Sermons in stones

I had forgotten that Mark Smith's Virtual Reality books were both set in a world which may very well be part of the Rainbow Land of his and Jamie Thomson's Duelmaster series. The name of the Palayal River by the city of Godorno suggests Tekumel, but nothing else about the setting does. The Forest of Arden features in both, though whether it's Shakespeare's, the one by the Avon, or some third high-fantasy variant is not clear.

It does feel quite Shakespearean, these books being very strong on atmosphere. That's especially true of Godorno in Coils of Hate, a city that resembles a nightmarish version of Venice where the walls fairly drip with a dank ambience of distrust and fear. I could ask Mark about the intended setting (possibly it was an unmapped corner of Orb) but it was twenty years ago and he's not likely to remember now.

Mark's titles in the series were Green Blood (love that title) and Coils of Hate. They were the nearest to being interactive novels - rather stronger on the novel side than on the interactivity, to be honest. The characters and locations would make a superb role-playing sourcebook, which is one clue that Mark might have taken them from his notes for the Orb campaign. (Which was not, as I never tire of telling people, even remotely Oriental, despite the Way of the Tiger books.)

And these maps..! I challenge any role-player to look at Godorno and not want to spend a few evenings adventuring there. One of Mark's biggest literary influences is Fritz Leiber Jr, and there's more than a hint of Lankhmar to those streets and canals. It does no harm to have the maps beautifully rendered by Leo Hartas, too.

Nerve-racking news

So you can't have missed that Megara Entertainment are working on deluxe hardcovers of The Way of the Tiger for release in 2014, nor that Fabled Lands LLP will be bringing out paperbacks (black-and-white, so a little less deluxe) later in the year.

Megara also have the Orb RPG in development, for those who are more interested in role-playing than in gamebooks and who aren't that bothered about sneaky, leapy geezers in black PJs. Come on, I can't be the only one. Any questions, just ask the chaps at Megara.

Even more amazing news: Jamie just told me that he was digging around in the attic and he came across a complete Duelmaster book, previously unpublished. This one was to be titled either Masters of the Martial Arts or Tournament of Champions, and Jamie finished it just a few days before he heard that the publisher had cancelled the series. We're going to be playing it next week to see if it stands the test of time. If so - well, can you stand another Kickstarter?

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

What is it about magic and colour? At a role-playing convention years ago, Greg Stafford described to the breathless Glorantha groupies a scene in a RuneQuest movie that was pitched to the deaf ears of Hollywood. Something has happened to remove magic from the world, said Stafford, and the movie would show this by switching from colour to black-&-white.

It made me think first of A Matter of Life and Death (the difference between monochrome and colour is used more interestingly there) but the very next neuron to fire recalled SPI's 1975 boardgame Sorcerer, in which wizards attuned to different colour frequencies vied for power by enticing each other to battle in zones whose hue favoured their own magic. Sorcerer created quite a stir among us boardgamers because it was SPI's first foray into fantasy gaming - which, as they usually catered for the hardcore wargamer, was a crisis of confidence brought on, no doubt, by the growing success of grungy dungeon games. If you're interested, you can get a glimpse of the rulebook here.

A few years after that, in 1986, Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson came out with the Duel Master series - for me, their best gamebooks, and probably my favourite gamebooks ever. The first (and best) of these, Challenge of the Magi, involved two duelling sorcerers of the Rainbow Land (part of which unaccountably overlapped with Warwickshire and/or the poems of Thomas Lodge) whose magic obeyed a chromatic taxonomy:

• Red for fire
• Black for death
• Blue for illusion
• Green for nature
• White for... um, "holy" stuff

There were two books. Each player took one and you chased each other around the map of the Rainbow Land, trying to fake out your opponent so he didn't guess the colours on which you were strongest. OK, in the era of videogames that probably doesn't sound too impressive, but we had to make our own fun* in those days. And anyway, books are like radio: the pictures are better.

To this day I never figured out how Mark and Jamie made those books work. There was some kind of crazed obsessive-compulsive genius at work in the amazingly detailed rules (which were, nonetheless, easy to use) and the complex intricacies of the flowchart (likewise). And they were meaty, these tomes: 800 sections each. And you got a solo option.

They should have been a massive success, but the tragedy of gamebooks was that the craze didn't last long enough to really support any of the interesting things they were evolving into. That's why it surprises me when some modern revivals of the medium seem to aspire only to setting the clock back to simple dungeon-bashing. By the late-'80s gamebooks were already way beyond that.

(For the sake of balance I should add that there are plenty of modern gamebooks that have continued to innovate in terms of rules, setting and, most interestingly, the depth and quality of the storytelling - just look at the quality of most Windhammer Prize entries, for example.)

