RPG Publisher Spotlight: Terry Maranda

Each month, Geek Native’s patrons vote in the RPG Publisher Spotlight for an indie creator, curator or community cornerstone to write up, and for February, Terry Marada won.

Terry has worked on Dungeons & Dragons and is currently exploring speculative evolution and running a popular Patreon for Sol’Kesh. Luckily, Terry also very kindly made lots of time for Geek Native readers, and we have a set of about a dozen questions here that tour through all those exciting topics.

Getting to know Terry

We’ll get on to speculative evolution and Sol’Kesh in just a bit, but an introduction is a helpful way to release why Terry’s an interesting person to be asking about it!

Geek Native’s patrons voted to find out about Terry Maranda this month, so there’s clearly name recognition there, but for anyone who might have stumbled on this interview, could you please introduce yourself? There are reasons why you won the vote!

To start things off, I want to give a huge thanks to your patrons for voting for the Sol’Kesh Bestiary, I’m really honored to be interviewed. My name is Terry, I live in the (currently) frigid north of Montreal, I’m an art director in the gaming industry and freelance illustrator for TTRPGs. 

I love world building and creature design, so after a few years of drawing beasts for fun, it was time I started thinking about how they can live in a shared world. That world is our own Earth, 82 million years in the future, mankind is long gone and forgotten, and the bestiary takes place on an isolated island, Sol’Kesh. The purpose of this bestiary is to give TTRPG players a sandbox of creatures and locations to populate their own stories that takes inspiration from the primal competition of evolution in a speculative far future. 

What was working with Wizards of the Coast on Dungeons & Dragons like? Would you do it again?

Working on a Dungeons & Dragons video game was a dream come true, for three years I handled the art direction for Warriors of Waterdeep and was one of the main contacts with WotC (being one of the few English speakers in a Montreal game studio helped a lot). I had already loved and played D&D for years, so getting access to their style and world building guides was next level amazing. 

While Hasbro has caused a lot of issues with the community over D&D and the OGL, the actual people working in their studio are wonderful, and I would jump at the opportunity to do so again. My greatest moment with them was spending a week with Richard Whitters (who has since left), that man is an absolute font of creative energy, and he spent nearly every moment sketching out ideas for my art team to use for adventuring in Faerûn.   

Getting to know Sol’Kesh, The Speculative Evolution Bestiary

There’s a highly rated digital shopping self for Terry at DriveThruRPG with $2 or PWFY downloads of monsters, but that’s not even the top of the iceberg. 

What’s speculative evolution?

Speculative evolution is a pseudo-science/art movement that tries to imagine how a plant or animal could evolve in different ecological situations, or in my case, the distant future. 

For me, it’s been a very useful method to ground my creature design and discover an incredible community of passionate creative people. Instead of drawing a monster just because it looks cool, speculative evolution forces me to think about what kind of environment this creature could live in, what it eats, how it survives against predators. If a leaf eating lizard has thick armored scales, what kind of predator is it trying to deter? And how would this predator get around those natural defenses, and then what kind of environment would these two animals compete to survive in? 

By trying to imagine how one creature can exist, I’m suddenly faced with needing to think about a whole supporting cast of flora and fauna for them to live in, and the world soon builds itself.

Ah, okay, so what does that mean for “Sol’Kesh, The Speculative Evolution Bestiary”?

For the Bestiary, speculative evolution has been the inspiration for the setting and how present, existing animals could one day adapt to a distant future on an isolated island. 

I wanted to create a living landscape of beasts that feel grounded. To give RPG players a location to explore, craft and tame that felt like an undiscovered primal land. 

I’ve always been very inspired by nature without man, that pure evolutionary arms race between animals when they compete for survival, and how strange adaptations arise to meet that, like the absolutely bizarre extinct animals found in the Triassic or Cambrian period. While I’m far from being an expert on evolution, I try to justify in timelines and little story texts throughout the book on how in 82 million years there can be great stretches of coral reefs breaching the waves, insects the size of cars roaming fields of flowers or that a whole ecosystem has flourished in the acidic runoff in underground caverns. 

Is there tension between creating a workable tabletop RPG setting and doing justice to the concept? How do you manage? 

That has been the biggest challenge to this setting and one I expected to take on. 

I created a campaign setting set on a tragically non-magical planet, Earth, and then killed off all of humanity, just with that it makes zero sense why a somewhat-medieval fantasy game like D&D could take place there. So to give this all purpose, I made the island Sol’Kesh as more of a sandbox setting for Game Masters to use, populated with creatures inspired by the speculative evolution of today’s animals and natural ecosystems that could one day arise in a world without the imposing control of an intelligent species. To help out those GMs, in the book I’ve created campaign suggestions and expedition tables. Campaigns that treat this an undiscovered island on Faerun, a new planet that some spelljammer ship crash landed on, or maybe they just want to pick out which creatures will fit best in their dungeon, I’ll just be happy if players are having fun slaying or befriending my creatures.

I guess that creating stats for D&D creatures from 82 million years in the future might be challenging. How have you been doing it? Any tips for readers?

For the first half of the book’s creatures I worked with some talented designers on D&D stats, but now after some time I’ve been able to handle the stat creation alone and I think the biggest challenge has been creating interesting encounters without relying on any magic or high fantasy abilities. 

So, my tip to those who also want to create some grounded creatures in D&D without going too boring in their rule set would be to start with an existing creature stat and build from there. 

For example, suppose you were to create a three-tusked rhinoceros that bellows out challenges to its rivals during mating season. In that case, you can start with the baseline of a rhinoceros statblock, keep the Charge, improve the Gore action to do Piercing and a bit more damage, and then add an ability to Bellow, doing thunder damage in a cone to any nearby creatures (to those non-D&D players thunder is sonar damage and I hate that they use the term thunder). This takes a lot of attributes found in nature and adds a layer of combat gameplay to upgrade your creation into something a bit more unique. 

