This is the most exciting news all year for me, and the culmination of a dream. The first fully playable demo for Blood Sword CRPG is released today on Steam. The fact that it's by Victor Atanasov at Prime Games (who also created the Fabled Lands CRPG) told me all along that it would be brilliant. The only question is how brilliant, and now we can all judge that for ourselves.
Victor drew on both Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors for the tactical elements, but if you've been following his design masterclasses on Steam then you'll already know that there's a lot more to the PC version than that. Still, enough talk -- you can take up the quest for yourself. Will the machinations of the Magi bring about a poisoned future, or will your band of heroes successfully wield the Sword of Life to defeat them? Find out right here.
I don't think I need to add anything, do I? The trailer says it all, but here's a little bit more to whet your appetite, along with the product page on Steam. Everyone who has played Prime Games' incredible Fabled Lands CRPG will be excited to hear that the Blood Sword game is going to be even bigger and better. Stay tuned, as I'll have a lot more to tell you in the weeks ahead.
And while we're on the subject of exciting upcoming releases, I'll just add:
As sure as men walked on the Moon, we now have incontrovertible evidence that the English edition of Blood Sword 5e exists. One of my gaming pals sent me this photo of the pack he just received. Others in our roleplaying group confirmed they also got their copies, and I'm hoping at least one of them will try running the campaign for their kids.
As to whether the book will be available to non-Kickstarter backers -- well, yes, that would make sense, 5e reputedly being a popular choice of rules, and it's a beautiful volume with detailed spells like Fairy Stride, Pillar of Salt, and (of course) Summon Faltyn, along with monastic orders, character backstories and birthmarks, guilds, blood feats, monsters, rules for magic items, colour maps of places like Crescentium, Sheol and Spyte -- along with lots of Russ Nicholson's best work, all on glossy high-quality art paper, and of course the whole Blood Sword saga converted to a 5e campaign.
It really is a labour of love by the creative team involved, and what I find most interesting is seeing a version of the lands of Legend that draws solely on the Blood Sword books and not on Dragon Warriors. This high-fantasy Legend is a very different place from the world of DW and Jewelspider, but no less brilliantly conceived and inspiring for that. I'm awed, flattered and humbled by the care Valentino Sergi and his team have put into every aspect of the design. In the ongoing absence of new official DW material, Legend players could do worse than embark on a Blood Sword 5e campaign.
How to buy a copy? You could try contacting the publishers, Tambù, but I suspect after two and a half years they've got other priorities. Maybe they'll license a paperback edition if enough people ask. For those who want to roleplay in the Blood Sword universe but simply can't get the 5e book, Oliver Whawell has converted the encounters to Dragon Warriors rules. Download those here:
My backers on Patreon got to see how I'd have written that final book, a more flashback-heavy, character-focused version that would probably be a better fit for a roleplaying campaign than the dungeon crawl that actually got published. And talking of book 5, Edizioni Librarsi have just published an all-new edition (based on my revised text of 2019) with a gorgeous Mattia Simone cover showing the Ghosts of the Magi in ominous conjunction on the last night of the world. (The hopes and fears of all the years...)
If you need maps of Legend, there's a wealth of cartographic treasures freely available on Lee Barklam's site The Cobwebbed Forest. And there will be some truly scrumptious maps in the forthcoming Blood Sword CRPG -- but now I'm getting ahead of myself. More news on that to come. Oh, and if all the above is like a coded message in Cabbandari and you're asking what Blood Sword even is, here's a podcast review by Mr H J Doom to get started.
Most of the time, what's marketed as fantasy is anything but fantastical. Fantasy movies are too often singularly lacking in magic, jokey romps with the visual styling of a medieval theme park. Fantasy novels, steered by imagined trends that publishing executives might just as well derive from staring at birds, are cookie-cutter remixes of the Last Big Thing*. And CRPGs? Face it, they're usually just D&D under a different label.
In such times, who would admit to liking fantasy? Tentatively my hand goes up. I'm a fan of fantasy fiction in the same way that Diogenes was a fan of honest men. So finding something really, really good in the genre is sweet water to parched lips. And that's The Thaumaturge, developed by Fool's Theory, which Jamie and I have been playing obsessively this month.
The game is set in Poland in 1905 and involves the experiences of Wiktor Szulski, who is one of a clandestine group of mages who derive their power by binding unseen beings called salutors. After the violent death of his father, from whom he was estranged, Wiktor returns home to Warsaw and investigates the possibility of murder while getting embroiled in family tensions and the politics and social intrigues of the day.
