Making stuff up

Uh-oh, it’s happening again. The players are going off-piste. You thought they were going to zig but they zagged. They’ve got the bit between their teeth and on top of that they’ve got the wrong end of the stick – except that it’s only the wrong end according to your notes, because whatever the PCs do, that is the story.

And this is all good, because now you’re forced to improvise, and improvisation is the key to pulling down the lightning so that, instead of just lying inert on the slab, your scenario comes alive. Nobody knows what will happen now, including you. That’s what makes roleplaying fundamentally different – and often much more exciting – from traditional scripted media. It’s storytelling in retrospect, but right there in the moment, it’s life.

(If you want a good example of how real life is much more engrossing than most fiction -- in short, how it spawns better stories -- compare the documentary Beautiful Young Minds with the excruciatingly lame and formulaic fictional version of the same characters in the movie X+Y. With all its genre tropes, the latter resembles a preposterously proportioned toy breed of dog in comparison to the natural honesty of the real-life version.)

"[David Lynch] is not following some screenwriting template where the characters are going someplace, they arrive someplace, and then it closes. Storytelling doesn’t have to be that way at all, especially if you’re interested in delivering a different type of truth."  -- Oisin Fagan

But for improv to work its magic, you can’t just apply it as a sticker slapped on the chassis of the planned scenario. For example, the characters are going to a secluded mansion to interview an NPC with important information. Instead of going by road, as you expected, they park on the far side of the woods and walk to the mansion that way. OK, this is a great opportunity for improv. You can build atmosphere and threat. You could have them find something sinister in the woods. Maybe somebody has tried to burn something out in the woods? Something heavy was dragged this way? Is that a mound of freshly-dug earth? And what about this makeshift tent as if somebody has been living rough out here?

But whatever you do it will be more effective if it connects to the core events rather than simply being a closed side-loop for the characters to deal with that has no bearing on anything else. Whatever emerges from this improvised woodland trek should tie back to the adventure. Maybe the burned papers contain fragments that hint at the NPC's secrets. Maybe the drag marks lead to a shallow grave that changes everything the players thought they knew. The goal isn't to create a self-contained side quest that gets resolved and forgotten, but to deepen and complicate the main narrative thread. Use the woodlands sequence as an opportunity to extemporize from what you know is going on at the mansion.

Improvising is easy for the players. They just have to think in-character and do what their game alter egos would do, and events unfold automatically from there. "What is incident but the illustration of character?" as Henry James put it. For the referee (or GM if you must) it's harder. He or she is not reacting from within the world except when improvising an NPC's choices. When in authorial mode, the risk is that the referee will improvise something clichéd -- as all writers tend to do when under pressure, which is why we see the same story tropes over and over again in TV/movie drama. Here's a trick for avoiding that. Whatever you first think of, put that idea aside and improvise something else. I ran a whole Krarth campaign that way and avoided all my bad habits. It was like somebody else was running the game, and the results were as surprising to me as to my players.

In this episode of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, the chaps describe an example of ‘extreme improv’. A player goes upstairs in the empty house and returns saying, ‘I found the missing woman’s diary and it explains everything she was up to in the days just before she vanished.’

Now, this sounds like a passive-aggressive way of telling the referee: ‘Too slow, bored now, get on with it.’ Obviously you can’t block by saying, ‘You didn’t find a diary,’ because that discourages improvisation. So how about: ‘The diary is interesting because it’s so uninteresting. The entries are all brief and pedestrian. Could she really have led such a boring life? Then you find an entry where she’s written something that’s been heavily crossed out. Holding it up to the light you can see she began writing, “At last! Exciting news from – ”. And she broke off there and scrawled out what she'd written.’

Now the players might realize: ‘She made a mistake writing that. So she must have had two diaries, one for show and one for secrets. We need to find the other one, where she recorded the important stuff.’

We could call this improv aikido, using the player's energy and redirecting it productively. The player’s improvisation is rewarded – it’s told them what they need to do – but you don’t have to drop the clever stuff you had planned for how they find it. Of course, if the player then says, ‘Yeah, I found the other diary too; it was in the same drawer,’ then she really is hating this game and you might as well play something else.

The best improvisation doesn't feel like improvisation at all. It feels as if the story was always meant to unfold this way, even though you and the PCs are making it up as you go. When you achieve that seamless integration of planning and spontaneity, you create something that no author or writers’ room could ever achieve – the plot that emerges out of contingency and character in a wonderful cascade of events that nobody could have predicted.

Bird's-eye view of the Vulcanverse

Following on from the flowchart for Fabled Lands book 8 that we looked at last time, here are the flowcharts for the Vulcanverse series. They're purposely zoomed-out to avoid spoilers, though you might glean some tantalizing clues from the close-up on one codeword in The Pillars of the Sky. The whole series is more than 6000 sections, but if you've got a hankering for an awfully big adventure then choose any of the books and dive on in.