Fabled Lands LLP has the rights to the Duel Master books and they are cherry-ripe for conversion to apps. A little bit of handheld tech is perhaps all they needed to get the success they deserved. Twenty-seven years on, we'll see what we can do.


* Although, as Mamet says, everybody makes their own fun; if you don't make it yourself it isn't fun, it's entertainment.

No Man’s Land is basically home

The Dark Lord books are supposed to be for kids, but I have yet to find an adult reader of fantasy who hasn't enjoyed them too, usually to the point of laughing immoderately in public whenever they open the book, thereby risking a tasering from the people who used to patrol the streets with nothing more dangerous than butterfly nets. I was recently reading the manuscript for the third book (WIP title The Dirkest Hour) in bed and I had to stop because I was laughing so loud I woke my wife up. It's a little hard to explain... "What's so funny?" "Well, there's this goblin and he's throwing custard at the wall, and then he lets off this horrendous fart and... Oh, never mind."

Jamie has just done an interview on the Hachette Children's Books site. Be sure to read the whole thing if you're interested in the creative process and the craft of writing. Here are a few highlights from the interview - and come back on Friday for more news from Jamie:

Some background before we begin... What were you doing, in the pre-Dirk world?

Well, I started off life in the '80s doing game books - the choose-your-own-adventure type - for Puffin in the Fighting Fantasy series. The first book I ever did, with my writing partner Mark Smith, was called Talisman of Death. Those did rather well, so I went off and did a load of them, then I did a two-player series and it had the only book I ever dedicated to my mother – ‘To my darling mother’ – and it was called The Arena of Death.

I must’ve done about twenty five game books, and then that whole market dried up when computer games came along. So I got back into computer games and had a computer game company called Black Cactus which went horribly wrong in the end and we lost a lot of money. After that I got back into novels, really.

Are there any games we might remember from that computer game company?

There was something called Warrior Kings, which was an RTS, in early 2000, a sort of fantasy thing. So essentially, it’s been thirty years of selling goblins to kids and just doing fantasy left, right and centre, creating endless Dark Lords and big, bad villains, shooting them down or killing them. I’ve lived in that world for so long you begin to think ‘surely Dark Lords have mothers…’ and that starts getting you into why someone would become a Dark Lord.

Do you remember where you were when you had the idea for Dark Lord?

Yes, I was with a friend of mine, Dave Morris. We’ve since started another company, Fabled Lands LLP, and we have an American investor. He’s quite a serious biotech venture capitalist, but he also used to love all of our gamebooks; for him it’s a bit of fun and he can meet up and talk to us and set us working on fun projects. It’s great for us because we’re just free to write whatever we like - it’s like having a patron, like a medieval Medici, except he’s called Big Wedge Frank. So that’s wonderful, and actually we’re doing quite well at the moment.

So it was just me and Dave, having a few beers and riffing off about how great it would be if you had a Dark Lord wandering around Earth. It began with an idea about a Diary of a Dark Lord, so it would be like Darth Vader or Sauron actually writing ‘Had to destroy a goblin today’, or you can imagine ‘Today the hobbits found my ring – Noooo!’, that kind of stuff. And then you start thinking about how could you really do the biography of a Dark Lord? You’d need to make him sympathetic or likeable, and you couldn’t really do that if you were doing it straight – then it would be like trying to make Hitler or Stalin likeable. It had to be jokey. And then the comedy angle led to the fish-out-water stuff, and then having him cursed is a natural progression, cursed into the body of a thirteen year old boy and sent to school is just perfect.

This is a very detailed world you’ve created – how long did it take to do that, and is there loads more that you know about but haven't been able to put in the book?

There is a lot that’s been left out, but nothing’s wasted. I’m writing the third Dark Lord book now and you never know when stuff will come in. But my career has mostly been about creating worlds, so that was the easy bit. You need the nations, but you leave religion out of it as it’s too sensitive these days. Already in the American version we’ve had to take out the word ‘Hell’, so instead of ‘By the nine Hells!’ Dirk has to say ‘By the nine nether worlds!’and there’s other stuff like that.

But normally, if you’re doing a computer game or role-playing game, you’d have a very detailed pantheon of different gods for different cultures, different politics and battle and combat tactics, like you’re creating an entire medieval nation from scratch, with stuff from mythology, science fiction and Japanese themes. I’ve done so much of that it would be easy to parody, but this is a more of a comedy parody and at the same time a great example of the genre and a loving homage

Reading the book is almost like being in the mind of a proper mad person, for whom other people’s reality is incomprehensible; how did you do that?

