GM in your pocket

When Jamie and I were trying to convince the Eidos execs to fund development of the Fabled Lands MMO way back in the late '90s, one of the features we talked up was a storytelling AI:

"The GamesMaster AI will have a library of partially scripted adventures and story elements that it can bring in to liven things up whenever your character is having too easy a ride. These adventures are templates with slots to accommodate friends and enemies you've picked up in the course of your travels.

"For example: you take a bounty hunter's job and go hunting bandits. You round up most of the horde but the leader, Black Nat Varley, escapes. Later, while implementing a random attempt on your life, the AI fills in the assassin's identity as being Black Nat. If Nat survives your second encounter, he'll eventually show up in another encounter and so on. (Maybe NPC adversaries who survive more than three encounters are classed as "dear foes" and have their own level increases tied to yours so as to always give you a good battle.) 

"And the GamesMaster AI will also take account of your character class, deity, etc, when introducing new missions and encounters. It can also randomly generate adventure locations as needed, spicing things up by adding special elements so that they never seem just random. This means that every campaign will be unique."

We looked at Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale for patterns the GamesMaster AI could draw on. The idea was that it would throw in plot twists and tropes, applying them with common sense. So having a storm at sea might be an interesting random event when you were setting out on a quest, but if you'd completed an adventure and were sailing home to deliver the princess back to her father (or vice versa) then it would realize that a potential shipwreck would just be an irritating distraction.

Fast-forward 25 years and the AI is nearly there. Game developer Hidden Door is working on a platform that effectively creates gamebook-style text adventures on the fly. So when I was talking a little while back about AI-generated covers for Fabled Lands books, I might have been a little too unimaginative. Pretty soon you could have endless open-world adventures whenever you want them, right there on your phone. Not just text, either. This is the current state of play with text-to-video: 

This entire movie was generated by AI. Every single pixel you see here is fake 🤯

RIP Hollywood ⚰️pic.twitter.com/VlIIv8zb5g

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) April 28, 2023

By the end of the year, who knows where we'll have got to. Nick Henfrey and I are using AI artwork for our boardgame A Thunder of Dragons (details on the Flat Earths gaming blog) and maybe by the time we've finished that it'll be time to think about a videogame.

The other side of reality

I finally got around to watching Stranger Things. After all the hype it came as a disappointment. I get that it's a pastiche of '80s movies, but I like my pastiches to be more than just familiar ingredients slung together and reheated. Nostalgia doesn't rule out putting something fresh in the mix. Think of Super 8, or even Fargo (season 1, obviously). Without the spark of originality, you might just as well be listening to greatest hits covered by a tribute band.

But I digress. I don't want to talk about 1980s, Stephen King, or pastiches in general. It's just that the Upside-Down in Stranger Things jogged my memory about a game concept I sketched out at Eidos in the mid-'90s. We needed a quick-n-dirty game (famous last words that have brought many a developer low, those) to show off Sam Kerbeck's cutting-edge 3D engine. It needed to be a realtime strategy game because that's what our game Plague, later renamed Warrior Kings, was. Sam happened to flip the landscape upside-down while showing off what it could do, and something in my brain put that together with the Aztec land of death.

We never got around to doing the game, as Eidos shut down internal development a few months later and Sam went off to do other things. His engine got used for another RTS game, Warzone 2100, but never in the freaky way I had in mind.

AZTECS

A variant on Plague set in pre-conquest Mexico, using the same engine and basic game design principles. It's anticipated that Plague will make quite a splash, and Aztecs will satisfy demand for follow-ups in the long wait for Plague 2.

Aztecs will however not be simply a copy of the original game swapped into a different setting. The Mesoamerican world is uniquely colourful. The architecture, costumes and imaginative mythology have rarely been used in computer games and merit a product that stands alone.

City management will be less intricate than Plague. This will be a game of warfare and keeping the gods happy.

All flesh is grass
Villages supply food. Food is not an explicit resource in the game as with Plague but is simply shared out to any units within range of your buildings. Rather than bothering with quantitative measures, you can tell how well the farms are doing by the landscape textures used: rich green if there's plenty of food, dusty scrubland if times are hard. Lack of food leads to loss of hit points; an excess is required for units to recover from injury.

As long as your people are healthy and well fed, new Aztec children continually appear in the School. You can pick these up and drop them onto other buildings, which will determine their fate in life. For example, a child dropped onto a Temple becomes a Priest, one dropped onto the War Lodge becomes a Soldier, etc.

Do it this way
Units are given orders through a (graphic) verb/adverb icon system. This means you can tell a unit to Attack (the verb) and just leave it at that, or you can go to the next level of icons to specify how the attack should be carried out: Aggressive, Balanced or Defensive (the adverbs). As with Plague, what you don't specify is left up to the individual unit's AI.

An eye in the sky
Your view is provided by a flying camera giving an eagle's-eye view of the world. You can fly the camera anywhere, but how much you get to see depends on whether you have any units nearby. Within range of a friendly unit, the camera can see enemy units and the condition of enemy farms and buildings. Outside this range the view enters the Fog of War; it becomes sepia-tinted, buildings appear stylized without hit point info, and enemy units freeze and gradually fade as if from a persistence of vision effect.

Trading in secrets
Merchants were notorious in the Aztec world for spying. This is reflected by allowing all players to have a clear view, free of the Fog of War, when within range of any player's Merchants. Thus the Merchant who increases your wealth by trading with another city will also allow you a clear view of that city's defences during his visit there but this advantage is a two-edged sword.