Books that you explore

I'm not sure about the term "ergodic" literature. It's derived from ergon (= work) + hodos (= path) and supposedly refers to a book for which "nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text". But that's true of a lot of academic textbooks and some novels. I'd certainly have to exert nontrivial effort to make it through a Lee Child or Harlan Coben book. Ergodicity already had a meaning before it was appropriated for tricky books, and it doesn't help anyone if terms end up with multiple meanings (see also: confabulate) so, if we're looking for a fancy-sounding term for gamebooks and other lean-forward texts what about polyhodal?

Whatever term we use, "Lost in the Labyrinth" on the Beautiful Books website provides a very comprehensive guide to such books, from Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler to Edward Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone by way of Choose Your Own Adventure, Fabled Lands, and even Tristram Shandy. There are titles here I'd never heard of, presented in a form that's an exploration in itself. Set off (no need for a map) and see where the journey takes you.

In related news, Riccardo Scaringi, host of the podcast Il Gioco in Tavolo, has just released a book of interviews with such gaming stalwarts as Ken St. Andre, Sandy Petersen, Kenneth Hite, and Shane Hensley. I'm in there too. Narrative at the Crossroads is on sale now.

Also on the subject of gamebooks, Paul Gresty was writing the eighth Fabled Lands book, The Lone & Level Sands, but had to abandon it because of other commitments. That was a shame, The Serpent King's Domain being regarded as perhaps the best in the series, but the good news is that Paul handed over around 750 finished sections. By the standards of most books that's almost finished. We're now looking at bringing in writers to help complete it. The book should eventually round out around 900 sections and will hopefully be the basis of new add-on content for the Prime Games CRPG. To whet your interest, here's the flowchart.

Comicon in Bergamo

Last weekend I was at Comicon in Bergamo as a guest of the festival organizers and my Italian publisher, Edizioni Librarsi. Jamie Thomson and I joined in a panel discussion (pictured above) on AI, technology and gamebooks, chaired by Francesco Di Lazzaro, and we sat in on a talk on gamebook design by Marco Zamanni. 

Our colleague on the panel was Gianmario ("The Teacher") Marelli and our superpowered translator was Giulia Brugnetti. Jamie was more sanguine about AI learning to write well, while I and Gianmario think (because good writing is a multi-faceted skill that doesn't lend itself to reinforcement learning, or even particularly well to supervised learning) that it's better used for the grunt work of writing to free the author's time for the actual creative part. Think of yourself as the manager/writer and the AI as your assistant.

For his design lecture, Marco used the interesting example of a gamebook based on Italo Calvino's The Cloven Viscount, a magic realist fable in which a character is literally split into two selves by a cannonball. The choices could emphasize the polarization of attitudes, whether the player wants to be purely "good" or utterly "evil", though when you repress half of your nature it has the habit of surfacing catastrophically. Alternatively you might concentrate on unifying the two selves. Not that Marco was suggesting anybody should actually vandalize Calvino's story by turning it into a gamebook, you understand, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

While at the con I met up with Valentino Sergi, who headed the design team on Blood Sword 5e, and he's hopeful there will be news about a 5.5e version soon. We also got to talk to author Alex Calvi, who translated a couple of my books for Librarsi. We all agreed that nobody could replace Russ Nicholson but that Marco Sada would be a great artist for any future Fabled Lands books. Oh, and on the subject of FL, Jamie blurted out the news that he's begun work on Into the Underworld, the 12th book, so that was a bit of a scoop.

The cosplayers at the convention showed great stamina, walking around in some heavy-looking costumes in temperatures nudging 38°, and Jamie and I signed a lot of books. Flying by RyanAir was hell, given the heatwave and delays of up to three hours each way, but (as Stevenson should have said) it is better to arrive than to travel without hope.

Walking the Sacred Way

Players who have completed the Vulcanverse usually tell me that they made dozens of pages of notes on all the quests. That's not surprising considering there are over 6100 sections in the whole series; I reckon that counts as a true epic. In a CRPG you'd have a quest log that automatically updated as you played. The equivalent in Vulcanverse are the companions and mentors who will nudge you in the right direction based on the titles, items and codewords you've acquired.

The snag is that you might be focused on one quest when the companion decides to give you a clue about another. So then it's back to the notebook. And not everyone likes taking copious notes (me, for one) so I got to thinking that a Guide to the Vulcanverse might be a handy adjunct to the series.

But how to do it? In an app I could easily hide spoilers. It's not that hard in a Kindle book either, where every clue could have its own page so you only see as much as you want. Here's one way it might work -- and be warned there are spoilers ahead.

Your brother's story

A tragic, multi-book quest concerns the death of your brother and your subsequent hunt for vengeance. The quest is tracked by three codewords: Ostrich, Quibble and Quad. The first of those triggers the quest, and the last means you have successfully completed it. This quest is only open to worshippers of Ares.

A death on the road

In the deserts of Notus (The Hammer of the Sun), you cross paths with a stranger whose face is obscured by a cloth. Later, after his death, unwinding the cloth from his face, you discover to your horror that he was your own brother. As his jaw gapes open, you realize he did not speak because someone had cut out his tongue.

The codeword Ostrich tracks your guilt at your brother's death and your vow to find the person who mutilated him. You are now a grieving sibling on a quest for justice. There are multiple circumstances that reflect your trauma and your thirst for vengeance:

• The Seer's Advice (The Hammer of the Sun): When you speak to the seer Antiphantes, he questions your responsibility for the death, but advises that before answering that, you must "find the one who cut out your brother’s tongue".
• The Furies (The Houses of the Dead): If you venture into the abyssal prisons of Tartarus where the Furies (the winged goddesses of retribution) nest and punish the wicked, the game checks if you possess Ostrich but do not yet have Quad. Since you are carrying the burden of guilt, this alters your encounter with them.
• Counseling the Dead (Workshop of the Gods): You can speak with the weary authority of someone who intimately knows grief and suffering. It grants you a bonus to your CHARM roll when trying to convince a despairing shade to cross over rather than fade into nothingness.
• Homecoming (Workshop of the Gods): The Ostrich codeword is checked when you return home (if you began your adventures in Book 5, in which case you'll have the codeword Reverie). Your sisters mournfully break the news that your brother was found dead by the roadside, mistakenly believing that "robbers stabbed him through the heart".

The hunt for the mutilator

In the realm of Boreas (The Pillars of the Sky) you encounter two men holding an amulet that belonged to your brother. When you threaten them, one of them breaks and confesses that he was given the amulet by a Halizon named Belus, a man with a purple tattoo of a crow's beak across his face. This news awards you the codeword Quibble. You have identified the man who mutilated your brother and you now have a specific target to hunt down in the Borean mountains. 

Having the codeword Quibble opens up specific avenues of investigation in the Halizon stronghold. For example, it allows you to make discreet enquiries about the crow-tattooed Halizon, leading a loquacious slave to inform you that the vicious Belus hangs out at the Inn of Prokoptas.

Vengeance is yours

When you finally confront Belus, he reveals a bitter truth: your brother was actually a highwayman who robbed travellers alongside him on the western road. Belus cut out his tongue so he wouldn't reveal the magic password to a hidden door where they stashed their loot. In a fight to the death, you cut Belus down and leave him choking on his own blood. Upon his death, you gain the codeword Quad. Your quest is complete and your brother's soul can rest easy.

The codeword Quad acts primarily as a resolution filter to turn off the ongoing vengeance-based encounters:

• Bypassing the Furies: As noted above, encounters like the Furies in The Houses of the Dead explicitly check if you have Ostrich and do not have Quad. Having Quad signifies your guilt has been expiated, meaning the Furies no longer pursue you.
• Family Reunion (Workshop of the Gods): As mentioned before, if you return to your childhood home in Vulcan City your sisters mournfully break the news to you that your brother was found murdered in Notus with his tongue cut out. If you possess the codeword Quad you can comfort your family with the knowledge that you have already tracked down Belus and exacted retribution.

You can see how a full guide to all the quests, NPCs, and items could easily fill a book. I should have written it at the same time as Jamie and I were working on the books. (Hindsight is a wonderful thing.) On the other hand, I now have NotebookLM, which makes sorting through all the references a lot easier and a lot more fun than it used to be with a simple Word search.

This is a good time to own up to a few errata from the Vulcanverse books namely:

The Houses of the Dead 182 should have the two initial codeword filters the other way round, ie:

• "If you have the codeword Negate ► 656 immediately. If not, read on. If you have the codeword Newhouse or Nimbus ► 343 immediately. If not, read on."

The Houses of the Dead 629 should begin as follows:

• If you have the codeword Nought or Nervous or Nefarious ► 587 immediately. If not, read on.

The Hammer of the Sun 474 should include this line, which should be deleted from section 6:

• Note the knotted rope on your list of possessions.

Thanks to the anonymous reader who spotted those. A much bigger howler is in Workshop of the Gods, where one of the endings couldn't be reached. Teófilo Hurtado, who has surely walked the Sacred Way many times, pointed out the problem. It requires a slight amendment to Workshop of the Gods 973, the options for which should read:

Make a STRENGTH roll at difficulty 16 to endure her punishing onslaught.

Success  ► 458 if you have the codeword Rhombus, and ► 1531 if not.

Failure  ► 385

Get a complete list of Vulcanverse errata here.

The babelfish option

If a week is a long time in politics then ten years must be akin to the lifetime of the solar system. That's how long ago that a slight majority of British voters opted for the UK to leave the European Union. The polling today shows a roughly 60/30 split reckoning it was the wrong decision. Oops. I wonder if that's because Britain is poorer, or because there's an obvious threat from Putin and no help to be had from the mad cadre of posturing jocks now in power in Washington?

Oh well, no sense in crying over spilt milk. We can still get a kind of twisted fun out of the situation. What could be more British than laughing like a drain while circling the drain? And now our (well, my) fellow Europeans in France, Germany and Poland can get in on the act, as I'm releasing app versions of my gamebook Can You Brexit? to mark the 10th anniversary of the referendum.

(Apologies to the many EU countries I haven't done translations for, but even with the turbocharging of Claude Code I only have so much time. Still, as the game runs in a browser anyone can play it in their native language just by enabling Google Translate.)

Brexit: Können Sie Großbritannien zusammenhalten? is the German version:

Sie sind Premierminister des Vereinigten Königreichs, und der Brexit läuft. Ihnen bleiben exakt zwei Jahre, um eine über vier Jahrzehnte gewachsene Allianz rückabzuwickeln. Und das ist noch die einfachste Aufgabe. Ihr Kabinett gilt als schwer steuerbar, Ihre Partei befindet sich in fortgeschrittener Selbstzerlegung, und das Land ist in dieser Frage weiterhin zuverlässig gespalten.

Schaffen Sie es, durchzuhalten und Großbritannien sicher in den Hafen zu manövrieren? Neue Handelsabkommen rund um den Globus abzuschließen? Die heimische Wählerschaft zufriedenzustellen und zugleich das Wohlwollen Ihrer ehemaligen EU-Partner nicht vollständig zu verspielen? Die Wirtschaft davon abzuhalten, sich eigenständig in Richtung Abgrund zu bewegen? Und nebenbei jene Parlamentskollegen im Blick zu behalten, deren politische Loyalität erfahrungsgemäß keine feste Größe ist?

Ein Spielbuch, in dem Sie sämtliche Entscheidungen treffen. Was sollte da schon schiefgehen?

Brexit: saurez-vous sauver le Royaume-Uni? is the French version:

Vous êtes Premier ministre britannique et le Brexit est lancé. Vous disposez de deux petites années pour détricoter une alliance patiemment construite pendant quarante ans. Et ce n’est que le début du parcours d’obstacles. Votre gouvernement ressemble à une cour de récréation, votre parti se fracture un peu plus chaque jour, et le pays reste férocement divisé.

Saurez-vous tenir jusqu’au bout et ramener le Royaume-Uni à bon port ? Négocier des accords commerciaux aux quatre coins du globe ? Composer avec une opinion publique versatile tout en ménageant vos anciens partenaires européens ? Empêcher l’économie de partir en vrille ? Le tout en surveillant ces collègues parlementaires dont les couteaux affûtés brillent déjà dans la pénombre?

Un livre-jeu où vous décidez de tout. Franchement, qu’est-ce qui pourrait mal tourner?

Brexit: Czy wyprowadzisz Wielką Brytanię z UE bez katastrofy? is the Polish version.

Jesteś premierem Wielkiej Brytanii, a Brexit właśnie się rozpoczął. Masz zaledwie dwa lata, aby wynegocjować rozplątanie sojuszu budowanego przez ponad cztery dekady. A to dopiero początek pola minowego, które musisz przejść. Twój gabinet trudno utrzymać w ryzach, twoja partia rozpada się na kawałki, a kraj pozostaje głęboko podzielony w tej sprawie.

Czy zdołasz wytrwać i bezpiecznie doprowadzić Wielką Brytanię do portu? Wynegocjować nowe umowy handlowe na całym świecie? Pogodzić poparcie wyborców w kraju z życzliwością dawnych partnerów z Unii Europejskiej? Powstrzymać gospodarkę przed wpadnięciem w spiralę spadku? A przy tym pilnować tych kolegów z parlamentu, którzy tylko czekają z nożami w rękach, by wbić ci je w plecy?

To książka-gra, w której wszystkie decyzje należą do ciebie. Cóż może pójść nie tak?

If you spot mistakes in the translations or any bugs in the game, let me know. At least those are the kind of blunders we can fix.

A deep dive

'As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.'

That's an excerpt from Bleak House, and has nothing to do with this week's post except that it perfectly evokes a diluvial theme and it's an example of masterful writing. We'll get back to that.

A partially flooded world is the setting of Bellwater, a tabletop roleplaying game about salvage crews operating in an inland sea created by a cataclysmic deluge centuries earlier. The game focuses on themes of debt, breath, and the recovery of relics from drowned cathedrals. What makes Bellwater unique is that it was written by OpenAI Codex. Ethan Mollick, who created it as an experiment in current AI capabilities, says: 'The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements.' 

I agree. I really like the game concept and the vaguely Edwardian feel of the setting. Inspired by Simon Stålenhag's Things from the Flood, you think? Possibly, but quite obliquely and among many other sources that might well include (AI being well-read if nothing else) Charles Dickens, J.G. Ballard and Marcus Sedgwick. The Old Testament swiped from the Epic of Gilgamesh, after all, so under the sun there is no new thing.

Professor Mollick does go on to point out the flaws: 'If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone.'

There's a lot of stinkingly bad writing out there, both AI-created and by human authors. Some of the latter is very popular, so it can't be that readers disdain slop. The difference is that the AI is getting better month by month, whereas the humans who are writing execrably aren't even trying to improve their craft (or their grammar). No author should just tell AI "write a book", but it can be very useful in brainstorming concepts, researching obscure details, and maintaining a world bible. Podcaster Joanna Penn explains here all the ways that authors can use AI as a useful tool of the craft, and director Ash Koosha talks about how he's used AI in filmmaking here.

If you want to take a look at Bellwater, Prof Mollick has made it available to download and has been revealing some of his experiments with early access to Claude Mythos. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who actually tries playing a game of Bellwater. You may not feel that it is done well, but reflect on what Dr Johnson said and be surprised to find it done at all.

Immersive books on your phone

In The Story is a gamebook app for readers and authors. I usually prefer to read in print myself. I can navigate the text better than on a Kindle, but it does mean that every room in my house is lined with bookshelves and there are overspill boxes in the loft. Where gamebooks are concerned, though, there's a lot to be said for an app that keeps track of keywords and stats and that means you don't have to keep flipping back and forth through the pages. That's why Down Among the Dead Men is available in digital form on the Storm Weavers store and you can read my interactive version of Frankenstein in multiple languages.

If you're an author, it looks like you can assemble your gamebook in a browser and then publish on the ITS platform. And the technology gives you access to all sorts of gameplay features such as tracking the passage of time, which is very fiddly in print gamebooks, as players of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective will know. A new medium opens up new opportunities, so although it will be nice to see some classic gamebooks like Way of the Tiger on the In The Story platform, it's the all-new content I'm looking forward to.

Portal fantasy

In the first six seasons of Doctor Who (that's the First and Second Doctor episodes, if like me you had no notion at the time about TV seasons) the TARDIS control console was largely for show. Sometimes the Doctor claimed to have ended up where he intended, but he was either unable or unwilling (and probably both) to plonk his passengers back where they started. When Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright blundered aboard, they had no idea of how long it would take for them to get back to Shoreditch in 1963.

Now suppose that's you. You've stumbled into what looks like an old police telephone box to find it's bigger on the inside. The doors, decorated on this side with huge roundels, are already closing. In a few moments the TARDIS will be dematerializing and if you go with it you might never return home (this being the First or Second Doctor, remember). Your friends and family won't have any idea what happened to you. So... will you jump back out? Or will you stay on board?

It's a variant on one of two what-if questions I'm fond of posing to party guests. Here's another one for would-be time travellers courtesy of the artist John Vernon Lord, grandfather of Inigo Hartas: you can go back to any year in history and be present as an observer at any place in that year. All languages are intelligible to you and you cannot be seen or touched. (So you're a bit like Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros.) When would you pick?

If those have whet your curiosity, the Greater Good Science Centre at UC Berkeley has a whole bunch of questions like them. And here's another bit of Gedankenvergnügen while we're at it:

You may feel you'd rather just head down the pub, but if you want to join in please leave a comment.

And talking of waste...

It's been a very long time since I played in the world of Glorantha but, like Tekumel, it's another of roleplaying's famously detailed subcreations, and the way you present that so as to hook players is not by giving them the anthropology textbook or even the tourist's guide, but by immersing them in what it's like to live in that world.

The mistake there lies in telling, not showing. Bad writing is the cause of the rot in the case of much bigger IPs than Glorantha. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Marvel, for instance. Wokeness often gets blamed, but that's not the problem. Star Trek always espoused a liberal humanist ideology. The difference was that the writers used to know that if you want to embed ideas in a story, you have to explore those ideas through drama, not lecture the audience while trying to distract them with characters who talk like they're in a high school comedy. Author David R. Low explains all about that here.

A waste of a great concept

In 1975, Empire of the Petal Throne introduced roleplaying gamers to the world of Tekumel, a beautifully detailed fantasy setting that was the first of its kind to feature non-Caucasian characters in a society nothing like the usual Graeco-Roman or medieval world. In fact it was the first ever society of any kind to appear in a roleplaying game, D&D and its imitators up to that point being just "a medieval Wild West" whose society consisted of nothing but a shop to spend your loot in.

Tekumel’s creator, M.A.R. Barker, drew on inspiration from South-East Asia, the Middle East, China and Pre-Columbian civilizations without his world actually being like any of those cultures. The result was something very different from other RPGs – and from most American or European fantasy literature. What made Barker's creation so revolutionary in 1975 was its vision of entire civilizations that didn't look, think, or act like variations on medieval Europe. Barker’s greatest gift to the fantasy genre was showing us that other worlds could be genuinely other. That lesson feels more important now than ever. Paul Mason gives a taste of what I’m talking about here.

That’s not how Tekumel gamers (a small and dwindling group) usually get to approach the setting, though. For example, Bethorm is the name of one of many Tekumel-set RPGs that have appeared in the half-century since EPT. It’s also the Tsolyani word for a pocket dimension, apparently. But why do the Tsolyani have a word for "pocket dimension"? Why do they even have the concept? It can hardly be something an ordinary citizen would use in everyday life, after all.

Consider the real world. "Galaxy" was the Middle English word for the Milky Way. Nobody knew until the 1920s that we lived in one galaxy and that there are trillions of others. Nobody knew until the 1950s that the universe is billions of light-years across. We don't even now have single words for dark matter and dark energy, and they are observable (in the first case, anyway), so I'm stumped as to how even educated Tsolyani ended up coining a word for "pocket dimension".

One argument is that the Tekumel setting incudes “learning spheres” – find one, give it a twist, and you’re an instant expert in whatever was originally programmed into it. So if learning spheres are common, that means the technological know-how of yore need never have been lost. Tekumel would be like the world in Zelazny's Lord of Light, where most people think that gods and demons and magic are real, but the select few know that's all just a way of explaining science to the uneducated. And if you spoke to those select few they would know all about quantum theory, atoms, cybernetics, etc.

(There's actually a real-life equivalent of this, incidentally. When William Kamkwamba wanted to build a dynamo in his village in Malawi, he told the locals he needed to collect old bits of machinery "to do some magic" because he knew that's how they would interpret what he was doing.)

The trouble is, we’re told that learning spheres are used up when activated. And they were constructed at least 30,000 years before the present day. So I don’t think they’d be a significant factor in the education of the Tsolyani, certainly not to the extent of making the concept of pocket dimensions commonplace.

This opens up the question of how much magic is there in "real" Tekumel. I imagine a world where priests do a lot of rituals before and during a battle, and those rituals have a real effect on morale, and many soldiers will swear blind they saw miraculous things like lightning bolts, but in fact that's mostly in the mind. So this would be a low-fantasy world with no more magic than Westeros, not a pulp sci-fi setting with spells like phaser-blasts. I do realize this would be unpopular with Tekumel enthusiasts, but after all they are an endangered species. My Tekumel doesn't consist of characters discussing abstruse cosmic concepts like bethorms.

What would Tekumel look like if it were contemporary SF/fantasy rather than 1950s-influenced Planet Stories, a bit like the way Battlestar Galactica was rebooted? Most Tekumel fans seem to prefer the space opera version, a genre that was repopularized by Lucas in the '70s after all. They play games in which the rich culture of Tsolyanu, Livyanu and the other states is all but irrelevant. Instead player-characters gad about between bethorms encountering alien/human multidimensional politics and yammering about warp drive and gravity engines, while Barker's invented societies, so marvellously different from our modern world, are flattened into the same sci-fi mush you’ll see in a dozen fungible entertainment franchises. 

It makes no sense. Barker was a linguist and anthropologist and he describes wonderfully strange civilizations which he brings to life in minute detail. That's where Tekumel shines. He wasn't a scientist and his science fiction ideas are a dime a dozen. His SF is also typically mid-20th century Western in flavour, whereas the cultures he created don't resemble any historical setting, most especially not any Western one. Not that setting alone is enough to deliver a compelling story, especially not in an era of BookTok, celeb book clubs, and dopy romantasy sagas. You need characters you care about. But the setting is the environment they move in, and if it's off-the-peg then the situations are too. Lizzie and Mr Darcy's relationship means nothing outside the special context of Regency culture and socioeconomics. Jane Austen even starts the novel with an ironic statement about that.

If I were to reboot Tekumel, I’d throw out the “Doc” Smith space opera stuff and make it more about everyday life. Much less magic and much, much, much less whizzy technology. The Eyes wouldn’t have standard names; they’d be too rare for that. There wouldn’t be an internet of telepaths reliably sending messages across thousands of miles overnight. There’d be no thousand-year-old plans hatched in “pocket dimensions”, no routine encounters with robots and gadget-wielding aliens. I’d strip it all back to what really is unique and wonderful: the cultures that Barker created. As we look toward the future of fantasy gaming and fiction, his example reminds us of the beauty of diversity. The most memorable worlds aren't built on clever mechanics or exotic technologies. They're built on the patient work of imagining how people actually live, love, struggle, and die in societies radically different from our own. That's the kind of magic that never gets old.

