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You can play the Vulcanverse books in any order, going back and forth on multi-stranded quests just like in Fabled Lands, but The Hammer of the Sun is the big one. At 1706 sections it's like two FL books combined. The discount applies to the paperback edition, which you can get at one-third off the usual price (UK) or almost half-price (US) for this month only.
(You can also buy the paperbacks from Amazon in Spain, Germany, Italy, France, and Japan.)
And while we're on the subject of open-world gamebooks, here's some more good news. Martin Noutch, author of the superb Steam Highwayman books, is creating a new four-book series called Saga for Spidermind Games, who publish the hugely successful Legendary Kingdoms gamebooks. Saga is set in the days of the Vikings, is described by the author as "atmospheric, morally ambiguous, and written with a love of place", and if like me you're an enthusiast for all things Norse then you'll want to bookmark that right now.
(Image by Wombo Dream, which has nothing to do with The Hammer of the Sun but I've been playing with it this week and I liked the Ditko-ness of this one.)
Wow - I don't know how I managed to miss that you guys have written another open-world solo series, but that's excellent news.
ReplyDeleteI take it there are no digital editions? Not that I don't actually prefer paper, but I'm moving house in six weeks and don't trust Amazon not to take months to deliver something to Australia, so I'll have to wait until then for a physical delivery. Looking forward to it either way.
I'm not sure how we'd do digital editions. We could hyperlink all the numbers, but you'd still have to roll dice. When we tried that with the first FL book on Kindle there weren't many takers. I suppose the Vulcanverse company could turn the books into a text-based CRPG, but there are no plans for that at the moment. Sorry, for now you're stuck with the paper versions!
DeleteThanks Dave. Exciting times!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Martin.
DeleteHi Dave.
ReplyDeleteI've forced myself to signing up into blogger just to ask you a couple things about Vulcanverse. It seems it's either loved or hated so it's piqued my interest in the long term.
Anyways, I'm from Spain and, as you may know, we can only purchase the hard cover edition of the books across Europe. As you may also know, The Hammer of the Sun has a price tag of 70€ (off to 30€ from time to time). Why is this happening? The rest of the books are around 20€. I mean, I'm not buying the book for that amount of money (not even for 30€), so I feel I have to restrict myself from buying the others as well, which saddens me.
Also, why can't the rest of Europe have the paperback edition? Can't you give us this option for us? Not only it is cheaper but it can also be more convenient for some folks. I myself like to play even in the river or when I'm having my treatment in the hospital so paperback editions make my reading easier and more available. I wouldn't mind hardcover if Hammer was in line with the rest, regarding the price, but I'm not getting the series in different formats.
Also, buying them in the UK or USA Amazon stores is not an option since they have added shipping and custom fees recently (more than 15€ to the total sum) for some reason.
I don't know if paperback would bring more readers but at least I'd be one of them. So, why don't we have this option? I mean, I know these books are printed on demand as my recent purchases of the whole of Fable Lands or Bloodsword, so I'm wondering what's going on with Vulcanverse.
And that's it. Also, I'm reading Fabled Lands and it breaks my heart that there's not a Spanish version while there's an Italian or a recent French one. It's just wishful thinking. As a translator myself I know the cost of translating these huge operae but these things have always itched me. At least, I'm lucky I can understand English for Fabled, same for Bloodsword which I discovered recently and never saw a Spanish translation (except for the first one which was fantranslated, I think).
Anyways, that's it (for real this time).
Best regards
Hi Perruno -- thanks your interest. I didn't realize there was any problem buying the books in Europe. In fact I expected more of a problem with the hardcovers because they are printed in Britain and Brexit has complicated a lot of things.
DeleteDoesn't this link work for the paperbacks? Please let me know and I'll try and find out why:
https://www.amazon.es/dp/1909905070
The full series should be available in Spain here:
https://www.amazon.es/dp/B09F38R7RD
I would love to see Spanish translations, so if any Spanish publisher is reading this and wants to get in touch -- I'm right here eager to hear from you.
The link worked so I bought the four of them in paperback! Wow. I wonder why Amazon doesn't throw results of the paperback edition and there's not such option when you visit the page for the hardcover ones. You definitely should check on that as I'm figuring it's a general problem across Europe as I tried in Denmark, France and Italy and only the hardcover versions appear.
DeleteAnyways, thanks a lot!
I was hoping that Amazon's own search engine would link the two editions together, and the fact that it doesn't might be because Amazon want to deter people from buying the hardbacks (which they don't print). I'll try contacting their help desk to see if there's a way to do this.
