Blood Sword - the prequel

This may make sense only to our British readers, but Guy Fawkes Night was originally instituted as a day of thanksgiving (with bonfires & straw-filled effigies instead of turkey & cranberry sauce) and for what could we have better cause to give thanks than Red Ruin Publishing's new 200-section Blood Sword prologue gamebook?

It's by Martin Dangov, with illustrations by Dean Spencer and Carlos Castilho, and there is a companion app developed by Prime Games that helps manage the character sheet, skill development, and combat. 

You can get Sword of Harmony on DriveThruRPG and it's pay-what-you-want. That's better than a sparkler and a hot dog, eh?

Casket of Fays #17

There's a new Casket of Fays just out with the usual blend of high-quality writing and art, this time with some gorgeous full-colour pieces by Inigo Hartas for Jewelspider. 

I won't list all the good stuff on offer, but among the articles I liked were Alistair Smith's thoughts on how to cut the "Gallows Wood" scenario from The Elven Crystals down to a single session's gaming. Alistair makes some good points, and I should have done it forty years ago on our DW promotional tour when I had to run the adventure every evening for sales reps and book buyers -- and invariably ran out of time.

Casket of Fays issue 17 is now available on DriveThruRPG.

A firestorm of fear

HUSK by Stanley R Barnes is a roleplaying game in a unique post-apocalyptic setting. Eons ago, a worldwide pestilence in the form of giant wasps consumed nearly everything. The resulting ecological collapse left behind a largely barren landscape plagued by powerful windstorms, toxic rain, and scorching heat. Humanity survived by finding shelter within the desiccated remains of the colossal insects, converting the husks’ innards into habitable (and sometimes mobile) habitats.

The player-characters are small crews and families struggling to survive not only the unforgiving elements but also the machinations of rivals and the constant threat of the living dead that emerge at night. The game emphasizes that humanity may never resolve its dire situation, but must endure the consequences of past generations. The primary currency is water, with bronze, silver, gold, and gems valued in terms of gallons of water.

HUSK uses a dice-based attribute system. Attributes are compared to a target number or opposed dice rolls to determine success. Characters are defined by six attributes: Might, Endurance, Nimbleness, Deftness, Fortitude, and Reasoning. Character creation involves assigning dice types (1d4, 1d6, 1d8) to these attributes, with no more than two of the same die type. Success is determined by rolling the appropriate attribute die against a target number which ranges from 1 (no effort) to 10 (Herculean). Modifiers from Guild Affiliations, Mastery Levels, or Special Abilities can influence the roll.

The game features various guilds such as Raiders, Roamers, Bounty Hunters, Tinkerers, Explorers, and Families, each granting a +1 modifier to a specific attribute. Mastery levels (Unskilled, Apprentice, Journeyman, Master) are gained through experience and training.

Combat is procedural and deadly, with attacks involving rolls that factor in attributes, weapon modifiers, and armour. The mechanics include Armour Bypass Rolls and Armour/Weapon Durability Rolls, simulating the wear and tear of conflict.

But the thing that most distinguishes HUSK is its setting, a far future that at the same time has resonances of ancient times. It’s far from being yet another twist on a familiar trope. The unsettling, hallucinatory atmosphere draws inspiration from multiple sources and takes its substance from various features of the world:

• The emphasis on a gritty, survivalist approach , dangerous combat, and the importance of resource management (eg water as a medium of exchange).
• The focus on deep world-building and a desire to provide a truly novel experience rather than relying on familiar tropes.
• The constant threat from merciless elements, ravenous night creatures, and the aftershocks of a catastrophic past, combined with the grim outlook that humanity may never resolve its situation, positions the game firmly within the survival horror subgenre.
• The barren wasteland, the struggle for survival against nature and other human factions, and the use of scavenged or repurposed structures (giant wasp husks as homes ) strongly evoke works like the Mad Max film series – and, for me, the unsentimental travails of the characters in Survivors.
• The game abounds in mystery and discovery, exploring the grotesque and the wondrous in the tradition of weird fiction authors like H.P. Lovecraft or Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation, etc), where the horror comes from the unknown and environments that defy conventional understanding.
• Beyond the broad post-apocalyptic genre, specific elements like the constant need for water, the threat of disease, and the emphasis on resourcefulness are reminiscent of stories where characters must meticulously manage supplies and face persistent environmental threats.

HUSK presents a bleak yet intriguing world that eschews conventional fantasy/SF tropes for a unique blend of post-apocalyptic survival, weird horror, and a gritty, old-school roleplaying sensibility. An old friend of mine borrowed one of my copies of HUSK and got back to me that very night to supply a rave review, containing amongst other sentiments that he was powerfully reminded of quality RPGs of the Golden Age -- exercises in classic imaginative world building that hooked him into gaming since the '70s and ever since. If that sounds appealing, you can get the game now on DriveThruRPG or Amazon.

