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Thursday 14 August 2014

Blood Sword redux: The Demon's Claw

Blood Sword
The point of the Blood Sword series is that you can play through all five books as a kind of epic role-playing campaign. It wasn’t the first time that had been done. Steve Jackson’s Sorcery books (currently enjoying a new lease of life via Inkle’s app version) paved the way, along with The Way of the Tiger by Mark Smith and Jamie. But I’ve never been a fan of Chosen One stories, and running a single-player campaign pretty much obliges you to make the hero a lost prince(ss) or a midichlorian messiah. Fantasy has more Enders than it has Frodos. The USP of Blood Sword is that it can be played solo or in a team of up to four, meaning that player-characters must rise on their own merits to become heroes, or fail in the attempt, rather than being born to a spoon-fed destiny.

Looking back, I wonder if the publishers were concerned that I wrote Blood Sword so that four players could make do with a single copy of the book. They’d probably rather have had special editions for Enchanter, Sage, Trickster and Warrior. A little more work, four times the profit. I’ve never thought of my writing in marketing terms, so there’s a lost opportunity – or a beacon of integrity, take your pick.

The Demon’s Claw, the midpoint of the Blood Sword series, is close to 600 sections and the thickest of all the books. This in a series where the shortest book is at least sixty thousand words. What can I say? I like to lose myself in my imagination and I hope you enjoy the ride. So, here are the influences, inspirations and reminiscences about The Demon's Claw in no particular order:

The title first. The Demon's Claw is the folkname of the Sword of Death, the mirror twin of the Blood Sword (the Sword of Life) which is of course the object of your whole quest. Unless both swords are the object..? That's a complication that starts to get hinted at here in book three and develops through to the finale in The Walls of Spyte.

Several of the non-player characters in the Blood Sword series are drawn from my own campaigns. Sir Tobias, the head of the Knights Capellar, was originally played by Steve Foster and if anything was more scary and fanatical in “real” life. (Tobias, that is, not Steve. He's a sweetie.) Anvil, the night watch commander in Crescentium, was one of Mark Smith’s characters in our original Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. (Mark later provided the template for Harold Shandor in Heart of Ice, where Steve also appears as Janus Gaunt – though those characters are much more loosely based on their Tekumel originals, Tlangten and Kanmiyel respectively.) The young knight Sir Balian was based on Jack Bramah’s EPT character Chaideshu.

Russ Nicholson

I had started thinking about casting choices by now. Prince Susurrien would be played by Omar Sharif, with his voice “soft and deep, suggesting the quietest beat of an enormous drum”. (Oh, you were thinking of Brian Blessed? Fair enough; once you open the cover it becomes your book.) And your arch-foe Icon makes his reappearance, now explicitly under his real Yamatese name, Aiken. I’d talk about his sister too, but that way lie spoilers.

The major literary influences here are Michael Moorcock (the ship that sails through time – though, yes, technically that is G C Edmondson; but I picked it from Elric stories), Robert Holdstock (Mythago Wood), and Robert Irwin (The Arabian Nightmare). If you’ve played Eric Goldberg’s Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame then you’ll recognize the impudent hunchback and the garrulous ghoul. Goldberg was the primum movens of the open world gamebook (Fabled Lands, for instance, or Fallen London, or Meg Jayanth's 80 Days) so we all owe him a lot.

As befits a story about the poles of Life and Death, the theme of The Demon's Claw is ambiguity. For instance, the man whose lower body is made of stone. Is he a spurned lover half-fossilized by a witch, or an incomplete statue given life by a kind-hearted sorceress? As the book’s original introduction put it:
In the words of Hasan i-Sabbah, Grandmaster of the Marijah Assassins, ‘There is no single truth; everything is possible.’ Or, as the Saviour of the True Faith said, ‘From the Cup of Truth one can drink a thousand times.’
In short, the message in encounter after encounter is that the truth remains deliciously unknowable, the box is never opened for sure, and Schrödinger’s cat remains intriguingly both alive and dead.