Discriminating views
View of enemy units is subjective. This reflects Aztec warfare, where experienced soldiers were needed to recognize details of enemy deployment. In the game, you can only distinguish the enemy's elite units (Eagle Lords, Jaguar Lords, Arrow Knights and Hummingbird Priests) if you have elite units of your own near at hand. Otherwise all the enemy's troops appear as generic soldiers and you won't know where the danger lies.

The flipside of reality
Slain units become Skeleton Warriors in the Underworld: a subterranean mirror-image of the living world, where mountains ridges become narrow defiles and vice versa. You view the Underworld by flipping the world around to see the underside. The Underworld is another front where you must fight wars, because the concentration of your Skeleton Warrior forces in the Underworld affects the power of your Wizards' magic in the world above. You have only very limited control of your Skeleton Warriors: you can order them to move, but once they get where they're going they'll just attack any other tribe's Skeleton Warriors that are nearby - even if the other tribe are your allies.

Open heart surgery
Morale is improved by human sacrifice, making it worth capturing foes and taking them back to your Temples. This also prevents the slain foes from becoming Skeleton Warriors in the Underworld, as well as earning you the favour of the gods. You can see this as a strengthening of the glowing aura around the shrine on top of the Temple, which is what your Priests draw on to cast their prayer-magic.

Visitors from heaven
Sometimes, when a Temple's aura is very strong, a Hero will emerge from inside it. These Heroes are beings sent by the god to aid you. They have special strengths in battle, magic, etc, depending on the god. (There are gods of Rain, War, Sun, Learning and Luck.) However, the main advantage of a Hero is that they can dreamwalk. This is essentially a way of setting up a long string of orders for the Hero to follow: a dream-self (Nahual) is created which you can run rapidly around the map, giving it a sequence of orders which it will remember. When the dreamwalk ends and the dream-self merges with the Hero's physical body, he carries out the orders you gave during the dreamwalk. This allows you to set up complex tactical patterns of attack and defence and hold them in readiness, waiting to awaken your Heroes at the moment of greatest need.

The nitty-gritty
There will be considerably fewer buildings and unit types than in Plague. The basic buildings featured in the game are:

• Palace School (spawns new units)
• Ball Court (increases public contentment)
• Skull Rack (each unit sacrificed adds a skull, boosting morale)
• Market Plaza (stimulates trade)
• Gladiator Platform (combatant is upgraded to veteran or killed)
• Wizards' Tower
• Priestly College
• War Lodge
• Temple (five types)
• Canal
• Well
• Road
• Causeway

Buildings concerned with resource production &/or processing:

• Farm (can be set to produce food or cash crop)
• Fishing village (produces canoes that can be seconded in wartime)
• Weaponsmith (upgrades swords, invents spearthrower)
• Cotton Mill (supplies cotton for armour)
• Quarry (supplies obsidian for swords and stone for buildings)
• Mine (supplies gold)
• Banner Maker (improves the commands you can issue to units)
• Aviary (supplies Banner Maker)

Resources that the player is told about in detail:

• Gold
• Stone
• Mana (decreases over time, but never below increasing limit based on total sacrifices)

Hidden resources that you have only qualitative control over:

• Food
• Cotton
• Obsidian

Basic unit types:

• Commoners
• Merchants
• Nobles
• Priests
• Wizards
• Scouts
• Swordsmen 
• Javelineers

And veteran units:

• Eagle Lords
• Jaguar Lords
• Arrow Knights
• Hummingbird Priests

Not all of those ideas would have made it into the finished game, of course. This is just a brainstorming pitch document to get the design process started. That's my favourite part of any project, incidentally, though I'm also willing enough to roll my sleeves up and keep toiling away to the finish line.

So you want to be a game designer?

I spent more than ten years working as a designer in the games industry and, although I've also been an author, comic book creator, scriptwriter and TV producer, it's game design that I get asked about most often. In particular people want advice about courses and ways into the business. Well, everybody's story is different, so anything I say probably won't be usable as a route map. Even so, if it's a career that appeals, maybe some of the following will be of interest.

I think of game designers as being "interested in everything" and in particular in straddling the arts/science boundary that tends to divide the majority of people. My college degree was in Physics but I'd always been interested in English too. After college I started writing role-playing game articles, and then choose-your-own style gamebooks, and that got me into writing novels and comics. And then I got a job as a game designer at Eidos (working on Warrior Kings, pictured below) and that seemed like the job I'd been training for without knowing it.

But there are other experiences. My senior assistant designer at Elixir Studios, Sandy Spangler, came into it from a quite different direction. She studied Fine Arts, went from there into character design and animation for TV, and then into art direction at a game developer, and from there into design.

As the game designer is really the "show runner", you need to be able to communicate your creative vision to the artists, coders, writers, voice and mo-cap actors and so on. Design is almost by definition the thing that unifies those disciplines into a new coherent opus. Of course, you have to be able to nudge people to do their best work without coming across as a supercilious know-it-all. Charm, humour, passion and a collegiate manner - what I used to describe as a "bridge of the Enterprise" attitude - will all help.

I'd always been a movie and comics buff right from earliest childhood, so over the years inevitably I picked up some visual skills by osmosis. Two weeks into my time at Eidos, I was showing one of the artists how giving his Tyrannosaurus rex a low, forward-leaning stance with its body parallel with the ground made it look a lot more threatening than an upright Godzilla-style posture. A decade on, working on Dreams (pictured above) at Elixir, I was drawing on rules from cinema to create a game with the focus on character interaction. If I could rewind now, I'd probably add a cinematography or photography course somewhere in my school years.

