Hammer and anvil

More from Fighting Fantasy Fest 5, and this time it's my chat with Gil Jugnot from Le Marteau et l'Enclume. Pay close attention and you'll get a scoop about the 40th anniversary of The Crypt of the Vampire -- but more of that anon.

More what you'd call guidelines than actual rules

It's always gratifying to get a review for one of my books, doubly so when the reviewer mostly liked it. Here's one for Down Among the Dead Men, the first book I wrote in the Virtual Reality series, that uses it as a design inspiration for Twine games. As James (the reviewer) points out, "Virtual Reality" was just an empty marketing title, which is why I changed the name to Critical IF when I relaunched the series.

If you just want a playthrough, there's a good one right here. (I'm "a fine old man", apparently -- thanks for those kind words, Jueri!) And below the astute, erudite and relatively youthful Mr H J Doom delivers his verdict on another Critical IF book, Heart of Ice.

While we're on the subject of old gamebooks, somebody said to me at Fighting Fantasy Fest that he thought you could only win in my 40-year-old gamebook The Temple of Flame by diving off the walkway into the shaft. I don't believe I'd have written an unbeatable path through the book, but it's a long time ago now and I might be wrong. Those who have played it more recently than 1984 may be able to shed some light on this?

And talking of FFF 5, if you weren't able to attend here's my and Jamie's talk along with discussion panels from later in the day:

Shoulders of giants

If you're a movie buff and you've played any of the Vulcanverse books, you can't have failed to notice my penchant for hommages. In The Hammer of the Sun the inspirations are mostly pretty obvious, from the skeleton warriors of Jason & the Argonauts to Eldon Tyrell's boardroom in Blade Runner -- but did you also spot the nod to Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse?

In Workshop of the Gods I should have made a list of the movies, TV shows, poems, short stories, comics and books referenced. There are so many I soon lost count. If you look closely you should be able to find the following:

• Blake's 7: "Orac" (Lorrimer, 1978)
• Breaking Bad: "ABQ" (Bernstein, 2009)
• B.P.R.D.: "The Soul of Venice" (Gunter, Oeming & Mignola; 2003)
• Dance of the Vampires (aka The Fearless Vampire Killers; Polanski, 1967)
• Dark City (Proyas, 1998)
• The Description of Greece: Book 6 (Pausanias, c.150 AD)
• Doctor Who: "The Edge of Destruction" (1964)
• Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973)
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Lovecraft, 1927)
• The Eyes of the Overworld (Vance, 1966)
• Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948; see the video clip above)
• The Freshman (Bergman, 1990)
• Fury Road (Miller, 2015)
• The Iliad (Homer, c.750 BC)
• Inferno (Dante, c.1321; The Divine Comedy, Canto 26)
• Iron Man (Favreau, 2008)
• The King of Elfland's Daughter (Lord Dunsany, 1924)
• Land of the Pharaohs (Hawks, 1955)
• Murder, My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944)
• Night of the Demon (Tourneur, 1957)
• On the Failure of Oracles (Plutarch, c.83 AD)
• The Revenant (Iñárritu, 2015)
• The Shadow (Mulcahy, 1994)
• Strange Tales #110 (Lee & Ditko, 1963)

If you spot any others, let me know and I'll add them to the list.

And if you should see me at Fighting Fantasy Fest (I'm there in the morning; schedule below) and you have a copy of Workshop of the Gods, I'll find the time to autograph it. Can't make any promises about my older books, though. Mick Jagger must find it hard to scrawl his name over Black & Blue now that Hackney Diamonds is out.

Fighting Fantasy Fest

Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 is coming up in just over a week. As you may have realized, it's the 40th anniversary of my first gamebook, Crypt of the Vampire. Oh, and it's the 40th anniversary of something called Deathtrap Dungeon, which accounts for why Fighting Fantasy author Sir Ian Livingstone and artist Iain McCaig are the guests of honour.

