X marks the spot

Recently I've been working with Paweł Dziemski, co-author of Whispers Beyond The Stars, on an app version of my 1990s Tudor pirates gamebook Down Among the Dead Men. 

Paweł said it would be nice to have background images appearing behind the text panels that would indicate the prevailing location. So when you're escaping across the ocean in an open boat at the start, you get an image that distills the atmosphere of desperation and precarious survival. Later, there are images for the islands you might stop off at, and later still for the ports you stop off at and the various ships you might sail aboard.

Great idea. The snag was that I needed to find which sections correspond to which locations, which is not easy given that the whole adventure is randomized. So it was off to the loft to search through stacks of boxes until I found the original flowchart. (Yes, I still have it. What do you mean, hoarding? It was just as well I hung onto it these thirty years as it turns out.) Along with the flowchart I found the sketch above, the very genesis of the adventure.

I only realized after digging out the flowchart (written out on sheets of paper, incidentally -- no Twine in those days) that I didn't need it after all. I could just feed the book to NotebookLM and ask questions like, "Give me the section numbers for when the player leaves Port Leshand". Although Claude is my main AI assistant/coworker, producing helpful aids like the updated flowchart below, I'm continually impressed by what NotebookLM can do. It's moved far beyond simply being an intelligent index, which was how I first encountered it, and I can now set it to doing logic markup or helping me navigate old gamebooks.

My evangelism for AI aside, the Down Among the Dead Men app was coded the old-fashioned way (by Paweł) and you can get it from the Storm Weavers online shop in both English and Polish. I particularly like the atmospheric sound effects that Paweł has added. The creak of timbers, the cry of gulls, the lapping of waves, all add immeasurably to the sense of immersion. I know that most gamebook readers prefer a physical book, but this digital version is a lot more than just the text on a screen. If you try it out, let us know what you think.

Blow the man down

Thirty-five years after it was first published, my pirates-and-sorcery gamebook Down Among The Dead Men is rising from the deeps as an app. More on that tomorrow.

More deep dives into the future

Google's NotebookLM is my latest toy. I've been having a blast unleashing it on various books of mine, game write-ups, favourite novels, etc, and listening to the podcast discussions it generates. They're not perfect -- a bit repetitive, and sometimes the virtual hosts get the wrong end of the stick, but this is still in experimental mode. Imagine what it will be like in a couple of years. And NotebookLM also has a serious use as a tool for writers. That's my excuse for playing with it, anyway.

Here are a few of its analyses; you'll need a Google account to listen to them.

Can You Brexit (Without Breaking Britain)?

"Can You Brexit is a political thriller that follows a fictional British prime minister as they navigate the complexities of Brexit negotiations. The book explores a variety of potential Brexit outcomes, including a 'hard Brexit' where Britain leaves the European Union and the single market, a 'soft Brexit' where Britain leaves the EU but remains in the single market, and a 'Swiss model' where Britain has a more limited relationship with the EU. The book delves into the internal political pressures the player faces as they attempt to negotiate a Brexit deal that satisfies both their own party and the British public."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

The Conclave 

"The story follows a group of wizards on a quest to find a prismatic jewel in a labyrinth on the island of Tartuva. They are hunted by a powerful adversary named Pale, who seeks to erase all names in the world. The wizards are aided by various spirits, including Surma, a wizard who is worshipped as a god, and Wax, a shaman who can communicate with the dead. The story highlights the importance of names in the world, and the struggle between those who seek to control them and those who seek to preserve them."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion (admittedly with a few hallucinations about the plot) here.

Dark Lord: The Early Years

"The story of Dirk Lloyd, a young boy who believes he is the Dark Lord transported to Earth by a magical mishap. While he grapples with his new reality, Dirk tries to adapt to life as a human child, and plots to reclaim his powers. The novel delves into themes of identity, power, friendship and good versus evil, with a darkly humorous tone."

Hear those puny mortal AIs talk about the great Dirk here.

Down Among the Dead Men

"The story follows the player-character as they navigate treacherous seas, battle pirates, face undead monsters and ancient demigods, and ultimately try to rescue Queen Titania from the clutches of the villainous Captain Skarvench."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

Dragon Warriors

"From the medieval-inspired kingdom of Albion to the exotic Ta’ashim lands, the game portrays a vibrant and diverse world with distinct societal structures, belief systems, and unique inhabitants."

Here are the automaton town criers to tell you all about it.

Florien

"Diana encounters a mysterious and alluring young man called Florien. The novel is characterised by a romantic and supernatural tone, with Florien appearing and disappearing at will, leaving Diana to wonder about his true nature and his relationship to the girl, Janice, who lives in a dark and forbidding manor house. It explores themes of obsession, captivity, and the allure of the dark and dangerous, particularly Diana's attraction to Florien and his mysterious and potentially sinister nature."

See what the Deep Dive hosts made of it here.

