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R.A. Salvatore has been at the fantasy game a long time. Thirty-one years ago, The Crystal Shard introduced readers to Drizzt Do’Urden, the twin scimitar–wielding, dark-elf ranger with a heart of gold (and a panther he can summon from the astral plane). Since then, Drizzt has become a fantasy icon, who, along with his supporting cast from the Forgotten Realms campaign, remain all over the new Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition handbooks, not to mention a handful of video games.

Salvatore, 59, is almost as ubiquitous in the genre world. He’s written nearly 40 books set in the Forgotten Realms alone, not to mention his DemonWars saga, plus work on video games including Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and the Neverwinter MMORPG. He even developed a DemonWars tabletop game with his two sons.

Yet Drizzt, above all, remains his most enduring creation — one whose moral compass never falters, even in the face of enormous challenges and the prejudice harbored by the “drow,” the name for the dark elf race in the land of Faerûn. In 2018, the social friction makes Drizzt’s story more poignant, and Salvatore’s return to the character in Timeless, which hits shelves on Sept. 4, more vital than ever for the fantasy readership.

1. Salvatore reflects on 30 years of writing Drizzt and an ever-changing fandom With the release of Timeless, a culminating adventure for his warrior drow, the author opines on the past, present.
2. Author R A Salvatore's complete list of books and series in order, with the latest. Reckoning of Fallen Gods (Coven, book 2). May 2019 (paperback) Timeless.

Last week, Polygon spoke with Salvatore on the phone from his home in Massachusetts for an hour and a half about Drizzt, the Hugo Awards, Gamergate, cutting his teeth in fantasy, his favorite secret sports references in his books, the inescapable political moment, and the joys of continuing to carve out his worlds.

Polygon: I read your books as a teenager, and it’s been about a decade, so I was thoroughly excited to drop back in with Timeless.

R.A. Salvatore: Yeah. I’m getting a lot of that. It had a lot to do with the way the publishing schedule worked out because we had cut back with Wizards of the Coast. We were doing a ton and then we all of a sudden stopped. There was a big challenge for me when I did Timeless, to make sure that I would recapture the old readers and give the new readers something brand new — something that they could jump onto, so to speak.

But I’m getting that a lot from people who are like, “I can’t believe I got so far behind on these books. I’ve gotta catch up.” Well, good.

The storyline centered on Drizzt Do’Urden and his father, Zaknafein, who disapproves of his interracial marriage, felt very 2018 to me. It’s about accepting people who are different from you, and immigrants, and trade, and a changing world, and how hard it is for older generations to accept those changes. Is every Drizzt book a reflection of its time?

Yes, they are actually, and it’s amazing to me. I had a book come out earlier this year called Child of a Mad God, from Tor. It had sexual violence in it. It’s very similar in tone to my DemonWars books. Most people really liked it. But there was a reaction to that book. It was very different for me, because the sensitivities have changed. Now, I didn’t glorify anything. Child of a Mad God is essentially Homeland but with a woman protagonist who’s looking at the traditions of her people and saying, “Wait a minute. This is wrong.”

Homeland was a template for that book because there was this character I really wanted to develop. In some of my books, I’m trying to say, “You can’t look at the surface level of things. You have to look at the intents behind them, and the intent of the author behind them.” In other words, don’t tell me you’re not going to read Mark Twain because he used the N-word. You know what I mean? Let’s talk about the context of history. Let’s talk about the bad things people do and identify them as bad.

Then, with the Drizzt books now — there’s this great awakening of our time, and it’s a good thing. It’s painful, and it’s awkward, and it’s hard to really know where the boundaries are as we’re trying to confront the realities. Look, I grew up in a sexist, racist society. I grew up in an Italian neighborhood. Have you ever watched The Sopranos? That was my neighborhood. Only without the mob, but that was my neighborhood. It had the same attitudes about life. I grew up with five older sisters, and I saw what they had to endure. And they’re also where I got the idea for the bad matriarchal society of Menzoberranzan, but that’s a different thing. No, I saw what they had to endure. To me, Zaknafein comes from that society. Even though he was a really good guy, comparatively speaking, he comes from that society, and there’s no way everything is hunky-dory, because his sensibilities have not adjusted to the evolution.

The whole theme of the Drizzt books is that the arc of history trends towards justice. That’s the whole theme of the Drizzt books over 30 years — things get better, and then there’s a step back, but then things get better. That’s what I believe about the world. So, Zaknafein, being caught out of time, gave me a perfect vehicle to look at that. He’s a good guy, but he suddenly confronted with a lot of things that just don’t play to his sensibilities. Drizzt went through some of the same stuff in the early Drizzt books. I don’t know if you remember back in The Legacy, but Drizzt had vowed he would never kill a drow. He’ll kill anything else that deserves it but he won’t kill a drow? Think about that for a minute.

