If you want to get a head...

The first of the Fabled Lands Chapbooks series was Headcases, in which I referred jokingly to my predilection for flying head monsters. Well, I thought at the time it was a joke, but now I think I might have a serious problem. Two recent scenario books in the series, Oliver Johnson's It's Mostly Been Forgot and my own "The Honey Trap" (in Wizards of Tamor) both feature flying heads, and I just edited an old Questworld scenario by the two of us, One Night in Deliverance, and found that among the critters was an early form of the Dragon Warriors skullghast. (Though, to be fair, those Questworld skullghasts weren't quite just flying heads, they had a sort of ethereal body too.)

The only solution to my head obsession might be to go cold turkey -- or cold feet, rather. In my next scenario I'll try to include some disembodied lower extremities, and not a bonce in sight. I've been there before too, in this letter to the gentlemen of the Royal Mythological Society from Mirabilis: Year of Wonders -- but so far the heads are still way ahead in my oeuvre while the feet are trailing with that sole entry.

What will survive of us

If you're able to get into London over the next few weeks and you appreciate the works of John Whitbourn, one of the truly great writers of English fantasy and horror, you should check out his play He Was A Bugger But I Loved Him, renamed Labelled With Love (why?) as part of a double bill at the Old Red Lion Playhouse. Get your tickets here. There are no interdimensional pathways, no malicious fays, no macabre twists in reality -- but there's a deeper kind of fantasy in the mysteries of love and memory, and that's what's on display in the drama.

Theatre might be a new calling for Mr Whitbourn. He recently completed another play, The Hunt For Blunt, about Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Blunt turned out to be a Soviet spy, the so-called Fourth Man, and went to ground at Watts Gallery in Surrey when his cover was blown. That's where the play is set and where, with luck, it will be staged.

The early bird...

Alkonost have some very fine gamebook editions for French readers, as these gorgeous covers and interior maps show. And you can now pre-order books that will be officially released in October, and I'm told that pre-orders made now should be delivered as early as next month so you'll get them a full four months early. Do I need to say more?

Pit stop

In the library you find the first volume of How to Enter the Underworld. This book is the work of a man called Agrash the Explorer. You learn that the Underworld is the name for the shadowy realm of the creatures like the trau, and of demons and the dead – in short, Hell itself. It has many names: the Land of Roots, the Place of Direful Dreams, the Land Beyond the Dark Mirror, and suchlike. There are several ways in. There is rumoured to be a stairway to the underworld on the other side of the Peaks at the Edge of the World, far to the north. Sailors say you can sail into the underworld through the cave known as the Mouth of Harkun, north of Yarimura. The monks of Noboro monastery claim you can walk into the underworld from Akatsurai, simply by always heading in a north-easterly direction. Scholars of Dweomer claim an entrance lies at the very top of the peak on Starspike Island. Also, the tunnels of the trau are thought to lead inexorably downward into the Realm of Shadows. The end of the book refers to volume two in the series, entitled How to Get Out of the Underworld. You ask one of the archivists if this book is in the library, but he tells you it never got written. ‘Agrash the Explorer never came back to finish it.’

Can we still talk about spoilers for a book that’s been in the publishing equivalent of limbo for thirty years? Into the Underworld was to be the last book in the Fabled Lands series – or maybe the next-to-last, if the whispers about a thirteenth book could be believed.

Throughout the Fabled Lands series, there are plenty of ways for a doomed or daring adventurer to find their way into book 12. You might have had a character stranded there for years, so arguably book 12 is more of a priority than books 8-11, which would wrap up some quests from other books but are otherwise just expansion packs to extend the places you can journey to.

Here are those routes into the underworld. Look away now if you still have hopes of FL book 12 appearing eventually.

Book 2: Cities of Gold and Glory

You can be carried off to the underworld by the Trau:

Book 3: Over the Blood-Dark Sea

You could be lured to the underworld by succumbing to the mermaids’ song:

You might suffer some bad luck while failing to repel a pack of hellions: 

You might descend into a hole among the roots of a tree in the Bluewood on Braelak Isle:

Or climb down inside the hollow mountain on Starspike Island:

Or choose (perhaps unwisely) to dive down to a submerged city:

Book 4: The Plains of Howling Darkness

You can get to the underworld by sailing your ship into the treacherous cave known as the Mouth of Harkun:

Being sucked down by a gigantic whirlpool:

Being hauled into a tunnel by a hairy demon:

Boarding the silver barge at the celestial harbour:

Rapping on a stone slab in the side of a cliff if you aren’t sufficiently sanctified:

Book 6: Lords of the Rising Sun

If you take a misty road heading north-east from Noboro monastery you can walk into the underworld:

And another route is via a nexus of mysterious pathways that would make Einstein and Rosen tear up their maps:

Book 7: The Serpent King's Domain

It’s possible to get yourself teleported to the underworld by the capricious monkey god Shimae:

Fabled Lands Quests: The Castle of Lost Souls

Guided by a pair of enchanted boots, your character is led past the Haunted Hills and through a foul swamp known as the Sodden Blight, eventually descending under a vast ceiling of rock into the underworld. Here you must cross an immense, ashen plain illuminated by an unnatural orange light to reach your destination, the Castle of Lost Souls, fortress of the demon Slank. While navigating the underworld, there are specific environmental rules you must follow:

1. You must have a source of illumination such as a lantern to travel through the dark caverns
2. The oppressive nature of the realm means you must temporarily subtract 2 from your COMBAT score, although this penalty is negated once you actually step inside the Castle of Lost Souls

If you fail in your quest -- for instance, if the magic of your infernal boots fades before you can find Slank's castle -- you are given the option to remain in the underworld. If you have Book 12, you wander aimlessly across the ashen plain until you pass through a tunnel and see a "curious city" looming ahead. At this point, you turn to paragraph 689 of Into the Underworld -- the same place as the monkey god sent you in Book 7.

There's also a scene in The Plains of Howling Darkness (FL book 4) where you might get the opportunity to visit the halls of the death-god Nagil --and, even more importantly, the opportunity to leave again. That's presumably located somewhere in the underworld, though there's no obvious route directly into book 12.

What would the FL underworld be like? Perhaps taking a cue from Dante, I envisage it as existing on multiple levels, so your exploration would be more three-dimensional than in other regions of the Fabled Lands. Also, both Jamie and I have used underworlds in previous gamebooks: Sheol in Doomwalk, the fourth Blood Sword book, and Hades in The Houses of the Dead, the first in the Vulcanverse series. For Into the Underworld we'd have to tap a fresh vein of inspiration -- perhaps drawing on our Tekumel games, or going back to the Hippocrene springs that fed them such as Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft.

Up above the world so high

The Ghosts of the Magi, known colloquially as Pyid (= "the Five") are five small luminous bodies that hurtle through the night sky above Krarth. With a good eye they can be variously seen in other northern regions also, but it is above Krarth that they are brightest.

The peasants of Krarth believe them to be the spirits of the five greatest original magi, cast into the upper heavens by the Blasting of Spyte. The Five have specific astrological significance and are known by these names: Red Death, Blue Moon, Plague Star, Gift Star and White Light. The Krarthian peasants believe they will come into conjunction above Spyte in the year 1000 AS, whereupon the gates of that deathly city will be hurled open.

Astronomers of Khitai or the Ta'ashim lands, where the world is known to be round, could possibly map these moons' orbits and calculate any conjunction – though if such a thing has ever been attempted the results are not known.

The above is what any Dragon Warriors player would have learned from "The Lore of Legend" chapter in DW Book Six, way back in 1986. But as I worked on Jewelspider, my return-to-Legend RPG, I got to wondering: what is official Church teaching regarding the Ghosts of the Magi? 

It struck me that it’s not in the nature of religious thinking to say, “OK, there are these spirits of ancient sorcerers that are hurtling around under the vault of heaven soaking up ineffable secrets for their eventual return to Earth,” because that’s a scientist’s interpretation, like saying, “We accept the origin of these objects and will now try to work out what they are.”

But in fact the Church is likely to take a very different approach: “These things are evidently real. Therefore they must be part of God’s plan, and we can ignore what those heathens in Krarth believe.”

So then I got to thinking that if you put White Light to one side, that gives us four baleful entities – the Four Horsemen, obviously and handily. So then, with a little Wiki-level research, I found that official Church teaching until very recently is not that the Four Horsemen are agents of the Antichrist. Quite the reverse: they are God’s agents who will scour the world to usher in the Last Judgement. And the fifth one? White is associated with the Holy Spirit, so that’s rather a gift.

Hence we have the True Faith’s doctrine as to what those five cometary objects are. The Five (known as the Pentaphan) are regarded as angels who have been appointed to scour the earth at the End of Days, specifically as the Four Horsemen who presage the Apocalypse, and are commonly identified as Apsinthos (ie Wormwood, harbinger of War, replacing Red Death), Qaphsiel (Confusion and Sorrow, standing in for Blue Moon), Abaddon (Destruction, taking the place of Plague Star), Kushiel (Punishment, whom the Krarthians call Gift Star), and the last is thought because of its pure white light to stand for the Holy Spirit through the agency of the archangel Jophiel (Understanding and Judgement).

Light of the Kai rekindled

I'm accustomed to describing Vulcanverse or Blood Sword as "epic". Vulcanverse is as long as fifteen or sixteen Fighting Fantasy books. Blood Sword is equivalent to six or seven. But if you want a true gamebook epic, what about the thirty-two (and counting) volumes in the Lone Wolf saga?

Joe Dever left copious notes detailing how he planned to conclude the saga, and now his son, Ben Devere, and gamebook author Vincent Lazzari have teamed up to write that story. Light of the Kai is the first part of the Lone Wolf finale, the culmination of more than forty years of adventuring in the world of Magnamund.

