Halloween treat, no trick

Forty years ago I wrote my first gamebook. I was a roleplayer and board gamer. I’d played the Fantasy Trip solo adventures, and even wrote a short solo dungeon for my friend Steve Foster (designer of Mortal Combat) when he had to spend a week in hospital, but I’d hardly noticed the growing kids’ gamebook craze until Ian Livingstone asked me to write a serialized solo adventure for White Dwarf. That was The Castle of Lost Souls.

It wasn’t long before almost everyone I knew was signing up to write a gamebook series. Joe Dever and Gary Chalk left Games Workshop to do Lone Wolf. Jamie Thomson too, teaming up with Mark Smith (who was another stalwart of our Tekumel campaign) to create Way of the Tiger and Falcon. You can see why Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (UK) might have felt a bit miffed. They’d started a trend and now half their workforce was deserting the ship to jump on the bandwagon – if that isn’t mixing metaphors.

I used to freelance for White Dwarf a lot in those days, but once Jamie quit the editorial chair I didn’t have as much reason to show up at the office. Then Steve Jackson asked me to come in to talk about a series of gamebooks that he wanted to publish. He and Ian were committed to doing more Fighting Fantasy for Puffin Books, so these would be Games Workshop’s own series.

Steve was always coming up with fascinating game mechanics. He told me about a little tactical combat system he’d thought of when stuck in a motel in the middle of America. You had a tactical diagram that showed which actions were permitted in a combat round. So from EVADE you could move to DEFEND, REST or NORMAL ATTACK. From DEFEND you could only move to EVADE or NORMAL ATTACK, and so on.

When the player’s action was compared with the opponent’s, that gave the number of hit points each combatant lost. ‘Do you think you could use this for a gamebook?’ Steve wondered.

I went away and did a little work on it. I can’t remember how I handled the NPC adversaries, but this was a 1980s gamebook so there wasn’t going to be any AI. Probably the NPCs just acted randomly each round, and that was cross-referenced with the player’s action to give the outcome for that round. That would eat up a lot of paragraphs if every encounter had its own set of action entries, so I imagine I had a few dozen entries for each of several types of monster. They could be customized by SPECIAL ATTACKS, which would vary depending on the monster.

‘Looks good,’ reckoned Steve, ‘but I’d like to see a sample. Fifty or sixty sections, say.’

I went home, sat down at my Olympia Traveller typewriter, and began: ‘Dusk in Wistren Wood…’ and launched into a solo adventure in a vampire’s mansion. When I showed it to Steve he liked it and proposed a contract for Vampire Crypt, as it was then called. When the contract came it had a clause preventing me from writing gamebooks for any other publishers. I’m glad I never signed it, as if I had then my writing career would have been over before it began. (You may have noticed that Games Workshop never did get around to publishing their own gamebook series.)

Still, I was left with the beginning of a gamebook. When I signed with Grafton Books a few months later to do the Golden Dragon series, those fifty sample sections let me get a head start on the tight deadlines. Of course I couldn’t use Steve Jackson’s clever rule system, but Golden Dragon needed something a lot simpler anyhow. And thus Crypt of the Vampire was born – or spawned, or sired, or whatever the appropriate term is for vamps.

(Yes, these are the original maps and notes. I'm that much of a hoarder.)

And here we are at the 40th anniversary. To mark it I dug out a reboot of the book that I wrote for Amazon a couple of years ago. They wanted apps for Alexa (for some reason they call them skills) so I turned Crypt of the Vampire into The Vampire’s Lair, a consciously old-school adventure in audio form. Rather than retain the dungeon fantasy flavour of the original, though, I leaned into the influences of those Universal and Hammer monster movies I loved as a kid, when horror was delicious shuddersome fun and before it became synonymous with serial killers, torture porn and (yawn) demonic possession.

The text I wrote for that is now on sale for Halloween in a slim paperback with Leo Hartas’s original illustrations reworked in full colour. (My generous Patreon backers get to read it for free -- just sayin'.) It was Leo’s first book too. I’d seen his portfolio when he came into the White Dwarf offices one day, and when my editor at Grafton, Angela Sheehan, asked me if there were any artists I wanted for the series Leo's name sprang to mind. And because of that I began a close and dear friendship, a friendship which also now forty years old. If it were a marriage that means Leo and I would be celebrating our ruby anniversary – a very suitable hue given the blood-sucking tastes of the sinister count.

Dusk in Wistren Wood

This year is the fortieth anniversary of my first published book, Crypt of the Vampire. I've blogged about it before, and longtime readers will already know the story of how it came to be written -- and revised (in 2013) and later expanded (in 2016) by David Walters.

And if you're familiar with the Mirabilis blog you'll also know how the Golden Dragon Gamebook series led to my lifelong friendship and creative partnership with Leo Hartas -- which also weaves back into the present day and my Jewelspider RPG, which is being illustrated by Leo's son Inigo. Everything's entangled.

In the introduction to David Walters's 2016 version I wrote:

"As my preference when running role-playing games is to let the players drive the story, I dispensed with the long introduction usual in gamebooks at the time. There’s no spoon-feeding here, no overt mission. You aren’t told your history. You are the hero, as the back cover blurb used to say, so your background and motivation are up to you. I’m not saying it works. You as the reader must decide that. I’m just saying it was deliberate. Crypt of the Vampire is my love letter to Hammer horror, and I wanted it to have the pace, vigour and dislocating dreamlike quality of the best of those movies."

Is there anything more to say? Yes, plenty. The full origin story of Crypt of the Vampire has yet to be told, but it's coming soon. With Samhain approaching, expect to hear the creak of a coffin lid, the howl of wolves, and the flapping of leathery wings. There's no escape -- so stock up on garlic and hawthorn stakes now, and watch this space.

While you're waiting -- have you tried this Golden Dragon mini-adventure, "The Island of Illusions", that Oliver Johnson and I wrote back in 1984? And listen to this comparative analysis of two very different Gothic novels by the virtual hosts on NotebookLM.

To get you in the mood for Halloween, here are some vampire movies I've enjoyed. Got your own favourite? That's what the comments are for.

• A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
• Count Dracula
• Cronos
• Dance of the Vampires
• Let The Right One In
• Mr Vampire
• Nosferatu the Vampyre
• Shadow of the Vampire
• Viy

Hammer and anvil

More from Fighting Fantasy Fest 5, and this time it's my chat with Gil Jugnot from Le Marteau et l'Enclume. Pay close attention and you'll get a scoop about the 40th anniversary of The Crypt of the Vampire -- but more of that anon.

Fighting Fantasy Fest

Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 is coming up in just over a week. As you may have realized, it's the 40th anniversary of my first gamebook, Crypt of the Vampire. Oh, and it's the 40th anniversary of something called Deathtrap Dungeon, which accounts for why Fighting Fantasy author Sir Ian Livingstone and artist Iain McCaig are the guests of honour.

Originally the plan was for me to be on a panel discussion with Jamie Thomson and Paul Mason, perhaps reprising some of our talk from MantiCon in 2018. (Video above if you can't make it to Ealing for FFF.) Plans changed and now I think the panel involves Paul, Steve Williams and Marc Gascoigne, while Jamie is going to give a talk and I'll be there to answer questions. So in the last six years I'll have attended conventions in Germany, Italy, France, and now Britain. At my age it might be time to slow down. Cutting out air travel would be good for the planet, too.

I'm not specifically at FFF to sign books, apart from a brief slot from 10:30 to 11:00 just before Jamie's talk, but if you happen to bring a book along and I have time then of course I won't refuse. Jamie and Paul are probably planning to be there all day, so if you have limited space in your bag I'd advise bringing Way of the Tiger or Robin of Sherwood rather than any of mine.

Now, about that 40th anniversary of Crypt of the Vampire. I ought to do something to mark that, you say? Watch this space.

A very witching time

My first published book was Crypt of the Vampire. That was before the Soviet Union fell. A couple of years ago I reworked it as an Alexa app (Amazon call them skills, but apps is what they are) but it never saw the light of day because the coder lost interest. Eventually -- by which I mean after I've finished Vulcanverse book 5, Jewelspider, Tetsubo, Abraxas and Λ -- I'll release that revised version as a book.

But you don't have to wait that long for some sinister vampiric thrills, because Red Ruin Publishing have unleashed another of their top-notch free Dragon Warriors solo adventures, Lair of the Vampire, set in Hudristania, where:

"...tiny villages squat miserably in the isolated mountain passes, like birds’ nests huddled into a crag for shelter. Frightened peasants quake under the rule of a hundred local despots. Terror soars aloft on membraneous wings by night and sifts the carrion in lonely churchyards—for this is the traditional home of vampires, ghouls and werewolves. Black-clad priests trek from valley to valley, but the peasants are always torn between faith and fear. Spend a few days in any of the mountain villages and you will see a funeral procession wending a path down through the narrow streets—old men whose lined faces show the scars of many losses, grim youths with jaws set in sullen defiance, veiled women sending up a shrieking lament, and wailing children who have yet to learn the injustice into which they have been born. The mourners are led by a priest with a silver crucifix on his breast. Watch and wait. After the procession has gone past, once the wailing and the clanging of the priest's bell have faded into the distance, you may see another figure pass by. He follows the mourners at a respectful distance, his eyes showing only a weary determination. On his back he has a heavy knapsack. After the coffin has been lowered into the ground, the priest will linger to pay this man a few silvers before hurrying back with the other villagers to bolt his door. The stranger opens his knapsack and prepares the items he will need. He is a draktoter, a profession that combines gravedigging with another unpleasant duty. He takes the mallet and stake from his sack and turns towards the open grave. It is his job to see that the ranks of the nosferatu will not be joined by this unfortunate soul."

(Incidentally, have I recommended Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing to you? Terrible title for a really down and dirty old-style vampire story that captures that same grim flavour.)

Over on Patreon today there are three adventure seeds for Halloween, as well as plenty of other material relating to Jewelspider and the lands of Legend generally. Also downloadable free from Red Ruin, and packed with the usual high standard of rules, scenarios, discussion and source material, comes Casket of Fays issue 11. Aunty Crookback alone will give you reason to close the curtains as dusk gathers, and you'll hesitate to answer the door to what sounds like trick-or-treaters...

That was the year that was

"Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."

Like H G Wells's time traveller, we've careened through another year. There should be a lever to slow this thing down, shouldn't there? But as "minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring" I've had the chance to glimpse a few standout moments of 2016.

My best roleplaying experience was getting to sit in on a session of Dom Camus' Earth Force campaign. This is a modern take on superheroes, with a dash of existential threat and a background swirl of geopolitics. I played a scientist and got through without actively needing to use my powers, but nonetheless getting multinational backing for my open source research program, which made me feel quite Tony Stark. The whole thing was helped along by an elegant, streamlined system that did everything you need of rules and kept out of the way of the roleplaying. I hope Dom will publish it.

Talking of sweetly simple rules, my favourite new game system has been Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders. If you're familiar with the sagas, this captures them perfectly. I ran it straight -- no fantasy, no 21st century mores, just bleak neighborhood struggles against the unsentimental elements and your fellow man. It's quick, easy, atmospheric, and the perfect antidote to decades of GURPS.

Proudest achievement of the year was publishing Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? This is my and Jamie's first gamebook in more than twenty years. I have no idea what will happen to the UK in 2019 (good luck -- by then I should have regenerated as an Irishman) but I am sure that the book will give you a better understand of the Brexit process than any of the government ministers charged with negotiating it. And Britain's godfather of gamebooks, Ian Livingstone himself, has taken a look at Can You Brexit? and pronounced it "very clever". He may be partial, of course.

Around the time I was finalizing Can You Brexit?, Ashton MacSaylor was getting ready to deliver on his Kickstarter for The Good, the Bad and the Undead. If you've hung around the saloon for a while, you'll remember that was the Wild West gamebook that Jamie was going to write but couldn't get beyond the outline. Ashton took it over, roped and threw and branded it, and now it's riding in out of the desert with a mean eye and a belt full of bullets.

Talking of gamebooks, I wrote two audio adventures for the Amazon Echo, one an all-new interactive drama, the other a reskin of my first ever gamebook Crypt of the Vampire. With very tight deadlines those were hard work, but luckily I like hard work, as long as it's work on something that interests me.


The highlight of the summer was travelling to Germany for Manticon. Good beer, nice people, an open society, fabulous landscapes, and the best trains I've ever been on. I might move there. (See Brexit, above.)

Earlier in the year, I got a call from Lawrence Whitaker at The Design Mechanism, publishers of the Mythras RPG. (Yes, I know; apologies for the spelling. I have to grit my teeth every time I type it, but it's the Runequest system with Glorantha stripped out, so it actually is rather brilliant.) TDM have acquired the licence to do a roleplaying game based on Jack Vance's fantasy trilogy Lyonesse, and having heard me talk about it on the Fictoplasm podcast they thought I might like to contribute a section to the book. You bet. I owe Jack Vance a huge creative debt and it's an honour to pay a little of that back.