Yeah, he was that inculcated into his society’s belief that there was something worse about killing a drow than about killing any other being.

Absolutely. That’s why I always laugh when people say Drizzt has no flaws. Drizzt has terrible flaws that he’s trying to overcome. He was a racist.

He grew up in a racist society. That doesn’t make him an anti-hero, though. That makes him a hero with flaws that he’s aware of and grows through.

Which is the whole point of being a writer: finding answers for yourself, and getting people to ask questions, if they’re reading the books. At least that’s how feel. I used to think when I first started writing professionally — I was 29 years old — that I knew the answer to everything, and now I’m old and I know nothing.

When I first started writing, the idea of preaching ... I thought that’s what all writers do. They tell people things. No. What writers do is they get people to ask questions so that people can find their own answers. One of the things that’s amazed me as I’ve gone through this journey is how many people will take that character Drizzt and align him with their ideology. I think I’m doing it right, because there are conservative readers who will swear up and down that Drizzt is a hardcore conservative. There are liberal readers who will swear up and down Drizzt is a hardcore liberal.

I like that. In a way it’s disconcerting. But I like that, because that means that people are searching, and that’s always a good thing to me.

On page 246, you talk about an illness called “the affliction of mirrors,” and one of the words in the drow language that makes up the phrase happens to be the seven-letter nonsense word “covfefe,” which was once tweeted by the President of the United States. That feels deliberate.

I actually did that in the rough draft because I wanted to see — this is my first time working with David Pomerico, who I love. He’s a fantastic editor. He’s tough as nails. I wanted to see if I could slip that by him, and I did. Then, when I told him about it, he said, “Don’t you dare take that out.” Well, the affliction of mirrors, right? Narcissism. It just seemed to fit. I’m sorry, it just seemed to fit. You know what, if I can’t have fun doing it, why the hell am I doing it?

In the past, you’ve said you don’t necessarily try to plan out what a character would do, but let the characters write themselves...

That’s absolutely true, but I’ll take it one step further than that: I was three books into the Cleric quintet that I wrote for the [D&D campaign] Forgotten Realms before I figured out what was bothering its hero, Cadderly: he was an agnostic priest. He’s getting these powers from this divine source but he didn’t believe. When I’m writing a book and my characters are acting out of character, I first say, “I’ve gotta fix that. What the hell’s wrong with this guy?” And then I let him show me or her show me what’s wrong.

In what ways did you follow where Drizzt took you and found yourself surprised by where he went?

Not so much Drizzt, but with everyone around him. The weird thing with Drizzt is that the connection I felt for that character immediately upon writing him, when he was supposed to be a sidekick character, was so deep that — not that he hasn’t surprised me, but he’s more surprised me in minor things that have happened in the books that I didn’t expect, rather than any major philosophical way, because Drizzt’s philosophy has been pretty clear to me from the beginning.

But some of the people around him have very much surprised me. Artemis Entreri surprised me quite a bit in the Sellswords trilogy, in Road of the Patriarch. That was supposed to be the end of Artemis Entreri. Road of the Patriarch was the perfect redemption, that redemptive moment where you could have hoped that Artemis Entreri ended on the right track. But after I wrote the book I got so many letters from people who had gone through similar traumas that Entreri had gone through when he was kid. They said, “You can’t end it here. We have to see him redeemed.” I got dozens of letters from people saying, “Please continue this character. This is personal to me.” And I was like, well, maybe I’ll learn something by continuing with this character. And I did. That’s a good thing.

What’s one way that Entreri has surprised you since that decision?

What I came to realize about Artemis Entreri is that a driving force in him was why he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror without self-loathing: it was guilt. And it was guilt over things that had been done to him, not things that he had done. I don’t think I ever understood that until after I put him on the road of redemption.

It’s a weird thing to me, sometimes, the way these books go. I’ll give you a perfect example of the joy I get in writing. In The Companions, Drizzt’s old friends Regis, Bruenor, Wulfgar, and Catti-Brie were in this Brigadoon-type thing called Iruladoon, where they are in stasis. They’re being held by the goddess Mielikki for a time when she’s gonna need them. The other people are dead. They really are all dead too, but they’re not quite dead — they’re in this alternate reality stasis force where time is moving at a different speed.

At the beginning of the book, they’re given a choice: they can go back to the world, or they can go through the lake, the pond, that’s in this forest ,to their reward with their god or whatever it may be. They can actually die — they can actually go away from Mielikki and get away from her protection and actually die.

Wulfgar, who’s lived a long life, feels like he’s completed his journey. He goes into the lake. The other three come out. What I did with them was, I wanted to give them that “if I only knew then what I know now” feeling. I’ve got them coming back, reincarnated in baby bodies but with full consciousnesses of their previous lives.

