"Beauty Like A Tightened Bow" (a scenario set in Legend)

The characters are staying at the castle of Baron Albemarle. They needn’t necessarily be honoured guests; they might just be passing through, eating on the lower tables while Albemarle wines and dines some more exalted travellers. All that matters is that there is some visitor here whom Lord Albemarle wants to impress.

Albemarle’s court wizard is Olaudah, a Mungodan who typically dresses in feathers, war-paint and animal skull necklaces despite being a scholar raised the palace of his father, a prince of the Desert of Songs. Olaudah is considerably more cultured than most of the Elleslandic lords and knights around him, but he recognizes the degree to which strangeness can affright a foe, so hides his aristocratic refinement and instead plays the part of a ‘savage’.

After the meal, with night drawing in, the baron calls for Olaudah to read his guests’ palms, which he duly does, issuing them cryptic predictions in the form of riddles. Feeling that the guests are insufficiently impressed by his having a Mungodan sorcerer at his beck and call, Lord Albemarle then insists that Olaudah perform a trick he’s seen him do before, making two ancient servants imagine themselves to be young again. That’s easily achieved by hypnosis, the guests laugh at the old pair’s deluded antics, and Olaudah is hoping he can return to an alchemical experiment he has had to leave at a critical point.

No such luck. One of the visiting knights tosses an apple core into the hearth, belching to show he’s unimpressed. ‘I saw a wizard in Cantorbridge who made rain fall from the ceiling,’ he says to Albemarle.

(If one of the player-characters chooses to be obnoxious, so much the better. It will be more effective if this lesson in manners is not precipitated by an NPC. But don't force it. If your PCs are all well-mannered, the arrogant visiting knight will do.)

Olaudah gives them a self-deprecating smile. ‘My lords, the roofers of Cantorbridge are notorious for their shoddy workmanship.’

‘Oh well,’ says the arrogant knight, ‘there are true wizards and then there are mere conjurers.’

Olaudah’s eyes flash at that, though he retains his bland smile. Lord Albemarle, though, takes it as a personal challenge. ‘My man can do anything those Cantorbridge wizards can. Name anything. Come on, any miracle you like.’

One of the knights sits forward with a leer. ‘Let us see that peerless maid of Argos, whom all the world admires.’

Another nods. ‘The angry Emphidians pursued with ten years' war the rape of such a queen, whose beauty passes all comparison.’

‘Elena of Ilion, she is the one we speak of,’ says the arrogant knight who first spoke. ‘Have your… witchdoctor show us her face and form.’

Olaudah bends to whisper in Albemarle’s ear. The baron scowls, nodding grudgingly. He gives an irritated gesture to indicate that Olaudah should tell the guests what he’s just told him.

‘My lords,’ says Olaudah, ‘I could conjure the Princess Elena here, and you would see her beauty with your own eyes, but that the Church forbids necromancy.’

‘Oh,’ says the arrogant knight, leaning back in his chair with a disdainful grin. ‘Necromancy, I see. Of course. Otherwise you’d do it, obviously.’

Nettled, Olaudah snaps back: ‘I can do better than summon up the shade of a mortal beauty. What of the pagan goddesses? Not one, nor two, but three. Their heavenly beauty is as terrible as the sun at noon.’ He looks around, raising his voice. ‘If anyone is afraid to behold the faces of the comeliest of the immortals, leave the hall now.’

Lord Albemarle leans forward and takes his wizard’s arm. (No one else hears what passes between them, unless the characters use magic to eavesdrop.) ‘Is this wise?’ he whispers in Olaudah’s ear.

‘My lord, it will be but an illusion,’ Olaudah assures him under his breath. ‘But it will be vivid enough to quail the hearts and still the tongues of these yapping dogs.’

Olaudah makes the conjuration more dramatic with a deep, droning chant, a series of flamboyant gestures and lithely executed dance steps, and ends by throwing powder onto a burning brazier to release clouds of pungent yellow smoke.

Silence in the hall. After a moment the arrogant knight speaks up, though his voice sounds less assured now: ‘Is that it? I don’t see – ’

Three tall female figures, covered from head to foot in robes, are present. It seems as though they have been standing here all along, though no one had noticed them until now. Even concealed by the veils, their face and form are enough to excite both desire and fear in all the men. The goddesses glide forward gracefully, silk robes hinting at magnificent physiques, and speak in unison with voices that inspire both admiration and awe:

‘There can be only one to wear beauty’s crown. We three wait to hear the mortal’s verdict. Who will say which of us is fairest? Come to us and render judgement. We await you.’

In the same manner as their arrival, it is now clear the three are no longer here. All around the hall there are looks of ‘wild surmise’. The arrogant knight is shaken, but dissembles with loud derision: ‘Goddesses? Three wenches wrapped up head to toe like sacks of flour – not much of a trick, is it? One brat on another’s shoulders, throw a sheet over them, anyone could do…’

His voice trails off as he notices what everyone else has seen. The far wall is now open to the sky – and outside is no longer the gathering darkness but the bright light of day.

They file out, awestruck, to discover that though inside the room still seems to be the great hall of the castle, outside it’s a ship with lowered gangplank. The ship is moored at a rocky island that rises steeply from the jetty to a high peak where a temple of gleaming white stone can be seen. While the rest of the island consists of dry scrub and a few dusty trees sweltering under a merciless sun, the temple enjoys sparkling water from a spring and is surrounded by lush green foliage. All around the island, an ocean the colour of brass stretches to the horizon.

‘The sun,’ says one of the guests after a while. ‘It’s not moving!’ And indeed he is right. The sun is fixed here at the moment of noon.

They are approached by a youthful-seeming pair: Phalaena, a green-eyed dryad with hair that resembles lush reeds, and a capering satyr called Flute. The two are quite embarrassingly infatuated with each other, openly canoodling even while the characters are talking to them.

‘We are servants of the great queens above,’ they say, pointing to the temple. ‘One among you is to judge their beauty. As you go to meet them, decide who that will be.’

Somebody has to volunteer, and it’s clear that the arrogant knight is in no hurry to put himself forward. Ideally it’ll be one of the player-characters, though they don’t need to decide until they get to the temple. A steep, narrow path winds up the mountain.

What has happened 

Olaudah cast the illusion of three beautiful goddesses and then slipped away to check on his alchemical experiment, figuring it would be safe enough to leave the hall for a minute or so. What he failed to take into account was that a convincing illusion of a goddess includes the illusion of her divine power. In effect, when he conjured the three goddesses he effectively gave them the ability to create a holodeck. And it would not be a convincing illusion of pagan goddesses if they meekly submitted to a beauty parade for the titillation of mortal men, hence their turning the tables by making it a contest – the Judgement of Paris, well-known from myth if only half remembered by most of Lord Albemarle’s guests. None of this would matter if Olaudah were really back right away, but the illusion has altered subjective time for everyone in the hall. While Olaudah adjusts the heat under his alembic and mixes in a few ingredients to the bubbling mixture, seconds are passing for him but minutes are passing for the people experiencing the illusion.

This is supposed to be an adventure seed, not a whole scenario, and in any case I’d expect it to be used to incorporate ongoing themes in the campaign, so I’ll leave the rest as an open canvas. The island can be a stage for various dream encounters, a slightly sinister locus amoenus similar to the Athenian wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As it’s an illusion you can contrive to split the party as they climb to the temple, giving them some strange experiences and hopefully also some clues as to what’s actually going on.

They will have noticed that Olaudah isn’t with them, but if they have a typical adventuring party’s attitude to sorcerers then it’s likely they’ll ascribe that to malice rather than oversight. Is this a ploy to strand Albemarle and his guests in a strange place at the mercy of pagan gods while Olaudah seizes power back in the real world? Work up the paranoia the way Tarantino or Sidney Lumet would.

What might tip them off that this is all an illusion? If they examine any coins, for example if Flute asks for a tip after showing them the way to the mountain path, they may notice that the coins are lacking in details – the king’s face blank, the inscription around the rim only random symbols. Books are unreadable, as in a dream. If they stop to pluck a flower that looks fine at a glance, they’ll see it has no more structure than in a child’s drawing.

They might also notice Flute and Phalaena using a phrase of endearment that the hypnotized old servants did earlier – which is who they are in reality.

After spotting some flaw, if somebody guesses that this is an illusion then they have a chance of finding their way back through to the fringes of reality where they could encounter Olaudah, hurrying back from his lab now that he is beginning to realize that his spell might have been a bit too effective. The sensible thing then would be to get him to dispel it, but if suspicion is running high – he is a wizard, after all, and a foreigner, and probably a pagan, and in the eyes of ignorant knights he might even be supposed to be a cannibal savage at heart – then there could be a fight.

Dispelling the illusion is one way to go. Another is to embrace the experience and see it through to the end. That’s trickier as you’d rather avoid the wrath of the two goddesses who don’t get picked.

First the characters have to decide which of them is going to be the judge. Obviously it’s a lot more fun if that’s a player-character. Other male characters are barred from entering the temple, but female characters are free to do so, and in fact the best way to avoid jealousy is to have the contest judged by a woman. The goddesses, having the pagan mindset that Olaudah imagined them with, don’t mind if a woman judges one of them more beautiful than the others; it’s only a man’s judgement that could annoy them.

At the threshold of the temple, a character might spot something behind a pillar. It’s a soot-blackened apple core. This is a last opportunity to twig that everything is illusory (it’s the same apple core the arrogant knight lobbed into the hearth earlier) before the beauty contest begins.

Inside the temple the goddesses are revealed without their robes – and they are as dazzlingly beautiful as only a dream-image or a true goddess could be. As Olaudah has misremembered the Emphidian myth, the three are Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite. All are tall, radiantly lovely beyond all mortal measure, and incidentally dark-skinned because they sprang from Olaudah’s imagination.

‘You may set any conditions you wish to the contest,’ they tell the appointed judge. ‘We will submit to your wishes. But you must choose which of us is the most beautiful before you leave here.’

If given an opportunity to speak to the judge in private, each goddess attempts to bribe them: Artemis offers grace and sharp senses; Athena offers wisdom and skill at arms; Aphrodite offers the knack of making others fall in love with them. But tempting as these bribes may be, the escalation of the stakes carries an implicit threat that the two disappointed goddesses will find some way to punish them.

Other than appointing a judge, how could the characters avoid having to pick one over the others? One way might be to trick them into making the choice themselves. Another might be to defer the decision to a higher authority such as one of the gods. A clever player-character may find a way to wriggle out of having to choose at all, or to convince each of the goddesses that she is the winner. That’s going to come down to improvisation, quick wits and fast talk, but if your players are anything like mine there’ll be more than one trickster in the party who is up to the challenge.

The illusion ends with clouds drifting across the sun, a reek of chemicals on the sea breeze, and then everyone is back in the great hall. Fumes from Olaudah’s lab fill the air. Anyone who was in the temple finds they are standing in the cavernous hearth. The two elderly servants are entwined like youthful lovers, and perhaps some of the characters are also in compromising positions – the arrogant knight crouching furtively under a table that he thought was a bush in the goddesses’ garden, for instance.

All’s well that ends well? If a character judged the contest then they certainly showed bravery, risking the displeasure of two goddesses, so it would be nice to let them keep a shadow of whatever bribe they were offered – a +1 on Agility from Artemis or whatever. Is that because the illusion actually reached through into a true mythic realm, or simply that the dream gives the character a new confidence? That’s for them to decide.

And there is a lasting effect on anyone who saw the goddesses unrobed – ie the judge and anyone who sneaked in for a peek. They can’t recall exactly what the goddesses looked like, but they are left with an impression of ineffable beauty. A glimpse of heavenly allure, half remembered, snatched away by the return to this world of dirt and discord and time – that is a bittersweet reward indeed.

* * *

This originally appeared in a slightly different form as an adventure seed on my Patreon page that tied in with the post on court magicians. It's available to all followers there, paid or otherwise, along with a lot of other good stuff. Pop over and join us.

And although I said above that it's all the men present who are affected by the goddesses' beauty, I intended to specify the hetero men (and any women who are lesbian/bisexual), meaning that a gay male character could have an unexpected role to play in the adventure. Alternatively, you might opt for a less literal concept of physical attraction; perhaps the goddesses' appearance arouses the admiration of men and not women regardless of their sexuality, on the simple basis that the goddesses are not mortals and so their attributes don't have to conform to mortal notions.

An evening with the RPG Blokes

I had the opportunity recently to sit down for a natter with the RPG Blokes. Not in the same room, unfortunately, and the internet connection over Zoom gave us a hard time, but Mark and the guys cleaned up the audio to make a seamless confabulation (in the real sense, not the dopy AI developer jargon). Join us and listen in as we natter about Dragon Warriors, Jewelspider, and all things roleplaying.

And in the same week there's an interview with my Dragon Warriors and Golden Dragon co-creator Oliver Johnson. You can listen to that or read the transcript.

Going for gold

When Vulcanverse was first published, Emmanuel Quaireau said to me, "It's easy to see this is a work written with love." It's really nice when somebody notices that. Jamie and I put years of work into Vulcanverse, and gamebooks are not such a vibrant market that we can expect George R.R. Martin scale rewards, or even George Costanza rewards. When you're wrestling with plot twists and story logic and the flowchart looks like all those notebooks the guy has in Memento, you'd better really love what you're doing.

So I was grateful and flattered to see that in his roundup of the top narrative games of the year, Juan Pablo Fernández del Río awarded Vulcanverse the number one slot for the second year running. And that's especially gratifying when you see the stiff competition we were up against. I particularly like the look of Pentiment (a stylish-looking whodunit set in a 16th century monastery) and Chants of Sennaar (Piranesi meets the Biblical Tower of Babel, with elements that made me think of the legendary Chris Crawford's Legacy of Siboot). But they're all enticing and have been crafted with obvious love, which makes Vulcanverse's position at #1 all the more a thrill and a privilege.

Juan has written extensively on all forms of interactive narrative, so I'll just recommend his website Mundo Iludico -- which, thanks to the magic of AI translation (see Tower of Babel reference above), is a treasure trove now unlocked for us all -- and say that a great place to start is his essay on open worlds.

At least as good as Wicked

Looking for the ultimate fantasy rock opera? The wait is over. Blood Sword aficionado Philip Hill, working with Copilot and Suno, has created a musical version of the gamebook saga. Several versions, in fact. The one above is the hard rock opera, but if that's too heavy metal there's also the soft rock variant below. Or are Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span more your thing? Here's the English folk version.

Philip confessed that he made a mistake with the lyrics, having assumed the Blasting of Spyte took place a thousand years ago when in fact it was only two centuries. An easy mistake to make given that the events of The Walls of Spyte take place in 1000 AS, and in any case we can allow some poetic licence when the results are as awesome as this. Rock on.

Mythos without the þorn

Talking about H P Lovecraft last time reminded me of a pet gripe. I have quite a few of those, if we're being honest, but this one is about the proper way to pronounce Cthulhu. To begin with, here's HPL's take, as given to Duane Rimel in a letter dated 23 July 1934:

"The word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. [...] The letters CTHULHU were merely what Prof. Angell hastily devised to represent (roughly and imperfectly, of course) the dream-name orally mouthed to him by the young artist Wilcox. The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlul'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered—the l sound being unrepresented [in Angell's rendition of the word]. My rather careful devising of this name was a sort of protest against the silly and childish habit of most weird and science-fiction writers, of having utterly non-human entities use a nomenclature of thoroughly human character; as if alien-organed beings could possibly have languages based on human vocal organs. Actually, every name supposed to have been originated by non-humans should be painstakingly shaped in such a way as not to conform to the principles of human vocalism and language."

Clear? HPL gave a simpler account in a letter to Willis Conover dated 29 August 1936:

"Of course it is not a human name at all-having never been designed for enunciation by the vocal apparatus of Homo sapiens. The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly-formed syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth. That is, if one is a human being. Directions for other entities are naturally different."

The confusion seems to have arisen because sloppy readers (and Wikipedia editors) have assumed Lovecraft was aiming for the suggestion of chthonian. Cthulhu is the very opposite of a chthonic entity, having come from the stars and been buried under the sea. If Lovecraft had meant the C to be pronounced as in the common but mistaken version "kuh-THUL-oo" he'd have written it Ch.

We can isolate the syllables as (Ct)(hul)(hu) rather than as the popular assumption of (C)(thul)(hu). It's more accurate to think of the sound that Prof Angell wrote as ct to be the consonant at the end of of a word like "act". Try isolating that, removing the a sound, and you have a sort of bitten-back consonant that could sound like a gulped k.

Now take the next element, rendered by Prof Angell as hul. With the gulped k followed by hul (vowel sound as in "full") and followed by hloo (mistakenly written by Angell as "hu") then we have something nearer to what Lovecraft imagined -- with the same proviso he applied, namely that our mouths and throats and the atmosphere we breathe are all wrong for making any such sound.

That said, Cthulhu cultists would have as much knowledge of the accurate pronunciation of their deity's name as any 1920s Christian or Muslim (etc) could have of the Big Bang. And Cthulhu probably knows and cares nothing for what its cultists think. So player-characters can pronounce it however they like, and argue it out with the big lug when it finally rises from the deep.

An ulcer on the big toe

‘People whose minds are—like [Arthur] Machen’s—steeped in the orthodox myths of religion, naturally find a poignant fascination in the conception of things which religion brands with outlawry and horror. Such people take the artificial and obsolete concept of “sin” seriously, and find it full of dark allurement. On the other hand, people like myself, with a realistic and scientific point of view, see no charm or mystery whatever in things banned by religious mythology. We recognise the primitiveness and meaninglessness of the religious attitude, and in consequence find no element of attractive defiance or significant escape in those things which happen to contravene it. The whole idea of “sin”, with its overtones of unholy fascination, is in 1932 simply a curiosity of intellectual history. The filth and perversion which to Machen’s obsoletely orthodox mind meant profound defiances of the universe’s foundations, mean to us only a rather prosaic and unfortunate species of organic maladjustment—no more frightful, and no more interesting, than a headache, a fit of colic, or an ulcer on the big toe. Now that the veil of mystery and the hokum of spiritual significance have been stripped away from such things, they are no longer adequate motivations for [fantasy or horror fiction]. We are obliged to hunt up other symbols of imaginative escape—hence the vogue of interplanetary, dimensional, and other themes whose element of remoteness and mystery has not yet been destroyed by advancing knowledge.’

We're almost a hundred years on from when H P Lovecraft wrote that and still plenty of humans imagine the universe being ruled over by a stern parent with a set of rules and punishments for naughty children to fret about -- and no two groups can quite agree on what the stern parent's rules are. It's pretty much the textbook study in how children grow up emotionally troubled. At this point I just hope we don't infect the AGIs of the future with our ape-brained notions.

HPL was a tireless champion for the sense of wonder. He was simply opposed to the category error that puts the numinous in the same box as objective reality. This is from the introductory paragraphs of  'Supernatural Horror in Literature':

'Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it.'

If that's the kind of fiction that sets up a stirring in your soul, you might like some of the offerings in Wrong magazine: stories that take the reader over the boundary into a place where everyday reality meets the inexplicable. Cue the music.

*  *  *

(While we're on the subject of Lovecraftian horrors -- if you missed the funding campaign on Gamefound for Whispers Beyond The Stars, there's now the opportunity to secure a copy with a late pledge. But don't dilly-dally. I can't guarantee there'll be a third chance.)

Caller Unknown

As well as co-creating Golden Dragon, Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors, Oliver Johnson has written a number of excellent fantasy novels. There's the Lightbringer trilogy and also a very fine opening volume in a new series, The Knight of the Fields. Unfortunately you'll look for that last one in vain. Publishers raved that it was the best fantasy they'd seen all year -- and then decided it was "too 1990s" (I wonder what they think A Game of Thrones is?) and wanted rewrites to give it a more conventionally heroic ending.

Fantasy publishers are idiots, but luckily Oliver has turned his talents to a field where the gatekeepers are more discerning: the conspiracy thriller. Caller Unknown, out next week, entangles its protagonist in a world of cults, terrorists and corrupt politics. Take a look at Michael Jecks' review in Shots magazine to see the kind of rave reception it's getting. If you enjoy the Winter Soldier/Three Days of the Condor kind of paranoia vibe delivered with the immediacy of a murky modern thriller, don't miss it.

The forms of things unknown

How come I'd never heard until now of Cardinal Cox? No, not the hottie from Friends -- Cardinal Cox is a poet who specializes in the eldritch, the macabre, and the wondrous, with poetry cycles devoted to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and the like. He has been poet-in-residence at a Victorian cemetery, at a 15th century Gothic church, and at the Dracula Society.

I was introduced to his work by a friend who picked up some of his chapbooks at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton recently and was kind enough to see that they would find a home with me. Look out for the Codex Nemedia, with poems about Conan, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane; and the Codex Yog-Sothoth, which includes lines that could have been penned for Queen Nyx in the Vulcanverse series:

"Whose body is the bend of stars

That bows across the night sky."

His poetry is accompanied by amusing and recondite notes to delight the hearts of every true SF/fantasy nerd. I particularly liked the reference to the Bramford apartment building and the translation of the Phaistos Disc. If the Cardinal doesn't run Call of Cthulhu games then he really ought to. One reviewer said of his work: "Earth is a part of the story but, as in much Lovecraftian literature, Earth and our species are by no means as important as we humans tend to think."

He has a collection called Grave Goods that is available on Amazon and is described thus:

"Yes, there are vampires. Plus ancient gods, Frankenstein's creation at the back of a drive-in, Dr Jekyll's sister's guest house, suburban devil worshippers, ship-wrecked sailors, alchemists, murderers, and an alien plant."

Flags and states in open-world gamebooks

I think it was Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson who first started using keywords in gamebooks. Prior to that, a gamebook might say something like, "If you met the old man in the almshouse and he gave you a piece of stained glass, turn to X." 

You can see the problem. What if I don't remember if I met the old man or not? That's especially likely if I've played through the adventure several times and can't remember whether I met him on this run-through or a previous one.

The other advantage of keywords is that they don't give the game away. The keyword for getting the stained glass fragment wouldn't be GLASS, for example, or even VITREOUS but something unrelated to the story event -- OBLIQUITY, for example. That way, if you come across the keyword without having triggered the event that would give it to you, you have no idea what effect it would have. That's particularly important in open world gamebooks like Vulcanverse and Fabled Lands, though there are cases where it's fine to know why an event is triggered -- getting arrested if you're a wanted fugitive, for example, or being granted an audience with the king because you're the court champion -- and in those cases we typically use a title like Godslayer or Saviour of Iskandria.

Keywords can serve one of two functions. The first is to record if an event has happened. For example, has the player ever met Baroness Ravayne? Once they have, that can't be undone. So in design terms that's a flag. The other use of keywords is to track a state that can change. An example of that would be whether they are an ally or enemy of Baroness Ravayne. Prior to meeting her, neither can apply. But once they are able to enter those states, there could be ways to flip them; you might become the Baroness's enemy, then redeem yourself and become her ally, then do something to make yourself an enemy again.

How many keywords do we need for this kind of set-up? I'll give you an example from The Pillars of the Sky, the fourth book in the Vulcanverse series. We've actually discussed this before. If you want to familiarize yourself with the scenario, here's a short demo version. The gist of it is that the player comes across a valley in perpetual darkness and finds a switch that lets them turn the sun on and off. (Here in London in icy January I could do with something like that.)

I used two keywords. Quell identifies whether the player has found the switch. So that's the first kind of keyword mentioned above, a logic flag. Once you've found the switch, you can't unfind it. The other keyword, Quire, records if the sun is currently on. If you go back to the switch and flip it to the off position, you lose the keyword Quire. Anytime you're in the valley, if you have Quire then the sun is shining, and if you don't it's pitch dark. So Quire records a state.

Typically you want to limit the number of keywords used in a book, as the reader is going to have to check through a list every time a keyword is called. In a multi-book series it helps a bit if the designer uses different letters of the alphabet for each book, as we did in Fabled Lands and Vulcanverse, but it's still preferable not to have too many. Initially I tried to economize in The Pillars of the Sky by only using Quire for the valley with the artificial sun. That meant there was no difference between the sun being off because the player hadn't found the switch and the sun being off because they had found the switch and left it in its original position. Later on I discovered that there were circumstances where it mattered whether the player had found the switch, so I had to bring in Quell too.

A slightly more streamlined (if less aesthetic) solution would have been to have Quire-ON and Quire-OFF as keywords, using ON and OFF to designate substates. Then I wouldn't have needed Quell as I'd be able to infer the state by asking, "Do you have a Quire-* keyword?" -- or maybe, more elegantly, "Do you have any form of Quire keyword?" I wouldn't do that in code as it's cleaner to differentiate the flag (has the switch been found?) from the state (is the switch up or down)? In fact, if the code isn't visible to the player, in an app version for example, I'd have both Quell and Quire-ON/OFF. As you will appreciate, technically I don't need the ON/OFF substates in that case because all conditions can be derived from simple combinations of Quell and Quire:

• Quell && Quire = The player has switched the sun on
• Quell && !Quire = The player has switched the sun off
• !Quell = The player hasn't found the switch

So the only reason for having the Quire substates is the belt-and-braces principle that when debugging it helps to have everything spelled out. Trust me on this -- currently I'm coding all the Vulcanverse books as a web app and O! the bugs!

If you try playing the demo, here's a moment from Workshop of the Gods that gives a hint of how that sunless valley came about:

Come on, baby, take a chance

The sands are trickling away on the preorders for Whispers Beyond The Stars -- just hours left now to reserve your copy. Backers will get the app version delivered right after the campaign ends, with the hardcover edition to follow later in the year. Meanwhile, here's me and Paweł talking about death in gamebooks.

It's nearly 2050

There's one more day left to get your tentacles (or other partly squamous, partly rugose appendages) around a copy of Whispers Beyond the Stars, the new gamebook co-authored by me and Paweł Dziemski. People keep labelling it as cyberpunk, but I think that's missing the point that both SF and our ideas of the future have moved on. A friend of mine nailed it when he described Whispers as "Cthulhu in the Age of Neo-Feudalism".

The story is set in 2050. You play Alex Dragan, who has just been released from prison and whose attempts to reclaim his/her/their life are destined to be wrecked by the incursion of entities who have been plotting the subjugation of Earth for over a century.

Paweł went on The Hardboiled GMshoe to talk about how we developed the Cthulhu 2050 concept, in particular the way we co-wrote the book. This wasn't like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain or Keep of the Lich Lord, with one person writing everything up to the midway point and then the other taking over. Instead, we began by designing the world background and themes. Then I wrote the whole adventure from start to finish in outline, leaving threads for my co-author to develop later in more detail. It's a true collaboration:

Paweł: "At the begining we had a couple of workshop meetings to discuss how the world will look in 2050, from the perspective of geopolitics, energy, technology, space industry. We wrote the year by year history from 2025 until 2050 as well. Then we discussed the overall story. Then Dave wrote 200 sections as a main end-to end-thread, then I wrote the alternative storylines (another 450 sections) discussing with Dave from time to time to be on the same page. Finally I wrote the app that interprets the story and provides all the game mechanics."

There will be hardback, paperback and app editions, and the English version of the app will be available to backers as soon as the campaign concludes tomorrow. But if you want to be part of this adventure, better be quick. There's no option to "eternal lie" where crowdfunding is concerned.

Bookkeeping in gamebooks

Just two days left of the crowdfunding campaign for Whispers Beyond The Stars, the new Cthulhu gamebook I've written with Paweł Dziemski, and here we are talking about recording stats and keywords in gamebooks. CRPGs keep a quest log for you these days. Print books usually don't, but there's a way they could, which we discuss here.

The slipstream question

More Lovecraftian musings from me and Paweł. We don' need no steenkin' genre. And remember, as recently as the beginning of the century our lives today were still science fiction.

There are still a few days to go to reserve your copy of Whispers Beyond The Stars. Don't look back with regrets.

Now I get it

Following on from yesterday's post, I came across this article by Joseph Heath which explains a lot. Populism has been a significant driver of revolutionary change throughout history (the collapse of classic Maya civilization, the French Revolution, the far-right and far-left in early 1930s Germany, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, MAGA, etc) yet I've never been able to get my head around it till I saw Professor Heath's analysis. So in case that's useful for you to carry into 2026, have a read.

Mob rule

One of my favourite movie moments. We could all do with taking this sentiment to heart. It's from Warlock (1959) and I'm going to watch it right now. Happy New Year!