The Sage and the Enchanter: Dragon Warriors rules for Blood Sword characters

Next year is the 40th anniversary of Dragon Warriors, and two years after that the 40th anniversary of the first Blood Sword book. I don't know if that accounts for the upsurge in interest in how to combine the two, which began when Tambù used the Blood Sword gamebooks as the basis for a 5e campaign. Some players grumbled that the 5e ethic wasn't a good fit for Legend, but I have always thought that the Legend of the Blood Sword books is tonally different from Dragon Warriors. One is epic fantasy, the other regular low(ish) fantasy -- and the Legend of the Jewelspider RPG will be low fantasy nudging towards realism. And in any case, there's no reason why Blood Sword 5e should be the same style as Dragon Warriors, any more than the TV version of Fargo has to exactly follow the plot of the Coen Brothers' movie.

(I realize at this point that somebody will ask me when Blood Sword 5e will be published in English. Sorry, I don't know. I'm told it's on the way, and the Italian edition is a luxurious masterpiece worthy of Gucci so I'm hoping to hold the English version eventually.)

All this preamble is to say that today we have a special contribution by regular correspondent Stanley Barnes, who has converted the Sage and Enchanter from Blood Sword into DW character professions. Thus, with thanks to Stanley and without further ado, here are those conversions. If you do have a go at putting these characters into your Legend game, come back and tell us about it.

Here come the machines

Now this is interesting. The Last Screenwriter is a movie made from a script written by ChatGPT-4. I'd like to tell you more, but knee-jerk hysteria (or so we're told) meant that the planned screening in London was cancelled. Too bad, as the filmmakers explain on their website that it was made as a non-profit experiment.

I'm curious about the use of generative AI in writing, art, and other fields. I suspect it won't lead to mass unemployment but instead will be a useful tool that creatives will collaborate with to improve their work -- much as desktop publishing has led to an explosion in the number of books. Hmm, given the quality of books these days maybe that's not such a great example.

Some people gripe (well, scream) that AI is stealing from existing authors and artists. Mostly that's a misunderstanding of how the models are trained. Yes, they look at millions of images to learn the way a picture is put together. Contrary to the belief of the pitchfork-bearers heading up to the baron's castle, the generative AI models don't record each individual image and reproduce it. It's more like how human artists and writers learn their craft.

For example, when I was a kid I'd often notice that my favourite comic book artists were having their panels "borrowed" by less well-known artists. The character poses you'd see in British comics in the early '70s (strips such as The Steel Claw in Valiant) had appeared in US comic books a few months earlier. But even among those Marvel & DC artists there was cross-pollination. Barry Windsor Smith famously started out drawing Jack Kirby pastiches and later went Pre-Raphaelite. Dan Adkins was famous for lifting poses from other artists. Writers too: H.P. Lovecraft began by imitating the style of Lord Dunsany. Dunsany was influenced by the King James Bible. Robert Bloch started out copying Lovecraft, and so the cycle continued. 

In the comics I made at school I emulated the art styles of Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor Smith; when I wrote my early stories I was following patterns picked up from Robert E Howard, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, August Derleth, and others. This is how we've always learned -- and it's a much more targeted kind of swiping than the generative AI is doing. The AIs don't play favourites, which is why (now that you can no longer specify "in the style of" in the prompts) their art output tends to look like the soulless photorealistic fantasy paintings you see on DeviantArt.

I've talked before about using AI for artwork in gamebooks and RPGs. It's a good fallback for game designers who have no art budget. The snag is, people lose their shit when you so much as mention it. I've hired human artists whenever possible -- most recently Inigo Hartas for my Jewelspider roleplaying game. Of course you get a better result that way, but most independently published books don't even make enough to pay the author's phone bill. The option is often either AI art or no art -- or else public domain art like the William Harvey illustrations I used in the new print edition of Once Upon A Time In Arabia. Nobody was happy with those. (You can get a copy with Russ Nicholson's artwork on DriveThruRPG.)

In any case, I'd like to see The Last Screenwriter because this is the future and we may as well start getting to grips with it. Smashing the looms never works.

A magic moment

If your interest was piqued by news about my forthcoming Jewelspider RPG last time, there's more today. Much more, in fact. I've been working away at the magic system, and finally it's been unveiled to all those patient Patreon backers.

Jewelspider is set in the world of Legend (the same setting as Dragon Warriors) but it's more of a realistic take on Legend's medieval origins. This is the world as the people inhabiting it believe it to be. Magic is real, but it isn't a matter of careening fireballs and glitzy special FX. Typically a spell takes minutes, hours or even days to cast, but the outcome is much more significant than simple artillery.

The theory is that an evocative and flavourful magic system will mean that every spellcasting attempt is an adventure seed in its own right. To achieve that goal I'm eager for feedback from the Patreon backers (that wisdom of crowds thing) and after that I'll be releasing the game, first as a PDF and then in print form.

In brief, this is how the Jewelspider magic rules work:

The Nature of Magic

Magic in Jewelspider is a subtle art, often requiring tools and time to manifest. The core of the system lies in reality's reluctance to be altered by magic; overt magical effects are challenging to achieve.

Spellcasting Mechanics

Mastery Levels: To cast a spell, characters must possess mastery in the relevant type of sorcery.

Skill Use: Most spells are cast using Reasoning, though some can be woven from artistic expressions using Artistry. 

Intrinsic Difficulty: Each spell has a difficulty level that must be met or exceeded for successful casting.

The Seven Magical Laws

Each of these modifies the difficulty of casting.