I like the stop-motion monsters and magical entities in this book, such as the Seven-in-One and the Hatuli. A little bit of Ray Harryhausen there by way of Jan Švankmajer. I can imagine them all jerky and a little bit fever-nightmarish. The jinni too, a real hairy blot of a being, a dirty great ink-stain on the clean page of reality. I wanted that folkloric feel. This isn’t a book of smooth Hollywoodized CG effects, it’s a Singing Ringing Tree of a fantasy.

Fighting Fantasy
Readers have noticed that the Blood Sword books are set in the Dragon Warriors world of Legend. The people of that world refer to it themselves as middle-earth (ie Midgard) but, as Tolkien has made that term his own, I’ve edited most of those references to “the mortal earth” or “the mid-world”. They don’t tend to call it Legend – that was always a term more for the players than the characters. But the interesting question is whether this even is the Dragon Warriors world or just something that looks a bit like it. In my Legend games you could go ten years and not meet a dragon, much less the World Serpent or an immortal like Hunguk the Pirate King. And there’s only one time we’ve had anything like orcs in Dragon Warriors, and that in a not-what-you-expected scenario by Steve Foster. The best way I can describe it is that if the real Legend is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the Blood Sword version is Guy Richie’s movies or a show like Penny Dreadful. No excuses here for that, mind you. Blood Sword was for a younger audience and it delivers a big bang whereas DW is all about the down beat.

As for the rules-y stuff, people have asked if you can complete the adventure without a Trickster. Most certainly you can. I reckon you’ll have more fun if there’s a Trickster along – that’s why stories about Odysseus are more interesting than ones about Ajax – but every character class can succeed and they all have their strengths. Personally I think you’re crazy if you don’t do deals with the sandestins – oops, faltyns – but the beauty of a series like this is you get to configure the kind of team that suits you best.

There’s little else to say about The Demon’s Claw except that I think it features some of Russ’s very best artwork. Next up in the redux series of blog posts is Doomwalk (aka “the one where they all go to hell”) but I should have a big announcement before that. Stay tuned.

28 comments:

  1. I always felt there were two Legends in contention. One was a little closer to the rules as written DW and probably closer to Blood Sword as well. The other was glimpsed in the description of people and places and magical items, probably reflecting your own play style more. As a young reader the former interested me but now the older me is intrigued by the latter. I don't read a lot of fantasy any more but the books I still love are those you mention as inspiration: Vance: Moorcock; Holdstock; Masefield; Garner; plus Wolfe.

    Anyway, can't wait for Blood Sword to be released again. Keeps these post coming, they are the perfect trailers.

    Rudd

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    1. Thanks, Rudd. I'm glad you're enjoying them. I do sometimes wish I could have written DW the way I wanted it to be. (Think Ironclad, The Black Death, Aguirre, Dragonslayer, The Seventh Seal, Season of the Witch... Am I missing any?) But if I had it probably would've sold a tenth the number of copies. Oliver was forever reminding me to please the crowd, not my own tastes, and I guess he was right.

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  2. I found 'The Demon's Claw' either just before or just after I read Robert Irwin's 'The Arabian Night's Companion', which lent an extra spice to the experience. There was something about Irwin's writing style that reminded me of yours, to the point that I went back through some of your dedications to see if he was in your gaming group! Since then I've realized he must be at least ten years older.

    Even now, whenever I reread one of these books I always end up dipping back into the other.

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    1. Funny you should say that, Tom. Robert was in the writing class run by Juri Gabriel, and my wife was in the same class, so we ran into each other a few times. Oliver even invited him to join in one of our role-playing games, but for whatever reason that never happened. And just recently I was running a campaign set in early 9th century Baghdad, and the Companion really came in handy. So there are currents of synchronicity at work there.

      Btw, age makes no difference in our group. A lot of our players are fifteen years younger than me, and I've played with guys twenty years older. You're as old as your character is.

