively small?” And that’s actually a great example of how working closely with the team can help, because it was around that point that Ryan Stevenson, the game’s art director, mentioned to us that the world was going to be bordered by a fog that would prevent you from sailing off the edge of the game map and asking us to help name it. One of the things I always try to do while writing is, if I have several story problems or dangling threads, see if I can use them to cancel one another out. So that became the solution — let’s not just have this gameplay mechanic that stops pirates sailing out of bounds, let’s call it the Devil’s Shroud, wrap it into the story as a supernatural thing everyone’s afraid of, and that’s why you don’t have fifty-man frigates breaking into the Sea of Thieves. They’re too big to make it through the Shroud. Now that the game world is so much more established and partners can jump in and try things like the Shores of Gold Tall Tales for themselves, my role is much more of an advisory one — making sure that anything that’s proposed fits within the game’s timeline, characters stay in character and that the scale of the adventures people are proposing doesn’t feel too big or too small next to the game’s content. It’s really important to make sure that the teams Rare is working with don’t feel constrained and get to be creative with their ideas, so there’s a balance to be struck!

That’s an interesting play there between things that serve a game play purpose (such as the fog surrounding the game’s map boundary) and the lore explanation behind them. Has this relationship ever worked in reverse, where things you wanted to do with the story or world building influenced the design direction of the game rather than vice versa?

A couple of things I’ve written have nibbled at the design in one or two places, mostly characters and names like the Magpie’s Wing. Some of the elements of Tribute Peak, like the fallen statue and the secret entrance on top of its throne found their way back into the game from the manuscript, too. By and large, though, I think gameplay elements influencing the narrative is where I can have the most impact. For one thing, ever since the Unity prototype the team have always had a very clear idea of what features they wanted to roll out and in what order, so it wouldn’t really be appropriate for me to add flocks of winged para-sharks into the world at launch just because they served my story. Beyond that, though, I think including gameplay elements where you can helps make the world feel unique. There are plenty of pirate universes out there across various forms of media, but Sea of Thieves is the only one where coming back to life via the Ferry of the Damned is a common occurrence. By working it into the tapestry of the universe rather than ignoring it as a conceit to make a fun video game, you immediately set yourself apart from those worlds and open up new storytelling opportunities, like when the team conceived of Graymarrow finding a way to “maroon” souls so that his enemies couldn’t just come back to life and take revenge on him. With the release of Seabound Soul, we’re starting to see that he and Captain Rooke might not have been the only skellies to possess that power. That’s obviously making the Ferryman a little bit more sympathetic to pirates as the curse makes his job more difficult, which might have consequences much further down the line…

With the Shores of Gold Tall Tales campaign and the “Athena’s Fortune” novel, the two are very tied together and share a lot of characters and themes. Were the plots of both always planned to work in tandem like this, or did one come first and inspire the other?

Well, for one thing, Athena’s Fortune was completed a lot earlier than most people realize. It takes a long time to print, publish and distribute books, so I was actually planning out the novel in the run-up to the game’s launch. That meant that Mike and the rest of the team had oversight into the broad strokes of what I was doing and were able to say things like “Don’t use Salty as the shopkeeper Larinna buys a sword from, he’s going to be used elsewhere” and make sure that the book and the game stayed aligned, as it were. Beyond that, there were certain events that just seemed to make sense — like including the Gold Hoarder, given that he’d already made his debut and his design had been well-received. One of the central themes of the book is something I spent a lot of time talking with Mike about back in 2017, and it’s a discussion that’s still taking place between players, which is the whole “It’s Sea of Thieves, not Sea of Friends” debate. Ramsey definitely has his viewpoint on how players should be treating one another, and Rathbone has his. I tried to give both opinions a good airing, and the strength of their convictions comes back to haunt both of those characters at various points during the story. When the Pirate Lord appears at the end of Shores of Gold, he reiterates his feelings on the matter. So I think a lot of what makes the novel and the game feel connected is less about directly following in Larinna’s footsteps and more characters behaving consistently in both stories.

Looking at Tall Tales: Shores of Gold, what is it like crafting an authored narrative that takes place in a shared world of emergent encounters and player interaction, how does this underlying game play impact the way you tell a story in that world?

