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Profile: Martin Klimes of Talisman Studios
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Martin Klimes is the publisher of Talisman Studios, who product the Shaintar setting for Savage Worlds, the Suzerain roleplaying game, and Gamescapes game aid series.He also has some exclusive news, just for Examiner.com readers.
Berin: Let's start with the obligatory questions: When did you start roleplaying, how did you get started, and what was the first game you played?
Martin: First roleplaying experience. Oh man, that would be way back in… ‘77 or ‘78. I was seven or eight and my brother was three years older (he still is, which I like to remind him of once in a while). He brought home the earliest of the D&D box sets you could get in England and wanted to play with his friend Stephane. They soon figured out that it’d be best to have at least one more player… so the kid bother, I mean brother, got roped in. We wandered around the little dungeon from the back of the book; I recall a few pirates in a cave and some giant rats.
And that was it. I was hooked. My brother stopped playing after a few years, but I never lost the bug, not for a minute. Getting jumped by giant rats was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Berin: How did you make the leap into publishing roleplaying games?
Martin: Fast forward twenty years into winter 1998 and I’d just got married, was in the middle of setting up my own IT business, and was looking for programmers to join me. A couple of friends said maybe, but when I suggested we publish an RPG with on online element they could code… well, we geeks just love that kind of thing. So that’s what we did. The RPG was Suzerain, and we demoed both the book and the online game at GenCon for two years, releasing the book in 2000. The people who were raising our finance for the online development were in the Twin Towers, and in September 2001… well, that really just stopped us completely and the online stuff never recovered.
I went on to other things for a while, but carried on developing the round-the-table roleplaying game in evenings and weekends. After five years I realized we’d moved forward an amazing amount, and had more than enough great material for a Version 2.0 release. At the same time an old friend, Aaron Acevedo, approached me to talk about running Talisman Studios, which was an arts studio to roleplay companies at the time, and doing some great stuff.
Then Sean Patrick Fannon, another of those old friends, heard I was working with Aaron and suggested we launch the Savage Worlds version of his amazing Shaintar setting through Talisman Studios. In winter of 2007, exactly ten years after first setting up as a roleplay publisher, it all clicked. The stars aligned, the cogs slid effortlessly into place, and both Shaintar and Suzerain were reborn.
Berin: Shaintar is possibly my favorite Savage Worlds setting. A friend of mine recently started up a gaming club at his church, with the caveat that he couldn't run Dungeons & Dragons because of the negative connotations held over from the 1980s. I pointed him toward Shaintar as an alternative, and it was a hit. I've seen several folks refer to Shaintar as "a D&D setting for Savage Worlds fans". How do you feel about that classification?
Martin: Firstly, it’s great to hear that you enjoy Shaintar. The reaction from the Savages has been wonderful, and we’re so grateful for all the positive feedback we’ve had since the launch.
On the one hand it’s flattering to be likened to D&D – after all, it’s the one that started us all roleplaying in the first place, and these days has a company behind it with like a million times the resources we have.
On the other hand, Sean never set his sights so low. D&D has developed into the mass market, super bland beast that is meant to satisfy all our tastes but rarely (from what I’m hearing from gamers) satisfies anyone. Shaintar is epic fantasy the way it was back in the old days. Nations clash, evil forces crush freedom and hatch nefarious plots, and the characters feel like they’re making a difference to the fate of millions. What’s not to love about that?
Berin: When one of my regular readers found out I was going to interview, he wanted me to ask you (half-jokingly) how you let Sean Patrick Fannon get away with not including gnomes in Shaintar. You know how those gnome fans are.
Martin: Oh man, I told you Sean. I said it years ago (and Shaintar has been in development continuously for over two decades now!), that you can’t forget the little people. Not everything is larger than life. But see, Sean’s larger than life in every respect, as anyone who’s met him at a convention will attest, so you can understand it.
Seriously, the poor gnomes never made it into the lands of Shaintar but it’s for the best. With horrors of the Flame and even greater evils around, it’s better that they keep their place in Happy Happy La La land (World of Warcraft) where they can stand a chance to get to mid level at least.
Berin: When are we going to see more Shaintar material?
Martin: Right now! We just released an Adventure Deck on our site that gives you Savages a total replacement for the generic SW deck, with new art in that fantastic Shaintar style and all manner of Shaintar-specific effects.
We’re also expanding the Shaintar team to add a couple of new talents. Sean’s still writing material and overseeing the whole thing, but we’ve got Ron Blessing of The Games The Thing lined up to be our editor and Kevin Ranson will be looking after the day to day development. Sean’s marshalling the troops as only he knows how, and I’m told there are several new books in development. We’re also putting together a new website for Shaintar world information which should launch soon, so there’s plenty of activity now that Sean’s got past the terrible, horrible year he had in 2008, where things happened that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, let alone one of your greatest friends.
Berin: Talisman Studios' Gamescapes material is impressive as well. I think they're the best-look map tiles being made today. I'm also pleased that you've expanded into stock art, and I've got my eye on that for some future projects of my own. What plans do you have to expand the Gamescapes line in the future?
Martin: In the last few weeks we’ve added two new types of Gamescapes. We now do a full ‘trade dress’ as well as stock art, so you can get a sci-fi layout including covers and internal page design, for instance, ready to drop your text into. We’ve already got a fantasy, sci-fi and horror set, and for $10 you can do a lot with that, even If you just want to make your player handouts look super amazing and never plan to publish professional books.
