More than any other fantasy author I have ever read, I've been fascinated by the inspirations he clearly draws from, and have wanted to learn more. It's clear that his career as anthropologist and archaeologist have, at the very least, informed his themes and his world-building. His portrayal of the relentless and ultimately unwitnessed march of history, for instance, has the taste of someone who's chewed these thoughts over in his mind for years. I often wonder how much of the hopeless nihilism so many of his characters portray comes from his own views.

Throughout the story he mentions several historians and even a couple straight-up archaeologists - and he always portrays them as fools pursuing a pointless cause, or men who eventually go mad with the futility of it all. The one he briefly has a character remembering in the Crippled God kills himself. And he doesn't really seem to offer any cheerier examples, even by the stark standards of the Malazan stories.


On the other side, we've got table-top gaming. As a game designer and an avid D&D player and DM myself, I'm absolutely fascinated by this aspect of it. How much of this worldbuilding happened in his games vs the books? How faithful to it was he? Was he DM or player? What was his DMing style, and how did he run his games? Who were the people he played with? Oh, and of course: how many campaigns were there, and which of his hundreds of characters started off as player characters in those campaigns?

(My money, by the way, is on at least two groups of players: One comprised of Kellanved, Dancer, Dassem, Tayschrenn, and probably Laseen, and another comprised of Quick Ben, Kalam, and possibly other Bridgeburners. There are plenty of other groups that could fit the mold, too.)