If you’ve read any of the fiction in our anthology books, in No Quarter magazine, in the organized play league seasons, and even in the occasional Skull Island eXpeditions product, you’ve likely seen the names Aeryn Rudel and William Shick on a fairly regular basis. Although Will and I really do have our own jobs (he’s the Director of Business Development and I’m the Production Manager), we’re also regularly called on to serve as Doug Seacat’s understudies, writing fiction for the Iron Kingdoms when the Great One is not available.

One of the things Will and I get to do from time to time is collaborate on a piece, working together to tell the same story from multiple POVs. Our first outing in this vein was the fiction for the 2013 organized play league Machinations, where we told the story of a sinister cephalyx plot eventually foiled by the Illuminated One Harlan Versh and the mercenaries Rutger Shaw and Taryn di la Rovissi. I wrote Versh’s POV for this, and Will wrote Rutger’s and Taryn’s. We had a blast writing together and found that our particular styles meshed well; they aren’t so different that the switch from one POV—and writer—to the next wasn’t jarringly obvious (we hope).

If you’re interested in checking out our first collaboration, you can download the novel-length Through the Darkness: The Story of Machinations for just 99 cents from Skull Island eXpeditions.

When the 2014 league season rolled around, Quartermaster Will Hungerford asked Will and me if we’d like to team up again for the fiction. That collaboration became Scars of Caen. When we began putting together the storyline and characters for this one along with Doug Seacat, it was important for the two of us to figure out which characters we wanted to write. We knew there was going to be a young druid character from the outset, and we knew we wanted a more “savage” companion for her. I like to write about things that make other things bleed, so I immediately called dibs on the savage character. Will, a kind and gentle soul (reflected in his writing), was happy to take on the druid.

This is where the fun began. I had a lot of ideas about what the savage character should be. Most of those were immediately shot down by Doug and Will—with good reason, as logic and reason had apparently abandoned me. I’ll just say that the warpwolf Rochlof could have been a Tharn, a bog trog, a gatorman (I wanted that one real bad), and—for a fraction of a second—a croak. Wiser heads prevailed because this is a Circle story and a Circle warpwolf makes some sense.

I warmed to Rochlof immediately. Here was a chance to get inside the head of a living, breathing warbeast. That’s a rare treat for a writer working in the Iron Kingdoms, and I was pretty excited to take it on. Surprisingly, though, the best part about the story for me was not the gore-soaked mayhem I had so looked forward to writing but the tragic relationship between Rochlof and Caelan. There was a lot of emotion there, and in the end, both Will and I knew that one of us would have to kill our darling. I won’t spoil that for those of you who haven’t read the story, but I will say killing off a character you’ve come to enjoy writing is never easy to do.

Where can you read this epic tale of dragons, druids, and danger? Well, as with all WARMACHINE/HORDES league fiction, you can download the individual chapters of Scars of Caen in PDF form from the Privateer Press website. And starting this Friday, you can purchase the entire novella-length story, packaged all neat and pretty-like in a single digital edition through Skull Island eXpeditions, for $2.99.

Will and I are already working on our next collaboration—along with a special guest star or two—for this year’s league, Path of Devastation. I’m hoping to get to write a gatorman doom reaver who dual-wields Orgoth war scythes. Doug seems reluctant for some reason, but we’ll see . . .