Expeditionary Company is in need of goldash

Only three decades after Jamie and I more or less invented the open-world gamebook genre, suddenly you can't move for new ones.

I'm not complaining. Books like Steam Highwayman are more than worthy successors to Fabled Lands, in the same way that Citizen Kane didn't need to spend too long genuflecting to Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed.

What I like about the new generation of open-world books is the way they take the concept as a springboard, not a straitjacket. Steam Highwayman gives you a role to fill in the world, though you have considerable freedom in deciding how you go about it. Alba is a more directed story experience, like a literary The Long Dark. And Legendary Kingdoms has a party of characters with their own relationships and an epic story set in a detailed fantasy world.

Oh, and there's Vulcanverse of course, which has companions and a story arc that builds in from the first four books to culminate in a finale that the MCU wouldn't be ashamed of. And there's never been a better time to try it out, incidentally.

But I digress. Now comes Expeditionary Company by celebrated gamebook authors David Velasco and Riq Sol. This is more than just a gamebook, though. It's almost a mash-up of roleplaying game, boardgame and multiple-choice adventure, with notes of Expedition and To Carry A Sword. Download the free demo and see what I mean. 

But it looks to be much more than just a blend of those elements, with a compelling lore and world all its own. What I especially like is the depth of the backstory: a mystery to be uncovered that not only sets up some dubious saviours (or more likely outright scheming bad guys) in the form of the Auric, it also provides the dramatic tension between travelling to make money and exploring the wilderness to find out more. It's a background that would do justice to a series of fantasy novels. This is how gamebooks grow up.

Tragically the Kickstarter was cancelled, so we can only hope the authors find another way to fund this innovative project. Perhaps a games publisher will get behind it, or maybe a new crowdfunding effort will raise the money needed. It's not easy (I can't even figure out how to Kickstart any of my own projects) but I'm really rooting for this one.

Wide open worlds

The Kickstarter for Legendary Kingdoms ends in a few hours. Better get over there right now if you want to back it.

In case the title isn't enough of a hint, LK is an open world gamebook series in the style of Fabled Lands. What that means is that you can start in lots of different places, take the kind of character you want, pick your own goals, and explore the world however you choose by going back and forth between the books, each of which covers a different region.

The grandfather of open world gamebooks is Eric Goldberg, who pioneered the idea (though he may not have realized it) in 1985 with his boardgame Tales of the Arabian Nights. That seemed to me what gamebooks ought to be: a roleplaying campaign in solo Choose Your Own Adventure form.

Jamie and I pitched an open world gamebook series called Hero Quest to publishers in 1987, and later repackaged the concept as Knights of Renown in 1989, but with still no takers. It wasn't until six years later that we convinced Pan Macmillan to do the Fabled Lands series, and by then the gamebook craze was dying out. That's why we only managed the first six books of the planned twelve.

All went quiet for a couple of decades, and then like long-awaited buses came The Serpent King's Domain, Steam Highwayman, Alba and Legendary Kingdoms. And, not to be left out, Jamie and I are writing an open world series of five books for his Vulcanverse fantasy setting, and we're hoping that Prime Games's CRPG version of the original Fabled Lands books might rekindle enough interest in those that we can finally finish off the series.

Meanwhile I'd be quite keen to write the Victorian survival horror gamebook Shadow King (think: H G Wells meets The Long Dark) but I'm too averse to social media and too deficient in marketing nous to run the Kickstarter campaign needed to fund it. Fans of open world gamebooks won't be short of alternatives. It may have taken three decades for the wider reading public to catch up with the concept, but I'm betting it has a bright future ahead.

Gamebooks are growing up

Some gamebook news today, and here's one that ought to be of interest to Fabled Lands readers. Apart from the Steam Highwayman series (excellent and highly recommended btw) there haven't been a lot of open world gamebooks, in the sense of giving complete freedom to travel where you want, go back and forth without limit, and pick up whichever quests appeal to your character. But here's a new one called Alba with a post-apocalyptic setting, and it must be doing something right because in fund-raising terms it has far surpassed other print gamebooks (open world or linear) of recent times.

I haven't seen the book myself, but from the Kickstarter page it looks like it has a lot of legacy game elements such as stickers that mark items or locations on the map. (And to think players used to grumble about having to tick boxes in Fabled Lands books back in the day.)

The writing style is of  higher quality than the purple prose of yore, and it looks as if the blocks of prose between choices are longer, making this more of a weighty novelistic experience than a CRPG in book form. Think Telltale Games' The Walking Dead rather than The Witcher. Here's the author, Harley L Truslove, talking about the books.

One obvious difference from old-style gamebooks is that in Alba your character can't die. That's a gripe about FL that we still hear. Somebody on Facebook recently was disgruntled because the skeleton pirates in Over the Blood-Dark Sea had carted them off to a life of undeadtured (sic) servitude with no hope of resurrection:

It used to be that whatever happened to you was part of the story, even when that story ended in tragedy and/or horror. But those were times when PCs in roleplaying games might get killed at the drop of a bascinet, and when we could reasonably expect Bucky to stay dead. We're in different times now, and Jamie and I have taken that on board with our new Vulcanverse gamebooks, which should eventually consist of around a 4000-section adventure in which you cannot die permanently, not even if the Furies and Nemesis team up against you. The worst you'll suffer is being sent to the naughty corner (aka Tartarus) for a brief spell.

I'm being facetious, but the Don't Kill Me players are right. A single-story game (Heart of Ice, say) shouldn't require trying-&-dying till you find an optimum path through. Every time the PC snuffs it in a book like that it's a failure on the writer's part. And even in an open-world gamebook, where death might be the appropriate ending for a given character's story, it can't just be random and unavoidable. Good god, that would be too much like real life.

But it's not just the legacy features and the immunity from death that have propelled Alba to unprecedented success for a print gamebook. The main difference is that it's not the usual hokey old '80s-era D&D kind of fantasy, but instead a vivid, gritty and character-driven narrative in a setting that feels contemporary. (The excerpt is quite well-hidden on the Kickstarter page, but you can download it here.) If Alba was a TV show it'd be a talked-about cable drama, whereas most gamebooks would be a cheaply-animated Saturday morning cartoon that you dimly remembered from your childhood.

In the '80s heyday of CYOA and Fighting Fantasy, gamebooks were hugely successful. Pretty much every series was guaranteed to sell in the tens of thousands per territory. Gamebooks could still matter to a sizeable readership if they moved on from their origin as kids’ books. Interactive stories like The Walking Dead can deal with whether you’ll commit murder to save a friend. Firewatch can tackle loneliness and hope. In games from Assassin's Creed to Bioshock the player is confronted with real feelings and choices more intense than any movie.

And meanwhile gamebooks* are mostly still about which key opens which chest or which item will defeat the Big Bad. Who cares? Crosswords and sudoku already have the puzzle market covered**. It's time for gamebooks to grow up the way that computer games have. That's what makes Alba exceptional. It's about an emotional journey, as all the best stories are. Only connect, that's the way forward.

* Print gamebooks, that is. For some time now Choice of Games have been producing interactive stories with more depth in digital book format, not the least of their titles being The ORPHEUS Ruse, a superbly gripping adventure by our own Paul Gresty.

** Unless you go full-on puzzle book, that is. I'd probably quite enjoy something like Journal 29, but it has stripped out all the story. And Alex Bellos's column in The Guardian satisfies my brain-training needs.