R.L. Westgate

I write dark fantasy, and most of it happens in Portland, Maine, because it is the city I know well enough to break properly. The Baku Trilogy started in 2020 with a woman who moved there to be nobody and failed at it inside six weeks.

Then the necromancer took over. Oxivius was supposed to be a mentor with a body count and about forty pages of screen time. Readers kept asking about him instead of the plot, which is the politest way a book has of telling you that you buried the lede. So the Soulstealer trilogy goes backwards seven hundred years to explain him, and ends at the exact moment the first book begins.

People ask why a novelist made a game. It is the wrong way round. I have been running tabletop games for thirty-seven years, and the storycrafting came a long time before any of the books did. Taking somebody's half-page character concept and making them real enough that the player still talks about them ten years later is the oldest thing I know how to do. The Baku-verse existed at a table before it existed on a page.

Bloodlust is a deliberate change of direction. Heroic fantasy, a different world, no connection to any of the above. I did not want to be a writer with one setting, and the only cure for that is to go and write something else.

I live in Sanford with my wife and our two daughters, both of whom grew up alongside this universe and both of whom have quietly changed it. One of them talked me out of killing a character in book one. The other is the reason the lead's greatest strength is hope rather than anything sharper.

The dog is called Ace. He has knocked the power strip out twice.