It's that man again

I was interviewed by Olly McNeil of the Storymaster's Tales for International Gamebook Day 2021. Lots of good questions meant that I didn't have to repeat my limited store of Games Workshop anecdotes too much. You can get the video here and buy Olly's Weirding Woods game here.

And the very same day, Martin Noutch joined Olly to talk about the Steam Highwayman books, my own favourite of all the successors to Fabled Lands -- not least because the action starts out in a corner of Buckinghamshire that happens to be where I was born and where a lot of my family live. And Martin shares my preference for low fantasy, the English landscape, and personal-scale stories, as he expatiates on here:

And our friends at Cubus Games will shortly be releasing a Steam Highwayman mobile game that looks absolutely amazing. Great music too. (And is that Boris Johnson I spotted in the NPC rogues' gallery there..? Worth stoking up your steam motorbike just to hold him to account, I'd say.)

The dawn of the Frankenstein Wars

It’s hard to put a precise timeline to it, but say the first real gamebooks appeared in the early 1970s. That means they’ve been around for as long as the gap between a one-minute amuse-œil like The Miller and the Sweep (1897) and Citizen Kane (1941).

Given that, it’s reasonable to ask when we’re going to see the grown-up classics of interactive literature. Early gamebooks were aimed at kids, after all, and there’s a limit to how many times you can save the world from the orc army in a sub-sub-Dungeons and Dragons setting. No, I don’t mean we need more sympathetic orcs. Just as Alan Moore utterly shook up the world of superhero comics with Watchmen, I want to see gamebooks that move beyond solve-the-plot. Gamebooks with three-dimensional characters, tangled relationships, complex motivations, difficult moral choices, and a story that really takes you on a journey.

The Frankenstein Wars is that gamebook. Written by Paul Gresty, who’s already proved his Wellesian creative chops with richly imagined gamebooks The ORPHEUS Ruse and MetaHuman Inc, this is the story of two brothers caught up in a wave of Napoleonic conquest as Victor Frankenstein’s resurrection technology ushers in an era of total war.

If that sounds familiar – yes, it’s my Frankensteinian alternate history of the early 19th century. Originally I created this as a computer game, then later tried getting it off the ground as a movie or a novel, then as a comic book, and even as a tabletop RPG which was to comprise two rulebooks, French and English, each with its own slant on events. I never expected it to be a gamebook app, but now that I’ve seen the fabulous job Paul and Cubus Games have done, I’m fired up to return to the Frankenstein Wars universe and see what else I can do with it.

As well as a sophisticated storyline that would do justice to any blockbuster novel, the app boasts tactical maps, weather effects, astounding artwork, all wrapped up in a cutting-edge design ethic that shows Cubus Games are now one of the leading developers of interactive literature.

It’s impossible here to give a summary that would do justice to Paul’s writing. As I said earlier, this is a story that will really take you on a journey. For my money it’s destined to be a genre-defining classic, and next week Paul will be here with a guest post to give you just a taste of all the marvellous work that has gone into creating this truly unique interactive adventure.

The Frankenstein Wars is out now for iOS and Android.

Never to be servants

Continuing the SF theme, a quick shout-out for the latest Kickstarter from Cubus Games. This one is a sequel to Heavy Metal Thunder by Kyle B Stiff:

"Heavy Metal Thunder is a gamebook hybrid that merges the strengths of two different mediums. You’ve got the immersive experience of a detailed story as well as the character customization, inventory management, and life-or-death struggle that only a really powerful game can deliver. It appeals to anyone who wants to lose themselves in a gritty space age war story. The protagonist is a soldier, a jetpack infantryman separated from his comrades. Alien invaders have taken over our solar system and things look bleak for the human resistance."

This new episode is called Slaughter at Masada and reimagines the famous Judean fortress on Olympus Mons*:

"Masada, a brutal warzone where three sides are vying for dominance, has been under siege for three years, and to overcome despair the people trapped in Mount Olympus have embraced a deadly philosophy of 'war for the sake of war'. They are surrounded by Invader berserkers - criminal psychopaths too dangerous to be trusted inside spaceships. And now the Black Lance Legion has arrived to break the siege and recruit the fighters of Masada - even against their will, if necessary."

The KS campaign runs until Saturday, so jump on quick if you don't want to miss it.

* Fun facts: Olympus Mons is three times the height of Everest but, being a shield volcano, has an average gradient of only 1 in 11. So if you stood on it you wouldn't actually realize it was a mountain!

Checking in on Fabled Lands book 7

A guest post today from Paul Gresty, who is currently chained to his desk completing The Serpent King's Domain, the long-awaited seventh book in the Fabled Lands series.

Dave has kindly invited me to write a few words on the Fabled Lands blog to talk about progress on The Serpent King's Domain. If you've been following the Kickstarter backer updates, some of the information here will be familiar – and some will be brand new.

It's been a busy year in Ankon-Konu. The Serpent King's Domain will be longer than any of the Fabled Lands books so far. Currently, the draft of the book is sitting at one-thousand-and-something paragraphs. And we're really into the home stretch now – the random encounters are finished, all the main quests are done; we're at the point where we're fleshing out the cities a little, and adding some of those touches that every Fabled Lands book needs (“How much does it cost to book passage to Smogmaw?”).

