Unearthing the Lich Lord

Oliver Johnson’s Lord of Shadow Keep was supposed to appear as a Fighting Fantasy book, but it got switched to the Golden Dragon series at the thirteenth hour. I wonder if that was why, when I finally got around to co-writing a Fighting Fantasy book, I called it The Keep of the Lich Lord...?

Probably not. Jamie and I submitted a whole bunch of concepts to the editors at Puffin, and Keep was a long way from being our favourite. It was rather odd that they picked it, come to think, as a quick glance on Wiki suggests that, Black Vein Prophecy excepted, the surrounding books in the series were all horror-inflected fantasy built on the very similar premise of raiding a monstrous super-villain's secret base. I guess Jamie and I aren’t the only ones who spent our formative years steeped in 007 and Hammer movies.

The deal with those FF books was that the authors got 60% of the royalty and Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson got 40%. Or possibly it was the other way round. You can’t really copyright a concept, but they established the brand and the split struck us as more than fair. When Icon Books picked up the series from Puffin (which, incidentally, is a bit like the BBC throwing Doctor Who to Canal+ in the early ‘90s) authors were offered a deal to sell their rights. Jamie and Mark Smith gave up Talisman of Death and Sword of the Samurai, but I make a point of never parting with copyright unless I’m paid crazy money. So Jamie and I kept Keep.

When I was prepping The Castle of Lost Souls for re-release, I briefly entertained the notion of relocating it to Golnir. The tone of the book just felt too whimsical for Fabled Lands, so that plan got dropped, but Jamie and I continued tossing around some other ideas. And we kept coming back to The Keep of the Lich Lord.

Obviously Fighting Fantasy fans would rather see Keep re-released using the FF world and system. I appreciate that. We can’t because we don’t have the rights, and anyway we have a gentlemen’s agreement not to make a big deal about it having been an FF book when publicizing the new edition. Not that we ever do any publicity per se, but you get the picture.

All of which is why Lord Mortis is now rising from the dead on an obscure but strategically important archipelago close to the Unnumbered Isles. You can start the book with a new character, or you can get an existing FL character to Dweomer and pick up the story there. We’re calling these single-story specials Fabled Lands Quests – though I admit to being slightly at a loss as to which other books could be adapted in the same way. Maybe a new version of Castle of Lost Souls, or the long-awaited reworking of Eye of the Dragon? Suggestions welcome!

To fit the adventure into the Fabled Lands, I wrote a new introduction set in Dweomer. But what to do with the old intro..? Recently on the blog, MikeH was asking about extras in our books. Well, Mike, you’ll be pleased to know that we have shamelessly swiped your idea and stuck our own names on it. This new edition of Keep has a wealth of cool stuff including the original introduction as an appendix, a section describing all the other concepts that could have become Fighting Fantasy #43, and a foreword in which I talk about the process of adapting the book from Titan to the Fabled Lands.

Anything else you want to know? Oh, artwork, of course. We don’t have the rights to the original FF illustrations so we couldn’t use those. Obviously, this being a sort-of Fabled Lands book, some new pictures by Russ Nicholson would have been great, but all-new art is expensive. We have the next best thing: thanks to the generosity of our friends at Megara Entertainment, the new edition features artwork from their Keep of the Lich Lord app of a few years back. Leo Hartas kindly let us use his gorgeous map, which appears in its full-colour glory on the back cover. And the front cover painting is courtesy of Kevin Jenkins, being the inside flap detail (as if you didn’t know) from the triptych of Over the Blood-Dark Sea.

Mean streets of Manhattan

At the end of last week I heard that Paul Gresty's gamebook The Thief of Memories was being converted into an app, and today we have a guest post by Mr Gresty himself. If this was ink it'd still be wet...

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It's interesting to see how things come around full circle. Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories was originally planned as a smartphone/tablet application, a reboot of the first Arcana Agency app that Megara Entertainment released some five years ago, now. Scrutinising Act I and Act II of the story, I can still spot a few holdovers from my initial draft of that app. Most visibly, for instance, each game paragraph is around sixty words long, so that it can neatly fit onto a smartphone screen.

Then, as I was midway through writing that app, Zach Weiner came up with the gamebook Trial of the Clone, and ran a Kickstarter that raised $130,000. Suddenly it seemed a really, really good idea for Megara to run a gamebook Kickstarter of its own.