It was definitely part of me, I’m afraid! I think I started life a bit bemused by the world, so I think I drew on that a bit…it’s a product of all that gaming, coupled with my own bemusement. Although, saying that, I was born in Iran and lived there for the first ten years of my life, and then went to boarding school in England; my dad worked for Shell and we lived on an oil field. So, in a way, that also makes you look at the world from a different perspective.

It gives you a very good understanding of the outsider principle.

I think that’s true. You're born a little bit of an outsider, in a small, unique group of people, then you come to Britain still a bit of an outsider.

No Man’s Land is basically home.

Yes, or the alternative is…I fell to your planet many years ago, from the Dark Lands – I pretend it is fiction, but it’s all true.

Do you know where you’re going next?

Not really. We sort of had this idea to do stuff, and it seemed like a good idea to write, but I never realised it would be so successful and create this writing career for me. It was more like, I’ve got some bills coming in and what can you do when you get to a certain age? I was so evolved as a specialist in game books. It's like pandas and bamboo…if there’s no bamboo, they die. As I still wanted to be a panda I had to learn to do something else.

Karate kick in the chest

Earlier this year, Jamie and I gave an interview to a Russian blog and it occurred to me that, as several of the questions touch on Fabled Lands, and as most of our readers may not speak Russian, it's worth posting up the answers here. (And with thanks and sincere apologies to the interviewer, who I would credit by name except that I now can't find the original email.)

When and where did you first meet? 

JT: Way back in about 1980 at a mutual friend’s house. I think I said hello to Dave by karate kicking him in the chest.

DM: That’s right. Jamie did a flying kick off a moving skateboard. It was impressive until he came back down to earth. The mutual friend was one of my gaming group at college, and he and Jamie had been at school together.

Why did you decide to make gamebooks?

JT: I ended up getting a job on White Dwarf magazine, at Games Workshop back in the early ‘80s. So I was working for Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson who launched the Fighting Fantasy series, so when they wanted more titles, I was there to do it for them. And that's when it all started.

DM: There was quite a craze for gamebooks in the 1980s and every publisher wanted their own series. Jamie and I and a lot of other people we knew were all writing them. We’d go round to each other’s houses and there’d be flowcharts all over the floor.

Where did the inspiration come from for Fabled Lands?

JT: Dave and I used to play role playing computer games together, and that gave us the idea of doing a series of sandbox type books that were like computer games without computers, so we could have a huge world you can explore and also affect, but also with lots and lots of little stories that were nicely realized, which computer games aren't so good at – or weren't in those days. Writing the books was much harder than a standard game book, of course. Complex flowcharts and managing the codeword system was difficult.

DM: We used a lot of ideas and characters from our role-playing sessions in the Fabled Lands books. They probably were the hardest series to plan, but also the most fun to write.

How long did the six Fabled Lands books take to write?

JT: It took me about 3 to 4, sometimes 5 months to write an FL gamebook. Dave is much faster than me though.

DM: That is true, I will get everything done on time, but rarely with as much flair as Jamie will put into it. Part of me thinks, “Well, it’s just fantasy,” but Jamie gives it 100%. He has more difficulty with the real world than I do, though.

Have you other plans concerning gamebooks?

JT: We may see the rest of the series, but our current plans are to get them out on various digital publishing platforms like Android, iOS, epub and Kindle. If they sell well on these platforms, then we can write the rest of the series. We would like to do them, but it's time and money, and we have mortgages, and bills, etc etc.

DM: Yes, we have to make a business case for doing more. Sales in digital form could possibly justify completing the series, and even if Jamie and I are busy on other projects we have some great writers who we can get to work on Fabled Lands for us.

How many copies of revived Fabled Lands books were sold?

JT: I have no idea! But it's definitely a lot less than our other more successful series like Way of the Tiger and Golden Dragon. While we think the Fabled Lands are the best game books we've ever done, they came out when the game book craze was just dying out and computer games taking over, so the Fabled Lands series never sold as much as we would have liked. It has the most dedicated fan base now though, with a bit of a cult following. The other series we have, that sold much more all over the world simply don't have that kind of dedicated fan base. Well, with the exception of Dave's Dragon Warriors books, but they're not gamebooks as such.

DM: Yes, we often think about how great it would have been if we had written the Fabled Lands books five years earlier. We had the idea for them in the late ‘80s but no publishers were interested then because they were too innovative – they just wanted more traditional single-storyline gamebooks. But that could be exactly why they still feel quite modern. Certainly we don’t want the Fabled Lands apps and ebooks to be a backwards-looking nostalgia thing.

