One of the cool things I got to do earlier this month, when I traveled to Indianapolis’ big Gen Con convention, was to sit down and talk shop with Storytellers Forge Studio’s Rick Heinz in the wake of his studios’ next big flagship project “The Black Ballad,” a 5E compatible tabletop role playing game scenario book that explores “what happens to adventuring parties when they die.”
The 42-year-old Chicago native is a prolific writer, gaming and storytelling enthusiast with deep roots in the hobby and even bigger ambitious plans for his nascent studio, which handles everything from fantasy novels to graphic novels and RPG system books.
“I have logged countless caffeine-driven hours playing Diablo,” he notes on his website, “From this I’ve gotten hooked on writing and storytelling.” His credits include the Seventh Age series, a post-apocalyptic sarcastic urban fantasy, to the official tabletop roleplaying adaptation of the immensely popular “Crow” film series, whose reboot will be released in the United States in just a few days by Lionsgate Films starring John Wick 4 actor Bill Skarsgard in the lead role.
Appearing at this year’s Gen Con to promote a myriad of projects, dressed simply in a black t-shirt referencing the Unholy Masquerade from the Emmy Award comedy horror mockumentary, “What We Do in the Shadows,” Heinz professed his love of the show and all things dark, true to his gothic roots growing up in Chicago. “It has been said I write about the end of the world and dead things with a splash of sarcasm,” he said, adding that his work primarily features around tabletop roleplaying games such as “Dungeons & Dragons,” “Dread,” “Eclipse Phase,” and “Vampire: The Masquerade.” But how did he get into these niche hobbies?
“I happened to be a child that grew up at the time when, I guess that I’m in that Oregon Trail Generation, we’d go to chess club and slap down RPG books, we were literally those kinds of nerds,” he said with a nostalgic tone to his voice. “I got into storytelling through ‘Vampire the Masquerade.’ I was a goth kid in the 90s out on river walks, we were doing all of that and I started running games in our groups. The projects I was running would get up to 600 people in Naperville near Chicago, so I had these massive live action games, and I am spending all of my time writing for character backgrounds, plots, storylines, hiring actors and we are all putting on this big full emergent world.” He worked on a lot of catered live action role play (LARP) events at the time.
The transition from storyteller to freelance writer was not a struggle once he got a nudge from friends. “At some point, my friends were like, ‘You need to stop writing notes, you need to just sit and write,’ he said, adding that his first novel was heavily inspired by a lot of the games and the characters involved in those storylines.
He soon found himself writing for a channel a lot of gamers will recognize: “Geek and Sundry,” the web channel started and popularized by Felicia Day of “The Guild” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fame, among others. D&D and gaming fans undoubtedly make the connection between that channel and its breakout star, game master Matt Mercer of “Critical Role” fame, but Heinz was there early on before Mercer made it big.
“When G&S asked for someone who writes or knows something about game systems other than D&D, I’m like ‘finally one I haven’t played, or ran.’ This led to a press beat at the web channel writing about independent content creators and helping with vlogs for Matt Mercer’s popular GM Tips series. “I remember covering the early first episodes of C.R. when nobody knew what C.R. was. During this time, I wrote my second novel and I saw that G&S was winding down in terms of press and what they were doing.” Heinz said he had a killer idea for a game book and wrote his first RPG during this time, “Red Opera: Last Days of the Warlock” a campaign book about a city of warlocks that anyone can drop into their own homebrew worlds.
Heinz was able to get the heavy metal band DiAmorte and the Budapest Symphony Orchestra to make a whole custom soundtrack for every chapter of the storyline for what he said turned out to be a crowdfunded “gorgeous book.” The project also taught him a lot about the process of publishing. “I learned a lot about copyright law. That publishing process didn’t go well in the end, but all of those hurdles and ups and downs is what made us start Storytellers Forge Studios, our new company we started about two years ago.”
His life experience has led to success in his field and he shared advice with would be writers and producers: ” Aim for something small, do some minor freelance flavor writing on a project, get to know the team that you are working with and when you have a writing director, or an art director, or a voice director, if you want to go further, whatever deadline they give you, turn it in earlier than that. If you can meet your deadlines earlier than the due date, and you are consistently doing that, that will lead to more stable projects.”
“Our goal as a studio is to create immersive storylines that plug into other people’s worlds, but also to do fantasy novels that go with that. For ‘The Black Ballad’ in October, we have four novels each written by different authors, including a debut novelist. Crowdfunding for that is going on now,” he said, emphasizing the studio’s goal to give new creatives a shot.
“The Crow” reboot is in theaters starting today in Lakeport. For more about “The Black Ballad,” “The Red Opera” and other RPG projects and fantasy novels helmed by Storytellers Forge Studios, visit Storytellers Forge .
Ariel Carmona Jr. is Managing Editor of the Lake County Record-Bee. When he isn’t following up on county budget, council meetings and other hard news items of local interest, he is engaged in gaming hobbies such as tabletop rpgs, mmos, Euro board gaming, and other geeky interests. You can listen to “The Nexus of Geek” show on KPFZ community radio 88.1 FM, Fridays at 4 p.m. PST.
