Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #729: Michael Ryan, Part 1

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

I've started recording "Drive to Work" from home due to the pandemic, so I decided to use the opportunity to do something that's hard to do in the car, interview people over the phone. This podcast is part one of a talk I have with Michael Ryan, my fellow co-creator of the Weatherlight Saga. We talk about how we made the story, including many of the characters.

Well, I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So, one of the cool things I'm trying to do, since I'm not actually in my car, is do some stuff that I can't normally do. And one of those is have guests call me on the phone, which is surprisingly actually hard to do in the car. So, today's guest is Michael Ryan. So, he was my co-creator of the Weatherlight Saga. So Michael, hello. Good morning. How's it going, Mark? Your drive seems like it's going well this morning. Yes, yes. I made it to work. So, okay, so what I want to do today is talk a little bit about sort of introduce the audience to who you are and sort of how you got involved.

And then I want to talk Weatherlight Saga. So tell a little bit, how did you come to Wizards? How did you end up at Wizards? Oh, I ended up at Wizards in early 95, like just, I think, right before you did, because I had been an editor at the National Council of Teachers of English, but I was a huge Magic player. And the Duelist, you all may remember the duelist, was coming out on a somewhat irregular basis.

So I wrote a fan letter and said, Love your game, love your magazine, everything's great, why are you always so late? If you need a freelancer to work on the magazine, I work at the National Council of Teachers of English, they make us be on time. And Watsi reached out and said, You know, instead of a freelancer, how would you like to come in and work on magic? So I moved cross-country from the Midwest

and settled in Seattle as one of the magic editors at Whitsun Coast. So I first met you, actually, you were the editor of my puzzle book. That's, I think, how we met. Yes. My favorite story from that era was that you and I were working on your puzzle book

and working on flavor text for an expansion at the same time in the middle of the night. It was 3 o'clock in the morning. Mirage, by the way. Oh, it was Mirage. Yeah, it was Mirage. And we were both absolutely exhausted. There was a designer there named Kim. Kim was working on printouts of the puzzling book, and she'd come over and give us the proofs.

We'd proof them, send them back. But we were also writing flavor text and we had Dwarven... Dwarven Minor was, yeah.

Dwarven Minor. And we didn't have any text. We didn't have any flavor text. We said, punch, drunk, exhausted. You said,

oh, I got an idea. Fetch the Pestrit or Paca. We've got Dwarves in the rutabaga. And we laughed for an easy 20 minutes and said, sure, I got an idea. Fetch the test ridder, Baca. We've got doors in the rutabagas. And we laughed for an easy 20 minutes and said, sure, that's Final Firetex. Let's put it on the car. I also wrote reparations that night. That's the, sorry I burned down your village.

Here's some gold. Yeah, I see that. We were quite tired. Okay, so you were an editor. I was in R&D. We became friends. And you and I, we both have a writing background. And so

we thought it was kind of weird that Magic didn't have an ongoing story. So what do we do? We make a story! And it was an epic story, I want to say. Epic. Asada. We built a board and said, here's

how we should go across nine expansions. At that time, Magic was releasing two small expansions and one big expansion as a block. And so we planned it out in a three-act structure and said, this is what will happen to the first block. This will be second block, this will be third block. We're going to need a whole host of characters. We're going to need all kinds of weird settings. We have to have a big culmination. It was spectacular. It was epic.

Yeah, so basically what happened was we put together a presentation. Like, we just made a story on our own, and then we went to the brand team, and we pitched it. We said, we think you should have a story. Here's why. We had a whole PowerPoint, I believe. And then we pitched our story. And they said yes. They're like, oh, this sounds like an awesome idea, and they signed us up.

So I want to talk a little bit today, or mostly I want to talk today about sort of the making of the Weatherlight Saga. So what came first? Do you remember what came first? Sure, sure. I remember distinctly coming out of that meeting, and they were, the upper echelon were really excited about the story idea, but they were, in our scheme, a little too overly excited because the Weatherlight expansion was, I don't know, two weeks away, three weeks away from going to print. It wasn't long. And they said, well, start it now. And we said, well, you know, we kind of had it plotted out this way. And they said, no they said, well, start it now. And we said, well, you know, we kind of

have it plotted out this way. And they said, no, no, no. Start it now. We want the story to start with the expansion that's going to print in three weeks. And we went back and looked at those cards. Well, it was a little before three weeks, because all the art hadn't been commissioned yet. But it was late. It was late in the process. Like, we were

a lot of the art had been commissioned. And so we sort of fitted in late in the process. Like, we were, a lot of the art had been commissioned, and so we sort of fitted in late in the process. That is true. And there was some serious retrofitting that went on, saying, well, we're not going to get a whole lot of story into these cards, but we can get some. So where should we put it? And that presented us with a whole new situation,

which was we had Sisay as the captain of the Weatherlight. There was flavor tax, and there was material associated with that. And we said, well, we weren't quite ready for her. Now what do we do? Yeah, so, okay, so let's talk a little bit. So the Weatherlight and Sisay, you and I did not create the flying ship Weatherlight nor the character of Sisay.

Correct, correct. That was part, it played a small role in the Mirage story. I believe that she transported one of the characters, I'm trying to remember the story of the Mirage story,

but anyway, they played a tiny role, but we liked the idea of having a regular set of characters that we said, we're going to tell a story over time. We want you to be able to relate to somebody, so we need a normal set of characters.

And we thought that, oh, a flying ship might be a perfect setting. So we sort of took the Weatherlight and SIS-A, which we didn't make, and then we added a lot to it. We made the crew. The crew, there was no named crew, just was SIS-A. So what I distinctly recall talking about,, just was to say. So what we, what I distinctly recall talking about too

was sitting in a meeting and saying, with just the two of us and saying, what are the, what are the archetypes here? We have, we have the Weatherlight,

which is kind of like, you know, the Starship Enterprise. It's kind of like Battlestar Galactica. It's kind of, we, there are a lot of,

it's the Odyssey. There's all of these stories that have been around forever and ever and ever. What are the archetypes? What do people expect to see? What are the popular ones that people will be able to gravitate to? And let's remember, in the same context, we have multiple arenas in which to put specific kinds of characters.

We need somebody to be, you know, for white magic and for black magic, and we've got a lot of work to do to make sure that everybody has somebody that they can link up with. And we wanted to do a whole bunch of different creature types. We wanted to show off the breadth of what magic could do. So we didn't want the crew to be just human, for example. We wanted, I mean, obviously a decent number of them were human, but we wanted some other characters beyond just humans. Right, right, which is how we ended up,

I seem to recall that one of the very first characters that we came up with was the Minotaur Tongars. I remember him being really early in the process. I also remember Squee being really early in the process, too. Yeah, I think we wanted a Minotaur, we wanted a Goblin. We said, well, what would the Minotaur do, and what would the Goblin do? And the Minotaur, I think the idea was, we liked the idea of, one of the archetypes is

what's called proud warrior. So Joseph Campbell wrote a book called, what's the name of the book? Power of Myth. Power of Myth. And he talks all about sort of, there's certain story structures, and so we took one of the structures, which is the epic hero, right? Right. The epic hero and his legacy and his history.

Right. And so we use that as a structure. And then we use a lot of, all the characters we based on character archetypes. So Tangirth was the proud warrior. And you've seen this character, like the archetype is very popular, which is, it's somebody that are at war, but they're very

proud, and they have great care of what they do, and they take their job very seriously. And they're very, very loyal. Tongar's character was loyal to Sisay, had been first mate with Sisay. So, you know, you've got that commitment and that devotion, and you know that if

the new captain, who we'll get to the new captain ever earns Tongar's loyalty you'll have it forever yes um okay so

and then Squee um we knew we wanted we knew we wanted a goblin I think we said look it's gotta be comic relief

like what you know like we felt like you couldn't have a goblin be too serious because it wouldn't like the fun part of a goblin is they're funny. At least, I felt that the fun part was they're funny. So, we decided early on that Squee was going to be, like, the cabin boy, like,

the comic relief. And I named Squee after I'd written a piece of flavor text for Relentless Assault, which was, someone had written, the first version was version was like a goblin childhood rhyme but I didn't like it so in the meeting I rewrote it because they said if you want to you have to change it

you have to change it now because we have to be done with this so it was like flog and squee in a tree see something flea flea flea or something

anyway that was it yeah so flog and Squee I named Squee because it rhymed with tree but I thought it was a funny name and so when we were naming it

I said uh let's name him Squee and you were like okay uh I also remember saying we should bring Flog along at some point

I don't think we ever got back to it we never got back to Flog I like to think that Flog was Squee's brother we never heard the story of Flog so um okay so yeah I think Tongarth and right Flog was Squee's brother. We've never heard the story of Flog, so. Okay, so yeah, I think Tongarth and, right, Tongarth and Squee were super early.

Gerard was also pretty early, I think. Gerard was early, yes. So tell us, where did Gerard come from? Gerard was easy. Gerard was, I don't know if you remember the conversation, but I'm a huge Harrison Ford fan. I didn't know that. Yeah, he's kind of, Gerard was sort of like Harrison Ford's Han Solo and Indiana Jones combined with Errol Flynn's characters from, you know, the old movies of the Seahawk or Adventure to Robin Hood or Captain Blood. He was a swashbuckler, but he had this

flaw, this secret, this history that he had denied, that he now had to step up for because people were looking to him. He couldn't go off and be Han Solo anymore. He couldn't go off and say, I'm just going to do whatever I want. Now there were people looking to him saying, you're the only one we can count on. You've got to step up. You can't just be this swashbuckler anymore. Yeah, so he, the archetype he was is what's called the reluctant hero.

In the Joseph Campbell stuff that we were following, the person, the main story, the main character has a destiny, but at first they won't, they won't, like they try to walk away from it. And circumstances keep bringing them back until they finally feel the pressure of moral responsibility to step into the role. And even then, they're periodically looking for ways to get out of it. Can I abandon this? But the people around them keep the pressure on to say, this is you, you must acknowledge who

you are. Um, okay. Right. So, yeah. So Gerard was, right, kind of, normally you see that kind of character, the roguish kind of character as a secondary character, and we thought it was kind of cool to make him the protagonist, which is something that we hadn't really seen in that, you know, like, Han Solo's not the main character, Han Solo is kind of the side character.

Secondary character, right, exactly. We thought it was cool to put that person, we thought it was neat to take the rogue character and the hero sort of in denial and put them together. We thought that was a cool combination. Which gives an enormous amount of clout when you do that to your other characters who might be considered secondary, because they all have reactions to that, and suddenly they come to the forefront. When your reluctant hero says, I don't think I want to do this,

but the other characters know it's right, it should be done, you get that immediate conflict. There's loyalty combined with the conflict of why aren't you doing what we expect you to do. It lends itself to great storytelling. So I think the next character, tell me if I'm wrong, remember the next character that we did was Hannah?

Hannah, that's right. So remember, Michael and I were involved in the story in the early part. We would not be involved in the later part. So in our original story, Urza was not part of the story as it would later become a big part of the story. So when we wanted to connect to the older story, and so we did that through Hannah.

So we knew that the ship, when we thought of the ship, we thought of stuff like Star Trek, like what are the roles you need on the ship? And we knew we needed somebody who was the mechanic basically. We needed somebody that made the ship run. And I liked the idea of it being a female character

and I loved the idea that since it was a magic ship, that this person would have training in magic. And so the idea we came up with was that she was Beren and Rain's daughter. Beren being sort of the right-hand man of Urza,

and that she trained at the Magical School, at Teleria. She trained at Telerian Academy, but instead of wanting to be a wizard, she got involved with artifacts.

And that would be like a big disappointment to her dad. Right, right. And her dad, if I remember correctly, feeling disappointed about the direction

she had gone, they had a conflict that was never acknowledged. He then trained somebody else. He trained another character. Yes, Ertai. He trained Ertai. Trained Ertai. Right.

So when we put Ertai, who was our sort of apprentice mage, we put him on the ship as well. There's a new conflict there because Hannah knows about Ertai and Ertai's relationship with her father. Yeah. So, you know, because you're always looking for places where characters can either interact or conflict directly to get a more interesting story out of it. How are they going to work this out?

What is the connection here? And once you understand the connection, ooh, how's that going to impact the long-term story? Yeah, and so Hannah and then Ertai were our link to the past because they tied the Toleran Academy. They had an interesting relationship with each other because one was Baron's actual child and one was kind of Baron's protege. And that Ertai, in some ways, he trained Ertai

because Hannah rejected sort of what he wanted to teach her. But the fact that she got really into magical objects meant that she made a lot of sense as our engineer, essentially, our mechanic. And then I think we decided early on it was important to us to set up the story that Gerard was with the crew and then left. And so we... He had known Sisay, right? He had been first mate once upon a time. Right, right, right. And it was important that the reason they come get him is not because they have no idea who he is, but he had been part of the crew.

And so we created a relationship. We wanted a relationship for Gerard and it ended up being Hannah because we wanted somebody who felt really abandoned when he left. And so there'd be this interesting tension between them, but they had had a relationship,

but when he left, he left for his own reasons, but she felt very abandoned when he left. And I thought there was... Once again, we were trying to make... We wanted to tell a story for many years, so we wanted to make a lot of interesting relationships between the characters. Right, and this is where you get into

the things that Hannah knew that Gerard didn't entirely knew. He knew that there was a past, but there was this thing called the legacy, which was all these artifacts. We were starting to come up with a story, not just the characters and how they interacted, but what they were doing.

Why, if they had been kidnapped, but this was all about this legacy. A bunch of artifacts that had to all be brought together to accomplish a greater goal, and we had to have a villain who was after it, which accounts for Sissay's kidnapping, and Gerard had to own it, had to go get it, had to find the pieces that create the long-term quest.

Right, well, so we made the villain, so Volrath, the main villain, we made very early, because in Joseph Campbell, your villain and your hero have to have a relationship. They're not just, they're not just like strangers that just meet, that there's something, they tie together. And so one of the real common things to do is making them related. And so we had them be adopted brothers rather than blood brothers. And it's not unlike, it's interesting, because when I first saw the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming out, and there was a whole line between Thor and some of the other characters saying, this is your brother.

And he said, you can't do that because he's my brother. And somebody said, yeah, but this is what he did. And he said, well, he's adopted. And I thought, oh, that's kind of what we did. We had a guy named Sidar Kondo. I remember coming up with him. Sidar Kondo was... And he had been sort of Gerard and Volrath,

who was at that... Vol, yeah. Vol, had raised both of them, and then they went in different directions. And so that was sort of our connection there, is that hero directly opposite from villain, and they know each other, so they know enough to act on each other. Yeah, and part of the story that we built in Gerard was, he, as a baby, he's given to Sedar Kondo, along with the legacy, and Karns, we'll get to in a second, and said,

you need to protect him. You know, he's destined to do something important and evil forces will try to get him. So we're hiding him away with you. You need to raise him. And then Vool is jealous of Siddhar Kondo's relationship with Gerard because Vool is the actual blood son of Kondo, Siddhar Kondo, but Siddhar Kondo has this very,

creates this very strong bond with Gerard, and that's some of the source of the conflict between the two of them. Right, right. So, that brings us to Karn, who is part of the legacy. Let's talk about Karn, because Karn, I gather, has really gained momentum over the years.