Would you agree if a Russian publisher proposed a translation of Fabled Lands?

JT: That is certainly a possibility. Fabled Lands is being re-published in Germany, there is a role playing game of the FL world published in English and French (though no actual gamebooks yet), and other possibilities on the horizon, so we are certainly open to it.

DM: We both enjoyed the movie Wolfhound (Волкодав из рода Серых Псов), which I understand was based on a novel by Russian author Maria Semyonova, so maybe her publishers would be interested. We’re very much in that same vein of fantasy adventure meets pragmatism and politics.

Which are your favorite gamebooks? Why do you think that they’re the best?

JT: My favourite of my own stuff is the Court of Hidden Faces in the Fabled Lands series, simply because I think it's the best I've ever done and I'm proud of it. Other gamebooks... Well, I don't know Having written so many, I really don't like to actually read gamebooksfor pleasure! I always end up automatically constructing a flow chart in my mind or thinking about what options there should be and so on.

DM: Not to swell Jamie’s head, but I also think Court of Hidden Faces is the best in the FL series. My other favourites are the Duelmaster books that Jamie wrote with Mark Smith. Those are amazing because you can play against a friend, each of you reading from one of a pair of books. I still don’t know how Jamie and Mark figured those out.

Do you think that game books have a future in 21st century?

JT: Yes, definitely, but not in old style print so much. On new platforms like smartphones, tablets and e-readers in general, then yes. Well, certainly in the next few years. Though how long it will last is another matter.

DM: I think they have a bright future if they evolve. I recently wrote an interactive reboot of Frankenstein for iPad, which was partly funded by our Fabled Lands company, and that’s structured like a gamebook but it does some very different things in terms of establishing an emotional bond between the reader and characters. That’s just dipping a toe in the ocean of possibilities.

Samurai smackdown

I said I had only one more of those Fighting Fantasy proposals - the ones Jamie and I submitted to Puffin just before being commissioned to do Keep of the Lich Lord. Turns out I was wrong; there were two more, and I'm going to save up the outline that I had been thinking of for a later post, but meanwhile here's the one I had clean forgotten about.

I'm pretty sure Jamie must have come up with this pitch, as it is similar in concept to a fifth title in the Duelmaster series that he wrote (and that was even fully illustrated) but that Armada Books then declined to publish. Which is a shame because Duelmaster was a great series, and if anyone could pull off the ultimate martial arts gamebook it would be our Mr Thomson!

MASTERS OF COMBAT

You are one of the brothers at a martial arts monastery in the land of Hachiman. One evening, the monastery funeral bells are rung and you are saddened to hear the chanting which declares the death of the old Soryo (abbot). A new Soryo must be appointed, and it is the tradition of your Order that this will be determined by a series of martial contests.

You are one of the best warriors in the monastery, but at first you have no intention of entering the contests. You are interested only in your unceasing quest for perfection in the martial arts, and you fear that the position of Soryo would require you to spend too much time on simple administrative tasks. However, as you make your way back to your cell after meditation one evening, you overhear something that changes your mind completely. Unaware that you are passing by, another monk, Nintoru, and his cronies are discussing the forthcoming contests. "When I am Soryo," snarls Nintoru, "I will end this practice of giving shelter and training to the peasant rebels in the hills. Our monastery will put its military support behind the Shogun's forces, and any rebels venturing here will be seized and handed over to him."

You are sickened to hear this. It is well known that the Shogun is an evil man whose oppressive taxes have caused thousands to starve and driven thousands of others to a life of banditry. As a powerful military force, your monastery has always sided with the peasants, as it is the teaching of your faith that the powerful fighting secrets that were imparted to the Order also carry a great responsibility to defend the weak. Nintoru has always struck you as a secretive and venal man, even though his martial skill is the equal of your own. Now it is clear that if he becomes Soryo he intends to overturn everything the monastery stands for. To curry favour with the Shogun, he is prepared to betray hundreds of downtrodden rebels and send them to torture and death. You cannot allow such a thing! You must enter the contests after all - you must confront Nintoru in a bid to become the new Soryo. And you must win.

The principal feature of this book is the combat system, which allows readers to decide from a range of martial styles which techniques they will develop for use in their battles. Observing Nintoru's progress in the initial bouts will give some idea of his strengths and weaknesses, and hence suggest techniques that might work against him.

The later contests are not simple face-to-face battles in an arena or dojo, but complete tests of initiative, strategic thinking, courage and fighting skill. The protagonist will have to descend into the ancient catacombs deep below the monastery and engage Nintoru in a prolonged running battle involving wits as well as strength.