Originally the plan was for me to be on a panel discussion with Jamie Thomson and Paul Mason, perhaps reprising some of our talk from MantiCon in 2018. (Video above if you can't make it to Ealing for FFF.) Plans changed and now I think the panel involves Paul, Steve Williams and Marc Gascoigne, while Jamie is going to give a talk and I'll be there to answer questions. So in the last six years I'll have attended conventions in Germany, Italy, France, and now Britain. At my age it might be time to slow down. Cutting out air travel would be good for the planet, too.

I'm not specifically at FFF to sign books, apart from a brief slot from 10:30 to 11:00 just before Jamie's talk, but if you happen to bring a book along and I have time then of course I won't refuse. Jamie and Paul are probably planning to be there all day, so if you have limited space in your bag I'd advise bringing Way of the Tiger or Robin of Sherwood rather than any of mine.

Now, about that 40th anniversary of Crypt of the Vampire. I ought to do something to mark that, you say? Watch this space.

A vessel for the finer

I'm no fan of the brand of fantasy popularized by Dungeons & Dragons and Fighting Fantasy, but a book featuring the art of that genre will include magnificent work by the late, great Martin McKenna (above) and Russ Nicholson (below), along with lots of other talented folks obliged to earn their crust by continually depicting a world of cannon-fodder goblins, ale-quaffing dwarves, and vatic old men in taverns. So any wealthy gamebook collector is going to want a copy of Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy and next month there's a launch party where you can get a copy signed by the author, Jonathan Green, and Sir Ian Livingstone.

One book to rule them all

At almost $300 for the hardback, The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies isn't likely to end up on my bookshelves, but wealthier gamers can buy it here.

Is it worth it? No idea, though I do wonder how long human beings can keep writing stuff like this now we have LLMs. An excerpt:

No AI hallucinations there, I'll give it that, but why bother with the accent in "Tekumel" if you aren't going to say what it means? (It's an emphasis mark, ie the word is pronounced TAY-koo-mail, but there's no point including the accent here if you aren't also going to write "Mórdor" when discussing Lord of the Rings and "Wiscónsin" in the section on TSR.)

Still, maybe I'm a tad biased towards the hard sciences. This diagram will tell you if it's the book for you or whether you'd rather buy the Vulcanverse series and have $225 left over:

Fire and water

You're in Paris. It's 1910, the year of the floods. You've been touring a doll factory. After looking around the workshop on the first floor (American: second floor) where the celluloid dolls are made, you go up to the second floor (that is, the third floor in US English). You stay there for a few hours, unaware that the Seine is flooding. The ground floor is soon completely underwater. The level rises to almost waist-height in the workshop, shorting out a fuse box. Sparks catch on the inflammable celluloid dolls. By the time you come back down, half the workshop is already ablaze.

You have to get out of the building. There are large windows behind you, not blocked by the fire, but you're on the first floor. Hurrying to the stairs, you find the stairwell completely submerged. To get down to the exit you'd have to swim underwater. It's only about fifteen or twenty metres, but the sun has set and the electric lights have fused. The only illumination down there is whatever is cast from the flames in the workshop.

This is in fact a scene from the 2023 movie The Beast. I won't give any spoilers except to say that the movie is 150 minutes of your life that you'll never get back, and that confusing and strident are not the same things as enigmatic and beguiling. If you do want a movie that conveys real emotional mystery, watch The Double Life of Veronique instead. Or you could read the Henry James short story, "The Beast in the Jungle", that the director Bertrand Bonello claims to have been inspired by.

But this is not a film review, it's a post about how screenwriters really ought to hire gamebook or RPG players to stress-test their scenarios. Because I can see an easy way to get out of the building which obviously didn't occur to the filmmakers because they didn't have a full mental picture of the characters' surroundings. (They also showed it as daylight outside. Unlikely at 7:30pm in January, but it allowed them to provide a lot more light in the submerged ground floor.)

OK, so what would you do? And can you think of any other movies where the characters missed an obvious solution?