Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 4

We've got another set of stat blocks from the Blood Sword gamebooks, as converted to Dragon Warriors rules by Oliver Whawell. This time it's the turn of Doomwalk (the one where they go to the land of the dead) and you can get the PDF here.

The original 1980s covers were always an oddity, as they were completely different in tone from the books themselves. Blood Sword was verging on grimdark (well, the nearest you could get in a book sold to 10-12 year-olds) before the term was even invented. The covers on the other hand were cute and funny. I'm not sure what the art director at a publishing house actually did in those days. Took long lunches, I suppose.

Thanks to Wombo I've been having a ball rejigging the cover art to suit the interiors. Use of AI art infuriates some people to the point of hysteria, but you can see that (a) it's not going to replace human artists just yet and (b) these aren't for commercial use, so it's not taking away a job that I'd have otherwise hired anyone to do. However, let me just assure General Ludd's followers that I'm doing my bit as the forlorn hope against the forces of AI art by engaging real-life illustrator Inigo Hartas for the Jewelspider project.

In the video below, Grim expresses pretty much how I feel regarding the use of AI art. But I'm open to debate on this, so let me know what you think.

Blood Sword redux: Doomwalk (part 3)

The final part of the Doomwalk designer's notes today, and as far as literary influences are concerned, the most obvious nods throughout the Blood Sword series are, of course, to Jack Vance. Those faltyns, for example: close cousins to the sandestins that were forever vexing Rhialto and the other sorcerers of Old Earth. I’m sure Shimrod in the Lyonesse books would know to be wary of a deal like this:

The faltyn flits through the streets, eventually leading you out of the north gate of the city along a rough track into the hills. There you see a jewelled door set in the side of a massive boulder. ‘What you seek lies beyond that door,’ says the faltyn. ‘As agreed, you will experience neither difficulty nor danger in obtaining it.’ With these words, it vanishes.

Why ‘faltyn’, incidentally? Doctor Strange fans, don't all shout at once. And how about this moment from Doomwalk for a typically Vancean way to get from A to B:

As soon as you have closed the cage door, the creature reaches down to seize an iron ring attached to the top and then launches itself into the sky. Despite its bulk and the burden of carrying you, it rises swiftly on its huge black wings. You are flung to and fro in the cage, but you manage to fight back your nausea until it has gained enough altitude to glide on the air currents.

(The picture here is from Pelgrane Press's superb Dying Earth RPG. Don't even read on until you've bought a copy.)

Now, I ought to warn you there are a few songs in this book. Not too many; don’t get alarmed, I didn’t go full Tolkien or anything. But you get a burst of the 14th century poem “Dou way, Robyn”, the Trickster gets to con some wights into thinking summer’s come to the underworld by singing a few lines paraphrased from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and a character greets his lover’s cruel rejection with a lament penned by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Blimey, you not only get heads rolling and demons ripping out guts, you get bloomin’ culture as well, eh?

The bridge that Modgud guards (or Móðguðr, if you must), which you need to cross to get from the nasty region of Sheol to the really nasty, is from Norse myth. You knew that. But the reason I included a covered bridge in the first place is because Roy Thomas and Gene Colan sent Karen Page across just such a bridge when I was at an impressionable age, and Gene the Dean was my first love in comics, so I had to build in a reference to his work somewhere.

But, raking over all these old influences and homages, I’m completely stumped by where these two oddities sprang from:

Forewarned that something inhabits the hill, you make use of the cover afforded by some thorn bushes to approach the summit unnoticed. Two odd creatures wait there beside an enormous treasure chest. One is a giant bat with crimson antlers sprouting from its head. The other is a dog the size of a warhorse, with white fur and a long beard flowing from its chin.

The Horned Bat and the Bearded Dog seem to be genuine originals and, my earlier reference to Afghan Black aside, I have no idea what chimerical vacuum spawned them. I know that I specifically didn’t want an illustration of them because I was trying for something like the encounters you get in dreams: elusive, ill-defined. Funny and creepy and odd at the same time. Are they characters animated by Disney or by Švankmajer? Would the movie be directed by Burton or by Spielberg? I know which version I see in my mind's eye, but reading is democratic. Having bought the book, how you choose to visualize it is up to you.

