Gamebook store

Thursday, 31 October 2024

Halloween treat, no trick

Forty years ago I wrote my first gamebook. I was a roleplayer and board gamer. I’d played the Fantasy Trip solo adventures, and even wrote a short solo dungeon for my friend Steve Foster (designer of Mortal Combat) when he had to spend a week in hospital, but I’d hardly noticed the growing kids’ gamebook craze until Ian Livingstone asked me to write a serialized solo adventure for White Dwarf. That was The Castle of Lost Souls.

It wasn’t long before almost everyone I knew was signing up to write a gamebook series. Joe Dever and Gary Chalk left Games Workshop to do Lone Wolf. Jamie Thomson too, teaming up with Mark Smith (who was another stalwart of our Tekumel campaign) to create Way of the Tiger and Falcon. You can see why Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (UK) might have felt a bit miffed. They’d started a trend and now half their workforce was deserting the ship to jump on the bandwagon – if that isn’t mixing metaphors.

I used to freelance for White Dwarf a lot in those days, but once Jamie quit the editorial chair I didn’t have as much reason to show up at the office. Then Steve Jackson asked me to come in to talk about a series of gamebooks that he wanted to publish. He and Ian were committed to doing more Fighting Fantasy for Puffin Books, so these would be Games Workshop’s own series.

Steve was always coming up with fascinating game mechanics. He told me about a little tactical combat system he’d thought of when stuck in a motel in the middle of America. You had a tactical diagram that showed which actions were permitted in a combat round. So from EVADE you could move to DEFEND, REST or NORMAL ATTACK. From DEFEND you could only move to EVADE or NORMAL ATTACK, and so on.

When the player’s action was compared with the opponent’s, that gave the number of hit points each combatant lost. ‘Do you think you could use this for a gamebook?’ Steve wondered.

I went away and did a little work on it. I can’t remember how I handled the NPC adversaries, but this was a 1980s gamebook so there wasn’t going to be any AI. Probably the NPCs just acted randomly each round, and that was cross-referenced with the player’s action to give the outcome for that round. That would eat up a lot of paragraphs if every encounter had its own set of action entries, so I imagine I had a few dozen entries for each of several types of monster. They could be customized by SPECIAL ATTACKS, which would vary depending on the monster.

‘Looks good,’ reckoned Steve, ‘but I’d like to see a sample. Fifty or sixty sections, say.’

I went home, sat down at my Olympia Traveller typewriter, and began: ‘Dusk in Wistren Wood…’ and launched into a solo adventure in a vampire’s mansion. When I showed it to Steve he liked it and proposed a contract for Vampire Crypt, as it was then called. When the contract came it had a clause preventing me from writing gamebooks for any other publishers. I’m glad I never signed it, as if I had then my writing career would have been over before it began. (You may have noticed that Games Workshop never did get around to publishing their own gamebook series.)

Still, I was left with the beginning of a gamebook. When I signed with Grafton Books a few months later to do the Golden Dragon series, those fifty sample sections let me get a head start on the tight deadlines. Of course I couldn’t use Steve Jackson’s clever rule system, but Golden Dragon needed something a lot simpler anyhow. And thus Crypt of the Vampire was born – or spawned, or sired, or whatever the appropriate term is for vamps.


(Yes, these are the original maps and notes. I'm that much of a hoarder.)

And here we are at the 40th anniversary. To mark it I dug out a reboot of the book that I wrote for Amazon a couple of years ago. They wanted apps for Alexa (for some reason they call them skills) so I turned Crypt of the Vampire into The Vampire’s Lair, a consciously old-school adventure in audio form. Rather than retain the dungeon fantasy flavour of the original, though, I leaned into the influences of those Universal and Hammer monster movies I loved as a kid, when horror was delicious shuddersome fun and before it became synonymous with serial killers, torture porn and (yawn) demonic possession.

The text I wrote for that is now on sale for Halloween in a slim paperback with Leo Hartas’s original illustrations reworked in full colour. (My generous Patreon backers get to read it for free -- just sayin'.) It was Leo’s first book too. I’d seen his portfolio when he came into the White Dwarf offices one day, and when my editor at Grafton, Angela Sheehan, asked me if there were any artists I wanted for the series Leo's name sprang to mind. And because of that I began a close and dear friendship, a friendship which also now forty years old. If it were a marriage that means Leo and I would be celebrating our ruby anniversary – a very suitable hue given the blood-sucking tastes of the sinister count.

10 comments:

  1. Dave and I made an unsuccessful attempt to convert Castle of Lost Souls into a computer game. A demo was produced but no contract ever signed. For those of you with a ZX Spectrum or emulator, there is a copy salvaged from a cassette tape a little while ago by some retro computing archivists:

    https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/27213/ZX-Spectrum/Castle_of_Lost_Souls

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    1. Retro gaming is the latest fad, too, so maybe there's a market for it yet, Steve!

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  2. Well, it's the antitheses of Vulcanverse, Dave, but I still greatly enjoyed it. My son has said he'll also read it, although it may take me longer prizing him off his gaming systems than me completing Vulcanverse! My Amazon review should be landing shortly. I knew 'Hammer Time' would come in useful for something!

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    1. I hadn't thought of it that way, Andy, but maybe I needed an antidote to world-shattering/-saving epic adventure! And thanks for the review. To quote Frank-N-Furter, I'm shivering with antici...pation.

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  3. Games Workshop DID finally publish some gamebooks, in about 2010 (of all times to get into the genre). They were patchy, with some good writing (Jonathan Green's effort is the best) and some terrible, average internal artwork, poor editing and hamstrung by a clear insistence on using Warhammer Fantasy Battle (the tabletop wargame) rules, which made combat dull and often impossible to win.
    They were only published for a short period of time and are therefore highly collectible.

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    1. So if I'd signed that contract and waited 26 years, I would eventually have got to release Crypt of the Vampire as a Warhammer gamebook... I dodged a stake there!

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  4. Messrs Smith and Thomson had a version of that sort of combat for the Grand Finale of Duel Master 2: Blood Valley. You chose from a variety of attacks like "Parry and riposte/ Dodge right, slash left/ Run away/ Charge", as did the opponent, and it resulted in bonuses or penalties as appropriate.

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    1. Is that like their combat system for Way of the Tiger? What I liked about Steve Jackson's idea was that your choices each round are affected by the manoeuvre you used the previous round. That added a narrative flow to the fight -- after you charge, you have to rest, and so on.

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    2. Not quite. With Way of the Tiger, you had punch/kick/throw, with throw doing no damage but making your next attack easier. Plus the option of INNER FORCE and the shouting giving double damage. And if you repeat moves you could get penalised.

      This was more like a complex paper scissors stone affair that applied modifiers.

      For instance, if I chose to parry and riposte while you ran away, you'd get away clean, but if I chose CHARGE! I'd get you. But if I chose CHARGE and you chose sidestep left, you'd put me off balance.

      Simple and elegant.

      Fury of Dracula had a system where you chose "chits" to select what you did, Paper Scissors Stone style, but you couldn't choose the same one twice in a row.

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    3. Jamie and I used to play 1st edition Fury of Dracula quite a bit, but Dual Master came out a year earlier so at least we know he wasn't ripping off FoD's combat system!

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