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.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 5

The Walls of Spyte is the last installment in Oliver Whawell's series of rules conversions from Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors rules. The stat blocks are available in PDF form here.

I had a lot less to do with the writing of the fifth book than the rest of the series. Oliver Johnson was supposed to write it, but ran out of time. Luckily Jamie Thomson was on hand to step in, but necessarily it was a rush job so he didn't have time to read the earlier Blood Sword books. I came in right at the end to tie up the last 40 sections or so.

Patreon backers can see how I'd have liked the series finale to pan out. Tambù's Blood Sword 5e campaign and rulebook drew on those notes, and I have a feeling so will Prime Games' forthcoming CRPG.

Various player-characters guest starred in the Blood Sword books, in a manner of speaking. This time it was the turn of Zaraqeb (Zara in the book) and Karunaz, who were played in my and Steve Foster's Empire of the Petal Throne campaign by Gail Baker and Paul Mason. The original PCs weren't a lot like their gamebook incarnations, incidentally. The real Zaraqeb wasn't a sorceress and wasn't that nasty; the real Karunaz was neither posh nor noble, though he was a much more interesting kind of hero because of that.