A designer doesn't need to be able to code but it won't hurt. Coders can be pretty superior types until you earn their respect by proving that you at least understand the architecture of the system. My degree-level maths, rusty as it is, counts as mad skilz in the games industry. Likewise, while you'll probably be hiring writers rather than doing most of the game dialogue in person, you should know enough about storytelling and drama to manage that part of the process. If you like acting or role-playing, that'll help both with narrative structure and performance.

So the skills needed are:
Creative writing
Planning
Visual sense (cinematography/narrative art)
Some maths
Some code
Some drama and storytelling
Communication and leadership skills

- and I guess the angle you come at that from (whether science/maths first like me, or art first like Sandy) really depends on what you find most inspiring. Then fill in the other skills as and when you get the opportunity.

The Chronicles of the Magi

A lot of people said that the Blood Sword series would make great novels, so in 1997 I took the plunge and revisited the gamebooks in order to convert them into regular fiction. If I'd anticipated the writing being a cakewalk - just a cut-n-paste job, right? - it only took a few days to demolish that notion. I needed to add a lot of text, for one thing, because in between the options in a gamebook there's an implied train of thought process and action that is left entirely to the reader's (ie player's) imagination. For a novel all that has to go onto the page.

And then there was the little question of a protagonist - or two. I rejected having a complete party of adventurers. I didn't want it to feel like a game write-up, for one thing. These were supposed to be proper novels, and having too many characters tends to throw a story out of focus. You've seen X-Men: The Last Stand, you know what I'm talking about. In the end I imported my own character Caelestis, a Vancean rogue who had appeared briefly in Tim Harford's Legend campaign, but on realizing that he was too much of a reprobate to serve as standalone lead in a middle grade series I created a "warrior monk" character (a sort of Capellar-in-training, I guess) called Altor who could come out with all the traditionally heroic lines.

A few weeks into the writing, I accepted Ian Livingstone's offer of a job as game designer at Domark (later Eidos Interactive) which made writing the Chronicles of the Magi trilogy a bit of a juggling act. I enjoyed it, though. Solving problems is my thing, and every scene threw up plenty of those. For instance, to get around the way the first Blood Sword book was really detached from the rest, being effectively a gameplay tutorial, I moved the opening scene of The Kingdom of Wyrd to the start of the first Chronicles novel. That got us right into the quest - though with rather more plot-twists along the way than the gamebooks needed to have. Here's (almost) the moment our two heroes first meet:

Altor reached for the banner, but just then there came a loud outcry from the far side of the square. He looked up to see the young dandy he had encountered earlier. His cloak swept out behind him like a bat’s wings as he ran, and hot on his heels were several guardsmen of the night watch.

‘Stop that thief!’ bawled the irate sergeant of the guards as the young man came racing past the booth.

Altor stepped forward without thinking and put out one arm. The dandy skidded to a halt in front of him and glanced up in surprise. For an instant their eyes locked, and Altor saw a look not of panic but of agile cunning. Then the young man ducked under his outstretched arm and reached for the last pennant. Altor lunged for it too. They both gripped the shaft at the same time.

The guardsmen pounded to a halt and began to fan out. ‘So, villain,’ gasped the sergeant, ‘will you come quietly?’

The dandy looked at him in disdain. ‘Villain, you say? I am Caelestis, the champion of Magus... of Magus...’

He turned to Altor who, although bewildered by the turn of events, found himself saying, ‘Magus Balhazar.’

‘Champion?’ The sergeant tucked his thumbs in his belt and rocked with breathless laughter. ‘You’re no champion, lad. You’re just a pickpocket and I’m taking you in.’

Caelestis stared back at him defiantly. The other guards hefted their cudgels and stood glowering. For a moment there was a tense silence, then the steward cleared his throat. ‘The youngster’s right. You can’t arrest him now he’s taken Magus Balhazar’s banner.’

Altor suddenly realized what was happening. Tugging the banner away from Caelestis, he said, ‘I was here first. Rightfully it is I who should be Magus Balhazar’s champion.’

‘Aha!’ cried the sergeant in triumph. ‘As I thought. Arrest him.’

Two of the guardsmen stepped closer. Caelestis wove away from them and snatched back the banner. ‘Not so fast. The banner is mine. How can this oaf be the magus’s champion? He doesn’t even have a weapon.’

It was true. Altor had left his sword buried in Magus Byl’s black heart. Rather than go into that now, he simply planted himself in a solid stance with his big arms folded across his chest. ‘I need no weapons. The monks of my order are trained to fight with empty hands if need be.’

‘Indeed?’ Caelestis cocked an eyebrow. ‘I doubt whether Magus Balhazar will be impressed.’

Altor snorted in derision. ‘Do you think he’ll be impressed by having a pickpocket as his champion?’

The sergeant flung up his arms in exasperation. ‘Enough!’ He turned to the steward. ‘What is the law? Are both these youths now employed by Magus Balhazar? Frankly I’d be happy to arrest the pair of them.’

‘I have committed no crime!’ protested Altor.

‘And I myself am merely a suspect,’ added Caelestis, ‘until my case comes to trial.’

The steward leaned on the rail in front of his booth and stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Both took the banner at the same time, so both are eligible to serve the magus. Consequently they are immune from prosecution.’

