Wide open worlds

The Kickstarter for Legendary Kingdoms ends in a few hours. Better get over there right now if you want to back it.

In case the title isn't enough of a hint, LK is an open world gamebook series in the style of Fabled Lands. What that means is that you can start in lots of different places, take the kind of character you want, pick your own goals, and explore the world however you choose by going back and forth between the books, each of which covers a different region.

The grandfather of open world gamebooks is Eric Goldberg, who pioneered the idea (though he may not have realized it) in 1985 with his boardgame Tales of the Arabian Nights. That seemed to me what gamebooks ought to be: a roleplaying campaign in solo Choose Your Own Adventure form.

Jamie and I pitched an open world gamebook series called Hero Quest to publishers in 1987, and later repackaged the concept as Knights of Renown in 1989, but with still no takers. It wasn't until six years later that we convinced Pan Macmillan to do the Fabled Lands series, and by then the gamebook craze was dying out. That's why we only managed the first six books of the planned twelve.

All went quiet for a couple of decades, and then like long-awaited buses came The Serpent King's Domain, Steam Highwayman, Alba and Legendary Kingdoms. And, not to be left out, Jamie and I are writing an open world series of five books for his Vulcanverse fantasy setting, and we're hoping that Prime Games's CRPG version of the original Fabled Lands books might rekindle enough interest in those that we can finally finish off the series.

Meanwhile I'd be quite keen to write the Victorian survival horror gamebook Shadow King (think: H G Wells meets The Long Dark) but I'm too averse to social media and too deficient in marketing nous to run the Kickstarter campaign needed to fund it. Fans of open world gamebooks won't be short of alternatives. It may have taken three decades for the wider reading public to catch up with the concept, but I'm betting it has a bright future ahead.

An open world built of words

The Fabled Lands were created over whiskies, like a lot of the things Jamie and I worked on back in the mists of the late twentieth century. (Less whisky, maybe less misty – who knows.)

It wasn’t done with the books in mind, not to start with. Jamie had a fantasy radio serial that he needed to write for the BBC, and the first step was designing a world. Tolkien had years to noodle around with Middle-earth, of course, but the BBC operate on less leisurely principles. Hence the whisky bottle and the midnight oil.

‘What’s a good name for the unknown lands across the sea?’ said Jamie. ‘Inconnu,’ I said, and so we got the continent of Ankon-Konu. There might have even been a circumflex accent on it in those days. You know, the exotic touch. Akatsurai was named after a bottle of saki I had sitting on a shelf. And the Violet Ocean because they can’t all be “wine dark”, and honestly, would you drink that plonk anyway?

That was months before we went in to see Mary Tapissier at Pan Macmillan. We pitched the idea of a big, open-ended gamebook series, something that reflected our own role-playing tastes where the players’ goals drive the story. Mary ran the show at Macmillan Children’s and she loved it. Having the land of Harkuna (it was probably Hârku’una in the radio play) to pull off the shelf meant we could get cracking straight away.

Eric Goldberg’s boardgame Tales of the Arabian Nights (reviewed here on Stargazer's World, whence comes the accompanying pic) was probably the biggest influence on the writing style. We couldn’t afford to be decompressed, wasting hundreds of words on long conversations or scene-setting. So our first pass on the books was to tear through the world giving just one or two sentences to each location. “The rolling fields of the west stretch off to the sun, and by night the only sound is of the crickets in the long grass.” That sort of thing.

And we’d lay out the random encounters without any thought yet as to what they’d be: “A cantankerous merchant. A trio of lost maidens. A piercing sound in the darkness.” I’d get Jamie’s and he’d get mine – challenges to each other to get creative. As I refereed a largely improvised role-playing game once or twice a week in those days, the Muse was always nearby ready to lend a hand.

They were a success, those six gamebooks, even though the craze was dying out. We caught the readers who had started out on the dungeon-bashing gamebooks of the 1980s and were now ready to move on. The trouble was the production costs. For not much more than the price of a regular paperback, we had these large-format books with fold-out map covers and lots of artwork. Strong sales didn’t save us. Halfway through, the series was cancelled.