The Hammer of the Sun

"The Great River lies barren, its lifeblood drained by an ancient curse. Journey through scorching sands and forgotten ruins, where sphinxes guard lost secrets and skeletal Spartoi wage perpetual war. Explore a vast open world where brooding sphinxes, proud Amazons, and forgotten gods cross your path. Uncover the mysteries of Iskandria, a once-great city now lost to time, and face challenges that will test your courage and cunning. Seek out mythical creatures, confront deadly foes, and collect powerful artifacts as you race against time to restore balance to the land. Will you become a legend, or be forgotten beneath the relentless hammer of the Sun?"

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

Lifeform Three

"The story of Paftoo, an artificial 'bod' in a dystopian future who works at Harkaway Hall, a nature reserve created from the ruins of a lost civilisation. Paftoo has no memory of his past, and his life is a constant cycle of work and night mode, where his mind is wiped clean. The novel explores themes of memory, identity, and the nature of reality as Paftoo tries to piece together fragments of his past and understand the true nature of the world he lives in."

Watch the bods discuss it on YouTube.

A Minotaur at the Savoy

"A series of letters sent to the Royal Mythological Society from individuals across the globe, detailing their encounters with fantastical creatures and events during the Year of Wonders, a period in which the lines between reality and imagination became blurred. The letters are a mixture of the mundane and the extraordinary, with correspondents reporting on everything from mischievous fairies and shape-shifting demons to giant birds carrying people off to ancient palaces. The letters serve as a humorous record of this extraordinary time, offering a glimpse into the impact of fantastical occurrences on everyday life."

Listen to the Deep Dive hosts talk about it here.

Necklace of Skulls

"The adventure involves the player taking on the role of a Mayan character searching for their lost brother in a fantastical mythological realm, encountering various challenges and finally confronting the semi-divine mage Necklace of Skulls, who may or may not be an aspect of the god of death."

Listen to the Deep Dive discussion here.

Richer source material typically inspires the AI to give a more interesting discussion. There's more depth to a novel like Lifeform Three than you'll find in any gamebook, even Heart of Ice. On the other hand, here's a case of our virtual hosts rising to a seemingly impossible challenge and acquitting themselves well.

More what you'd call guidelines than actual rules

It's always gratifying to get a review for one of my books, doubly so when the reviewer mostly liked it. Here's one for Down Among the Dead Men, the first book I wrote in the Virtual Reality series, that uses it as a design inspiration for Twine games. As James (the reviewer) points out, "Virtual Reality" was just an empty marketing title, which is why I changed the name to Critical IF when I relaunched the series.

If you just want a playthrough, there's a good one right here. (I'm "a fine old man", apparently -- thanks for those kind words, Jueri!) And below the astute, erudite and relatively youthful Mr H J Doom delivers his verdict on another Critical IF book, Heart of Ice.

While we're on the subject of old gamebooks, somebody said to me at Fighting Fantasy Fest that he thought you could only win in my 40-year-old gamebook The Temple of Flame by diving off the walkway into the shaft. I don't believe I'd have written an unbeatable path through the book, but it's a long time ago now and I might be wrong. Those who have played it more recently than 1984 may be able to shed some light on this?

And talking of FFF 5, if you weren't able to attend here's my and Jamie's talk along with discussion panels from later in the day:

IF critique

This made for a lovely start to my year: an in-depth, considered and very flattering review by D F Chang of my four Critical IF gamebooks. "Compelling characters, perfectly plotted, amazingly written..." I didn't bribe him to say that, honest. Mr Chang's comments on Once Upon A Time In Arabia are more than fair, and three out of four A-ratings is nothing to gripe about. I just came across the video by accident, but you can bet modesty won't stop me sharing it every place I can.

Mr Chang raises a few interesting points, some of which have been addressed in earlier blog posts but this is a good opportunity for a recap. There were six Virtual Reality gamebooks but I only wrote the four that were republished as Critical IF; Mark Smith wrote Green Blood and The Coils of Hate. I wrote Down Among The Dead Men first, then Necklace of Skulls, then Heart of Ice, and finally Twist of Fate -- which was retitled Once Upon A Time In Arabia for the new edition.

Mr Chang has some valid criticisms. He doesn't like 'Necklace of Skulls' as the wizard's name. My only defence is that the nobles and kings of the Maya tended to be called things like that, if we interpret their names literally: Bird Jaguar, Sky Witness, Centipede Claw, Shield of the Sun, Curl Snout. It was anyway fashionable to translate them like that in the '90s, rather than attempt to recreate the sound of the names (K'inich Kan B'alam, for instance) which are even more deeply lost in the mists of time.

I agree that my inspiration was flagging when it came to the Arabian book. Or maybe I was trying too hard to recreate the picaresque feel of the Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame, where the goal is likewise to scoot all over the world in order to achieve riches and honour. Probably I lavished too much energy on Heart of Ice and had nothing left to spare for the final book, and the deadline didn't permit me to take a break and recharge. That's why, when editing the new edition of Twist of Fate, I took the opportunity to change the lame title and rewrite the introduction to the story.

