Dynamite Comics Is Waking The Dead: Interview With Fred Van Lente

Welcome to the table.

While I’ve been running and playing TTRPGS since I was in my single digits, I started running a regular weekly game in a local comic shop when I was around 15 years old. Any money I had from odd jobs, couch cushions, and recycled cans ended up going to the comics in my pull boxes and the dollar slices from the pizza shop across the street. 90% of the media I consumed came in comic form, so it stood to reason that Spirits of Vengeance and Eater of Worlds would worm their way into our weekly adventures in some form or another.

For 10 years, until we moved our weekly game to our living room full-time, we played almost exclusively in comic shops. Sometimes three days a week we would roll dice and read comics, the two hobbies informing each other. The shop I ended up working at for a while was closed on Sundays and we played a private six-person TTRPG game there for a few years.

Under the watchful gaze of the new issues that had dropped on Wednesday, I weaved adventures laced with Right Hands of Doom and the Ogdru Jahad lurking around abandoned temples and the space between spaces. Even now, in my home office where I run my weekly game from, there are stacks of long boxes in the closet and organized graphic novels lining my shelves alongside the vast TTRPG book library. For me, comics and gaming have always been woven into each other.

So when I was offered the opportunity to interview Fred Van Lente about his upcoming Dynamite comic set in Golarion, the core world of the Pathfinder TTRPG, I was more than happy to say yes to the opportunity. After all, one of my players has written for Dynamite, and another has drawn for them, so the talent they employ and the work they produce are very familiar to the table. On top of that I’m a fan of the previous comics that have come out for the Pathfinder setting, having a handful of the early books in floppies, and a few more across various digital readers (the new local comic shop is not wheelchair accessible so I have to order online or read digital if I want comics these days) but with a title like “Wake The Dead” and the mention of GEB one of my favorite NPCs and locations in the P2 setting, I knew this was going to be something special.

Anton Kromoff: Before I let my excitement run away with me and we get in too deep, let’s start with the basics. Can you please tell our readers a little bit about yourself?

Fred Van Lente: I am married and I live in Brooklyn and I have two cats. Their names are Newt and Zelda and they do not like each other but are fortunately fond of me. Newt won’t stop eating my wife’s hair while she is trying to sleep, though, please send advice.

Kromoff: As a cat dad of four my wife and I could tell you how to clean a lot of random stains off a lot of random surfaces but the elusive mystery as to why they eat hair is lost on us as well. I have a well-known habit of derailing when it comes to talking about my wife or our cats so before I do that let me jump back on track with a question about gaming. Was gaming part of your childhood?

Van Lente: It was, particularly in middle school. We played a lot of Top Secret, the old TSR espionage game, believe it or not. I was a pretty anxious kid and many of our roleplaying sessions would be me descending into tears and yelling that the players weren’t taking the game seriously enough, but they kept coming back so I guess I was doing something right? Then at a summer camp where I was D&D counselor (!) I was introduced to GURPS and played that pretty extensively through my twenties. Then when I became a professional writer I drifted away from the hobby because it felt too much like work. A comics retailer friend of mine brought me back when he invited me into his Pathfinder group, that reawakened my love of RPGs for good.

Kromoff: Oh man! I played a ton of Top Secret when I was a kid. Strangely I also was a camp counselor at a Boy Scout camp for many years but my focus was not as D&D, I was responsible for a lot of the art and craft-based merit badge classes we did. We played a ton of TTRPGs on staff though. I think there was one summer we went through most of the Palladium games like Ninjas & Super Spys, R.I.F.T.S., and Beyond the Supernatural, because we were just trying out new flavors of games. So is it safe to assume you play regularly?

Van Lente: I have run a monthly group for almost a decade now, and we started out doing Call of Cthulhu (I have a couple professional horror writers in my group), but then we ran a bunch of old-school TSR stuff like Metamorphosis Alpha, Top Secret, Boot Hill, and Marvel Super Heroes, the latter of which really holds up! Recently I fell in love with Modiphius’s 2d20 system through their Dishonored RPG, and right now–our next session is this Sunday, actually–I am running a John Carter of Mars campaign, a setting I got into while doing Die!namite zombie fest for Dynamite.

Kromoff: Oh man! Those are some great games! As a fan of dime store novels and pulp in general the idea of a Princess of Mars-themed game is pretty freaking cool! I’ll have to look into that. Now when venturing into the world of Golarion what source material did you read to get acclimated to the world?

Van Lente: Given the subject matter, Book of the Dead of course, and Impossible Lands in manuscript form (is that out yet?). Our heroes venture into the Spellscar Desert, and I leaned on Cradle of Quarts for that. I wrote some short fiction for the Paizo blog when Guns & Gears came out, some of that snuck in too.

