My sweet Claude

I'm a technophile through and through, but even I know that not everything that can be done should be done. Case in point: there's a service where you can order up a plot and characters and have a bespoke novel written and printed just for you.

(Hang on a tick, though. We'll be talking about AI here, and I can't be doing with the obligatory two minutes' hate of people telling me their tribal identity via a series of muddled anti-AI arguments, so take a look at the blog policy on that one, and if it's not to your taste then come back tomorrow.)

OK, so this customized novel service involves 'romantasy' books and the way it works is each reader specifies their required hero and heroine type, the degree of steaminess, whether the relationship should be bittersweet or rosy, and any necessary plot details. Then an AI writes the thing, the company prints a copy, and it's yours for a mere $89.

I have no doubt the results are as horrible as they are expensive. There is quite enough human-generated slop in publishing without pressing a button and having machines add infinitely more. The AI models get grammar and spelling right, and their prose style is marginally better than some bestselling authors, but they still shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the actual authorial process. For one thing, speaking as a writer, the words are the fun part. Why would I want anyone or anything else to do the writing for me?

I do use AI every day, though, in the tedious support tasks for which, if gamebooks and roleplaying games made any money, I'd hire an assistant. This month I'm making a push to complete my pet project, Jewelspider, a book which is now over two hundred pages long and three years late. I'm drawing on a host of primary sources, many of which are in Latin, French or Middle English. Finding all references to medieval lycanthropy, say, in a few dozen books like that could eat up weeks -- or I can get Gemini Notebook to help me and have those weeks free for writing instead.

In the middle of that, I'm still fielding the dozens of micro-tasks that would suck up time if I let them. A publisher needed me to give them a list of fifty scenes to illustrate in a couple of gamebooks I wrote  years ago. I'd have to re-read the books, find fifty key scenes, and collate all the text the artist will need across several sections. That's a few days of the most mind-numbing work... for a human. Claude read the books, found fifty different dramatic scenes, made sure to avoid spoiler scenes, and from my text pulled together a briefing for the artist for each illustration. I was able to check that list in an hour, make a few corrections, and it was good to go.

Then an app developer who is considering adapting another series of mine asked if I could provide them with a list of every item that can be picked up in the books, where they can be used, what they do, and where the player can lose them. That's a good month of work as the books were written decades ago and I don't still have the flowcharts. But Claude did the job in twenty minutes and gave me all the info in an Excel spreadsheet. It was two hundred items, incidentally. If I'd done that myself I'd still be working on it now.

Another app developer is producing an audio version of my gamebook Heart of Ice. Every few days they send me the scripts. That's dozens of pages to check, not only for dialogue but for the logic markup that drives the game. If I allowed myself to get pulled down that rabbit hole, Jewelspider would never get finished. So Claude took a look and came back with a list of the things I needed to take a closer look at -- dialogue given to the wrong character, inconsistent tagging, that kind of thing. Another couple of weeks saved. When the developer emailed to say they'd be recording the next day and the actors needed a pronunciation guide to all the items, names, places, etc, in the book, it could have meant me pulling an all-nighter. Claude took ten minutes to find all the words that might get mispronounced along with suggested alternative ways to say them, so all I had to do was tell Claude which were right and I got a list back with both a plain phonetic respelling and (for especially diligent thespians) an IPA version of each word.

The AI dealt efficiently with chores that once would have cost me time and energy, of which I nowadays have far less than I did in my youth, allowing me to focus on the creative part of my job: the actual writing. And if you're interested in Jewelspider (which is all-human work, both the writing and the art) please come over to Patreon and take a look.

Unmellow fruitfulness

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flow’d that juice...

It's almost upon us. The start of autumn. My own gaming group like to mark the seasons with one-shots or mini-campaigns, and in that spirit here's a three-part roleplaying campaign based on Hope Mirrlees's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, which must have been written as a riposte to Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, published two years earlier, but whose most obvious inspirations are Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market and Aeschylus's The Eumenides.

