Indie Edge October 2016: Erik Mona

This month’s featured creator is…

ERIK MONA

Please tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a writer, editor, publisher, gamer, comics junkie, and armchair historian. I collect comics, science fiction pulp magazines, Ouija boards, and books about the occult. By day I’m the Publisher and Chief Creative Officer of Paizo, Inc., makers of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, which I have guided since before the beginning. I’m a former Editor-in-Chief of Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron magazines, the co-founder of the Living Greyhawk and Pathfinder Society “organized play” RPG campaigns, and a long-time contributor to Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and other tabletop roleplaying games. I live in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle with my girlfriend, my pug, and a room full of old books.

What are your favorite projects you’ve contributed to over the past decade?

I co-created Pathfinder’s world of Golarion, which has expanded over literally hundreds of books to become one of the most fully realized sword-and-sorcery settings ever published. It’s absolutely crazy to me to see how it has grown over the years, and while there are a few elements of the world that I have fiercely protected as “my own” since its launch in 2007, what’s been most interesting and gratifying is seeing how other game designers, novelists, and comic book writers and artists have taken ideas that started in my brain and moved them in amazing directions that I could never have imagined myself. It’s been particularly cool to see our world translated into comics by authors like Jim Zub, and over the past couple of years my favorite creative projects have been the comic scripts I’ve been able to contribute to Dynamite’s line of Pathfinder comics. My fascination with tabletop roleplaying games like D&D and Pathfinder literally started on the same day as my fascination with comics when my dad bought a small collection of both and gave it to me as a little kid, so getting a chance to create stories inspired by both comics and games has been a nice way to tie it all together, all these years later.

What are you currently working on?

My current project is Pathfinder: Worldscape, a six-issue comic series that sees the Pathfinder adventurers Valeros the fighter, Seoni the sorcerer, Kyra the cleric, and Merisiel the rogue transported to a bizarre prison dimension designed to draw in the greatest warriors of three worlds. There, they encounter a cavalcade of sword-&-sorcery superstars like Red Sonja, John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, Thun’da, and others drawn from Dynamite’s vast catalog of amazing fantasy and pulp-inspired characters. Together, these heroes work to thwart the machinations of Red Sonja’s wizardly arch-foe, Kulan Gath, who has sinister plans of his own for the Worldscape and its mighty inhabitants! Dynamite challenged me not just to include their major characters, but to draw in interesting public domain characters from the long history of fantasy comics, which brought me to others like Fantomah, Camilla, Queen of the Lost Empire, Kalkor and other even more obscure and interesting heroes and villains. Weaving it all together — while still leaving room for an interesting story about people, rather than just a string of cameos — has been an exciting challenge, and one of my all-time favorite creative projects. Along the way, every issue of Pathfinder: Worldscape also features an RPG appendix I’m also writing, providing official Pathfinder RPG stats for the book’s guest-stars. I’ve already figured out how to translate Red Sonja into Pathfinder, and I’m currently working on John Carter’s best friend, the green Martian, Tars Tarkas, who appears in issue #2.

What fun titles are you reading?

Saga (Vol. 1 Dlx. HC / SEP140591):

There's so much unique and interesting stuff coming out right now I feel incredibly spoiled for choice. Some of my favorite reads over the last couple weeks include former Pathfinder writer Jim Zub’s Cthulhu/Hollywood mash-up, Glitterbomb, the space opera police procedural Hadrian’s Wall from Kyle Higgins (with beautiful art by Rod Reis), and the Lake of Fire, by Nathan Fairbairn and Matt Smith. The latter is an historical fantasy set during the Catholic Church’s Albigensian Crusade against the French Cathars in the 1200s, a little-explored era that holds great interest to me. Smith’s art gives the whole thing a storybook flair I find particularly appealing. Great stuff!

EDGE ESSENTIALS

Pick up these books to learn more about Erik Mona's Indie Edge style!

Pathfinder: Worldscape #1 (AUG161517)

Pathfinder Vol. 4: Origins HC (SEP151254)

Pathfinder Goblins! HC (AUG141370)