Ill doings in God's country

Dragon Warriors' 40th anniversary won't pass unnoticed as long as Red Ruin Publishing have anything to say about it. They've just released the seventeenth book in their series of DW adventures, and it's one of the best. The Curse on God's Acre is a 500+ section gamebook by David Donachie and Paul Partington:

Deep in the fertile countryside of Chaubrette, you find yourself in the isolated valley known as God's Acre. Here the sturdy locals grow wine and keep sheep — but all is not as it seems. A pernicious evil haunts the lanes and narrow fields.

Revealed at first in scraps of children's songs, in the blank stares of straw dolls, in the animals masks lurking in the shadows, in the tangled entrails of a murdered woman. Mysterious evil has the valley in its grasp and is squeezing ever tighter.

Special rules for dread and exhaustion add to the sense (for me, anyway) of a blending of Clark Ashton Smith's eerie tales of Averoigne with the straightforward secular horrors of The Wicker Man. But to make any such comparison is to sell this atmospheric and original adventure short. The Curse on God's Acre is a memorable solo scenario that deserves a place in every Dragon Warriors player's collection. You can pick it up for as little as $1 if you're hard up, and the artwork alone is worth more than that, so grab your copy now.

The mystery at the desert's heart

Why do people roleplay? For as many diverse reasons as they indulge any other activity. Somebody on Twitter was discussing the best way to include traps in RPGs, citing the example of a curse of fire and ice inscribed on a tomb. That’ll be interesting, I thought; how would a curse of fire and ice manifest? How would it take its toll on the violators of the tomb, whittling them away, pushing each to abandon his comrades and selfishly try to save his own hide? It wasn’t like that. It was just a fireball followed by a treasure sealed in ice and protected by extreme cold. So the players had to figure out a way to chip the treasure out before they froze to death.

Well, I enjoy lateral thinking problems, just not usually as part of my roleplaying games. Not that I have anything against the dungeoneers who like traps and secret doors and wandering monsters and rooms with puzzles. Whatever floats your boat. If you adventure in Legend, though, it’s likely to be because you prefer your fantasy to feel more real, peopled by adversaries with nuanced motives and allies who could in extreme circumstances abandon or even betray you. You want credible storylines, complexity of relationships, and richness of character interaction. If there are puzzles they shouldn’t feel like something in a game show but will arise organically out of the dynamics of the world and the society. 

If that sounds like your thing, take a look at David Donachie’s superb Outremer gamebook Icon of Death, which plays out like a real Dragon Warriors adventure with mysteries and uncertainty, fully rounded NPCs, and action that’s all the more exciting and involving for arising out of a completely convincing background. You get a 320+ section gamebook with superb artwork that brings the characters to life, and it’s entirely free.

David Donachie also has a strong contender for the Lindenbaum Prize with his gamebook The Garden of Earthly Regrets. For me it felt like Max Payne crossed with The Romance of the Rose and directed by Jan Švankmajer. You can try it along with all the other entries and vote for your favourites. And those too are all free.

I began by talking about fire and ice. If Icon of Death provides the desert fire L'Hiver des Hommes, Akonost's new release in the Destins series, brings the ice. It is of course the French version of Heart of Ice, now out in a beautifully produced edition with a couple of all-new illustrations by Russ.