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Thursday 21 January 2021

IF critique


This made for a lovely start to my year: an in-depth, considered and very flattering review by D F Chang of my four Critical IF gamebooks. "Compelling characters, perfectly plotted, amazingly written..." I didn't bribe him to say that, honest. Mr Chang's comments on Once Upon A Time In Arabia are more than fair, and three out of four A-ratings is nothing to gripe about. I just came across the video by accident, but you can bet modesty won't stop me sharing it every place I can.

Mr Chang raises a few interesting points, some of which have been addressed in earlier blog posts but this is a good opportunity for a recap. There were six Virtual Reality gamebooks but I only wrote the four that were republished as Critical IF; Mark Smith wrote Green Blood and The Coils of Hate. I wrote Down Among The Dead Men first, then Necklace of Skulls, then Heart of Ice, and finally Twist of Fate -- which was retitled Once Upon A Time In Arabia for the new edition.

Mr Chang has some valid criticisms. He doesn't like 'Necklace of Skulls' as the wizard's name. My only defence is that the nobles and kings of the Maya tended to be called things like that, if we interpret their names literally: Bird Jaguar, Sky Witness, Centipede Claw, Shield of the Sun, Curl Snout. It was anyway fashionable to translate them like that in the '90s, rather than attempt to recreate the sound of the names (K'inich Kan B'alam, for instance) which are even more deeply lost in the mists of time.

I agree that my inspiration was flagging when it came to the Arabian book. Or maybe I was trying too hard to recreate the picaresque feel of the Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame, where the goal is likewise to scoot all over the world in order to achieve riches and honour. Probably I lavished too much energy on Heart of Ice and had nothing left to spare for the final book, and the deadline didn't permit me to take a break and recharge. That's why, when editing the new edition of Twist of Fate, I took the opportunity to change the lame title and rewrite the introduction to the story.

But how marvellous it is to hear of readers still getting pleasure from books I wrote twenty-five years ago and more. I'm nearer the end than the start of my writing career, but that reward never gets old.

34 comments:

  1. Last year I discovered Heart of Ice. What I wasn't prepared for was experiencing the best interactive fiction piece I'd ever read. While reading, I'd often put the book down because of how in awe I was with this journey. How had this been hiding from me for 25 years?!

    I quickly sat down to map out the entire book on paper and was just stunned by the clever tricks and shifts throughout. From allowing the reader to choose a large path right out of the gate, to subtly peppering key characters early on, using first person to hide that the player may be a cyborg (in one path), placing upgrades in only one section, to swapping up the end to be a party adventure - the whole damn thing is brilliant.

    Since then, I've read your other Critical IFs alongside Fabled Lands, enjoying them thoroughly. Finding your blog surprised me yet again because the topics you cover are so diverse and inspired still.

    Congrats, and here's to new readers continuing to find your inspiring work for decades to come!

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  2. That is the best gamebooks series hands down, and it is a shame that there are only so few books.

    And talking about that, I see somewhere that the IOS version of Down Among the Dead Men have the option "woman in disguise"; owning the original book, but not an IOS, I'm curious to know how that option had changed/add some path in the story.

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    1. Good question. The iOS version was coded by Inkle and unlike the Frankenstein app, which I wrote myself, in the case of DATDM I licensed them to rewrite and expand it. The original book is gender-neutral, of course, but I assume Jon Ingold added some sections where it makes a difference if you are male or (as some pirates are said to have been) a woman in disguise.

      If anyone out there has played the iOS version and can shed some light on this, please chime in.

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    2. According to the reviews here, the only difference the character's gender makes is at the end -- but that may not be based on an exhaustive playthrough of all options. (I just hope they didn't make it that you get to marry Queen Titania!)

      https://appgrooves.com/ios/903402226/down-among-the-dead-men/inkle-ltd/positive

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    3. Thank you for the clarification!

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    4. I've looked at a few more reviews and, as I suspected, the reviewer who said gender only makes a difference at the end can't have been paying attention. The advantage an app has over a print gamebook is that it can include lots of conditional text. In Frankenstein, for example, whether the creature is referred to as "he" or "it" throughout the whole book is decided by a few early choices. In DATDM it sounds like Inkle kept the original idea that you are playing a changeling, gypsy, etc, and put in occasional references to that background, for example coming across a mysterious island and, if you're the changeling, finding it oddly familiar -- was it was where you originally came from, perhaps? This means that your choice of background can have frequent textural effects on how you experience the adventure. It won't make any big difference to the plot, but it adds depth and colour. Having to hide from your companions that you're a woman in disguise adds to the richness of the story, as will little touches for other PC types. It actually makes me want to play the whole thing multiple times with different characters to see what other little hidden gems Jon has scattered in there.