Regis is the one who wants to correct the past. Catti-Brie is the one who wants to continue the journey better for Mielikki and her beliefs. Bruenor is the one who’s ripped. He feels like his whole previous life was cheated because he didn’t go to the Halls of Moradin and return to his gods, and he felt compelled to come back. So, Bruenor is the one who’s answering the question for me of, can you bring a character back in a book? Regis is the one that was answering the question of knowing what I know now, what would it be like to go through high school again? Catti-Brie is the one who’s answering the question of what it would mean to be able to go back physically and build upon that which you already accomplished. It’s like a continuation, an addition.

So, I was having a blast writing the book. Well, at the end of the book, they find Drizzt atop the mountain and, basically, save him. I’m writing that scene at the end of the book, and all of a sudden I’m typing and Guenhwyvar, the cat, her ears go back and she growls. She’s on guard like someone’s coming.

And that moment, while I’m finishing the book, is when I realized that Wulfgar didn’t go through the pond. I didn’t even know. And that was a moment where I was pumping my fist and then yelling, saying, “Yeah, Wulfgar’s back.” And it’s like I could have brought him back at any time. How does this happen? It’s so much fun when that happens. It’s almost like I didn’t do it. He just showed up. Well, of course I did it. You see?

You’ve been writing Drizzt for 30 years, and while he’s changed as a character, his values have remained very similar — they’ve just shifted with the lessons that he’s learned. Do you feel like they reflect lessons you’ve learned also?

Yes. Absolutely. Here’s the thing about that. Drizzt, he’s not me, obviously. I’m putting myself into his place. But the main impetus for that character when I first wrote The Crystal Shard was that I got tired of seeing movies where the hero was the guy with the biggest gun. He could be an absolute dirtbag, but if he could shoot better than anyone else, he was the hero.

To me, it’s the will of the heart. To me, that’s the hero. The heroes have got the biggest heart. And by heart I mean the courage, the conviction, the willingness to do what’s right when it’s the tough thing to do. That’s the difference. That moral compass, which I believe in…maybe it sounds corny, or whatever other pejorative you want attach to it, but I believe in it. That’s been there with him from the beginning.

Even when he’s made mistakes, like his “I’ll never kill a drow” racism, that’s a product of who he was, which, once he recognized it, he would judge himself by whether or not he could overcome it.

You’ve spoken before about how you didn’t realize that you were “obliviously sexist” in writing the first draft The Crystal Shard, in which there were no named female lead characters, and that it’s surprising to you now how much of a commentary on race relations Drizzt actually was from the beginning. What can we learn from this elf about our current era? Your books suggest that those who possess evil beliefs can change.

Well, I grew up Catholic. One of the tenets of the Church — one of the tenets of most sects of Christianity that I’m aware of — is the concept of redemption. I’ve gotta believe in that. I’ve gotta believe that a mistake isn’t the end of your existence, that you fix things, that you try to fix things. That you try to atone, you try to do better. That has stayed with me.

Two of the stupidest things I’ve heard in my life are racism and sexism. They are stupid concepts. They seem like self-defeating, self-limiting, societally-limiting concepts that I want nothing to do with. And Drizzt, almost by accident, gave me paradoxes that I had to deal with in my own writing, when I realized that it is true that one of the joys of fantasy can also be one of its weaknesses. Right? Because one of the joys of fantasy is you embody evil, and then you take your sword and you, without guilt, disembody evil. That’s the joy of fantasy.

But at the same time, that’s a very black and white statement. Even that statement is the old trope of black and white. It’s just wrong! But it’s so ingrained in us. It’s a yes or no statement, if you will, on good and evil. But that’s not how the world is.

One of the joys of working in the genre for this many years has been watching the erosion of that absolutist stance on good versus evil. There is good and there is evil, but it’s not predetermined. It is in some cases, right? A demon is evil, period. But one of the joys has been watching the gray areas filter into fantasy over the last 30 years, much more than they were in the 1980s.

It’s like, for most of fantasy in the ‘80s — not always, because there were some very strong women writers doing great, strong female characters even then, but they weren’t getting the kind of acclaim they deserved — women were chicks in chainmail or damsels in distress. How much better we are now. How much better the books are. How much more real the books are now.

In a lot of ways, realness has torn the fantasy world apart, affecting the Hugo Awards every year for the past few years. Is this change, to you, the natural evolution of fantasy and science fiction and reflecting how we’ve come further as a culture? Do you see the reactions of groups like the Sad Puppies as natural as well? The death wails of old school fans who are angry to see those old ways of black and white thinking, and chicks in chainmail, and damsels in distress, go the way of the dodo?

There was a great episode of I Love Lucy where she was giving the commencement speech at a high school. She got up there and said, “Now, I’m supposed to say, ‘these kids today, they don’t work hard, they don’t this, they don’t do that.’ But I tell you what, I look at these kids and I think that the future is bright, and they’re gonna be better than we were.”

That’s how I feel. The idea that, when I go to book signings now, I see grandfathers with their sons and their granddaughters all reading the books together. It thrills me. The idea that there are women who look at Aoleyn in Child of a Mad God, or Catti-Brie, and see a hero, thrills me.

I read [The Last Jedi star] Kelly Tran’s piece she put up the other day, in which she says that I’m supposed to be a side character in your story. When I read the voices that are finally, finally being heard, I think it’s a better place ahead. And in science fiction and fantasy, there are so many moving parts to this whole thing, whether it’s the Hugo Awards or the ideological battles that people are putting forth just for the sake of having ideological battles. It’s all fallout, because it’s going to go where society is going. It’s that simple. And where that is I don’t know, but I have great faith that it’s going in a good direction.

Who are some of the writers, or what are some of the books, that you’ve read recently that have made you think, “Yes. This is exactly where science fiction and fantasy should be going?”

I don’t read a lot of science fiction and fantasy right now because I’ve been so busy writing. It’s hard for me to read it while I’m writing. What I read instead, I read a lot of the commentary by the writers. John Scalzi, Patrick Rothfuss, George R.R. Martin, Myke Cole, Sam Sykes — a lot of the people working in the business. Elaine Cunningham, who’s been writing some wonderful essays. I tend to read more of that while I’m right in the middle of a book instead of reading another book, because it just blows me up.

The book I’m reading now that’s not science fiction is Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. And I love it. One of the things that’s in my mind right now is the difference between symbolism and reality, and the way that symbolism is being used to distort reality, which I find tremendously dangerous and demagogic. It just drives me crazy. So, I love the book. Taking my time with it. I’m savoring it. I’ll go back and reread the chapter I read last week. I’ve been reading this book for a couple of months now. Terry Brooks gave it to me. So, I just keep going back and rereading a couple of chapters to make sure I’m on the same page as these soldiers. It’s a wonderful book.

A lot of this stuff with the Hugos and all — I don’t want to say petty and arrogant, but that’s what it seems to me. It’s like, write your damn book, and the audience is going to be the one that decides which ones are lasting and which ones go into the dustbin. This idea of writing books to influence or drive people over to your side, it’s not how you do it. You write your book, you tell your story, you let your characters speak for themselves and let the readers get what they will from it. You paint your ethics in the book. Whether you want to or not, you’re going to.

Some very talented writers who have incredibly flawed heroes and do not even understand why those heroes are flawed — no. You really can’t cross this line and expect people to care about this guy, but go ahead. I find the argument almost superficial. It’s important for the players involved who are getting affected by it. Gamergate really deeply affected me. I was working at a video game company for years, at 38 Studios.

Working on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning?

Right. Big Huge Games did Reckoning, but it was the Amalur world that I was building for them. There needs to be a lot of change because there’s a lack of appreciation of talent, of substance over bullshit hype. That business has some problems that they need to deal with. But I’m happy to report that a dear friend of mine, Jen MacLean, who is one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life, is the head of the [International Game Developers Association] now. She’s fantastic. Do I think we’re going in the right direction? Yes. Do we have a long way to go? We have a long way to go.

This is one of the things I found really fascinating about Star Wars — a franchise for which you’ve written an extended universe novel, and I know that was not the easiest thing for you — and the reactions towards the recent movies. Like a sub-group of fantasy readers and watchers, some Star Wars fans are just ready to be mad at something that isn’t exactly like what they remember.

And so, they suck.

We can argue all day about the physics of Star Wars. Right? We can argue all day about the practicality of being able to build a clone army and take it across the galaxy in three days, which is Attack of the Clones. You can make all the little nicks around the edges you want. When you’re complaining that somebody doesn’t look the way you want them to look? Shame on you. Just shut up. I don’t even want to hear it after that point.

As far as Star Wars goes, there was a study that found out that storytelling is more important than awards. And my response to that was, “put 10,000 people in a room, and give ‘em a choice between watching Star Wars and Citizen Kane. Duh. They’re gonna watch Star Wars. But most of the lessons that people get out of a book, or out of Star Wars, they bring to it. I’ll never publicly attack another author or a book because I’m not insulting the author, I’m insulting the people who love the book. And who the hell am I to do that?

One of the things that you deal with when you have a long-running series that’s beloved is that people feel a sense of propriety over the series. With every Drizzt book I’ve written since 1993, I’ve gotten letters from people saying, “You blew it with this. I’m never reading you again. This sucks.” And yet, here we are.

