Magic: The GatheringClick for full cover |
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Magic: The Gathering |
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Magic: The Gathering
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In this trilogy for Magic: The Gathering, the first book is JOHAN, appropriate since he starts all the trouble. Like calling World War II "Hitler's War". Oddly, Jedit Ojanen doesn't appear in the first book. Jedit comes along in the second book. His father, Jaeger Ojanen, fills in in the first. The story really follows four characters. Johan is the Tyrant of Tirras and Emperor of the Northern Realms, and would-be ruler of all Jamuraa. Hazezon Tamar, a desert mage and Adira Strongheart, pirate queen, form an uneasy alliance with all the southern city-states to oppose Johan. Staggering into the mix comes a tiger-man, a fabled creature never seen before. |
The sources
for The Legend of Jedit Ojanen are three cards and two old comic
books.
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| Not a lot
to build an adventure of 270,000 words, but I found some interesting
crises for them to solve. Click the covers for large. |
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The tiger warrior has
his own troubles, but we don't get back to them for a while. Anyway, the arrival of this fabled creature - half-man, half-tiger
- reawakens legends of the ancient prophecy of None, One, and
Two. "When None, One, and Two clash, only Two shall remain." Hazezon, as chief wizard, gets to grapple with the prophecy while Johan's troops are hammering Bryce (lots of fight scenes!). Then he must head up a southern alliance, if possible, but mostly he has to cope with Adira Strongheart. And he'd rather face a battalion alone... Why? To make a long story
short, Tirras is landlocked and expanding rapidly. Johan's only
chance to invade the south is by following the River Toloron
to Bryce. It crosses a massive desert, the Sands of the Sukurvia.
The river is the only lifeline. Fine. Except there's a stumbling
block along the river -- the village of Palmyra. It's a lousy
pesthole full of pirates, criminals, misfits, and more. Who's in charge? Adira Strongheart, who rules with her fists and matched daggers. She won't even TALK to Hazezon because the two were once married! So when "Haz" shows up with a talking tiger(!) proposing peace, things do NOT run smoothly. |
Jedit Ojanen, |
Johan, |
Hazezon Tamar, |
Adira Strongheart, |
Here are the three original character cards, plus one. Adira I mocked up from the comic. She deserves to be a card, though. |
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And of course, any day Johan's gigantic army of soldiers, Blue Mountain barbarians, Aerathi Berserkers, dwarf sappers, siege engineers will arrive to pounce on Palmyra... There are, as I mentioned, lots of wild fights, weird magicks, and colorful characters. Adira Strongheart heads up the Robaran Mercenaries, a private army of mercenaries and pirates. She keeps the best of them close as her personal bodyguards, called her Circle of Seven. They come and go, often getting killed -- fighting wars is a dangerous business. Some of them include: Heath, a mysterious archer possible part-elf, possibly a Radjan spirit. Simone the Siren, a buxom black pirate. Treetop, a dwarf. Sister Wilemina, an archer-nun who worships Lady Caleria. Badger, a salty veteran. And others. Questions and tensions abound? Can Hazezon convince Adira to help defend Palmyra against Johan's invasion. Can the south ally? What's the tiger-warrior after, and how does his coming trigger the prophecy of None, One, Two, whatever that is? Can Johan be stopped? Who lives and who dies? Read them and find out.
