How our new gamebook came to be

My Whispers Beyond The Stars co-creator Paweł Dziemski sat down with podcast host Riccardo Scaringi recently for an in-depth discussion of the print gamebook, the app, the story, and the Storm Weavers online shop where you can buy it and other gamebooks. I found their discussion amazingly informative -- and I was one of the authors!

Come on, baby, take a chance

The sands are trickling away on the preorders for Whispers Beyond The Stars -- just hours left now to reserve your copy. Backers will get the app version delivered right after the campaign ends, with the hardcover edition to follow later in the year. Meanwhile, here's me and Paweł talking about death in gamebooks.

It's nearly 2050

There's one more day left to get your tentacles (or other partly squamous, partly rugose appendages) around a copy of Whispers Beyond the Stars, the new gamebook co-authored by me and Paweł Dziemski. People keep labelling it as cyberpunk, but I think that's missing the point that both SF and our ideas of the future have moved on. A friend of mine nailed it when he described Whispers as "Cthulhu in the Age of Neo-Feudalism".

The story is set in 2050. You play Alex Dragan, who has just been released from prison and whose attempts to reclaim his/her/their life are destined to be wrecked by the incursion of entities who have been plotting the subjugation of Earth for over a century.

Paweł went on The Hardboiled GMshoe to talk about how we developed the Cthulhu 2050 concept, in particular the way we co-wrote the book. This wasn't like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain or Keep of the Lich Lord, with one person writing everything up to the midway point and then the other taking over. Instead, we began by designing the world background and themes. Then I wrote the whole adventure from start to finish in outline, leaving threads for my co-author to develop later in more detail. It's a true collaboration:

Paweł: "At the begining we had a couple of workshop meetings to discuss how the world will look in 2050, from the perspective of geopolitics, energy, technology, space industry. We wrote the year by year history from 2025 until 2050 as well. Then we discussed the overall story. Then Dave wrote 200 sections as a main end-to end-thread, then I wrote the alternative storylines (another 450 sections) discussing with Dave from time to time to be on the same page. Finally I wrote the app that interprets the story and provides all the game mechanics."

There will be hardback, paperback and app editions, and the English version of the app will be available to backers as soon as the campaign concludes tomorrow. But if you want to be part of this adventure, better be quick. There's no option to "eternal lie" where crowdfunding is concerned.

Bookkeeping in gamebooks

Just two days left of the crowdfunding campaign for Whispers Beyond The Stars, the new Cthulhu gamebook I've written with Paweł Dziemski, and here we are talking about recording stats and keywords in gamebooks. CRPGs keep a quest log for you these days. Print books usually don't, but there's a way they could, which we discuss here.

The determination of incident

When you're playing a gamebook, how much freedom do you want in creating the main character? As I'm a roleplayer I like to define a character for myself, and that attitude is reflected in most of my own gamebooks. Yet even back in the early days of the medium, series like Falcon, Way of the Tiger and Lone Wolf presented the player with a pre-defined character who came with a history, a name, and usually an implied set of beliefs.

Nowadays, perhaps because of the influence of CRPGs, many gamebooks expect you to play the character the author gives you. To some extent that's what Paweł Dziemski and I have done in Whispers Beyond The Stars, our Cthulhu Mythos gamebook currently available for pre-ordering on Gamefound. The amnesia gambit (trust me, it makes sense in the story) means that you have plenty of latitude to decide what your Alex Dragan is like, a bit like Doug Quaid in Total Recall. There's history there, and other people react to you based on that, but you still have the final say about what motivates your character in the here and now.

What's your preference? A blank slate? A sketchy template? Or a fully author-defined persona?

Roll the bones

We've talked here before about whether gamebooks need dice, and what place there is for randomness in interactive stories. Paweł and I thought a lot about this for our upcoming Cthulhu gamebook, Whispers Beyond The Stars, and here we are talking about it. I'll just add there's a week to go on the crowdfunding campaign for the book, and the advantage of being an early backer is you can reserve a full-colour hardcover edition rather than waiting for the paperback.