To me, the idea of getting mad at someone because they produced something, because what they produced is not something you wanted, is absurd. Change the channel. Watch something else. There are plenty of movies that I don’t watch, some that would probably surprise my readers, that I just don’t like. They’re not my taste. But then I just don’t like it, why am I bothering with it?

We were talking a little bit about how you believe that “the moral arc of the universe bends towards goodness.” I think Jarlaxle is a really great example of that as a character. He’s got his schemes, but they’re influenced by his awareness that the world is a little bigger than he thought it was, and people are a little more surprising, and their values are a little bit more worth thinking about.

To me, when you’re stereotyping or lumping someone into a stereotype, whether it’s culture, religion, race, what have you — when you’re shutting that off because of some preconceived notion, the person you’re really hurting is yourself. I have friends of every faith, of every color, of every nationality. When I meet someone who’s from another country and they have a “weird” name, where did that come from? Tell me about your name.

To me, if you want to look at people who are heroes, or who’s work I admire? Anthony Bourdain. Going into places and, instead of imposing his values, seeing what he’s seeing through the food and through the people and the local culture. That’s a good thing.

In the new book, Luskan, a human city, is now openly influenced by and trading with dark elves and in alliances with halflings and dwarves. Dwarves hate drow! And yet here is Jarlaxle, a drow, being able to walk through a portal into King Bruenor Battlehammer’s home.

Jarlaxle has brought progress to the city of Luskan that will benefit the people of Luskan. The drow coming to Luskan is the best thing that ever happened to Luskan. Think about that. And the drow are doing that, by the way, for self-serving reasons, as well. They’re not like beneficent, generous coming in with rainbows and unicorns.

That’s an interesting commentary, too.

John McCain and John Kerry are the two politicians who normalized relations with Vietnam. More than anyone else in this country, they’re the two people who fought for that. John McCain was tortured by the Vietcong. John Kerry had to kill people, and was shot by people. I think that’s pretty remarkable. The guy who was John McCain’s captor wrote a letter to the McCain family with sincere condolences, saying he was heartbroken to hear that John McCain had died.

Who would have thought that when they were hitting him with the butts of rifles, dragging him out of the lake, after he had just dropped bombs on them? Learn something from that. Right? And don’t drop the bombs or hit people with your rifle in the first place.

John McCain supported the Iraq War, and he only called it a mistake in his latest memoir.

Danger’s scary. Unfamiliar things are scary. I’m the one who goes to the same hotel 30 times. It’s just being a human being. When I was a kid, it didn’t scare me to think of an Italian with a knife. I grew up in an Italian neighborhood. These are my people. These are my buddies. These were my the kids I got in fights with and the kids I played softball with. But I understood them. So I wasn’t afraid of them. But look at “the filthy Irish” or any other culture and oooh, you know? It’s just a natural human reaction that’s hard to overcome. It’s going to be the long game. It really is. It’s gonna be the long game. But that’s where it’s trending. Even right now, with all the things going on that I find maddeningly stupid and dangerous, and just wrong, I hold out hope up for the arc of history.

On a completely different note, you’ve said that your five sisters influenced Menzoberranzan’s matriarchy?

I’m kidding. I love my sisters dearly. It’s funny, because they’ll always come up to me and say, “I’m Vierna, tight?” I had five older sisters and an older brother. I didn’t even realize when I was writing Drizzt family that I was kinda writing mine, only giving them different personalities. I grew up with six mothers, essentially. And I love ‘em dearly. I have four left, and my brother’s gone as well, but my four sisters and I are incredibly close, and my sister-in-law is like my other sister — my brother’s widow. We’re incredibly close, a loving family. I was a very lucky kid in that regard.

And I grew up with a dad who taught me a lot of things. He didn’t say a lot, but he taught me a lot. And it helps me get through tough times.

In some ways you passed that on. You literally designed a role-playing game you play every week with your sons, right?

Well, my sons are way smarter than I am. So is my daughter for that matter. She’s not into those role-playing games, but my kids are their own people and I’m proud of every one of them.

Exactly what a parent would want. So, you built the DemonWars RPG with your sons. Did that happen at the same time as the novels?

No, the novels are much older. What happened was, in 1994, TSR, [Inc.] wanted me to sign some new books, and the contract just fell apart. It wasn’t even over money. It was over integrity, and I’ll just leave it at that because I don’t want to speak ill of someone who can’t defend himself — he’s dead.

It didn’t work, and that was the end of my relationship with TSR, and, I thought it it might be the end of my career. I would have had 10 Drizzt books out. They all did well, and the cleric books were out, and I had a couple of other minor series, but when I left, I thought, “I’m going back to tech. Going back to be a manager at a tech company again.” Or something, you know, because I had little kids, I had to work.