The magic of the machine

All five Vulcanverse books are now available in ebook format for Kindle and as watermarked PDFs on DriveThruRPG. If your friends scoff at the very suggestion, saying, "But the full-colour hardbacks look so amazingly collectible!" -- well, they have a point, but you can counter with the fact that you'll be getting the entire open-world series (6115 gamebook sections, and getting on for three quarters of a million words) for less than the price of a single paperback book.

The Sisyphean task facing me was hyperlinking all those sections. You can see from the image above what the text looked like. I had the five books in Word and I was quickly able to convert all the centred numbers to headings. You can hyperlink to headings, so that was the first hurdle. But then I thought about the task ahead. More than six thousand sections meant about twelve thousand hyperlinks to put in. If I did those by hand it would take weeks of mind-numbing labour.

Ah, but that's 2024 thinking. We're in the future now. I keep extolling the benefit of writing with AI. What better use of it could there be than saving me hours and hours of drudgery? I presented the problem to Gemini 2.5 Pro:

"I have several Word documents into which I need to insert hyperlinks. Each document has numbered sections, typically from 1 digit to 4 digits -- so, for example, 1, 2, 3... to 1499, 1500, 1501, say. Those numbers are styled as headings in Word. Then in the body of the text I have a bunch of links, also numbered, like so: ► 1, ► 2, etc. I want to link those so that the number after the arrow is hyperlinked to the corresponding heading. For example, given ► 188 the "188" would link to to the heading labelled 188. Rather than do this laboriously by hand, I'm hoping you can write me a macro that will add all the hyperlinks automatically."

Gemini quickly came back with a macro to run in Word. And here's a bonus: a human coder would certainly have told me that I should have written the book in Twine to begin with -- in other words, "I wouldn't start from here." But I had it all in Word, so who cares what I should have done if I'd thought about it a couple of years ago? I needed the solution to this problem right now. LLMs don't scold you, they just get on with it.

Gemini's macro hyperlinked the whole of a Vulcanverse book in a few minutes. The only snag was that it hyperlinked every instance of a number N to heading N, and that included hyperlinking stat bonuses, the costs of items for sale, and numbers given in difficulty checks -- whereas I only wanted it to hyperlink numbers that followed a ► , ie in the format "► N", indicating a player option. Gemini suggested a couple of fixes but those didn't work. At this point it was time for the human writer to earn his keep. I said:

"The new macro is inserting hyperlinks for all instances of ► N but also hyperlinking any number N regardless of whether or not it was prefixed by "► ". I have thought of a possible solution that would save me having to completely reformat the original document. What if I replaced all "► N" with "► xyzN". If you rewrite the macro to search only for "xyzN" and hyperlink those, I can then globally remove the "xyz" and we should be left with hyperlinks only where we want them. I suggest this on the theory that it's the search for ► that is confusing the VBA editor."

That met with Gemini's approval. "Your proposed workflow is a classic troubleshooting technique," it said. "If the target is ambiguous, make it unambiguous. By 'salting' the numbers you care about with a unique prefix, you create a perfect, undeniable target for the macro, completely eliminating the possibility of it acting on the wrong numbers. I am confident this will work."

The best-laid plans of mice, men and machines... The new macro added the hyperlinks, and as promised the hyperlink was only on the numerical part of any instance of "xyzN" (so that I could remove the "xyz" without losing the link), but any given link for a number N didn't necessarily point to the heading N, but to the first occurrence of the number N anywhere in the Word document. Since a number frequently might be mentioned before the heading corresponding to that number, we were still stuck.

My first thought was that the macro was having trouble identifying the headings, so a possible fix would be to run a macro that created a set of bookmarks from the headings. So, for example, heading 323 would lead to the creation of a bookmark labelled bookmark_323 (because bookmarks can’t have names that only comprise digits). We’d end up with a bookmark list: bookmark_0001, bookmark_0002, etc, all the way to bookmark_1800 or whatever. Then we could run a modified version of the hyperlinking macro that would only link to corresponding numbers in the bookmark list.

By this point I'd begun to lose confidence in Gemini 2.5 Pro so I turned instead to Claude Sonnet 4. I didn't give Claude my proposed solution of creating a bookmark list as I wanted to test it properly against Gemini, so I just showed it the macro I had been using and told it the problem. "I can see the issue with your macro," said Claude almost immediately. "The problem is in how you're creating the hyperlinks. When you use SubAddress:=headingNumberText, Word is searching for the first occurrence of that text anywhere in the document, not specifically looking for a heading with that text. The solution is to create proper bookmarks for your headings first, then link to those bookmarks. Here's a corrected version of your macro that should work properly."