Some historical background might help if you're not familiar with the story, which takes place in the fantasy republic of Dorimare, formerly a duchy with a strong lacing of fairy influence. Dorimare’s modern history is defined by a revolution that overthrew the hereditary dukes, the last of whom was Duke Aubrey, a "hunchback with a face of angelic beauty" who was a "laughing demon of destructiveness." His reign represented a synthesis of high art, wild romance, and sinister caprice.

The merchant class, seeking to remove barriers to trade (the "damming of the Dawl"), eradicated the nobility and the priesthood in a three-day battle. Post-revolution, the state established a strict taboo on all things "fairy." Fairy fruit, once a ritual offering for the Duke, was labeled a "loathsome and filthy vice."

The republic operates on a code of jurisprudence that uses "legal fictions" to manage reality. In the eyes of the law, Fairyland does not exist; consequently, the smuggling of fairy fruit is prosecuted under the fiction that the fruit is "woven silk."

Dorimare is bounded by the sea to the south and the Elfin Hills to the west. There are two rivers. The Dawl is the river of commerce, making Lud a city of wealthy merchants. The Dapple, however, has its source in Fairyland. It is a "humble little stream" that plays no part in commerce, yet an old maxim warns that "the Dapple flows into the Dawl."

The Elfin Marches are foothills that are considered fraught with physical and moral danger. In the two centuries since the overthrow of Duke Aubrey, no mortal is known to have crossed them and returned. But that's exactly what the player-characters may have to attempt.

Some readers have compared Lud to Rye in Sussex. I don't know if Hope Mirrlees was familiar with the town, but you could do worse than use its picturesque streets as a visual springboard, along with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy cover art by Gervasio Gallardo. More probably Mirrlees based Lud on Godalming, not far from where she lived at Shamley Green, in which case the fairy lands might correspond to Binscombe.

The game uses Powered by the Apocalypse rules and is structured in three acts involving investigation, adventure, and cunning. Players must be subtle, treading a fine line between truth and fiction. The campaign will end with their world fundamentally changed - but whether towards the exciting unpredictability of fairyland or the illusory stability of mortal laws is up to them.

I worked with Claude Opus 5 to design the game. Claude is very smart, but does have a laboured and unlovely prose style. Normally I wouldn't let an LLM get involved in actually writing the words, but for a free game created just for a blog post I've made an exception. If you play it, let us know how you get on in the comments. (If you habitually use the term "AI slop", feel free not to comment, and have a nice day.)

Blood Sword comes to the PC

This is the most exciting news all year for me, and the culmination of a dream. The first fully playable demo for Blood Sword CRPG is released today on Steam. The fact that it's by Victor Atanasov at Prime Games (who also created the Fabled Lands CRPG) told me all along that it would be brilliant. The only question is how brilliant, and now we can all judge that for ourselves.

Victor drew on both Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors for the tactical elements, but if you've been following his design masterclasses on Steam then you'll already know that there's a lot more to the PC version than that. Still, enough talk -- you can take up the quest for yourself. Will the machinations of the Magi bring about a poisoned future, or will your band of heroes successfully wield the Sword of Life to defeat them? Find out right here.

A whole other country

"It was anathema to her to shelter her head under a roof by a city hearth. Dear to the deities of Erebus, she dwelt in deserted tombs, and haunted the graves from which ghosts had been expelled.

"The gods grant every horror at the first cry of her voice, dreading a second incantation. Living spirits, still in control of their bodies, she buries in the grave; or reversing the rite she brings back the dead from the tomb, their corpses escaping to life. 

"She gathers the fragments of the funeral bier, and the fluttering grave-clothes turned to ash, and the cinders that reek of the corpse. And if the dead are sealed in a sarcophagus, that dries the internal moisture, absorbs the corruption of the marrow-bones, and stiffens the corpse, then she vents her anger eagerly on its limbs, thrusting her fingers deep in the eye-sockets, scooping out the solidified eyeballs in delight, gnawing the yellowed nails on withered hands. She mangles the hanged corpse, cuts the fatal noose with her teeth, scrapes at the crucified, tears at rain-beaten flesh and bones scorched by the sun. She steals nails that have pierced hands, the clotted gore and the black residues of putrefaction that oozed over all the limbs; and hangs her weight on sinews that resist her teeth.

