Shakespeare's Landlord Chat #5 - Becoming Shakespeare's Champions

Welcome back to the fifth One More Story Games podcast. We're using a new Facebook live streaming system called BeLive.tv, so for the first few minutes we're enjoying the new chat features where people have their comments shown right in the stream. Jean Leggett is away giving a keynote address at the Jalloo Festival of Animation and Gaming in Miramichi, New Brunswick. This week I'm talking with game-designer/writer/director Neal Hallford who is working with us to create the Shakespeare's Landlord story game. Neal has been in the games industry for 27 years and has worked on many sword & sorcery RPGs most notably "Betrayal at Krondor". We talk about appreciating storytelling, yet working within the video games industry. Neal shares his background of growing up in Tulsa and being close to the Texarkana setting and world of Lily Bard's Shakespeare. Most importantly we discuss becoming Shakespeare's Champions, protecting Charlaine's voice and characters in building the interactive version of her world. To that end, Neal has gone through and counted the 226 characters that make up Harris' dramatis personae of Shakespeare. This will form the foundation of our future game development. We get closer to discussing the problematic Chapter 5 and talk about how the extreme violence has shaped the character of Lily Bard (stay tuned for next week where we deal with this head-on). And will we have so much fun that Charlaine Harris will want to write another Lily Bard book?