It's hard to talk about my progress on Fabled Lands without also mentioning The Frankenstein Wars, another Kickstarter project that took place around the same time, and my other big project of 2016. Both projects are moving steadily towards their conclusion; the deadline for a full draft of both texts is imminent (for more information on TFW, feel free to go check out this project update that recently went online.

Regarding The Serpent King's Domain, one of the jobs that remains is to go back and fill in some of the treasures that the player can discover, and include some new and interesting magic items – things that fit neatly alongside the artefacts that you can discover in the first six books, but that also have a healthy dose of originality as well.

I'll confess that item creation is an area I've found surprisingly challenging. I don't want to make SKD into some sort of arms race – the player's focus shouldn't solely be on picking up super-powered items; nor do I want every player to have the same list of possessions once they've thoroughly explored the book. One tentative idea is to include items that have both advantages and disadvantages, such as:

373 

If you possess (XXXXXXX ITEMS TO CONSTRUCT CLOAK) Bellentacq can, quite reluctantly, create a darkling cloak. Such a cloak will grant a +7 bonus to your THIEVERY score while you possess it, but it will also temporarily reduce your SANCTITY score to 1, and prevent your SANCTITY score from rising by any means (including bonuses from other items). Note that you need not actually wear the cloak to receive this effect; so long as it is in your possession these changes to your Ability scores will apply (also note that, of course, leaving this cloak in storage will remove its effect from you). If you ask Bellentacq to carry out this work, remove the requisite items from your Adventure Sheet. In their place note darkling cloak (+7 THIEVERY, SANCTITY temporarily reduced to 1). Should you discard the cloak, or store it somewhere, you lose the bonus to THIEVERY, but your SANCTITY score will return to its normal value. Turn back to 167.

So, you have an item that grants a great big bonus to THIEVERY – but your SANCTITY will take a hit. Is the gain worth the loss? I'm guessing that some players will think it is, and some won't.

Another way to differentiate equipment lists for different playthroughs might be to include items that have various powers for different professions – which has a handy knock-on effect of helping to distinguish the various professions at higher ranks. For example:

711 

The sacrosanct sabre will grant a COMBAT bonus equal to half the wielder's SANCTITY, rounding down, and not including bonuses from items. So, a wielder with a SANCTITY of 11 would use the sabre as a COMBAT +5 weapon. In addition, if a Priest possesses this item, this will allow him or her to have a maximum of two SANCTITY blessings at any one time (rather than the normal maximum of one).
If you keep this item, note the sacrosanct sabre (COMBAT bonus = half SANCTITY) on your Adventure Sheet.
Turn to 488.

The specific advantage for a Priest character is not enormous here; it's more a distinction that adds flavour rather than one that grants world-shattering power. Certainly, the item should be cheaper, or easier to acquire, than some of the COMBAT +6 weapons that appear in the first books (since that's the maximum bonus it'll have anyway).

For a while I've been thinking about opening a discussion on magic items on the Fabled Lands Facebook group – but then I got angry at the internet and deleted my Facebook account. Regardless, I'll open up that conversation here, instead – what sort of items do people want to see in The Serpent King's Domain? Feel free to chime in in the comments section below, or even to contact me directly by hitting the link.

Really, if people have any ideas for magic items – maybe something that isn't too powerful, that fits in with the jungle-themed setting – I would love, love, love to hear them.

So, to round up: the text is nearing completion. Expect a full first draft around Christmastime – which will then have to go through editing and page layout and whatnot. Regarding artwork, we've been talking to both Kevin Jenkins (cover) and Russ Nicholson (interiors) recently. It's a little soon to make big pronouncements, but that's moving forward as well. I'll tentatively say that project backers will have a book in their hands in the early part of 2017.

Deadman Diaries

I'm a big fan of film noir. An ordinary Joe in a fix that tips him over the edge of the safe little bubble we normally live in and into a crazy whirlpool of existential nightmare: from Sunset Boulevard to Max Payne, all it takes is the slick of rain, ominous bars of shadow, a heavy-lidded femme fatale and a patina of luminous monochrome, and I'm hooked.

So it's a particular delight to discover the latest gamebook adventure from Cubus Games (developers of The Frankenstein Wars and Necklace of Skulls) is a noir thriller called Deadman Diaries. It takes the form of a diary written by a guy who's deep in gambling debts and now needs to do whatever he has to, legal or otherwise, to stay alive. So you can help him find a way to pay off the mob, or you can lead him further astray with a view to getting him killed in a variety of different ways.

The text is by Ricard Fuster and the artwork is by Gerard Freixes. As it says in the logline, life's a bitch and then you die. Grab your ticket to the long goodbye for iOS here and for Android here.