At this the guards gave sighs of disappointment and started to wander off. The sergeant spat on the ground to show his opinion of the steward’s judgement. Fixing Caelestis with a beady stare, he said, ‘Just you wait, lad. I’ll be waiting outside the Battlepits for you, and if you fail then you won’t be able to count on the magus’ protection.’

‘If he fails,’ said the steward laconically, ‘then he’ll be past caring about the laws of mortal men.’

The Chronicles of the Magi books are due to be republished on Kindle by Fabled Lands LLP at the end of the month and you can pre-order them now at a special introductory price:

The Sword of Life
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

The Kingdom of Dreams
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

The City of Stars
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

Jack of all trades vs the one-trick pony

Cast your mind back to the start of the year, and a discussion we had about how digital interactive fiction is breaking out of the gamebook ghetto by using maps, comics, animations and audio instead of prose. Or as well as prose, anyway. Among many good points he made in the comments, Emanuil Tomov said this:

"There's a useful tension, even a moral one, in reconciling minmaxing with possible unsalutary effects this could have on the narrative. Imagine a system where you can either spend or hoard XP, spending being linked to short-term benefits, hoarding being linked to 'advancement' through a richer background for the character, learning skills through interesting narrative that deepens your understanding of the character, forming certain bonds with powerful allies, etc. XP literally represents your experience in the world. Now imagine a PC who spends all their XP short-term and they're really, really, really good in a pinch; but they're completely flat, a competent, one-trick bit player in a story where they could've been much more. It's an interesting trade-off both on the minmaxing and the narrative front.

This point about the value of versatility reminded me of a section in Game Architecture and Design, which I co-wrote with Andrew Rollings to get the horrors of working in the trenches at Eidos out of my system.


The book is twelve years old now, and games have sure moved on, so don't feel you have to run out and buy it. By the time I was working at Elixir Studios, only a few years on from the Eidos of the late '90s, software development for games had been completely revolutionized, and that made my job as designer a pure pleasure. But I digress; we were talking about versatility...

Versatility in gameplay
A useful rule-of-thumb for anticipating gameplay is to ask what is the best and worst thing about each of the player’s options. For instance:

• This maneuver does the most damage, but it's the slowest
• This maneuver is the fastest, but it leaves me defenseless
• This maneuver gives the best defense, but it does little damage

And then there's a unique kind of choice:

• This maneuver is never the best or the worst, but it's the most versatile

So a useful question to ask yourself when designing a weapon or strategy for your game is "When, if ever, is this the best option for the player?" Most choices that you put into the game should be the best in some way. And one of these can be the choice that works only moderately well, but in many different ways: the jack of all trades option.

The more unpredictable the game environment, the bigger the payoff for having versatility of choice. Beginners in particular will benefit from versatile options in a game, as it means there's something they can do while working their way up the learning curve. But versatile options are handy for expert players too. When fighting an expert opponent, you must expect the unexpected, and choosing the versatile maneuver or unit may buy time to put together a more considered response.

One obvious kind of versatility is speed. The fast moving character or unit can quickly go where it's needed. So, normally, you won't want the fastest units to also be the best in other ways.

Also, the value of a fast-moving unit depends on the game environment. On the battlefields of the 14th century, a knight was deemed to be worth 100 foot soldiers. That wasn't because knights were each individually as tough as 100 men, but rather because, in a terrain of hedgerows, ditches, ploughed fields and heathland, the knight had more chance of being at the right place at the right time.

There are many other ways to make an option versatile. If a beam weapon can be used to mine asteroids as well as to destroy incoming nuclear missiles, then that versatility can make up for a disadvantage elsewhere. Of course, if there is no compensating disadvantage, there's no interesting choice. Be careful not to make the versatile choice dominant over all others. Also, be aware that the versatility of a choice may not be obvious even to you as designer. In the last chapter, we saw how the designer of the fantasy game Arena hadn't originally anticipated the way players might use the fireball spells.

You can measure versatility by looking at the switching costs in the game. This is how much it costs a player to change his mind about the strategy he's using. An example in an espionage game might be if you recruit a spy and later realize you need an assassin instead. The switching cost is however much you wasted on the wrong character, assuming for the sake of argument that the spy is not usable elsewhere. So, say that both cost $1 million. When deciding which to buy, at first you'd think, "If I buy the spy and I need the assassin, I'll end up paying $2 million. If I choose right, it costs me just the $1 million. On the other hand, suppose I buy both now. I only need one, so I'll have definitely wasted $1 million."

Now suppose there is another character, the ninja, who can function as either spy or assassin. How much should the ninja cost? It depends how unpredictable the game is. In this example, if the game were completely predictable, the player would know in advance which character to recruit and so versatility is of no value - the ninja should cost $1 million just like the others. In a completely unpredictable environment, the average cost would be $1.5 million ($1 million if I choose right, $2 million if I choose wrong), which is what a good gambler would pay you for the ninja. Since the truth will lie between those extremes, the versatile unit should cost more than $1 million but less than $1.5 million.

Versatility is more prized in an uncertain environment. No multiplayer game is completely predictable, since you can never know what the other player(s) will do. Even in a relatively predictable game, some levels are more uncertain than others. All of which makes the choice between specialization or versatility an interesting one because it all depends on the circumstances.

The first glimmer of the Fabled Lands MMO

I was talking recently about the RTS game Plague that I worked on with Sam Kerbeck and Richard Fletcher at Domark (later Eidos). Around the same time, Jamie Thomson and I were trying to convince the Domark/Eidos management to start development on a multiplayer CRPG based on our Fabled Lands gamebooks.