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  3. In many ways, my favorite gamebook series. Probably the best combination of storylines and game design. I only wish there had been more books in the series. So many possibilities for quasi-historical settings...

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    1. Thanks, Gaetano. Mark and I pitched the series as gamebooks but with the quality of stories and characterization you'd expect in a novel. I'd like to have written more, and Mark did at least one (The Masque of Death) that was never published.

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  4. I've had 4 very good, in my opinion, ideas that If you ever do A Fabled Quests Version of Down Among The Deadmen I think would make it even better then it otherwise would be. What do you think?

    If when the character reaches civilization they have The Codeword that makes them realize their unfit to rule men have them head to Harkuna in the hope of redeeming themselves by helping the both The Peoples or and The Lands of Harkuna

    If the character gets the ending that happens at the last paragraph how about after 5 or 6 years they get bored of a life of luxury and become A Adventurer for the excitement and every time you change books your lands net you a small sum, for example 2D6x10+100 Shards

    Or as a different way of continuing the sage of a character that gets the ending that happens at the last paragraph how about the character being The Son or Daughter of The Character from Down Among The Deadmen

    Another idea that could work with it being a characters Son or Daughter is that he or she starts with what his or her father or mother started with, and maybe a few more bits and pieces

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    1. I liked that when Inkle adapted the book as an app, they set it in the real world. Well, a fantasy version of the real world, I mean, where magic works -- but instead of Glorianne and Sidonia, the countries are England and Spain. It's interesting that back in the '90s it must have seemed too way out to do that, whereas after Pirates of the Caribbean came out audiences found it more natural to mix fantasy into real history.

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  5. How about we each name our favorite Book by Dave Morris that isn't A Fabled Lands Book and why its our favorite?

    Mine's Down Among The Deadmen and the reasons its my favorite is because of how easy I found it to convert it into A Short Piracy Themed Campaign for 2nd edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

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    1. Ooops just realized that I meant to put that's A Critical IF Book but by mistake I put that isn't A Fabled Lands Book. Sorry

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    2. Down Among The Dead Men *is* a Critical IF book, though. My own favourites are the Duel Master books by Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith, because you get to play them with a friend. I just never have the patience for solo gaming.

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  6. Sorry I meant to ask for your favorite book that is A Critical IF Book

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    1. Ah, I gotcha -- OK, then. I can't really choose one of my own (my favourite to write was Heart of Ice) so I'll say Coils of Hate. It was a nightmare to work on because the flowchart was utterly broken and I had two weeks to try and fix it, working nonstop, when I had a deadline looming on another book. So that was a bit stressful, but what I remember of its was the very richly evoked setting, the complexity of the characters, the maturity of the theme, and the fine writing. If Mark turned it into a novel I'd give it 5 stars.

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  7. A friend of mine has a question about A RPG that she claims to have made that combines the best parts of both Down Among The Deadmen and Fabled Lands. What do you suggest?

    What she wants to know is how does she ensure that at least 1 of The Player Characters has A Skill that if none of them have it they can't win the campaign?

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    1. The view I took with those books was that the reader had to be able to complete them whichever skills they started with. Because you get to pick four out of twelve skills, that meant that if there were any skill-dependent choke points that you had to progress through to reach the end, at least nine of the twelve skills had to be usable to get through.

      Mark Smith disagreed with me about that. I remember that in Green Blood there was a point that you could only succeed at if you had Spells or Swordplay. Mark said, "Oh, every reader will pick one of those two." But many of the pregen characters had neither, so I added a few options to try to make it playable for readers who picked them.

      More about that here:

      http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-first-tree-in-greenwood.html

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  8. If I ever won £10 million or more on the lottery would you, Jamie, Paul and whoever does the illustrations be interested in £550,000 each to make me custom made versions of Fabled Lands Books 8 to 12 and Fabled Lands Versions of Down Among The Deadmen, Talismen of Death, Sword of The Samurai, Way of The Tiger Book 3 and The Castle of Lost Souls that will challenge my Super-Human Character?

    In case you are wondering why I only want Fabled Lands Versions of Down Among The Deadmen, Talismen of Death, Sword of The Samurai, Way of The Tiger Book 3 and The Castle of Lost Souls its because they are the only gamebooks written by 1 or both of you and Jamie that I can beat without a guide

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  9. I've just remembered a series of strange coincidences about books by you and Jamie. What do you think of them?

