Six Of The Best With ROB ROGERS

Rob Rogers is living the geek dream - a comic book-reading roleplayer who is about to see his first novel, Devil's Cape, published on April 1 from the Wizards of The Coast Discoveries imprint. A married, father of two, Rob is a writer, editor and project manager who lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas.

(1) Please tell us something about your superhero novel Devil's Cape.

Wow. This is kind of like a "tell me about your child" question. It's hard to know where to start.

As you said, it's a superhero novel - set in a world where superheroes and mystery men have been around for quite some time.

But the city of Devil's Cape, Louisiana, where the book is set, is hard on its heroes.

It was founded in the 1700s by a masked pirate named St. Diable and it's earned a reputation for corruption and banditry.

Toward the beginning of the book, something pretty bad happens that inspires some heroes to stand up to the people who have been oppressing the city.

I wrote the book to be a fun read - the kind of book I would enjoy reading. One reviewer said: "Devil's Cape reads like a Disney World ride or a great burger – fun, filling, and while it won't change your life, you probably won't mind much."

And that's exactly the kind of thing I was going for. A fun story with feats of daring, superhero battles, carnival freaks, Greek mythology, a high-tech flying suit, and more. I hope I succeeded there, while also adding enough depth to the characters involved to make them feel like real people in a real world.

(2) What's your recipe for the perfect superhero/comic book film – and what movies do you think have got closest to this ideal?

You have to choose character development and writing over spectacle. Yes, the superpowers are cool and make for incredible visuals. But these have to be about people first.

I think that there's a pretty significant difference, particularly in expectations, between a comic book film and a superhero film with original characters (like maybe Unbreakable).

If you're making a film with original characters, you have a lot of leeway. But if you're making a movie based on a comic book or other property, you have to respect that property.

That doesn't mean you can't change some details to make the story fit the new medium better, but it does mean that you have to be very conscious and careful about any departures you make from the source material and make sure that you're making them for good reasons.

Take Spider-Man for example. I think it's one of the best comic book movies, maybe the best. It has strong acting and writing and doesn't forget about the fun of the material. Sam Raimi and screenwriter David Koepp respected the comic books the story came from.

The biggest changes I can think of were the fact that Spider-Man's web shooters were natural rather than mechanical (a good change, although I was resistant at first--it simplifies the story so that you don't have to spend a lot of screen time explaining how Peter Parker can whip up the impressive mechanical web shooters) and the visuals surrounding the Green Goblin (less of a good change, to my mind, since they made him overly mechanical and kind of fake looking).

Then take Superman Returns, which had some strengths, but just really mucked around with the source material too much (the kid, Superman having left Earth for years for no good reason, Clark back to being a dweeb, ad nauseam). It just wasn't Superman anymore, at least for large stretches of the movie.

Or take the first Punisher, where if I remember correctly, he never even wore the costume. What the heck?

Yeah, I guess I'd say Spider-Man or Spider-Man 2 was closest.

(3) I understand you play Champions, and other Hero RPGs. How did you get into roleplaying games in the first place?

Pretty much the classic way, I guess. I started out reading fantasy and science fiction at a young age. When I was maybe 10 or 12, I got the Dungeon board game and played it a lot.

From there, I was drawn to Dungeons & Dragons and picked up the Basic set and played it some with friends and some solo. I spent a lot of time in junior high rolling up characters and mapping out dungeons and writing down monster stats on 3" x 5" cards.

My love of comic books drew me to Champions back in the second edition boxed set and I've been playing it on and off ever since.

(4) From all the roleplaying games you have played over the years, can you think of a single moment that encapsulates just what is so great about this hobby?

I've had lots of great gaming moments, of course. But here's maybe my favorite. I was at GenCon playing in a Justice, Inc. adventure (a pulp fiction game with two-fisted heroes from the twenties).

This was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek game that ran the same basic characters for years at GenCon.

I was playing Johnny Danger, a kid acrobat and sharpshooter.

The first part of the adventure started, as many of them did, with the heroes in the clutches of the insidious Dr. Wong, a Fu Manchu type. He threatened us for a while and then ended up falling into a pit of lava or something like that.

All the PCs shouted out in unison, "No one could have survived that!"

Anyway, that was just the preamble to the adventure, a kind of cut scene like at the beginning of an Indiana Jones or James Bond movie.

The game played out over a four-hour session and I ended up making the cut to advance to the second round (they had like eight separate offerings of round one and one or two players made the cut from each to advance to round two, with the player selected as best role-player or most entertaining advancing).

We played the next day, some storyline involving a mummy's tomb where we saw the ghosts of people we'd known (including Johnny's parents).

As the thing wrapped up, each player got a chance for a quick monologue or dialogue to wrap things up. As Johnny, I turned to my "uncle," a player-character called "the Colonel," and said something like, "Uncle, when we were in the mummy's tomb, we saw all the people we knew who'd died, all the important people in our lives, right?"."Yes, Johnny," he said quizzically."But uncle," I said, "How come nobody saw Dr. Wong?"

The GM yelled "Cut!" and "Best end line of a JI game ever" or something of that sort. And I just beamed. Because I'd gotten in a good, fun line, because I'd been playing with a bunch of truly talented role-players, all of whom were full of creativity and fun. It was a great collaborative experience.

(5) Did your superhero roleplaying game experiences influence the plot or ingredients of Devil's Cape?

Not the plot so much. But a couple of the characters actually started as player characters for play-by-e-mail games.

One of them I never ended up playing. The other I actually played for a short time in a campaign - a wonderfully creative campaign with a number of talented writers - that ended pretty shortly after I joined (it wasn't my fault, I promise!).

I took some of the background I'd written up for the character as well as parts of a couple of turns I posted and adapted them for the book. By the time Devil's Cape was finished, much of it was altered. But one scene in particular, where a gang member named Cain Ducett attacks a woman in a fit of anger and ends up cursed for it, is taken almost whole cloth from a background story I'd written for his character.

(6) As a keen comic book reader, what current titles would you recommend to people?

There are a lot of good titles out there right now.

In no particular order, I've really been enjoying Suicide Squad (John Ostrander really has some strong writing on this one -it's like I'm flashing back to the "glory days" of my comic book collecting), Booster Gold (an old favorite of mine in an interesting new framework), Blue Beetle (I miss Ted Kord, but the new title is just very classic and fun in its approach), Captain America, Checkmate (some really good stories here from Greg Rucka), Wonder Woman (Gail Simone is the perfect writer for that title), and the recent Green Lantern Sinestro Corps storyline (one of the best "big event" stories I've read in a long time).

Oh, and The Brave and the Bold has been rocking my world, too, with its classic, fun superheroics. I'm also looking forward to the upcoming Last Defenders miniseries by Joe Casey.