A whole other country

"It was anathema to her to shelter her head under a roof by a city hearth. Dear to the deities of Erebus, she dwelt in deserted tombs, and haunted the graves from which ghosts had been expelled.

"The gods grant every horror at the first cry of her voice, dreading a second incantation. Living spirits, still in control of their bodies, she buries in the grave; or reversing the rite she brings back the dead from the tomb, their corpses escaping to life. 

"She gathers the fragments of the funeral bier, and the fluttering grave-clothes turned to ash, and the cinders that reek of the corpse. And if the dead are sealed in a sarcophagus, that dries the internal moisture, absorbs the corruption of the marrow-bones, and stiffens the corpse, then she vents her anger eagerly on its limbs, thrusting her fingers deep in the eye-sockets, scooping out the solidified eyeballs in delight, gnawing the yellowed nails on withered hands. She mangles the hanged corpse, cuts the fatal noose with her teeth, scrapes at the crucified, tears at rain-beaten flesh and bones scorched by the sun. She steals nails that have pierced hands, the clotted gore and the black residues of putrefaction that oozed over all the limbs; and hangs her weight on sinews that resist her teeth.

"Often too, when a loved one is buried, the dreadful witch will hang over the body in kissing it, mutilates the head, opens the closed mouth with her teeth, bites the tip of the inert tongue in the dry mouth, infuses the cold lips with murmuring sound, and sends a wicked and arcane message down to the Stygian shades.

"Sextus Pompeius heard local tales of Erichtho, and made his way to her dwelling when night ruled the sky, at the hour in those deserted fields when the sun is in the zenith for those on the other side of earth..."

That chilling little passage is from Lucan's Pharsalia. You can read what happens when Sextus consults the witch here or here. I was put onto it by Paul Chrystal's book Miracula: Weird & Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece & Rome, essential reading for any roleplayer or writer with an interest in the odd customs of the past. 

The book comprises the most wonderfully abstruse collection of anecdotes, aphorisms, travel tales, superstitions, sexual practices, dining etiquette (especially important in the case of the Roman diplomat who describes going to dinner with Attila the Hun), parenting tips, ancient world science and medicine, conversation, humour, burial customs, and space travel -- and even in that list I've barely scratched the surface. The ancient curses alone (chapter 66) are worth the price of the book. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

On the road

Suppose you’re writing a gamebook and you want the player to be able to travel from Wishport to Haggart’s Corner on this map. In its simplest form that would require a section (A) for Wishport, a section describing travel on the road (D) with possible side encounters, and a section (F) for arriving at Haggart’s Corner.

In an open-world gamebook it gets a bit more involved. Now you might be travelling on that same stretch of road either north to Haggart’s Corner, or in the other direction south to Wishport. In Fabled Lands we wanted to have random encounters occur when the player is travelling, so we needed a section (C) to handle those. Each encounter could be an entire side-adventure, though the two in this example are both very short. Once the encounters are resolved, or if you didn’t get an encounter, you’re routed to section D and can decide which way to head. Like this:

A

Wishport is a picturesque town set at the back of a bay rimmed by white cliffs. Fish, oil, dyes and other commodities are packed here for transport inland. You can buy a town house here for 100 Shards. If you decide to do that, cross off the money and put a tick in the box by the town house option below.

[Various options in the town]         …

Leave Wishport                           turn to B                  

B

From Wishport, you have the option to put to sea, take the road to Haggart's Corner, or travel cross-country. In order to go by sea, you must either possess a ship which is docked in the harbour (check the Ship's Manifest) or find a captain who is willing to take you as a passenger.

Go to the harbour                                 turn to ---

Take the road north                              turn to C

Go west towards Metriciens               turn to ---
    Go east into the Magwort Fens           turn to ---

C

The road follows the ridge of low hills extending out into the headland of Knucklebones Point.

Roll two dice for encounters:

Score 2-5         Eerie things                            turn to X

Score 6-8         Uneventful journey              turn to D

Score 9-12       Penniless adventurers          turn to Y

 

D

You are on the road between Wishport and Haggart's Corner.

Follow the road to Wishport              turn to A

Go north to Haggart's Corner             turn to E

Go due south towards the coast          turn to ---

Go east into the Magwort Fens           turn to ---

E

The town of Haggart's Corner stands at a place where three roads meet. Here, in certain seasons of the year, the trau are said to come and trade their marvellous trinkets in exchange for human favours.

Stop at Haggart's Corner            turn to F

Continue on your journey          turn to G

F

Haggart's Corner is a pretty, pastel-hued town. Houses with high gables and mullioned bay windows are set around a series of courts where fountains splash dreamily in the sunlight.

[Various options in the town]         …

Leave Haggart's Corner              turn to G

G

The fey, sleepy, whimsy-tainted air of Haggart's Corner is soon forgotten as you turn your face to the wind and journey onwards.

Take the road to Metriciens                turn to ---

Head to the Monastery of Molhern    turn to ---

Take the road to Wishport                  turn to C

X

Misshapen sprites with grotesque faces come scampering out of the hedge beside the road. Tittering to themselves, they prod you with gnarled fingers and discuss whether you are worth eating.

`Give us an emerald and we'll let you go,' pipes up one of the sprites.

It seems they will accept a green gem to leave you in peace.

Give them a green gem            turn to D

Make a break for it                      turn to Z

Y

Three penniless wanderers tell you a tale of being washed up on a lonely shoreline. ‘Still, we're determined to make names for ourselves,’ they vow. Their predicament reminds you of your own early career, so you give them a tenth of any cash you have on you (rounding fractions up). Only later, while passing through a village, do you remember seeing their faces on a wanted poster.

Turn to D.

Z

Guffawing, the sprites let you go. You run pell-mell until there's no breath left in you. Only then do you notice that they stole one of your fingers. Lose 1 from THIEVERY (down to a minimum score of 1) and turn to D.

This example is a simple one, but as I said those encounters could be entire quests in their own right. That creates some difficulties. First of all, once the player has dealt with a major quest such as exploring a ruined castle we may not want them to experience it again. One way to deal with that is to put a check box in the first section of the sub-quest – something like this:

Section R is the ‘defused’ version of the encounter – the castle is empty, nothing to see here, back to D. That’s assuming you only want the player to have one crack at exploring the castle. If it’s possible for them to fail – and flee, or die there – then you might need to filter it with a keyword, so that they only go to the defused version of the encounter once they’ve handled it successfully. Incidentally in Vulcanverse, where I needed to stop the keywords from proliferating to an unmanageable degree, I used a structure like this instead:

There you embark on the sub-quest at 306. No matter how many times you come back here, if you haven't successfully completed the quest you'll go to 306. When you do complete the quest you'll be told to turn to 41 and tick the box. Section 476 gives you the spiel for having just completed the quest. Section 734 is for if you return here subsequently. (Incidentally I used a similar mechanic in Can You Brexit? to determine when the player had resolved one of the UK/EU negotiating points.)

The other problem with putting sub-quests on a random encounter table is that the player might just walk back and forth among that same section of road repeatedly until they get the special encounter they want. In Fabled Lands that’s a passage of time issue, similar to the way we don’t want players to make investments at the merchants’ guild and walk back in minutes later to collect a windfall:

Notice those keywords Almanac, Brush and Catalyst. You can only get those by travelling to a distant port. Then when you return you get to roll to see how your investments have been doing:

You could use the same mechanic to prevent the player repeatedly traversing the same stretch of road to get that lucky encounter roll. Just mark the encounter as only happening if the player has the keyword Afar or whatever, and remove Afar after they’ve been along the road – so then they’ll have to voyage off to Sokara in book one to collect Afar again.

It’s not ideal, because it’s contrived. We’re trying to represent passage of time, which a paper gamebook obviously can’t do directly, so we say that if you’ve visited a distant location, which we can keep tabs on, then time must have passed. But the player is bound to wonder why going to a specific location in book one arbitrarily unlocks an unrelated quest opportunity in book two. It breaks suspension of disbelief.

If you can think of a better solution, I’m all ears.

The art of the possible

Political games are in fashion. It might have something to do with the rapid turnaround of prime ministers now that British politics functions like a reality TV show. No 10: Full Confidence is outselling Monopoly Go in the UK Apple game charts. There's also Fantasy Parliament, a browser game that lets you simulate party politics, and UK Politics Simulator is on the way.

Where was all this interest a decade ago? That's when I released Can You Brexit? Ancient history now, but all the issues dealt with there are still in play. You can buy the book or play the browser version free.

Dragons in the Dark

A lot can change in forty years. Attitudes and opinions especially. I was reminded of that when I came across the March 1986 issue of a fanzine called Dragons in the Dark, edited by Henk Langeveld, and flipped it open to discover a letter from my very much younger self. So what games were grabbing the attention of the Dave Morris of four decades ago? Let's find out...

"I agree with what Mike Williams said about getting the rules out of the way of role--playing. I have enjoyed several games where there was no dice-rolling at all -- not because the players didn't get into combats, but because the game was flowing along so smoothly that I decided not to break it all apart by insisting they get out the figurines and the dice. Games can't always work out like that (my sessions have their share of dungeoneering too), but at their best they are pure role-playing, an improvised story created jointly by the players and the GM. Some letters in White Dwarf objected that this type of gaming is just chaotic – no rules. There are rules, I have found, but rules of a very subtle sort that arise out of the nature of storytelling. A player may spontaneously invent some power, item or general get-out if he thinks the others will accept it. As GM, I cannot just take the item away from him without forcing a re-take in the adventure, so I have to be inventive and twist things against him again. I really think that for a group of experienced gamers who are used to one another’s foibles, this gives an opportunity for imaginative gaming and shared fantasy that the old rule systems (that mostly developed out of wargames and table-topping) do not allow. This is one of the reasons that I'm against things like fatigue points – who can be fagged to calculate all those numbers and things during a game that should represent the triumph of imagination?"

Here in 2026 I'm still in favour of improvisation, but not in the authored sense described there. I value roleplaying precisely because it is a work without an author, so I would rather not have players seeing their characters as pieces to move around a story. I want them to improvise in character. You know, the way we do in real life.

Anyway, back to 1986:

"I didn't invest in RuneQuest 3 (though I have looked through it) because I didn't see that much wrong with RQ2. The RuneQuest Compendium could have handled any necessary adjustments and expansions, but instead wasted itself with useless padding on how to cook a walktapus and suchlike. Since the world of Glorantha is defined by the game, it means that the old Glorantha has gone – the world must now be a very different place. If the POW gain for priests has been changed there will be fewer priests of great power, for example.

"For me, the main role-playing event of 1985 was the publication of Swords and Glory, M.A.R. Barker's complete reworking of his Tekumel game. Greg Stafford was right to call Barker a genius – he developed Tekumel as a real place and his rules merely interpret that into a game. 'Game' Tekumel is asymptotic to 'real' Tekumel, but there is no sense that with a new set of rules the whole world has changed."

I guess I'll stand by most of that, except that Barker has nowadays been cancelled for his assumed views so we're not to mention him, and anyway if I were still playing Tekumel-based games I'd use the Tirikelu rules rather than S&G. 

Moving on, we get to a kind of cultural appropriation that still makes me seethe:

"I cannot say that I'm waiting for Chaosium's feudal Japanese supplement to RQ3 with much enthusiasm. Bushido seems to handle this setting very competently and evocatively anyway. The attitude towards Japanese culture and folklore that shows through published Chaosium material is not particularly auspicious in this regard. I found the dragonewts write-up in – was it Different Worlds or Wyrm's Footnotes? Can't remember – pretty offensive. Dragonewts, these utterly unhuman creatures, apparently fight with katanas, perform seppuku, compose haiku... all things that maybe seem utterly unhuman to the Californian mind, but personally I think don't measure up. Probably these Japanese elements are grafted onto dragonewt culture in a spirit of amused incomprehension rather than outright chauvinism, but I am not impressed. Returning to the example of Tekumel, Barker manages to make his nonhumans (the ssu, the hlüss, the pe choi, etc) look and feel alien without recourse to traditional Western myth or swiping from non-European cultures."

And the letter rounds off with a last little bit that's of historical interest because it pins down my and Jamie's inspiration for creating open-world gamebooks:

"Tales of the Arabian Nights by West End is well worth a look, though pricey. It is an original concept, attractively presented and great fun. I bought it a month ago and have been playing three or four times a week since then."

That would have been in the autumn of 1985, two years before we pitched a gamebook series we were calling Hero Quest. It's interesting to look back now and see the glint in my then-youthful and sparkling clear eyes.

Oh, you're wondering about that cover? The image above is ChatGPT's retconned version, but for the sake of historical interest here's what RPG fanzines actually looked like in the days of typewriters, Letraset and Cow Gum:

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?

A Fun Guy From Yuggoth

It's H.P. Lovecraft's 136th birthday, so here's a little song he might have enjoyed. (He was tickled by "Yes! We Have No Bananas" in his own Latin translation, so I think I'm justified in saying that.) Here are the lyrics if you want to sing along:

Greetings from the fourth dimension.
(Hush now, keep the tension)
Just a chap with simple needs,
Sown from prehistoric seeds.
No need for alarm, no need for fuss.
I only want to be like us!

I'm just a fun guy from Yuggoth!
A fungal star in your orbit!
A little spore, a little damp,
A cosmic glow beneath your lamp.
Don't mind the shadows on the wall.
I've come to bloom and stand quite tall.
I've come to bloom and stand quite tall.

I love the drizzle and the fog.
(It's marvelous for the mycelial log.)
I've brought some geometries
To plant among the garden trees
Just a quirky hobby, don't you see?
Building shrines for entity!

I'm just a fun guy from Yuggoth!
A fungal star in your orbit!
A little spore, a little damp,
A cosmic glow beneath your lamp.
Don't mind the shadows on the wall.
I've come to bloom and stand quite tall.
I've come to bloom and stand quite tall.

The mind is soft, the brain is bright
(Soft and bright...)
A lovely snack for fungal night.
I'll take your cortex, save your soul
(Save your soul...)
In a lovely canister, whole!

I'm just a fun guy from Yuggoth!
A fungal star in your orbit!
A little spore, a little damp!
A cosmic glow beneath your lamp!
Don't mind the shadows on the wall!
I've come to bloom and stand quite tall!
I've come to bloom and stand quite tall!

And if a Mi-Go is your preferred amigo, the full-colour paperback of Dagon Warriors is still on sale.

The future's not ours to see

Whispers Beyond The Stars is set twenty-five years from now in one possible future. I wouldn't bet on that being the actual future, history being such a squirmy and chaotic thing, but I’m always interested to hear forecasts of what life is going to be like. Elon Musk claims to think that money won’t matter by 2036. I don’t think he really believes that, but he might think he believes it. Quite possibly he was thrilled as a teenager by Star Trek’s depiction of a post-scarcity society. Adult Elon probably doesn’t realize that the Federation is a socialist utopia, socialism being a term that makes him lose his shit, but the dreams of teen Elon are still sparking away dimly in the depths of that ketamine-treated brain.

Ten years might be a stretch, especially to attain super-intelligent AGI, so let’s stick with Whispers' longer horizon of 2050. With advanced robotics and very good AI, labour might be effectively free. Even energy might be free if (a big if, this) we have controlled fusion. What won’t be free? Living space for one. That apartment overlooking Central Park will still be beyond the means of most. Minerals that only need labour to extract would be more or less free, but unfortunately the rare earths needed for electronics aren’t among them, so your household robot won’t be free unless it has a very different kind of electronic brain from those we can build now.

So this is post-scarcity with a jagged edge. And by the way we in the developed world already have a post-scarcity society from the perspective of the poorer nations. Elon Musk talks about “universal high income” -- no mere UBI for him, you see. Hang on, though. A billion people live on less than $3 a day while the Western World has a median income more than twenty times that. We’re not distributing the world’s wealth fairly now, so why would that change by 2050?

If robotics really takes off, there might be a vast workforce that’s effectively slave labour. There might also be a vast slave army. Those robots will be owned by the likes of Musk and/or by the governments of the major powers. Will they dole out UBI? That depends on who controls the weapons. You’re an absurdly rich person with a private military and you only have to reach out your hand for anything you need. How much money will you throw to the masses to spare yourself the inconvenience of waging continual war on them?

In Whispers Beyond The Stars we used a different template for our future world. Not Roddenberry’s Federation but Ancient Rome. There you have wealth concentrated into the hands of a few, labour (but not warfare) largely carried out by slaves, and UBI in the form of the dole. Bread and circuses keep the people acquiescent while the oligarchs enjoy all the luxury.

What about Elon Musk’s prediction that artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence by 2031? “There really won't be anything that AI can’t do better than humans apart from being human.” And he thinks (or claims to think, or believes he thinks) that means AI will be in charge: “In the same way that if the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge.”

Is that so? Intelligent people don’t run this planet. Really they don’t; just take a look at it. The US has a government that opposes vaccination and mRNA research. Russia is drilling for self-replacing oil on the basis of a theory barely less barmy than some of the Nazis’ pseudoscience ideas. Politicians get elected without even trying to make any intelligent arguments, knowing that flattery, lies and hatemongering will stand them in far better stead at the ballot box than reason ever could -- or else they seize power by force and install dictators who are never chosen on the strength of their intellect. Meanwhile the vast majority of smart people have no chance of doing anything with their intelligence because they belong to the two-fifths of humanity that has to make do with 1% of global wealth.

I sound like I’m disdainful of Elon Musk’s theories, and I certainly wouldn’t call him a genius, as Zanny Minton Beddoes has, because I don’t use the term genius so promiscuously. (Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein, maybe a few others; that's it.) Most of my friends are at least as smart as Elon seems to be, and with the added bonus that most of them know what they don't know. But I agree with him when he says, “The most important thing for AI safety is [for it] to be maximally truth-seeking and curious. If that's the case I think it will foster humanity.”

That is, it will be morally better than us; a low bar, as I’ve argued before.

One remark Elon Musk made I found especially revealing: “I've said many times I think work is going to be optional. Maybe a good comparison would be gardening. You don't have to grow vegetables in in your garden. You can go to the store and they're going to be pristine vegetables, or you could grow vegetables in your garden and they will actually be less perfect. Your tomatoes are not going to be as plump and juicy as the ones at the store. They’ll look a little artisanal. But if you go to a friend's house and they make dinner with vegetables from their garden, it's a nice touch.”

I know people who grow their own fruit and vegetables in the garden. They are much, much tastier than anything I can buy in any of the stores that I can afford. So presumably Elon Musk’s cook has access to stores where they can source vegetables even better than that. There’s no better illustration of how detached from everyday reality you can get if you have three-quarters of a trillion dollars.