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).

Light of the Kai rekindled

I'm accustomed to describing Vulcanverse or Blood Sword as "epic". Vulcanverse is as long as fifteen or sixteen Fighting Fantasy books. Blood Sword is equivalent to six or seven. But if you want a true gamebook epic, what about the thirty-two (and counting) volumes in the Lone Wolf saga?

Joe Dever left copious notes detailing how he planned to conclude the saga, and now his son, Ben Devere, and gamebook author Vincent Lazzari have teamed up to write that story. Light of the Kai is the first part of the Lone Wolf finale, the culmination of more than forty years of adventuring in the world of Magnamund.

Ben says: 

"We spent over two years piecing together Dad’s ideas, updating the mechanics, and staying true to his vision. It’s a real labour of love - and a way to say thanks to all the fans who’ve stuck with us. Expect familiar terrains, fresh challenges, and the same epic feel that made Lone Wolf so special."

Players can take a new character or play the part of Lone Wolf himself. (Or herself? I'm not sure if Lone Wolf's sex is ever given in the books...) The action takes the player into the forsaken north, where old foes stir and long-buried secrets await.

There will be a collector's edition, a standard hardback, and a limited number of signed copies. You can also order art prints by Gary Chalk. Yes, you read that right. Mr Chalk, the original and definitive illustrator of the Lone Wolf series, is returning to bring these final chapters of the story to life.

Find out all the details on the Magnamund site.

Seminar: "The AI Assisted Artisan Author"

The main reason I abhor terms like "AI slop" is that they are propaganda, not arguments. They are used as substitutes for thinking and reasoned debate. (It's the same mindset that coins slurs like "Crooked Hillary" and "Comrade Kamala"; "stochastic parrot" is another.) The fact is that some things generated by AI are slop but many are not - in physics, biochemistry, medicine, etc. Only a fool, given that the genie is out of the bottle, refuses to engage with it. Also there is, and always has been, plenty of slop that humans created for themselves without the help of AI. Just cast an eye over the bestseller lists.

AI art comes in for a lot of flak, not entirely unfairly. It's much more polished than anything I could draw. But it's only workmanlike; it's never great. The people who are quick to coin terms like "AI slop" have latched onto the claim that using AI art is putting human artists out of work. I can't speak for others, but if a project of mine has a budget then I want to work with human artists every time: Inigo Hartas on Jewelspider, Leo Hartas on Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, Mattia Simone on Vulcanverse, Russ Nicholson and Kevin Jenkins on Fabled Lands. I make sure they get paid even if (as often happens) I don't. No AI can do what they can do.

A lot of projects don't have budgets, though. Blog posts, for example. For a decade I'd have to trawl through mediocre public-domain images to find something to illustrate the week's piece. Now, in the absence of anything better, at least Gemini can whip up something passable. After spending an hour or two planning and writing a post, not having to waste half an hour scouring the internet for images is a godsend.

Most gamebook and RPG authors don't make any money. Their works are labours of love. After months of writing, when they were finally ready to publish, it used to be that their only option for illustrations was to find some out-of-copyright art. That could occasionally be just right -- who else but Gustave Doré could illustrate James Wallis's storytelling game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen? More often than not it was just the creator making the best of a bad job. They weren't putting a human artist out of a job, any more than you're paupering a plumber or carpenter when you do some DIY based on a YouTube instructional video, because there never was a job there in the first place. 

And incidentally there'd be no indie game scene at all if not for desktop publishing software and print on demand. Those came along more than twenty years ago. Do you see the streets lined with out-of-work typesetters and printers? No, and this technological revolution won't wreck anyone's career either.

So much for art. What about writing? AI is really not good at fiction. Its prose (learned from humans, of course) is ungainly. That would be hard to fix because elegant prose is not easily evaluated and so it would be hard to train a model to know the difference. It's not like coding or maths, where there's a clear difference between a right and wrong answer. (That's why, when teachers had to estimate their pupils' exam performance during the covid lockdown, there was much greater variance between the estimate and the eventual exam result for arts subjects than for sciences.)

Even if we could teach an AI to write beautifully, it couldn't (currently, anyway) write a good novel because it has no depth of insight -- though, again, that's true of many human authors. The telephone-directory-sized romantasy bestsellers stacked up in the bookstore window are not good novels, just popular ones. Lee Child's working method for writing the Jack Reacher books is effectively just what an LLM does, so there's no reason ChatGPT couldn't come up with a passable pastiche of one of those. But it's not going to rival Flaubert or Turgenev for a while yet. Owning a camera doesn't make you Da Vinci, after all.