"Often too, when a loved one is buried, the dreadful witch will hang over the body in kissing it, mutilates the head, opens the closed mouth with her teeth, bites the tip of the inert tongue in the dry mouth, infuses the cold lips with murmuring sound, and sends a wicked and arcane message down to the Stygian shades.

"Sextus Pompeius heard local tales of Erichtho, and made his way to her dwelling when night ruled the sky, at the hour in those deserted fields when the sun is in the zenith for those on the other side of earth..."

That chilling little passage is from Lucan's Pharsalia. You can read what happens when Sextus consults the witch here or here. I was put onto it by Paul Chrystal's book Miracula: Weird & Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece & Rome, essential reading for any roleplayer or writer with an interest in the odd customs of the past. 

The book comprises the most wonderfully abstruse collection of anecdotes, aphorisms, travel tales, superstitions, sexual practices, dining etiquette (especially important in the case of the Roman diplomat who describes going to dinner with Attila the Hun), parenting tips, ancient world science and medicine, conversation, humour, burial customs, and space travel -- and even in that list I've barely scratched the surface. The ancient curses alone (chapter 66) are worth the price of the book. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

On the road

Suppose you’re writing a gamebook and you want the player to be able to travel from Wishport to Haggart’s Corner on this map. In its simplest form that would require a section (A) for Wishport, a section describing travel on the road (D) with possible side encounters, and a section (F) for arriving at Haggart’s Corner.

In an open-world gamebook it gets a bit more involved. Now you might be travelling on that same stretch of road either north to Haggart’s Corner, or in the other direction south to Wishport. In Fabled Lands we wanted to have random encounters occur when the player is travelling, so we needed a section (C) to handle those. Each encounter could be an entire side-adventure, though the two in this example are both very short. Once the encounters are resolved, or if you didn’t get an encounter, you’re routed to section D and can decide which way to head. Like this:

A

Wishport is a picturesque town set at the back of a bay rimmed by white cliffs. Fish, oil, dyes and other commodities are packed here for transport inland. You can buy a town house here for 100 Shards. If you decide to do that, cross off the money and put a tick in the box by the town house option below.

[Various options in the town]         …

Leave Wishport                           turn to B                  

B

From Wishport, you have the option to put to sea, take the road to Haggart's Corner, or travel cross-country. In order to go by sea, you must either possess a ship which is docked in the harbour (check the Ship's Manifest) or find a captain who is willing to take you as a passenger.

Go to the harbour                                 turn to ---

Take the road north                              turn to C

Go west towards Metriciens               turn to ---
    Go east into the Magwort Fens           turn to ---

C

The road follows the ridge of low hills extending out into the headland of Knucklebones Point.

Roll two dice for encounters:

Score 2-5         Eerie things                            turn to X

Score 6-8         Uneventful journey              turn to D

Score 9-12       Penniless adventurers          turn to Y

 

D

You are on the road between Wishport and Haggart's Corner.

Follow the road to Wishport              turn to A

Go north to Haggart's Corner             turn to E

Go due south towards the coast          turn to ---

Go east into the Magwort Fens           turn to ---

E

The town of Haggart's Corner stands at a place where three roads meet. Here, in certain seasons of the year, the trau are said to come and trade their marvellous trinkets in exchange for human favours.

Stop at Haggart's Corner            turn to F

Continue on your journey          turn to G

F

Haggart's Corner is a pretty, pastel-hued town. Houses with high gables and mullioned bay windows are set around a series of courts where fountains splash dreamily in the sunlight.

[Various options in the town]         …

Leave Haggart's Corner              turn to G

G

The fey, sleepy, whimsy-tainted air of Haggart's Corner is soon forgotten as you turn your face to the wind and journey onwards.