Just in case you're thinking this all sounds like serious stuff, let me assure you that there's a good lacing of humour through all the Blood Sword books, even when you're slogging through hell or counting down the minutes till Doomsday. Case in point: the talking boat figurehead whose conversation is limited to weather forecasts and continual re-estimates of arrival time. That example is unusual, in fact, because mostly I don't go for humour that pokes fun at fantasy tropes - too easy a target. Instead I take my cue from Vance, who always remembers that however desperate the situation - and often precisely because it's desperate - human beings will find something to laugh about. So next time you get on the wrong side of a bargain with a faltyn, try to see the funny side.

In the next "Making of Blood Sword" I'll be looking at the writing of the fifth and final book in the series, The Walls of Spyte - otherwise known as "The One Where They Blow Up the Universe". But that's still a month or so away. Next week we'll have Jamie's latest series and after that some really big Way of the Tiger news. Don't miss.

Blood Sword redux: Doomwalk (part 2)

More designer's notes in "the making of Blood Sword" series, this time another look at Doomwalk. (Part one here.) The covers of this and the previous book in the series, The Demon’s Claw, now credit me as the sole author. Originally Oliver Johnson and I signed to do all five Blood Sword books, but Oliver’s job at Random House meant that he had very little time to spend on them from the start, having to bail out altogether shortly after we started work on The Kingdom of Wyrd. He did return – sort of – for the final book, but one at a time, eh?

Between The Battlepits of Krarth and The Kingdom of Wyrd, a week or so has passed. Between the latter and The Demon’s Claw, the characters are implied to have been adventuring for years. But Doomwalk begins with a Bourne-style cut, following on immediately after the events of the previous book. There’s no particular significance in this. I usually avoided cliffhangers because books couldn’t be ordered off the internet in those days, and I’d learned the hard way about the vagaries of distribution when all the copies of Dragon Warriors book 1 went to the south of England and all of book 2 went to the north. So I tried to make sure you could jump into a series like Blood Sword at any point and if you missed out a book entirely it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Except in book 5, when it really was the end of the world. But, as I said before, more on that in a later post.

I was glad to have the chance to fix the maps, which in the 1988 edition were printed the wrong way round. So you were presented with a map of Sheol at the start of the book, and if you managed to get to the lands of the dead and if you were lucky enough to find the ancient carving on a monolith there, you would uncover… a chart of western Legend showing the location of the island you needed to find in order to reach Sheol in the first place. I was aiming for a certain amount of dream logic, but not in Lewis Carroll quantities. So after twenty-six years it’s nice to be able to put the maps back where they belong.

Talking of maps, I noticed that the artist (not Russ Nicholson; he wasn't the original map artist) had written “burrow downs” instead of “barrow downs”. I’ve never had much luck with artists and barrows. In one early gamebook I described the character crossing a desolate moor at night when an old man steps out from behind a barrow. That became a picture of a geezer with a wheelbarrow. But I digress… All this talk of barrows at least gives me an excuse to run one of my top favourite of all of Russ's pictures, the wights who come out for a meet 'n greet when you arrive in Sheol.

It’s not obvious why we didn’t make more use of codewords as logic flags in early series like Blood Sword and Way of the Tiger. Instead the reader would just be asked, “Did you meet the scarred scholar and ask him about the carved pillar…” or whatever. If you’re playing the book for the umpteenth time, it can be tricky remembering which incarnation of you did what, and codewords help with that. I’ve written a few into Doomwalk including one to keep tabs on whether you’re accompanied by Cordelia’s ghost as you cross Sheol. (The codeword there, incidentally, is WANDER – a little tip of the hat to Team ICO.)

One more part of this reminiscence of Doomwalk to come. That's in a fortnight, and then we're on to The Walls of Spyte and the big Krarthian free-for-all on the final day of all Creation. But what about next Friday's post, you ask? Ah, or should I say Arrrrr!

Blood Sword redux: Doomwalk (part 1)

I sometimes think the imagination is a big old cooking pot that carries the tang of every ingredient that’s ever been put in it. A frinstance: long ago at primary school I came across a storybook with big, blocky, semi-abstract illustrations. You know the sort of book, covered in plastic that made a creaky, crinkling sound as you opened the spine. One of the stories was about a cursed ship. It had people’s hands being cut off, is about all I can remember. Now, I was a kid who relished a good fright. I read Dracula at a tender age and started writing my own sequel to it before I was ten. But that story about the ship scared the bejasus out of me. I shoved it back into the book cupboard, did a good job of forgetting it, and then spent years trying to remember exactly what it was that I’d found so terrifying.