This was around May/June of 1996. The Fabled Lands Otherworld Game, as we called it, was destined to mutate considerably over the next couple of years as the technology advanced by leaps and bounds. We changed to an all-new setting, the continent of Abraxas, which you can read about here. We massively expanded the scale of the game into a true MMO and we abandoned the top-down isometric view for true 3D. We began to use Propprian theory to develop the idea of a "referee AI".

It was all too ambitious for the Eidos senior management, who by then may have spotted that they didn't need to develop games to make money. Many internal teams were hived off into private companies like Black Cactus, the FL team was laid off, and the Fabled Lands MMO never happened. But, for no better reason than historical curiosity, here is the original pitch document that Jamie and I showed to Ian Livingstone in mid-1996.

Fabled Lands "Otherworld" Gaming

We say "role-playing" when we're talking about solo explore-and-level-up games, and "adventure gaming" when we really mean boring old crate-stacking and puzzles, which means that when it comes to real role-playing for the PC games market we don't have a term left. So let's call this "otherworlding": realtime multi-player role-playing, given a new lease of life by the medium of software to create a new kind of gaming experience.

The Fabled Lands Otherworld Game anticipates the gaming styles that will have become current two years from now, while not abandoning traditional gaming forms. I'll start by describing how the game would play in its solo form and then go on to cover future innovations.

The Solo Game

On the surface FL won’t look much different from a traditional CRPG. You choose a character from a gallery of races, classes and clothing styles and assign starting skills. (These are mix-&-match to allow multiple options, eg in favourite weapon.) Then you set out on your adventures, your adventuring persona represented by an animated sprite on isometric city streets and landscapes. Dotted around the world are many lost ruins, wizard's towers, haunted castles and other areas where you can gamble risk against reward. In the cities you can spend your treasure on new equipment and magic, resurrection deals, buy a townhouse or castle – or even ships to go trading and privateering across the sea.

Where it differs from ordinary CRPGs is in having a number of special partially-scripted adventures that a campaign "referee" (in the form of the game's AI) can bring in to liven things up whenever your character is having too easy a ride. These adventures are templates with slots to accommodate friends and enemies you've picked up in the course of your travels.

For example: you take a bounty hunter's job and go hunting bandits. You round up most of the horde but the leader, Black Nat Varley, escapes. Later, while implementing a random attempt on your life, the AI fills in the assassin's identity as being Black Nat. If Nat survives your second encounter, he'll eventually show up in another encounter and so on. (Adversaries who survive more than three encounters are classed as "dear foes" and have their own level increases tied to yours so as to always give you a good battle.)

And the referee AI will also take account of your character class, deity, etc, when introducing new missions and encounters. It can also randomly generate adventure locations as needed. This means that every campaign will be unique.

The Home Campaign

A bunch of friends arrange to get together and play a Fabled Lands Otherworld campaign on a regular basis. Say I'm the campaign manager; this means the campaign data is kept on my machine. Players come round once a week with their laptops, or maybe they dial in – or the campaign might be run on an office network a couple of evenings a week.

Within the game, players can get together for adventures or split up and go their separate ways. Some magical objects allow you to spy on the progress of other players, possibly with a view to ambushing them and grabbing their treasure. The magic level is high, permitting frequent teleportation and communication at a distance. Alliances and rivalries are equally possible. The game moves more swiftly than old style pnp RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. This allows players to move around the world quickly and have plenty of adventures every session. (The best way to explain this is as a combination of an RPG and an adventure boardgame like Eric Goldberg's Tales of the Arabian Nights.)

The Open Campaign

Almost a Multi-User Dungeon, except with the AI referee throwing in plenty of plotlines to keep the adventure fizzing. The way this would work is with a company picking up the licence to run a commercial Fabled Lands campaign. Such companies might have a couple of hundred participants in one game, all paying-to-play with a percentage coming back to Domark. (Distributed processing through the network would prevent the game from being frustratingly slow.)

The character-to-character interface will mean that when two adventurers meet they cannot immediately start typing messages to each other. To start with they have to go through a menu of greetings and responses, which will be decided by factors such as class, race and deity. For example, an elf meets a human. They're given possible messages and responses that, if followed appropriately, allow both players to reach a point where direct messages can be typed in. However, a human meeting a goblin would not be able to do this (the two races being mutually hostile) unless one or both was accompanied by a dwarf or other "neutral" race. This effectively provides a kind of "Turing Test" interface when first meeting a character whereby you cannot know if you're talking to another human player or a computer-controlled character.

What happens if you can't turn up (on-line or in person) for a game? This is the bane of the old-style roleplayers life, because his character misses out on treasure and experience awards. The way Fabled Lands solves this is to get every player to choose a Downtime Mode for his character when logging off. If you opt for "Sanctuary" then your character is retired from the game world until the next time you play. He gets no awards but cannot be attacked while you're off-line. "Training" means your character is in the arena or library. He gets some experience for any campaign time that passes when you're absent, but there is a chance of other players stealing from or assassinating him. "Adventuring" makes your character available for dungeon expeditions or other endeavours, making him an AI-run NPC for the duration, but although this means you can get your share of treasure and experience you also run the risk of logging on next time to discover your character has been killed in action.

Game mechanics

By basing the game on our Fabled Lands world – which we have developed over several years for radio plays, gamebooks and role-playing adventures – we make sure to avoid the cobbled-together warmed-over fantasy typical of the usual CRPG output. Fabled Lands is as detailed and unique a setting as you will find in any fantasy novel.