Then there was Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios getting in touch to bring Tetsubo back from the Land of Roots. Nothing's forgotten, as we Robin of Sherwood fans know. Watch for that in 2019, if you still have money left after food and medicine rationing.

I also got roped in by Ian Turnbull, one of the Black Cactus co-founders, to do some work on a Virtual Reality game. Don't reach for your Oculus headset just yet. The developers originally hoped to get the game ready by October this year, but Ian's and my combined half-century in game development told us that was never going to happen. Maybe next October. My role was, as it often is these days, to clarify, simplify and focus the design and creative goals of the game. (And to chuck out all the bloody cutscenes on the principle of "discover, don't tell".)

In October my time machine lurched off into a pocket universe of misery for a few weeks when I came down with a nasty virus followed by a racking cough. It stopped me from going to TekUKon, which was a blow, but every cold has a silver lining. Unable to get on with any of my new projects, I whiled away the time for the fluid link to repair itself by editing the fifth Blood Sword book, The Walls of Spyte. It's still a slapstick dungeon bash but at least the flowchart now makes sense and the pieces of the key you find are properly numbered, so for the first time ever you can actually complete the adventure.

Surprising creative experience of the year was discovering I still have a copy of the Lord of Light boardgame that Nick Henfrey (creator of Spacefarers) and I pitched to Ian Livingstone (yes, 'im again) and Steve Jackson back around 1980. We didn't have the rights, which might or might not have been a problem. Nowadays there's always Kickstarter, so who knows?

And entertainment highlight of 2018 was discovering Guy Sclanders' hilarious Fabled Lands playthroughs on YouTube. Many of the comments focus on how nasty things used to happen in games in the old days. Well, nasty things are more fun. Whatever doesn't kill you helps you level up.

And on that note, best wishes for the year ahead. See you on the other side.

By the light of the night it'll all seem all right

A few weeks ago I got a call from Amazon to talk about the Halloween releases for Alexa. They’d seen my Frankenstein app and wondered if it could be turned into an interactive audio story.

I’d already talked to a few audiobook companies about that. Frankenstein is tailor-made for audio. It’s narrated by Victor Frankenstein, whose confidant and advisor you are, and written “to the moment” (ie in the present continuous tense). And I’ve been banging on about audio adventure games since I worked at Eidos in the mid-90s. So Amazon’s suggestion was perfect, except…

It’s over 150,000 words. That’s about twenty hours of audio. I’d have to edit all the text, it would need to be cast, recorded, have sound effects added, coded – and all that within five weeks, assuming one month was enough for testing.

So naturally I said I’d do it. Not only that, I’d recently talked to a company called Mythmaker Media about working on an interactive audio project, so how about hooking them in?

“We already have a developer in mind for Frankenstein,” the Amazon guy said, “but why don’t I talk to Mythmaker anyway? Maybe there’s another project you can do with them.”

A few days later, that one got the green light too. Now, as well as editing Frankenstein, I had to write an interactive audio drama from scratch. Only seven thousand words, but it had to be scary (Halloween, remember) and it had be a completely innovative model of interactive storytelling. (Otherwise why do it?)

Skype chirruped again. “What about your gamebook Crypt of the Vampire? That could be an Alexa app, couldn’t it? Can you get that ready for Halloween?”

I said yes on the basis that you can’t have too many irons in the fire; something always goes wrong. And a few days later the Frankenstein developer, having run the numbers for actors’ fees and studio time, asked if it would work with synthesized speech.

“Not really. Victor has to come across as impassioned, driven, stressed, increasingly desperate… But look, the story is in six parts. The second part is different from the others. It’s the monster’s story told in second person, so you are the monster. That might just work with synthesized speech. And it’s just thirty thousand words, so I’d have time to edit it and add markup. Pauses, interjections, that kind of thing.”

They lost interest. Not to worry, as I still had the drama with Mythmaker Media (that’s called “Fright Tonight”) and the gamebook, by now retitled “The Vampire’s Lair” because it’s snappier. Or bitier.

For The Vampire’s Lair I’ve teamed up with a programmer called Kevin Glick. We decided to strip out all the game-heavy mechanics: hit points, skill rolls, things like that. It’s audio, after all, though in fact there’s a Fire Tablet option with some toothsome graphics by Leo Hartas. The way it works now, you play until you die, and you can then either buy another life and keep going, or you can restart from the beginning. (And, yes, of course it’s possible to play right through to the end without having to buy a single life.)

