RPG ECHOES OF HEAVEN Writer/Designer Robert Defendi Interview

Find the author Robert Defendi at RobertDefendi.Com
Find Echoes of Heaven 
Find Echoes of Heaven Reborn

I recently shared some links for the Echoes of Heaven project of Robert Defendi on Kickstarter. And as a former constant gamer to me now as I guy who appreciates gaming, but doesn't get to play often.

Through the PR share, Robert and I chatted quite a bit and I like him very much.

ROBERT DEFENDI INTERVIEWED
By Alex Ness
November 13, 2025
 

Why do you write, what do you write, how did you get educated to do so? Is your work released in a form of chapters, as a largely connected universe, or does it provide a single event or game, and anything further is self contained?

I've written many things. I've been in game design since '96, working on games like Rolemaster, Spacemaster, Exalted, Spycraft, Shadowforce Archer, and Stargate SG-1 to name a few.

I've written several fantasy and hard sci-fi novels and short stories, although the only ones readily available are my Death by Cliche novels, and some anthologies on Amazon. I started my game company Final Redoubt Press around 2004 or 2005. Game wise, I've mostly worked on the Echoes of Heaven campaign setting since them.

As for why I write... Honestly, it's probably because my father died when I was young. He wanted to write the great political thriller but passed away before he could finish it. That makes a big impression on a child.

I've been practicing writing most of the time since then. I think I wrote my first "book" after I saw The Black Hole in 1979. That would have been about seven months after he died. I had a great creative writing teacher in college named Larry Harper. He let us write our own syllabus, so I just said, "Fine. I'm giving you a chapter a week and by the end of this class I'll have a novel."

As for how I release, it depends on the form. I release adventures one at a time, like chapters. For a longer form work like a novel, it's all at once.

Where were you born, do you still live there, is it a well educated and sci fi loving place, or is it a world that bright sci fi fans find to be anti Imagination? In my case my cousin Tom took me to see a couple great fantasy films, and lit my engine to launch. I had friends in High School took it from there for me.

I was born in Dubuque, IA to parents who, frankly, should have known better. Sorry, that's the first line of my bio. When I was a kid, the Iowa school system was rated the top in the country. It's amazing some of the things drilled into me in elementary that many adults don't understand today. Especially when it comes to nuance.

I wouldn't call it a great place for sci-fi, but my mother was a huge Star Trek fan and Star Wars exploded onto the scene when I was 6 and it changed everything. Still, I had to move to Utah before I really learned what it's like to live in a sci-fi culture.

Fun fact, when I won a place in Writers of the Future, I went to their workshop in Hollywood. The great (and dearly missed) writer Jay Lake was in my group. When introduced to the president of Galaxy press, Jay said he was from Oregan, and the president said, "Ah, there's our Oregan person, now which of you is from Utah?"

I don't know if that pattern has been broken, but pretty much every year up until then, they had at least one writer from Oregan (probably from the Wordos writers group) and one from Utah. We are a sci-fi culture.

When did you begin playing RPGs and what did you like about playing? What system did you start with, which have you most played and/or enjoyed playing? As we are about to discuss your own campaign and game setting (let me know if I am off track) did the system you played growing into a gamer and game designer influence your own work, for good or otherwise?

I started right around 1982 when my family moved to Fairfield, IA to study under the Maharishi. In the first month, a kid showed me AD&D, and I was instantly hooked. I bought the famous red box shortly thereafter. That was during the great dice shortage, so my red box didn't even have dice. We had to cut up chits and put them into dixie cups...and we LIKED it. :)

I've played so many games. At one point I could say I'd played just about everything, but that hasn't been possible for a long time. Although I wrote the current incarnation of Spacemaster (last I checked), I've gravitated more to fantasy.

I don't think the games themselves influenced Echoes of Heaven. That was probably more my love of medieval history with a sprinkling of my varied religious background. According to the dedication I wrote, works like the novel "To Rein in Hell," by Burst or the movie "The Prophecy" by Widen played a big role. Part of me also wanted to reconcile contradictions between what modern Christians believe and what the scripture actually says. I love my Dante, but most modern people don't realize that hell was supposed to be a prison, not a domain to rule. I had to reconcile that and not build that contradiction into my setting.

That's not to say this is a "Christian" setting. It doesn't represent any religion to any great extent, but there are angels and there is hell. In reality only the images and iconography of the War in Heaven really come for real world churches. But the medieval-style culture is the real driver for the practical setting. The church in the game isn't the catholic church in any doctrinal way, but the CULTURE is very similar, because I built the whole culture of the world from my medieval studies (mostly the "Life in a Medieval <Blank> books), and you can't recreate medieval Europe without some church that fits in the cultural niche that the Catholics held. That's why all the titles are the same.

Do you see a greater purpose to RPGing, or is it simply a game for fun? I was a TA in a History department and part of a humanities class was to show some of the events and factors in crosscultural first contact. After that event went so well, it led to desire by some of the students to ask for similar events on future portions of the class. However, the other TA and Professor mocked me for suggesting I gather our 200 students and play a round of D&D, which I had no intention of. Just said, could you dig deeper with this and they treated me as wearing a tinfoil hat.

