Beth Lyons

Game Heroes

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Beth

I love games — board games, tabletop games, console games and PC games. I’ve even played a round or two of Angry Birds. My heart belongs to RPGs, though. I love playing tabletop Dungeons and Dragons and console RPGs like the Mass Effect series. That’s because I want to be the hero.

We’re all the hero of our own life story (even when we have an epic fail) but in games you get to be a real hero, thwarting the bad guys, saving the princess, and sometimes the world.

I have to credit my partner, Debbie for getting me involved with Dungeons and Dragons. I’d never played anything quite like it and being a participant in an epic story, gave me insight into how to craft my novel. Heck, it gave me the inspiration to write the novel — but that’s for another post.

As I play games, most recently Mass Effect 3, I see how I’ve been influenced — consciously and unconsciously — by the mythos of these amazing games. The Mass Effect universe could not be more different than the world of The Soul Thief and yet there are ways that Shepard reminds me of Teaka, my hero. The same could be said for Skyrim, Fallout 3 or the Dragon Age universe.

So in a very practical sense, Teaka is a game hero — The Soul Thief is the game I played with myself for months as I wrote it, and hopefully it will be a game that you will enjoy playing, too.