So I hauled out a copy of Crypt of the Vampire, my first ever gamebook from way back in 1984, and embarked on what I thought would be a simple editing job. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, as they say, the enemy in this case being reality. Too much of Crypt was a dungeon bash when what Kevin and I needed was a haunted house adventure. Too many encounters depended on dice rolls. All of that needed to be rewritten. Also, it needed to be scary. Fun-scary, you understand, like pumpkin lanterns and spray-can cobwebs. The orcs had to go.

Luckily I wrote “Fright Tonight” first, because plunging into the flowchart for Crypt and completely rewriting about half of the book would have burned out my creative psyche for weeks. But I got it done, and the result should be soon available on Amazon as an Alexa Skill. (Yeah, don’t blame me; that’s what they call them.) Just say, “Alexa, enter The Vampire’s Lair,” and get ready for some agreeable chills.

Lord Tenebron has risen from the grave

My first ever gamebook was Crypt of the Vampire, illustrated by Leo Hartas, and recently Leo was asked to do five new illustrations for a special colour edition of the book published by Megara Entertainment. It's not just window dressing. Megara also commissioned Way of the Tiger scribe David Walters to write a bunch of new sections for the book, expanding the adventure by about 30%.

David has done a fang-tastic job of matching the style and mood of the original book, while also making it more cohesive by building up the sense of the vampire as a threat throughout. So it's no longer just a dungeon bash. Now it really feels like you might find Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing around the next corner. (Possibly with Jack MacGowran and Alfie Bass not all that far away.)

You can get the new edition exclusively from Megara, while the original version is available from Fabled Lands Publishing on Amazon. Take your pick.

Another bite of the cherry

It's dusk in Wistren Wood again. If you've been stymied by earlier false starts of the crowdfunding for Crypt of the Vampire (my first ever gamebook) then you'll be happy to hear that Megara Entertainment are running it again for real. The Kickstarter campaign is not just for a full-colour hardback edition of that book, but also to pay Leo Hartas to colourize his illustrations for the second Golden Dragon gamebook, The Temple of Flame.

Black and wight

A little while back I mentioned a Kickstarter campaign by Megara Entertainment for a hardback edition of Crypt of the Vampire, which was my first-ever gamebook and also Leo Hartas's first illustration job. That was the mid-80s and Leo was still at university at the time - as indeed I might have been, researching fundamental particles and the theory of everything, if I hadn't frittered away the time I should have spent revising for Finals on roleplaying, girls, and punting. But that's a detail.

Anyway, after tweaking the campaign a few times, Megara gave it up as a bad job. I could have told them. In fact I did tell them. A Kickstarter for Heart of Ice might have soared to great heights, but Crypt of the Vampire was written for 9-12 year olds, and they're not the demographic that's going to shell out $50 for a hardback book.

The saddest casualty of the aborted Kickstarter campaign is that we won't get to see Leo's colour versions of his original artwork. When I first heard about that I thought it was a terrible idea. Why not colourize Citizen Kane while we're at it? But I should have trusted more in Leo's talent. As this sample shows, he can do a lot more than drop in some tints using Photoshop.

You can't buy any of Leo's original artwork via Kickstarter, but if you wanted a piece to hang on the wall then you can contact Leo directly via his website. He's got drawings from the Golden Dragon books and from Down Among the Dead Men, as well as a drawer full of fabulous fantasy maps from Fighting Fantasy. It's as great a treasure as any Smaug ever made a pillow of, believe me. And what a great birthday or Christmas present (is it too early to mention Christmas? sorry) for a fantasy fan.

STOP PRESS: Would you believe there has been some talk this week about Megara restarting that abortive Kickstarter campaign? I wasn't going to authorize licences for any more of my old gamebooks, but Leo seems keen and I'd hate to miss the chance to see his colour versions of all those old pics. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

Quelle horreur!

Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once. No, honestly, because it's about a Kickstarter for Le Tombeau du Vampire, "premier livre de la série Dragon d'Or", currently being run by Megara Entertainment, and I suspect not that many of this blog's readers are fluent in French.

Having said that, you might still want to check out the Kickstarter page because Leo Hartas is putting up some of his original pen-and-ink drawings for the book as one-off items you can buy - including my favourite one (possibly the first illustration Leo did for what was his and my first ever book) of the gate into the vampire's garden. And you can read that story here.

A neck romancer

I think of Crypt of the Vampire as my first gamebook, but it’s moot. I’d already written the magazine version of Castle of Lost Souls. That was serialized in White Dwarf in the summer of 1984, several months before the Golden Dragon series launched, and later got reworked as the sixth GD title. But Crypt was the first time I’d taken on a whole book.