It wasn’t a guillotine blow, more a wasting illness. Marion Lloyd, the editor at Macmillan, came up with a plan to repackage Fabled Lands in smaller format. Bigger margins, with those sales figures, would have let us continue. But publishing by then was all politics, and not enough support could be drummed up at the courts of Uttaku – in other words, the publisher’s Fulham offices. And I can’t blame them. Adventure games and CRPGs were stealing the gamebook thunder. After Lords of the Rising Sun, darkness fell.

Still, Fabled Lands is not unfinished in the way that a TV series like Cupid or Awake or Deadwood is unfinished, canned before its story could be told. In Fabled Lands there is no story – or rather, a hundred story threads from which the player gets to weave the narrative they choose. You bring the motivation, we’ll give you the plot seeds. If we had gone on to twelve books, readers would have got twice as many adventures. But as it is there are almost 4400 sections. That’s equivalent to eleven ordinary gamebooks. Plenty to get on with.

Videogames did sweep away the demand for gamebooks, but twenty years is long enough for an industry to turn right around. The resurgence of vinyl shows that music buyers value a physical artefact considerably more than they do the content itself. And gamebook collectors are rushing to invest in deluxe print editions offered on Kickstarter. So maybe, just maybe, crowdfunding of print books will be the key to resurrecting the Fabled Lands. However, as I've argued before, the only way to make that work is if it goes hand in hand with a digital version.

In the meantime, text-based open worlds are enjoying a resurgence - and why not? It's the only medium that at reasonable cost allows the polymorphously rich and diverse variety of storylines that interactive fiction needs. So if you've been hankering for more Fabled Lands all these years, why not dip into Meg Jayanath's marvellous Indian dream-tapestry Samsara, Gordon Levine's wild western Zero Summer, Yoon Ha Lee's icy apocalyptic SF saga Winterstrike, Alex Livingston's cyberfaerie science fantasy The Annwn Simulation 1985, or the source from which those all flow, Failbetter's massive and brilliant Fallen London? Or, if none of those tickle your fancy, how about Meg Jayanth's project with the fellows at Inkle: the steampunk reworking of Jules Verne's 80 Days. With over 4000 sections and nearly 500,000 words, 80 Days is as big as the existing Fabled Lands series with the evolutionary adventage that, being an app, it can adapt the pace and the quests to fit what you're doing. That's real interactivity, that is.

Blood Sword redux: The Demon's Claw

The point of the Blood Sword series is that you can play through all five books as a kind of epic role-playing campaign. It wasn’t the first time that had been done. Steve Jackson’s Sorcery books (currently enjoying a new lease of life via Inkle’s app version) paved the way, along with The Way of the Tiger by Mark Smith and Jamie. But I’ve never been a fan of Chosen One stories, and running a single-player campaign pretty much obliges you to make the hero a lost prince(ss) or a midichlorian messiah. Fantasy has more Enders than it has Frodos. The USP of Blood Sword is that it can be played solo or in a team of up to four, meaning that player-characters must rise on their own merits to become heroes, or fail in the attempt, rather than being born to a spoon-fed destiny.

Looking back, I wonder if the publishers were concerned that I wrote Blood Sword so that four players could make do with a single copy of the book. They’d probably rather have had special editions for Enchanter, Sage, Trickster and Warrior. A little more work, four times the profit. I’ve never thought of my writing in marketing terms, so there’s a lost opportunity – or a beacon of integrity, take your pick.

The Demon’s Claw, the midpoint of the Blood Sword series, is close to 600 sections and the thickest of all the books. This in a series where the shortest book is at least sixty thousand words. What can I say? I like to lose myself in my imagination and I hope you enjoy the ride. So, here are the influences, inspirations and reminiscences about The Demon's Claw in no particular order:

The title first. The Demon's Claw is the folkname of the Sword of Death, the mirror twin of the Blood Sword (the Sword of Life) which is of course the object of your whole quest. Unless both swords are the object..? That's a complication that starts to get hinted at here in book three and develops through to the finale in The Walls of Spyte.