Yes, yes. It's funny, Karn and Squee are the two crew members that are still in the game, that haven't died or whatever. So Karn, I really, really wanted an artifact creature, and I think I said Gollum. I think you and I talked. We said we want an artifact creature, and I think we decided that Gollum made a lot of sense.

Yep, right away. Oh, and so the archetype we wanted for him, there's an archetype known as, what's the name of the archetype? It is the Gentle Giant. Right. And the idea is, it's a character that's the most powerful character, but they're the sweetest, kindest sort of character. That while they seem really gruff, they're actually very kind. And we came up with this interesting story for Karn

that he had accidentally killed somebody and he had vowed a life of pacifism. David the Pacifist. And at the time he killed a human being, he was protecting Gerard.

Yes. So that we end up with an interesting relationship between the two of them. And so when he rejoins Gerard on the Weatherlight, Yes. Yeah. And so one of the things that happens in the story is Voul is jealous of Gerard. And so Voul sets up... These criminals come and rob and steal Gerard of all the legacy, including Karn. And that is all orchestrated.

Gerard doesn't know the time, but it was orchestrated by Voul. And Karn and all the legacy get taken away. And the reason that's important is Sisay gets enlisted to go track down all the legacy. That is Sisay's actual major job. That's what the Weatherlight is doing, is

it's trying to find all the pieces of the legacy, and it spends years doing that. So here's a question for you. Do you remember where Karn got his name? Because you came up with it. Where did Karn get his name? No, I don't remember. Well, I do remember

which would be past Hannah. I just want to mention. Yeah. Hannah was named, we dropped the H off the N, I don't remember why, but Hannah was named after

D&D character that my then wife was playing. As did Selenia later on who was an angel. Also named for a D&D character that Melody was playing at the time.

I don't remember where Cairn's name came from. It came from the word Cairn. C-A-I-R-N. Oh, right. Right. Now I remember from the word cairn. C-A-I-R-N. Oh, right. Right. Now I remember. So a cairn is a bunch of rocks that's like a funeral.

Yeah, like a, it's in memory of something. And because he was, cairn was made out of silver, made out of rocks, but I guess it was silver. But anyway, so we did a riff on that word. I don't remember where all the names came from.

I remember, Karn I remember, like Tom Garth, I have no idea where Tom Garth came or Gerard came from. No, Gerard came from something that I had read someplace,

like a sci-fi book somewhere years and years ago, but I don't remember very many. I mean, there's a few that I know where they came from. There were some characters later on that were references to your mom and my parents. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. But some of the early ones, I don't remember really well.

I remember talking about Crovax at great length because, you know because the V sound and the X sound, you know, the Voltwrap has a hard V sound. The V and the X is a hard sound, and we wanted Crovax to be to seem simultaneously

heroic and villainous. Yeah, so what, so Crovax came about because we wanted a vampire on the crew. So we wanted all the colors to get represented. We needed someone from black. So, for example, Gerard was kind of white-red,

Tinegarf was red, Hannah was white-blue, Karn was an artifact, Ertai was blue. We needed black. And we love the idea of having a vampire on board, but we, like... It's fun. We're like, well, no one's going to just let a vampire be on board.

So we like, well, he won't start a vampire. And as part of the story, we'll make him a vampire. So by the time he becomes a vampire, they're not going to throw him off the boat or anything. Right. And he had joined them. And I mentioned that Angel Selenia a little bit ago. Selenia was in wrath, was on the plane of wrath. And that was his strongest motivation. His family had been protected by Selenia a little bit ago. Selenia was in wrath, was on the plane of wrath, and that was his strongest motivation.