So come up to the lab

In case you missed it, Paul Gresty has been spilling the beans (human beans) over on Lloyd of Gamebooks about the hopefully upcoming story/game The Frankenstein Wars that he and I are are developing with Cubus Games. Here's a taster:

"Imagine yourself in the place of a lazaran for a moment. One morning you wake to learn that your boss has grafted an extra head to your shoulders, and given you one extra arm. He's severed your own scrawny legs, and replaced them with the brawny limbs of a champion sprinter. All because he feels it will make you more effective in your work. How would you fight the wave of madness that such a change would surely engender? Could your husband or wife understand this transformation? How could you explain it to your parents, or your children?"

The story is about using the Frankenstein process to create an army of bioengineered soldiers - stronger, faster, more indifferent to pain than any normal man. If they fall in battle - even if they're killed - the body parts can be recycled to create the troops to fight on the next day. As Paul concludes:

"The conflict threatens to tear apart the heart of Europe. And yet the damage to humanity's soul may be far greater still."

You can read his whole article here and back the gamebook on Kickstarter here.

The start of the Frankenstein wars

In 1827, a terrible secret that has long stayed hidden is finally unearthed. The life-generating techniques discovered by Victor Frankenstein are seized by the radical Zeroiste faction, who raise an army of lazarans - resurrected men assembled from the bodies of the dead. As the tide of this unstoppable force sweeps across Europe, lives will be changed forever.

This is the gamebook I've wanted to do for over a decade. It's a true blockbuster that weaves the lives of ordinary individuals against a backdrop of hellish war with the soul of humanity at stake. And now, with the help of writer Paul Gresty, artist Rafa Teruel, and the unholy design and code talents simmering in the vats at Cubus Games, The Frankenstein Wars is about to burst into the light of day on Kickstarter.

I call it a gamebook, but this is no ordinary choose-your-own text. Cubus and the team are promising a raw, bloody, uncompromising epic of gritty 19th century sci-fi and face-clawing body horror in which you get to explore interactive maps, direct rival brothers through branching non-linear storylines, pit yourself against ever-shifting goals, attempt time-sensitive missions (the longer you take, the better prepared your opponents will be), direct whole battalions in strategic battles - all of it made nail-bitingly immersive by full-colour artwork and a movie-quality soundtrack.

Even if you're a gamebook fan, you've never seen an interactive blockbuster like this. It's a story with the sweep and scale of a whole alternate-history universe. It seems like the guys at Kickstarter must agree, because as I write this the project has only been live for a few hours and already it's been awarded a Staff Pick. And with your help this is only the beginning.

A brandy with the monster

I've talked about Frankenstein's Legions on this blog before. Here, for instance. And here. I'll be talking about it more over the month ahead because I'm involved in a Kickstarter with Cubus Games, who will be creating an interactive story set in that world, under its new title The Frankenstein Wars.

The concept is simple. In the 1820s, Victor Frankenstein's secrets are recovered. Some of them, anyway - specifically, the ability to sew a body together from scavenged parts and bring it back to life. In France, a new revolution brings the Zeroistes to power. Named for the their "Year Zero" mentality, they are willing to do whatever it takes to usher in a new society. And that includes recycling the bodies of those killed in battle to create an endlessly-respawning army.

And what about Frankenstein's monster? He represents something more than a patchwork revivified man. In Mary Shelley's novel he was a new lifeform, a homo superior, with greater strength, endurance and intellect than any normal man. If you want to read his origin story, it's a lot more interesting than the Universal sparks-n-stitches version, and my interactive novel is as good a place as any to start.

But here in The Frankenstein Wars, the monster is thirty years older. He's learned to be warier and more ruthless - and this is a guy who was willing to strangle kids and murder innocent people even in his formative years. He calls himself Mr Legion now. Here's a scene between him and Lord Blakeney:

That night. Blakeney warms himself in front of a crackling log fire, a glass of brandy cupped in his hand. In the leather armchair opposite him sits Mr Legion, also slowly swirling a brandy. His cigar glows in the gloom of the dining room, where they have just finished a meal.
“I think Miss Byron’s vacation might need to come to an end quite soon,” remarks Blakeney.
“You know, Blakeney, when I was thirty years younger I would have thrown you in the fireplace, burned down the house, and killed every man between here and Hastings. I also would have settled for the cheap brandy.”
“Why is that? The burning and the killing, I mean.”
“You were expecting them to kidnap Ada Byron.”
“Not exactly. I merely made sure we had a contingency in case you failed. As sometimes you do.”
“And now you’d like her back.”
“Her improved revitalizing serum, at any rate. I’m sure Napoleon doesn’t care for the cheap stuff either.”
Mr Legion blows a smoke ring and watches it drift in the firelight, like a god contemplating the constellations he has made. “You’re not counting on Clerval for that?”
Blakeney smiles. “Doctor Clerval is one of those men you can count on utterly. Their moral code is so predictable.” Blakeney gets up and walks to the window, pulling aside the curtain to gaze into the night. “And he’s a man who doesn’t shirk from a challenge. So also there’s that. But what’s really at the bottom of it all, I suppose, is love.”
Legion drains his brandy in one gulp and tosses the cigar stub into the fire. “All right,” he says, rising. “I have my own reasons, of course.”
Blakeney watches the door close behind him. “Of course you do," he says to the empty room. "But in your case it's a long way from love.”