Begin by choosing your race (human, trau, merfolk, mannikyn people or whatever), country of origin (the four continents and many islands of the Fabled Lands world all have their own character), deity (there are over a dozen with a complex interplay of antagonisms and associations), and a name for your adventuring alter-ego.

Next the player sets his expertise in the five abilities: Combat, Magic, Charisma, Wayfaring, and Agility. Each of these governs your potential scores in the skills which are sub-groups of that ability. (For example, Wayfaring devolves to Sailing, Riding, Scouting, Survival and Streetwise.) By focussing in one field you can make yourself a master, but at the expense of your other abilities.

Higher ability scores bring in hero-level skills and spells that the player had no idea were possible, maintaining the excitement of discovery that is at the heart of the real role-playing experience.

The display is isometric and characters move in real time. A whole gallery of animated figures can be custom-coloured in the way that tabletop gamers like to paint their own figurines. In combat you can preset your fighting mode (ie, how much is put into attack and defence) or key in manoeuvres on the fly. More experienced adventurers can perform more effective fighting manoeuvres with just one keystroke, or unleash more devastating spells.

Expansion disks would introduce new quests, encounter areas, and characters while extending the map and including additional storylines for the referee AI to use.

Whereas CRPGs up till now have copied the sillier and more tedious aspects of early DnD (one dungeon level full of orcs, another full of lizard men, and so on...and on), Fabled Lands will emulate and expand on the things that made role-playing popular to start with. This means building up a character history: exploring exotic worlds, encountering friends and deadly foes, discovering magical artefacts and the excitement of researching ever more powerful spells. At the highest levels players can occupy their own castles, hire armies, wage wars or create their own "pocket universes" using the mightiest magic.

It will be a journey to a whole other world.

Breaking the butterfly

Last week I was talking about Plague, the game I designed at Eidos in the mid-90s that morphed from sim-medieval London to "the game of war, Black Death and taxes" to the unabashed RTS that was Warrior Kings.

I wish I had more than snippets from old documents to show you. Sam Kerbeck's 3D engine was amazing. He and lead artist Richard Fletcher worked 24-7 for weeks to build a demo that would make the execs at Eidos take notice. Unveiled at E3, that demo reportedly rattled Peter Molyneux enough to put Populous: The Beginning back by six months. The engine was whisked over to Eidos subsidiaries like Pumpkin to use for Warzone 2100, but development on Plague itself was dogged by the politics that comes of being located at a games publisher's head office. One day I'll write the novel, only nobody will believe it.

So this (below) is the second attempt at an intro for Plague. The idea of writing these was more to give the team a creative focus than to necessarily be the actual game intro, as by this stage development had entered a kind of reverse Zeno's Paradox whereby the projected shipping date seemed to be receding into the far future. Within another year I had seen that the only way to fix the whole thing was to junk Plague and start afresh with Warrior Kings. It worked for a little while, but - Oh, maybe I'll save that story for the novel too.

Plague Intro Movie

A glimmer in darkness. Words briefly appear on the screen: Sunset, on the Day of Judgement. The words fade.

There's the sound of screams and moans, of many people. Flames licking up out of the darkness around ruined towers. We're pulling back gradually as the flames die down and the screams recede away...

The fires fade and we continue pulling back. What seems to be the walls of an immense dark cavern reveals itself to be the socket of a skull. We continue pulling out. It's not a whole skull, the lower jaw's missing, and it's charred and blood spattered. We see a black clawed hand is holding it.

The hand crushes the skull. There comes a hideous gasp of triumph. Continuing still to pull back, we see (from low angle shot - he looks immense) a figure. Under his cowl, you can't quite make out his face - it could be black bone, or hard black beak like a raven's. He has black raven-wings and a scythe.

We stop tracking out with Death in three-quarter shot and pan across as he turns to survey a wasteland, shrouded in smoke or fog. Music: the "Dies Irae" from Symphonie Fantastique. The sun hangs on the horizon, strangely close. Death lets the last fragments of the skull fall.

DEATH: It is over. Mankind's day is done. The last mortal soul speeds on its way to Hell, and Death holds illimitable dominion over all.

Hold on the scene a moment. The music fades away.

There's a flare of white light from behind Death. A wind roars across the plain, dispersing the fog. We pan round as Death turns to see...

A figure all in white, delicate features, with jagged fractal wings like a marvellous butterfly. The wings may have caused the wind, but now they're relaxing slowly back into position as we see the figure. White light shines from behind him.

DEATH: I thought I had slain everything.

ANGEL: I am the last of my kind.

DEATH: You come too late. This is the end of Time. Eternity is drawing to a close.

ANGEL: Perhaps.

DEATH: There's nothing you can do for Man. He has been judged for his sins and sentenced to extinction.

ANGEL: Perhaps not.

DEATH: Who are you? Tell me what name to carve in the stone that shall press your corpse into the earth!

ANGEL: I am hope. While I live, Mankind has a future.

DEATH: While you live - ? I'll putrefy your body with a thousand pestilences, rack you with a thousand agonies... break you down to atoms and less than atoms and scatter the debris across the cosmic void.

While they've been talking we've tracked across towards the angel (the whole thing is one continuous shot all the way through with no cuts), who turns briefly to look into the sky. With the fog gone, a long swathe of dim stars is visible in the darkness. The angel reaches up and takes them from the sky - a sword made up of a million stars that flare with renewed light at his touch. As he turns back to face Death, his eyes and mouth glow with inner white light.