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  3. The Demon's Claw was always my favourite of the series. It's partly due to the setting, which was really memorable and different from most fantasy (which is mostly based on European myths). But I also liked the structure of the story. Whereas books 1, 2 and 4 have a 3-act structure, with a short act I to set the stage, a short final confrontation in act III, and a long act II where you're going from A to B with all sorts of adventures on the way, book 3 had a lot more acts and, as a consequence, you never lost sight of *why* you were doing whatever you were doing – and I thought that made it stronger.

    Incidentally, it's funny to see that there were people who were convinced that you needed a trickster (i.e. that you needed to give Susurrien the fake Hatuli) to win. I used to auto-win all the fights when I read the books 20 years ago, but even I realised that you weren't supposed to defeat those three demons (?) that Susurrien summons.

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    1. Now, that's a *very* interesting point, Johann. I've never thought of it like that, but that probably is why The Demon's Claw is the highest-rated of the series - and why I'm not satisfied with The Walls of Spyte. (Getting ahead of myself there.)

      The book's original intro does invite the reader to auto-win battles, but I always thought it was obvious that fleeing from the mythago/demons was the only viable option. Having a Trickster along gives you a back-up way to win, but if you've been as chivalrous as a would-be hero oughta, you'll have already met Fatima much earlier. So any combination of character classes can win.

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    2. I used to play using the rules as written, more or less - and in that case, you see very quickly that it's wiser to flee from Susurrien's demon summons.

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    3. I was also surprised at one review that said using Augustus's flying carpet would result in certain failure. Considering that it's 3 encumbrance slots and you have to lug it around from book two, that would be a serious problem. But when I reflowcharted the whole thing (how's that for dedication?) it's just not so.

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  4. Even in French-speaking countries, le "Port des Assassins" is well-rated, so much that it is claimed to be the best gamebook ever written. It has indeed the perfect mix between action and description of a fascinating setting, between realism and fantasy.

    Olivier

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    1. The best gamebook ever written, Olivier? But surely that was Coeur De Glace? :-)

      Of the Blood Sword books, my own favourite is Doomwalk, but that is inevitably more linear than the others. I can see why The Demon's Claw gets the most top votes.

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    2. I should add : "ever published and/or translated into French", for "Cœur de Glace" was an inofficial translation and/or publication.

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  5. Funny you should mention Season of the Witch. It made me think of DW.

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    1. If there's mud, plague, moral ambiguity, and most of the heroes come out of it scarred in body and soul, then it's Dragon Warriors :-)

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  6. I've never read any of the Blood Sword series, so I'm looking forward to them being republished. And now for something completely different.

    I just wanted to share something for the Fabled Lands gamebook rules I've tested out that I think works pretty well. The 2/12 rule (2 always fails and 12 always succeeds) works well for single dice rolls, but my earlier vision of it for combat was lacking, so I've tweaked it a little. Especially in Book 6, it becomes very easy to become really deadly really quickly. Between "Master Dragon" and delivering those Lacquer Boxes, getting a 12 Combat skill is simple. Also, powerful weapons and armor are relatively cheap here and even if they weren't money isn't too much of a problem either. So, I tweaked things.

    In combat rolling a 2 or a 12 gives special results. A 12 gives an optional continuing roll. If a combatant (yes, NPCs can use this too, though they'll always choose to continue rolling). On a 12 the character may roll the dice again and add them to the first roll. If he rolls a 12 again he can keep going until he either choose to stop or rolls a number than isn't 12. If he rolls a 2 (as in snake-eyes) then that combat roll fumbles. Not only does the attack fail to hit, he takes a 1d6 penalty to his Defense against his next blow(s) ie, if he's fight multiple opponents and fumbles, he suffer the Defense penalty again all his opponents during their attacks. Once those attacks are resolved, his Defense goes back to normal. That said, the Defense penalty is not subject to continuing rolls. The penalty is a static 1d6.

    I playtested this thing and it had too effects that I liked. First, it tended to make combat go a little faster, especially against High-Defense opponents. Secondly, it brings suspense back to combat by making it less predictable. Sure, you're probably going to wipe out the hopping vampires or the little thief with the kitchen knife pretty easily, but you can't be sure of that anymore. And who wants to play a game(book) where you're sure of everything?