So, Arcana Agency became a print gamebook, in glorious full colour. The setting is New York, 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. The story follows a trio of private detectives - Humphrey Brown, Joe Strelli and Tom Shanigan; respectively studious, streetwise and superstitious - as they investigate the mystery of a man who apparently cannot die, and a wicked cultist long thought dead. The atmosphere is on the dark side, as gamebooks go. The detectives are never quite sure if their murderous antagonist truly possesses supernatural powers, or is merely a gifted charlatan. (And which is it, in the end? No spoilers here, I'm afraid.)

The book was, in some ways, a tricky one to write. Not least because of the level of research involved in order to be historically accurate (what type of car would somebody on Humphrey Brown's pay scale be likely to drive in 1932? Hmm...). And yet I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've read a few reviews that mention a Cthulhu-esque tone to the story. In truth, I've only ever read a handful of Lovecraft's stories in my life and, while I've glanced through the Call of Cthulhu RPG, I've never played it.

No, I feel detective literature was a far greater influence than the horror genre. Certainly, I tried to imbue the setting with a touch of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe stories. Of course, The Big Sleep, the first full Marlowe novel, was published in 1939, so that added to the time spent checking historical accuracy. Sherlock Holmes is my own personal detective of predilection, and there's an air of Holmes about Humphrey Brown. Well, an awkward, unsure version of Holmes, maybe.

The gamebook roots of the book - once we'd decided it would be a gamebook - are likely quite visible. The codeword system and mechanics owe more than a nod to Fabled Lands. Some of the numerical manipulation ('deduct 40 from the current paragraph number if you think you've found the clue...') is reminiscent of a couple of Steve Jackson's books. And the app adaptation will remain faithful to much of this, dice-rolling and all.

But I think there are a lot of fresh elements in there too. The narrative is in the third person, and the past tense. Perspective switches between various characters throughout. There's more interplay, more of a relationship, between the three detectives than you might often see in gamebooks. Occasional interludes take the narrative focus away from the three principal protagonists entirely. A big point: I think the book's villain is credible, and human. Nobody wants a nice villain. But it's important to sympathise with the villain's motives. Gamebooks have a nasty tendency of featuring evil sorcerers who want to destroy the world because... well, you know, because being evil is really cool. Here - yes, the villain is a nasty, murdering scumbag. But, should you manage to reach the end of the story, you kind of get why.

So, here we are two years later. The app that became a book has become an app once more, and I'm lucky enough to get to talk about it on the Fabled Lands blog. Have I mentioned that I originally started working with Megara because they wanted to translate and publish a scenario that I wrote for the Fabled Lands Role-Playing Game? As I said, it's interesting to see how things come around full circle.

The road to heaven

I thought I'd posted up this puzzle ages ago, but a Google search shows no sign of it. As I've recently been discussing it online with Chris Garratty, I thought I'd throw it open to the vast Kree Intelligence that is gamebook fandom. You've played Sorcery, right? You must all have IQs as big as the Death Star. So here goes:

While walking upon a path through unmapped territories, you come across a group of three cowled figures standing where two roads meet. You are informed by one whose counsel you have no reason to doubt that these three are Mung, who keeps the secrets of the grave (for he is the god of death) by invariably lying, Sish, the Destroyer of Hours, who speeds the flight of time's arrow by always telling the truth, and Kib, the god of life, who created Man and consequently lies and tells the truth equally without conscience. Further, you are told that one of the two roads leads to Paradise while the other takes travellers to the lowest circle of Hell. Presupposing that you wish to take the road to Paradise, how can you, by asking one yes-or-no question of one of the three gods (who are, incidentally, indistinguishable), find whether to go left or right?

So, with two questions you might start with the old, "If I asked if the way to Paradise is left, would you say yes?" If you only have a liar and a truth-teller, if the answer is yes you should go left, and if it's no you go right. The snag is, that question sets up a logical impossibility for the god who randomly chooses to lie or tell the truth. Figure that he works out the lying or truthful response to the current question and then flips a mental coin to choose which to say. Your hypothetical question nested within the first is a separate question for which he hasn't yet flipped that coin.

However, if you did have two questions, there is a way to use the first question to weed out Kib. (This is from Ivan Morris, by the way, who originally devised the puzzle.) Say you pick one god (call him A) and you ask, "Is B more likely to tell the truth than C?" If you get a yes, C cannot be Kib. If you get a no, B cannot be Kib. You can then proceed to the question above.