DeleteI bet that's the case for the majority of interested readers.
DeleteAlso, I think that Hammer is the second book right? It's listed as the first one in Amazon so many people might be thinking there's not point investing in a book that expensive to start the adventure.
There's not really an order to the books, as you can start in any of them, and unlike Fabled Lands they don't increase in difficulty through the series. So ideally I wouldn't have numbered them at all. Probably I should have made Hammer shorter, though!
DeleteNo way! Loves me a good fat gamebook, tbh
ReplyDeleteLoving it so far. The only thing I don't like is an instant death I've come across and that's no cool in 2022. I treat them as never happened. Also, would be nice if when you are prompted with directions, they clearly said where they lead to.
ReplyDeleteFor the rest, I'm not having a problem at all except for the online character sheet tracker (provided in this blog) which is missing a lot of titles, and some codewords for The Houses of the Dead are repeated and some missing (from New Apollo to Nihilism).
Good job. Very engaging books so far!
There are very few permanent deaths in the Vulcanverse books (normally you get automatically resurrected) but we sometimes needed to block resurrection otherwise the story logic breaks. Those cases can occur when you are close to the end of a major quest thread and if you came back to life we'd need to reset too many things.
DeleteIf it were software then we could reset a whole bunch of logic switches in one go, but the consequence of doing these as print gamebooks that allow the player to permanently change the world is that there will be a few places where if they do something wrong there needs to be a hard reset. If we ever do CRPG versions we can build in save points to avoid that.
So if you ignored a permanent death you'll probably find that the logic of the book doesn't make sense from that point on. Still, it's the player's choice -- it's not up to me to tell you how you should play :-)
For those who haven't yet tried the VV books I should stress that there are only a handful of points where your character can be permanently killed and those are clearly at the climax of major plot threads. Nine times out of ten, if you die you get to come straight back to life, just like in modern mollycoddling RPGs, m'kay?
Unless this is a part of a quest I'm unaware of, I don't find a reason why the world shouldn't make sense anymore. I found that death by just exploring the overworld and two sections (literally) later I was dead. It happened in book 1.
DeleteI'm excited now, I need to find out what was that important in that area. Thanks for clarification.
Oh, wait -- I thought you were talking about one of my books (The Hammer of the Sun and The Pillars of the Sky). In those the permanent deaths are used to avoid "crash bugs", as I said. For example, you can reach a point where your city goes to war with another, and if the player is part of the invasion force and fails then they have to die permanently, otherwise I'd have needed to write a whole other set of global outcomes for if the enemy city ended up as top dog.
DeleteBut if it happened in book 1 that's on Jamie's watch, and I can't guarantee he had a good reason for including a permadeath. He's more old school about these things than I am -- I won't say lazy :-) So maybe you can just safely ignore any permanent deaths in his books.
As I said, it can be totally ignored and nothing in the world changed. Curiously enough, on a second visit, that section led to the beginning (stress on this word) of a major plot quest, so I wonder why hiding this behind permadeath. So yes, I think it's safe to say you can ignore at least one permadeath.
DeleteI started to visit the desert now. I'm amazed at how the books are a huge puzzle like old Sierra adventures. I feel I'm playing King's Quest, Gabriel Knight...discovering and unlocking new places and people to interact. Getting or forging items which let me traverse dungeons that were a death trap before. Everything is cleverly thought for now and the feeling of accomplishment is great.
As I think Fabled Lands would need the introduction of some advanced rules by the 8th book, I feel Vulcanverse is totally fine being more graphic adventure than rpg. Both sagas can satisfy different kind of gamebook readers.
Glad you're enjoying it. I really don't know why Jamie put that permadeath in, but if he sees these comments (I think he looks at the blog occasionally) then maybe he can enlighten us.
DeleteI think there are three permadeath links in The Hammer of the Sun (all on the big finale quest) and five or six in The Pillars of the Sky (almost all on the big sea battle sequence).
Everything comes to a head in book 5, which I'm planning now. This will bring back a lot of the codewords and titles earned in the other books, and unlike FL the story has an ending. I just have to get on and write it...
Sorry. Never seen a permadeath in Houses of the Death. Always resurrected and items stored in vault.
DeleteI think there are six ways to get permadeathed in The Houses of the Dead, but maybe Jamie always gave you enough warning to avoid them. Next time I see him I'll ask about that. Our aim was that most of the time death is just a slight setback, and you even get to stash your items in the vault between worlds so you can retrieve them. The only real penalty for dying is you usually acquire a scar, but those aren't always bad news.
Delete