JOHAN is #1, JEDIT
#2, and HAZEZON #3. (The actual titles, in my opinion, should be HAZEZON first, since he's featured, JOHAN second, and JEDIT last.) |
Got a call. "We want you to write a trilogy about an older Magic (The Gathering) character. Actually, three. The series revolves around this tiger-warrior, Jedit Ojanen, who's proved popular with the fans." Okay, sure. "There's a catch. The three books have to be based on two comic books that came out a while ago." Oooookay. "In the comic, there are two warring cities on either side of a desert. The cities are connected by a river. A bad wizard named Johan keeps sending his army down to raid the other city, which is a seaport. There's a tiny town in the middle named Palmyra, and that's where the city makes a stand." Uhh, I ask, if this guy is a wizard, why doesn't he just shift his army to the other city rather than take the long slow river route across the desert? "Oh. Well, I don't know. He can't shift, I guess." If you're a wizard, I wonder, and you can't shift, how do you pluck things out of the air? But never mind, the editor is boss. Okay, I plow on, where does this tiger warrior fit in? "Well, in the first book, the two armies clash at Palmyra in the middle of the desert. The bad guy Johan loses the battle and flees on a flying drake. The End. Then, in the second book, he crash-lands in the oasis where Jedit lives. They team up for a while, because Jedit doesn't know Johan is evil - We can't change the names, by the way, too bad they both begin with J. - and eventually Johan invades Jedit's oasis homeland, where we have the final battle at the end of the third book." Hold it. The series is *about* Jedit Ojanen, but he's not IN the first book at all? "Nope." Well, how about if I collapse the two comics into the first book, get all that out of the way, then make up further adventures in the second and third book? "No, we want to stick to his format." Lord knows why. "Oh, and you can only use the cards listed in the encyclopedia from pages 139 - 156. No other cards." Ooog, that limits things. "Oh, and no cards with the words 'Legend' on them, because those characters all have their own books." More limits. Anything else? "No, that's about it. Can you do it?" Sure. I need the work. And people wonder where writers get ideas. I have to take two old comics, maybe 44 pages total (and not even printed in the right order, because the fool artist didn't bother to number the pages) and spin it into a trilogy of 900+ pages. Hmmm, calls for some padding. AND I can't use any of the characters in the comics except for two. AND I have to make sense of an invading army crossing an "impassible" desert. AND the chief villain is an ancient super-wizard, except he can't teleport across the street. AND I get to use maybe 90-odd cards as background material. Oh, joy. Some solutions worked. I needed a tiger in the first book, and the comic mentioned Jedit's father had departed for the west years ago, so the first book follows Jaeger, an older wiser version of Jedit. Of course, he has to be gotten out of the way before Book Two, so it's curtains for Dad. There wasn't any information on Johan, the chief villain, so I had to make stuff up. I was given an EMPTY map of the continent, and told to fill it, so I did. After I'd completed the second book, I found the entire northwest portion of the continent detailed on a map on the Internet. Boy, THAT would have been handy. Or maybe not. I gave WOTC a crystal-clear copy of the map I'd filled, and they promptly dislocated everything, so it's impossible to match the map to the heroes' travels. And more. But I managed to write a coherent story with a LOT of filler material, lots of action, some fun, clever dialogue, an on-off romance, and gobs and gobs of magic. Did the fans like it? Some did, some didn't. |
about the Jedit Trilogy |
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My first trilogy for
MTG is now called "The Greensleeves Trilogy" or "The
Whispering Woods" trilogy. The short description is: Gull is Everyman struggling to cope with a mad world. Greensleeves begins as an idiot (savant) and matures into the most powerful wizard of The Domains. |
Bill Fawcett, a book packager, grilled the WOTC creators for seven hours to get millions of details about the world of Dominia and its magic. It was fun to use the cards as a "magic catalogue", then show how magic can empower wizards but mess up common peoples' lives. I was called in to write books 2, 3, and 4. Bill Forstchen wrote the first book. They don't have numbers, but here's the order. ARENA by Wm Fortschen. Introduces Garth One-Eye as he enters a city as a provocateur. He plays off one gang against another until they wipe each other out. (Same plot as "Yojimbo", "A Fistful of Dollars", and "Last Man Standing".) Turns out Garth's family was wiped out by warring gangs, and he's gotten revenge. Goes planeswalking at the end, I think. His love interest is a woman named Rakel. WHISPERING WOODS by Clayton Emery. Not a followup to ARENA (yet). In another part of Dominaria, Gull sees his village destroyed. Though he hates wizards, he signs on with a magician named Towser as his wagonmaster. Drags along his idiot sister Greensleeves, whom be babysits. Except that, once out of the Whispering Woods, Greensleeves comes to her senses and begins manifesting wizardry. SHATTERED CHAINS by Clayton Emery.