Several of the non-player characters in the Blood Sword series are drawn from my own campaigns. Sir Tobias, the head of the Knights Capellar, was originally played by Steve Foster and if anything was more scary and fanatical in “real” life. (Tobias, that is, not Steve. He's a sweetie.) Anvil, the night watch commander in Crescentium, was one of Mark Smith’s characters in our original Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. (Mark later provided the template for Harold Shandor in Heart of Ice, where Steve also appears as Janus Gaunt – though those characters are much more loosely based on their Tekumel originals, Tlangten and Kanmiyel respectively.) The young knight Sir Balian was based on Jack Bramah’s EPT character Chaideshu.

I had started thinking about casting choices by now. Prince Susurrien would be played by Omar Sharif, with his voice “soft and deep, suggesting the quietest beat of an enormous drum”. (Oh, you were thinking of Brian Blessed? Fair enough; once you open the cover it becomes your book.) And your arch-foe Icon makes his reappearance, now explicitly under his real Yamatese name, Aiken. I’d talk about his sister too, but that way lie spoilers.

The major literary influences here are Michael Moorcock (the ship that sails through time – though, yes, technically that is G C Edmondson; but I picked it from Elric stories), Robert Holdstock (Mythago Wood), and Robert Irwin (The Arabian Nightmare). If you’ve played Eric Goldberg’s Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame then you’ll recognize the impudent hunchback and the garrulous ghoul. Goldberg was the primum movens of the open world gamebook (Fabled Lands, for instance, or Fallen London, or Meg Jayanth's 80 Days) so we all owe him a lot.

As befits a story about the poles of Life and Death, the theme of The Demon's Claw is ambiguity. For instance, the man whose lower body is made of stone. Is he a spurned lover half-fossilized by a witch, or an incomplete statue given life by a kind-hearted sorceress? As the book’s original introduction put it:

In the words of Hasan i-Sabbah, Grandmaster of the Marijah Assassins, ‘There is no single truth; everything is possible.’ Or, as the Saviour of the True Faith said, ‘From the Cup of Truth one can drink a thousand times.’

In short, the message in encounter after encounter is that the truth remains deliciously unknowable, the box is never opened for sure, and Schrödinger’s cat remains intriguingly both alive and dead.

I like the stop-motion monsters and magical entities in this book, such as the Seven-in-One and the Hatuli. A little bit of Ray Harryhausen there by way of Jan Švankmajer. I can imagine them all jerky and a little bit fever-nightmarish. The jinni too, a real hairy blot of a being, a dirty great ink-stain on the clean page of reality. I wanted that folkloric feel. This isn’t a book of smooth Hollywoodized CG effects, it’s a Singing Ringing Tree of a fantasy.

Readers have noticed that the Blood Sword books are set in the Dragon Warriors world of Legend. The people of that world refer to it themselves as middle-earth (ie Midgard) but, as Tolkien has made that term his own, I’ve edited most of those references to “the mortal earth” or “the mid-world”. They don’t tend to call it Legend – that was always a term more for the players than the characters. But the interesting question is whether this even is the Dragon Warriors world or just something that looks a bit like it. In my Legend games you could go ten years and not meet a dragon, much less the World Serpent or an immortal like Hunguk the Pirate King. And there’s only one time we’ve had anything like orcs in Dragon Warriors, and that in a not-what-you-expected scenario by Steve Foster. The best way I can describe it is that if the real Legend is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the Blood Sword version is Guy Richie’s movies or a show like Penny Dreadful. No excuses here for that, mind you. Blood Sword was for a younger audience and it delivers a big bang whereas DW is all about the down beat.

As for the rules-y stuff, people have asked if you can complete the adventure without a Trickster. Most certainly you can. I reckon you’ll have more fun if there’s a Trickster along – that’s why stories about Odysseus are more interesting than ones about Ajax – but every character class can succeed and they all have their strengths. Personally I think you’re crazy if you don’t do deals with the sandestins – oops, faltyns – but the beauty of a series like this is you get to configure the kind of team that suits you best.

There’s little else to say about The Demon’s Claw except that I think it features some of Russ’s very best artwork. Next up in the redux series of blog posts is Doomwalk (aka “the one where they all go to hell”) but I should have a big announcement before that. Stay tuned.