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.
Long-time Fabled Lands reader here. I grew up collecting the books and always felt they were ahead of their time: an open-world RPG in book form, with quests, inventory, choices, consequences, and a world that felt alive.
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to put this thought somewhere public in case it reaches the right people: AI-era technology may now be able to support the kind of living adventure-book experience Fabled Lands seemed to be reaching toward — persistent world-state, branching choices, quest tracking, maps, inventory/stats, consequences, and adaptive narrative, while still being grounded in a strong human-authored world bible.
I’m not claiming ownership of the idea or asking for anything back. I just think the original concept meant something to a lot of people, and it feels like modern technology may finally have caught up with part of what made it so special.
If someone closer to the Fabled Lands world, rights, lore, or community can carry that thought further, I’d love to see it happen. And if something like this ever does come to life, I’d be grateful just to know that it exists, because this series stayed with me for a long time.
Thank you to Dave Morris, Jamie Thomson, and everyone involved in creating a world that clearly meant something to more people than you may ever fully know.
— Simon Delaile
Thanks, Simon. Back in the last century, Jamie and I were working on a Fabled Lands MMO at Eidos. We wanted to have a "God AI" that would take note of the quests the player was on, and how far they were through, and throw in encounters and twists to fit with each player's backstory. And that was twenty years before AI could pass the Turing Test -- nowadays it could be a lot more sophisticated. Certainly the only way (short of hiring thousands of online GMs) to get MMOs to replicate even a fraction of the narrative responsiveness and custom storylines of a tabletop RPG is to have the game overseen by AI. If I were twenty years younger that's exactly what I'd be working on. Well, that or Von Neumann probes.
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