But here's the snag. You don't have two questions, you just have one...

The time of year for fear

Halloween is nearly here. Tell my next-door neighbours - they've had plaster pumpkins and a big witch's-hat display on their porch for weeks. If you get yourself all worked up that early, I think the actual day loses its spooky shine. Premature horripilation, Dr Freud would've called it. But if you're not sick of ghosts and goblins yet, here are some suggestions for an enjoyable shudder:

The image above is from "Wrong Turning", a comic strip in the Creepy style that I wrote for Martin McKenna after a fog-shrouded week at Shute Gatehouse. You can read the story here for free, but if you want to see the works of real genius that inspired it, Steve Ditko's collected Creepy and Eerie strips are here.

If that lights your turnip lantern, the comics connection gives me a segue to "A Dying Trade", a story I originally cooked up for a ghost-written Clive Barker book that didn't happen. I tried turning it into a comic with the help of Russ Nicholson, but that didn't get off the ground either. But eventually Dermot Bolton produced it as a short movie directed by Dan Turner, and you can watch that here.

Talking of movies, The Book of Life is out now and has to be worth a watch, because if two Mexican maestros like Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez don't know their Day of the Dead, who does? As del Toro says:

“[What is it with Mexicans and death?] Ultimately you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It’s an impulse that’s intrinsic to the Mexican character. And when people ask me, what is so Mexican about your films, I say me. Because I’m not a guy that hides the monster: I show it to you with the absolute conviction that it exists. And that’s the way I think we view death. We don’t view it as the end of end all. You say 'carpe diem' in Dead Poets Society; we have that in a much more tequila-infused, mariachi-soundtrack kind of way.”

That whole vibe of wild partying and the flowering of life in death resonates with me, maybe because I got married in Mexico (just after the Day of the Dead, in fact). I like the fabulist notion of death teeming with all these passions and possibilities, which probably accounts for me being such a big fan of Tim Schafer's adventure game Grim Fandango. Boy, I wish somebody would turn that into a movie. Or a kids' TV show. Or a comic or a series of novels. (Well, maybe somebody did the last of those, kind of, only without Manny Calavera's decent-little-guy charm.)

The thing about Halloween is the fairground fun side of it. It's the ghost train version of scariness, a chill to enjoy by the fireside on a dark and stormy night. That's why I love John Whitbourn's classic series Binscombe Tales - not exclusively horror stories as such, but all of them open a window on an unsettling world of weird. They've been anthologized more widely, and won more awards, than any eerie English yarns this side of Algernon Blackwood, and the main reason for that is the storytelling warmth that accompanies the grave-deep chill and feverish fizz of Mr Whitbourn's imagination.

A more serious take on a tale of dread is to be found in Frankenstein, which (I'm sure you know) I turned into an interactive novel a couple of years back. There's no comfort to be found there, no cosy shiver before bedtime. This isn't the Universal horror movie version to be taken with popcorn and a pinch of salt, it's Mary Shelley's bleakly brilliant work of SF - only with more humour and characterization and fewer descriptions of mountain walks and river journeys. Oh, and I added a solution to the knotty problem of how the monster got the corpse of Frankenstein's murdered friend to Ireland, which otherwise makes no plot sense whatsoever. (Sorry, Mrs Shelley.) Read Dr Dale Townshend discussing the story with me here, or go and grab a copy (for iOS or Android) here.

More exploration of nightmarish unease was supposed to happen in Wrong, the online magazine I launched with Peter Richardson. Unfortunately the creators involved were all too busy trying to make a crust to throw in their time for free - myself included. But I still stand by our manifesto:

The most unsettling fears are the ones you can’t quite put your finger on. It needn't be anything as cosy as werewolves or vampires; nothing so comfortingly concrete as a madman with a knife. The supernatural, when it appears, can be a catalyst evoking the real horror that comes from within. ...Dreams are also a kind of truth, and bad things are more sinister when they happen to the blameless. Not everything is always explained and neatly tied up. There are often loose ends that will leave you uneasy. Rod Serling would be at home here. 

