Christian Vanover

Heroes of Might and Magic III level designer and assistant director. Christian wrote most of the hero biographies as well as the Lost Lore  stories ascribed to Xanthor.

Technically Chris was H3's assistant director, but I adopted him as my assistant designer. He was a big help in many of the grunt areas. I was hoping to hand the expansion off to Chris so I could concentrate on the next Heroes.
- Gregory Fulton

Trivia

The hero Christian is named after him.

Interviews/Memoirs

Recollections on the Forge to AcidDragon [1]

Regarding Heroes III, as soon as the base game was released, I was transferred to Legends of Might and Magic. Because of that, I didn't work directly on any of the expansions or Chronicles (well, except for one map for the first expansion). I actually heard about Forge at the same time as the public... when unapproved concept art was released without our marketing department's consent. I can say with certainty that if NWC had continued working on the city of Forge, nothing even resembling a Naga in a tank or a Zombie with a chainsaw would have ever existed there, because that was simply not our style - the concept of the city was supposed to be "steampunk", not "horror". The concept art would have gone through a revision process and the artists would have heard "this is wrong, do it again" and if it wasn't for our marketing department, the public would never have even known what units didn't make it into the game in the end (and that's something that happens in every game development, really). Instead, the Heroes III team decided to abandon the city altogether. Why? I never found out, but that's how it turned out.

"Creativity" [2]

I had already done many maps for Heroes III, as I had done for Heroes I and II, including all the writing and flavor text that players would encounter as they played. The tales of Xanthor that were posted on our community forums were also my creation, and it was a lot of fun to be able to craft each new chapter and see the immediate responses that it would generate.

So when the Design Lead, Greg Fulton, told me he wanted to hand off another design task, I jumped at the chance without question. It turned out to be two requests, actually:

1. Come up with names for the eight leaders of Erathia.
2. Write a short bio / backstory for each hero. Each of the one hundred and twenty eight heroes.

*Gulp*

Deep breaths, Christian, you can do this. But I wasn't panicked for the reason you might think. See, when it comes to writing, I can go on and on. But when it comes to names, I'm hopeless. They are my collective Achilles Heel. My own pen-and-paper character names are terrible, and it carried over to the video games that I play: a Diablo Barbarian named Smaash, who was later reborn as my Rock Band drummer. A SWTOR Bounty Hunter named Guido. I used the name Widowmaker because I was a fan of Glen Cook's excellent Black Company series. At one point I even started naming personal characters after Might & Magic characters, including Xanthor, Korbac, and yes, the hated Spaz Maticus (my Bothan Teras Kasi in Star Wars Galaxies).

What I'm getting at is that, when presented with the two tasks by Greg, I very calmly said to him, "You need to know that I'll come up with 128 character bios before I come up with 8 good names." He laughed, but not as much as he did when I had finished the bios, but still needed two more leader names. I think he took pity on me by allowing me to change the names of one of the Knight characters to Sir Christian - my most unoriginal name ever, but I wouldn't have it any other way!

See also:

• Behind the Scenes