diamondthrone.com: What was the highlight of the con for you?

I really enjoyed the final round of the AE tournament. That was a lot of fun. I think I've run something like this for the past three years and every time on Saturday night I'm always thinking "Ugh. Why did I schedule myself to run a game at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning?" but also every year, I have a blast playing it. Particularly because it's the final round, so these are great players and they know what they're doing and it's a lot of fun. So that's definitely a highlight.

diamondthrone.com: Talk a little bit about how the tournament came about.

Last year we had the two-round tournament and we all really enjoyed that so much we thought, you know we can do more than this. And there were a lot of people who came up to me and to others who said "I really wanted to get into that AU game but I just couldn't get in." And so we said, let's see how many tables we can fill and it turns out: a whole lot. I really pushed for the three round idea, but the Council of Magisters really took the idea and ran with it and I really appreciate that.

diamondthrone.com: Well, to me, as one of the organizers of the tournament, one of the great things about it is that we just emailed our contributors to diamondthrone.com and said "Who's going, who's willing to run?" and those people stepped up to the plate. To me, one of the great things about the tournament is that the community said "Yeah, we'll do it." They got on board, too.

That's really nice because I didn't get to see every single table run, but I got to see some of them and it looked like everyone was having a great time. I'd like to continue this next year, I'm up for it. Next year we're also going to be pushing Ptolus really big so we'll probably have some Ptolus games going.

diamondthrone.com: That brings us around to Ptolus. You've been teasing us a little bit with information but I'm sure all the AE geeks want to know: What can we expect in terms of AE crossover or conversion?

There is going to be AE conversion material. The book, the huge, big 600-700 page book, is indeed going to have a CD-ROM in it that is going to have even more content in it - which is where we'll put the AE conversion notes. Which enables us to make them as big or as small as needed, because there isn't any kind of limitation there. And actually, Soren (Siobharek) of the Council of Magisters has volunteered to help with that. It's going to be a big job but I think it's going to be fun.

Ptolus does lend itself naturally because so much of AU, when it first came out, came out of the Ptolus campaign: litorians, and faen, and even some of the ideas for classes like the Runethane actually were in my D&D campaign of Ptolus first.

diamondthrone.com: And right now you're running kind of a hybrid campaign, right?

Very much so. It's almost 50-50 as far as the player characters are concerned. Two litorian brothers, one of whom is a bear totem warrior. And then we have a sibeccai cleric. And what's really interesting is that we have a human magister and a human wizard in the same party. So you get to see round for round how those two things stack up. And it's interesting because the human wizard's spells are better and the magister can cast open lock and have a chance to open a lock but the wizard can cast knock and it just works. And I didn't want to modify that. I wanted to see the two things straight out of the book and how they compare.

However, the magister is so much more flexible and has such a wider variety of spells and the flexibility of the customization of heightened and diminished and ladened.

So it really kind of equals out, but it's fun.

diamondthrone.com: Let's talk about what's coming up. You've got the Spell Treasury coming out in PDF at the end of the year and the hardcover in March.

Yes, it's hardcover. It's basically going to have enough spells in there that the number of spells in the game essentially triples.

diamondthrone.com: And what's the blend? There are some SRD spells in there, some Grimoire II spells in there, there's some new spells. Can you give us an idea of what the mix is?

Well even if I did break it down that way, it would be kind of deceiving because there are some things that the other author, Jeffrey Dobberpuhl, did where he would take a spell from the SRD and he'd convert it and by the time he converted it and made it appropriate for AE it's unrecognizable as the spell it once was. It's really cool, but you wouldn't even really think of it as being an analog to some Core spell.

So I would say, there's a fair number of spells that transfer pretty standardly. And then there's probably another half again as many of those spells that were inspired by or based on Core spells but have changed dramatically. And then I would say there's about 60/40 with the Grimoire II and the new spells. It's hard to say because the book is still under development.

diamondthrone.com: And what sort of setting/other material is going to be included?

There's kind of an extensive section on "here's a whole new bunch of AE spells, how do I incorporate them into my campaign?"  And beyond that, throughout we created these flavor text side bars that give you the story elements behind the spells so you can take that stuff and integrate it into your campaign. And there's some new monsters that come out of the spells. For instance, there's a cool new plant monster that the greenbond can summon.

