Novel approach

As a counterbalance to all the gamebook posts recently, roleplayers out there might be interested in news of the Ophis campaign setting which was where Oliver Johnson and I originally planned to go in the Dragon Warriors world, Legend. We wrote a massive amount for this - the background, mythology, city maps, NPCs and new monsters, and a couple of paperbacks' worth of scenarios. And we even planned out the obligatory trilogy and got started on the first novel.

Well, most of that is probably doomed to languish in a drawer for another thirty years (literally a drawer, too; we banged it out on typewriters and it is stuffed into a bunch of card folders!) but we can bring you a taster in the form of that novel, The Land Below the Sunset, which is currently being serialized on free reading channel Wattpad. In a nutshell:

It is a time of warring city states. A long, bitter war that has left the land barren and the people sick. A war that ends not with victory for any side, but with the unstoppable progress of plague across the world. In the sprawling city of Deliverance, at the mouth of the great river that divides a continent, Propriano of the Astralis family, heir to a noble tradition, finds himself abruptly in a pivotal role in his people's history

Take a look and, if you like it, do please spread the word. I'm just itching for any excuse to dust off all this great material - and I can say that in all modesty because the Gothic-drenched atmosphere and hallucinatory weirdness is 99% vintage Johnson.

The image above is by xXsilvbarisXx on DeviantArt. Looks a lot more alien than the concept art for most SF/fantasy fiction, doesn't it? Now, if you'll excuse me I'd better get back to the (sigh) Javascript for these gamebooks...