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    1. I just played some of Book 6 using a Mage named Petros. I sold my Platinum earring in Nagai and bought a house and a candle there. Then I collect 8 Lacquer Boxes, making the roll each time I stored one in the house. Once I had my 8, I took a ship to Kaiju and gave the boxes away to the Woman in White to boost my Combat to a 12. I bought a Ship at Kaiju, sailed it to Mukagawa, left it docked there and traveled north and east. I entered the Forest fought the vampire, came back out and ultimately encounter the Flying heads, which I figured were an easy kill. I wasted one of them (with the Spear +4 and a Combat of 12) easily. Then one of the others rolled 12, another 12 then an 8 and killed my Rank 6 ass right then and there.

      Yes, combat is a little more unpredictable, which is a good thing, even with the above character loss.

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    2. Oh boy, is it that easy to get up to Combat 12? We have to fix that if we ever get the FL books out as apps.

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    3. Ah, I just checked. So you don't mind having a Sanctity of 2, eh, John? You must be the senior wrangler at Dweomer :-)

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  7. I was already playing Petros as a Mage,which starts at a Sanctity of 1. Since I can't fall below below that, there's no reason not to deliver box after box and then work on his Sanctity later. Meanwhile, sections 704/216 offer an easy way to raise Charisma to 12. The worst thing that can happen is you lose Blessings (so don't go there with any) or Charisma (so don't go there with any Cha raising items).

    One other thing to look at is the northern Monastery at section 402 in Rising Sun. It seems weird that they'll apparently let anyone study there while the southern monestery requires its pupils to be initiates of the Sage of Peace.

    But let's face it, there's always going to be holes in any gamebook series. An easy get rich program is to sell your Platinum Earring at Chambara, buy a couple of swords +1 (or whatever you can afford) then tote them over to Mukagawa at 744 and sell them for profit. Repeat until rich enough.

    Here's a question for you, Dave. Does the Sage of Peace count as a deity given that Buddhism is as much a philosophy as a religion? In other words, can you become an initiate of the Sage after eating the Tatsu pearl and becoming part Dragon?

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  8. Thanks for pointing out these loopholes, John. If FL ever comes out in app form it'll be a lot easier to patch them up as we go. (And talking of that, Jamie and I hope to have some news soon.)

    Buddhism is as much a philosophy as a religion? To modern Western minds, certainly. In the language of Akatsurai it probably isn't even possible to make that statement. In any case, Sanctity is still the governing stat. Dragons need not apply :-)

    As for those monasteries... Each has its own rules. There isn't the centralized organization that you find in an institution like the Church in Legend.

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  9. Given the non-centralized nature of the monasteries, presumably a part-Dragon can thus go to the north one to boost his Sanctity back up. He'll never be initiated to any religion, but he'll still be able to potentially wield general faith abilities.

    On the subject of Sanctity, the Holy Sword that you get from raising the dead in Book 5 bugs me a little, so I put some House Rules to it. As long as your God box includes Ebron, the sword will give you a bonus equal to your Sanctity-1 up to a limit of +6. If you reach that limit then the sword will indeed "pulse with white light" which means that it can take the place of a candle/lantern or other source of light. Which in terms means that if you fight that thing in the vampire barrow in Book 6, you can roll your full Combat dice.

    If you get this sword and don't have Ebron in your God box, it becomes a Cursed sword that provides a penalty equivalent to whatever bonus it would have provided (and doesn't glow). The curse can be removed by joining the Church of Ebron as an initiate (at which point you get the bonus) or going to that mad wizard, Holyamu who will remove it in exchange for keeping the sword.

    Speaking of things that produce light, given the various feats of magic that can be performed, it seems odd that something as trivial as a Light spell seems beyond the most potent of wizard. So, another house rule is that if your class is Wizard and/or your Magic score is above 6 (whether naturally or through items) you can produce light at will and also don't need candles or lanterns.