To round off, let's go back to Mexico. As well as getting hitched, I was there researching Maya mythology for my gamebook Necklace of Skulls. Eldritch encounters abound with skeletal noblemen who invite you to join them for a chat, threshold guardians on the way into Xibalba, disembodied heads, and the like. You can buy that in its new Fabled Lands Publishing edition, and if you get the paperback then the Kindle version is free, but I recommend waiting a week or two for Cubus Games's all-new app version. The full gleeful ghoulishness of the Day of the Dead has rarely been so vibrantly evoked as by Xavier Mula's artwork.

A marvellous night for a moondance

Some news for Lone Wolf fans. Autumn Snow, the new gamebook series set in the LW universe, has raised enough money to go ahead, and now has this appropriately autumnal cover by Gary Chalk. Speaking of which, as the season has come round again, here are my takes on the early, crisp fall and the darker, smoky time after Halloween. More on that tomorrow.

Arcana Agency: the app version

Remember Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories? It was a gamebook by Paul Gresty, published a couple of years ago by by Megara Entertainment using funds raised on Kickstarter. Well, now it's returning as an app, which is currently in review at Apple and should be on sale within a week for iOS, with an Android version not far behind. I'll run a guest post by Paul Gresty when the app actually launches, but to warm things up here's my foreword from the 2013 print edition. 

(Where I got it wrong: gamebooks on Kickstarter are mostly not innovating; they look more '80s than the '80s! But in the digital space there is real innovation in the form of projects like 80 Days from Inkle/Meg Jayanth and Frankenstein by - modest cough - me. So quality gamebooks like The Thief of Memories do have a future, only it'll be as apps rather than expensive KS hardbacks.)

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It's generally thought that the boom time for gamebooks was the 1980s. Back then, every publisher wanted at least one gamebook series and it was hard for the small pool of authors willing to wrangle with flowcharts and rules systems to keep up with demand. But who could have imagined that, thirty years on, a first-time gamebook writer would raise the staggering sum of $130,000 – and not as advance against royalties, as publishers pay for new work, but in the form of pure patronage? For that is Kickstarter, today’s answer to François I.

The genius of Mikael Louys, founder of Megara Entertainment, has been in seeing that crowdfunding could point the way to an entirely new funding paradigm for specialist interest publications. Role-playing games and gamebooks, which would have struggled to find a market on the shelves of a bookstore, at one stroke become a very viable proposition when backed by a devoted core of aficionados.

Of course, there is rarely a new thing even in the third millennium, and Kickstarter book ventures in fact represent a return to the 18th century model of publishing whereby a subscription would be raised to pay for the writing and printing of a new work. So gamebooks may have left their ‘80s heyday behind, but reports of their extinction have been wildly exaggerated. Instead they could, alongside other hobby and genre interests, spearhead a whole new evolution in publishing.

It’s not just the financial side of gamebook publishing that’s changing. We are starting to see innovations in content too. Back in the 1980s, it was hard to convince publishers to try anything new because the standard Dungeons-and-Dragons-influenced fantasy gamebooks were selling so well. Now, that whole genre of gaming has been claimed by videogames, which will win hands down when it comes to dungeon crawls and monster bashing. Gamebooks have to get smarter. They have to evolve into new genres and styles. They must thrive by identifying the things they can do better than videogames. More complex characterization. A greater variety of situations. Deeper exploration of themes. That level of moral and emotional richness that prose can do better than any other medium.

Arcana Agency is just one such work and it can only do so much. But I’m interested in the mold-breaking aspects that Paul Gresty is trying out here. The usual second-person, present tense that has been the standard register of gamebooks since Steve Jackson’s Death Test has gone, throwing us into a medium that feels grown-up, intriguing, and full of properly differentiated characters. I’m not even sure that I’d use the label ‘gamebook’ anymore. That seems to imply something to read on the bus home from school, something to fit in after homework. Mr Gresty is writing interactive literature here, making full use of the medium at his disposal to provoke, stimulate and challenge the reader in interesting ways, and I’m sure we’ll look back on Arcana Agency as a pioneer of a whole new phase in the ongoing evolution of the interactive novel.

Learning by playing games

Reading a text book is a terrible way to learn about a subject. You’re looking at a linear block of facts and trying to reconstruct in your own mind the complex set of connections that, in the case of the original author, comprises real understanding.