Lord Blakeney, as you will have guessed, is the former Scarlet Pimpernel. Now in his mid-60s he commands the British secret service (officially known as the Alien Affairs Committee). In a very real sense he is the “M” of his day.

The Frankenstein Wars app is based on my world and story, but that's not all. It's being written by Paul Gresty, who is also the talent behind the new Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain. At Cubus's request, Paul is adding some steampunk tech to the mix. There was a little bit there already in my story outline, in the devices Ada Byron had constructed. Personally I'd have have left it at that, not feeling the need to add a gilding of steampunk to the lily of Frankensteinian body horror. But I'm not writing it so I've given Cubus and Mr Gresty carte blanche to take whatever liberties they need to. Without a doubt Paul will be adding his own unique style of interactive storytelling to the bare bones of the plot and characters that I provided.

You'll be hearing more of The Frankenstein Wars over the next few weeks - not just here but on the project's Kickstarter page as well.

Talking heads

There's been a slew of interviews on the Lloyd of Gamebooks site this month, and with so much going on you might have blinked and missed them. There's one with the redoubtable Paul Gresty, whom most FL blog regulars will know for Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories, and another with the very talented Michael J Ward, author of the Destiny Quest gamebook series. Oh, and not forgetting the master of death-rock space opera, Kyle B Stiff, creator of Sol Invictus.

And there's even an interview with yours truly, in which I spill the beans (well, one or two beans, not the whole can) about a couple of new gamebook projects I'm working on with the aforementioned Mr Gresty. One of those is the ever-so-long-awaited new Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain, for which we are hoping to team up with Megara Entertainment. (Incidentally, search around on Megara's site and you might even see The Thief of Memories on sale. Be prepared to do some Howard Carter level digging around to find it, though.)

And then there's the first mention of a gamebook app that I'm helping Cubus Games to launch on Kickstarter sometime soon. This is being written by Paul Gresty based on my setting, story and characters. The picture above is your teaser.

Best of all, though, there's an interview with Emily Short, co-creator (with Richard Evans) of Versu. She talks about someof her favourite examples of Interactive Fiction (capitalized here because it refers to the specific parser-type definition, rather than just "fiction that you can interact with" which is what I usually mean by the term) and anything in the IF field recommended by Ms Short has to be worth a look.

How to park a jumbo

We've talked about it before, the elephant in the room of gamebooks. Text is what I mean. Prose. Words words words. The "book part" of this strange hybrid medium that squeezed its way into existence at a time when people had got a thirst for interactivity but games still took twenty minutes to load up off a cassette tape.

Earlier posts have thrown the elephant a bun or two. We considered the problem that text gets in the way of interaction. In which case, do gamebooks even need text at all? And if we have to have text, how do we make people want to read it?

Jon Ingold of Inkle was discussing these points at GDC. You can see the talk here. It turns out he never liked what I did with Inkle's engine, namely my interactive reimagining of Frankenstein. Ouch. Turns out he also doesn't care for Crime and Punishment, though, which takes the edge off.

I got the same vibe from the editors at Profile Books (the actual publishers of Frankenstein, though you would hardly guess it). They loved Telltale's Walking Dead - and quite right too. Why couldn't I have given them that instead of 150,000 words of text? But, publishers, here's a tip: if you want videogame production values, you can't pay the typical minimum-wage advances to authors and expect them to return a few months later with a nifty 3D interactive movie.

All right, I'm being disingenuous there. These days you don't have to spend north of five million dollars to make a decent-looking game. Indie development has brought the focus off Uncanny Valley emulation of blockbuster movies and back onto gameplay, panache and style. Apotheon, say, or This War of Mine. This might be your Golden Age, gamers; make the most of it.

People think a writer's job is moving words about, but that's the first fix. In the very beginning, as you're laying the foundations and erecting the scaffolding of the story, what's churning around inside your skull is a flood of images, character traits, emotions. The shape starts to reveal itself in snatches of dialogue, mood, key events. When you're ready, when it's fully marinated, that's when you put it down in words. If your medium is the novel, it will all be rendered into words eventually - but even that is only a program, a code that will run in the reader's brain so that they can construct their own experience of your story. It's those cassette tapes all over again.

For writers working on a movie, or designers on a game, that process of communicating the final experience is far clearer. You know right from the get-go that all that documentation you're writing is not the thing itself, it's the blueprint that will be used to make the thing. It differs from a novel only in that the reader of a novel has to do for themselves, and in their imagination, all the work of the development team.

If gamebooks have a future, we can surely agree it will be in digital form. No one disputes that the medium is evolving and that its boundary with videogames is getting so blurred as to be meaningless. Is Sorcery a gamebook? With each instalment the prose fades further into the background. In a game like This War of Mine we don't even talk about a "text component"; the text is just one more way of presenting the game world to the player. So it must become with gamebooks. The writer must think in terms of all the media (text, audio, images) and mix them as the story and the budget allow.

