We'll never reach infinity

You can't keep a secret in the internet age. I'd barely heard the news myself when readers of this blog started asking why the Infinite IF gamebooks had disappeared from the Osprey Adventures site. Weren't we going to team up with Osprey to bring back the Virtual Reality and Way of the Tiger books in digital form? That was the plan last summer. So what happened?

Now it can be told. Fabled Lands LLP won't be partnering with Osprey after all. It was an amicable parting and we wish them huge success with the Osprey Adventures line. Think Nazi occult secrets, zombie hunting guides, Cthulhu investogators' handbooks, dossiers that lift the lid on Area 51 - all coupled with the awesome full-colour artwork you'd expect of any Osprey book.

It became clear that gamebooks didn't really fit in there. Personally I wish we'd realized that before I spent eight months writing tedious Javascript and pasting it tediously into Excel because that's the way the toolset for these books worked. Oh, and it was undocumented. And occasionally the syntax would change. So that was a lot of fun. But it wasn't anybody's fault. Sometimes you get into something - pointing a gun at an archduke, digging a trench in the Somme valley, and the next thing you know it's out of everyone's hands.

When we finally had breathing space to sit back and look at the almost-complete e-gamebooks, that was when we saw they didn't have a natural home alongside either myths and legends or dark Fortean stuff. Had I written all-new gamebooks it might have been different. I wish I had done that, in fact, because the Dark Osprey books in particular are a really cool genre to work in.

The silver lining is that this change of plan means there will be print editions of those books. The Infinite IF series was going to be epub3 only, but now that I have the edited and revised text of the books, it's not too arduous to set them up in paperback on Amazon. Those should be ready in time for Christmas. More news about that in a month.

If you actually prefer digital gamebooks, I have nothing to promise right now, but don't give up hope. Jamie is looking into various other ways to get those versions completed and published. Meanwhile, I'm just happy to swap Javascript for Serif PagePlus (my DTP software of choice) and to set up some covers featuring Jon Hodgson's glorious artwork.