Nobody learns only from textbooks, okay, but traditional teaching methods are not a big improvement. At college I went to lectures, made notes, was asked to write essays on magnetism and neutrinos and discuss them. I learnt very little from that part of the course, which as far as I could see was really English, not Physics.

Solving problems, that was how I learned. “What is the field gradient above an infinite charged plain?” Do all the calculus and then kick yourself when you realize the field is constant (the clue is in “infinite”) but, having found that out for yourself, you won’t forget it.

Leo Hartas and I took this idea to Dorling Kindersley ten years back with a proposal we called the Inspiration Engine. These would be a series of books tied in with games. Take a staple subject for popular kids’ nonfiction: the solar system. We outlined a tactics and management game in which the player was setting up colonies on other planets. In building habitats and craft you’d be finding out about the gravity, atmospheric density, composition, etc, of different planets. The accompanying book would act as a manual for the hands-on experience of the game. A goal (winning the game) drives the human mind like nothing else. This wasn’t just reading about the solar system, it was getting out there and (virtually) exploring it.

Dorling Kindersley turned it down. We got in front of the board and said we’d start by showing them some games on the Playstation. “I’m not watching you all play games,” snorted the DK chairman. “You can just call me when you’re ready to talk about books.” Naturally his board members all just shrank in their seats at that. Afterwards, one came up and said, “I think you can see that half of us are with you on this project. If you want to continue championing it, we’ll back you up.” I was very glad to get offered a job by Demis Hassabis a month later so I didn’t have to keep banging my head against the brick wall of nonfiction publishing.

You can’t keep a good concept down. This week comes news that Ian Livingstone has applied to start a school using interactivity and problem-solving as its primary teaching methods. It’s not just a gimmick. Students taught in that way will learn differently and more deeply than they would by traditional methods. As Thoreau said, "Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory."

Let me give you an example. I’ve never had much of a flair for electronics, but my practical partner at college was one of those fellows who were playing with crystal radio sets before they could talk. We’d be building a circuit and he’d say, “Looks like we need a 2 ohm resistor there.” I’d work it all out using the equations, and a couple of minutes later I’d find the theoretical value was 2.12 ohms. But my partner had got there right away. When it came to electrical circuits, I had only knowledge; he had real understanding.

Computer simulations give us the means now to allow students to develop hands-on understanding of subjects. The biggest threat will be if the old ways of assessing progress are applied to this new way of learning. It’s like asking a karateka to perform a kata when the real test is: can he break a brick or lay the other guy out flat? I’m reminded of Peter Ustinov, asked by his schoolmaster to name a great composer. “Beethoven,” said the young Ustinov. “No,” replied the master, “the correct answer is Mozart.”

And by the way it doesn't have to be a computer simulation. Boardgames are pretty effective teaching simulations too. Playing a game of the Cuban revolution in Command magazine - or maybe it was Strategy & Tactics - I had the problem of government forces facing a guerrilla war. Since I didn't know where the next bomb would go off, I had to massively increase military patrols. But since in nine cases out of ten my troops had nothing to do but inconvenience locals by asking for their papers, that only had the effect of driving the populace over to Castro's side. If I pulled the troops back to barracks, on the other hand, that gave me no chance of interdicting the rebels when they struck. A book could state that fact, but it wouldn't give you a fee for how it actually plays out in reality, just as any ancient history professor can tell you that iron weapons are superior to bronze, but it takes a simulations wargamer to say by how much.

I’m sure plenty of education’s old guard will have their knives out for Mr Livingstone’s proposals, in just the same way as that DK chairman was disgruntled at the very idea of including games in a discussion about learning. But it’s a new world coming, and the men and women who go out there to explore the solar system for real won’t have got their expertise out of a picture book. They’ll have acquired it by playing games

Image of Pandora shepherding Saturn's rings courtesy of NASA.

Step into myth

If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video must go at least an order of magnitude beyond that. So instead of my customary long screed, this time I'm just going to leave this trailer from Cubus Games and this sample image by Xavier Mula to tell their own story.

The Way of the Tiger continues

1987. It was the climax of the sixth book in the Way of the Tiger series. Having risen from orphan to pretender to king, the hero of the series, Avenger, travels to the Rift, a great chasm into the heart of the Earth, to rescue her (or his) comrade Glaivas the ranger. Plummeting down the precipices, Avenger lands on something soft. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's a web, in which she (or he) is stuck fast, and a colossal spider (and/or god) is coming closer, closer...

Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith got to there, section 424 in the book, and wrote, "The end." Other books in the series had an implied "to be continued", but this one bore a stamp of finality. There's a good reason; Mark and Jamie didn't expect to be writing another one. Knight Books, publishers of Way of the Tiger, had dragged their feet over whether to renew the contract. It's the eternal worry of the freelancer - a publisher or network executive twiddles their thumbs, unhurried as only a regular salary can make a person, while the writer or artist frets about where she (or he) will find the next mortgage payment.

Not knowing whether to commit to more Way of the Tiger, Mark and Jamie had pitched another series, Duel Master, and got an offer from Armada. So by the time the alarm clock went off at Knight Books and somebody remembered to phone up for a discussion about a chat about some thoughts regarding a possible book 7, Jamie was already deep into designing the rules and complex structure for Duel Master. Mark finished off Inferno, dumped Avenger into that web, and typed two three-letter words that stuck a generation of schoolkids on tenterhooks for twenty-seven years. He left the tiniest of get-out clauses, a faintly glimmering "unless" in the final sentence, but the truth is Mark and Jamie never expected to be coming back.

Never say never. All these years later, Fabled Lands Publishing got hold of the Way of the Tiger rights and enlisted the editing team at Megara Entertainment, headed up by Richard S Hetley, to fix some of the logic problems in Inferno, refurbish the text, and now we have an all-new edition to please the most demanding fan. (Not only that, author David Walters has permission from Mark and Jamie to continue the series and looks set to do that brilliantly, starting with book seven, Redeemer.)

The new edition of Inferno is on sale now. The cover took some thinking about, and in the end we didn't use any of the designs above. Initially we were going with the giant spider painting by Mylène Villeneuve, the artist for the other five WOTT covers. It's nice and sinister, but the problem comes when you see it in thumbnail, as it would appear on most online bookstores, whereupon the tiny figure of Avenger is lost and all the customer would see is a picture of a spider. And, as you can see, to use that painting we'd have needed to add a blank strip at the bottom, otherwise the text of the title would have obscured Avenger anyway.

So we turned to the rising star of Megara's art stable, Sébastien Brunet, who did the cover art for the new edition of the Blood Sword gamebooks as well as the interior illustrations in Inferno. But the first stab at using his picture (above right) didn't work. The conventional direction of movement implied the dragon/serpent trying to get somewhere and the swordswoman Cassandra trying to stop it. That may be the scenario in the story, but the cover becomes more dramatic when it's flipped the other way round. On top of which, it always looks odd when artists insist on having warriors fight left-handed. (Unless the author has specified that. I bet a hundred WOTT fans will now tell me Cassandra's a southpaw.) So finally we come to the cover above left, which is the one you'll get if you part with your hard-won oban. But don't empty the piggy-bank completely, as the coming weeks will see the re-release of Falcon 1: The Renegade Lord, a beautiful (and multi-platform) app version of Necklace of Skulls, and The Keep of the Lich Lord (formerly Fighting Fantasy Gamebook #43) as a Fabled Lands adventure. Christmas is indeed coming early.

I want to live like common people

Think of the central characters in the two great high fantasy novels of the twentieth century. Steerpike and Frodo, both working class guys. Oh, okay, Frodo is as bourgeois as they come, but compared to the likes of Aragorn and Boromir he's a mud-caked serf. The point is, it’s only in also-ran fantasy works that dispossessed lords or brave rebel princesses get to be the heroes. Which perhaps is the inspiration behind J M Perkins’ Kickstarter campaign to fund a “how to play a commoner” RPG book.

For a rewarding role-playing game you need a deep, consistent world and the possibility of conflict, among other things. Social class helps provide both. Of course, it’s not enough just to have low-class characters. That only makes sense if there are higher classes to interact with, whether other players or NPCs.

A low-class character can be more imaginative and flexible than their social betters, because they have less to gain from sticking to society’s rules. That was my thinking when I created working-class hero Jack Ember for Mirabilis: Year of Wonders. The postwar fiction of the "Angry Young Men" was full of clever commoners like Arthur Seaton and Jim Dixon - or, even earlier, look at the examples of Kipling's "Tommy" and Twain's Huck Finn.