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  10. I have a question about the swords from the Long House of the Seven Lords (and also the Ring of Ultimate Power). By one interpretation of the rules, these items are worth far less than the trouble to get them. To get, say, the Sword of Fire (Charisma +2) you have to throw of a curse, fight the champion and fight a water weird, at which point you get a Charisma boost less potent than that of a Centaur flute which you can buy in the Aku Grand Bazaar.

    My interpretation is that the swords (and ring) work differently than the usual Ability-modifiers. They instead work like the potions which temporarily increase Abilities, except that these increase are permanent (as long as you have the item in question). So, a character with the Sword of Fire, Ring of Ultimate Power, a Jade Crown and a Charisma of 10 would effectively have an 18 Charisma (19 for one roll if he also downed a potion of Charisma). Since they directly increase Abilities, the Swords and Ring are cumulative with each other, much like befriending the Unicorn and eating the Tatsu pearl after killing a dragon are cumulative. Doing both of these things give a character a +3 Magic increase. Are these interpretations correct?

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    1. Are those from Jamie's books? I'm going to let him take this one.

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    2. Btw it occurs to me that many of these rules questtions have probably been covered by the FL Yahoo group: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fabled_lands/info
      - worth a look, anyway.

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  11. I've signed up for the group but the moderator is taking his time to approve me.

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    1. I never joined it myself. Jamie is (I think) a member, so if he sees this comment maybe he can give the moderator a nudge.

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  12. In the meantime, I have another House Rules to share. I like the class-specific quests, but at times they get to be a little bit ridiculous. If I'm a Mage with 10s in Charisma and Combat and 8s in everything else, it seems a little presumptuous for Yanryt the Son to say that I'm not worthy of his quest when I can drop-kick the Black Knight's head into Aku if I felt like it.

    So I thought there should be a mechanism for shifting classes aside from very specific situations or encounters (eating the dragon's pearl, being turned into a Priest by the Clearwater Shrine). My method is still costly and somewhat dangerous, but it's both doabel and true to the spirit of the books.

    You may switch classes A) whenever you die and are brought back through a resurrection deal or B) whenever a book address you in a "class-specific" way ie "If you are a Mage, turn to page xxx." or C) when the books force you to change as in the Shrine and Dragon pearl examples above.

    Forced changes are handled as the book statues when they occur. Changes by choice work a little different. You can only attempt a change if you qualify for the class you wish to become. If you're a Warrior who wants to be a Mage and your Magic ability is a 2, you can't change. Assuming you qualify with your abilities, you must also be at least Rank 4 in order to change. Characters with less Rank than that Just don't have the life experience and to make such a drastic move. Assuming the character meets these requirements, the player rolls 1d3 (1d6 half it and round up ie rolling a 5 means a 3) and reduces his rank by the number rolls. Rolling a 2 on a d3 means 2 ranks lost. Each Rank lost reduces unwounded Stamina by 4 per Rank. If this would reduce a character below 9 unwounded Stamina he may reduce an Ability of his choice by 1 for each 4 Stamina (or fraction thereof) he lacks.

    Example: Myna the Mouse is a Rank 4 Rogue who has just poured the yellow dust into the Blessed Springs and restored Oliphard the Wizardly at which point the books "Asks" if she is a Mage. She looks at her abilities of Charisma 5, Combat 5, Magic 6, Sanctity 1, Scouting 5, Thievery 7 and decides that yes, she really is more of a Mage now. She rolls her d3 and gets a 2, losing two ranks and 8 Stamina from her unwounded Stamina of 14 (her Stamina rolls for Rank kind of sucked). Her Unwounded Stamina drops to 10 and she drops her Charisma to a 4 to "pay off" the other 4 Stamina. If you're in the position that any drop in stats prevents you from bein in your new chosen class then you still lose the Rank, Stamina and/or Ability you remain in your former class even if your Abilities are such that you no longer qualify for it.

    Note that the reduction to your unwounded Stamina also carries over to your Wounded Stamina. If this reduction would reduce you to 0 Stamina then you are too weak/wounded to commit to the class change and cannot change classes at this point.

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