Dream sequence

Recently I've been checking the flowcharts of the Vulcanverse books. It's a task like painting the Forth Bridge, as with more than 6000 sections and close on three-quarters of a million words I suspect there's always going to be one more bug lurking in the thickets and hidden from notice by Titivillus.

Recently I came across a big one -- though luckily (can you hear my sigh of relief?) it's not a bug that affects anything important. In The Wild Woods it turns out there are a few orphaned sections involving travelling in your sleep from one of the other regions of the Vulcanverse -- most likely Hades, as The Houses of the Dead was Jamie's other book in the series. It looks like there was meant to be an encounter somewhere with a priest of Hermes who waited till the player was asleep to send them to Arcadia. Evidently you could encounter the priest more than once as there are three different outcomes from The Wild Woods section 821.

821

[three tickboxes]

Put a tick in a box. If two boxes are now ticked ► 59 immediately. If all three boxes are now ticked, ► 492 immediately. If only one box is ticked, read on.

Hermes has sent you across the world in your sleep. You wake with a start. You find yourself trapped in a kind of box, one side of which is made of glass, the other sides of a strange material you have never seen before. Staring down at you are two enormous figures – one a grey bearded oldish man with a wild look in his eyes, clearly tinged with madness, the other a red-haired woman, pale skinned and lean. They wear curious clothes of browns, blacks and greys that barely cover their bodies, with trousers in the Scythian style and white shoes tied up with string. The man holds an odd black device of some kind in one hand.

‘What… what is it?’ says the woman.

‘I dunno – I think we’ve been hacked,’ says the man.

And then suddenly you wake up – again. Thankfully it was just a fevered dream, no doubt of the gods. But which ones?

Anyway, you look around. You have arrived in Arcadia, the land of eternal summer. A warm haze washes through the air, birds and insects chirrup and whirr in the trees. But this is the Vulcanverse... what horrors lie hidden in this verdant paradise?

Nearby, you can see the pillared portico of a great palace, jutting up over the treeline. ► 686

686 

You have come to the near centre of Arcadia, following the Arcady Trail, a dusty pathway through the wild and rampant greenery that leads to the Palace, set in a deep valley, flanked by impassable towering cliffs to east and west. To the north is the great lake that is the source of the river Ladon. From here you can go:

South-west on the Trail ► 455

South on the Trail ► 728

North to the Lake ► 37

To the Summer Palace ► 10

59

The priest of Hermes has sent you off to Arcadia in your sleep once more. This time you wake up with a start to find yourself in a warm, wooded glade – and a hooded figure is rummaging through your back pack!

With a strangled cry of rage, you stagger to your feet, still groggy from your journey, and the figure gives a squeaking yelp, as of a young woman. She dashes away into the woods. Her hood falls back, revealing a mop of bright red hair but you are unable to see her face before she is gone.

Quickly you check your gear – you have not lost any items but you been robbed of up to 50 pyr. Cross it off.

Cursing your luck, you look around. Once again you have arrived in some woodland close to the Summer Palace of Arcadia. ► 686

492

Hermes has sent you in your sleep to Arcadia once again. You wake with a start, fearful of thieves, bizarre visions or some other catastrophe but nothing untoward occurs. You find yourself in quiet, sun-dappled woodland, warm and cosy… but you know that won’t last for long.

Nearby, you can see the pillared portico of the Summer Palace, rising up above the trees. ► 686

Jamie can't remember writing these sections or how they were meant to fit in with the rest of the books. Obviously it was a rapid-transit system back to the Summer Palace, and it was probably intended to lead from one of the other books because it seems like the player is surprised to wake up in Arcadia. There are three sections in The Houses of the Dead that he left blank (92, 415 and 702) so were those earmarked as the lead-in to the sections above, but Jamie forgot to write them? 

That theory doesn't hold water, though, as Jamie wrote The Houses of the Dead first. He surely wouldn't have written a sequence for The Wild Woods that followed on from something that he forgot to put in the earlier book. So presumably the rapid-transit must have been from elsewhere in Arcadia -- not so useful in gameplay terms as a Hulk-like leap across the whole Vulcanverse, but it does fit in with the statue of Hermes next to a dried-up drinking fountain at section 85 in The Wild Woods. The theme of the book is restoration, so it makes sense that the player is supposed to make the water flow again and those teleports back to the Summer Palace were intended to tie in with that quest somehow.

We'll never know, the author having no recollection of what he was trying to do. Ideally I'd like to fix it, hating loose ends as I do, but the books are typeset now and adding new sections isn't feasible. But if I ever get to turn the Vulcanverse series into a CRPG I'll figure out a way to include the Hermes bits. (And there'll be no cryptocurrency or NFTs involved either, that I swear by Zeus Kronion and all the Olympians.)

