AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

The phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to my agent, Jonathan Matson. He said there was a fellow named John Cutter, who wanted to speak to me about a game deal. I told Jonathan to give him my phone number at home and forgot about it.

A while later the phone rang again and a pleasant voice at the other end identified himself as John Cutter, a game producer for Dynamix, Inc. a company in Eugene, Oregon.

John had produced the second game in the successful Might & Magic series while at New World Computing, Inc. and was itching to do the same for Dynamix, a company known primarily for flight simulations, particularly the popular Red Baron. He had been told by one of the firm’s founders, Jeff Tunell, that I was a good fantasy author and thought maybe I could write them a game.

I explained to John that he couldn’t afford me, but then introduced him to the idea of licensing, and from that point forward, we were on the same wavelength.

That’s how Betrayal at Krondor started.

Fantasy role-playing games and books both use stories, but in different ways. My experience prior to working with John and his crew at Dynamix was limited to my own involvement with the creation of Midkemia, the fantasy world in which my work resides, and with playing other people’s computer role-playing games.

Neal Hallford and John Cutter wrote the game. I got to review things, but they wrote it. I talked with them about story, gave them ideas, listened to their ideas, and the game took form. But even I had no idea what it would look like, or play like, until it was finished. I got the script, but John had simply printed everything and sent it to me, without any idea of how it hung together. The first time I jumped from the opening narrative to the initial dialogue in the first sub-quest, I was lost. And that wasn’t the last time.

When I finally got a look at the finished game, it was at the Drake Hotel in Chicago before my first press interview on the game at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1993. It was a revelation. It was my world, but it wasn’t. These were my characters, but they weren’t. They came alive and ran around and fought and died and started over and fought again. When it came time to give the interview, I didn’t want to stop playing.

The rest, as they say, is history. Betrayal at Krondor won awards, sat atop the Entertainment Weekly CD game bestseller list for six months, and is considered by many to be the best computer fantasy role-playing game ever created. And most of the credit goes to John, Neal and the team at Dynamix.

When I approached turning Betrayal into this novel, I was faced with many decisions, revolving around story elements that make for a really good game, yet are either inconsistent with the literary Midkemia, or are just too silly to believe. ‘The Quest for Ale’ and ‘Find The Lost Minstrel’, to name two sub-quests in the game, were clearly going to totally destroy the tension of the story.

That being the case, I decided that rather than attempt to ‘novelize’ the game, I would take the core story of the game and tell it in novel form. So that’s what I did; I took Neal and John’s story for the game, Betrayal at Krondor, and started churning it around in my head, deciding scene by scene what would go, stay, be changed or introduced. The book you hold in your hand is the central story of the game, without most of the sub-quests and side trips, and without a great deal of what makes a game a game. But the story of Owyn and Gorath, James and Locklear is at the heart the same one.

So for those of you who have played the game, Betrayal at Krondor, this novel, Krondor: The Betrayal, will be very familiar, but will also contain a few surprises. For those who have never seen the game, just consider this another missing chapter in the ongoing history of the world of Midkemia and the City of Krondor.