We also started a range of battlemat terrain, by popular demand. We’d had a lot of feedback from people at conventions that our map tiles were cool, but could we do something without the buildings and objects, for tactical mini gamers playing Star Wars, D&D Minis or whatever. It was a great idea, and Aaron managed to find time to look at it seriously… with stunning results. I’m really proud of the sets we’ve already done – we’ve got grasslands, desert steppes (my personal favorite), wastelands and mudflats. They each cover 24x32 inches of table top and, best of all, you can choose to print them out with 1” squares or with hexes on them, so they fit into most any game system.
The trick is to make a landscape that still has great visual detail without having a single feature dominating it. And we’re very lucky to have Aaron for that – he’s got a fine eye for the details, making every inch of grassland interesting, even on a clear terrain tile.
Berin: You also publish Suzerain, a pretty tight universal rules system. Do you feel any conflict of interest, publishing your own system and then publishing a setting for another universal system?
Martin: None at all. We love the Mojo Rules! system that powers Suzerain and we love Savage Worlds. They each give a different play experience. Because of its roots in The Great Rail Wars, Savage Worlds plays at its best in high octane combat focused game. Dozens of combatants can fill a battlefield and you can have several combats in a session because it all moves so slickly. Mojo Rules! is a balanced play system, meaning that it puts no focus on physical, mental or social scenes. All three get equal focus, so if you mix up a bit of intrigue, investigation, infiltration and combat, Mojo Rules! does a great job of representing them all. Combat is fulfilling but more involved than Savage Worlds, so suits games where you’ll have fewer dust ups and really relish those major fights that are pivotal to the flow of your story.
Okay, time for the big reveal. I promised you an exclusive, and here we go <drum roll>… Suzerain will be getting its own Savage Worlds rule book this summer. Players will be able to choose which system they use to enjoy the Suzerain universe, and play games according to their chosen style. I’m really excited by this. It’s a wonderful step forward for a great universe. We’re just tightening up the setting rules before we thrash them in play test starting next week, and we’re planning on making the beta rule book available as a free download that Savages can enjoy and comment on, before tweaking it based on the feedback and going live.
Because of the way the Suzerain universe is an interconnected set of realms, the rule book itself opens up all manner of possibilities. Rather than producing dual-system books, we’ll be developing campaign settings that suit each system. Some will have Mojo Rules! and Savage Worlds versions, but mostly we’re thinking of playing to the strengths of each system. And right now we’re looking for more play testers, so if any gaming groups are reading this and are interested in joining in – just email me at mmk <at sign> talisman-studios.com to let me know. The more we push the rules, the better they’ll become.
Berin: Right now the Suzerain line is focused on Relic, a high fantasy world. Are their plans to publish other settings, to highlight its utility as a universal system?
Martin: Relic is the realm we’re releasing most product for right now, but it’s the second that we brought out. Untamed Empires was the launch world for Suzerain, offering pirate-and-sea-monster adventures, wild frontier horror and classic Three Musketeers swashbuckling all in one. We’re still doing stuff with that (because it’s so much fun) but we’ve put more effort into Relic in recent months, that’s true.
As for the future, there are several more realms in development. I should get the manuscript for the last of three American Grit books this month, which is the first historical realm we’ll be looking at. It covers 1930s Great Depression America, but with supernatural elements lurking under the surface of society. Then there’s Garden Of Athena which takes us to the far future for the first time. And we have files stuffed with notes on five more realms too.
We’re not short of plans for the coming months and years, but we also see Suzerain as a playground for the imagination. We’re developing books, but we’re also making toolkits, examples and ‘how to’ books available for free download from the website. And we’re really big on helping people bring their own realms to life – ask a question on our forums and you’ll usually find you get an answer really fast, and we might just put some more free content in the ‘Treasure’ area of the site for you. Weapon stats for a post-apocalyptic world? No problem. How to deal with shield fighting? Flight? Psionics? We’ll help out in any way we can.
That’s what Talisman Studios is best at, what makes us happiest. In fact, our biggest project of the last few months wasn’t a book or supplement, but the www.suzerain.info website we just launched. It’s the repository for all things to do with the Suzerain universe, a place for us to put all the knowledge of all the realms for anyone to reference at any time. And for anyone to contribute their own background and entire realms so we can all share that and enjoy it.
Berin: What do you do when you're not playing games?
Martin: There’s such a time? Really? <laughs> These days I get to spend a lot of my time with my one year old daughter. Since I work from home, Tiger and I are together all the time. I can find an hour or two disappear without realizing it… something that any parent can probably relate to. And that’s how Talisman Studios is, too. It’s like Tiger’s older brother in a way – hours just disappear while I’m happily in that ‘Talisman zone’. I’m still doing stuff I love, even when I’m not gaming.
Berin: Finally, the signature question I ask everyone: tell us about your favorite player character.
Martin: Being a GM mostly, that ends up being quite a list to choose from, seeing as every game session is a potential cast of thousands and I treat them all as player characters in miniature. Still, I’d have to say that I’m most delighted every time I get to play my first Shaintar character, the venerable General Gunther Olar. He’s an occasional guest in Sean’s Shaintar games, and I love him because he’s a character who got the same character creation process as everyone else, but is a huge hero in the world, renowned for his astonishing presence, leadership ability, and prowess in one-on-one combat.
To make him no stronger, faster, or better than any other starting character, I asked Sean whether he minded the General being an old man. In his seventies, his physical abilities have massively declined from their best, and he’s a frail individual these days. But he’s still an inspiration, and strikes fear into the forces of evil by just stepping onto the battlefield in the first place. And because his stats are likely to decline further rather than get better, he throws himself into harm’s way with great gusto, hoping to go out in a blaze of glory and to inspire all those around him, one last time.
To me, he’s everything that I love about Shaintar.
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