That’s when I got the call from Del Rey, and I think Terry Brooks put the bug in their ear, because Terry has been a dear friend since 1990. They called me up and said, “Look, I want you to come in here, and I want you to build your own world, and write the best book you can write, and take all the time you need to do it.” And after done three books a year, at least, in that frantic first five, six years of my writing, that was music to my ears.

So, that’s when I created DemonWars. And I wrote the DemonWars saga, a seven-book series that Del Rey still publishes, beginning with The Demon Awakens. Then Peter Atkinson called me, and they wanted me back at TSR. We mended some fences, I came back, and everything was going great, but I fell in love with that DemonWars world, so I wrote a book called The Highwayman, and it was almost one of the first self-published books in the modern age because this was still before e-books were big. I fell in love with the character. I thought it was a one-off book — I had a great time writing it, it did really well. But I was still buried in the Realms, and lots of things that were happening in the Realms. But then I spoke to Tom Doherty, and he wanted to work with me, over at Tor. I had always wanted to work with Tom. Tom was the last of the giants from the Golden Age — and from the inception. He’d been working at Ballantine since the ‘50s. Tom had broken his leg skiing, but he came up to Boston to meet me for lunch one day.

He said, “I want to work with you. I want you to do some books.” I owned The Highwayman, so I sold that to him, and I did three more books. Those are all set in the DemonWars world, but they’re hundreds of years before the books I had done for Del Rey. When I did the first DemonWars books, I knew that it was unlikely that I would do another fantasy book in a world of my own making that wasn’t Forgotten Realms, which is Ed Greenwood’s world, that wouldn’t be DemonWars. That world gives me everything I want.

Now, maybe creatively I’ll have an urge to go back do something with The Woods Outback and those Spearwielders books, which is very different. Or maybe creatively I’ll have something else I want to do. But as far as creating a fully fleshed out world, with magic systems and social structures and church structures and all the rest of it, DemonWars gave me everything I wanted, with plenty of room to expand.

So, when Wizards said they were done with the book line a couple of years ago, I was like, “What am I gonna do now? I think I’ll go back to DemonWars.” So I got some inspiration from a place I visited, and a television show I watched, and just the story I wanted to tell, and I created a whole area in DemonWars, and wrote Child of a Mad God. I took a twist on the magic system that I had done.

In the meantime, before I’d done that, when 38 Studios collapsed, my sons Bryan and Geno both had been working for 38 Studios. Geno had moved on from there, but Bryan was working at 38 Studios till the end, and he had a son, and a wife, and they wanted to move back in with us for a while, to get back on their feet, because it was so unexpected.

Bryan’s an amazing game designer … and Geno’s a pretty amazing narrative designer who I’ve worked with on books, comic books, and games. This was back when Kickstarter was just getting going, and so we ran a Kickstarter for the DemonWars game. When I built DemonWars, with the gemstone magic system, I knew it would translate very well to a game. I’ve been a gamer since 1980. More than that, but role-playing games since 1980.

Do you still play DemonWars?

I play every Sunday night. Bryan lives in California, but Geno’s out here. Geno still plays. There are a couple of guys from 38 Studios who joined the group. Another guy who’s been with the group since 1989. And one of my brother’s sons, my nephew.

You call Faerûn, and the Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood’s world. Yes, he created it, but I think a lot of readers think of it as your world. You look at the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and the handbooks now are just totally populated with your characters. Do you miss Corona when you’re in Faerûn? Do you miss Faerûn when you’re in Corona?

No. I’ve always said writing about Drizzt is like writing about my family, but Corona is the world I’m building, so it’s really different. They fill two different niches for me. DemonWars ... there’s a whole different level of having to do worldbuilding, and create societies that I love. I really don’t get to do that in the Realms anymore. I did that with the dark elves, but I really haven’t been able to do that since they’ve got a million products from game designers. It’s what they do all day, every day.

You made your big mark and they’ve incorporated it. But since then, now they want to run the show.

I am eternally grateful that Mary Kirchoff pulled me up … and gave me good editors. To her and Eric Severson, Jim Lowder, some of my early editors, who really helped me learn what I was doing. Eternally grateful to Ed Greenwood, who I consider an absolute genius, for creating that world when he was eight years old. It’s a crazy, fantastic fantasy world. And it’s proven it, just with its longevity and popularity.

When Wizards decided to discontinue the book line, the biggest pain for me wasn’t that I was about to lose half my work, it was that I wasn’t going to get to see my friends at Wizards. These people aren’t just work colleagues. I love them, like family. We’d been together for decades. And they’re really good, creative people. Now we’re working together again, whether I’m work with computer game companies that are licensing our properties or when they let me go and do Drizzt books for HarperCollins. They’re a very big part of the process. This process would have never happened without Wizards. It wasn’t contentious.

For this book, it was three different parties. Me, Wizards of the Coast, and HarperCollins, all trying to figure out how we could arrange this to be mutually beneficial to all of us. It took seven months to work that out.