By the time a Tall Tale reaches me, I’m fortunate in that a lot of those questions have already been answered by the design team! George Orton gave a great breakdown of how the Tall Tales are constructed at Rare’s New York Comic-Con panel, and a lot of the structure of the stories comes from the prototyping and playtesting they do. For a tale like “The Legendary Storyteller”, where the Quest Book clues were a child’s drawings, I touched basically nothing. Some Quest Books have their narratives in place already and I just give them a quick once-over, and others I write from scratch along with the lore journals. Sea of Thieves is somewhat unique as Rare games go because it allows players to run around blowing stuff up while NPCs are giving them instructions rather than freezing them in place, which is something really only GoldenEye and Perfect Dark ever did. On top of that you’re quite likely to have players’ voices in your ear dividing your attention between the story and other activity in the environment. As such I try to take cues from other games that have always wrangled with these complications, particularly first-person shooters, and apply the same rules to my writing.

We’ve heard that each of the original Tall Tales were built around a particular emotion, like the “Tale of Love” or the “Tale of Wonder”, etc, and we’ve also heard that they were not initially planned to all be connected as a 9 part saga- can you give more background on how the Tales evolved over time into the version that was released?

Like I say, the team did a great job of nailing down which emotions they wanted to focus on and the structure of each Tall Tale long before they landed on my desk, and letting me know which was the driving emotion of each. They were very much all one connected storyline by the time I got to tinker with the text. That said, I remember thinking that players who were keeping a close tally of Shroudbreaker fragments might be a little puzzled that they didn’t receive one at the end of the Wild Rose quest, so I was keen to tie that back into your meeting with the Ferryman and make it clear that he’s only willing to help you find the final piece because you were able to free Rose and George. Finding little ways to strengthen those narrative links between the Tales, like having Greymarrow be the one to teach Rooke how to curse Rose and George, was a lot of fun.

Do you have a favorite Tall Tale, or a favorite character in the Sea of Thieves universe?

Briggsy would be an obvious choice, but honestly, it’s got to be Rooke, the Skeleton Captain from Wild Rose. I’ve written a lot of villains over the years but Rooke’s motivation, that obsessive jealousy, is very much the dark side of love, the emotion that’s powering the tale. She is willing to stick George’s soul into a pendant and wear them like jewelry for all eternity rather than give him up while simultaneously telling him he should be grateful to her, which is just utterly vile and made my skin crawl while I was writing her dialogue.

The Seabound Soul just released and is the first new Tall Tale since the initial batch. The game will now tell more episodic stories rather than releasing a full “campaign” of multiple chapters. Can you give a little background on how that changed the way this story was written, and how it changes the way future Tales will carry on from it?

Far be it from me to confirm or deny what the cadence (ooh, fancy) of any future Tall Tales might be. That’s up for those boffins back in the lab to discover! As far as Seabound Soul, though — spoilers, sweetie — you could say it’s the first Tall Tale that ends on a genuine cliffhanger in that you’re left pretty clueless as to what your next move should be in a way you weren’t when you discovered, say, that Briggsy had removed parts of the Shroudbreaker. Obviously, you’re going to have to live with that and the events you just played through for a little while at least, no matter how quickly you did the Tale. I think that’s a really cool decision on the team’s part, but I don’t think people will find it affecting the writing too much. The reason I say that is because we made no assumptions that players would binge the Shores of Gold Tall Tales, and that we might have to account for long gaps inbetween play sessions while players went off to try the Arena, do Bilge Rat adventures, that sort of thing. One of the advantages of each Tale beginning with a different NPC is they all get their chance to say “Ah-ha, well, I’ve heard about your quest for the Shroudbreaker and this is what I think…” as a reminder of where you are in the story and what to do next.

Seabound Soul stars “Arthur Pendragon”, the protagonist of a series of Commodore 64 games from Rare’s predecessor company “Ultimate Play The Game”, and as a result, the Tale ties lore from those games into Sea of Thieves’ universe. Where did this idea of using a legacy character in Sea of Thieves come from, and when can we expect Captain Blackeye from Banjo-Tooie to join him?