• Contagion: Using personal items like hair or nails can influence spell difficulty.
• Subtlety: Spells cast without witnesses are easier to achieve.
• Deferment: Delayed effects are simpler to integrate into reality.
• Proximity: Closer targets make for easier spellcasting.
• Impermanence: Temporary spells are easier than permanent ones.
• Invitation: Spells accepted by targets (even unwittingly) are more potent.
• Sympathy: Artistic mimetic components (e.g., a feather for a levitation spell) can enhance spell effectiveness.

Tools and Time

The effectiveness of a spell often depends on the tools used. Rings, Diagrams, Books, Apparatus, and Laboratories each provide varying bonuses and require different amounts of time to use, from instantaneous to several hours.

Success, Failure, and Partial Success

Success: If the casting effect equals or exceeds the difficulty, the spell works as intended.

Failure: No effect occurs, though mishaps are possible.

Partial Success: Unexpected, often uncontrolled effects occur, adding a layer of unpredictability and excitement to spellcasting.

Counterspells and Wards

Defensive measures like Wards and the innate ability to resist spells by other sorcerers add depth and strategy to magical duels and encounters.

If you want to dive into the full details and join the conversation, head over to my Patreon page. Your support helps bring Jewelspider to life, and you'll get exclusive content and a behind-the-scenes look at the development process. Or just join as a free member, which still gives you access to a whole lot of early posts and ensures you'll get updates about publication.

(The image at the top is from Robin of Sherwood. As if you couldn't tell.)

Stranger than fiction

For Legend games I’ve always liked taking a seed crystal of historical fact (or anecdote) and growing an adventure around that. When a friend of mine told me a story about Notker the Stammerer and a stolen relic, I had the basic set-up for “A Box of Old Bones” right then and there.

Real history offers plenty of inspirational snippets like that. How about these, taken from a review in The London Review of Books of Martyn Rady’s book The Habsburgs?

“Werner the Pious was the first fabricator in the family, forging a charter that confirmed him as the hereditary abbot of the local abbey (where the Emperor Karl’s heart rests today). But this was small potatoes compared to the heroic efforts of Rudolf the Founder, who had his scribes concoct five interlocking charters claiming that previous emperors had confirmed the Habsburgs as hereditary archdukes of Austria, bolstered by letters supposedly written by Julius Caesar and Nero.” 

“Cymburga, the Polish mother of Frederick III, renowned both for her beauty and for her ability to drive nails into planks with her bare fists; Frederick the Slothful, who travelled his realm with his own hen coops to save on buying eggs; the Habsburg knights who had to cut off their fashionable long toe-pieces when forced to fight the Swiss infantry on foot; Margaret of Parma, another illegitimate child of Charles V by a different serving wench, who grew and carefully trimmed a moustache to provide her with an air of authority when her father made her governor of the Low Countries.” 

“The slaughter of thirty thousand in the Lutheran stronghold of Magdeburg led to a new word being coined, ‘Magdeburgisierung’. Invaders bombarded cities with shells of poison gas, a fetching compound of arsenic and henbane. After the war, France and Germany signed the Strasburg Agreement of 1675, the first treaty to ban the use of chemical weapons.”

There are ideas for Legend there almost in whole cloth. But they’re trumped by another of Notker’s accounts which is pretty much a ready-to-run adventure:

“In one particularly bad crop year, a certain greedy bishop of Old Francia rejoiced that the people of his diocese were dying because he could sell the food from his storehouse to the survivors at exorbitant prices. Amidst this climate, a demon or spirit started haunting the workshop of a blacksmith, playing with the hammers and anvil by night, much like a poltergeist. The blacksmith attempted to protect his house and his family with the sign of the cross, but before he could, the demon [Notker describes it as ‘pilosus’, ie hairy] proposed an arrangement of mutual benefit: ‘My friend, if you do not stop me from playing in your workshop, bring your little pot here and you will find it full every day.’ The starving blacksmith, ‘fearing bodily deprivation more than the eternal damnation of the soul’, agreed to the demon’s proposition. The demon burgled the bishop’s storehouse repeatedly, filling the flask and leaving broken barrels to spill on the floor. 

“The bishop discovered the theft and concluded, based on the excessive waste, that it must be the work of a demon rather than a starving parishioner. So he protected the room with holy water and placed the sign of the cross on the barrels. The next morning, the guard of the bishop’s house found the demon trapped in the larder. It had entered during the night, but, because of the holy protections placed by the bishop, was unable to touch the stores nor exit again. Upon discovery, it assumed a human form. The guard subdued it and tied it up. It was brought to a public trial where it was publicly beaten (ad palam cesus). Between blows, it cried out: ‘Woe is me, woe is me, for I have lost my friend’s little pot!’ “

If we read that with a modern sceptical eye we can work out what had really happened, but the motif of the devil and the blacksmith is common in folklore, and the world of Legend is the Middle Ages as the people at the time believed it to be, not as it really was. That said, I doubt if any demon or goblin in my game would be quite so easy to deal with.

This is a repost of a piece on my Patreon page, proceeds for which will support the artwork (by Inigo Hartas; sneak peek at the top of this post) for the Jewelspider roleplaying game which is due for publication later this year.

The pivot of destiny

I came across this 120-player game of D&D on LinkedIn. Unfortunately the post was whisked away from me before I could note the name of the valorous GM, so apologies for not crediting him here. It reminded me of when my friends Nick Henfrey (co-founder of Flat Earths) and Steve Foster (creator of Mortal Combat) and I turned up at our university D&D society just after Freshers' Week. Dozens of new members had signed up, so we found ourselves crammed into a tiny room (five metres square at the most) with a couple of dozen eager first-timers.