If you want to get a head...

The first of the Fabled Lands Chapbooks series was Headcases, in which I referred jokingly to my predilection for flying head monsters. Well, I thought at the time it was a joke, but now I think I might have a serious problem. Two recent scenario books in the series, Oliver Johnson's It's Mostly Been Forgot and my own "The Honey Trap" (in Wizards of Tamor) both feature flying heads, and I just edited an old Questworld scenario by the two of us, One Night in Deliverance, and found that among the critters was an early form of the Dragon Warriors skullghast. (Though, to be fair, those Questworld skullghasts weren't quite just flying heads, they had a sort of ethereal body too.)

The only solution to my head obsession might be to go cold turkey -- or cold feet, rather. In my next scenario I'll try to include some disembodied lower extremities, and not a bonce in sight. I've been there before too, in this letter to the gentlemen of the Royal Mythological Society from Mirabilis: Year of Wonders -- but so far the heads are still way ahead in my oeuvre while the feet are trailing with that sole entry.

What will survive of us

If you're able to get into London over the next few weeks and you appreciate the works of John Whitbourn, one of the truly great writers of English fantasy and horror, you should check out his play He Was A Bugger But I Loved Him, renamed Labelled With Love (why?) as part of a double bill at the Old Red Lion Playhouse. Get your tickets here. There are no interdimensional pathways, no malicious fays, no macabre twists in reality -- but there's a deeper kind of fantasy in the mysteries of love and memory, and that's what's on display in the drama.

Theatre might be a new calling for Mr Whitbourn. He recently completed another play, The Hunt For Blunt, about Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Blunt turned out to be a Soviet spy, the so-called Fourth Man, and went to ground at Watts Gallery in Surrey when his cover was blown. That's where the play is set and where, with luck, it will be staged.

The early bird...

Alkonost have some very fine gamebook editions for French readers, as these gorgeous covers and interior maps show. And you can now pre-order books that will be officially released in October, and I'm told that pre-orders made now should be delivered as early as next month so you'll get them a full four months early. Do I need to say more?

Pit stop

In the library you find the first volume of How to Enter the Underworld. This book is the work of a man called Agrash the Explorer. You learn that the Underworld is the name for the shadowy realm of the creatures like the trau, and of demons and the dead – in short, Hell itself. It has many names: the Land of Roots, the Place of Direful Dreams, the Land Beyond the Dark Mirror, and suchlike. There are several ways in. There is rumoured to be a stairway to the underworld on the other side of the Peaks at the Edge of the World, far to the north. Sailors say you can sail into the underworld through the cave known as the Mouth of Harkun, north of Yarimura. The monks of Noboro monastery claim you can walk into the underworld from Akatsurai, simply by always heading in a north-easterly direction. Scholars of Dweomer claim an entrance lies at the very top of the peak on Starspike Island. Also, the tunnels of the trau are thought to lead inexorably downward into the Realm of Shadows. The end of the book refers to volume two in the series, entitled How to Get Out of the Underworld. You ask one of the archivists if this book is in the library, but he tells you it never got written. ‘Agrash the Explorer never came back to finish it.’

Can we still talk about spoilers for a book that’s been in the publishing equivalent of limbo for thirty years? Into the Underworld was to be the last book in the Fabled Lands series – or maybe the next-to-last, if the whispers about a thirteenth book could be believed.

Throughout the Fabled Lands series, there are plenty of ways for a doomed or daring adventurer to find their way into book 12. You might have had a character stranded there for years, so arguably book 12 is more of a priority than books 8-11, which would wrap up some quests from other books but are otherwise just expansion packs to extend the places you can journey to.

Here are those routes into the underworld. Look away now if you still have hopes of FL book 12 appearing eventually.

Book 2: Cities of Gold and Glory

You can be carried off to the underworld by the Trau:

Book 3: Over the Blood-Dark Sea

You could be lured to the underworld by succumbing to the mermaids’ song:

You might suffer some bad luck while failing to repel a pack of hellions: 

You might descend into a hole among the roots of a tree in the Bluewood on Braelak Isle:

Or climb down inside the hollow mountain on Starspike Island:

Or choose (perhaps unwisely) to dive down to a submerged city:

Book 4: The Plains of Howling Darkness

You can get to the underworld by sailing your ship into the treacherous cave known as the Mouth of Harkun:

Being sucked down by a gigantic whirlpool:

Being hauled into a tunnel by a hairy demon:

Boarding the silver barge at the celestial harbour:

Rapping on a stone slab in the side of a cliff if you aren’t sufficiently sanctified:

Book 6: Lords of the Rising Sun

If you take a misty road heading north-east from Noboro monastery you can walk into the underworld:

And another route is via a nexus of mysterious pathways that would make Einstein and Rosen tear up their maps:

Book 7: The Serpent King's Domain

It’s possible to get yourself teleported to the underworld by the capricious monkey god Shimae:

Fabled Lands Quests: The Castle of Lost Souls

Guided by a pair of enchanted boots, your character is led past the Haunted Hills and through a foul swamp known as the Sodden Blight, eventually descending under a vast ceiling of rock into the underworld. Here you must cross an immense, ashen plain illuminated by an unnatural orange light to reach your destination, the Castle of Lost Souls, fortress of the demon Slank. While navigating the underworld, there are specific environmental rules you must follow:

1. You must have a source of illumination such as a lantern to travel through the dark caverns
2. The oppressive nature of the realm means you must temporarily subtract 2 from your COMBAT score, although this penalty is negated once you actually step inside the Castle of Lost Souls

If you fail in your quest -- for instance, if the magic of your infernal boots fades before you can find Slank's castle -- you are given the option to remain in the underworld. If you have Book 12, you wander aimlessly across the ashen plain until you pass through a tunnel and see a "curious city" looming ahead. At this point, you turn to paragraph 689 of Into the Underworld -- the same place as the monkey god sent you in Book 7.

There's also a scene in The Plains of Howling Darkness (FL book 4) where you might get the opportunity to visit the halls of the death-god Nagil --and, even more importantly, the opportunity to leave again. That's presumably located somewhere in the underworld, though there's no obvious route directly into book 12.

What would the FL underworld be like? Perhaps taking a cue from Dante, I envisage it as existing on multiple levels, so your exploration would be more three-dimensional than in other regions of the Fabled Lands. Also, both Jamie and I have used underworlds in previous gamebooks: Sheol in Doomwalk, the fourth Blood Sword book, and Hades in The Houses of the Dead, the first in the Vulcanverse series. For Into the Underworld we'd have to tap a fresh vein of inspiration -- perhaps drawing on our Tekumel games, or going back to the Hippocrene springs that fed them such as Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft.

Up above the world so high

The Ghosts of the Magi, known colloquially as Pyid (= "the Five") are five small luminous bodies that hurtle through the night sky above Krarth. With a good eye they can be variously seen in other northern regions also, but it is above Krarth that they are brightest.

The peasants of Krarth believe them to be the spirits of the five greatest original magi, cast into the upper heavens by the Blasting of Spyte. The Five have specific astrological significance and are known by these names: Red Death, Blue Moon, Plague Star, Gift Star and White Light. The Krarthian peasants believe they will come into conjunction above Spyte in the year 1000 AS, whereupon the gates of that deathly city will be hurled open.

Astronomers of Khitai or the Ta'ashim lands, where the world is known to be round, could possibly map these moons' orbits and calculate any conjunction – though if such a thing has ever been attempted the results are not known.

The above is what any Dragon Warriors player would have learned from "The Lore of Legend" chapter in DW Book Six, way back in 1986. But as I worked on Jewelspider, my return-to-Legend RPG, I got to wondering: what is official Church teaching regarding the Ghosts of the Magi? 

It struck me that it’s not in the nature of religious thinking to say, “OK, there are these spirits of ancient sorcerers that are hurtling around under the vault of heaven soaking up ineffable secrets for their eventual return to Earth,” because that’s a scientist’s interpretation, like saying, “We accept the origin of these objects and will now try to work out what they are.”

But in fact the Church is likely to take a very different approach: “These things are evidently real. Therefore they must be part of God’s plan, and we can ignore what those heathens in Krarth believe.”

So then I got to thinking that if you put White Light to one side, that gives us four baleful entities – the Four Horsemen, obviously and handily. So then, with a little Wiki-level research, I found that official Church teaching until very recently is not that the Four Horsemen are agents of the Antichrist. Quite the reverse: they are God’s agents who will scour the world to usher in the Last Judgement. And the fifth one? White is associated with the Holy Spirit, so that’s rather a gift.

Hence we have the True Faith’s doctrine as to what those five cometary objects are. The Five (known as the Pentaphan) are regarded as angels who have been appointed to scour the earth at the End of Days, specifically as the Four Horsemen who presage the Apocalypse, and are commonly identified as Apsinthos (ie Wormwood, harbinger of War, replacing Red Death), Qaphsiel (Confusion and Sorrow, standing in for Blue Moon), Abaddon (Destruction, taking the place of Plague Star), Kushiel (Punishment, whom the Krarthians call Gift Star), and the last is thought because of its pure white light to stand for the Holy Spirit through the agency of the archangel Jophiel (Understanding and Judgement).