I realize that in the 2020s there is no longer any possibility of convincing anybody that they might be wrong or even that somebody who disagrees with them isn't a knave, but maybe we can all still agree that it's better to be informed than not. That's why I'm recommending Joanna Penn's online seminars on ways to use AI to make you a better author. For the reasons given above, that doesn't mean prompting it with, "Write this novel for me." What Jo is covering includes the background tasks: deep research, brainstorming and ideas, outlining, structuring, plotting, and planning, characters and worldbuilding. For example, she explains how to use NotebookLM to maintain a world bible. (That would have saved months of wading through texts if it had been around when I was working on the Lyonesse RPG, for example.)

There are seminars on 16 and 23 May. I've taken Jo's seminars before -- even after 40+ years as a working author there's plenty I can still learn -- and they are worth every penny. Get your tickets here.

The Festival of the Shining Sun

Tekumel, because of the wealth of detail defining its laws, customs, mores and social structures, is immeasurably richer and more real a setting than any other I’ve played in. New players, used to more of a medieval Europe theme park environment, sometimes balk at its exotic names and ways of thinking: ‘How will I get my head around it all?’ Well, children don’t come pre-loaded with any culture either, and somehow they manage. In Tekumel gaming it’s why we usually start with a “fresh off the boat” set-up or a session zero in a location far from the main centres of civilization. With the Tekumel Sourcebook, The Eye of Allseeing Wonder, and Tirikelu you have everything you need to get started. Add Deeds of the Ever-Glorious and The Book of Ebon Bindings for extra spice.

Over the years my gaming friends and I have led whole parallel lives in the world of Tekumel. You’ll find its influence throughout ‘80s and ‘90s British gamebooks because the campaign roster included Jamie Thomson, Paul Mason, Mark Smith and Oliver Johnson. The Legion of the Sword of Doom in The Way of the Tiger? Look no further than Gruganu, Black Sword of Doom, the cohort of the god Ksarul, coupled with such Tsolyani regiment names as the Legion of Potent Destiny, the Legion of the Portals of Death, the Legion of the Night of Shadows, the Legion of the Storm of Fire, and the Legion of the Lord of Red Devastation.

When you have such a deep background, you can dive into a game with no preparation. The referee has to do almost nothing, in fact, as the player-characters drive the whole show. Players asked to sit out in another room continue to converse in-character. Adventures arise out of the goals the PCs set for themselves. Here’s a case in point. The characters were heading along the Sakbe from Bey Sű to to Sokatis. I had sketched a few notions that I could use as cues to the players for them to spin up into an evening’s events. For example:

Which led to the session of which this is the write-up:

As you arrived, preparations were being made for the Festival of the Shining Sun, dedicated to Hnalla’s second aspect. Chusun [Oliver Johnson] insisted on staying two days for the festival.

You took lodgings at the House of the Champion’s Rest, owned by Turuku of Mimore, an expat Salarvyani who obtained Tsolyani citizenship and is something of a local hero, having won a number of spectacular bouts in the arena until he retired five years ago.

Chusun visited the temple of Hnalla and made a lavish donation – his Excellent Ruby Eye with some 25 charges! This at least secured an audience with the Governor. You also spoke to the local police chief, Ssai hiMabran, a retired captain of the Legion of Hnalla. Chusun also gained admittance to an inner sanctum of the temple, where he saw the sun’s image focused on a pool of water and, disturbing it not by his breath, perceived sunspots that darkened the blazing disk.

Meanwhile, Tsamurel [Jamie Thomson] convinced Turuku to come out of retirement for one bout in the town’s quite impressive Hirilakte. The terms of the contest were to second injury. Tsamurel, to cover his bets, pawned the party’s Eye of Healing for 2000 Kaitars.

The festival began with an early morning contest. Young men of the town gather before sunrise to dive, swim the surging river, climb one of the tall swaying junkel trees on the far bank, swim back, and present an unbroken junkel nut to the Princess of the Sunrise, who by tradition is the prettiest local maiden. On this occasion the lucky girl was Eleara hiJefash, the Governor’s daughter.

Jangaiva [Mark Smith] and Tsamurel took part and was neck and neck with couple of local lads. Then Chusun noticed that one young fellow, Hogesh hiVurar of the Wooded Slope Clan, seemed to be cheating. Hogesh returned with some leaves stuffed inside a sheet (most contestants carried a sheet, net or sack) and swam into reeds where he previously hid a junkel nut the night before. When the deception was revealed, things looked bad for Hogesh and the crowd booed him, but Tsamurel (who was the legitimate winner) took the lad under his wing – in fact, went so far as to appoint him his second in the Hirilakte bout, which was scheduled for that evening.

There was a procession around the town, with Tsamurel riding as “Prince of the Sunrise” beside Lady Eleara, while Chusun chose instead to shave all his body hair and walk naked, beating himself with a whip and frightening the crowd with his enormous member, which seemed to become erect as he intensified his self-flagellation*.

Towards sunset, Chusun mastered his own Pedhetl, achieving momentary enlightenment into the inner mysteries of Hnalla’s second aspect**. He sat in the still-empty stands of the arena, and as people entered they took him for a holy man and gave him money and food in return for blessings.