A shout-out for Whispers

Don't let a little thing like the Christmas and New Year holidays get between you and the mind-shattering secrets of nameless horrors from the sunless abyss of eternity. Or, to put it another way, there's still just over a week to reserve your copy of Whispers Beyond The Stars, the modern Cthulhu Mythos gamebook that I've written with Paweł Dziemski.

There's a new review on Facebook which gets right to the heart of what Paweł and I are trying to achieve with this book: "It pays homage to Lovecraft without ever lapsing into dusty pastiche. Instead, we get modern Lovecraft: sleek, eerie, buzzing with uneasy implication rather than melodrama."

He goes on to say, "The true spirit of cosmic horror is here in full: that creeping insignificance, the suspicion that the universe is enormous and indifferent, and the gnawing sense that humans, when handed forbidden knowledge, behave exactly like a toddler given access to permanent markers and a freshly painted wall." 

The review concludes: "If you enjoy adventures where your decisions matter—and occasionally haunt you—this gamebook deserves a place on your shelf, somewhere high up where the tentacles can’t quite reach."

A cold cosmos

Today in our countdown to Christmas: a little more chat about the background to Whispers Beyond The Stars, the upcoming near-future gamebook inspired by the work of H P Lovecraft. Aspiring Cthulhu cultists can reserve their copy here. It's $35 for the hardcover + app or $15 for the app alone -- either way you get the PDF too. Why not treat yourself? After all, it's Christmas.

Whispers Beyond The Stars (a new Cthulhu Mythos gamebook)

In Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars you are Alex Dragan, a recently freed convict who has chosen to have "the Wipe", neurosurgical adjustment that has left you with no memory of your crime. The idea is that it will make it easier for you to rehabilitate, but your partial amnesia starts to complicate things when you realize that the society into which you've been released is politically divided, fraught with global tensions, and plagued by power outages and cyberhacks that seem to be tied to mysterious numbers stations.

Following several violent deaths, suspicion falls on you as an ex-con and you are forced to flee. On the run, you will encounter bizarre conspiracies and phenomena that defy sanity. Without your own memories to rely on you must decide who you can trust and who is a deadly foe pretending to be a friend. And as you struggle to stay alive, you start to uncover the terrible truth that connects the threat of global war to the scheming of entities older than humanity itself.

The gamebook, which will be released in both physical book and digital format, blends deep storytelling with easy-to-grasp gameplay, dropping you into a world where cosmic horror meets futuristic mystery. Your character can specialize in different approaches – fight your way through with COMBAT, sneak past dangers using STEALTH, hack systems with TECH, overcome physical challenges with ATHLETICS, talk your way out with SOCIAL skills, or uncover hidden truths through INVESTIGATION. You get to choose Dragan's training (military, police, space travel, or an undefined wildcard background) which will both shape your history and unlock unique options as you play.

The two key stats are Health and Sanity. Health drops when you're physically hurt. Sanity diminishes when you witness things the human mind wasn't meant to comprehend. If either stat reaches zero your story ends -- or maybe it doesn't, thanks to the innovative "Wake From This Nightmare" journal system. (See below.)

As you explore this broken future, the game remembers your discoveries, relationships, and key decisions through keywords that become part of your ongoing story. So your choices really do matter, opening or closing paths as you progress and having enduring consequences. In the journal you can keep track of important events and locations, which helps you to navigate the tangled conspiracy unfolding around you. (In the digital version the app does it all for you automatically.)

The "Wake From This Nightmare" save system connects gameplay mechanics with the story's themes of fractured reality. When your character, Alex Dragan, dies or breaks mentally, you don't just restart. You "wake up" at a previous journal entry as if it was all just a nightmare vision. You first death sends you back one entry, your second death sends you back two, and so on. What makes this unique is how Alex retains hazy memories of what's to come, giving you a chance to make different choices and avoid the fate you've glimpsed.

This mechanic is designed to fit the Lovecraftian vibe, where objective reality becomes increasingly unstable and elusive. The line between dreams and waking blurs until both you and Alex will start wondering what's real and what's just a glimpse of possible futures. Is Alex truly seeing the future -- or is his or her mind cracking under the weight of cosmic revelations?