His family had been protected by Selenia and dumped his whole family, and so he wanted to go and find this angel and bring her back. Well, he was in love with her, right? Yeah, he loved her, yes. Yeah, there was a cursed artifact

that produced Selenia, and he fell in love loved her, yes. And he... Yeah, there's a cursed artifact......he set his goal for himself. There's a cursed artifact that produced Selenia. And he fell in love with her, but that was part of the curse, I believe. And he let her go and then she left. Like, he freed her because he loved her and then she just left. But she had gone to Wrath. And so Stark, which we'll get to in a second,

knew they were in Wrath, but only Crovax knew how to get to Wrath, which was why they to in a second, knew they were in Wrath, but only Crovax knew how to get to Wrath, which was why they needed Crovax's help. And that was through his bond with Selenia, I believe is how he knew where Wrath was, or how to get there. Since you mentioned Stark, let's talk about

Stark. Okay, so we knew Sisley got kidnapped. We needed somehow to how did they know who kidnapped her? And so we decided that somebody who worked for Volrath would have reasons to come and ask for help. And the help

was that Volrath had not only kidnapped Cisse, but had taken Stark's daughter, Takara. And so the reason Stark comes to them is he's like, I'll help you get your person if you help me get mine. I need to rescue my daughter. But Stark is really untrustful.

We like the idea of having somebody you couldn't trust that was, you know, like they needed him, but he wasn't something you really could trust. We thought that was a neat character. And I remember thinking at the time about Stark as if he were the sort of Kaiser Soze character, as if he knew all kinds of things and wouldn't tell anybody and doled it out a little bit at a time

to get what he wanted to advance. That he was very duplicitous. He didn't want to ever turn your back on him, but they needed him. We liked the idea of a character that you didn't trust. ever turn your back on him, but they needed him. We liked the idea of a character that you didn't trust. We thought that was

a neat character. Yeah. Okay, how about... And I happen to know where his name came from, by the way. Oh, where's Stark come from? I had read about

Charles Starkweather. He was a serial killer, and I thought the name Stark was such a good name. Starkweather seemed a little too much. There's only one Starkweather that anybody would recognize. I thought Stark is a harsh name. It's got that hard K sound in it.

And it's a word unto itself if you take the E off of it. And I thought, that's a good name. That's a really good name. We should use it. And then this character, as we were developing him, seemed to fit perfectly with that kind of name. Okay, next. Miri. So I talked about how we had white, we had blue, we had red, we had black,

but we had green. No green. We needed a green character. So Miri came about because we wanted a character which was Gerard's friend, best friend. And I like, I don't remember, I like the idea that it was a female character, but there was no relation, there was no, they were just friends. There was nothing romantic about them at all.

They were just friends. They had trained together under another character. Multani. Multani. And that was their background, that they knew each other. Well, and it was them and Rofellos trained. Right, right, and Rofellos. It gave a character to whom Gerard could both air his personal fears or his worries about

what was going on, and who could offer criticism of him that could be out in the open to say, you know, somebody who wasn't beholden to him open to say, you know, somebody who didn't, wasn't beholden to him because he was, you know, the captain of the ship who could say, yeah, you're the captain and you're also a jerk. Stop doing this. So we needed an offset, somebody who could course correct the character without having to do it in front of the whole crew so he could maintain his persona of leadership. And Miri was blunt.

She was a very blunt character. Yes, yes. And we made her a cat warrior because I think Mirage had a bunch of cat warriors and we thought they were cool and we just wanted some more non-humans. So we liked the idea that Miri was, yeah, not human, was a cat.

So she was, by the way, Miri was designed to be a really, really good fighter, and then weirdly in the story, the few times you saw her in the early story, she like... She got beat up. And then... Anyway, so... Mirri's story

is a sad one in the larger picture, but... The other crew member we haven't talked about yet is Orym. So, we really have this model of thinking of it like Star Trek or that kind of show. And one of the things we realized is we needed a doctor. That was one of the things they always had. There's always a doctor.

And so, well, who better to be our doctor than a Samite healer? We felt like what was more apropos for magic than a Samite healer? And so she was designed as a more minor character, and then she ended up having a much bigger role than we had originally intended for her. And if I remember correctly, she had a bit of background. She was connected to Hannah. Yes.