Now, this was encouraging. Claude had come up with the same solution as me (not always a good sign in and of itself, admittedly) and its code was considerably tighter than Gemini's. Not only that, Claude's macro ran faster and with no errors. Some twenty minutes later I had all five Vulcanverse books fully hyperlinked. (And the Fabled Lands books after ten or fifteen minutes more.) It's a perfect example of how AI tools can make a writer's life so much easier. All the words and storylines are by me and Jamie, all the illustrations are by Mattia Simone and the art team at Vulcan Forged; only the grunt work was done by machine.

Dark with something more than night

American GIs returning home from the war found their society had changed in disturbing ways. The homecoming boys found women's new confidence and independence both alluring and threatening. At the same time the soldiers had to adjust from being brave heroes to nine-to-fivers -- if they could find work at all. And they brought back their own demons, the aftereffects of having faced death and being expected to kill. The tough masculinity that was so prized in wartime was out of place and brittle in peacetime America. And over all of that hung the shadows of the atom bomb and the almost unimaginable monstrosity of the Holocaust.

No wonder it was the heyday of noir.

Noir and hardboiled fiction are adjacent and often people get them mixed up. Author Megan Abbott explains the difference:

"The common argument is that hardboiled novels are an extension of the wild west and pioneer narratives of the 19th century. The wilderness becomes the city, and the hero is usually a somewhat fallen character, a detective or a cop. At the end, everything is a mess, people have died, but the hero has done the right thing or close to it, and order has, to a certain extent, been restored. [...] In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable. In that sense, noir speaks to us powerfully right now, when certain structures of authority don’t make sense any longer, and we wonder: Why should we abide by them?"

The best noir game I can think of is the original Max Payne, which is a long way from the hardboiled 1930s background that is the default setting for Cthulhu roleplaying. Paweł Dziemski and I have drawn on noirish elements for our upcoming Cthulhu 2050 gamebook, locating them a century on from classic noir's origins. There are some RPGs like Gumshoe that lend themselves to the hardboiled milieu, but up till now there haven't been many specifically for noir in a mid-20th century setting. Which is why Alexander and Mina Stojanovic's Infinite Night looks so interesting.

Here the world is definitely a morally murky one. To paraphrase the rulebook, the game takes place in a Los Angeles that reeks of desperation, betrayals, and deals gone wrong. Infinite Night has an elegant dice pool system based on three stats: Brutality, Cunning, and Seduction. Rolls are quick and simple, modified where appropriate by Reputation (War Hero, Driver, Night Owl, etc). Instead of tracking hit points, injury and emotional trauma impose conditions that reduce some rolls. Personal contacts provide a roster of supporting characters to ease PCs into adventures. I like it because it's a system that is there when you need it but that doesn't get in the way of the story.

Currently it's only available as an ebook -- Kindle link here; Apple version here. I don't know whether there'll be a print edition, but Future Pixels who publish it have an Infinite Night MMO in the works. Noir gaming has a bright future ahead.

And... while we're talking about ebooks, this is a good time to mention that The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun, the first two books in the Vulcanverse open-world gamebook series, are now out on Kindle and on DriveThruRPG at a special low introductory price. If you've been thinking of giving the Vulcanverse a try, now is the perfect time.

When to go all-in

John Whitbourn, author of the wonderful Binscombe Tales and many other first-rate fantasy stories, has the knack of finding out about a wide range of interesting curiosities. "Perhaps you've seen this," he'll say, pointing me to an obscure book or a movie or a game that is absolutely right up my street and yet that I'd never heard of before that moment. If I try it in reverse, telling him about a little-known Nigel Kneale SF drama, say, or a 1960s Soviet folk horror movie, or a seminal work of English apocalyptic fantasy, it usually turns out he already knows all about it.

I've given up looking for an explanation. The universe just looks favourably on John while I'm its red-headed stepchild. But I'm grateful to be kept abreast of news that otherwise would have passed me by. For instance, he recently dropped me an email about an OSR game called Slay. This line jumped out:

Slay has a unique d6 combat system. Roll a red effort die along with your white task dice. Make a decision to either add the effort die to your attack or convert it to a dodge die and keep it to improve your defence. This makes every attack roll a decision: do you go in for damage but potentially leave yourself open? Do you play defensively even though you could potentially deal damage?

That made me think of Tirikelu, another RPG where you can trade off attack against defence. But there are differences worth pondering. In Slay, you roll the dice and then decide how to share out your zanshin. In Tirikelu, you set your priorities first, then you roll. You also get the chance to alter your tactics as the round progresses. Say you get initiative and you start off with a half-value attack. That leaves you with the option later in the round of either using the other half-value action to parry, or letting your opponent strike at you unopposed and then at the end of the round you can use the remaining half-action to attack again.

One system gives more tactical choice, the other is super-quick. Which you opt for depends on your playing style and preferences. In fact, since Slay is pay-what-you-want and Tirikelu is free, why not try both? And now that autumn is here, and Halloween barely a month away, the perfect reading matter as the nights draw in is the aforementioned Binscombe Tales. Tell a friend about them and you'll soon have a reputation for spooky synchronicity.

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.