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.
I'm using the rules you gave years ago for converting A Fabled Lands Character into A Vulcanverse Character, Book 5 arrived today and I want to know what paragraph of Book 5 would you suggest I would start at when using A Vulcanverse Character that's A Converted Fabled Lands Character
ReplyDeleteGood question, JM. You could start at any of the gates; 333 for example. Though do bear in mind the caveat I mentioned in that rules conversion post:
Delete"The Vulcanverse books start out with your character's childhood in that world and there are callbacks later to your family, even encounters with family members. None of that will make sense if you're playing somebody who has dropped through from a different universe, so transporting a character across is entirely unsupported."
I do bear in mind what you said but I'm interpreting it in a unusual way
DeleteYou never actually said at 1 age he came to The World of Vulcanverse
Meaning he could have come as a very young child and his family could be his adopted family
The home in Book 5 the home of his adopted family
He was given the job of looking after the family because he was the most capable not because he was the oldest
Such interpretations are the reason why in my opinion The Vulcanverse Books are better then The Fabled Lands books
According to https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Quests, BG3 contains 147 quests.
ReplyDeleteAccording to https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Quests, BG1 contains 131 quests and BG2 87.
The sweeping scale of the Vulcanverse series might backfire on us. Maybe the reason we don't get many Amazon reviews is because most players haven't finished it yet.
DeleteI think your reviews observation is about right, Dave. I want to review Vulcanverse with a view to how the series gels as a whole as much as how good are the individual books, especially with your previous mention about yours and Jamie's narrative style and game design detail being so different in VV. I would hope that would be weeks rather than months, but then a lot of people may not have the free time that I have. It might be years before you reap the review benefit, albeit given the length of time Fabled Lands span, you seem to have more patience than most!
DeleteHaving told mates not to leave a review for my own book unless they've actually read it properly, to then see it plummet down the Amazon charts as it doesn't have the credibility to sell many copies, does rather feel like having shot myself in the foot. So I sympathise with your plight!
It's a quandary, Andy. One guy got in touch to say that if I sent him a PDF of Workshop of the Gods then he'd do a review. So now I see how lots of new gamebooks end up with literally thousands of 4- and 5-star reviews. Like you, I only want honest reviews, but these days those are hard to come by. It does mean that I really appreciate a review by somebody who has played all the books -- like this one by Joonseok Oh.
DeleteThanks for your inside on Tickboxes, Dave. I'll reference this post at some point when I finish my 'how-to' open world series... (What will get finished first?) I like tickboxes - particularly multiple ones with different effects - but I don't like it at all when they refer to another paragraph - although I've had to use that myself on occasion. Nor do I really like a purely logic passage - I want every passage to have a piece of story or world. It's not that a single logic query disrupts the flow for me, but a passage composed purely of logic definitely interrupts IMHO. Your Brexit book has some complex loops and one criticism I have is of the number of unintegrated logic query passages - but the experience of reading that is very different to open-world adventuring. I think there is a lot more possible yet than we have discovered with these.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, Martin. In the case of Can You Brexit I tended to separate the logic sections from the narrative sections because we originally expected that to be read by people who'd not encountered gamebooks before. But I carried it over into the first Vulcanverse book, where there was less justification.
DeleteSeveral people have said they don't like tickbox sections where you're only supposed to tick it if told to do so in the preceding section. (I originally developed that as the time-counter mechanism in Can You Brexit.) The alternative would be to use three times as many keywords -- easier if each book didn't have keywords starting with the same letter, but still necessitating a lot of checking on the reader's part. Swings and roundabouts.
Have you seen Ruth Ward-Lee's open world gamebook toolkit? It's very useful and I'd link to it here but she didn't get back to me when I asked about it. (Ruth, if you're reading this, let me know!)
Swings and roundabouts just isn't it! Steam Highwayman IV codewords are stacking up thick.
DeleteThanks for the heads up on that toolkit. Rings a very faint bell so I will go look.