Twin pique
The sense of atmosphere is superbly evoked, both for the historical period and the feeling of uncanny magic deriving from Eastern European folklore. The occasional black humour is nicely judged and doesn't rely on anachronisms. The characters -- including some famous names you'll have heard of -- are rounded, complex and believable, and in investigating the stories of their Flaws (the character traits that led to a salutor attaching itself to them) you'll often find that your first or even second guess is wide of the mark. The story unfolds in surprising ways, always richly inventive, and with plot twists that are more interesting and make more sense than you'll find in many a movie or TV show.
Hello, Darkness, my old friend
Add to that the resonance with modern real-life events, which pervades the story without ever being hammered home, and you have what is not just the best CRPG for several years but the best fantasy story in any medium. The actors nail these characters. Listen to Maciej Nawrocki's pitch-perfect aristocratic drawl as Wiktor, Filip Lipiecki delivering Abaurycy's edge-of hysteria braggadocio (Richard Widmark couldn't have done it better) or Ewa Prus blending Ligia's heartfelt concern for her brother with the needling urge to scold him.
The writing team comprises Paweł Nowak, Magdalena Bialek, Alicja Korzewska, and Paula Mejsner, and this open-world game is so story- and character-centred that I'm bound to emphasize their work, but the credit goes not just to the writers but to the visual designers and the other developers who built up the meticulous details of the game world. Just look at the personality conveyed by the macabre and silent Upyr, oldest of your salutors, a nightmarish presence who feels also like a faithful companion and by that contrast draws you into what it feels like to be a thaumaturge with one foot in reality and the other in a different world. There is real creative genius here. My faith in fantasy, at least for another year, is restored.
*The other day a friend was telling me about a bestselling series set in a school for teen dragon-riders. "Of course it's just Anne McCaffrey meets J K Rowling," they said, "but with a TikTok vibe for readers who've never read a Pern or Harry Potter book."
Big news for Fabled Lands fans: Prime Games have released of the expansion pack for The Serpent King's Domain. Paul Gresty's expansive and ingeniously plotted adventure is now available for players of the FL CRPG. The new DLC includes 180 new items, 34 new achievements, a huge expansion to the explorable world, along with the following:
17 new quests
4 new titles
48 new enemies
6 new music tracks
There's also new markets, new weapons, new rules (including heat penalties for heavy armour in the jungle), new kinds of blessing and much more. Don't take my word for it -- all the details are here.
Players of the Fabled Lands CRPG by Prime Games can now head to fresh adventures in the distant east with the new downloadable content comprising Akatsurai, a feudal country on the brink of civil war. New lands to explore, new quests to find, new enemies to fight, and new loot to plunder. Banzai!
To help you rig your vessel for the trip, the base game currently has its biggest discount ever and Steam are providing a daily deal for the DLC. Grab your dai-sho and get over there.
At last, the moment we've been waiting for: the full release of the Fabled Lands CRPG on Windows and MacOS. After years of amazing work by Prime Games, this beautiful and immersive game is available for players to plunge into. The launch content includes the whole of the northern continent (FL books 1, 2, 4 and 5) with the Violet Ocean and Akatsurai to follow as downloadable add-ons.
This is the ultimate incarnation of Fabled Lands that Jamie and I dreamed of twenty years ago, when we pitched the FL computer game concept to Eidos as "characters exploring and adventuring across a gloriously coloured map of the world". It's been a long road, but Prime Games have brought that vision to life more vividly than we could ever have hoped.
How do you follow something as fantastic as this? Well, Prime Games still have a way to go with Fabled Lands -- including, perhaps, the southern continent. But as soon as I saw those tactical maps and started hurling some spells around, my first thought was how brilliant it would be to give Blood Sword the same treatment. Who knows?
The Fabled Lands CRPG has been on early access for a while now, but in just a few weeks you'll be able to buy the full release in all its glory. Initially the game will feature all the content from The War-Torn Kingdom, Cities of Gold & Glory, The Plains of Howling Darkness, and The Court of Hidden Faces. The plan is to add Over the Blood-Dark Sea and Lords of the Rising Sun as DLCs later in the year -- and after that, who knows? Possibly all-new FL adventures if the 23,000 people who have wishlisted the CRPG all buy it. Find it on Steam here.