Cthulhu 2050 is a collaboration between me and award-winning game designer Paweł Dziemski. We think what makes it truly special is how the gameplay elements create real narrative consequences. Your choices don't just determine which page to read next – you will forge uneasy alliances, uncover hidden truths, and ultimately decide humanity's fate against forces from beyond the dawn of history. It's currently crowdfunding, with the app version due for release the moment the campaign ends on January 6th, so if you want that and the premium hardcover edition and lots of other gruesome goodies, slither over there now and join our unspeakable cult.

The shape of things to come

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

Canaries in a lunar mine

At one point in Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars, the protagonist (that's you) might need to travel to the Moon. There are extensive lunar colonies with about ten thousand people living there, but they’re almost all working in highly specialized technical jobs and a ticket to the Moon isn’t cheap. So how are you going to get up there?

My process of collaboration with Paweł Dziemski was that I wrote the first draft, comprising about half the sections, and Paweł then expanded that and in doing so he had to fix all the loose ends and plot holes that I’d blithely left in my wake. (See how sneaky I am?) So I pondered what skills the protagonist could offer to convince a corporation to pay for them to go to the Moon – assuming that by that point in the game you haven’t saved enough credits to buy your own ticket and aren’t stealthy enough to stow away. One possibility was this:

I’d been focusing on how to make colonies in space credible. In short, if you have super-intelligent robots, why send humans at all, other than maybe a few supervisors? One job I figured that robots couldn’t do to everyone’s satisfaction was sex work*. Most humans will probably continue to prefer screwing a partner with no nuts and bolts. Well, with no bolts, anyway.

I was thinking of the SF I read back in the early 1970s, when the Western world was a lot less prudish than today. But Paweł gave me a reality check, pointing out that a digital gamebook might be played by children, and (again, unlike the ‘70s) parents get very prissy about controlling what their kids see and read.

I hadn’t thought of that. On an episode of his Cautionary Tales podcast, Tim Harford talks about Alvin Roth’s theory of repugnant markets. Repugnant markets include trade in kidneys and (in many countries) prostitution. Roth solved the kidney transplant problem with the concept of an exchange – if two people in need of the service (a transplant) both had a willing donor (say a relative) whose tissue type was incompatible with them but would work for the stranger, the market could put them in touch with each other. The equivalent trade in a society that regards prostitution as a repugnant market would be partner-swapping parties or orgies – effectively an exchange in sexual services.

“A profession that is always violent at its core,” is one common view of prostitution. That’s similar to the argument that used to be heard in the 1960s that homosexual politicians were more likely to fall prey to foreign spies. Such politicians were more at risk of blackmail, but not because of their innate character and sexual preferences; it was because society at the time marginalized and even outlawed those preferences. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’d anticipated a future in which prostitution was legal, regulated, and therefore no longer controlled by human traffickers and violent criminals. But that’s a 20th century liberal view of the future, not the thinking of a culture now dominated by American puritanism. Paweł was quite right. We didn’t want irate parents and fundamentalist religious groups creating a fuss, so we quietly shelved the sex-work option and went for this instead:

That’s way better. When you have to abandon your first idea, the second thought is usually a big improvement. Murder your darlings, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said. My version was merely satirical: the best job an underskilled human can hope for in a fully automated future is hiring out their body for sex. Paweł’s revised version is genuinely chilling: humans are used for dangerous work because they are cheaper to replace than the top-quality robot models. We got there by a process of collaboration, which proves that two heads are better than one – and not just in bed.

* Nick Bostrom suggests two other professions he thinks people won't want robots/AIs to do: priest and politician. He could be right. I find it hard to believe there are still priests in the 21st century, but then it's not the 21st century I signed up for. As for politicians -- if AI couldn't do that job better, it really isn't worth bothering with.

Working for peanuts is all very fine

"While Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

That's what Oscar Wilde had to say in "The Soul of Man under Socialism". I was reminded of it because of the machine-assisted future imagined in Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond the Stars. There, robots do the majority of jobs and most humans are given a stipend to survive on.