I've recently been discussing a new interactive story app called The Frankenstein Wars with Jaume Carballo, content director of Cubus Games, and Paul Gresty, who will be writing it. Referring to how an all-new interactive story needs to be conceived right from the outset so as to make full use of all component media, Jaume said:

"Keep in mind that we have to write the text over a structure comprising interactive maps, plans, images and so on. We're not doing an adaptation of a '90s gamebook, we're creating an interactive story app, so the team must work together. We don't want to end up with tons of text written thinking just in the story and not in the mechanics."

With that, I'd say he bagged the elephant. And just before it could go into musth. Phew.

Pixel perfect

I've been wanting to show you this artwork for a while and now I can. A while back, internationally renowned art studio Clonefront Entertainment were asked to create digital colour paintings of many of Russ Nicholson's iconic Fabled Lands drawings. For a long while these amazing paintings have languished in legal limbo. The details of that are hearsay so I won't repeat them here but in any case, as derived works, the paintings always remained Russ's copyright.

But now Mikael Louys of Megara Entertainment has come to the rescue, sealing a deal with Russ and Arpad Olbey, CEO of Clonefront, that will allow him to use the colour paintings in a range of products, starting with the hardback edition of The Keep of the Lich Lord (from which these two pictures are taken) and moving on later next year to an all-new Fabled Lands role-playing project.

And not only that - I just looked on Clonefront's website and came across this stunning image of a manta car from Heart of Ice. We were planning to use this as the cover of the epub3 version but that, of course, never happened. That was a blow, but there's always a silver lining - in this case, the strong possibility of a multi-platform app from Cubus Games, who did such a great job adapting Necklace of Skulls. That won't use this artwork, but something totally new, original and unexpected by Jaume Carballo's madly skilled creative team. Watch this space.

For whom the bell tolls

I was sorry to hear the news about Destiny Quest. After putting out books two and three with quite a bit of fanfare and nice production standards, publishers Gollancz found the series wasn’t selling as they’d hoped. There will be – from Gollancz, anyway – no book four.

I’m sorry because Destiny Quest was meticulously designed, brilliantly plotted, vividly written, and imbued with genuine passion. If it had come out back in the ‘80s it would have been one of the classic gamebook series that everybody talked about today.

But I’m not surprised. Even by 1995, the gamebooks tide was ebbing so fast that we couldn’t convince Pan Macmillan to let us finish Fabled Lands. What happened? Videogames happened. They can do just exactly what old-style gamebooks did and, let’s be honest, they do it better. If I have an evening to kill and it’s between The Witcher and Deathtrap Dungeon – no contest.

Wait a moment, though, because what I’m talking about here is ‘80s-style adventure gamebooks. That is, a multiple-choice format Dungeons and Dragons game – or, these days, World of Warcraft. And in print. All that Gollancz’s announcement has confirmed is that in 2014 you can’t put a gamebook series like that into bookstores, with all the pressure of finding a wide, deep market that implies, and make a go of it.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room for gamebooks any more. Gollancz's experiment possibly shows that dungeon-delving gamebooks with highly detailed rules don't sell well in bookstores. But they should have tested the water with several different types of gamebook - some rules-lite, some non-fantasy. That's the only way to find out if there's a broad market for interactive fiction out there. The success of Inkle's Sorcery and 80 Days suggests there is, and don't tell me a publisher couldn't figure out any way to get similar success in print or ebooks. They just didn't try a wide enough range to get any kind of statistically significant result.

And in any case, Destiny Quest was a success long before a publisher tried to take it out to the mass market. (There are various magnitudes of mass market, but that’s a detail.) The series’ creator, Michael J Ward, built it all up on his own and established a solid fanbase. That’s still there. I expect we’ll see more books in the series before too long. Think of Marillion albums. And regardless of the fate of gamebooks in print form, Destiny Quest itself will be back as a browser gamebook-meets-CRPG called Destiny Quest Infinite from Adventure Cow.

And then there are apps. I think this will be a narrow window, and one that’s already closing as far as those traditional DnD-type gamebooks are concerned. It helps to have the phone or tablet handle the stats for you, but in the long run people want their eye candy. A big chunk of text and three choices isn’t going to hold its ground against animated combats. So let’s not see the future there as book apps but as mobile entertainment in general.

Fabled Lands Publishing is reissuing series like Way of the Tiger and Blood Sword in print, not because we expect them to usher in a new Golden Age of gamebooks, but because we want them to always be there for the fans who’d like to collect them. Those fans may be small in number but they are devoted and this is something we owe them. But we’re a business, and we couldn’t reissue all those books if the only revenue was from print sales. We also want to see what we can do with those adventures in new formats. I don’t mean book apps (possibly a closing window, as I said) but something more. Blood Sword would make a great tactical adventure game along the lines of Warhammer Quest. We tried Fabled Lands as book apps and they didn’t work, so now we want to turn them into full-on CRPGs. Inkle have begun this process with their brilliant Sorcery adaptations – the book part of those, let’s face it, is like a placeholder waiting for the graphics and audio. It’s poetic justice, right? Videogames killed off gamebooks, so now we’re aiming to move on over and elbow us some room there.

