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Friday, 1 August 2025

An old soul reborn

We'll have an in-depth report on this in a month or so in the form of a guest post by author Paul Gresty, but I couldn't let the summer pass without letting you know that The Castle of Lost Souls has been completely reworked as a Fabled Lands Quest.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that it was originally published in four parts in White Dwarf magazine from April to July 1984. I revised it for the Golden Dragon series the following year, but those changes were nothing beside the transformation that Mr Gresty has wrought. The book is now more than twice as big at 700 sections, the action takes place in Golnir in the Fabled Lands, and you have the option of dropping in and out of the adventure at several points.

To quote from the blurb, this edition of The Castle of Lost Souls sports "a huge amount of original content, including resurrection rules, the ability to travel back and forth between this book and others in the Fabled Lands series, a range of completely new magical items for the Fabled Lands setting, and much more." And that's without mentioning all the scrumptious Leo Hartas illustrations, which haven't been seen since the original 1980s edition.

4 comments:

  1. Do you think these could be included into the new Fabled Lands computer game?

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    1. Prime Games are currently talking to Paul Gresty about exactly that. Look for an announcement on the Fabled Lands page on Steam very soon.

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  2. Hello Dave! About the new "augmented sections", are they illustrated by new Leo Hartas illustrations ? Or "only" the old (and wonderful) previous illustrations ? We could dream about new pictures from Leo (as we could dream the same for the new Crypt of vampire) ?

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    1. Hi Gil -- I'm afraid there are no new Leo pictures there, much as we'd have loved to see some, but I'm hopeful that we haven't seen the last of his gamebook work. For one thing, if Fabled Lands book 8 ever gets finished we're going to need a colour map, and nobody does fantasy maps like Leo!

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