Ben says: 

"We spent over two years piecing together Dad’s ideas, updating the mechanics, and staying true to his vision. It’s a real labour of love - and a way to say thanks to all the fans who’ve stuck with us. Expect familiar terrains, fresh challenges, and the same epic feel that made Lone Wolf so special."

Players can take a new character or play the part of Lone Wolf himself. (Or herself? I'm not sure if Lone Wolf's sex is ever given in the books...) The action takes the player into the forsaken north, where old foes stir and long-buried secrets await.

There will be a collector's edition, a standard hardback, and a limited number of signed copies. You can also order art prints by Gary Chalk. Yes, you read that right. Mr Chalk, the original and definitive illustrator of the Lone Wolf series, is returning to bring these final chapters of the story to life.

Find out all the details on the Magnamund site.

Seminar: "The AI Assisted Artisan Author"

The main reason I abhor terms like "AI slop" is that they are propaganda, not arguments. They are used as substitutes for thinking and reasoned debate. (It's the same mindset that coins slurs like "Crooked Hillary" and "Comrade Kamala"; "stochastic parrot" is another.) The fact is that some things generated by AI are slop but many are not - in physics, biochemistry, medicine, etc. Only a fool, given that the genie is out of the bottle, refuses to engage with it. Also there is, and always has been, plenty of slop that humans created for themselves without the help of AI. Just cast an eye over the bestseller lists.

AI art comes in for a lot of flak, not entirely unfairly. It's much more polished than anything I could draw. But it's only workmanlike; it's never great. The people who are quick to coin terms like "AI slop" have latched onto the claim that using AI art is putting human artists out of work. I can't speak for others, but if a project of mine has a budget then I want to work with human artists every time: Inigo Hartas on Jewelspider, Leo Hartas on Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, Mattia Simone on Vulcanverse, Russ Nicholson and Kevin Jenkins on Fabled Lands. I make sure they get paid even if (as often happens) I don't. No AI can do what they can do.

A lot of projects don't have budgets, though. Blog posts, for example. For a decade I'd have to trawl through mediocre public-domain images to find something to illustrate the week's piece. Now, in the absence of anything better, at least Gemini can whip up something passable. After spending an hour or two planning and writing a post, not having to waste half an hour scouring the internet for images is a godsend.

Most gamebook and RPG authors don't make any money. Their works are labours of love. After months of writing, when they were finally ready to publish, it used to be that their only option for illustrations was to find some out-of-copyright art. That could occasionally be just right -- who else but Gustave Doré could illustrate James Wallis's storytelling game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen? More often than not it was just the creator making the best of a bad job. They weren't putting a human artist out of a job, any more than you're paupering a plumber or carpenter when you do some DIY based on a YouTube instructional video, because there never was a job there in the first place. 

And incidentally there'd be no indie game scene at all if not for desktop publishing software and print on demand. Those came along more than twenty years ago. Do you see the streets lined with out-of-work typesetters and printers? No, and this technological revolution won't wreck anyone's career either.

So much for art. What about writing? AI is really not good at fiction. Its prose (learned from humans, of course) is ungainly. That would be hard to fix because elegant prose is not easily evaluated and so it would be hard to train a model to know the difference. It's not like coding or maths, where there's a clear difference between a right and wrong answer. (That's why, when teachers had to estimate their pupils' exam performance during the covid lockdown, there was much greater variance between the estimate and the eventual exam result for arts subjects than for sciences.)

Even if we could teach an AI to write beautifully, it couldn't (currently, anyway) write a good novel because it has no depth of insight -- though, again, that's true of many human authors. The telephone-directory-sized romantasy bestsellers stacked up in the bookstore window are not good novels, just popular ones. Lee Child's working method for writing the Jack Reacher books is effectively just what an LLM does, so there's no reason ChatGPT couldn't come up with a passable pastiche of one of those. But it's not going to rival Flaubert or Turgenev for a while yet. Owning a camera doesn't make you Da Vinci, after all.

I realize that in the 2020s there is no longer any possibility of convincing anybody that they might be wrong or even that somebody who disagrees with them isn't a knave, but maybe we can all still agree that it's better to be informed than not. That's why I'm recommending Joanna Penn's online seminars on ways to use AI to make you a better author. For the reasons given above, that doesn't mean prompting it with, "Write this novel for me." What Jo is covering includes the background tasks: deep research, brainstorming and ideas, outlining, structuring, plotting, and planning, characters and worldbuilding. For example, she explains how to use NotebookLM to maintain a world bible. (That would have saved months of wading through texts if it had been around when I was working on the Lyonesse RPG, for example.)

There are seminars on 16 and 23 May. I've taken Jo's seminars before -- even after 40+ years as a working author there's plenty I can still learn -- and they are worth every penny. Get your tickets here.