Take the road to Metriciens                turn to ---

Head to the Monastery of Molhern    turn to ---

Take the road to Wishport                  turn to C

X

Misshapen sprites with grotesque faces come scampering out of the hedge beside the road. Tittering to themselves, they prod you with gnarled fingers and discuss whether you are worth eating.

`Give us an emerald and we'll let you go,' pipes up one of the sprites.

It seems they will accept a green gem to leave you in peace.

Give them a green gem            turn to D

Make a break for it                      turn to Z

Y

Three penniless wanderers tell you a tale of being washed up on a lonely shoreline. ‘Still, we're determined to make names for ourselves,’ they vow. Their predicament reminds you of your own early career, so you give them a tenth of any cash you have on you (rounding fractions up). Only later, while passing through a village, do you remember seeing their faces on a wanted poster.

Turn to D.

Z

Guffawing, the sprites let you go. You run pell-mell until there's no breath left in you. Only then do you notice that they stole one of your fingers. Lose 1 from THIEVERY (down to a minimum score of 1) and turn to D.

This example is a simple one, but as I said those encounters could be entire quests in their own right. That creates some difficulties. First of all, once the player has dealt with a major quest such as exploring a ruined castle we may not want them to experience it again. One way to deal with that is to put a check box in the first section of the sub-quest – something like this:

Section R is the ‘defused’ version of the encounter – the castle is empty, nothing to see here, back to D. That’s assuming you only want the player to have one crack at exploring the castle. If it’s possible for them to fail – and flee, or die there – then you might need to filter it with a keyword, so that they only go to the defused version of the encounter once they’ve handled it successfully. Incidentally in Vulcanverse, where I needed to stop the keywords from proliferating to an unmanageable degree, I used a structure like this instead:

There you embark on the sub-quest at 306. No matter how many times you come back here, if you haven't successfully completed the quest you'll go to 306. When you do complete the quest you'll be told to turn to 41 and tick the box. Section 476 gives you the spiel for having just completed the quest. Section 734 is for if you return here subsequently. (Incidentally I used a similar mechanic in Can You Brexit? to determine when the player had resolved one of the UK/EU negotiating points.)

The other problem with putting sub-quests on a random encounter table is that the player might just walk back and forth among that same section of road repeatedly until they get the special encounter they want. In Fabled Lands that’s a passage of time issue, similar to the way we don’t want players to make investments at the merchants’ guild and walk back in minutes later to collect a windfall:

Notice those keywords Almanac, Brush and Catalyst. You can only get those by travelling to a distant port. Then when you return you get to roll to see how your investments have been doing:

You could use the same mechanic to prevent the player repeatedly traversing the same stretch of road to get that lucky encounter roll. Just mark the encounter as only happening if the player has the keyword Afar or whatever, and remove Afar after they’ve been along the road – so then they’ll have to voyage off to Sokara in book one to collect Afar again.

It’s not ideal, because it’s contrived. We’re trying to represent passage of time, which a paper gamebook obviously can’t do directly, so we say that if you’ve visited a distant location, which we can keep tabs on, then time must have passed. But the player is bound to wonder why going to a specific location in book one arbitrarily unlocks an unrelated quest opportunity in book two. It breaks suspension of disbelief.

If you can think of a better solution, I’m all ears.

The art of the possible

Political games are in fashion. It might have something to do with the rapid turnaround of prime ministers now that British politics functions like a reality TV show. No 10: Full Confidence is outselling Monopoly Go in the UK Apple game charts. There's also Fantasy Parliament, a browser game that lets you simulate party politics, and UK Politics Simulator is on the way.

Where was all this interest a decade ago? That's when I released Can You Brexit? Ancient history now, but all the issues dealt with there are still in play. You can buy the book or play the browser version free.

Dragons in the Dark

A lot can change in forty years. Attitudes and opinions especially. I was reminded of that when I came across the March 1986 issue of a fanzine called Dragons in the Dark, edited by Henk Langeveld, and flipped it open to discover a letter from my very much younger self. So what games were grabbing the attention of the Dave Morris of four decades ago? Let's find out...

