News flashes

A grab-bag of news today. First there's my interview with Riccardo Scaringi above, in which we talk about Vulcanverse, Lovecraft, Buffy, Rifkin's Festival, The Seventh Seal, Captain America: Civil War, robotics, post-scarcity, the simulation hypothesis, Whispers Beyond the Stars, and a few other matters.

(The "OK, boomer" moment: at 6m59s I say that Alex Dragan, the protagonist, could be male or female. What I should have said is they can be any gender. Consider me corrected.)

Other news: James Desborough's Stray Crows is currently on Kickstarter. This is a roleplaying game set in the Japan of the Sengoku and early Edo periods. Unlike most Japan-set RPGs, it isn't populated with 21st century Westerners cosplaying at being ronin and ninja. Mr Desborough believes in striving for authenticity, as do I. We may not be able to fully recreate the mindset of a 16th century samurai, but we can surely do better than James Clavell and Justin Marks, at least. Back Stray Crows now if you care at all about real roleplaying. I also think it's the most elegant and dramatic set of rules designed yet for such a setting, and the proof of that is in this sample combat.

One of my favourite podcasts is Fantastic Fights. Hieronymous (sic) J Doom's reviews of gamebooks are excellent and his insights into gamebook design are useful even to a forty-year veteran of the field like me. Mr (or maybe Doctor?) Doom mostly covers Fighting Fantasy books, which I'll confess aren't my cup of tea, but this month he's taken a look at Mark Smith's Coils of Hate. That was one of the books in the Virtual Reality series, my own titles from which have been resurrected as Critical IF, but Mark's Coils of Hate and Green Blood are hard to find in print these days.

Coils is a particularly tricky one, so here are some tips on how to survive it. Listening to HJD's very smart analysis of the book's problems was a bit triggering for me. I did make a half-hearted effort to get it into vaguely playable shape, given that some of the handwritten pages just ended with lines like: "Various options here, turn to ?" I was at my desk at 7am every day for a fortnight to devote a couple of pre-breakfast hours to trying to make sense of it while also facing a deadline for a book of my own. The published version of Coils of Hate was an appalling mess even so, and I'd rather have been hired as official editor and been given a month to fix it properly, but the publisher wasn't paying anything for that and they refused to wait, hence the botched version that still makes me want to hide in a storm cellar every time it's mentioned. Here's an account of my very minimal involvement in the book and how I'd have advised Mark to restructure it if there'd been more time.

What I do think is that Coils has some of the best writing, best characterization, and best worldbuilding you'll see in any gamebook even to this day. And Mark had the courage to tackle a serious issue -- not just intolerance, but the way that hatred and tribalism are auto-immune diseases of society that eventually harm not just the scapegoated target group but everybody else, even the haters. It's a long, long way from the old man in the tavern who tells you to collect five items so you can beat the evil guy who wants to take over the world.

Now that we're talking about Coils, there's something I ought to clear up. I sometimes get credited with being Mark's co-author, so just to be clear: I had no hand in the writing. I didn't even rewrite any of the sections I was given in hand-written form; I just typed them up and tried to figure out how to connect one to another when all I had to go on was "turn to ?" It's all Mark's work. The flashes of real genius are his. If only he'd written it as a novel instead of a gamebook! Luckily Stuart Lloyd has rescued the book, doing all the editing work I didn't have time for thirty years ago, and he has made his version available free on DriveThruRPG. Without him, Coils of Hate would probably have been forgotten. Stuart, you are a star.

In other news, the chapbook series from Fabled Lands Publishing now has over a dozen titles, as illustrated above, so if you suffer from the collecting bug those might be worth a look, either on Amazon or DriveThruRPG.

Lastly, a new Casket of Fays is always a treat, and the latest issue features the usual fine selection of articles including an in-depth look at Gully's Inn by Shaun Hately. It's a useful location for any medieval fantasy setting, whether or not you use the Dragon Warriors or Jewelspider rules. There's even a map. What are you waiting for?