If you’re a writer, that’s where the cooking pot comes in. Because I was striving to recapture that special frisson in the haunted ship sequence in Blood Sword 5: Doomwalk.

Black clouds clot along the horizon. Only minutes ago the sky was as blue as a sapphire, now the furled sails mutter fretfully in the easterly gusts. You shiver and follow the mate below. The entire ship’s company is crowded into the forecastle, and oil lamps are lit and the hatches are battened down against the coming storm.

I won’t give away what happens next in the book, but that’s where it was dredged up from – getting spooked out by a story in childhood. And that’s appropriate for this book because, as much as it’s a descent into the lands of the dead, it’s also a journey into dream. This is not the afterlife of fiery torments that Dante described, but a chilly protean clime where you might trip over ghosts creeping about looking for bowls of blood to lap up, or bump into a half-cadaverous goddess in the myths. I mean mists.

The first part of Doomwalk involves finding a way to reach the afterlife so you can go and retrieve the Sword of Life stolen by your enemy, Icon, at the moment you killed him. If you first put in some library time like a good Scooby, here’s how a dusty book you find describes the land of the dead:

Your search through Emeritus’ books drags on into the evening, when the muezzins’ call and the sound of church bells mingle in the dusk outside. A servant comes into the library to light the lamps. You are on the verge of giving up when you find some more references to Sheol. Theodoric of Osterlin Abbey writes that Sheol is a dream landscape comprising fragments of various mythologies. He confirms the claim that you found earlier that mortals can reach Sheol – but adds that the longer one spends there, the more difficult it is to return.

I thought, as was editing this book, ‘Dream landscape? I must have been ripping off Gaiman.’ But in fact I completed the manuscript for Doomwalk a full year before Sandman #1 went on sale. I expect we both had in our blood the same cocktail of Ron Embleton’s Wrath of the Gods and the cosmically bleak stories of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown, we both devoured Norse myths and the gloriously far-out fantasy strips in Valiant, were both reared through adolescence on the same heady stew of Moorcock, Dunsany, Lovecraft, Calvino and others. Or, I dunno, maybe it was just that kickin’ early-80s Afghan Black.

More about the influences on Doomwalk next week, but drop back Friday for another announcement.

Red as blood

I've dropped a few hints about Blood Sword coming back. The rumors are of a deluxe, hardcover edition of the complete series with full-color artwork throughout - and I'm not going to deny those rumors here, no indeed.

A previous post discussed whether to keep Blood Sword's very complex rules or to go for something a little bit easier. The current thinking is to start off with a "classic edition" using the original text and rules complete with tactical maps. That's the version the diehard fans will want. I can always revise it as a rules-lite edition later.

Fabled Lands LLP will start by releasing the classic edition in paperback, with the first two books, The Battlepits of Krarth and The Kingdom of Wyrd, appearing this summer. Personally I think the full tactical rules are better suited for an app version than print. In an app the tactical stuff would work brilliantly and require no work by the reader; something a bit like Warhammer Quest. But as the apps would necessarily prune the text down (those books are like thumping great GoT novels) we're going to publish the print version so that you can have both.

The hardcore collectors among you will be asking when the hardback edition is coming. Well, it's all just speculative right now, but probably this time next year. It all depends on Megara Entertainment's Kickstarter campaign for the Way of the Tiger books. Given the success of that, maybe we should try the same with Blood Sword's hardback edition.. Or maybe the Kickstarter should be to get the app launched, as that's going to take a little bit more oomph than most gamebook engines have going for them at the moment.

While you're waiting, here are a couple of images from the fourth book in the series, Doomwalk - which can be yours right now if you have $175 handy. The map is by Geoff Wingate, who I tapped for these books after seeing the fine cartographic work he was doing for Paul Cockburn in Imagine. The drawing of the marketplace storyteller is by Russ - as if you needed telling. And if you want to see an overflowing treasure house of great Russ drawings, hie yourself over to his blog this minute, for he generously posts collections of his outstanding fantasy and SF work, both old and new. The interesting thing about this one is the Vulcan (or Romulan?) in the audience there at top right. (I don't think I ever noticed that before, and I've been looking at this picture for 27 years!) I can't wait to see what these classic images look like in glorious color.