When it comes to writers, Sarah Madsen is the definition of a multi-hyphenate.
Madsen, who lives in Atlanta, writes novels like “Weaver’s Folly” and her newest book “When the Stars Bleed.” But she also is a game designer, writing for video games like “The Necromancer’s Tale” and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) like “Keys From the Golden Vault.”
Madsen will be a guest at this year’s MomoCon, Atlanta’s annual celebration of all things gaming, comics, and anime, which runs from May 21-24. Ahead of the convention, I spoke with Madsen about her career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To start, I’d love to hear just a little bit about you – where you’re from, how you first developed an interest in TTRPGs and video games, and where that interest came from.
Sarah Madsen: I’ve been in Georgia, in the greater Atlanta Metro area, since 1995. I moved down here from New Jersey. My interest in tabletop games – honestly, I’d known about D&D back in the ‘80s when it started becoming a big thing. We had the animated cartoon, it had really hit the broader pop culture, to an extent – not as much as I think it has now, with “Stranger Things” and everything, but it was still part of the conversation. But I didn’t really know how one played D&D, or how you found people to play Dungeons & Dragons and other games with. So I really got into tabletop gaming when I got to college, and I met other people who played.
With video games, I’ve been playing video games since – gosh, since I was playing “Space Invaders” on my dad’s little – [laughs] not even Atari – television back in the early ‘80s. I’ve always been a huge fan of video games and tabletop games from a storytelling perspective. RPGs are my favorite kind of video game to play, just because it’s so immersive and allows you to experience such an amazing story. I’ve been playing for a long time, and I’ve been a writer for a long time, and that sort of led me down the path to game design.
Talk to me about how that happened. When you started playing, was there ever a thought in your head of, I could do this for a living?
Madsen: It’s really funny, because it’s one of those things that between playing tabletop games and playing video games, there’s so much writing that goes into it. But it never really clicked that there are people that write this, and that is a thing that somebody could do as a job. [Laughs] I just had that disconnect until my first tabletop RPG game design.
I’ve been playing tabletop and LARP, which is Live Action Role Playing games, for a long time. One of my friends that I met through my LARP had a friend who was making their own tabletop RPG book. She knew that I was a writer and that I was a gamer, and so she came to me and said, “Hey, did you ever think about doing game design? Because I have a friend who needs additional people to write.” I was like, “Oh! No, I hadn’t thought of that.” [Laughs] That was my first [moment of], oh wait! There are people who actually do that. That could be me, that’s pretty neat.
I want to talk about the concept of writing an adventure – how does the process differ from other types of writing? When I think about it, I’m like, okay, you have to take into account the different choices that someone might make. Talk me through that a little bit.
Madsen: So novel writing is sort of its own little encapsulated experience. As the author, you are in charge of everything, as much as you can be. We joke that our characters sometimes take us in directions that we don’t expect the story to go in. But still, at the end of the day, you are in charge of what goes on the page.
When you’re writing for TTRPGs, you are still the one in charge of what goes on the page, but you are not in charge of how the material you have written is interacted with, to a larger extent. Everybody brings their own experiences to reading books, but when you’re playing TTRPGs, you can’t plan for every potential choice that the players are going to make at the table. Because you could plan six options, and the players are going to pick the seventh one. Every time, they will surprise you.
I think the key to writing good adventures for tabletop games is providing enough setting and character meat for the [game master] or the [dungeon master] to then play with. You want to give them: this is the quest, this is the problem or the quest that the characters have been put on. Here are the players, the other NPCs that are involved in the situation, and what their motivations are, so that when the players go off the rails, inevitably, and take a path that the author, the writer of the adventure did not plan for, the DM can look at that and go, “Okay, well, I understand why the other people in this situation are doing what they’re doing, so I can therefore extrapolate out from that.” You really want to give them enough inspiration and enough information that they can then run with that, and go from there.
Do you have a favorite adventure that you’ve written throughout your career?
Madsen: Oh man. I have a bunch, and I love them all. I really liked writing “The Stygian Gambit.” Wizards of the Coast did a book called “Keys From the Golden Vault,” which was a collection of heist adventures. “The Stygian Gambit” was the one I got to write, and it was the casino heist. So, basically, [they asked] will you please come do fantasy “Ocean’s 11?” [Laughs] Yes! I would love to. That was a lot of fun to write.
Shifting to the novels, I know you have a new one coming out this year?
Madsen: It actually just came out. What month are we in? [Laughs]
May.
Madsen: Yeah, it’s been a couple of weeks now, I think. It’s called “When the Stars Bleed.” It’s a space opera, fun space romp in spaceships, with aliens and all sorts of fun stuff.