"I agree with what Mike Williams said about getting the rules out of the way of role--playing. I have enjoyed several games where there was no dice-rolling at all -- not because the players didn't get into combats, but because the game was flowing along so smoothly that I decided not to break it all apart by insisting they get out the figurines and the dice. Games can't always work out like that (my sessions have their share of dungeoneering too), but at their best they are pure role-playing, an improvised story created jointly by the players and the GM. Some letters in White Dwarf objected that this type of gaming is just chaotic – no rules. There are rules, I have found, but rules of a very subtle sort that arise out of the nature of storytelling. A player may spontaneously invent some power, item or general get-out if he thinks the others will accept it. As GM, I cannot just take the item away from him without forcing a re-take in the adventure, so I have to be inventive and twist things against him again. I really think that for a group of experienced gamers who are used to one another’s foibles, this gives an opportunity for imaginative gaming and shared fantasy that the old rule systems (that mostly developed out of wargames and table-topping) do not allow. This is one of the reasons that I'm against things like fatigue points – who can be fagged to calculate all those numbers and things during a game that should represent the triumph of imagination?"

Here in 2026 I'm still in favour of improvisation, but not in the authored sense described there. I value roleplaying precisely because it is a work without an author, so I would rather not have players seeing their characters as pieces to move around a story. I want them to improvise in character. You know, the way we do in real life.

Anyway, back to 1986:

"I didn't invest in RuneQuest 3 (though I have looked through it) because I didn't see that much wrong with RQ2. The RuneQuest Compendium could have handled any necessary adjustments and expansions, but instead wasted itself with useless padding on how to cook a walktapus and suchlike. Since the world of Glorantha is defined by the game, it means that the old Glorantha has gone – the world must now be a very different place. If the POW gain for priests has been changed there will be fewer priests of great power, for example.

"For me, the main role-playing event of 1985 was the publication of Swords and Glory, M.A.R. Barker's complete reworking of his Tekumel game. Greg Stafford was right to call Barker a genius – he developed Tekumel as a real place and his rules merely interpret that into a game. 'Game' Tekumel is asymptotic to 'real' Tekumel, but there is no sense that with a new set of rules the whole world has changed."

I guess I'll stand by most of that, except that Barker has nowadays been cancelled for his assumed views so we're not to mention him, and anyway if I were still playing Tekumel-based games I'd use the Tirikelu rules rather than S&G. 

Moving on, we get to a kind of cultural appropriation that still makes me seethe:

"I cannot say that I'm waiting for Chaosium's feudal Japanese supplement to RQ3 with much enthusiasm. Bushido seems to handle this setting very competently and evocatively anyway. The attitude towards Japanese culture and folklore that shows through published Chaosium material is not particularly auspicious in this regard. I found the dragonewts write-up in – was it Different Worlds or Wyrm's Footnotes? Can't remember – pretty offensive. Dragonewts, these utterly unhuman creatures, apparently fight with katanas, perform seppuku, compose haiku... all things that maybe seem utterly unhuman to the Californian mind, but personally I think don't measure up. Probably these Japanese elements are grafted onto dragonewt culture in a spirit of amused incomprehension rather than outright chauvinism, but I am not impressed. Returning to the example of Tekumel, Barker manages to make his nonhumans (the ssu, the hlüss, the pe choi, etc) look and feel alien without recourse to traditional Western myth or swiping from non-European cultures."

And the letter rounds off with a last little bit that's of historical interest because it pins down my and Jamie's inspiration for creating open-world gamebooks:

"Tales of the Arabian Nights by West End is well worth a look, though pricey. It is an original concept, attractively presented and great fun. I bought it a month ago and have been playing three or four times a week since then."

That would have been in the autumn of 1985, two years before we pitched a gamebook series we were calling Hero Quest. It's interesting to look back now and see the glint in my then-youthful and sparkling clear eyes.

Oh, you're wondering about that cover? The image above is ChatGPT's retconned version, but for the sake of historical interest here's what RPG fanzines actually looked like in the days of typewriters, Letraset and Cow Gum: