London's burning

W Somerset Maugham said, "There is an impression abroad that everyone has it in him to write one book; but if by this is implied a good book the impression is false." Sixty years later, Christopher Hitchens put it more brutally: "Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain."

In the last few years we've seen both statements proved many times over. Self-publishing and e-books have increased the number of titles being released each year from hundreds of thousands to many millions. It's a tidal wave of tat with just a few treasures in among the deluge, and those swept by so fast you could blink and miss them.

All the more reason, then, to rejoice when a writer of proven talent comes out with a new novel. And that's especially so when the novel is that writer's masterpiece, the one they've been honing for years, the work into which they've poured a lifetime of experience, craft and imagination.

Such a book is John Whitbourn's Babylondon. (Babylon and London, that is, as I'm sure you already realized.) How can I describe it in a way that will do justice to such a unique story? Imagine yourself in London in the summer of 1780. An angry rabble, enraged by laws intended to reduce discrimination, descend on the capital in an orgy of violence. A week of destruction and violence follow. These are the Gordon Riots. As one bystander put it as he watched public buildings go up in flames:

‘London offered on every side the picture of a city sacked and abandoned to a ferocious enemy.’

Yet this is unlike any modern populist howl of prejudice. Behind the scenes, malevolent forces are at work, exploiting the ignorant minds of the mob to bring about an infernal doom even more calamitous than a no-deal Brexit. From elsewhere in the multiverse comes a supernaturally competent, stylish and deliciously eccentric agent known as the Cavaliere. Imagine a refined, swordstick-wielding incarnation of the Doctor impeccably dressed for the century of lights, perhaps played by Tim Roth...



...with a touch of Marius Goring's performance as Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death...



The Cavaliere soon gets himself an able companion to serve as his guide to this era, by the simple expedient of acquiring an orphan from the Foundling Hospital. (Since I'm doing the casting, Kate could be played by the young Billie Piper -- or Chloë Grace Moretz if she's up for attempting a Cockney accent.) Our two heroes will need all their wits and wiles, though, because ranged against them are a whole hierarchy of lethally adept opponents from this world and the planes beyond -- some of them armed with quantum weapons that even the Cavaliere has no defence against. ("This stuff shouldn't be here at all," warns the shadowy Guardsman as he equips his locally recruited minions.) And all this against the bloody backdrop of the riots as London is torn apart.

If I haven't piqued your interest by now then that's entirely my fault, because Babylondon is a modern classic that should appeal to every connoisseur of historical SF, multiverse adventure, and parallel worlds. John Whitbourn has been working on this novel since the late '90s and he's brought it to the quintessence of perfection. Grab your periwig and your poignard, and allons-y.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

What is it about magic and colour? At a role-playing convention years ago, Greg Stafford described to the breathless Glorantha groupies a scene in a RuneQuest movie that was pitched to the deaf ears of Hollywood. Something has happened to remove magic from the world, said Stafford, and the movie would show this by switching from colour to black-&-white.

It made me think first of A Matter of Life and Death (the difference between monochrome and colour is used more interestingly there) but the very next neuron to fire recalled SPI's 1975 boardgame Sorcerer, in which wizards attuned to different colour frequencies vied for power by enticing each other to battle in zones whose hue favoured their own magic. Sorcerer created quite a stir among us boardgamers because it was SPI's first foray into fantasy gaming - which, as they usually catered for the hardcore wargamer, was a crisis of confidence brought on, no doubt, by the growing success of grungy dungeon games. If you're interested, you can get a glimpse of the rulebook here.

A few years after that, in 1986, Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson came out with the Duel Master series - for me, their best gamebooks, and probably my favourite gamebooks ever. The first (and best) of these, Challenge of the Magi, involved two duelling sorcerers of the Rainbow Land (part of which unaccountably overlapped with Warwickshire and/or the poems of Thomas Lodge) whose magic obeyed a chromatic taxonomy:

• Red for fire
• Black for death
• Blue for illusion
• Green for nature
• White for... um, "holy" stuff

There were two books. Each player took one and you chased each other around the map of the Rainbow Land, trying to fake out your opponent so he didn't guess the colours on which you were strongest. OK, in the era of videogames that probably doesn't sound too impressive, but we had to make our own fun* in those days. And anyway, books are like radio: the pictures are better.