Every crisis is an opportunity, anyway. There may not be much demand for dungeon-bashing and +3 swords in text gamebooks, but there are plenty of interesting avenues for the medium to explore. Look at Versu, or Inkle’s 80 Days, or the interactive Frankenstein I did for Profile Books using Inkle’s engine. Look at how Cubus Games evolved Necklace of Skulls into something new, with its roots in books but its branches stretching to the firmament of a new medium. (And I happen to know that's just the starting point for Cubus, because we're working on some even more exciting things with them.Watch this space.) If gamebooks are going to survive in text form they have to play to the strengths of prose – deep characterization, unreliable narrators, different points of view, relationships between reader and character. You know, literary stuff. Ironically, Jamie and I offered something like that to Gollancz a couple of months before they signed up Destiny Quest. A shame they didn't do it, as there'd have been plenty of room for both.

And if you really absolutely gotta have print, that can survive too. Not thirty thousand copies sold in Waterstones at a tenner each, but lovingly produced, full-colour hardbacks like the editions that Megara are producing for hardcore collectors. In an ebook era, hardbacks are the new vinyl. As Marillion probably could have told us all along.

Just my cup of tea

Still on the theme of Necklace of Skulls, what do you reckon to this far-from-ugly mug? It's one of a set of sixteen created by Cubus Games from the beautiful Mayan-themed artwork of Xavier Mula.

Click here to see them all. Which is your favorite?

A talk with Jaume Carballo

Still (sort of) on the Necklace of Skulls theme this month, I had a long chat with Jaume Carballo, creative director at Cubus Games. You can read the first part here. Jaume is an interesting guy - the first time we got talking by email he was quoting Hobbes, which is not something you often find in the games industry following straight on from a discussion of logic markup. He's a big Hitchcock fan too, so it didn't take us long to bond.

In our latest chat, we surprisingly don't get onto cinema or philosophy, though we do cover all kinds of topics involving games and stories, and the combination of both. Also quantum physics, Game of Thrones, comics, and what to do if we had a time-travelling DeLorean. (And we got into a very long digression about the Catalan question, but I suspect that the other fellows at Cubus will censor that bit.)

The picture? I didn't have one of Jaume, so that's me in a very cold, squelchy and un-Barcelona-like part of south-west England.

Hero twins of the One World

Mayan history – the part of it we still have that wasn’t burnt by Christian missionaries – is not like modern history. Since Herodotus, the First World has had the tradition of objectively establishing facts from multiple sources, reporting events in a dispassionate register that opens a window upon the past. But reading the history of the Maya is like reading one of those Ancient Egyptian historical accounts in which untrustworthy foreign diplomats become snakes and a severed tongue can still tell a tale. It’s as much a magic realist novel as an account of what really (Calvino or Borges would insist on inverted commas there) happened.

Take the story of the hero twins from the Popol Vuh. Is this a holy book, a work of fiction, an allegory, or a chronicle? All of the above. The Mayan scholar-priesthood drew no distinction. They’d had no Plato to say that poetry tells lies. They used drugs and blood-letting to reach a point where hallucinations revealed the deeper truth beneath the veneer of ordinary events.

The hero twins’ father has annoyed the lords of the underworld by making too much noise while playing in his ball court. They invite him to play a match against them, misleading him into taking the black road into Xibalba, the Place of Fear. That’s where it all goes south, or rather west, as the twins’ father is subjected to various ordeals and finally sacrificed and his head hung in a calabash tree.

At this point in the story, the twins’ father is dead but (bit of a snag) they haven’t been born yet. A maiden goes to pick calabash gourds. She might in fact be the moon, but that’s a detail. The father's skull spits into her hand, or maybe she eats it thinking it’s a fruit, and she's sent away to live in the upper world when her mother notices she’s pregnant.

The twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, grow up to be star ballgame players like their dad, annoy the lords of the underworld in just the same way, and get invited to Xibalba. But these hero twins, they’re clever. They send a mosquito to bite the underworld gods, who call out each others’ names, allowing the twins to greet them correctly. They foil the ordeals, using red macaw feathers to make it seem that their cigars have stayed lit all night. When one of the twins is decapitated (even the Popol Vuh must have an “all is lost” moment), the other temporarily reanimates his body with a squash for a head and, forced to play a match using the brother’s head, substitutes it and brings him back to life. The twins then trick one of the lords of the underworld into allowing himself to be killed. They subjugate the Place of Fear, at which point we discover it isn’t just the mythical land of the dead, it’s also a hostile nation whose power over the Mayan city-states has now been broken.

So that’s the flavour I wanted to capture when I started writing Necklace of Skulls. I’d just got back from honeymoon in Central America, and having gone to the top of every Mayan pyramid I could find, and into the tunnels inside them too, I felt exactly ready to do it. What I wanted to avoid was that kind of wasted cultural appropriation you get in so many roleplaying games, where a minor deity like Xiuhcoatl would get a Monster Manual write-up as “a” xuih dragon, with 8 dice hit points and a fiery breath attack, located in a Pre-Columbian themed corner of the game world like one of the zones in Disneyland. You know what I mean. When I roleplay, I want to go the fount of ideas, not have it brought to me in a plastic bottle.