"You can't run a game for a party this size," I pointed out to the GM as we all put down figurines in the traditional ten-foot-wide corridor.

"Course we can," he insisted, announcing that the two people at the front could just make out an ochre jelly or whatever it was.

We played on for half an hour, with most people there watching in bafflement as the experienced players leading the party rolled lots and lots of dice. It didn't look like many of these newbies would be coming back next weekend. Nick whispered in my ear. "Let's liven things up."

We were in the middle of the party, so we started blasting spells and swinging swords in both directions, slaughtering folks on both sides until the experienced D&D players waded back and killed us. Outside in the corridor, one of the first-year players whose characters we'd killed asked, "So what are we going to do now?" I didn't know then, but he was Mark Smith.

I opened the next door. It was another meeting room even smaller than the first, maybe four metres square this one, but it was empty. "Have you ever heard of Empire of the Petal Throne?" I said. And that's where we started a game with the core of a group who went on campaigning together for a long time to come -- decades in some cases. There were several who went on to careers far removed from games (and hi there, Les, Sheldon and Pauline, if you happen to see this) but most notable among them was Mike Polling (yes, the author of "The Key of Tirandor") a friend and creative mentor with whom I did much of my early writing. Mike and Mark had been at school with Jamie Thomson, and Mike soon introduced me to Oliver Johnson -- and so, directly or otherwise, that Sunday afternoon connected me to most of the RPG writers I'd be working with over the next forty-five years.

Maybe life is full of those "Turn Left" moments. I met my wife because of another, but although that's obviously of paramount importance to me personally there's no gaming dimension so I won't recount the story here. What about you? Are there people or games that have changed your whole life which would have gone entirely unnoticed if you'd made just one different choice?

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe

Traditionally the Fourth of July stands for the people standing up to rid themselves of incompetent and backward-looking government. The UK electorate will get the opportunity tomorrow to claim their own share of that. If you are reading this in Britain: vote for who you like just as long as you vote, try not to demonize people who have a different opinion from you*, and don't let me influence you. Well, beyond saying that the choice is pretty much summed up in this Brian Bilston poem.

And my thoughts too are with our neighbours across La Manche, also in the midst of a fraught election. The result there could have far greater consequences than the vote in Britain, given that one of the party leaders openly supports Putin over the EU. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion isn't even close.

* Unless they really are irredeemable, that is.

The sense of an ending

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god’s hammer. A red-bearded bruiser with a laugh like the sky splitting. A silver-tongued schemer who can’t help brewing mischief. Together, they fight giants. I was hooked right out of the gate.

Soon after that Doctor Who’s cliffhangers held a generation of children spellbound week after week. James Bond felt like he’d go on forever. (Funny, that.) And the British comic TV Century 21 wrapped all those now-classic Gerry Anderson puppet shows into one shared universe. It all fed the notion that stories don’t ever have to end.

"Give me a child until he is seven..." No truer word, only in my case it wasn’t the Jesuits, it was serial storytelling. And that's fine for kids, in the eternal summer they inhabit, but as we get older we realize the ending of a story is what gives it meaning and value.

What about roleplaying campaigns? In the old days, campaigns were as open-ended as a daytime soap. Campaigns like that can eventually reach a natural conclusion, which is perfect if all the players agree. More often they fizzle out for external reasons, which is rarely satisfying. Nowadays, when campaigns are often built around a high concept with a beginning, middle and end (like Tim Harford's brilliant Redemption campaign, or his equally inspired Earthsea-style saga The Conclave) or designed in seasons like a TV show (Camelot Eclipsed or Keeping the Peace) it's worth thinking about how you can bring them in to land.

Writing guru Rebecca Makkai has some great tips about this. It's a longish series, but worth studying.

• Part One is about open vs closed endings.
• Part Two is about endings that come about structurally. For example, in Redemption the campaign ended when we reconsecrated the abandoned chapel we'd been sent to find.
• Part Three is about meaning, the takeaway you get from the ending.
• Part Four is about the sound, style and tone of the ending. (To apply this one to roleplaying campaigns requires a bit more work.)
• Part Five deals with the change brought about at the end.
• Part Six concerns the way the ending shades into past, present or future.

And author Brandon McNulty has an excellent video essay on what distinguishes good endings from bad ones.

Silver linings

Eight years ago almost to the day, a referendum in the United Kingdom voted 52/48 to leave the European Union. Regular readers cannot fail to have noticed that I was one of the 48% (nowadays more like 63%). I didn't imagine I could know in advance whether the eventual outcome would be good or bad, but I do know that extreme perturbations to complex systems (like modern societies, for example) can have highly unpredictable results. Unless the current state of such a system is catastrophically bad to the point of imminent failure, it never makes sense to make revolutionary changes rather than gradual ones. There were indeed British communities where people figured their situation literally couldn't get any worse. I couldn't even start to get my head around such thinking until I watched this, given that median wealth in the UK is twenty times the median wealth globally, though I tried to keep my own preferences (some would call them prejudices) out of the way enough to ensure that Can You Brexit was an even-handed look at the pros and cons.