But how marvellous it is to hear of readers still getting pleasure from books I wrote twenty-five years ago and more. I'm nearer the end than the start of my writing career, but that reward never gets old.

For hardcore collectors (of paperbacks)

Getting one of my old '80s and '90s gamebooks back into print involves a pretty laborious process. I have to take a Stanley knife to the book, scan each page, put the scans through an OCR program, reconstruct and fix the flowchart, typeset and edit the text, and finally run off an "editing proof" copy to do a final check before publishing.

That last stage means there's a one-of-a-kind copy of each book. As the cover art usually isn't ready during editing, and yet I'm too OCD (not OCR) to print a book with a blank cover, I grab some art online. The end result is too nice to just sling in the bin, but I'm having to declutter my bookshelves, so these two proof copies of Heart of Ice and Down Among the Dead Men are looking for a new home.

If you'll excuse the hard-sell, another thing that makes these copies unique is the filler artwork, which was never used in any other edition. I thought of holding the books back as rewards in a future Kickstarter campaign, maybe for Jewelspider, but to be honest running a Kickstarter is more effort than it's really worth, so in the end I just handed them to my wife and told her to put them on eBay. If you're a gamebook collector and you want a genuine one-and-only, here (and here) is your chance. And, if you're just interested in playing the books, they're still on sale on Amazon and at all good bookstores.

Portraits of Peril

We don’t usually do news around here, unless it’s Brexit or Trump or other End Times scenarios, but there was some recent discussion in the comments about Scholastic UK’s re-release of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, and I kind of like the covers, so why not?

What’s good about them, first of all, is that they’re simple. These covers will have taken a fraction of the time of a full painting like Martin McKenna’s (very striking) image for Bloodbones. So they’ll be cheap, and that’s smart thinking.

On the other hand, cheap would be counter-productive if it looked cheap. Try the cover below that was proposed to me for Down Among the Dead Men by a mainstream publisher. ‘But… but…’ I said. And, when my brain regained control of my mouth: ‘It’s about pirates, not cowboys. And also it’s not a funny story for eight-year-olds.’



Thus it is that I know how utterly slapdash and dire a ‘professional’ attempt at a cover can be. By contrast, these FF covers are bold, modern and eye-catching. I can imagine them convincing today’s eleven-year-olds to give gamebooks a try.

But will those kids want to roll dice and wrangle their way through all that character-sheet arithmetic? Will the puzzle- and plot-driven adventures hold up? Will the creaky purple prose of thirty-five years past still compel attention in a videogame era? I don’t know. I just think they look pretty.

Splice the mainbrace!

Pirates are all the rage nowadays, thanks to Jack Sparrow, but back in the mid-90s it was a genre in the doldrums. The heyday of The Sea Hawk and The Crimson Pirate was a half century earlier, Polanski's Pirates in 1986 had failed to rekindle the buccaneering craze, and Renny Harlin with Cutthroat Island was just about to put a hole below the waterline.

I've always liked tall ships and I owned a copy of Tim Powers's On Stranger Tides - though I actually didn't get around to reading it till a couple of years ago. More to the point, Mark Smith and I needed to come up with a clutch of story ideas for the Virtual Reality gamebook series. The ink was barely dry on the deal, but the publisher's marketing department were already asking for a list of the first six or eight titles. We'd already decided not to set the books in one universe, and we'd both had enough of medieval(ish) adventures for a while. Mark went Cinquecento with Green Blood, Coils of Hate, and the never-published Masque of Death. I scattergunned off into apocalyptic SF (Heart of Ice), Mayan myth (Necklace of Skulls)... and Down Among the Dead Men.

It's not quite your traditional baroque frock-coated pirate thing I've got going on here. Dead Men is set in a more or less Elizabethan world, in which the kingdoms of Glorianne (England) and Sidonia (Spain) are getting into a shoving war on the high seas that grant them access to the New World. But your basic piratical ethic is intact, with room even for a few necessary anachronisms.

I always wanted to try my hand at fantasy in a Tudor setting, with conjurers like Prospero and Doctor Dee as character templates.In Dead Men, a slanderous reworking of Doctor Dee becomes William Wild (the real John Dee's granddad). And "El Draque" was a real Spanish nickname for Sir Francis Drake, though here it gets a bit of vampiric twist. And the inspiration for this Caribbean sky, and the scene that follows with its flying ships, comes from a late-night walk across Clapham Common, when the clouds opened up suddenly like an observatory dome to show me the blinding lamp of the full moon sliding across the sky, a galleon under dazzling canvas:

At last the storm blows over and the full moon appears – a blazing white beacon. The clouds go draining away like pools of quicksilver in the vast dark blue dish of the sky. ‘Ship ahoy!’ cries the lookout. ‘She’s the Rose!’ 

That sky whisked me right back to Nightmaster, the comic by Denny O'Neil and Bernie Wrightson, which was probably the first place I became aware of flying ships, or at any rate realized that one day I needed to put one in a book.

The book's title comes from an old song:

We are the red men,
Feathers-in-our-head men,
Down among the dead men.
Pow wow.

Apparently it's not heard much these days because of fears that it's a racial slur on Native Americans. Nope, nothing to do with that; it was originally a drinking song. Red faced, feather-headed, you see. From too much booze.. "Dead men" are the empty bottles under a tavern table. Hence this song, from John Dyer's toast to the King: "He who would this health deny, down among the dead men let him lie."

I liked the way Dead Men turned out. Its use of 16th century superstitions, of rapiers and flintlocks, felt fresh after years of gamebooks filled with clanking armour and broadswords. Like most of my worlds, there is no day-to-day contact with nonhumans like elves. The setting is so close to real history with sorcery spinkled on as a spice that Joe Humfrey and Jon Ingold at Inkle Studios suggested it could easily be relocated to a real-world historical setting. Queen Titania is obviously our own Virgin Queen (as played by Cate Blanchett anyway) so why not do the minor rewriting to make her so? In gamebooks twenty years ago I suspect that would have seemed strange, but it makes perfect sense today.

Ah, you noticed the reference to Inkle. That's the reason for this post, because today (which happens to be International Talk Like A Pirate Day - pure coincidence, I assure you) Inkle have launched Down Among the Dead Men as an app for iPhone and iPad. This was actually in development a couple of years back, but got caught up in Fabled Lands LLP's abortive partnership with Osprey Books. That was a big mistake that caused me to wrestle all summer long with an appallingly complicated interface (not Inkle's, I hasten to say) to create some epub3 books that never saw the light of day. It was one of those messy tangles of business and corporate politics that Jamie and I quit the mainstream games industry to escape from. And all along we would have much preferred to be working with Inkle anyway. So let me publically announce how glad I am that it all worked out in the end, Dead Men returned to its rightful harbour at Inkle, got refitted as an app rather than a mere ebook, and here it comes now with all guns blazing.

Click on old crossbones there, he'll see that you get aboard without undue keelhauling. Or go to iTunes here, and for a behind-the-scenes including the full flowchart, go to the Inkle blog here. Alternatively you can buy the print book from Amazon or get a PDF version on DriveThruRPG. Ah, and I see that a version of the "Down Among the Dead Men" tavern song features in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Drink up, me hearties.

Proof positive

Quick recap: Fabled Lands LLP owns the publishing rights to The Way of the Tiger, a classic series of jumpy-kicky gamebooks from the 1980s. Last year, we granted Megara Entertainment permission to print a limited edition of full-colour WOTT hardbacks to be funded via Kickstarter. That paid for editing and new artwork, which Megara in return allows Fabled Lands Publishing to use for a new paperback edition.

With me so far? The first two paperbacks, Avenger(!) and Assassin(!) are now on sale, and you can buy them from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online stores. As you can see from the pic, the new books are a bit bigger than the '80s originals and have rather more impressive covers. Mylène Villeneuve really packs energy, movement and drama into her paintings, whereas the original '80s painting for Avenger looks like a waxwork of a ninja having a poo.

Fabled Lands Publishing will be releasing the other four original books in paperback over the coming months. But that's not all. Megara have commissioned new books in the series. You can now buy the prequel book, Ninja, and the series is set to continue in Book 7, Redeemer, in which our hero or heroine bounds free from the giant spider's web. Both of those are by the talented David Walters, with stalwart support from editor and Megara US chief Richard S Hetley, and of course none of this would be possible without the Herculean dynamism of Megara's founder, Mikaël Louys.

Before you backflip over to Amazon, feast your eyes on the Easter eggs in the picture. Zen Combat by Jay Gluck (1962) and Ninjutsu by Donn F Draeger (1977) were the white-box DnD of the genre, the books that retconned "ninja" into Japanese history and ignited the craze for black-pyjamaed black ops that had become a full-on media frenzy by the start of the 1980s. And if you look really closely, you may see part of the flowchart for Down Among The Dead Men in the background there too, as stealthy as the ninja who lives in your chimney.

You wait for a gamebook and then four come along at once

I think we pitched the Virtual Reality books as "like novels only you get to make choices". Mark Smith certainly wrote his that way. The Coils of Hate in particular has some beautifully evocative descriptions and sharply tuned dialogue, though even after struggling from dawn till midnight for weeks on end I don't think I managed to fix its dysfunctional flowchart.

My own VR books were not so much novels as role-playing adventures. Heart of Ice in particular was based on a Tekumel campaign that I ran many times, except that for the book I moved it to a near-apocalyptic future where the world may end with a bang or a whimper, and which of those fates it will suffer is largely up to you. I always saw it as a Sergio Leone movie with operatic sweep and pragmatically amoral heroes. In the new edition, I've corrected one logical flaw and in the process added yet another possible ending with the obligatory nod to Blade Runner.

Down Among the Dead Men is an adventure with pirates, magic and the undead. Pirates of the Caribbean in those days was still just a ride at Disneyland, and I don't know if I'd even heard of On Stranger Tides. If this one were a movie it'd be directed by Tim Burton. The setting is about a century before the powdered wigs era popularized by Hollywood. Think Drake and Raleigh and Doctor Dee.

I researched Necklace of Skulls while on honeymoon in Mexico and Guatemala following the Maya trail. Spirtually it owes a debt to Professor M A R Barker - as do all my books, really - but there's nothing there that came directly from our Tekumel role-playing games. There are two main routes through: one the underworld of Pre-Columbian myth, where I aimed for the logic of dreams, and that's contrasted with the "reality" option of the everyday world of the hero's clan and the historical backdrop of the collapse of Teotihuacan. Director of the movie? Jan Švankmajer or Terry Gilliam, maybe.

For the new edition, I've retitled Twist of Fate as Once Upon a Time in Arabia and I've given it a completely new prologue. The core of the adventure is unchanged, though: a whirlwind of encounters with a 1001 Nights flavour involving ghouls, djinn, flying carpets, magic rings, lost palaces, strange lands, devious villains and brave comrades. Well, you've seen the movie and played the boardgame I'm sure.

All four of my VR books return to print this week as Fabled Lands Publishing's new Critical IF series. These are completely re-edited versions, in many cases with new sections, and with brand spanking new covers by Jon Hodgson. All but Once Upon a Time in Arabia have the original illustrations, and they are formatted to fit on the shelf along with the new edition Fabled Lands and Golden Dragon books.

And if you're into the digital era of reading, all four books are also out on Kindle. Even better, they're included in Amazon's new Matchbook bundling program, meaning that if you buy the print book, you get the Kindle version for no more than 99c extra.

And, and, and - this weekend only, you can pick up a FREE Kindle edition of Down Among The Dead Men. This is what heaven is like for e-gamebook fans. But just till midnight on Sunday, mind you.

These are some of my very best gamebooks, so I'll hope you'll check them out - or, if you already read them, maybe you'd like to go put a review on Amazon? If so, may your barysal gun never want for charges.



Sorry about all these covers. I know it looks like a supermarket shelf, but I wanted to be sure everybody had easy access to at least the US and UK links. (Hey, I could have added Italian, German, Canadian...)

We'll never reach infinity

You can't keep a secret in the internet age. I'd barely heard the news myself when readers of this blog started asking why the Infinite IF gamebooks had disappeared from the Osprey Adventures site. Weren't we going to team up with Osprey to bring back the Virtual Reality and Way of the Tiger books in digital form? That was the plan last summer. So what happened?

Now it can be told. Fabled Lands LLP won't be partnering with Osprey after all. It was an amicable parting and we wish them huge success with the Osprey Adventures line. Think Nazi occult secrets, zombie hunting guides, Cthulhu investogators' handbooks, dossiers that lift the lid on Area 51 - all coupled with the awesome full-colour artwork you'd expect of any Osprey book.

It became clear that gamebooks didn't really fit in there. Personally I wish we'd realized that before I spent eight months writing tedious Javascript and pasting it tediously into Excel because that's the way the toolset for these books worked. Oh, and it was undocumented. And occasionally the syntax would change. So that was a lot of fun. But it wasn't anybody's fault. Sometimes you get into something - pointing a gun at an archduke, digging a trench in the Somme valley, and the next thing you know it's out of everyone's hands.

When we finally had breathing space to sit back and look at the almost-complete e-gamebooks, that was when we saw they didn't have a natural home alongside either myths and legends or dark Fortean stuff. Had I written all-new gamebooks it might have been different. I wish I had done that, in fact, because the Dark Osprey books in particular are a really cool genre to work in.

The silver lining is that this change of plan means there will be print editions of those books. The Infinite IF series was going to be epub3 only, but now that I have the edited and revised text of the books, it's not too arduous to set them up in paperback on Amazon. Those should be ready in time for Christmas. More news about that in a month.

If you actually prefer digital gamebooks, I have nothing to promise right now, but don't give up hope. Jamie is looking into various other ways to get those versions completed and published. Meanwhile, I'm just happy to swap Javascript for Serif PagePlus (my DTP software of choice) and to set up some covers featuring Jon Hodgson's glorious artwork.

Worlds of IF

I've been dropping enough hints that it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that the Fabled Lands LLP gamebook back catalogue (which includes Blood Sword, Way of the Tiger, Virtual Reality, Falcon and Golden Dragon) is the secret third strand in the new Osprey Adventures imprint.

The Critical IF series will comprise new versions of classic gamebooks by me, Jamie, Oliver Johnson and Mark Smith, alongside new titles such as the Wild West fantasy Undeadwood which Jamie will be getting back to as soon as he's finished writing Dark Lord book 3, our new kids' SF series Starship Captain, and a few other things.

The books will be released in both print and ebook editions, the latter being fully interactive. So the sections are not only hyperlinked, but your hit points are automatically updated, skills and codewords checked, and so on. It's a miracle of technology (what passes for a miracle in the ebook world, at any rate) courtesy of the master coders at Spirit Entertainment, who are also developing the new Fabled Lands apps. You knew that. I know you knew that.

We'll be launching in the spring with Heart of Ice, Down Among the Dead Men, Necklace of Skulls, Avenger, Assassin and Once Upon a Time in Arabia. Oh, that last one? That's Twist of Fate as was, finally blessed with a title I approve of.

These aren't the covers you'll see on the finished books. These are just mock-ups (courtesy of Pieter Bruegel and Maxfield Parrish) I did so as to have some working copies by my side while editing and revising the manuscripts. Osprey have their artists working on all-new covers, maps and interior fillers.

To whet your appetite, I'll leave you with links to Per Jorner's comprehensive, no-holds-barred reviews of Necklace of Skulls, Heart of Ice and Down Among the Dead Men, and Mrs Giggles' reviews of Assassin! and Avenger! There, I even put the exclamation marks in this time.

Cover versions

I'm right in the throes of getting these four gamebooks ready for release next spring, so I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me for keeping this one short.

The first thing I ought to say is that these aren't actually the covers they're going to have when they go on sale. I just knocked these up to have handy copies to write in. It beats feeding reams of paper into the laser printer. Instead, I just have to fiddle around on Lulu for a half hour and lo, it's all sorted and some spanking new paperbacks arrive a few days later. The cover design process is quite therapeutic, too, after hours of flowcharting and proofreading.

The eagle-eyed will notice Twist of Fate has a new title. I never liked the original and this one explains what it's about. Mind you, I have yet to find out what our new publishers think. It could be The Thief of Bagshot by the time it comes out.

Ah yes. Our new publishers... Because this is not a Spark Furnace venture, but rather a partnership with a leading international publisher. If you're any sort of a gaming or fantasy nerd, you'll have heard of them - and, if you're like me, you'll have been collecting their books since you were a kid. I'll let you know who it is (assuming you haven't guessed) as soon as the ink is dry on the deal.

As well as these four books, we'll have an all-new gamebook by Jamie that I'm still going to refer to by the irritatingly tantalizing title of Undeadwood just so I'll have something to post about when we're ready to announce what it's really called. And for the sixth book - well, I'm still hoping it'll be the first in the Way of the Tiger series, and the news as of today is that it probably will be. Maybe even two Way of the Tiger books to kick off and we hold back Undeadwood till the autumn. What would your vote be on that?

Pain is his wine, and death his meat

Down Among the Dead Men is one of my own favorites of all the gamebooks I wrote, ranking equal second (after Heart of Ice) with Doomwalk. Partly that's 'cause it's pirates - with magic, but in almost an historical setting, not high fantasy. Leo did his best work ever, really pulled out the stops for this one. And even though the gamebook craze was dying out (this was 1993) Mark Smith and I had both put in more than our 10,000 hours, so if we were ever to be masters of our craft it was then.

I've always felt there's something more to be done with Dead Men. It was one of the story ideas that Leo and I pitched to David Fickling for his comic The DFC. So in another universe, instead of Mirabilis, we're now busy creating an 800-page fantasy comics epic about pirates. Recently Fabled Lands LLP has been looking at doing some new with it - and I can't tell you any details yet, but those plans are pretty exciting. So watch this space for more on that. (No, it's nothing to do with the new gamebook I mentioned in the last post. That's a whole other top secret FL project.)

In case you never read Dead Men, here's the introduction that sets the scene:

'Pirates!' The roar of cannonfire thunders across the waves as the word leaves the captain's lips. Hurtling out of the billowing plumes of smoke comes a barrage of iron shells. Each is larger than a man's fist, and strikes with a force that splinters the oak beams of your ship and shatters men's skulls like eggs. The mainmast takes a direct hit and topples, crushing the sailors standing under it.

A grappling hook latches onto the rail. The pirates are getting ready to board. Rushing to the side, you see their sinister vessel drawing alongside. Black sails flapping in the breeze like a carrion-bird's wings, her prow has the face of a medieval gargoyle. You read the name painted on her bows: the Belle Dame. But there is no look of beauty about her, nor hint of mercy on the faces of the brigands lining her rail.

A crewman standing beside you utters a groan of fear. 'It's Skarvench's ship.'

'Who's he?' you ask, having to shout over the din of cannon shots and the pirates' battle-cries.

He stares at you as though you are a simpleton, and then remembers that this is your first voyage to the New World. 'The worst man that ever lived,' is his blunt reply. And then the ships come together and the pirates are upon you.

Rushing headlong into the terrified crew, the pirates cleave a swathe of gory death across the ship's deck, their cutlasses rising and falling like scythes. You see the ship's officers valiantly fighting to defend the helm, but they are hopelessly outnumbered and soon butchered at their post. The fierce grins on the pirates' faces tell you that they expect easy pickings. You narrow your eyes as anger wells up inside you. You know that you will die today, but you feel no fear - only a cold determination to sell your life dearly. Two pirates lunge towards you. You duck the swing of the first, catch his arm and throw him against his crony. The sword intended for you ends up embedded in a pirate's belly, and his knife comes up by reflex to slash at the man who has inadvertently impaled him.

'Two down...' You turn, and then for the first time you clap eyes on Skarvench himself. He stands on the rail, grasping a grappling-line in one hand and a pistol in the other, whipping his sea-dogs into a killing frenzy with his evil laughter. His broad back and gangling limbs make him look like a massive crow. His beard is as long and lank as seaweed, and a single eye blazes beneath his bald brow - the other is covered by a leather patch.

He is raising his pistol. You are rooted to the spot under his baleful stare. It can't be fear you're feeling, surely...

'Ah, matey,' he says with a brown-toothed grin. 'Got to kill you again, have I?'

Again? You have no time to ponder this enigma. In the next instant, he fires his pistol and your whole world goes black.

* * *

You sit up with a gasp, sweat soaking your clothes. 'You've 'ad that dream again, eh?' says a voice.

You look around, your memory trickling back as the dream recedes. The slow creaking of a ship's timbers, the unhurried heave of the waves... you are in the stuffy confines of the Belle Dame's bowels. Sailors snore fitfully around you, catching some sleep between chores. In the glimmer of an oil lamp sits Old Marshy, the ship's carpenter, whittling at a stick of wood. He glances across at you, shaking his head sadly. 'It was two years ago,' he says. 'Don't know why you can't stop 'aving the dreams.'

'Dreams? Nightmares!' you say, mopping the sweat away. As you do, you feel the scar across your forehead where Skarvench's bullet struck you. A finger's breadth to the right — one less tot of rum for Skarvench's breakfast that fateful morning! - and your brains would have been blown out. As it is the bullet grazed you, leaving only the visible mark on your head and the scar of hatred deep in your heart.

Now that the nightmare has washed away, you recall the two years that have passed since that day. When you were first brought aboard the Belle Dame, Skarvench deemed you too insignificant to ransom and too close to death to be worth pressing into service. He would have cast you into the deep and never had a qualm - that was the fate of most who survived the battle - but Old Marshy undertook to nurse you back to health. You can well remember the weeks it took to get your strength back – weeks experienced like glimpses through broken glass, because of fever. You remember Old Marshy holding the wooden spoon of gruel to your lips until his thin arms trembled with tiredness, urging you to eat. You remember the shouts of the pirates as they toiled in the rigging, and their drunken laughter under the stars at night. And most of all you remember Skarvench, looming through your thoughts like the embodiment of cruelty, striding the deck and waiting for you to die.

You did not die; thanks to Old Marshy you regained your strength. But death might have been better than the living hell you have had to endure these two years as an ordinary seaman aboard the cruelest ship to sail the Carab Sea. Skarvench metes out discipline as the whim takes him, reveling in the suffering of others; pain is his wine, and death his meat. Often you have had to stand by and watch a man whipped for the slightest mistake. Sometimes you have felt that whip yourself- all to the raucous laughter of Skarvench and his vicious pirate band.

'All hands on deck!' Hearing the command, you shake the other sailors awake and hurry up out of the dingy confines of the orlop deck into the blaze of daylight.

Skarvench stands on the poop deck. The ox-like first mate, Porbuck, gives you a shove and growls, 'You, get up in the rigging.' As you climb, you glance out to sea. A small ship lies off the port bow and the Belle Dame is rapidly closing on her. You see a tall wooden crucifix standing amidships; she has no cannon. That is foolhardy: 'Go to sea on a prayer,' as the adage goes, 'but take a keg of powder too.'

You understand the reason for the other ship's lack of weaponry when you get a better view of the men lining her rail. They are all monks!

Skarvench's voice goes snarling across the water. 'Heave to or be blown out o' the water!' he calls. 'We'll be takin' your treasure, holy or not!'

'We have no treasure,' calls back one of the monks. 'We are poor brothers of the Savior, travelling to the New World to spread His message to the heathen.'

Skarvench smiles — always a sign of his bad temper – and says, 'Is that so? Well, I know of no place more heathen than the ocean bed.' He leans on the poop deck rail and calls to the master gunner: 'Mister Borograve, prepare to give 'em a broadside. I want their shaved heads sent forty fathoms deep, where heaven can't hear their mealy-mouthed prayers!'

The monks know they cannot outrun the Belle Dame. As Borograve orders the cannons primed, they begin to sing a hymn. It is a glorious and peaceful sound that reminds you of the meadows and villages of your homeland. Most of the sailors pause in their duties, overcome by the melancholy beauty of the song. Even one or two of the pirates look uneasy at what they are about to do.

'Prepare to fire,' says Skarvench, keen as a hound at the scent of a kill.

'No!' A carpenter's hammer goes flying through the air and strikes Skarvench's head with a crack loud enough to carry up to where you sit in the rigging. Skarvench remains as steady as a rock, his hand flashing out with startling speed to snatch the hammer out of the air as it falls. Then he turns. His face is a mask of white fury. The fact that there is a stream of blood flowing from his temple only makes him look all the more terrible. His gaze bores along the deck and finds:

'Mister Marsh! This your hammer, is it?'

Old Marshy quails, his one jot of boldness used up. 'B-but, Cap'n... they're holy men! I don't think...'

Skarvench tastes his own blood on his lip and savors it with his tongue. He gestures to a couple of the pirates, and Old Marshy is seized and dragged up to the poop deck. 'Lay his head on the rail there, lads,' says Skarvench in a voice like honeyed venom. He raises the hammer. 'You're right, Mister Marsh; you don't think. That's the trouble with having nothin' in your brain-pan, see?'

Far too late, you realize what Skarvench is going to do. You give a gasp and start down through the rigging. But even as you act, you know there is nothing you can do...

The hammer smashes down. It sounds like a wineflask breaking. The ordinary seamen look away in horror. The pirates grin gleefully like their captain, excited by the grisly sight. The corpse slumps to the deck.

'God curse you, Skarvench,' you mutter under your breath as you reach the foot of the mast. 'I'll see you dead for that.'

'You're not alone in wishing that,' whispers a voice, 'but I'd stow such talk unless you want your own skull under the hammer next.' You look around to see three of the crew - Grimes, Oakley and Blutz - men who, like you, were taken off plundered ships and forced to work for the pirates. 'We've a plan,' continues Grimes in a low voice. 'If we stay aboard this devil ship our days are surely numbered, so tonight we plan to jump ship. We're scheduled to take the evening watch. We'll lower the jollyboat with a few supplies, then strike out towards Port Leshand.'

'Five hundred leagues of open ocean in a tiny boat like that!' you gasp. 'It's near certain death.'

'Better than certain death, which is what we can expect here,' mutters Oakley. 'Look, you've got a reputation of being a handy customer to have along in a tight spot. To be honest, we haven't got much of a chance without you. Now, are you with us?'

You glare back up at the tall stooped figure on the poop deck. He stamps to and fro, the brain-smeared hammer still in his hand, annoyed that the monks made their getaway while he was distracted by Old Marshy. You'll make him pay for his crimes one day, but you know the moment is not yet right. You turn to Grimes and the others and give a swift nod. 'I'm with you,' you say.

Now turn to 1.

Some trivia: (1) This introduction was the last part of the book that I wrote. (2) I put on Danny Elfman's soundtrack to Batman Returns, walked around the room dreaming this bit into existence, then went to the keyboard and wrote it all down about as fast as I could have spoken it aloud. (3) Old Marshy is a nod to my friend Ian Marsh, former editor of White Dwarf magazine and our editor on the Virtual Reality series to which Dead Men belonged. (4) Ian also got kind of a namecheck as Captain Numachino in Fabled Lands book 6 - which he edited and typeset. (5) The name of the protagonist of Dead Men, though never mentioned in the text, is Angel Bones.

And if that prologue has given you a taste for piratical adventure on the high seas, I notice there are some copies of the book still available on Amazon. They may be worth snapping up. I mean, you'd be happy to own a first edition Harry Potter, now, wouldn't you?

In the lair of the Mantikore

If the images on the left look familiar, you probably played Sagaland, the German edition of Fabled Lands, which was released in 1998 by Ravensburger Buchverlag. The style of the artwork was very different from the original books, kind of a cross between Hannes Bok and Carl Barks only a lot more cartoony than either. It had a charm of its own, but it was all vignettes and close-ups. It didn't illustrate the world in the sweeping, immersive way that Russ's dynamic landscapes, street scenes and battlefields do.

Anyway, German FL fans who have been holding their breath for a new edition need risk asphyxiation no longer. Nicolai Bonczyk, of Frankfurt RPG publishers Mantikore Verlag, has just started re-releasing the series under the title Legends of Harkuna. The first book, Das Reich des Krieges, is out now and book two is already in the pipeline. A parcel of copies just arrived from Germany and I can tell you that they really look marvellous, with a high-quality paper that does full justice to the crisp reproductions of Russ's illustrations.

I have some other gamebook news that I'm dying to reveal but the deals aren't finalized yet. Suffice it to say at this stage that fans of Fabled Lands and Virtual Reality will have plenty to talk about. And as for talk of an all-new gamebook by me and Jamie - that's just a rumour. You didn't hear it from me.

Mirror mirror

An artistic curiosity today. We see two versions of my Virtual Reality gamebook Down Among the Dead Men - or, in French, Le Pirate des Sept Mers. I remember that when I got some copies of the French edition, I was immediately struck by how much more powerful the cover image looked when mirror-flipped like that. And it reminded me of a book I wrote in the mid-80s to tie in with the TV series Knightmare. When my dad saw the cover, he turned it upside down and said, "See how much more threatening it looks?" He was right; try it for yourself and see. (Dad was an electrical engineer, incidentally, not an artist.)

In the case of the Dead Men cover, I don't know if the artist or the art director was responsible for the orientation on the English edition. I suspect the latter, because that would explain why ol' Billy Bones there has the sword in his left hand. Although to really have maximum impact, his head should be turned so he's facing us or looking over our right shoulder.

Incidentally, you can try the same mirror-flip trick on yesterday's Blood Sword cover.