Are they gonna incorporate Drizzt into more video games? Aside from Baldur’s Gate.

He’s in the Neverwinter games. Actually, with Bruenor — there’s a whole quest with Bruenor. I wrote that quest line. Bryan and I wrote it, with Cryptic Studios. It was a blast working with those guys.

Do you play video games, too?

Not as much, though I was playing video games a lot when I lost my brother. I buried myself in RPGs like EverQuest. I played World of Warcraft for a long time. I’m actually back to it a little bit. But I’m waiting for WOW Classic to come up, because I like MMOs at the beginning more than I like them at the end, where the numbers get too big for my old brain to handle. But when 38 Studios, collapsed I just shut off the video games. It was painful. That was a bad time.

In Timeless, you jump between two different time periods, showing 400 years before and the present. Did that help in writing it? Did it make it harder?

It made it easier for me. I’m not saying this to be mercenary, or to be commercial: I wanted this book to be a place where new readers could jump on, and if they like what they see, they’ve got years of reading ahead of them — right behind them. Right? And I wanted it to be a book that would give the people who had been following along, even the ones that went all the way through to the end, something different. So by doing the Jarlaxle/Zaknafein story, I was able to reintroduce Menzoberranzan to readers through a different set of eyes, and that’s what I really wanted.

If you look at some of the passages in those parts of the book, some of the ways Jarlaxle and Zaknafein talk about Menzoberranzan, you see very strong echoes to what I was getting at the very beginning with Homeland, but from a slightly different perspective.

That allowed me to do that. That allowed me to bring Zaknafein’s character up when I was writing in the present. I think you’ll understand him better than when he was the guy you saw jump off the ledge and into a pit of acid at the end of Exile.You’ll understand that character a lot more. You’ll also understand Jarlaxle a lot. Really, in this series, the two characters that I’m learning about are Zaknafein and Jarlaxle, more than any others.

Toward the end of the book, one of the moments that I found poignant was when Jarlaxle thinks about the Zaknafein he remembered versus the Zaknafein that he did not. What his values were, and what his actions said, and what 400 years of not seeing somebody can do to you in terms of your memory of that person.

The part to me that was the revelation of that was when Jarlaxle really took a good look at who Zaknafein was and realized why he was so fond of Artemis Entreri.

Doing it this way worked out better than I thought it would. It’s what I wanted to do, it’s what I planned from the beginning, and I had no idea what I was going to do for the adventure. I knew that whatever I did in the past had to be smaller, a more personal journey that had a definite conclusion, because I couldn’t be opening a can of worms that I would have to explore in future books — even though I’m going back there again in the next book, and going back there in the book after that, for a couple of sections. But at the same time, it was more about the character development of Jarlaxle, which he would see reflected when he reunited with Zaknafein. And it was also about better understanding where Zaknafein was gonna be coming from now.

You still open a can of worms, though. [This question contains spoilers for Timeless] At the end of the book, Yvonnel, the reincarnated Menzoberranzan matriarch Yvonnel Baenre, says she doesn’t understand why she was given form by Lolth, the Spider Queen and goddess of the drow, since she was opposed to her doings. That presents a deep philosophical question.

It’s got me waking up at three in the morning more than one night a week, thinking about that. I love that. I live for those nights when I don’t sleep and I wake up and I go, “Wait a minute!” I live for those nights.

Yeah, that got me doing that, and I find that Yvonnel can be incredibly intriguing, but it would be hard to do books about her because she’s almost a walking deus ex machina, she’s so powerful. But I find her to be intriguing in what she can do. Not with magic, but just because of who she is, what she can affect. I’m having an awful lot of fun exploring this. I have no idea where it’s going, and I’m almost through the second book. Like, I think I know, but I know I’m going to be surprised, which makes it even better.

Speaking of having fun, you’re a sports fan, and you’ve mentioned George R.R. Martin, who slyly works references into things he likes into his books. He has a house in A Song of Ice and Fire that has a sigil that is clearly the Dallas Cowboys logo. Do you have sports references in Drizzt books that none of us have noticed?

Mm-hmm. Not just sports, but yeah, absolutely. I’m a hockey fan. There’s a character named Brind’Amour. He was a major hockey player when I used to really follow hockey.

Being a writer is somebody who takes in everything: music, movies, television shows, books, newspapers, news events, everything. Takes in the people he or she meets: family, friends, enemies. Takes ‘em in, chews ‘em up into tiny little bits, rearranges them, and spits them back out in a way that makes sense and gets people to ask questions with shared experience.

Is that why you did it? After you finally read J.R.R. Tolkien during the blizzard of ‘78 and decided to be a writer? You just realized you needed to do this for people?