I was reading about your other work, and “Weaver’s Folly” came up, which is set in a futuristic Atlanta, which I loved. I live in Atlanta and it’s not a place I would normally think of someone doing something like that with. It’s always New York or L.A., but I just found that so much fun. Could you talk a little bit about imagining what futuristic Atlanta looks like, and how it’s unique?
Madsen: Yeah, and I think you’re right in that a lot of the futuristic stories are set in these huge metropolises, right? Atlanta is very unique in so many ways, but part of it was I’m here, and so I know this place. In fact, I know it a lot better now than I did when I first wrote “Weaver’s Folly,” and I think that there will probably be some additions to it when I write the next book, simply because I understand the area so much better than I did however many years ago.
I wanted to play with a smaller [place] but still a city … Like you said, you think of New York, you think of Chicago, you think of L.A., you think of all of these big, really influential cities. But Atlanta still has a lot going on and a lot going for it. So being able to take the city that exists now and looking at it through the lens of, what will this look like in 50, 100 [years] ? Not even crazy futuristic. Just the near future, just a few technological leaps and bounds ahead of here. What will we look like, and how will that affect the region and the characters that live here? I really liked playing with that idea, because Atlanta is so interesting in that it’s the city in the forest. We have so much green space here as well. The futuristic New York, the futuristic Chicago, is all very metal and steel and glass. There’s no nature, and I don’t think that would happen here. We want to hold on to our green spaces, we want to hold on to that forested area, and so what would that look like while still having that futuristic, slightly dystopian aspect to it?
Obviously there are differences between writing novels versus adventures versus video games – do you have one that you prefer, or one that comes more naturally to you?
Madsen: I’ve been writing novels and stories, just prose fiction, the longest. So, I definitely think that’s what comes naturally to me. When I have a new idea for something, it’s a new idea for a book. I don’t dream up TTRPG adventures or video game adventures, at least not yet, [laughs] when I’m in the shower. When I’m thinking up my own personal projects, it also always comes back to novel writing, and I think that was just because that was where my first love was.
What is the relationship like when you’re writing an adventure between you and the company or whoever it is commissioning it? How much freedom do you have, what is the creative relationship like?
Madsen: It really depends on the project. In some cases, like with the casino heist, they came to me. They were like, “We need a casino heist. This is the slot we haven’t filled yet in this book.” … In some cases, it’s, “Hey, we have this setting, we need an adventure written in the setting.” And you have a lot more freedom as far as what that story is, specifically, the kinds of antagonists or monsters and things that you put into it. In some cases, it’s a lot shorter, it’s a lot more streamlined. In some cases, I’ve gotten whole outlines where it’s like, this is the basic story, these are the beats we need you to hit. Expand on that.
Even with the ones where I’m given an outline, there’s still a good amount of creativity that goes into that, simply just by the nature of the design work. I know that this is a plot point, but how exactly is that executed on the page? What does that look like? What are the voices for these characters? It’s a wide variety of what gets dictated to me versus what I get to put to get to create myself, but they’re all fun in their own ways.
Talk to me about your relationship with MomoCon, and being able to be there as a guest and what that experience is like.
Madsen: I actually started going to MomoCon a while back. Years ago, before I was ever a guest, because I’m local. We would go, and we would take my kids … it’s very kid-friendly, because it’s so self-contained in the Georgia World Congress Center. Like, DragonCon is spread out over all the hotels and all of the everything else, and it’s very big and intimidating, whereas Momo Con is still big, but you have it a little more contained, and it’s more comfortable to be able to send your kids off.
I’ve always enjoyed coming to MomoCon, both as an attendee [and a guest] – just coming to all the panels and seeing all the guests and enjoying their gigantic 24/7 arcade that they have set up. I spend many hours playing pinball there and wandering the vendor hall. As a guest, it’s been absolutely great too. They take really good care of us. They have a lot of really fun panels and a lot of really interesting conversations with lots of other very interesting guests with a lot of diverse [interests]. Because tabletop art, tabletop RPGs, are not a monolith. It’s not just Dungeons & Dragons. There’s so much more to it, and being able to get all of these different guests with different experiences, both from other freelance designers, designers that work for these companies, designers who have made their own companies, and everything in between – it’s great. I love it.
Do you have anything this year in particular that you’re really excited about, or something that every year you’re sort of excited to see?
Madsen: I’m really excited because Critical Role is gonna be there. I’m a huge Critical Role fan. I’ve been for a long time. A couple of the cast members came years ago, and actually that was the first MomoCon I went to, in big part because they were going. That kicked me into gear and finally made me go to MomoCon. I’m very excited to see them back in Atlanta again, and I’m very interested to see how the con handles [it]. Because when they were here before they were very popular, but they’re so much more popular now. I’m sure they’re going to bring in a lot more folks than we usually have, or new people who maybe haven’t come in the past. So I’m really excited for these new folks to come, and maybe be able to experience everything else MomoCon has to offer.