To this day I never figured out how Mark and Jamie made those books work. There was some kind of crazed obsessive-compulsive genius at work in the amazingly detailed rules (which were, nonetheless, easy to use) and the complex intricacies of the flowchart (likewise). And they were meaty, these tomes: 800 sections each. And you got a solo option.

They should have been a massive success, but the tragedy of gamebooks was that the craze didn't last long enough to really support any of the interesting things they were evolving into. That's why it surprises me when some modern revivals of the medium seem to aspire only to setting the clock back to simple dungeon-bashing. By the late-'80s gamebooks were already way beyond that.

(For the sake of balance I should add that there are plenty of modern gamebooks that have continued to innovate in terms of rules, setting and, most interestingly, the depth and quality of the storytelling - just look at the quality of most Windhammer Prize entries, for example.)

Fabled Lands LLP has the rights to the Duel Master books and they are cherry-ripe for conversion to apps. A little bit of handheld tech is perhaps all they needed to get the success they deserved. Twenty-seven years on, we'll see what we can do.


* Although, as Mamet says, everybody makes their own fun; if you don't make it yourself it isn't fun, it's entertainment.

The sleep of the sword

Joseph Lynch was brawny and big-boned. At wrestling he always won, and there was no door he couldn’t heave from its hinges, or failing that break it down with his head. His beard was as red as fox fur and broad as a shovel. Upon his nose he had a wart with a tuft of hairs red as the bristles in a sow’s ears. His nostrils were black and wide, his mouth as big as a furnace door, and by his side he wore a sword few men could lift even with both hands.

Joseph was one of the Iron Men, a small mercenary band out of Ellesland who lived in the latter time as the millennium wound down towards Judgment Day. I stood alongside him in a mountain hall facing goblins in the darkness, and once in a wood we fought a slithering thing that stuck to the misty hollows and might have been a dragon. At least, we called it that.

After our ship put in at a cove among the Stranded Isles, we had gone out to forage for supplies, and when our horses were stopped by robbers on the road our first thoughts might have been to pity them. My thoughts, anyway; Joseph was less given to pity. But by ill luck one of their swords found a space under his arm, and the blade slid in and punctured his lung, and Joseph fell like an oak.

With us traveled a man from Krarth called Kal ki-Lan Tor, who claimed to be a magus. I made him use his magic to call back blood into Joseph’s limbs and air into his lungs. But if any man has the art to defy Death, he will find that new life can only be borrowed for a short time. The flame had gone, and although Joseph continued on for a few days, he grew in pallor and we noticed that when he forgot to draw breath he sat as still as a figure of clay.

Finally he had to be put in the ground. I laid my sword of faerie steel beside him and covered the grave with rocks, for the soil of that shore was too hard and cold to dig. And that was the second and final death of Joe Lynch.

In the world of Legend there’s no way the story could follow what happened to Joseph’s soul after that – not least because Legend is based on medieval Christian belief, and for all I or anyone else knows there is no afterlife until the physical resurrection of all the faithful dead on the Day of Judgment. Beyond that, like Lovecraft, I prefer to keep the truth unutterable.

But there are games in which death is another dungeon level, and the old gods are as mysteriously solicitous of mortal morality as today’s monotheistic deities. And if you play in a campaign like that, James Wallis has come up with a brilliantly funny one-off roleplaying game called Afterlives that will provide you with a framework for legally weighing the soul of a deceased player character. Find out more about it – and where to get it – here on the Mirabilis blog.

Alternatively, instead of trying to plug Afterlives into your existing RPG campaign, you could run it with everybody playing themselves. That could be a lot of fun, though when you hold up the merciless mirror to your players’ real lives you might find them unfriending you pretty quick.