    The 1st time I completed Way of The Tiger Book 3 without cheating was on the 5th anniversary of the 1st time I beat Talismen of Death without cheating

    The 1st time I fairly beat Big Boy The Giant in Book 6 without cheating was on The 10th anniversary of when I first read A Fabled Lands Book

    The 1st time I beat Nagandel in Book 7 was on The 25th anniversary of when I first completed Sword of The Samurai without cheating

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    1. Get that lottery ticket, JM :-)

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    2. My parents get me at least 1 every week, get myself a scratch card most weeks and I personally buy a lottery ticket now and then, but so far I've never won more then £80 on The Lottery and £100 on a scratch card

      I'm also wondering what you think of me deciding that if I do fund it the only Fabled Lands Versions of Books by 1 or both of Jamie and you that I'd want are 1's that I can beat from memory with no guides?

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    3. Well, I calculate that if I bought a UK lottery ticket every week, I'd have to play (on average) for a million years before I nabbed the jackpot. But I'm sure that if you should pick the winning numbers then neither Jamie, I nor any other gamebook author would pass up the commission for a custom version of the books!

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    4. While we're on the subject, let me caution all readers of the blog that the people who run gambling are the ones who get rich out of it, not the punters. If you really want to see the mathematics (don't say I didn't warn you) there's a link below, but if you want me to distill it into English it adds up to: "Don't bet. Save your money."

      https://owlcation.com/stem/How-to-Calculate-Lottery-Probability

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  10. I've just remembered something I'd forgot to mention a fortnight back but I forgot. Sorry

    Last month me, 7 of my mates and 4 members of my family decide to vote voting over Skype as to whether we though you, Jamie or Paul were the better author. It was A Draw

    The result was 3 votes for you being the best, 3 votes for Jamie being the best, 3 votes for Paul being the best and 3 votes for you all being the best in your own unique way. What do you think?

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    1. Oh, Jamie won't concede. He'll whip up his supporters to refuse to believe the result. (You know, something like: "We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved." The usual fascist playbook; full transcript below.) But me, I'm more of a Biden; I accept the democratic process.

      https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/11/full-transcript-donald-trump-january-6-incendiary-speech

      However I will just point out that it is a truth universally acknowledged that the best of the FL books is The Court of Hidden Faces. Let the record show who wrote that.

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    2. The 3 people that that voted for Jamie told me that they voted for him because of how good The Way of The Tiger Series is and that them voting for him had nothing to do with The Fabled Lands

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    3. That's only 1.5 votes for Jamie, then, and 1.5 votes for Mark Smith :-)

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    4. Actually it was 3 for Jamie and the reason why is cos we were voting for whose the best of the to 3 and in our opinion Mark Smith is 4th

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    5. Ooops by mistake I put to 3 and not top 3. Sorry

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  11. I've got something to admit

    For a long time I liked Fighting Fantasy more then Fabled Lands, but over time the fact that books that came out in The 2nd and later editions of Fighting Fantasy not being as good as the originals slowly turned me towards Fabled Lands

    In the end what made Fabled Lands better then Fighting Fantasy was a combination of how poor, in my opinion, Night of The Necromancer, Port of Peril and Assassins of Allansia were and how great, in my opinion, Keep of The Liche Lord and The Serpents Kings Domain were

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  12. I've recently started a new character and he had a lot of luck with a investment. Here's what happened. What are your thoughts? and in case you are wondering I've memorised how and were to get The Codewords Almanac, Brush and Eldritch

    Invested 4,000 Shards in Marlock City

    The 1st roll was A 10+6 or 16, so it doubled, the 2nd roll was A 2+3 or 5, so it halved, rolls 3 was A 10+1 or 11, so it went up by +10%, roll 4 was A 5+6 or 11, so it went up by +10% and roll 5 was A 2+6 or 8, so it drops by -10%

    That means that the investments worth 4,356 Shards, which means that as of now I'm looking at A Profit of 356 Shards

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    1. Nearly a 10% return overall is pretty good, I'd say. It'd be interesting to know what kind of return you can get on average if you trade regularly.

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    2. I've since made 4 more rolls. Here's the overall results. What do you think now

      Like I said earlier I invested 4,000 Shards in Marlock City

      The 1st roll was A 10+6 or 16, so it doubled, the 2nd roll was A 2+3 or 5, so it halved, rolls 3 was A 10+1 or 11, so it went up by +10%, roll 4 was A 5+6 or 11, so it went up by +10%, roll 5 was A 2+6 or 8, so it drops by -10%, rolls 6 and 7 were both A 4+6 or 10, so it stays the same, roll 8 was A 6+2 or 8, so it drops by -10% and roll 9 was A 9+5 or 14, so it goes up by +50%

      That means that the investments worth 5,880 Shards, which means that as of now I'm looking at A Profit of 1,880 Shards, all in all very good

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