Opens with Gull and Greensleeves leading a ragtag army on a hunt
for evil wizards. Meanwhile elsewhere, Garth One-Eye lives with
Rakel, formerly of Benalia. Except Garth has been seduced by
planeswalking and keeps wandering off to explore. Rakel, a reserve
soldier, is called up to infilitrate Gull and Greensleeves' army
and hijack it over for Benalia... Rakel drops into a battle, changes
her name to Noreen, and demonstrates she can really fight. So
she's appointed commander of the army and begins rigorously training
them. And falls in love with Gull. And gets recalled to Benalia
and tortured for insubordination. And gets rescued by Gull. And... At the end, when she's wondering what to do, Garth drops in! He's shaken off the influence of planeswalking and wants Rakel / Noreen back. So they exit together. I introduced Garth and Rakel to the second book because I like to see continuity, and they were interesting characters. Most fans said they liked seeing Garth again, if only briefly. Others were upset at the casual planeswalking, which was made MUCH harder later. FINAL SACRIFICE by Clayton Emery. Gull and Greensleeves are sweeping up evil wizards right and left and stranding them on a desert island. Except a bad guy liberates and unites them ALL against G/G's army. Big battles ensue. In the end, Greensleeves gets the drop on ALL of them because she's willing to make the final sacrifice. Other books were written by various people and published by HarperCollins. None of them mentioned my characters, as far as I know. As MTG spread around
the world, these books totaled over 500,000 copies. They have
been translated into German, French,
Dutch, Czech, Italian, Japanese?, and possible others. Here are
two Finnish covers, very small. They even included the Clockwork
Horse!
I also advised WOTC for a RPG Module that would feature my characters and The Domains as then known. Cool, hunh? Except WOTC
decided to publish their own line of books, so jettisoned all
the earlier HarperCollins books. NONE of my books are now considered canonical to M:TG universe. They simply never happened. |
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These early books also came with a special mail-in offer for unique cards. I was thrilled, since I named the centaurs and conceived the giant badger. I wasn't thrilled to hear that some readers would, in the bookstore, pay for the book, tear out the last page for the coupon, and throw the book away. I hope that was just a rumor. |
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There were Finnish editions of Magic books, including at least two of mine. The pics are small, though. |
After the Jedit trilogy, I had to make some hard decisions - and decided to stop writing for Wizards of the Coast. For various reasons. For one, they offered me LESS money to write this trilogy than I'd earned before. "Hard times," they said. Hey, wait, don't you guys print Pokemon cards? "Doesn't count. Different pocket." I managed to get them to fork over my regular fee after some haggling, but really, if you perform diligently and deliver 10 goods books on time that require zero editing, shouldn't they pay me more, not less? Another. I finally attended GenCon after they'd begged me to come for years. And arrived to find waiting for me -- nothing. No green room, no free coffee, no signing party, no reading, no panels, no chance to meet fans, and not a single copy of any of my books anywhere in sight. Why did you invite me? "We just wanted you to come." And do what for three days, shop? While there, I did get to ask, How do I graduate from the B list to the A list? "You don't." Will you guys promote my work? "No. If you catch fire with the fans, then we'll promote you." How do I catch fire with the fans if you don't promote my work? "Who knows? We don't promote Magic books as a rule anyway, because they don't sell well." Then why produce them? And hey, you promoted Jeff Grubb's latest Magic book, advertising it on the inside front cover of every DC comic for three months during one summer. "Oh, sure. His books sell." Well, am I at least guaranteed future work because of my loyalty and professionalism? "No. We can't guarantee anything." Such incentives can make a body dizzy. Basically, WOTC is a corporation, and by its very nature, doesn't care about people. People at WOTC might care about people, but that's irrelevant. Let me inject here that the WOTC editors are the nicest people in the world. Kind, attentive, funny, quick to praise, easy to accommodate. But -- they are stuck in a huge megacorp with arbitrary rules and saddled with patchwork histories and business plans and what-all that often plain doesn't make sense. Their hands are not only tied but tangled, and I have great sympathy for them when they're trying to create an intriguing world that's supposed to be fun but keeps getting hammered by out-of-nowhere business concerns. All said, writing for WOTC got me a paycheck and nothing else, especially no future prospects. So, after some soul searching, I decided to pursue my own writing projects. They might not sell, but at least they're MY works with a prayer for future success. Or as George Burns said, "I'd rather fail at something I love than succeed at something I hate." |