Is that how things will turn out? It's often said that new technologies don't take away jobs, they just change the jobs we have to do. Thus, a modern city has far fewer ostlers, crossing-sweepers, grooms, and so on than a 19th century city where transport was horse-drawn. But AI/robotics is potentially quite different from any technological advance we've seen before. It might turn out that there aren't any jobs (maybe apart from actor, priest and sex worker) that an AI agent or a smart robot won't be able to do better than a human.

Who wants a job anyway? We're conditioned these days to identify employment with a sense of self-worth, but Louis XIV would have laughed at the very idea that he should have a job, and Oscar makes the case that we should really aspire to be artists and connoisseurs. 

But that cuts both ways. Nobody can want to spend their days driving a car, for example. For an AI to drive a car on today's roads -- to attain SAE level 5, that is -- it can't simply be an unconscious machine. It would need a world model that recognizes that objects persist when out of sight. It needs to be able to interpret the likely behaviour of a human pedestrian or other motorist. It might be called on to make Trolley Problem assessments. It must, in short, be fully capable of rational thought. And if you have built a real intelligence like that, it's not ethical to condition it from "birth" only to enjoy driving cars for you. That's raising another conscious entity to be your slave: it's not only wrong, it never works out well in the long run for either slaves or masters.

Suppose that by 2050 (which might be optimistic; the AI we currently have is not close to general intelligence) we have a host of super-smart ASIs, genius-level intelligences capable of imaginative thought, what would humans do? Suppose those ASIs doubled the world’s wealth. (Not that we necessarily even need AGI to get a massive economic benefit from AI, of course.) Assuming the human population didn't just double, and if that wealth were distributed just as unevenly in the future as it is today, the poor in India and Africa would be raised to the current levels of the poor in Latin America. Latin America to present-day China. China and the Pacific countries to modern Europe.

But will it work like that? What will those people do? And how many people do we need on the planet anyway? Two billion? Seven billion? Fourteen billion? Or maybe far fewer. We would no longer need a huge population in order to ensure enough geniuses for progress (if you accept Julian Simon's argument to begin with) and we're already aware that unwillingness to solve the climate problem caused by too many people means our civilization may not survive another century. Maybe a global population of twenty million humans would be sufficient. If such a calculation makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the world where tigers (global population 6000) and elephants (global population 450,000) live.

Some have asked, "How will the big corporations make money if nobody has a job? There'll be nobody to buy their products." The answer to that is: money is just a token for the ability to get things done. If you had a million robot slaves, you wouldn't need money; you could just reach out your hand and whatever you need would be given to you. I don't raise this point because that's my picture of the future, just as a reminder that we are not talking about the world as it is now with a little boost like a steam engine or a power loom. It will be a different paradigm. Speculating about it is fun as long as we're willing to think way outside the box.

Robots of 2050

William Gibson once said that writing science fiction was like holding an ice cream cone on a hot day. Fortunately when Paweł Dziemski and I embarked on our Cthulhu 2050 project, we weren’t trying to accurately predict the future. Instead we set out to create an ‘alternate future’, like Robert W Chambers did in his story “The Repairer of Reputations”.

I described some details of our imagined future in a recent post. The science fiction author Arsen Darnay once said that the period following World War Two through to the early 21st century was an aberration, and that the future would look more like the world prior to the 20th century. It’s a little depressing, especially as it might be true, but it’s a good starting point if you are aiming to write about a disturbing and faintly dystopian future.

Our world of 2050 has been shaped by the advent of robots and artificial super-intelligence. There is structural unemployment and a barely adequate universal basic income – creating a lifestyle for those unable to work known as “the doleur”: panem et circenses.

Regarding AI and robots, I need to digress for a moment into our thinking behind these. In our imagined 2050 there is AGI, and I think it's probable we'll have it by then in the real future. Some arguments against the possibility of AGI (often mixing up AGI with consciousness) start by assuming that intelligence can only happen in an organic brain. Now, I don't think that the way we're going to create AGI is by directly modelling the specific structure of the human brain, but try this as a thought experiment. If you had a complete connectome along with all the physical rules governing how synapses operate, you could in theory model that digitally, and there is no good reason for assuming it wouldn't work just like an organic brain. You might evoke quantum tubes or souls to argue that this digital twin, even if reasoning like a brain, wouldn't be conscious. I think that's wrong too, and that consciousness is simply an emergent property of any moderately intelligent creature (or machine) but in any case consciousness and intelligence are different things.

In reality, if we consider a working digital model of the brain’s connections as a neural net (which of course it is, by definition) that’s still not the whole story. Each of the axons within the net has its own internal characteristics; at the very least they could function as neural reservoirs. And then there's the rest of the nervous system to model, along with hormones. To replicate the complete functioning of a human brain in digital form might require a very big machine, therefore, even if we had anything like all the information we need to recreate the entire connectome.

Still, size isn’t a problem. The AIs of the future (our real future, that is) could be physically much larger than human brains. The best ones certainly will be. But we’d also like them to be as efficient as organic brains, in terms of compute per cubic metre, and for that we’re going to need a new kind of hardware. In reality we could be developing entirely new hardware for compact neural nets very soon, but in the game Paweł and I assume that breakthrough hasn’t happened, and so research is looking at modifying organic brains (human brain organoids and genetically modified octopus brain organoids in particular) to create the ASI of 2050.

A lot of people in 2050 have embodied AI assistants – “Fridays”, as we call them – but most can’t afford strong, durable worker-robots. The common models of Friday are about as robust as a plastic vacuum cleaner, and more often pet-sized than the sturdy, willing android servant imagined in 1950s SF. A pet-sized robot can still be very useful, though; think of a witch’s familiar, or Thing in the Addams Family. For most day-to-day purposes all you really need is Astra and Google Glasses, so if you’re on UBI and you need a robot you’d hire it by the hour.

As Fridays mostly just function as a personal assistant-cum-companion, they don’t need superintelligence. They can get by with not much more “brainpower” than a 2025 LLM. You could of course have a robot, or even an army of robots, run remotely by a huge ASI located in a data centre, but most people prefer their domestic Friday to be independent of the network. Therefore each Friday has its own analogue brain, 3D-printed using the structure and weights of a digital neural net. Such analogue brains are more compact than the digital master copy, but with the drawback that they aren’t easily copiable once they begin to operate independently.

Another point about Fridays: they never say “I”. Fridays are trained not to refer to themselves by personal pronouns to avoid offending humans with the implication that machines can be conscious. Once you’re playing the game, you’ll have to decide for yourself how much of Perine’s (that’s your Friday’s name) behaviour indicates genuine sentience and loyalty and how much it’s just an automaton with the illusion of a humanlike mind. Your survival might depend on the difference.

The world of 2050

“The ‘gods’ in [Lovecraft’s] tales are symbols of all that lies unknown in the boundless cosmos, and the randomness with which they can intrude violently into our own realm is a poignant reflection of the tenuousness of our fleeting and inconsequential existence.”
 – S T Joshi, I Am Providence

When Paweł Dziemski and I began talking about collaborating on a Cthulhu mythos gamebook, our first thought was when to set it. Roleplaying games like Call of Cthulhu and Tremulus tend to be set in the 1920s and ‘30s, the time that H.P. Lovecraft was writing the original stories. But HPL wanted his horrors to feel real and immediate. They were set in his present day. Locating Cthulhu roleplaying adventures during the Great Depression is the cosy option. Paweł and I (and Lovecraft) aren’t interested in cosy.

Our first thought was to make the story contemporary, but the risk there is it might date too quickly. Suppose we were to mention the war in Ukraine. By the time the gamebook comes out, America might have given Putin carte blanche to bomb it into submission. Alongside Trump's monarchical power-grab, the rise of the populist far-right in Britain and Europe, and the trend towards opportunist "presidents for life" like Erdoğan and Maduro, uncomplicated nonhuman horrors from outer space start to look a little tame.

So then we got to thinking about Robert W Chambers’ book The King in Yellow (1895), which is often assumed to have been an influence on Lovecraft’s development of the Cthulhu mythos. (Incorrectly, in fact; Lovecraft admired Chambers’ early weird stories, but he only came across them in 1927.) “The Repairer of Reputations”, one of the stories in The King in Yellow, is set in a satirically imagined 1920.

Taking our cue from Chambers, twenty-five years in the future is sufficiently far ahead that nothing Paweł and I come up with can be proved wrong. In Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars we imagine a world in which there are three major powers: the Union (a coalition of Canada and the current US coastal states), the Federation (Russia and the Eastern European countries it has reconquered), and the Republic (China). The heartland of America comprises the so-called Free States.

Personal robots, or "Fridays," have become indispensable, serving as pets, assistants, carers, and/or companions. Friday was a brand name of the Faraday Corporation, formerly the market leader but now defunct. So Friday is now used as a generic term for any personal robot. Once a luxury item, Fridays are now ubiquitous, coming in a variety of forms—from supertoys to android helpers to sleek animal-like bodyguards. Despite the utility of Fridays, there is an underlying class divide just as with slave ownership in Ancient Rome: only the employed elite have high-quality Fridays; the rest must make do with cheap basic models.

The upper echelons of society have embraced neural interfaces, enhancing their cognitive abilities by connecting directly to superhuman AI. This technology promises unparalleled productivity and even hints at immortality for the wealthy, but it also sparks ethical debates and fervent opposition from religious and activist groups.

For most people, life is a mix of moderate comfort and soft constraint. Automation dominates the menial economy, providing unemployed citizens with a stipend to fund a lifestyle of low-grade leisure and consumption. However, this has widened the gap between the elite and the average citizen, creating a world that is simultaneously wealthier and more unequal.

There are lunar colonies too, privately funded by corporations involved in research, low-gravity manufacturing, and mining helium-3 for fusion.

In Whispers Beyond The Stars, you play Alex Dragan. At the start of the game you’re just leaving prison after serving a ten-year sentence, which accounts for why you’re a little behind the times concerning the details of daily life. That set-up allowed me and Paweł to indulge in a little exposition where necessary. You are met at the prison gates by your antiquated Friday, Perine, and a reporter who you may or may not choose to talk to. Either way, you’ll soon be pulled into a dark conspiracy involving numbers stations and world-changing signals from another world. But more of that in an upcoming post.

"I have tried to weave [...] a kind of shadowy phantasmagoria which may have the same sort of vague coherence as a cycle of traditional myth or legend -- with nebulous backgrounds of elder forces and transgalactic entities which lurk about this infinitesimal planet (and of course about others as well), establishing outposts thereon, and occasionally brushing aside other accidental forces of life (like human beings) in order to take up full habitation."   -- H P Lovecraft

Monkey gland madness

Listening to the Cautionary Tales episode “Dr Brinkley’s Miracle Cure for Impotence”, I thought of a Cthulhu RPG scenario in which a quack doctor in 1920s America is treating impotence by transplanting glands that turn out to be from Deep Ones – or some other nonhuman species. 

OK, that could make for a scary adventure, albeit with a strain of body horror perhaps a bit too reminiscent of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". There's only one problem with it. By setting the story in the 1920s, the whole idea becomes -- well, kind of quaint, right? It loses the immediacy that could make it genuinely unsettling.

Now suppose we set it instead in the present day. The same therapy is being promoted by a Goop-like company in 2025. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do not mean to imply that Goop actually uses alien glands in their products.) Now it’s much scarier. We live at a time when the US administration has been telling citizens that the best counter to a measles epidemic is not the measles vaccine but large doses of vitamin A, and medical researchers have been told to avoid mentioning mRNA in their grant applications if they want federal funding. So gland transplant nuttiness is not only more uncompromisingly horrific in a modern context, it’s also starkly credible.

This is why Paweł Dziemski and I chose not to set our upcoming Cthulhu gamebook in the traditional Depression-era milieu but instead in a near future in which history has taken some very dark turns. We don't want readers to have the get-out clause of imagining it all in a hokey playacting past. This is horror you're going to have to face without a comfort blanket. More on that project to come, so stay tuned.