I strive for an open mind on all issues, so it's only right to admit now that it's not all been bad news since the referendum. Admittedly the UK is considerably poorer as a result of leaving the EU's single market -- unnecessarily so, too, as the Norway model was an oft-touted Brexit plan among the more moderate of the Leave campaigners. But there are upsides. Immigration into the UK has increased since the Brexit vote and, contrary to the beliefs of the ship-'em-to-Rwanda mob, those immigrants are integrating well into British life and bring valuable skills, energy and culture. New citizens are also now coming from a wider diversity of backgrounds rather than just Europe. So that is good news, albeit the opposite of what most of the people voting Leave actually wanted.

By the 2010s the UK had long been in need of a way to break the old political mold. The main parties stood for fossilized versions of the socioeconomic classes of a century ago, not today's class structure, but Britain's first-past-the-post voting system prevented any reconfiguration of the parties to fit modern UK society. The Brexit vote had the effect of radically shaking up what the main parties stand for. The electorate would have done better to switch to an instant-runoff voting system when they had the chance in 2011, but that became another of history's missed opportunities. (See also the US Presidential election of 2000.)

Also, Britain seems to be escaping the trend towards nationalist populism (indeed, let's just call it fascism) that's surging across Europe. The British Isles have always been stony ground for fascists, and the Britain First party (whose leader has publicly supported lynch mobs) are faring no better among voters than Oswald Mosley's lot used to. Meanwhile, although the slightly less toxic Reform Party has been climbing a bit in the polls, that rise is largely matched by the decline in the Conservative Party's fortunes. Between them, Britain First and Reform are effectively Britain's far-right Tea Party/MAGA movement, liable to get noisily vexed about any measure that's even halfway sensible, informed, decent or rational. The greatest shame about their electoral alliance is that it's sullying the good Whig name of Reform, but eventually their supporters will get absorbed back into the Tories where their reactionary stridency will be dulled to a general grumble of dissatisfied resentment at the modern world. The example of Poland shows what harm can be done to the mechanism of state once you let people like the PiS stick their finger on the scales, but that threat seems far greater in many EU countries (and across the Atlantic, sadly) than in the UK.

Europe needs to worry about defence, of course, and while I preferred the days when Churchill could sell the concept of the Declaration of Union, post-Brexit Britain at least didn't vacillate in supporting Ukraine against Putin's invasion. It might make more sense to have a truly united European front, especially if Ukraine falls and Putin starts hoovering up the former Soviet states, and given that the next US President (and maybe the next French government) might be more pro-Putin than pro-NATO, but there's little sign that the EU as a whole is more alert to that threat than Britain is.

In another eight years, will I say that the Leave vote was a good idea? Steady on there. I'd still prefer my Enlightenment dream, but that might be one to put alongside the Mars colonies and controlled fusion for everybody and the von Neumann probes equipped with strong AI. At this point I'll settle for a world with fewer despots and more equality, and if getting that means distracting populists with some shiny trinkets like Brexit then so it goes.

Buy Can You Brexit on Amazon

Play the free version

Cambridge Econometrics analysis of the effects of Brexit (PDF)

Post Factum analysis of the pros and cons of Brexit as of summer 2024

Growing up in the heart of the Vulcanverse

If you've seen any of the recent posts, you already know that Vulcanverse is a solo role-playing game set in an open world, meaning that you can play the gamebooks in any order, coming back to earlier books whenever you travel to the region they cover. Instead of a single storyline there are virtually unlimited adventures. 

Although it's nominally the fifth and last in the series, Workshop of the Gods is a good place to begin your adventures. You’ll have the advantage of having grown up in the city, so you’ll be familiar with the streets and landmarks, and also there are characters who will task you with quests right from the start. Not only that, they'll give you some hints to help you on your way.

Any one book in the series is enough to get started, as in Fabled Lands, and other books allow you to explore more of the Vulcanverse. You will keep the same adventuring persona throughout the books – starting out as a novice but gradually gaining in power, wealth, prestige and experience throughout the series.

OK, why don't we run through the rules and then you can try it for yourself by launching into the first part of the adventure...

ADVENTURE SHEET
Your Adventure Sheet lists everything you’ll need to keep track of while playing. There's an online Adventure Sheet you can use, but don’t fill it in yet. That will happen as you begin your adventure.

ATTRIBUTES
You have four attributes whose values typically range from −1 to +2 as you’re starting out. You will discover your attribute scores as you play. The attributes are:

• CHARM: Your understanding of people and their motives. 
• GRACE: How agile, supple and quick you are. 
• INGENUITY: Cunning and reasoning, and your ability to think on your feet. 
• STRENGTH:  Physical might and endurance.

The maximum possible innate score in an attribute is +5. If you are at maximum and are told to add to your score, it has no effect.

Items that augment attributes
There are items you can acquire that boost your attributes while you have them. These are:

You can only use the bonus from one such item at a time. So if you had a laurel wreath that gives CHARM +1 and a golden lyre that gives CHARM +2, you’d only get the CHARM bonus from the latter. Similarly, two laurel wreaths still only give you a +1. 

An item can augment your attribute score above the innate limit of +5. If you have a STRENGTH score of +5 and you possess an iron spear, your total STRENGTH bonus when making a roll counts as +7.

Making an attribute roll
Attribute rolls are made to see if you succeed at a task. These are rolls of two dice with a difficulty that you must equal or beat to succeed. For instance, you might be told: ‘Make a STRENGTH roll at difficulty 7’. You roll two dice, add your STRENGTH score (including the modifiers for any one possession that boosts STRENGTH) and to succeed you need to get 7 or more.