Future (but not 82 million year future) RPG publishing insight

Given Terry’s professional experience and hands-on knowledge with Sol’Kesh, I was all too ready to hit up one of my favourite topics: what RPG publishing will be like in the near future. 

How is Patreon working for “Sol’Kesh, The Speculative Evolution Bestiary” and what are your thoughts about Patreon in general as an alternative publishing model for the hobby?

Patreon has been great for gathering a community around the project, especially since they recently created a free membership feature for people to learn about the project and join the Discord group easily. 

The monthly release cadence has helped me build momentum towards the bestiary book completion and the subscription money has been put to super good use in working with some incredible 3D artists, from my first partner in this, Edge Miniatures’ Pascal Cleroux to the current artist Worldshaper’s Keith Kirby, painting tabletop minis of 3D prints of my creatures is like all my favorite hobbies coming together at once. 

While I don’t think Patreon is a strong alternative to actual publishing, it is a very great tool for an indie creator to build a fan base and grow that into something big. I do have a lot of hope it’s future as I’ve already seen some improvements in the last year, and I wish it will one day have a lot more features like a wiki type structure to post content like you’d find in World Anvil, a robust chat group system like Discord and just simply a better way to host and manage files. And while it’s not perfect, it has still been a huge help in funding the Bestiary and has been a huge stepping stone in building the community of players that are already playing within the setting so I’m still very thankful for it.

You have hundreds of backers so it’s clearly working for you. Do you know if people are using the setting yet? Is there a hungry community growing and putting you under some pressure to publish a complete entity?

I crave all the pressure! Getting the book out and published has been the end goal, the community on Patreon and Discord that’s built up around it has been instrumental in pushing me towards that. And it’s been more than just that pressure, on Discord there’s already several games going on in parallel over the last year, the absolute wealth of ideas and feedback the players have has been priceless…plus they catch my frequent spelling mistakes on every release. Thanks to them I’ve created full features in the book based on their suggestions. 

Honestly, this aspect of the project is something I never expected to happen, and it beats the hell out of sitting alone in a room drawing monsters, the fact that people are playing within the setting on a weekly basis and making friends while doing so has made this whole endeavour already a success to me.

“Sol’Kesh, The Speculative Evolution Bestiary” takes us into the future of animals and monsters, but do you have any thoughts about the future of the hobby? Beyond Patreon, we’ve Kickstarter and crowdfunding, we’ve AI and virtual tabletops, and even movies and TV shows in the work. Is it all change?

While last year’s D&D OGL drama revealed a lot of greed encroaching into this creative space, I think the fear of that control was a wonderful catalyst for an explosion of new RPG systems and settings to expand outwards. While D&D will always be a standard for TTRPGs and still be the most popular in mainstream media, I think the future is looking incredibly bright for players to simply search or build the game world they want. 

At this point if there’s a fictional movie you’ve seen that you loved, there’s a good chance there’s a campaign setting and accompanying ruleset for that, either officially or not. And with DrivethruRPG, Patreon, WorldAnvil, and I’m sure I’m missing some others, finding inexpensive and well-made PDFs couldn’t be easier, and even just walking into a friendly neighborhood game store will have a wide selection of printed books from major companies to indies. 

When it comes to how the players game, I think in the end the more options available to how people want to play the better, Virtual TTRPGs saved my sanity during the pandemic lockdown and it allows people from all over the globe to game. So whether you prefer remote or on a table, or even solo play, I think it’s amazing that we all have these expanding choices.

Medieval weapons and the future

My research for the interview took me (virtually) to Darksword Armory. 

Is it true that you work in an actual forge? Do you make horseshoes or something like that?

Not as cool as hammering iron on the anvil by a burning forge, but more cool than horseshoes. I’ve been designing medieval weaponry for this forge in Montreal, Darksword Armory, for 15 years now, often historic replicas and a few fantasy blades of my own design. It’s been amazing seeing the actual blacksmiths craft the blades when I visited the forge.

Gosh! Are the swords we sometimes see in fantasy RPGs anything like swords you can imagine would come from a real forge?

Hah awesome question, discounting all those swords on fire and made out of crystal, a lot of what I’ve seen in RPGs is definitely something that could come from a forge, and would be an absolute mastercraft to see created… I just don’t know how well they’d hold up in a fight. All those epic looking guards with sculpted obsidian skulls and sharp fangs look like they would not only unbalance the blade but will probably cut up the wielder’s hand. But there is something to be said about the rule-of-cool, so for RPGs I say go wild!

What’s next for Terry Maranda?

The big question! I’m happy to say most of the book is written and illustrated, so my two major goals that I’m trying to accomplish this year is finding the right publisher to help get Sol’Kesh out there, and then start a Kickstarter campaign to get this printed and in the hands of the players. 

After that, I definitely want to keep the Patreon and community going even after the book is out. I haven’t actually told many people what those plans could be. I’m thinking of either focusing on a sequel to Sol’Kesh with a continental setting instead of an island, or a whole new, much more magical fantasy setting with actual humanoids. Both projects are pulling at me to do them… so maybe both!

Terry Maranda

• Welcome to Sol’Kesh.
• Sol’Kesh Linktree.
• Sol’Kesh on Gumroad.
• Sol’Kesh on Cults3d.
• Sol’Kesh on MyMiniFactory.
• Terry Maranda on DriveThruRPG.
• Terry Maranda on Instagram.
• The Sol’Kesh Patreon.