Not from me! You’d have to ask Mike about the specifics, but I know that Ryan Stevenson, Sea of Thieves’ Art Director, is a huge fan of the Pendragon series and pushed hard to include all the cool Blackwyche easter eggs at Shipwreck Bay to begin with. As for Blackeye, someone of that name is mentioned in the Tales from the Sea of Thieves book, which as has been mentioned before is part of the canon, so who knows? One nice thing about Pendragon’s character is he’s a natural fit for the Sea of Thieves, meaning he won’t feel strangely out of place if you’ve never played an Ultimate game and don’t get the reference. After all, it’s getting to the point where, in terms of ongoing narratives within the game and all the expanded universe material, Sea of Thieves has far and away the most cohesive lore of any single Rare game. (That’s even counting the German Nintendo Power comic where Yoshi had to summon the Blast Corps team.) Like with the ship cosmetics, I think the team are very mindful that cameos need to be handled carefully, rather than shoving Jeff and Barry from Jet Force Gemini into a tavern just because it’d be a bit of a laugh.

With the Shores of Gold campaign, it was all building up to meeting The Gold Hoarder, the villainous Skeleton Lord that also headlined several outings of Expanded Universe material. Since before launch, a different Skeleton Lord has been marketed almost as much, and that’s Captain Flameheart. With Seabound Soul, we see him make his grand re-entry into the Sea of Thieves world, but it feels like only an introduction and far from the end of his story. Has this “schedule” of events always been the plan for Flameheart, and what can we expect from him in the future? #SeaofTease

I think it’s fair to say that Flameheart was always going to rear his bony head when the time was right. Of course, as of right now, an introduction is all you get — for one thing, we know that there’s some ambiguity whether or not this is “Flameheart Senior”, the infamous pirate, or the scholarly son who took on that same name and went in search of the Sea of Thieves himself. I maintain that the Gold Hoarder was the right choice for the first “Big Bad”, a term I’m stealing shamelessly from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because he’s kind of isolated. He gets up to mischief sometimes but by and large he’s content to sit in his treasure vault and amass wealth until pirates come blundering in to steal it. If you’re not the kind of player who wants to take on the Tall Tales, you’ll never know he exists. Even if you played all the way through the Shores of Gold but you hadn’t read Athena’s Fortune, it’s obvious he’s the vault’s guardian and you don’t need to know anything more about his motives than that, because either he’s dead or you are by the end of that fight. Flameheart, though, has a very different set of motivations. He’s quite chatty, too, and now he’s out somewhere in the world and you have no idea what his plans might be. He could be plotting all kinds of misdeeds while you’re off cooking up a batch of splashtails. The game is very much afoot, and I think that’s going to be a really fun feeling, particularly for the lore-hounds, knowing that somebody out there is in active opposition to you. As for what you can expect in the future… you can expect to learn more about his past. Something or someone had to put Flameheart in that coffin and sink his ship, after all. #SeaOfTease

As you’re the author of Athena’s Fortune, I’d be remiss not to ask you- when can we expect another novel, and is there anything you can tease us with on that front? How much of the cast will be named after TV Science Fiction characters?

Yes, I can confirm that another novel is in the works! I’m going to be disappointingly vague about the ‘when’, though, partly because it’s not totally up to me and partly because I’ve also been attending to a number of other projects, including a Borderlands art book and some other Sea of Thieves writing that I hope will surprise people, in a good way. I’m sure I’ll end up naming at least one minor character as a cheeky reference to something, too. (Fun fact, Captain Douglas was named after Captain Douglas Richardson from John Finnemore’s superb radio comedy Cabin Pressure.) As for the rest of the cast, I can say a few characters that players were introduced to during The Shores of Gold will be centre-stage this time, alongside some new faces. My plan is to once again focus on two crews with intertwined fates like Athena’s Fortune, but this time it won’t be the passage of time that divides them…

Final question, and I like to ask this to everyone I interview- what is one question or topic you were hoping I would touch on but didn’t?

Kameo, honestly. The game turns fifteen next year, after all, so… I mean if you wanted to ask… No? I’ll see myself out.