There's some exciting art that's coming out for this book, too. You can see the cover on our website and that looks really great. And in addition to some of the great artists that we use now, we have a brand new artist whose name is Ben Wooten who is the head of the WETA workshop, who did the special effects for all of the Lord of the Rings movies. Academy Award-winning Ben Wooten. So that's kind of cool. We're excited about that.

Turns out and a lot of the guys who work there in the workshop are AE fans. Ben contacted us, and we were thrilled.

diamondthrone.com: Speaking of awards, the ENnies were Friday night and you guys walked away with a pile of recognition.

We did very nicely. Beyond Countless Doorways won for Best Cover and the silver for Best Supplement. And then Arcana Evolved won for Best Interior Art and Best d20 game. It was very flattering.

diamondthrone.com: Iron Heroes was also a huge hit at the con this year. Tell us a little bit about the development of that book.

Well, the real story is that the original plan was that Ptolus was going to come out this Gen Con: 2005. And we were working hard toward that but shortly after Mike Mearls came onboard with Malhavoc it became clear that wasn't going to happen. So we needed something new for the schedule for this summer. And I'd had this idea actually ever since AU. When I wanted to do a variant player's handbook, it was between doing something that was kind of out there like AU, with a bunch of weird races and classes and stuff, or do an analog of the Player's Handbook rebalancing everything so that there are pretty much no magic items, a lot fewer spells, things like that and see what happened. And so when it came time to put that on the schedule I knew I couldn't write it and so I said to Mike "Is this something you'd be interested in?" and he jumped at the chance and really went to town.

He and I, particularly in those early stages, bounced a lot of ideas off each other and to be honest - it's almost all him. I was really just kind of a sounding board. Really, Iron Heroes is all Mike Mearls. I was just another guy there to look at it and that's kind of what a "developer" means - someone who's got your back. I did the final development pass on it and we tweaked a few things but really, it's Mike's book.

diamondthrone.com: Were you involved as well with the two future releases?

Actually, I was probably even more involved with Mastering Iron Heroes and the Bestiary - particularly the Bestiary. I did almost a second design pass on that. It was something that Mike was doing just as he was finishing up with us and he had a new job to start and didn't have the time to go back through one more time on that one. To a lesser extent that was true of Mastering Iron Heroes as well.

diamondthrone.com: Will the Bestiary, like Ptolus, have AE conversion stuff attached to it or do you think you could just plant the stuff in your game straight up?

It's pretty straight forward. It would be just as easy to use an Iron Heroes monster in Arcana Evolved as a D&D monster. So there's a little bit to do - but not much.

diamondthrone.com: I know there's been a lot of chatter in the community about blending Iron Heroes and AE. Do you have any guidance on that?

Well, AE is fairly high magic. And Iron Heroes, while it has plenty of magic, you would not call it high magic by any stretch of the imagination. So that's going to be the inherent conflict. But if I was going to do it, I would take various aspects of Iron Heroes and incorporate them into AE. Like, the skill groups is a great idea. Some of the token use would fit into AE really interestingly. The stunts and zones and things of that nature fit in really well.

I think you'd have a tough time just putting in an Iron Heroes archer into the game straight up but I think you could take a lot of the aspects of it. Iron Heroes characters are designed to be more powerful. And so in a straight up game you're going to have some difficulties. But if you go into that with your eyes wide open I don't think it's too much work to figure out.

diamondthrone.com: What about the idea of tokens as either a replacement or a subset of hero points?

That is really interesting. I don't think those two mechanics don't have to be one or the other. You could combine those in interesting ways so that hero points can activate token abilities or maybe you could translate a whole bunch of tokens into a hero point, or a hero point-like effect. It's interesting because it would enable you to have a hero point and use it as a sort of long-term token in your pool or the equivalent of multiple tokens in your pool.

diamondthrone.com: We're joined now by Sue Weinlein Cook. Sue, what was the highlight of the con for you?

I think I'd say the ENnies -- the recognition from the fan community, everybody on ENWorld, and in the room. It was just wonderful. What a rush. Makes all that hard work even more worth while!