A waste of a great concept

In 1975, Empire of the Petal Throne introduced roleplaying gamers to the world of Tekumel, a beautifully detailed fantasy setting that was the first of its kind to feature non-Caucasian characters in a society nothing like the usual Graeco-Roman or medieval world. In fact it was the first ever society of any kind to appear in a roleplaying game, D&D and its imitators up to that point being just "a medieval Wild West" whose society consisted of nothing but a shop to spend your loot in.

Tekumel’s creator, M.A.R. Barker, drew on inspiration from South-East Asia, the Middle East, China and Pre-Columbian civilizations without his world actually being like any of those cultures. The result was something very different from other RPGs – and from most American or European fantasy literature. What made Barker's creation so revolutionary in 1975 was its vision of entire civilizations that didn't look, think, or act like variations on medieval Europe. Barker’s greatest gift to the fantasy genre was showing us that other worlds could be genuinely other. That lesson feels more important now than ever. Paul Mason gives a taste of what I’m talking about here.

That’s not how Tekumel gamers (a small and dwindling group) usually get to approach the setting, though. For example, Bethorm is the name of one of many Tekumel-set RPGs that have appeared in the half-century since EPT. It’s also the Tsolyani word for a pocket dimension, apparently. But why do the Tsolyani have a word for "pocket dimension"? Why do they even have the concept? It can hardly be something an ordinary citizen would use in everyday life, after all.

Consider the real world. "Galaxy" was the Middle English word for the Milky Way. Nobody knew until the 1920s that we lived in one galaxy and that there are trillions of others. Nobody knew until the 1950s that the universe is billions of light-years across. We don't even now have single words for dark matter and dark energy, and they are observable (in the first case, anyway), so I'm stumped as to how even educated Tsolyani ended up coining a word for "pocket dimension".

One argument is that the Tekumel setting incudes “learning spheres” – find one, give it a twist, and you’re an instant expert in whatever was originally programmed into it. So if learning spheres are common, that means the technological know-how of yore need never have been lost. Tekumel would be like the world in Zelazny's Lord of Light, where most people think that gods and demons and magic are real, but the select few know that's all just a way of explaining science to the uneducated. And if you spoke to those select few they would know all about quantum theory, atoms, cybernetics, etc.

(There's actually a real-life equivalent of this, incidentally. When William Kamkwamba wanted to build a dynamo in his village in Malawi, he told the locals he needed to collect old bits of machinery "to do some magic" because he knew that's how they would interpret what he was doing.)

The trouble is, we’re told that learning spheres are used up when activated. And they were constructed at least 30,000 years before the present day. So I don’t think they’d be a significant factor in the education of the Tsolyani, certainly not to the extent of making the concept of pocket dimensions commonplace.

This opens up the question of how much magic is there in "real" Tekumel. I imagine a world where priests do a lot of rituals before and during a battle, and those rituals have a real effect on morale, and many soldiers will swear blind they saw miraculous things like lightning bolts, but in fact that's mostly in the mind. So this would be a low-fantasy world with no more magic than Westeros, not a pulp sci-fi setting with spells like phaser-blasts. I do realize this would be unpopular with Tekumel enthusiasts, but after all they are an endangered species. My Tekumel doesn't consist of characters discussing abstruse cosmic concepts like bethorms.

What would Tekumel look like if it were contemporary SF/fantasy rather than 1950s-influenced Planet Stories, a bit like the way Battlestar Galactica was rebooted? Most Tekumel fans seem to prefer the space opera version, a genre that was repopularized by Lucas in the '70s after all. They play games in which the rich culture of Tsolyanu, Livyanu and the other states is all but irrelevant. Instead player-characters gad about between bethorms encountering alien/human multidimensional politics and yammering about warp drive and gravity engines, while Barker's invented societies, so marvellously different from our modern world, are flattened into the same sci-fi mush you’ll see in a dozen fungible entertainment franchises. 

It makes no sense. Barker was a linguist and anthropologist and he describes wonderfully strange civilizations which he brings to life in minute detail. That's where Tekumel shines. He wasn't a scientist and his science fiction ideas are a dime a dozen. His SF is also typically mid-20th century Western in flavour, whereas the cultures he created don't resemble any historical setting, most especially not any Western one. Not that setting alone is enough to deliver a compelling story, especially not in an era of BookTok, celeb book clubs, and dopy romantasy sagas. You need characters you care about. But the setting is the environment they move in, and if it's off-the-peg then the situations are too. Lizzie and Mr Darcy's relationship means nothing outside the special context of Regency culture and socioeconomics. Jane Austen even starts the novel with an ironic statement about that.

If I were to reboot Tekumel, I’d throw out the “Doc” Smith space opera stuff and make it more about everyday life. Much less magic and much, much, much less whizzy technology. The Eyes wouldn’t have standard names; they’d be too rare for that. There wouldn’t be an internet of telepaths reliably sending messages across thousands of miles overnight. There’d be no thousand-year-old plans hatched in “pocket dimensions”, no routine encounters with robots and gadget-wielding aliens. I’d strip it all back to what really is unique and wonderful: the cultures that Barker created. As we look toward the future of fantasy gaming and fiction, his example reminds us of the beauty of diversity. The most memorable worlds aren't built on clever mechanics or exotic technologies. They're built on the patient work of imagining how people actually live, love, struggle, and die in societies radically different from our own. That's the kind of magic that never gets old.

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.