You want fries with that?

In a very short time (I say that with fingers crossed) I'll be ready to put my Jewelspider RPG on DriveThruRPG. Urged by regular correspondent Stanley Barnes, and with the help of Simon Barns of Red Ruin Publishing, I thought I'd better learn the DriveThru ropes by uploading some books I did earlier.

So, if you're looking for digital gamebooks, you can now get the Critical IF series from DriveThruRPG:

• Heart of Ice
• Down Among the Dead Men
• Necklace of Skulls
• Once Upon a Time in Arabia

As well as the grand finale of the Blood Sword series:

• The Walls of Spyte

And a former Fighting Fantasy title that has been reworked as a standalone adventure in the Fabled Lands series:

• The Keep of the Lich Lord

And the first Fabled Lands book:

• The War-Torn Kingdom

You get a watermarked PDF with all the sections hyperlinked and the original illustrations by Russ Nicholson and Leo Hartas. In the case of Once Upon a Time in Arabia that makes this quite a collector's item, incidentally, as the print version currently lacks Russ's pictures.

Games that gloomviles play

If that picture rings a bell, you may have an eye like an A.I. but you'll also appreciate that gloomviles from an early Golden Dragon gamebook have found their way into the latest issue of Dragon Warriors magazine Casket of Fays. This issue has a sandbox campaign (my kind of game, that) set on the moors, magic items, creatures, adventure seeds, and a feature on the games that characters (not players) enjoy in the lands of Legend.

And while you're on DriveThruRPG don't fail to pick up Paul Partington's latest Dragon Warriors gamebook Scourge of the Shadows. It's a 480-section adventure set in Ereworn and, like Casket, it's absolutely free.

Also, though it's not related to Dragon Warriors or Fabled Lands, don't forget to check out the Kickstarter for the third Legendary Kingdoms book, Over the Bloo-- no, I mean Pirates of the Splintered Isles. Open world gamebook adventure, except with a party of characters instead of a single PC. You can get a sense of what it's like from the playthrough here:

Icon of Death

I keep whingeing about how exhausting it is to write the Vulcanverse gamebooks, work on which has taken me most of the year, and meanwhile Red Ruin Publishing have been steadily releasing top-class Dragon Warriors gamebooks with no fuss whatsoever. I feel chastened.

The latest in the series is Icon of Death by David M Donachie, it's completely free, and it's set under the blistering sun of Outremer. Watch out for mirages and forsaken lazars.

"As he smoothly lowered me into the gloom, I held forth my lantern and gazed at the cold, wet stone..."

Also just out and also free: a new Cedric and Fulk adventure, "The Well of All Tears", in a chapbook that also includes pieces on zombie beasts and gallows wood (the material, not the place, though both are ominous).

A little touch of the apocalypse

Still searching for the perfect online roleplaying game? The lighter the better, I say. You can roll dice and move figurines on Roll20, but a conversational style of game is a lot easier and for my money more fun. That's one of the reasons I enjoyed running Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders, which quite honestly is a work of genius. If you've read the sagas you'll know how perfectly it captures the spirit of them, and right now it's Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG. Oh, and Gregor is giving half of the profits to the Red Cross while the pandemic continues.

Two other games with a similarly light touch when it comes to rules mechanics are, unsurprisingly, both Powered by the Apocalypse. First up I give you Tremulus, which spins Lovecraftian horror in an improv storytelling style. I have a conflicted relationship with HPL-based games in that, if you play them true to the spirit of the Cthulhu Mythos, the heroes can't win. Having said that, going mad, giving in to despair, and suffering inevitable defeat can also make for a cathartic experience.

Then there's Alas For The Awful Sea, which appears to be inspired by Melville, Conrad, Poe, and probably HPL again. You play a ship’s crew navigating the remote British Isles in the 19th century. There they face a world consumed with suspicion, sadness, and desperation. Hard to sum it up, but the designers Vee Hendro and Hayley Gordon say this:

"Struggles for power have deadly consequences; mysterious disappearances plague the region; and those who seem human may not all be so. Amidst all this, the sea sends forth strange messages. Will you be the one to listen?"

If you liked The Lighthouse, that one's definitely for you.

I've been making some discoveries about playing online. Simple rules work best, but that was pretty obvious from the git-go. I'm also finding games run better when they're audio only. We have one game on Discord with eight players, and one on Zoom with five players. There's much more cross-chat in the latter, because any appearance in any player's room of a child, spouse, pet, pizza or whatever risks distracting several of the players into launching off on a separate conversation where they talk over everyone else. Lacking video, the Discord game is much more focussed. Players stay in character more and wait for each other to speak, so it's less of a hubbub as well as encouraging a more vivid mental picture of the adventure. There's a good reason they call this improvised radio theatre with dice.

Pop back tomorrow when we'll be jumping on the magic carpet for a trip back to the land of the Arabian Nights. Not just an adventure, oh no. Open sesame indeed, this is a full campaign complete with detailed maps of 8th century Baghdad. And whatever you're playing in these difficult days, and whether it's with voices only or facetime too -- stay safe.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the lands of Legend

Magnum Opus Press did a sensational job of bringing Dragon Warriors back from the veils of obscurity with a series of beautifully produced, stunningly illustrated and superbly written scenario packs, rulebooks and source material. Unfortunately, as everybody knows by now, MOP supremo James Wallis has had to move on to other projects - in particular his exciting Facebook-based sim/RPG, of which I can tell you absolutely nothing except that it is certain to become a household name as soon as it's revealed to the world.

But it's not all bad news. In fact, far from it. As one door closes another - equally gilded, bejewelled, enticing and with the requisite hint of dark faerie magic - is swinging open, because a new company will be picking up the DW reins. There are some top industry names involved and you're going to like what they have planned for you.

Before the new stuff starts flowing, Magnum Opus have announced the sort of offer that won't get repeated in this lifetime of the universe. They have packaged up every single one of the new edition DW releases in The Ultimate Legendary Pack, a PDF collection priced at only $88.95, which is way less than half of what all those books would cost you in their unkind-to-trees edition. Check it out over on DriveThruRPG.

Fabled Lands covers

I'm up to my eyeballs in PDF formats and preflight checks for print compliance, but there's just time to bob up to the surface and let you have a sneak peek at the first four covers. The layouts are by Leo Hartas, my Mirabilis co-creator and longtime friend and collaborator - check us out on DriveThruComics. On the FL books, page count is coming in around 240 pages per book and we are still on course for a December release, at least for these first four books. With luck they should be available to preorder on Amazon pretty soon.