Hi Dave! New Vulcanverse reader here! First, I just want to say a big thank you for writing these books. I've recently gotten into gamebooks again after a couple decades away from them. Over the past few months, I got through several Lone Wolf books and a couple Fighting Fantasy. They seemed a bit short and I wanted to try a more modern, involved experience. So I did some research on Google and was amazed to discover there is such a thing as an open world gamebook. Your Vulcanverse books came up several times in my searches, so a few weeks ago I bought all 5 on a whim and I've been playing them for a couple hours almost every night. I started in Workshop of the Gods and now I've explored most of Notus and a bit of Hades. I love the freedom to wander around and go wherever I want, seeing what kind of trouble I can get into! The codeword system, tickboxes, it all works well together and feels very polished. I also like that you don't have to start over from the very beginning when you die. However, one thing that has been proving a bit tedious is managing all my items. I've died a couple times now and stashed all my items in the vault between worlds during the resurrection sequence. But I'm having a tough time figuring out how to get back to that vault to retrieve my items. I'm stuck at the moment because the items I need to continue making progress on the main quest in Notus are all in the vault. I've been wandering all over trying to find some hidden entrance to get back in there and rescue my items, but to no avail. I don't suppose you could be so kind as to provide a hint on where to find the entrance to the vault from the lands of the living? Just a gentle nudge in the right direction would be much appreciated. :-)
ReplyDeleteAfter all that flattery, how can I refuse? OK, it is a bit complicated. First you have to acquire Polymnia as your companion (just off the road in the extreme south-east of Notus) and then head to the low hills just south of the shrine to Tethys. The first time there you may not find the vault, but you'll get to tick a box thanks to something Polymnia tells you, and the next time you pass that way...
DeleteAh, so that's it! Thanks a lot, I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I think it's awesome that you make yourself accessible to your readers on here. I was looking a lot around the Notus / Hades border area, thinking that maybe a "vault between worlds" was located literally between the two realms... I guess there's probably a different way in from each book? Anyway, finding it will be my goal for this evening, and then it's onward & upward!
DeleteThe vault works a little differently in every realm. In both Hades and Boreas it's easy to find -- no need for a companion to point it out. In Arcadia you need a key to open it from the land of the living, and acquiring that key is an adventure in itself. The Notus way in is the trickiest, but once you've found it you don't need Polymnia with you every time. Good luck!
DeleteOh, and there's no vault in Vulcan City because there's a different kind of resurrection there. But you don't want any more spoilers, I bet ;-)
DeleteI found the vault in Notus and was quite happy to get my items back. :-) It's cool that locating the vault in each book is sort of a little mini-quest in its own right. Makes getting into it feel more satisfying than if there was an obvious entrance in some hub location, like at each of the gates to Vulcan City. I'm loathe to write in my beautiful books, so use digital note-taking on my iPhone to keep track of vault & inventory contents (as well as the rest of my adventure sheet). Which led me to introduce a house rule for myself: rather than having 4 separate vaults for each of the books, I treat it as 1 vault (it's a magical space after all!) that has 4 separate entrances. That way if I die in different books before collecting things, I won't have to backtrack through all of them to recover an item here, and an item there, etc. I can just make a beeline for the nearest entrance to wherever I re-spawn. Which for now will have to be in Notus, since that's the only entrance I've found so far. Looking forward to locating the others as well!
DeleteGood house rule. It's how I'd have preferred to have the vault work if we hadn't been stuck with the limitations of print as a medium. But if there's ever a CRPG version (I wish) then there'll just be one vault with an entrance in each of the first four realms.
DeleteOne of the reasons I like Vulcanverse is that it really pushes the limits of what you can do in print form. I figure there's a good reason that open world gamebook series are few & far between. They look incredibly difficult to write! I'm actually a software engineer in my day job, doing development for an online TCG. I was struck by how the Vulcanverse game mechanics seem like a paper version of computer memory & program logic (with tickboxes in place of "if / then / else" program code). I don't think it would be very difficult to write a game engine for the Vulcanverse books, perhaps coupled with an SQL database for keeping track of game state. Probably the biggest challenge would be figuring out how to digitize all the thousands of book sections along with their corresponding logic in a way that the game engine can parse. But once you have all that raw data encoded, I bet writing the code for the game engine itself would be straightforward. Ultimately I'd still prefer the printed books though. Having them digitized would take away some of the special magic of interacting with a physical book, which is a big part of the charm & pleasure of gamebooks for me. If I wanted to play a computer game, I'd just go for Baldur's Gate or something.
DeleteIn Hammer of the Sun I often broke out logic filters into their own numbered section (for instance section 11 in that book), rather than running them straight on from the accompanying prose, because I figure that makes the book easier to convert to code if anyone ever wants to make a digital version. But some readers complained that logic-only sections broke immersion for them, so in later books I switched back to a more traditional way of doing it.
DeleteI think the biggest innovation in these gamebooks is the Current Location feature, which lets me have quests which aren't location-specific. A good example of that are the love letters you can carry between Psyche and Eros. It's possible to meet Eros at several different locations, and you're then taken to the quest subroutine, then taken back to wherever you noted as your current location. I'm trying to squeeze all the performance I can out of ink on paper, but of course it would be a whole lot more straightforward in software.