Example: You are at the bottom of a cliff. To climb it you need to make a GRACE roll at difficulty 5. You roll two dice and score 4. Your GRACE attribute is −1 but luckily you have winged sandals which give a +2 GRACE bonus, so your modified GRACE is +1, just enough to make the roll a success.

A roll of double 6 (‘boxcars’) is always a success regardless of difficulty. A roll of double 1 (‘snake eyes’) is always a failure regardless of modifiers.

WOUNDS
The Adventure Sheet has a box labelled Wound. This is unticked at the start of the adventure. From time to time you may be asked to put a tick in it. You only have one Wound tick at a time; if you’re asked to tick the box when it is already ticked, you don’t add another. While the Wound box is ticked you have injuries, and must deduct 1 from any attribute roll until the box is unticked. 

If you have an item such as tincture of healing that allows you to untick the Wound box, you cannot use it to avoid taking a wound, only to remove a wound after you have taken it. So if you do take a wound, apply any effects listed and when you turn to the next section you can then use the item to heal.

SCARS
You begin with no scars, but may acquire them from lasting injuries or from returning from the afterlife. Scars are a mixed blessing. Many people will shun you because of them, but others will admire or fear you more.

POSSESSIONS
Possessions are always marked in bold text, like this: iron spear. If you come across an item marked like this you can pick it up and add it to your list of possessions.

You can carry up to twenty possessions at a time. If you come across an item you want when already at your limit, you’ll have to discard something to make room. There are places in the Vulcanverse where you can leave possessions and come back for them later.

MONEY
You can carry any sum of money (measured in a coinage called pyr). You’ll discover as you play whether you have any money to start off with.

GLORY
Glory starts at 0 but will grow as you perform deeds that increase your renown. With high Glory you will be recognized as a hero and given more respect by those you meet.

CODEWORDS
There is a list of codewords at the back of each book. Sometimes you will be told you have acquired a codeword. When this happens, put a tick in the box next to that codeword. If you later lose the codeword, erase the tick.

TITLES
Titles record the achievements you have earned, marking you as the champion of a city, protector of a temple, admiral of a fleet, or even a monarch. You will be told when you acquire a title.

BLESSINGS
If you fail an attribute roll, you can use up a blessing to roll the dice again. You can only do that once per roll, so you cannot use a second blessing to get another reroll if the first one fails.

You can have up to three blessings at a time. You start the adventure with no blessings. Usually the place to get blessings is at a shrine or temple, but you may find other opportunities to acquire them.

COMPANION
As you travel the Vulcanverse, you will sometimes meet people who are willing to journey with you. You can have one companion at a time. When you pick up a new companion you must remove your current companion, if any, from the Companion box. You can also part company with a companion at any time just by deleting their name from the box. You do not have a companion at the start of the adventure. 

CURRENT LOCATION
You’ll use this box from time to time to keep track of where you are. You will be told when to use it. Whenever you are told to record an entry number in your Current Location box, first delete any number that was already there.

Want to try the intro sequence for yourself? It covers your childhood in Vulcan City, generating your character according to the life choices you make, so by the end of it you're ready to set out on your adventures. You can download that demo here.

Actions and consequences in an open world

When I mentioned on social media that Vulcanverse would be the first open-world gamebook series to be finished, somebody rightly pointed out that "finished" is a moot term when we're talking about open-world adventures. Fabled Lands, for example, is famously incomplete -- but all that actually means is that you can only explore about two-thirds of the areas shown on the map. If and when we ever type "The End" on Fabled Lands book 12, that wouldn't constitute an ending in the way a linear story ends. You can go round and round forever. That's what open worlds are all about.

Vulcanverse is different. Superficially it is like Fabled Lands, a sandbox for adventuring in, but that's deceptive. It's actually more like an open-world CRPG where you can take up quests in any order, but they feed into a central story thread that will lead you to a grand finale. Minor quests allow you to qualify for major quests, and some of those have payoffs that change the landscape of the game (literally) or win you allies who may rally to your side at the showdown with the Big Bad.

The last half of Workshop of the Gods (around 880 sections out of 1667 in total) is devoted to that endgame track, and once you complete it the game is over. You can bide your time entering the endgame, gathering everything and everyone you think you'll need, but once you're on it the structure is pretty linear. It's like a traditional gamebook from that point, sacrificing complete freedom of choice in favour of a dramatic conclusion.

I got to wondering how many quests are up for grabs in the whole five books. One clue might be in the codewords that we use to keep track of earlier decisions. For instance, if you begin your adventures in Book Five you start with the codeword Reverie. That remembers that you have a home and family in the city, and that you are familiar with the main landmarks. Titles such as Amazonian Queen or Tricked by a Water Nymph serve a similar function, the main difference being that you can see what the title records whereas the function of a codeword is usually not obvious immediately.

There are about two hundred codewords and seventy-odd titles across the five Vulcanverse books. As a quick yardstick, that might suggest around 250 quests (given that you might pick up more than one codeword on the bigger quests) but actually it's the tip of the iceberg. We only use codewords and titles when a player choice can have consequences anywhere in the Vulcanverse. All sorts of people you meet will react differently if you're the Amazonian Queen, for example.