I was a math major. I read that book, and I fell back in love with escapism. And just as much as the book, it was Peter Beagle’s introduction to that book, the foreword, that did it. Peter Beagle wrote it.

I had one of my greatest fanboy moments ever. Peter Beagle was out promoting The Last Unicorn release. Recently, he was doing a tour, and he came to my hometown, to the [movie theater]. So I went to the movie, and I waited. A friend of mine went and we waited. It was midnight and the line was finally gone. I went up to him and I just said, and I recited back a bit of that foreword. And I said, “This is why I’m a writer.” I was scared because you meet someone who have idolized and you’ve gotta be prepared that he’s gonna be a jerk. He was the nicest guy, the most generous. We talked for hours.

But it was that introduction, that says that we are raised to honor all the wrong heroes, from murderers bearing crosses and thieves carrying flags, and that maybe escapism isn’t such a bad word after all. That whole theme of that is what made me remember when I was a little kid back bagging school — because my mom would let me, as long as I got As — reading my Charlie Brown books, and going out there and playing baseball with Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and Peppermint Patty, and Lucy, and Violet, and Schroeder, and the whole crowd. It made me go to a place of comfort and enjoyment, where I had friends that I liked. And who liked me. To this day, my favorite letters are the ones that say, “I never read a book until…”

Considering how active you are, Twitter must give you the opportunity to be Peter Beagle.

That would be a good person to be. Another good person to be would be Robert Cormier, [who wrote] I Am the Cheese and The Chocolate War. One of the greatest young adult writers 20th century. He grew up in my hometown, and when I got my first rejection letter, in 1983, distraught, I called him because it was actually his phone number at the time in the movie I Am the Cheese. He kept me on the phone for hours, and we became fast friends. When he passed away, I took his place on the board of trustees at the local library. Someone asked me to sit on the board and I said, “I’m busy. I have kids. I’m running around. The time, I really don’t have the time.”

”It’s Bob Cormier’s seat.”

”I’ll do it.”

Pay it forward, man … When I first got published, it was a very different world. It was before the internet. I would get fan letters now and then, and go to the book signings. But it was a very different genre. My book signings were filled with 20 teenage boys and the four moms who drove them, basically. But to see where it’s gone now to see how it’s grown up, to see how the conventions have become these incredible events, and to make connections with people, people I’ll never meet!It’s incredibly humbling, satisfying, and gratifying. I have nothing to complain about.

You called it escapism, but that doesn’t sound like escape.

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Writing is how I make sense of the world. When my brother was dying, and I was losing my mind, because he was my best friend — next to my wife, he was my best friend in the world — and he was dying before my eyes, having pancreatic cancer, I wrote Mortalis, the fourth book in DemonWars, which I still think is the best thing I’ve ever written. It saved my sanity.

Writing is how I make sense of the world. When I first started realizing that this genre that I’m so in love with can be horribly racist, I thought, wait a minute. All of a sudden it dawned on me, “Wait a minute.” If Drizzt is a good drow, what does that say about wantonly killing goblins?

So I wrote a short story called “Dark Mirror,” It’s where Drizzt meets a goblin, who’s not evil. He’s a slave to humans. And that’s when I realized that this incredible paradox that fantasy could be an incredibly powerful learning tool for me.

I mean, there are times I hate it. I hate sitting down at the computer and having to type. It’s 75 degrees outside? I want to go for a ride. I want to go for a hike up the mountain. I want to go back to back to my house in California and go sit on the beach. I don’t want to be here typing at a computer in a dark office. And then I start writing, and I love it. And I realize I’m lost without it.

Talk about a lesson: the ability to separate. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a writer is the ability to separate trivial from profound. People who want to make books or come up to me and say, “It’s popcorn fantasy, pure escapism,” and I laugh and I, “Sure!” They’re happy, enjoying it, great. wonderful. And then I’ll get a letter from somebody who says it saved his life.

And you realize, in your humility as a writer that you have to hold onto, as a human being, that the reader is bringing as much to the experience as the writer ever could. So, it’s not going to be the writers handing out their American Book Awards or Hugos or Nebulas. It’s not going to be them who determine where the industry is going. It’s going to be the vast multitude of readers, players, and viewers who are going to be the ones before the final arbiters.

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What are you most excited for readers to read about in Timeless? What are you most excited, personally, to have them read?

Every book I write, I try to write it in the same tone as the early ones, because one of the things I try to do with the Drizzt books — particularly for those who have been with me for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years reading these — I want you to feel the way you felt when you were a kid playing D&D and read the first one. In this book, I really think they’re gonna get that feeling, because that’s how I felt writing it.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

John Maher is digital editor and associate news editor at Publishers Weekly and co-founder and editor of The Dot and Line. He has written for Time Inc. Books, Esquire.com, Real Simple, Pacific Standard, Thrillist, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Hyperallergic, among others.