Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Zork, 10-sided dice, and one out-of-this-world dress

It’s no secret that Ashleigh Raine is a writing team of two women. We’ve been friends since junior high. Yet what many people don’t know is that role-playing was at the heart of our friendship.

It started with a simple game of Zork. Anyone remember that game? Zork was one of the first interactive fiction computer games. In eighth grade—the year we met—one of our teachers had Zork installed on the classroom computer. When we finished our schoolwork, we had the opportunity to play on the computer. So we bonded over searching for hidden treasure and fighting monsters, becoming the unnamed fictional character on an otherworldly quest.

Pretty soon, we were exploring a modified version of the popular role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. I say modified because we wanted to create our own world, our own rules, our own characters, and were bored by the traditional role-playing structure. We made up stories, sometimes written out on our own and then shared later and sometimes, it was a collaborative effort in the spur of the moment, both of our minds actively dreaming up characters and situations to put them in. It was just easier if I “played” one character and she “played” another so that we could write down what the other was saying and later share it with our friends at school.

Fast forward fifteen years. We’re happily writing romance novels and cruising around a convention when a couple girls with a video camera stop us for an interview. I happened to be wearing one of my all-time weirdest outfits, but Jen (being used to my clothing antics) had no problem standing next to me and talking… But the coolest part happened halfway through the interview, when the interviewer asked us if we’d ever done any type of role playing. We both enthusiastically replied, “Yes!” and went on to talk about how it had played—and still did—an important role in our writing.

But what I think is truly odd about Ashleigh Raine is that we never really stopped. Plotting a scene is more like “Okay, this is the big demon chase scene. One character is actively getting chased and there are three more characters who can help, but only one can get away from what he’s doing. What should we do?” To me, that totally sounds like a Dungeon Master talking to the players. What’s funnier is that usually we both have almost the same ‘idea’ about what to do. It’s in the times when we either disagree or just don’t know what to do that the real magic happens and the story gets bigger, more involved.

Lisa: I think our hero’s gonna get his butt kicked pretty hard by this demon.
Jen: I’m not so sure. He whips out the harpoon gun—y’know the one we mentioned earlier.
Lisa: The harpoon? What’s he got it stuffed down his pant leg or something?
Jen: No, remember he did that spell so he has the portable hole that follows him? He’s got all sorts of stuff in there.
Lisa: Okay, so the demon’s got him by the throat and he whips the harpoon gun out of the hole. The demon counters with a shriek and tightens his grip.
Jen: Duh. He shoots the harpoon gun. But not at the demon trying to choke him. At the other, three-headed demon coming up on the right.
Lisa: Well there’s also a sloth demon approaching from below, but he can’t see that yet. Ugh. What did I do with my dice? I think we really need ’em this time.