But there are plenty of quests that don't have global repercussions, so to avoid having to check codeword lists too often we use a non-global logic filter: the tickbox. A tickbox is located "in the code". At the point that you arrive at a location, say, a tickbox could record whether this is your first visit (in which case you get the longer description) or a follow-up. Multiple codewords can be used to trigger different events each time you visit the location, as in the case of the tengu king's court in FL Book Six:

With a little extra tweaking, a tickbox can serve to filter a quest that is not yet complete, or that has just been completed, or that you completed a while ago. Here's an instance of that from Vulcanverse Book Four:

In this case, section 912 gives you the set-up conditions before the quest is dealt with and asks if you have what's needed to fulfil it. Usually you'll go away and come back later with what you need, though you might be lucky enough to have it already -- an item, a codeword, a companion, etc. If and when you do, 912 steers you to a section (or a whole subquest loop consisting of many sections) that if successful routes you back to 408 with the instruction to tick the box. At that point, you'll then go to section 1043 and be told the outcome and what reward you get. If you return to the Atlas tree later on, you'll see that the box is already ticked and so you'll go to section 1007, which tells you the new status quo that applies since you resolved the quest.

There are a lot more localized quests than globally significant ones, just like in a CRPG, so at a rough guess that means the whole Vulcanverse series comprises about six or seven hundred distinct quests. Some just earn you an item or a stat boost. Others unlock bigger quests. Each of the first four books features three major quests called labours, and when you've completed all twelve of those it unlocks the possibility to jump into the endgame in Book Five whenever you're ready.

I haven't seen a breakdown of the quest structure for something like The Witcher or Baldur's Gate, but I'm curious to know how the scope of those games measures up beside Vulcanverse. If you know the numbers, share them in the comments. And if you have a loved or loathed gamebook design feature -- maybe you can't stand writing in books, or you don't like logic gates -- let us know about that too.

Online Adventure Sheets

Tickbox and codeword spreadsheet for all 5 Vulcanverse books

Buy the Vulcanverse series on Amazon

How To Back Horses & Yourself

Friend of the blog Andy Fletcher will need no introduction to anyone who follows the comments around here. He can be relied on to contribute to any discussion with wit and wisdom, so it's no surprise that his book How To Back Horses & Yourself is a thoroughly enjoyable read that will half the time have you laughing out loud and the rest of the time scribbling notes to remind yourself of all the brilliant insights.

Andy has walked the walk, having had considerably more success picking winners than most bookies have had picking their ties. That said, personally I'd give good money to have a tiepin like the one on the cover, if only because it would please my granddad, who was a great one for the horses. He'd claim not to understand my maths homework and then he'd reel off the statistics for a series of races at a speed that would have left Red Rum in the dust.

Andy has kindly given permission for a little taster of the book. This is one of the appendices, so it doesn't convey the full value of the book's contents but it does show you that our man has the gift to entertain.

Omens and Auguries 

I read somewhere that every book requires a backstory. This is a somewhat self-indulgent one, where I drone on about how my love of fantasy adventure gamebooks and a children’s book series played a part in my book’s creation. So, if you’re only interested in horse racing, I suggest you leave now, no hard feelings. Please just remember to shut the door on the way out.

SLAM! I must admit, I wasn’t expecting that many to leave. Still, we’ve cut the wheat from the chaff so to speak. Quality not quantity as they say. It would seem like it’s just you and I left then dear reader. (Stop trying to write the afterword like Stephen King and get on with it you vile polyp, otherwise prepare for pain! - The Warlock). Gulp! Right you are, oh splendid one!

Blimey, his temper hasn’t improved much this last 40 years or so, has it? That is of course assuming you remember ‘Warlock’ magazine from the mid-1980s, and perhaps more specifically, Jamie Thomson’s ‘Omens and Auguries’ column, which I absolutely loved. (Right, you were warned, prepare to spend eternity dealing with auditors you putrid maggot! - The Warlock). No, anything but that oh mighty one! You’ll find this next bit really interesting I promise!

Phew, I think we’re ok for now. ‘Warlock’ magazine supplemented the ‘Fighting Fantasy’ adventure gamebooks that were so popular in that era. However, it was Jamie Thomson’s gamebooks that were my favourites. (What was that gamebook bilge called which Thomson and his old crony Mark Smith peddled back in the day? The Day of the Toga and Kestrel, that’s it! - The Warlock). Erm, I think you mean ‘The Way of the Tiger’ and ‘Falcon’, oh supreme one.

Being a fan of ‘Monkey’, Bruce Lee and ninja films, it was no surprise that ‘The Way of the Tiger’ were my favourite gamebooks. Undertaking the ‘Teeth of Tiger’ throw was certainly not advisable unless in the vicinity of a bouncy castle. Some of my GCSE artwork were ninjas ripped off from the books. When the artwork didn’t get graded, the school told me my work had vanished. The irony.

‘Golden Dragon’ by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson was another favourite series, though even the fabled WHSmith book ordering counter couldn’t find ‘Crypt of the Vampire’. I roamed across the Midlands for months trying to locate it. A few years later, I bartered my entire magazine collection with someone at school who owned a copy. (WHAT?! - The Warlock). Erm, except ‘Warlock’ of course your greatness.

On a nostalgic internet browse in 2011 many years later, I stumbled across a book called ‘The Dark Lord’ by Jamie Thomson. I wondered whether it could be the same Jamie Thomson, favourite author from childhood? It was, and I was pleasantly surprised when Dave Morris, author of the ‘Golden Dragon’ gamebooks, replied to a remark I’d made on a comments page about it.

Doubtless I wasn’t within the intended age readership range, but the Dark Lord book was brilliant. The humour a throw-back to the author’s ‘Warlock’ column. (Pah, that piffling Dark Lord is no match for me, I could destroy the pipsqueak with my eyes shut! - The Warlock). Oh, I totally agree your wonderfulness.