She was educated in the same university as Hannah. They sort of had a passing acquaintance with one another. I think that's right. I think that's why they got her aboard, actually. Yeah, I think they were friends. Hannah said, I know somebody. Hannah brought Orm aboard. Yes, I believe that's correct.

Remember where Orm got her name? No idea. No recollection at all. So Orm was originally O-R-A-M, which is just Morrow backwards. Morrow backwards. Because she's a minor character, we just gave her, like, a filler name. And then we just said it enough times,

it sort of grew on us. And then we changed it to I-M, just so it would be a little easier to pronounce. Because A-M, there's like, it's A-M or Um,

or, you know, so we changed it to I-M. But anyway, that's where Orm got her name. Okay, so, let's see, we're... We had a villain

at that time, too. Outside of Volrath, we's see, we're... We had a villain at that time, too, outside of Volrath. We had a... What was... Meraxus... Meraxus, well, we needed a villain in the Weatherlight story so that...

We liked the idea that Gerard had to save Stark from somebody, that Stark was just constantly getting himself in trouble. But Meraxus, I think, was a one and... Like, I think we took a character already in the Weather I think we took a character already in the Weatherlight story and then made that character relevant. We took a card and said, oh, we'll make this character relevant.

Because that character, it was based on how big the creature was around it. So Gerard had to send everybody away to be able to beat him, I think was the story beat. Yep, yep. Oh, another... Go ahead. Another important character, Raffaello's... Well, Raffaello's...

Miri and Gerard and Raffaello study under Multani. Multani... So we wanted a... What do they call it? A mentor character, another part of the, of the Joseph, Joseph Campbell. And I really wanted to get Amaro into the story. So we ended up making Multani, which was Amaro Sorcerer, be that sort of the Yoda, you know, of the story. And the reason that that was important was the three of them joined the Weatherlight, and then Rofellos gets killed by, I think, Maraxus. Maraxus, yeah.

Not Maraxus, by one of the... I'm sorry. One of the... From where Krovex is from. Mornfen and Galabraid. One of them kills Rofellos. Oh, right, right, right. And it's the death of Rofellos that makes Gerard and Mirri leave the ship. Because when the story starts,

they're not on the ship. And we needed a reason that they left. And Raffaellos, we had realized after we had made the initial crew that we hadn't made an elf, and I really wanted a Llanowar elf. And so we ended up making Raffaellos our Llanowar elf.

And we made Selenia our angel. We made the crew, we're like, wait, there's no elf, no angel. And then we added them in so that the story would have an elf and an angel. See, under normal circumstances, there probably wouldn't be

this wide of a variety. But you have to bear in mind, everybody, that we were writing a story for Magic the Gathering. And there are archetypes within magic that had to be incorporated

to fit the archetypes of the story, too. We didn't want anybody to feel left out. Right, we needed all the colors, and yeah. And we were trying to make something that would feel very magic-y. We wanted to get as many races as we could, and so anyway, we gotta wrap up,

because I'm almost to work. Oh, gosh. You made it to the kitchen, did you? Yeah, made it to my den. So anyway, I definitely will invite you made it to the kitchen, did you? Yeah. Made it to my den. Um, so anyway, I definitely will invite you back to some future time, Michael.

We got the major crew, but there's all sorts of characters we didn't talk about. And we didn't even get to the story itself. We spent most of the time talking about the characters.

There's a story to be told. So, you know, yes, I'd love to come back. Okay, so I will definitely invite you back. So, we have to wrap up for now because I am trying to keep my podcast

to roughly how long it takes to drive to work. So, thank you, Michael, so much. It was great invite you back. So we have to wrap up for now because I am trying to keep my podcast to roughly how long it takes to drive to work. So thank you, Michael, so much. It was great having you here. And I definitely want to have you back on and we'll talk more all about the Weatherlight Saga. So anyway, I'm in my den. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work.

Drive to work. So instead of talking magic with Michael, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.