If paper-&-pencil games are more your thing, this is a good opportunity to mention the Lyonesse RPG based on the fantasy novels by Jack Vance. I contributed to the book but it's the work of divers hands, all of them very talented and with the forceful gust of Vance's imagination to fill their creative sails. Video reviewer Pauli Kidd gives a good idea of what to expect:
The most exciting news of 2022 is arriving early: it's the planned roll-out of content for Prime Games' Fabled Lands CRPG. As Prime Games CEO Victor Atanasov puts it: "Who doesn’t want to have their own castle? With knights, a smithy, temples, and their own magus?" And soon you can.
I'm sometimes asked what it would take to complete the Fabled Lands gamebook series. The simple answer is that we need more players. From there comes the revenue to pay for all the writing, artwork, editing, typesetting, and so on. In the case of the Vulcanverse there was a multi-million-dollar company funding the books, but Fabled Lands has always relied on its fans and if the FL CRPG is as big a success as it's shaping up to be it could make that river flow, just as the success of MCU movies over the last decade has helped sustain the comic books.
Not that we're quite expecting the FL CRPG to rival the scale of Marvel's big screen success. But you never know.
And if you're wondering about the title of this post, here's the perfect musical accompaniment for a few hours' exploration of Golnir. And it's got Christopher Lee!
Do I need to say it twice? Get it on Steam, FL fans.
The early access edition features all character professions, the only limitation being that your adventures are restricted to two regions: the kingdom of Sokara and the the Great Steppes of the North. That's about twelve hours of content for a successful start-to-end playthrough that unlocks all forty game objectives.
All of the game's core features are integrated: exploration, combat, items, sailing, active and passive skills, resurrection deals, blessings, potions, tutorials, everything you might want. And the full version will open out to include Golnir and Uttaku, ie all the regions of the northern continent. And later expansions should extend across the Violet Ocean to Akatsurai, Ankon-Konu, and even those regions yet to be covered by the books.
Victor Atanasov and his team at Prime Games have done an amazing job, and they're just getting warmed up. Still need convincing? There's a playthrough by the utterly compelling master of stories Guy Sclanders here. Beats a box set of Marvel TV shows in my book. Better acting, too.
We've been seeing some glimpses of Prime Games' forthcoming Fabled Lands CRPG, and shared some of Guy Sclanders' wonderful FL playthroughs, so you won't want to miss Guy taking the alpha of the CRPG for a spin. Thanks to Victor Atanasov and the team for a truly marvellous-looking game.
Part two here:
I see in the chat window that Guy was reminded of the music accompanying Igrayne's dance in John Boorman's Excalibur. Judge for yourself below. (And, Guy, you're dead right; it is the best Arthurian movie ever.)
Here's a moment that every adventurer in the Fabled Lands has experienced: the confrontation with Vayss the Sea Dragon. (Yes, I know he's a sea dragon and he lives in a lake -- but I'm not going to argue with him.)
This gorgeous piece of artwork is by Renie Aganchyan, whose brother Bernar Aganchyan is the game's art director. That's one talented family!
It's just a taste of the goodies Prime Games have in store when their Fabled Lands CRPG erupts from the depths early next year. Players will be able to explore the lands of Sokara, Golnir, the Great Steppes and hopefully Uttaku too. And that's just for starters. Further releases will add other lands, and Jamie and I are looking at writing all-new books in the series if the CRPG kindles fresh interest. The year ahead could be a great time to explore uncharted waters.
The Fabled Lands CRPG that is currently in development at Prime Games is now on Steam. It's not going to be ready for a few months yet, but you can sign up so as not to miss any updates.
If these screenshots don't excite you, what can I say? You don't deserve to be an initiate of Nagil, or to have dinner with the worshippers of B-----r the Unspoken! Jamie and I have been playing it and it's everything we could have wished for in a Fabled Lands CRPG.
If the FL game sells well, hopefully Prime Games will follow up with a Blood Sword CRPG. But that could be a year or more off, so in the meantime take a look at Adam Samson's playthrough on YouTube:
If I told you there was a definitive history of computer roleplaying games available as a large format 528-page full colour book, you'd have your chequebook out and be asking me for the Kickstarter link, right?
Well, spring is here and with it a flowering of sweet beneficence. Because The CRPG Book Project, authored by divers hands under the editorial aegis of Felipe Pepe, is here right now and it's completely free. Don't believe me? I wouldn't blame you, so go take a look.
If you want a print copy you could probably fix one up for yourself on Lulu. Or just read the book on a tablet and let those colours glow the way they were always meant to.
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