In 2012, my wife and I went on honeymoon to Sorrento and the only book I took with me was The Dark Lord sequel, ‘A Fiend in Need’. We encountered weather of biblical proportions. Having several gripes with the travel firm Thomson, I had a flash of inspiration to write a book, comprised of increasingly unreasonable complaint letters to them, working title ‘Dear Thomson’. It would be based upon real events, with the irony of only having the Dark Lord book to read. I made notes, but writing a book was too much like hard work.

A few years later, much to my delight, I had another comments conversation with Dave Morris, that led to me discovering he has a blog, ‘Fabled Lands’, which I have continued to read. I also rediscovered his excellent ‘Virtual Reality/Critical IF’ and ‘Bloodsword’ series. (Spare me your sycophantic gibbering about that lickspittle’s drivel! - The Warlock). Of course, brilliantness.

Years later, I mentioned ‘Dear Thomson’ on the Fabled Lands blog. After words of encouragement from Dave, an abridged version of ‘Dear Thomson’ felt the need to expunge itself from my system over the course of a few days, enabling me to sharpen the pencil as it were for the main event of ‘How to Back Horses’. I sent ‘Dear Thomson’ to Dave, who gave me some kind feedback and useful writing advice. I quite like ‘Dear Thomson’, so have left it here for prosperity.

See, that was a really interesting story wasn’t it your appendixness? (Not in the slightest. On the subject of Thomson, he’ll feel my wraith when I find out which rock he’s crawled under, and… hang on, what did you just call me, you snivelling little worm? - The Warlock). Gulp! Erm, just a slip of the tongue oh wonderous one. Anyway, you can’t just go around punishing people anymore, things have changed in the last 40 years! (Yes, I’d heard they’d banned smoking in most places, but we’ll see about that! - The Warlock).

ZZAP! SIZZLE! ‘ARRRGHHHHH!’

How To Back Horses & Yourself by Andy Fletcher is now on sale from Amazon, and for one week only you can get it at half price. Don't miss your chance to back a winner.

Snake charmer

Big news for Fabled Lands fans: Prime Games have released of the expansion pack for The Serpent King's Domain. Paul Gresty's expansive and ingeniously plotted adventure is now available for players of the FL CRPG. The new DLC includes 180 new items, 34 new achievements, a huge expansion to the explorable world, along with the following:

• 17 new quests
• 4 new titles 
• 48 new enemies
• 6 new music tracks

There's also new markets, new weapons, new rules (including heat penalties for heavy armour in the jungle), new kinds of blessing and much more. Don't take my word for it -- all the details are here.

Darkness visible -- at last

It turned into a real labour of Hercules -- sorry, Herakles -- but it was worth it because now I can say: the Vulcanverse series is complete! The fifth and final book, Workshop of the Gods, is finally available in either colour hardcover edition or in paperback. As the blurb puts it:

Vulcan City is a place of striking contrasts. A metropolis where marble palaces and gilded rooftops soar against the sky, whose walls and towers seem to approaching travellers like the flanks of mountains, where gold and jewels overflow the coffers of wily merchants, and where nobles in silk finery indulge in epicurean pleasures to rival the banquets of Olympus.

But it is also a place of teeming streets and plazas where cutthroats and spies hide themselves amid the crowds, where narrow alleyways can lead to stinking, maze-like warrens where the unwary visitor is soon as lost as in the deepest wood. In candlelit taverns you may overhear whispered secrets that can make a fortune or ruin a reputation. And here in the magnificent hub at the centre of the Vulcanverse, life is often as cheap as a trinket sold on a marketplace stall.

Meet up again with old friends and bitter enemies. Uncover long-buried secrets, hunt down thieves and murderers, wrestle with demons, cross swords with assassins, join criminal gangs – even come face to face with the spectre of your own death.

Visit the puppet shows where you’ll find hints about the fate of a universe. Seek counsel from the oracle who is privy to the insight of the gods – if you can afford it. Venture into the prison that holds the cleverest man alive, knowing that you must either befriend him or kill him. Lay claim if you can to a mansion brimming with treasures and traps. Rise in society, making alliances among the ruling factions. And attend the glittering party at Vulcan's palace, whose location is hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals, where you will set out on a perilous journey through space and time to reach the crucial, cataclysmic battle between light and darkness towards which all your choices have been leading.

This is the city where all possibilities meet, where destinies are made, where the fate of the Vulcanverse will finally be decided.

In the Vulcanverse series, as in Fabled Lands, you can begin in any region and travel freely back and forth between the books to pursue your quests. But there are significant differences from the earlier series. In Fabled Lands there's no central storyline, whereas in Vulcanverse most of the hundreds of quests feed into a plot that builds across all five books to an epic finale that occupies the second half of Workshop of the Gods. Your choices in the books have lasting consequences, altering the fate of nations and even the very landscape. You'll develop relationships with recurring characters, both friends and foes. And you will bear the scars as well as carry the glory of your exploits through all 6115 sections (more than fifteen Fighting Fantasy length gamebooks!) and three quarters of a million words. Did I say epic? It's longer than The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit combined.

And what is your ultimate goal through the series? As you'll soon discover, darkness casts a lengthening shadow over the Vulcanverse, threatening all who dwell in the five realms. Queen Nyx, with her dread sons Death and Sleep at her side, has unleashed a devastating war that will sweep away both gods and titans and leave her the unchallenged monarch of all creation. You must hone your skills, win over allies, and gather the weapons and clues that will make you into the Hero of the Age, the only mortal capable of opposing the Night Queen.