For an aristocratic character, strait-jacketed by social rules, it can be handy to have a commoner to take care of the grubby side of problems. Maybe the cardinal’s high-born daughter can’t countenance plain murder, however ruthless she is, but a word to her guttersnipe servant – “I hope I never see that man again” – may be enough to put her enemy in the Tiber with a wide red smile. The master-and-servant relationship is such a staple of drama that Keith Johnstone devoted more than half of his book Impro to it. Think of Blackadder and Baldrick. Wooster and Jeeves. Fogg and Passepartout. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Especially mature readers might even remember Mr Stabs and Luko:

Of course, servant-and-master is only going to work in an RPG if players stick to their social roles. You can’t chummily forget about status differences when it suits you. I was lucky enough to play in a campaign where Jamie was an aristocratic army officer and Patrick Brady was his sergeant. The relationship between them was pitch perfect even when (especially when) Patrick’s character was bending the letter of his orders as far as he could.

Fun though these examples from fiction and gaming are, they're all essentially romps. Yet in real life there's a heavy burden to being at the bottom of society's heap, a burden that many are overwhelmed by. Dig a bit deeper and the challenges and conflicts of being a commoner prove a lot harsher than the entertaining high jinks of Passepartout or Panza. Take a look at Mulk Raj Anand's classic novel Untouchable, an angry, desperate, tragic and ennobling account of those who are spurned as the dregs of society. Or consider the struggle of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, who suffers the double misfortune of being poor and a woman in nineteenth century England. Those are great stories to visit, but you wouldn't want to live them for real.

If you only read YA fiction you'd think that all these put-upon peasants needed was an uprising, but that's rarely an option in reality. The truth is always more interesting. Social class is hard to pull off but, like any attempt to take roleplaying seriously rather than as a make-believe send-up, it pays dividends in terms of the places it will take you.

The Wrong Side of the Galaxy

I still call him Gazza Greene, because that's what he was called in the early drafts, but now publishers feel it's safe to have another Harry as hero of a bestselling kids' series. So here comes Harry Greene, Starship Captain, kidnapped by aliens on his birthday, and then those aliens get attacked by another lot of (much nastier) aliens, and Harry ends up on the far side of the galaxy - in fact, a little way out beyond the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is really way too far from home when your tea's getting cold.

Alone but for a super-devious Cugelian alien, two cloned royal princesses who finish each other's sentences, and a senile ship's computer, Harry has to try to get home while dodging super-nasty aliens who are after the Galactical Imperial Crown Jewels. Before the first book is over, Harry will have acquired at least two arch-enemies and he'll have become a mum. (You'll have to read the book. Trust me, it all makes sense.)

This is proper SF, this, and not just another fantasy story masquerading as sci-fi. There are no mysterious prophecies, no magic monsters that can't see you if you hold your nose, no dangers that can be dealt with by believing in sugar plums, no hand-waving bamboozling ways out of a predicament. It's for kids, not idiots. It's by Jamie (of course) and I have to say that it's not just a side-splitting comedy that's the funniest thing since Douglas Adams, it's also a rollercoaster SF page-turner with some really wonderful alien worlds and creatures to enjoy along the way.

The Wrong Side of the Galaxy, the first in the Starship Captain trilogy, is out now in UK paperback. (Oh, I just realized we should have called the character Gordon Greene. Then we could have had, "Gordon's alive!" Darn. Talk about l'esprit de l'escalier...)

Cubus Games announce Necklace of Skulls app

More about this later in the month, but here's the first official announcement by Cubus Games of the forthcoming Necklace of Skulls app. If you're not already familiar with Cubus's great work on interactive story apps The Sinister Fairground and Heavy Metal Thunder, check them out and you'll see why we're thrilled to have them working on several of Fabled Lands Publishing's gamebooks. The vibrant artwork by Xavier Mula is a breath of fresh air after decades of a hobby dominated by clunky mail-clad dwarves and dank dungeons.

So this is quite a time for Critical IF, what with Inkle's adaptation of Down Among the Dead Men still riding high on the gamebook charts, Heart of Ice prepping for development, and of course the paperbacks all still available if digital isn't your thing. And before anyone asks, Necklace of Skulls should be out for Android as well as iOS.

And if you think all that is exciting news, wait till you hear about Jamie's new novel. If I had to Hollywoodize the pitch, I'd say it's Percy Jackson meets Galaxy Quest. Come back tomorrow and I'll tell you all about it.