Patrick Rothfuss is partnering with One Shot podcast to produce a new mini-series set in the same world as his popular Kingkiller Chronicles epic fantasy series. The series, which dropped its first episode yesterday, is an improvised story from a playtest of a currently-in-development game based on Rothfuss’s world, and marks his the latest addition to the world of The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear.
OneShot is one of the podcasts from the OneShot Podcast Network, which features dramatized roleplaying game sessions hosted by James D’Amato and guest performers.
D’Amato notes that he’s developing the Kingkiller Chronicles RPG with Rothfuss, and that last year, Rothfuss promised fans that the two would collaborate on a long-form podcast set in the world, following the successes of the 2019 Worldbuilders Campaign. This project, D’Amato says, is an experiment before they launch that project, as a way to test out the RPG as they develop it, and to give fans a peak behind the curtain of game development.
This particular podcast follows a quartet of students from the The University’s Arcanum, voiced by Rothfuss, Bee Zelda, Satine Phoenix, and Liz Anderson as they “get unlucky draws for their tuition interviews with the masters and have to reckon with the possibility of taking a semester off.” The first episode runs for an hour and 17 minutes, and new episodes will drop every Monday.
In the podcast’s announcement, Rothfuss explains that this project goes back to the original roots of Temerant, in that he cut his teeth with roleplaying games.
“Telling stories like this will give me a chance to show off corners of my world that don’t appear in my novels, and it’s playful and collaborative in a way that I really miss. Most importantly, these are stories that will let people spend time in my world sooner rather than later, while they’re waiting for the next book to come out.”