With Christmas coming up (and yes, I'm sorry to be mentioning it while we're still in November) what could be a more perfect gift than a gorgeous full-colour hardcover Vulcanverse book? If you were thinking the same thing, we have a special offer just for FL blog readers: a copy of The Wild Woods at half price available here. But hurry. The offer is limited to the first fifty customers and expires on Christmas Eve. And just one order per person, please, to make it fair for everybody.

The Wild Woods

Thomson, Jamie and Simone, Mattia and Morris, Dave

Buy Now

Down in the valley

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

With those words, and not "It's alive!", Victor Frankenstein describes the bringing to life of his creature. When I wrote an interactive version of Frankenstein I gave the creature transparent skin -- the écorché look. But in doing so I was giving it a science fictional spin. Victor says, when asked why the skin is transparent: "Originally that was an accident of the skin-culturing technique I have been using. I tried for some time to fix it, until I realized that this translucence will make it easier for physiologists to study the functioning of the creature’s muscles and arteries."

Writing before SF existed as a genre, Mary Shelley was more interested in character and motivation than in the technical details. She also wanted the creature to be alarming to look at, to explain why he is shunned by everyone he meets and so ends up homicidally resentful, but she does it more subtly. Consider that description: the features "selected as beautiful" that become horrifying when they start to animate. It's easy to imagine a yellow-hued statue with lean, chiselled features. That could be a thing of great beauty -- unless it came to life, in which case it would suddenly slip from being an aesthetically pleasing artwork into the Uncanny Valley. Shelley had recognized the effect a century and a half before Masahiro Mori gave it a name.

In Frankenstein (the proper 1818 version) Victor flees to his bedroom, but the creature follows him there:

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs. I took refuge in the court-yard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.

Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.

In rejecting his creation, Victor sets off a chain of events that will spell tragedy for both of them. It's by no means as simplistic as the internet meme about "knowing that Frankenstein is the monster". Victor shirks responsibility; the creature murders a whole string of people, with possible rapes too. But neither of them is a hero or a villain. Shelley didn't write that kind of dumbed-down fiction. Her work has been woefully overshadowed over the years by the many movies and, fun as some of them are, none can hold a candle to the original novel. If you want a real Halloween treat, that's where to look.

A second resurrection for Lord Mortis

As the season brings the haunting howls of spooks, spectres and the restless dead, it might be a good time to pick up the new edition of The Keep of the Lich-Lord. Or maybe I should say the old edition, because this is not the Fabled Lands Quests version from 2014 but an almost-exact reprint of the Fighting Fantasy book from 1990. Apart from a few place-names that we've changed because the story can't be set in Titan, this is as near as possible the original text. The new rules are designed to replicate the probabilities of the FF system, so the adventure is exactly as difficult as it was four decades ago. And there's even a ghoul-green spine to satisfy the most demanding gamebook aficionado. Happy Halloween.

Time lapse

"A Town Through Time" was the working title of a book project I developed with Russ Nicholson in the 1990s. I thought of it when my wife and I saw some 19th century maps of the part of London where we live. In the 1870s it was all fields. The only landmarks we recognized were the main road, some churches, and a coaching inn that is now our local pub. Thirty years later everything had changed. All the familiar roads were there and where there had been fields were now hundreds of houses.

What happened to so radically transform the outskirts of London? The underground railway, that's what. Overnight it made sense for people to live a few miles from the city centre and commute to work each day. To give you a sense of the difference: I used to work in Camden, a district in the north of London. To walk there from south-west London, where I live, would take two and a half hours. On the Tube it used to take me less than an hour door to door.

I was interested in how the landscape could show a changing world. We talked about each spread showing the same few roads, and each time you turned the page there'd be a new snapshot ten years on. So on one page there might be a carrot-topped kid doing a paper round. On the next spread we'd see a wounded soldier with red hair back from the Western Front, and we'd realize that was the boy grown up.

Here's how I described it in a letter to Russ:

I think the book should focus on a street in a southern English town, showing how it has changed over the period from the 1850 to the present day. The gimmick would be to show the street each decade, so the book could be called Ten Years On.

I've sketched a vague idea of how the street could look. This is an area which would have been parkland adjoining a major coaching route up until the mid-19th century. The original buildings were just the church, manor and coaching inn. As the suburbs grew, more buildings were put up. By the 1900s it is a suburban street with a fruit-&-veg shop at the end and the coaching inn has become the local pub. By the 1950s the manor will have been partially bombed and rebuilt as a school.

I'm going to do some research at the local library, which has a good historical reference section. I'll photocopy anything you might find useful. To sell the book, I think we'll need to do at least one spread, and I suggest the one set in the 1900s. Queen Victoria has died and people wear black armbands. In one of the houses a woman scolds her maid. Her husband is coming back from work in the city, tipping his top hat to the lady next door as he comes in his front gate. The son plays with a stick-and-hoop in the street. The cutaway of the house next door shows an upstairs room where a man lies sick in bed with a doctor listening to his breathing.