Those were busy times. I had to turn down designing the PC game “Eureka by Ian Livingstone” because of all my magazine and book commitments. Maybe that was a mistake, as my friend Steve Foster, who wrote it in my place, told me he bought his first house on the proceeds. (The picture below, that's us back then in our slimmer days. I'm the one reading Captain America.) But at least with Golden Dragon I got my name on the title page. The road that’s grassy and wants for wear, you see.

Crypt and the later books nearly didn’t happen. In spring of 1984, while I was writing the first instalments of Castle of Lost Souls, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson offered me a contract to do a series of gamebooks for Games Workshop. I’d done bags of work for GW before – an entire role-playing game in 1980 called Adventure (never published; GW acquired the RuneQuest rights) and then in 1983 an entire Questworld campaign pack with Oliver Johnson (never published; GW lost the RQ rights). In the case of the gamebooks, though, they seemed to be serious. They were willing to pay an advance, and that was a first.

Except… it was £350 per book, which was a pittance even in the ‘80s. And it would have been an exclusive contract, meaning I couldn’t work with any other publisher. “Why would Ian and Steve want to compete with Fighting Fantasy?” I wondered. For whatever reason, I dragged my heels about signing and was mighty glad I did, as a matter of weeks later I went to see Angela Sheehan at Dragon Books, had a nice long chat, and walked out with a two-book deal.

Originally Temple of Flame was down as the first book in the series, and the contract describes the other as “Dungeon of the Undead”. I think it was probably my dad who said, “Put ‘vampire’ in the title, it’ll grab people more than ‘undead’.” The publishers wanted to call it Crypt of Dracula, but I wasn’t having that. These books would be read by kids, and I didn’t want their first experience of Bram Stoker’s creation to be in a gamebook. Dracula was already in public domain, Stoker having died seventy-two years earlier, but I believe writers owe a creative courtesy to each other that lasts a lot longer than the term of copyright – though, regrettably, not everyone shares that view.

For the new edition, I’ve revised the text slightly to excise the trad fantasy elements (a hobgoblin, an elf) that seemed most intrusive. Now the atmosphere is very slightly more Gothic, the setting less definitely medieval. “Ah!” the DW players will say, “but isn’t Wistren Wood in Ellesland?” And so it is, but my Legend games have moved on – past the Last Trump at the end of The Walls of Spyte, even – to a time of matchlocks and sabres*.

But that’s getting close to a foolish consistency. Whether or not Crypt of the Vampire is set in Legend, at heart it belongs to the lurid fairytale world of Hammer horror, where Cushing’s alert, flashing gaze locked with the fiery brooding in the eyes of Lee, and dark ivy-choked halls waited in the depths of darker woods. I like what Johnny S Geddes said about Crypt on Demian Katz’s gamebook page:

“Every now and then around midnight, and especially when there's thunder outside, I go back and take another tread through the enchanted forest leading to a dark mansion.”

That’s how I like to think of it being enjoyed. And, with Halloween almost upon us, here’s the chance to curl up with something creepy. The new edition also has Leo Hartas’s illustrations, incidentally – it was Leo’s first book as well as mine. Start as you mean to go on, that's our motto.

* Update 2024: In fact that gunpowder-powered version of Legend never came about, as I realized that the kind of campaign I was planning to run wasn't a good fit with the tastes of some of my players. So the Legend you'll see in my Jewelspider RPG is the original Dark Ages/early medieval setting familiar from Dragon Warriors. 

Drac the Dane

More Way of the Tiger news on Friday, but here's a curiosity I wanted to share. Following on from the Danish edition of The Temple of Flame, it's Peder Bundgaard's cover for Crypt of the Vampire. Look for this one in October, along with four other revised, revamped and utterly awesome gamebooks. (Crypt would have been ready sooner, but I couldn't resist saving it up for Halloween.)

The vampire in the English version was named Lord Tenebron, incidentally, not Count Dracula. That was a deliberate choice that may baffle marketing experts, but seemed to me to be a question of creative integrity. Nowadays fanfic will happily appropriate even copyrighted characters, of course, but in the new edition he's still going to be Tenebron. He's not my most original gamebook vampire (that was the far more earthy Grim Dugald in "In the Night Season", the interactive section of my first Heroquest book) but hey, I was just starting out. I don't doubt there'll be more bloodsuckers to come.