RPGs are just a different way to tell stories, but stories as a whole have a tremendous impact on us. One year at World Horror I was on a panel with Tim Powers, who I'd like to call a friend. We were asked why we love horror, and I told them that we're built with all these survival mechanisms that trigger off fear, but for the most part, we don't have as much a use for them in modern society. Huge mechanisms of our brain what have no way to be exercised in everyday life. Most of us are not often stalked by monsters anymore, but in a horror story, we tap into that deeply ingrained survival instincts. It give us a kind of genetic validation. Tim leaned back behind the other panelists and mouthed "That's really good."

I saw an interview with Tim later and he was asked the same question. He gave my answer. Its one of the greatest compliments I've had.

But more generally, stories are how we learn empathy. Stories are how we practice dealing with certain trials in our minds. Tracy Hickman once told me at a lunch that the reason he hates the Twilight books is that vampire stories used to serve an important cultural purpose. They taught young women to be wary of predatory men. All our stories do something like that. Most of my moral compass doesn't come from religious upbringing. It comes from the examples of my parents and years of reading stories. Thinking about the implications. Empathizing with people who don't share my background or POV.

Our brains don't differentiate between reality and fiction. Every story we experience, we experience as if it really happened to us. Stories don't just shape us, they inhabit us. We are all the sum of every story we've ever heard.

How have you presented your Echoes of Heaven to newbs or people who haven't a clue about a participation oriented story telling game, or worse, someone who thinks RPGs are evil at their basic root?  I ask because during the rise of D&D and other RPGs the church tried to create something of an alternative by having Knights solve problems and what not by Christian oriented questions or quizzes. I never strayed into the demonic areas that one could enter, but it freaked people out who couldn't perceive what RPGs do. Also, looking at the present world, RPGs are idea engines for games, entertainment and storytelling. How do people maintain lack of perception or appreciation for entertainment?

Honestly, I don't think I've done either. Echoes was originally popular with the baked in Rolemaster crowd, and they all knew me because I worked on Rolemaster and Spacemaster. As for people who think RPGs are evil, I don't think I've met one of them since the 90s. Now, everyone knows about RPGs because of Critical Role and Stranger Things.

Creating games and new storytelling products would seem in ways to be daunting. So many games follow what's been done already, if not in story but setting. I have played a helluva lot RPGs and I am so tired of people remixing the mechanics but presenting the same damn thing otherwise. I am not an expert but is it really the story and/or campaign setting that turns something from, same old stuff, to wow, new outlook?

Well, I mostly concentrate on the story, since I've always worked in ground where the rules are already well-planted, but off the top of my head, the Alien RPG by Free League is pretty interesting. It's only 6 years old. The way it handles stress, making it a game of escalating hyperfocus until you snap from the pressure, creating a system were the tension of the situation helps keep you alive until suddenly, without warning, it does the exact opposite. Its simple and yet the most brilliant thing I've seen in decades. But then again, and I might have mentioned it before, its based on a movie so icon that the pivotal scene in the climax spawned the title of the premier book on screen writing (Save the Cat.)

They refined the stress system in Alien Evolved, which is just now releasing, but the core concept seems to be the same, they just fine-tuned the bad end of that spectrum.

Before that, I think that the RPGs for Smallville and Leverage had some very interesting takes on RPG tropes. In Smallville your dice pool was based on your relationship with the people effected more than your skill (the example they said was that Chloe was a pretty good hacker normally, but she was UNSTOPABLE if Clark was in trouble.) And they added a mechanic where everyone got plot points for certain in-character interactions, so while most of the characters might be upset that Lois was being unpleasant to everyone, she was giving the PLAYERS in-game currency, so they weren't upset at all. Brilliant.

Leverage had a flashback mechanic that allowed players to start a flashback to explain why the latest complication wasn't a complication after all. I don't know for a fact that's where Blades in the Dark got the idea, but I do know that Leverage had it first.

For the record, who are the writers who gave life to your imagination to also create creative works? Are they mostly fantasy, or as you mentioned Dante, and I enjoy his great works. But who, and what realms they wrote became a furnace in your own creative gut?

Larry Niven is probably my favorite author of all time. I met him at the Writers of the Future BBQ, back before I was in the con circuit, when meeting writers was still a novelty. And until they messed up how panels were organized, I was THE go to Tolkien person at FanX panels (formerly Salt Lake City Comic Con.) Well, I say the go to person, but I've only read the Silmarillion five or six times. There was one women there who had read it over 40 times, but I was in more panels, so I expect her availability wasn't as good as mine.

But I came up in the 80s. If you named the ten or so authors that were defining the field back then, such as Eddings, or Brooks, or Donaldson, I probably read them all. The fantasy section was just a tiny portion of the already small Sci-Fi section back then.

I've run PR for your system ECHOES OF HEAVEN, could you here give a short description and tell people if there is more storytelling in that on the way when the readers, buyers finish their first investment into that world?

There's only one campaign in Echoes right now, (The Moving Shadow), so it's easier just to refer to it as Echoes of Heaven. The current story in Echoes is a ten-part epic that brings the world to the edge of destruction. We just had the Kickstarter finish for part two, so there's plenty of story left to tell. Most of my play testers have seen all of it. In D&D terms, it takes people from 2 to 20th level, and I find the flashbacks in Heaven are the parts that stir the imaginations of my players the most. I don't think I've ever had someone play in it what wasn't hooked, but I might be a bit biased there.