ANGEL (smiling): Want a bet..?

As they move together, the scene blurs and starts to fade, becoming a swirl of black and white that spirals around and around...

The game options are superimposed, set out on bars that mirror the Light vs Darkness theme (ie, hardship level, difficulty level, etc). The player selects his options...

The swirl, like a whirlpool, opens up to reveal the start of the game.

Plague outro 1: Dark Lord victory

The same desolate plain seen the start, now completely shrouded in a thick blanket of mist. Slowly a hump rises, like a black mushroom. Tracking in, we see it's a hunched figure in black robes: Death. Slowly he rises to his feet, the mist swirling around him in slow eddies as he moves, and the camera POV moves around likewise, ending close in and to one side of him.

DEATH: So that was Hope...

He swings his scythe round. A single tatter of white robe hangs from the tip of the blade.

Death plucks off the tattered fabric, gazes at it a moment. In his hand it blackens and shrivels.

DEATH: ...but now he too is gone. In all the universe, there is no living thing left...

Death suddenly looks straight at the camera. It's a bit of a jolt, seeing into his eyes for the first time. More of a jolt is the implication that we're actually present in the scene.

DEATH: ...except for you.

But does he mean it as an acknowledgement of victory, or something more ominous?

As he starts towards us, suddenly, cut to black.

Plague outro 2: Bright Angel victory

Death and the Angel are locked in combat, but Hope has the upper hand. Death falls back, and behind him a swirl of nascent stars forms in the dark void. The mist is sucked away into them - and the plain too, leaving Death and Hope suspended in a cosmos which is starting to glow with new nebulae.

Death's scythe is pulled out of his grasp, sucked back into the swirl of stars, which now begins to resemble a galaxy - setting the scale as cosmically huge.

Death braces himself against the cosmic wind. His robes flutter and snap, but the Angel is unmoved. Remorselessly he reaches out to place his hand around Death's black mask-like face.

DEATH: You can't destroy me! I am Death...

We cut to the Angel's face. With the brilliant light behind his eyes and mouth, he hardly looks human at all.

ANGEL: Not any more.

Cut back and pull away fast as he closes his grip. Death's head seems to shatter, and as it does there is a blinding burst of light as the Universe begins again.

Cut to a man's face, waking startled from a dream. He's a BEGGAR, wearing rags and sleeping in the gutter of a medieval town. From the angle and colour of the sunlight we guess it's dawn.

The beggar gasps and mops his brow, relieved that it was all a dream. Then a shadow falls across him and he looks up, momentarily alarmed. We see him shield his eyes, squinting into the sun.

BEGGAR: Who are you..?

Cut to the beggar's POV, looking up at a STRANGER who is silhouetted against the rising sun so that we can hardly see his face because of the halo of light.

STRANGER: Do not be alarmed. I'm not here to hurt you.

BEGGAR: Stay away for your own sake. Do you not see I have the plague?

The stranger bends to help him up, and as he does we cut back to the beggar's face. Before he may indeed have been pockmarked, but now there are no sores on him.

STRANGER: The plague has gone. You do not have it.

The stranger steps back out of shot. The beggar gets up, feeling his face in growing amazement as he realises it's true, he's been cured.

He looks up for the stranger, then we see him look puzzled because the stranger has gone. He looks around.

Cut to see the stranger walking off down the narrow medieval street, trailing his fingers past beggars who are waking up to a new day. There's astonishment and delight as each realises that he too is free of the plague.

As the sun rises higher, there comes the sound of birdsong and the growing bustle of the town. The beggar watches till the stranger is out of sight, then notices something in front of him. He bends down and plucks it: a beautiful flower coloured like a butterfly's wing.

I do remember showing it to Ian Livingstone and he thought the intro script would be better if, after the Angel says, "Want a bet?" Death curls his (unseen) lip and purrs, "Oh really...?" I tend to think one punchline is enough, but that's the problem with being a writer. Everybody thinks they can do your job. There was also an Eidos game called Gangsters. The copy for the poster read: "Real power is never given..." with an image of a wild-eyed wiseguy with a tommy gun spitting lead. The Eidos brass added a line at the bottom of the poster: "...It's taken " - just in case you hadn't got the point. Two punchlines again, you see. May Death and the Angel of Life both save us from execs with too much time on their hands.

A journal of the Plague years

Jamie and I went to work at Eidos Interactive in late 1995. I don't even think it was Eidos yet - that was some kind of reverse takeover manoeuvre cooked up by Charles Cornwall to finagle ailing software house Domark into a big money-spinning confection. As he put it at the time, "It's a minnow swallowing several whales."

None of that made any difference to us developers. Jamie was hired to do level design on the Deathtrap Dungeon computer game, while Ian Livingstone asked me to design a SimCity-type management and building game set in medieval London, or something like London. The inspiration was Daniel Simpson's short claymation movie H, in which a mark in the form of the letter h appears on the hand of a medieval stonemason who is sculpting a gargoyle for a cathedral. The stonemason is branded a heretic - or something else beginning with h - and burned at the stake We decided to call the game Plague, happily having talked Ian out of calling it P.

After struggling with economic models and architectural plans for a few weeks, I saw Ian in the corridor brandishing a copy of Warcraft 2 that he'd brought back from the States. He knew Warcraft was a favourite game of mine. "Have you played this yet?"

"No."

He chucked me the box. "You better take a look. Plague's got to be like this."