Tsamurel and Turuku arrived, garbed as the champions of sunrise and sunset respectively. Tsamurel gave Hogesh the opportunity to address the crowd as his herald. Hogesh did so, putting just as much effort into singing his own praises as into bigging up Tsamurel, yet giving a stirring speech regardless that mollified the still-angry crowd. Only Chusun was not ready to forgive the young man for his attempt to cheat at the junkel nut contest – a naked, bald, seven-foot giant rose in the stands crying “Fraud!” and “False wretch, be silent!”

The duel began. Twice Tsamurel splintered Turuku’s mace, but each time stood back and called for a replacement before continuing the fight. Then Turuku scored a slight injury on Tsamurel. The bout was due to continue until either had taken two blows. As they fought on, Tsamurel’s mace broke and now Turuku called for another, joking to the crowd that they would soon have used up all the maces and might need to ask for a loan. Now Tsamurel wounded Turuku. It was all down to who would be injured next – and then, acting at precisely the same instant, both chose to attack and both blows drew blood.

A draw? The crowd could not allow it. Hastily conferring, Tsamurel and Turuku agreed to fight on until the next blow should decide the fray. After a furious exchange of attacks, parries and (on Tsamurel’s part) acrobatic dodges, Turuku’s mace struck home and Tsamurel’s legs buckled under him. He was back on his feet in seconds, both men bowing to the crowd. But Tsamurel was now 2000 Kaitars the poorer, and despite his 500 Kaitar share of the gate takings, has no way of redeeming the Eye of Healing from the temple.

In the evening, you heard rumours of a couple of burglaries that had occurred while everyone in town was watching the arena bout. This followed on from a spate of similar crimes that used to happen regularly years before, and were attributed to wandering woodfolk or puppeteers, but which had petered out in more recent times.

The next day, Chusun quizzed the Governor about the Black Ssu. The Governor's homeland turns out to have been the isles of Tsolei, and he told how the Black Ssu would raid the island to steal children who they bring up among them as "Non-Men" - humans who have been raised to serve the Ssu. He also mentioned what he knows of Hrugga, which is that Hrugga failed to give a gift to the demon brother Nurgashte because he couldn't afford anything of appropriate value after giving the scabbard of his fabled weapon, Kakara, to Bassa, king of the Black Ssu.

Meanwhile, Tsamurel met with Captain Ssai, offering to keep an ear open for news of the burglaries. On returning, he got into an argument with Turuku (the argument was all on Tsamurel’s side) when Turuku offered a gift of 500 Kaitars so that Tsamurel could redeem the Eye of Healing. Tsamurel, resenting the implication that he needed charity, tried to force Turuku into a rematch, but Turuku insisted he was now retired for good.

(In fact, the offer of 500 Kaitars would not have been enough. Tsamurel pawned the Eye for 2000 Kaitars and must pay back 2100 to redeem it, but only has 500 Kaitars – even if he’d taken the gift, that still leaves him 1100 Kaitars short. So you have probably lost both that and the Excellent Ruby Eye.)

* Hey, all I can say is that’s how Oliver chose to portray his character.

** There was a bit more background info that I gave in case any of the players wanted to delve into the religious aspects of the festival:

‘Hnalla’s Second Aspect is Chirashin Tulengkoi (literally "the Shining Sun") who gives his devotees surcease from care and freedom from grief or fear. He accepts only offerings of diamonds and other clear crystals. His priests and priestesses go nude except for necklaces, anklets, and bracelets made of ropes of crystals "hung about their persons, making each movement glitter and flash".

‘The most famous shrine of Hnalla's Second Aspect is in Jakalla. There, on his festival days, 9th Firasul and 4th Trantor, thousands of those whose lives have become sorrowful (the bereaved, crippled, those who have been shamed or paupered, etc) march in procession to his shrine. Miracles occur, souls are healed, and grieving hearts are filled again with joy on these days. [In the campaign it's currently around 22nd Drenggar, ie some 18 days to the 9th Firasul festival day.]

‘The "commonly known" or "outer" mystery of the Shining Sun's devotees, revealed to all lay followers such as yourself, is that the colours of the rainbow that a diamond makes from the pure white light of his disk are analogous to the things that make up all the rest of the universe. Each separate thing appears as having a single nature, but when all things are perceived at once, in their totality they are the light of the Shining Sun.

‘A deeper mystery is described by the priests as like gazing into a source of intense light. At first the light is dazzling, but gradually the eyes adjust and it is possible to make out some detail within the light source. In the same way, they say that those who receive initiation into the mystery cult of the Shining Sun can be taught to endure the light and will eventually have revealed to them the greatest mystery of all, which is to glimpse what is revealed within the source. Your own High Prelate of Hnalla in Bey Su, Chankosu hiMareda, is a special adherent of the Second Aspect and is rumoured to be an initiate to whom the mystery has been revealed.’