A place of bones

In its third installment, the Vulcanverse gazetteer reaches Notus, the blisteringly hot realm of drifting dunes, shimmering oases, and ruined temples buried in the sand. Here and here you can read hints about how to survive and find the big quests.

Players have asked about the connection between the Vulcanverse gamebooks (an open world series in the tradition of Fabled Lands) and the Vulcan Forged MMO (an NFT-based world). Well, you don't need to know anything about one to enjoy the other. Seen from an online gamer's perspective, the gamebooks add background lore to the online setting. Ask a gamebook player and they'll likely tell you they haven't tried the online game; after all, there's continuing new content for the Fabled Lands CRPG to play first.

One of my personal favourite locations in The Hammer of the Sun (the book set in Notus) is the strange city of Ostopolis (depicted above). I could have set a whole gamebook there. In fact, seeing as The Hammer of the Sun is over 1700 sections long, the quests in and around Ostopolis probably do make up nearly the whole of one ordinary gamebook.

The city of the Spartoi is a brooding, half-ruined metropolis of black basalt rising from the white desert sand. Did living beings once walk those cracked streets, barter in the now dust-choked marketplace, and cheer their sportsmen in the arena that looms like a giant broken pot against the sky? Now it swarms with the fleshless grinning hordes of the Spartoi. The streets are wide avenues of cracked paving where sand sifts in endlessly shifting threads and lies banked in the gaping doorways. A skeletal dog stirs listlessly in the heat and gazes blankly as you pass.

Drop in for a visit, why don't you?

US: Vulcanverse on Amazon

UK: Vulcanverse

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