Although technically the fifth book, this is actually a good one to start your adventures in. That way you'll have a base in the city which is the hub for all the other regions. You can visit the Oracle in the temple district to get hints, and your family will introduce you to mentor characters who can help you figure out some of the major quests that you'll need to complete.

Jamie and I are keen to hear what people think of this series. So if open-world solo roleplaying is your thing, do pick up a volume or five, embark on some adventures, and tell us how you get on.

You can find a copy of the Adventure Sheet for the book here, and the books themselves (both hardcover and paperback editions) here.

O tempora! O mores!

It's been a long wait -- decades, he's been talking about it; since the last century -- but finally Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is nearly here. I hadn't realized how much he's modelled the story on the Catiline conspiracy, which resonated with me because six or seven years ago, having had a TV project blow up because of circumstances beyond my (or anyone's) control, I was told by the network executive who commissioned it that she felt I owed her a show.

Unable to return to the original concept, the rights in which Jamie and I were in the process of recovering from a delinquent former business partner, I started developing a couple of alternatives, one of which was this:

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Civilization is fragile, and finding that out can be a terrifying thing. When you discover that the laws that kept you and your loved ones safe are being burned down in a firestorm of hatred and hardline politics. When lawgivers are denounced as saboteurs, when fanatics seize power and whip up the mob with ranting and lies. When decency and compromise have fled and you can see the cracks spreading through society all around you…

Welcome to Rome in the 1st century BC.

The life of Cicero, from the Catiline conspiracy onwards, is an amazing, dramatic, twist-filled story of trust and betrayal, alliances and vendettas, triumphs and scandals, optimism and civilized values versus self-interest and the threat of political violence.

Look at that. The story should be fresh as today’s news, but those togas and laurel wreaths and mannered period speeches can make everything seem very far-off. Irrelevant. Safe.

So what we’re going to do is set the whole story in modern dress with modern dialogue. The events are the same. The people are the same – only they look and sound like modern politicians in present-day settings.

It’s a way to bring it all home, uncomfortably so, to make us really feel the gut-wrenching danger and turmoil of those times. It’s a technique we’ve seen applied to Shakespeare (think of Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus) but in this case we’re applying it to an original script based on real events.

We’ll stick to real Roman history whenever possible. This is supposed to be a modern I Claudius meets The West Wing, not a vaguely Roman-themed fantasy. That said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and (just like in I Claudius) we’re taking historical events as the basis for our drama, but we don’t have to be dictated to by them.

Cicero’s life gives us a story spine to connect all the major events in the collapse of the republic, but Mark Cicero is not the sole character. This is an ensemble drama (again, The West Wing springs to mind) that can pick up other characters and include flashbacks to earlier events. We also have the option to show earlier events (in the Social War that established the dictator Sulla, for example) in diegetic form, as newsreel footage for example. (Roughly: events of Luke Sulla’s early dictatorship will appear to take place in the mid-1970s, Serge Catiline’s execution in the 1990s, etc, with the main storyline appearing to happen right now.)

That was the basic idea. I played around with an opening scene just to get a feel. We might never have used the scene in the finished script; writing it was just part of my process. I liked the idea of a bunch of Romans talking in a sauna to start off with, so they’re wearing towels and for all the audience could tell it might be actual Ancient Rome, and it’s only at the end of the scene when the peppy business-suited assistant looks in that we see it’s all styled like modern-day.

The project never happened -- this time for reasons unconnected with deranged business associates, but simply because the show the network wanted was adventure sci-fi in a Doctor Who-meets-MCU mold, like the one we'd written before. Nowadays, after the triumph of Succession and with the possible last days of the US republic on the horizon, maybe it would be possible to go back in and repitch it. But I'm inclined to let Mr Coppola tell his version instead. He's done a few pretty good movies in his time, after all.

Counting the days

Workshop of the Gods, the concluding instalment of the Vulcanverse saga, is available for pre-order now in full-color hardcover.

6115 sections. 750,000 words. Hundreds of quests, locations, characters, items. An open-world epic with a central storyline that builds across all five books to a world-shattering conclusion.

(For comparison: the Fabled Lands CRPG has 9200 choices and 400,000 words. I'm not sure how many choices Vulcanverse has, but even if it averages only two options per section that's still well over 12,000 options.)

Both the hardcover and b&w paperback editions drop May 19. That's this Sunday. Just thought you'd want to know.

Pre-order links:

• Barnes & Noble
• Amazon US
• Blackwell's (UK)
• Amazon UK

A baker's dozen

There's very little new material released for Dragon Warriors these days, but I prefer to take a goblet-half-full approach, consoling myself with the thought that what is released is of top quality and written and drawn by the best creative team an old-school RPG designer could possibly wish for. Yes, I'm talking about Red Ruin Publishing, whose latest offering is Casket of Fays #13.

If the cover alone isn't enough to tempt you, look at the contents: a couple of adventures (one of them solo, one of them with orcs), rules FAQs, some very useful campfire magic for travellers, a two-part article adding some details to the light-level rules and how they interact with spells, and creatures both new and really old. And you get bonus campaign material about the port of Gatina on the Azure Coast.

What do you have to pay for such riches? This is where the goblet magically runneth over, for Red Ruin are giving it all away for free. (The madness rules are in DW book 5, you'll recall.) Go and clear out the treasure hall now on DriveThruRPG.

Next year is Dragon Warriors' fortieth anniversary. I'd like us to mark it with lots of new stuff -- Robert Dale's brilliant Brymstone campaign for starters. Here's hoping the stars will align.