"OK, but Plague is a SimCity game."

I might have sprouted antennae, the way he looked at me. "Nobody wants more sim games. We want excitement. We want realtime strategy."

This was news to me, since I'd been hired to design a sim game, but I loved Warcraft 1 so I wasn't about to argue. I duly started to pack RTS elements into the city-building game the team were working on. It was going to be nearly a year before I realized that what was needed was to throw Plague out and start afresh - which is how Warrior Kings came to be conceived. That got mixed up in the political and business fallout of extricating a team from Eidos and forming Black Cactus, so the Warrior Kings that got released was a bit of a mishmash. A story for another day, that. We were talking about Plague.

As the wargame elements started to get bolted onto the original design, I realized that the team were still thinking of it as a city-building game. Our lead artist was an architecture graduate, and he had a lot of sway in the company, so it wasn't politic to junk the SimCity stuff right away. To help steer everyone's vision onto the new page, I wrote a script for the game intro sequence and got Martin McKenna to storyboard it. This wasn't even the intro I intended to use (more on that next week) but it made the team aware that the game they were working on was going to be about rather more dramatic issues than where to put the fish market...

Opening titles cards appear in sequence:

“The High King is dead.”

“The rule of law and justice is dead.”

“The dragon wing of night o'erspreads the world…”

We see the funeral of the High King. He's carried by his knights and laid in a burial mound, which is then sealed. As the knights and mourners file away, a storm-cloud darkens the sky.

Unhindered by the old King's edicts, resentment festers among his former knights. Each believes himself the rightful inheritor of the crown. Honour withers and treachery takes root, spreading like a poisoned weed in embittered hearts.

Across the countryside, the peasants huddle in fear. Murder, acrid-smelling, wafts on the air. The knights scent it; they grow grim and battle-keen. Each dreaming of dominion, they marshal their forces and prepare for the carnage to come.

In the court, knights look at each with hooded eyes, distrustfully. Some glance towards the empty seat at the round table, behind which hangs the dragon's-head banner of the High King.

Shadows on a castle wall: an assassin stabs a man in the back.

Kindled by intrigue, old grudges ignite. The kingdom is plunged into civil war. Armies surge and clash. Ringing steel and the wailing of widows drowns out the voice of reason. While Death sharpens his scythe, men who were once closer than brothers slaughter each other like wild beasts.

Crops and homesteads burn, great castles are shattered and left to ruin. A hundred noble knights lie dead, swords buried in mud, armour rusting. The victors bay for yet more blood. No quarter is given. The vanquished are hung on gibbets, ripe fruit for ravens.

Scenes of erupting battle, fire, dying men, executions...

A shadow sits now upon the vacant throne: the shadow of terror. The High King's dream has become a nightmare.

Sunset, falling through a narrow window on the deserted hall of heroes, leaves a slash of blood-coloured light across the dusty throne. The dragon's-head banner is by now moth-eaten.

Such brutal passion soon is spent. The fury of battle at last is lulled to sullen silence. In the aftermath thrive pestilence and famine. The soil, blood-clogged, yields weeds instead of wheat. Grain rots in dank barns where rats breed in the darkness. Behind the fortified walls of their towns, the survivors cower in dread of the plague that now sweeps the land. The sick are nailed inside their houses and abandoned to die. Bodies thrown into carts are left to blacken and bloat, the living too few and too fearful to bury them.

Prophets preach that Doomsday is near, that God means to wipe Man from the world for his sins. To most this is welcome news. The suffering is too much. Better the endless sleep of death than to endure the relentless horrors of the world.

Scenes of hardship. Narrow empty streets in a town, with smoke drifting on the breeze. Flagellants wearing crowns of thorns shuffle along, crying out as they whip themselves. A few peasants trudge miserably past – a weeping funeral cortege carrying the bundled body of a child.

Then, one night when the high winds howl, a traveller comes to your court. In these times, strangers are feared as carriers of the plague but he walks past your guards unchallenged, as if in a dream. With your ministers you listen to his words, even though he comes from far away and his tongue is hard to understand. In your hearts you hear him, in your memories you recognize the ring of noble speech. There is wisdom in his strange words. And he reminds you of the secret that in these terrible days of turmoil and death had been forgotten:

The court. Lightning outside. Knock at the doors, which swing open and a stranger enters. He looks like the High King seen on his bier in the first scene. This whole bit seems dream-like. We’re closing in on the stranger's face and into his eyes, sparkling in the firelight, and we hear the stranger speak:

“The soul of the land is its King. It withers because its soul, the King, is dead. So there must be a new King. His reign will mark a new beginning. For good or evil? Time will tell. But power cannot be shared. Others also come to take the throne. Therefore grasp you now this sword. Conquer by might, rule with right. One land, one King.”

While the stranger speaks, the view pushes into his eyes, fades to black, and then shows the faces of those listening to him. We pan around the court, ending on the lord's face.

The stranger reaches the bit about others seeking the throne and his voice becomes more emphatic and resonant. Cut back to where he was standing to find he's no longer there. A gleaming sword hangs in the air. The lord rises, reaches to take it –

The lord wakes, sitting bolt upright. He is surrounded by his ministers and men, who had fallen drunkenly asleep at the benches. Now they stir and, seeing the resolve in the lord's eyes, are instantly alert. Perhaps they shared his dream? We see his hand close, remembering the phantom sword he was reaching for. Jaw set sternly, he repeats the final words of the dream:

“One land, one king...”