On the main road at the end of the street, people are coming and going on foot, horseback or penny farthing. The road is still more like a hard-packed earthen track than a modern tarmac surface, of course. A man could be driving a couple of pigs down the street, taking them to the common. (That actually happened in the area where we live when people first started to move into the newly-built houses in the 1890s. A banker was astonished to come out of his front door and see farmers with their animals coming up the road.)

All the spreads will show the street from the same angle, as if viewed from 45° above the ground. The cutaways will be X--ray vision views into the houses that can vary from spread to spread -- ie in some cases we might look into the attic of one house, the ground floor of the one next door, and in the following spread we might not look into either.

The idea will be to show the way lifestyles, fashions and the appearance of the street change over the years. Also to be a kind of 'soap opera' where you can see a man courting a girl down the street, married to her ten years on, their son playing, off to war ten years on... etc. Put in any amusing little visual stories you think of, as this is one of the aspects that the editors at Pan Macmillan liked. Call me once you've had a think about it. I think this project could be a real winner - one of those books that stays in print for thirty years.

The publishers liked the idea -- unsurprisingly, as picture books like that can sell to dozens of countries without the expense of a lot of translation. I don't know why we never went ahead with it. Maybe the publishers didn't like the sketch Russ did. Or maybe we got so busy on the Fabled Lands books that we forgot about this project.

I was reminded of it recently by the release of Robert Zemeckis's film Here, which uses a fixed camera and a series of time jumps to tell its stories. I obviously like the idea of telling a story with a fixed camera because I even dreamt about it twenty years after Russ and I first discussed Ten Years On. Maybe it's just the passage of time that fascinates me. Funny thing is, I told Russ this could be "one of those books that stays in print for thirty years". Well, it's been thirty years now, and while the book never made it into print, the concept has stayed with me just as long. 

The sound of the Heart

Think you know Heart of Ice? Guess again. Playnook Games have released the 30-year-old gamebook in brand new form as an audio game. Back in the days when Jamie and I worked at Eidos I used to bend the ear of anyone who'd listen about how audio adventure was a medium ripe for development. And lo, a mere quarter-century later, here it is. Check out the video above (or this one) for a promo code.

Wonderful things

One of my favourite books is Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. The main character, Lizzie Greystock (later Lady Eustace) is one of fiction's standout characters a breathtakingly unabashed chancer, a kind of Victorian-era Donald Trump if Trump were quick-witted, beautiful, charismatic, young and female. It's not a spoiler if I reveal that Lizzie ends up with a diamond necklace, worth upwards of five million dollars in modern terms, that she claims her husband gave her as her personal property a few days after they were married and a few months before he died.

The concern of the Eustace family and their lawyer is that, if they can't prove the diamonds are an heirloom that should be held in trust for Lizzie's infant son, she'll sell them for cash. That means they'll be broken up and lose about half their value.

The fun of the novel lies in the increasingly chaotic repercussions that ripple out from Lizzie's lies to affect everyone around her, but it also got me thinking of how much value must have been lost in the course of plunder through the ages. Conquistadors seized Aztec treasures and melted them down for shipping home to Spain. At the time they only cared about the gold, but to us today those artifacts would be of immeasurably greater value if they could be restored. It's in the artistry and the history where the value lies.

In traditional dungeon bashes, adventurers rush into ancient buried temples, prise jewelled eyes out of idols, break gold statues up for easier carrying, and load their mules with bags full of ancient coins that will be sold for smelting, not to adorn a numismatist's collection. Imagine Howard Carter had done that to Tutankhamun's treasures. The value in gold ingots would only be in the tens of millions, but as a complete set of 18th Dynasty artifacts they've been insured for one billion dollars.

Heists are popular in roleplaying these days, it seems. If the player-characters steal treasure from a private collection, they may not be able to sell the items at their true value. Crown jewels, for example, can't easily find a buyer. In that case there may be no choice but to break the jewels up and melt down the precious metals. The loot may thereby lose 90% of its value, but the difference is that the remaining 10% now goes to the thieves, so what do they care about the vandalism involved?

For treasure to be worth anything as art, you need to have a society in which aesthetics feature as well as commerce. In Tekumel gaming, for example, coins bearing the head of Queen Nayari, founder of the Bednalljan dynasty, would be worth far more intact than if melted down into silver or gold ingots -- in theory, that is, though first you'd have to find a wealthy numismatist to buy the coins. In contrast, D&D was styled more on the Wild West, where one sack of loot was much the same as another.

Does treasure play a role in any of your games, and if so is it in the form of mere plunder or artworks of unique value?

Casket treasures

I don't have words enough to properly praise Casket of Fays and all the other fine Red Ruin publications. Red Ruin Publishing itself is the brainchild of Simon Barns, tireless champion of Dragon Warriors and Legend generally. Andrew Girdwood at Geek Native has just published this interview with Simon with lots of tantalizing glimpses at what Red Ruin has in the pipeline.

Come back tomorrow for more about treasure and the part it plays in roleplaying games.