In Necklace of Skulls you play a Maya called Evening Star whose twin has gone missing in the far western desert. As in all the Critical IF books, you get to customize your character by picking your skills, and you can choose to be either sex, as it is never stated whether you’re Morning Star’s twin brother or twin sister. Sneaky, huh? (There’s actually a precedent for that in the Popol Vuh, Xbalque’s name translating as either “Little Sun Jaguar” or “Lady Sun Jaguar”.)

While you’re trying to find out what happened to your brother, the big event happening in the background is the collapse of the Great City, which is sending out ripples of chaos and fear even as far as your own Yucatan home. History buffs may think that this ties the book to 540 AD and the fall of Teotihuacan, but I couldn’t possibly comment. My version of the One World of the Maya is not an archaeologist’s version, in any case. This is a setting the ancient Maya themselves would hopefully recognize, in which heads grow on trees, a sinkhole can be a shortcut into the land of death, and playing a game in the ball court is a ritual as potent as any spell.

That’s why I’m so delighted with the app version of Necklace of Skulls, published today by Cubus Games to (belatedly) mark the Mexican Day of the Dead. This is much more than just a gamebook ported over to mobile devices. The Cubus team, headed up by Jaume Carballo, have taken the original book as a foundation and built a fabulous, beautiful interactive story game on top of that. Combat, for example, uses a mini-game of brinkmanship and tactics instead of digital dice. You select one of several Mayan icons to create a persona for your hero-twin. And the text itself has been rewritten and sharpened to make it more immediate, better suited to reading on a phone or tablet rather than a printed page.

And the art… Everything I said above about wanting to evoke a setting that has the feel of both reality and dream, history and myth – you only have to look at any one of the images to see how brilliantly Xavier Mula has achieved that. I want to see gamebooks pull up their old gnarly roots, shed the ‘90s scales, and become something fresh and exciting. This app shows that Cubus are right at the forefront of that revolutionary movement, and I’m proud to have the book that was born out of my honeymoon emerging in a new glittering incarnation, its old bones suddenly sprouting new foliage and bright flowers – just like, in fact, one of the Mayan hero-twins.

You can get the Necklace of Skulls app on iTunes USA or iTunes UK. Or anywhere else in the world come to that. And for Android users, the Google Play link is here. Or there are the print books, of course:


[Photo of Xiuhcoatl by Tony Roberts; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.]

The time of year for fear

Halloween is nearly here. Tell my next-door neighbours - they've had plaster pumpkins and a big witch's-hat display on their porch for weeks. If you get yourself all worked up that early, I think the actual day loses its spooky shine. Premature horripilation, Dr Freud would've called it. But if you're not sick of ghosts and goblins yet, here are some suggestions for an enjoyable shudder:

The image above is from "Wrong Turning", a comic strip in the Creepy style that I wrote for Martin McKenna after a fog-shrouded week at Shute Gatehouse. You can read the story here for free, but if you want to see the works of real genius that inspired it, Steve Ditko's collected Creepy and Eerie strips are here.

If that lights your turnip lantern, the comics connection gives me a segue to "A Dying Trade", a story I originally cooked up for a ghost-written Clive Barker book that didn't happen. I tried turning it into a comic with the help of Russ Nicholson, but that didn't get off the ground either. But eventually Dermot Bolton produced it as a short movie directed by Dan Turner, and you can watch that here.

Talking of movies, The Book of Life is out now and has to be worth a watch, because if two Mexican maestros like Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez don't know their Day of the Dead, who does? As del Toro says:

“[What is it with Mexicans and death?] Ultimately you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It’s an impulse that’s intrinsic to the Mexican character. And when people ask me, what is so Mexican about your films, I say me. Because I’m not a guy that hides the monster: I show it to you with the absolute conviction that it exists. And that’s the way I think we view death. We don’t view it as the end of end all. You say 'carpe diem' in Dead Poets Society; we have that in a much more tequila-infused, mariachi-soundtrack kind of way.”

That whole vibe of wild partying and the flowering of life in death resonates with me, maybe because I got married in Mexico (just after the Day of the Dead, in fact). I like the fabulist notion of death teeming with all these passions and possibilities, which probably accounts for me being such a big fan of Tim Schafer's adventure game Grim Fandango. Boy, I wish somebody would turn that into a movie. Or a kids' TV show. Or a comic or a series of novels. (Well, maybe somebody did the last of those, kind of, only without Manny Calavera's decent-little-guy charm.)

The thing about Halloween is the fairground fun side of it. It's the ghost train version of scariness, a chill to enjoy by the fireside on a dark and stormy night. That's why I love John Whitbourn's classic series Binscombe Tales - not exclusively horror stories as such, but all of them open a window on an unsettling world of weird. They've been anthologized more widely, and won more awards, than any eerie English yarns this side of Algernon Blackwood, and the main reason for that is the storytelling warmth that accompanies the grave-deep chill and feverish fizz of Mr Whitbourn's imagination.

A more serious take on a tale of dread is to be found in Frankenstein, which (I'm sure you know) I turned into an interactive novel a couple of years back. There's no comfort to be found there, no cosy shiver before bedtime. This isn't the Universal horror movie version to be taken with popcorn and a pinch of salt, it's Mary Shelley's bleakly brilliant work of SF - only with more humour and characterization and fewer descriptions of mountain walks and river journeys. Oh, and I added a solution to the knotty problem of how the monster got the corpse of Frankenstein's murdered friend to Ireland, which otherwise makes no plot sense whatsoever. (Sorry, Mrs Shelley.) Read Dr Dale Townshend discussing the story with me here, or go and grab a copy (for iOS or Android) here.

More exploration of nightmarish unease was supposed to happen in Wrong, the online magazine I launched with Peter Richardson. Unfortunately the creators involved were all too busy trying to make a crust to throw in their time for free - myself included. But I still stand by our manifesto:

The most unsettling fears are the ones you can’t quite put your finger on. It needn't be anything as cosy as werewolves or vampires; nothing so comfortingly concrete as a madman with a knife. The supernatural, when it appears, can be a catalyst evoking the real horror that comes from within. ...Dreams are also a kind of truth, and bad things are more sinister when they happen to the blameless. Not everything is always explained and neatly tied up. There are often loose ends that will leave you uneasy. Rod Serling would be at home here. 

To round off, let's go back to Mexico. As well as getting hitched, I was there researching Maya mythology for my gamebook Necklace of Skulls. Eldritch encounters abound with skeletal noblemen who invite you to join them for a chat, threshold guardians on the way into Xibalba, disembodied heads, and the like. You can buy that in its new Fabled Lands Publishing edition, and if you get the paperback then the Kindle version is free, but I recommend waiting a week or two for Cubus Games's all-new app version. The full gleeful ghoulishness of the Day of the Dead has rarely been so vibrantly evoked as by Xavier Mula's artwork.

Step into myth

If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video must go at least an order of magnitude beyond that. So instead of my customary long screed, this time I'm just going to leave this trailer from Cubus Games and this sample image by Xavier Mula to tell their own story.

Cubus Games announce Necklace of Skulls app

More about this later in the month, but here's the first official announcement by Cubus Games of the forthcoming Necklace of Skulls app. If you're not already familiar with Cubus's great work on interactive story apps The Sinister Fairground and Heavy Metal Thunder, check them out and you'll see why we're thrilled to have them working on several of Fabled Lands Publishing's gamebooks. The vibrant artwork by Xavier Mula is a breath of fresh air after decades of a hobby dominated by clunky mail-clad dwarves and dank dungeons.

So this is quite a time for Critical IF, what with Inkle's adaptation of Down Among the Dead Men still riding high on the gamebook charts, Heart of Ice prepping for development, and of course the paperbacks all still available if digital isn't your thing. And before anyone asks, Necklace of Skulls should be out for Android as well as iOS.

And if you think all that is exciting news, wait till you hear about Jamie's new novel. If I had to Hollywoodize the pitch, I'd say it's Percy Jackson meets Galaxy Quest. Come back tomorrow and I'll tell you all about it.

Gritty adventure on the final frontier

If you've read Heart of Ice, you'll know I like my science fiction grim, dark and with no unequivocally happy endings. Actually, for the most part I like my fantasy that way too, but good SF demands an uncaring universe. In fantasy you can be saved by a mysterious prophecy and a saviour. In (too) many fantasy stories, if things look tough, having the right moral code deep down inside can count for just as much as knowing how to wield a sword or weave an intrigue.

But not in the best SF. That's the tale of mankind confronting a vast, awesome, bleak infinity that both terrifies and calls to us. For the brutal collision between guts and survival I'm talking about Apollo 13 or The Martian, for sheer wonder try Europa Report or Rendezvous With Rama, and for the great and terrible unknown take a look at Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three.

Now there's a new title to add to that list: Kyle B Stiff's Heavy Metal Thunder, released last week for iPad and iPhone by gamebook app developers Cubus Games. The art and sound effects are very stylish indeed, building extra layers of eeriness and menace into the story, which was originally published as a regular prose gamebook for Kindle. Humanity reached its golden age, only to have it all snatched away by alien invaders. The sola system is overrun. You have your wits and your courage. That may not sound like much, but it's what got us out of the caves and up into space in the first place. Now it's time to show those aliens the hard downside of picking a fight with the human race.

Even if SF isn't your thing, there's still a point to all this. Fabled Lands LLP have been talking to the guys at Cubus Games about some pretty exciting projects. (Yes, we have apps in the works with Tin Man Games and Inkle, but we have so many gamebooks that one or even two developers could never handle the workload. And on top of that, we like making new friends.) The plans with Cubus are very hush-hush for now, but you know me. Give it a few weeks and I'll be spilling the beans.

Before all that, though, come back Friday when I'll have the second part of the "DVD extras" for Doomwalk. See ya then.