Long-time writer Jeff Grubb is no stranger to fantastical fiction. You’ll find his name attached to some pretty big names, from classics like Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms to more recent works within the Warcraft and Starcraft expanded universes.

Grubb signed on with NCsoft several years back and lent his talents to the Guild Wars franchise. Since then, he’s been credited as a designer for Guild Wars Nightfall and the Eye of the North expansion, and more recently, content guru to the Guild Wars 2 writing team.

He was in San Diego this past week, and I met up with him at the NCsoft booth for an interview that turned into a discussion between two major fans. Grubb’s own excitement over the upcoming MMO was apparent, and his answers were supplemented with brief bouts of laughter. Exceeding my initial questions, his answers go into great detail and paint a clearer image of we can expect.

What you should know about Guild Wars and Jeff Grubb...

Ever wonder about Gwen's OP firestorm? The team wanted to end the first Guild Wars beta with a bang but couldn't figure out how. Then someone just came up with the idea of using Gwen. Her awful temper in Eye of the North is a reference to the fiery massacre.



None of the races can boast unusually long lifespans. Charrs tend to live shorter lives simply due to their violent culture.

Grubb is particularly fond of the asura and norn.



He loves the part in the 2009 Gamescom reveal trailer that zooms in on the asuran cube city, Rata Sum.



“Long ago and far away,” Grubb designed gnomes for the Dragonlance series as a satire on engineering, because engineers “design something and then design something else to fix it.” He majored in civil engineering during college.



You've referred to yourself as an “embedded writer." What do you mean by that?

JG: We have a writing staff. We have very talented people, and their primary task is to take all the design documents – all the text, conversations, etc. – and put them together, making sure it all irons out. I work with these content people in the design department. Officially, I’m not a writer, I’m a game designer. My job is to be a resource for all the other designers, all these content people. Okay, I need a name, take a look at this conversation, or I want to say that charr don’t shower that much. We’ll always coordinate to make the best story possible.

That’s why I say I’m an embedded writer. I’ve done a lot of writing: novels, comic books, and games. In this case, I’m working with the game designers in order to produce a good game from the ground up – if that makes sense.

Many players complained about the unusually brief story in Guild Wars Factions. Do you think NCsoft bringing you aboard for subsequent games was a direct response to that?

JG: Well, I was working in the Seattle area. Actually, I had interviewed once with them before. And in the wake of Factions, they were looking to get more story-based. And my responsibility at ArenaNet is content, lore, and continuity – a game designer basically, but a game designer who writes.

And out of that, we started looking at what type of story we were selling. Nightfall was the first project I was involved with as far as the story was concerned, and after that Eye of the North. And right now Ree Soesbee and I are responsible for lore and continuity for the upcoming Guild Wars 2. And I’m the co-author with Matt Forbeck on Ghosts of Ascalon, which is our first novel and shows up next week.

That’s great! And it’s a prequel to Guild Wars 2, right?



JG: It basically takes place in the space between the original Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. There’s 250 years of history. We’ve jumped forward in time, and the result is this world has changed. The dragons have woken up, and they’re hungry. The other races are getting more powerful, the humans have been rocked back on their heels. It’s a very rich world with which to tell stories, so what we did is say, “So what stories do we need to tell before people get into the game?”

One of them was the resolution of the Human Charr War – that is one of the big stories of the first novel. How do we get to the truce where we have the humans and the charr working together? That’s the larger issue. The smaller issue is the personal story of Dougal Keane, who is one of the few who had gotten into the haunted city of Ascalon and came out alive. This is because King Adelbern’s last actions basically transformed the natives into ghosts.

In order to combat the charr?

JG: Yeah. So the charr may control Ascalon, but a lot of [territories], the ghosts will come out. The ghosts of Ascalon are remnants of the past, which [the heroes] must get beyond if they are to survive.

Does this mean we’ll be visiting that area in the game then?

JG: Correct, and there is strong coordination between the book and the game. Characters will show up in the game, and characters from the game will be showing up in the book. We’ve actually redesigned some of the towers in Ascalon to fit with what we said in the book. It’s just a very exciting time because we’re growing the game and the novel at the same time. As we’re changing it all the time, we’ll sometimes make a change in the game and ask, “Okay, how do we explain that now, because in the book we said something else.”

I know we are fearless about coming up with cool new stuff. So if you wonder why there’s no mention of something in the book, maybe because we haven’t thought of it yet.

When we talk about continuity, are the events in Cantha and Elona going to cross over?

JG: We are concentrating on Tyria – of course, the world of Guild Wars Prophecies – for the first book. Do we get to Elona? Do we get to Cantha? We don’t know yet, but we do know what happened there. We’ve dropped a few big hints. When you’re coming into the game and unable to go into Cantha immediately, you know the link with Cantha has been broken. There have been some refugees that’ve come up, human and other races all coming together in Tyria.

Same thing with Elona. Stuff happened further down south, sealing that area off for the time being. What exactly happened, we don’t know yet or can’t reveal.

I hear that Palawa Joko is in charge now.

JG: Yes! Palawa Joko, who came out of one line in Prophecies when you meet the Ghostly Hero, who said, “I fought against Palawa Joko in the Battle of Jahai.” We had no idea what this meant, so we went and created Jahai and Palawa Joko. In the middle of Nightfall, the centaur warns you not to work with him, he’ll become too powerful, you’ll live to regret it! When you’re fighting an undead guy, he can wait. He has secured his faction of power. Now, how does that work out when the dragons awaken – I don’t know what yet, can’t tell you.