Kromoff: Guns and Gears is one heck of a sourcebook. I have that on my stack to do a deep-dive article very soon. Was there anything that when you were getting up to speed really excited you about the world?

Van Lente: Well, Golarion as a setting is really the best thing about Pathfinder in my opinion, and the idea of a country made up entirely of undead is pretty great. But I also like the wizard fascists of Nex even more. The Spellscar Desert with its mana storms is super unique, that features heavily into #3. For that reason that was probably the most fun single issue to write, to come up with crazier and crazier ideas to drive the Iconics crazy, just as I would if I was Gamemastering.

Kromoff: I am so stoked you said that! I think Golrion is such a rich world and the team over at Paizo has not missed yet on the new source material they have been putting out. I’m a big fan of the P1 stuff but P2 has been a heck of a romp for sure.

Now regular readers of the Pathfinder comics have seen so many stories about Ezren, Kyra, Merisiel, Valeros, and Seoni but it looks like with this new outing we are seeing new icons come to the forefront of the story. From the covers of Wake The Dead #1 I was able to spot who looks like Seelah the paladin, Sajan the monk of Irori, Lem the halfling bard, the dwarven ranger Harsk and as a pleasant surprise the sword cane-wielding Quinn, easily one of the most striking of the Icons in Pathfinders arsenal. What was the inspiration to move away from the old party and explore these new characters?

Van Lente: That was a Paizo directive but I suspect it’s because if you’ve read my Fumbus comics one-shot and the aforementioned Guns & Gears fiction on the blog you know that original bunch is off on an adventure in Acadia, and while that’s happening Harsk, the ranger, who is also a member of that group, gets sent by the Pathfinder Society to Nex on a secret mission to meet up with a defector from the Land of the Dead, Geb. The problem he has is all these new Iconics have also been sent by competing organizations to meet with the same defector, so the question of which one of them gets to her first animates (forgive the term) the first issue.

Kromoff: I am so not caught up on the recent Pathfinder comics, the local shops are super hard to navigate these days and I am woefully behind. I will have to figure out how to catch up soon.

Of the new group, my favorite is probably Lem. I often find myself in the role of the Storyteller at the table and bards are some of the most enjoyable NPCs to use to interact with my players because you can give them a reason to have all the small bits of information to further the story in the form of rumors or songs. Was there a character you enjoyed writing the most?

Van Lente: I like Lem a lot too. My interpretation of him is that he’s a bit of a diva. He whinges a lot. If he knew what green M&Ms were, he’d demand them in his dressing room. My all-time favorite fantasy PC is a bard and so I have a lot of familiarity playing that class. It was fun to work the unique Pathfinder class traits for it into the story, it’s a unqiue skill set and makes Lem a real favorite.

Kromoff: As an open and avid fan of Geb ( the place and the spectral necromancer who rules over the land of his namesake ) Wake The Dead intrigues me as it may give more insight into the material presented in Pathfinder’s Book of the Dead (review here). Are you able to let us in on any areas of interest these newly spotlit icons will be adventuring in?

Van Lente: Do the words “Bone Wall” mean anything to you? (laugh evilly)

Kromoff: OHHH MAN! If we actually get to see the Blood Lords do what I think they are going to do with that thing I am going to lose my mind! That is so exciting!

Aside from seeing cool places and artifacts in action, one of my favorite parts about comics that are based on TTRPG IPs is that they often contain additional stats on monsters, items, and elements that can be added to your weekly game. Will there be any supplemental material like that included in these books?

Van Lente: Yep, and Paizo is generating them now. I am as excited to see them as everyone else.

Kromoff: RAD! Speaking of stats and rules on monsters and items is there anything from the Settings Books or core books you were able to showcase in the pages as you put the scripts together for the comics?

Van Lente: Of course. I really liked a lot of the unique undead types in Book of the Dead and used them throughout the series. My favoite monster from that book was the Fluxwraith, just a really clever idea for an adversary, and when one of those shows up…well, things get gnarly. I’ll leave it at that.

Kromoff: I’m so excited about this book right now! I can’t wait to read them all! Okay, okay, real quick… a standard round in Pathfinder is six seconds. If you had six seconds to tell the readers about the book what would you say?

Van Lente: All-new party, all-new lands to explore, all-new awesome to fuel your own campaigns. Adventure, heart, humor, and zombies. Not necessarily in that order.

Kromoff: As we wrap up I just want to thank you again for giving me a chance to talk to you about this. Please let our readers know where they can keep up with you and your work.

Van Lente: My pleasure! If you can spell my name you can follow me on any of the big social media sites. The easiest thing to do is to sign up for my quarterly newsletter on the home page.