New Q&A with Scott Lynch

There's a new Scott Lynch interview out there, courtesy of the folks at Threat or Menace. While we wait for The Republic of Thieves (Canada, USA, Europe), it's always fun to read what the author has to say!

Here's a teaser:

Locke is easily one of the most memorable characters is recent history and he seems to have echoes of Edmund Dantes, Scaramouche, D’Artagnan, Percy Blakeney and Tom Jones while remaining indivisibly unique and original. Could you tell us where the character came from? Did you build him or did he just spring forth?

He was originally conceived for, believe it or not, a Star Wars roleplaying game, using the “force adept” class that Wizards put into its d20 version of the game. The backstory was that there was this tiny, out-of-the-way, somewhat idyllic planet that kept itself out of galactic turmoil generation after generation through the efforts of a small corps of Force-sensitive special envoys. They were diplomats, spies, saboteurs. They juggled political crises and bribed officials and arranged quiet coincidences to keep deflecting harm from their homeworld.

Locke was one of those guys, sent out with a bunch of standard-issue tramp freighter yahoos on some mission. The game was sadly quite short, but I enjoyed the character concept enough to keep toying with it. Eventually, I became passionately certain that the character in the book shouldn’t have any supernatural powers, and once I tore them out he became sort of recognizable as the Locke we now have on the page.

Follow this link for the complete interview. =)