Hard to be a God Interview

Gamasutra has conducted an interview with Hard to be a God lead designer Stepan Vakhtin about the challenges involved with adapting the Strugatsky brothers' book to a role-playing game.
Why did you decide not to follow the narrative of the book directly?

SK: Frankly speaking, that's a bundle of reasons that drove us. Firstly, we felt it could be quite boring and trivial to follow the narrative of the book just word-for-word. Secondly, we at our dev team are true fans of the Strugatsky brothers' written heritage. We were always so much enthusiastic about following up on what they created, you know, what could happen afterwards, may be some time after the events described in the novel.

So when we finally embarked on the challenge, it became totally clear our time had come to feature our own variant of what might have happened later. Incidentally, we received a great support in composing the storyline and dialogs, making the overall setting from one of the authors of the table edition of the Hard to be a God game.

What's the table edition?

SK: This is the tabletop RPG Hard to be a God. It is based on a non-commercial Russian roleplaying system The World of the Great Dragon, which, in turn, is based on classic Dungeons & Dragons. The game was created under the supervision of Dmitriy Knyazev - we had been working together on the computer-based version of the game as well.

The rules of this role-playing system cover the character creation, skills, weapons and equipment, typical NPCs and the bestiary.