Mapping the FL universe

Isn't this a thing of beauty? What is it, you ask? It's a map of all the connections in the seven Fabled Lands books. I don't know who created it, but I'd like to thank them for making the effort. The end result looks a little bit like a map of the actual universe, though naturally that has around a sextillion times as many nodes. You can view the source files (for the FL map, not the universe) here. And now I'm wondering what the Vulcanverse connections map would look like...

Hear ye

A quick note to let you know that the Fabled Lands CRPG expands today to include The Castle of Lost Souls, as revised and expanded by Paul Gresty. Read more about it here.

And the Dealing With Demons chapbook is free on Kindle till tomorrow. Get your copy here.

Tomorrow: Dragon Warriors goes east, with converted Tetsubo rules for hungry ghosts and dream eaters. See you then.

A toolkit for open-world gamebook design

The earliest true gamebook (with rules, that is, and disregarding mere multiple-choice texts) was probably Steve Jackson's Death Test in 1978. That allowed players to backtrack and visit the same location multiple times, but throughout the 1980s the main evolution of gamebooks detoured down a different branch with series like Fighting Fantasy, where the arrow of narrative time pointed in one direction. It wasn't until 1995 that the first open-world gamebooks appeared -- followed by silence until, decades later, series like Steam Highwayman and Legendary Kingdoms took up the torch. Finally it seems that open-world gamebooks might be becoming the dominant form.

I have been sent a succinct and comprehensive toolkit for open-world design that would-be gamebook writers will find very useful. Not just would-be writers, either; I've been doing this since the last millennium and even I found it had some handy tips. You can find that toolkit here. The author prefers to be known only as Ruth, so I will respect her anonymity, though it can only be a matter of time before her own open-world gamebook series appears.

In the Vulcanverse books, when I used what Ruth calls Local Changes, typically I'd include another entry:

So you’d arrive at the location and be presented with the situation that could lead to a change. If you complete that correctly you’re told to turn to the original location and tick the box. Then you get a one-off scene that explains the change and assigns any relevant keywords. If you return to the location subsequently you go to X*A which is the location in its changed state.

Regarding keywords, it’s worth differentiating (and incidentally I say this with 20/20 hindsight) between keywords used as logic flags to denote that an event occurred (“a tidal wave hit the city”) and keywords used to indicate a current state (“the city is in ruins”). In Vulcanverse I could have used keywords and titles respectively for those two functions. I didn’t, which meant that sometimes I’d remove a keyword that was no longer applicable, only to realize later that I’d still like to know if the player had originally had that keyword. Eg if I complete a quest for the king and so he makes me the court champion, even if later on I lose the court champion keyword I still need to have the keyword that says I did the quest. (I'll discuss flags and states in more detail in a future post.)

Regarding rules mechanics generally, I keep promising that next time I’ll create an object-oriented rule set so that I could keep track of, say:

• having one’s face stolen by a mujina
• getting cursed by a fairy to have a donkey’s head
• acquiring blue skin
• being body-swapped into another form

Variously those conditions could mean:

• You’re not recognized by somebody who should know you
• You’re mistaken for someone else
• You are treated differently from other people (potentially in several different ways)

In Fabled Lands I ended up filtering for all those statuses every time I asked the player to check them, whereas if they had been properly organized I could simply have asked, “If you have a status that is listed as transformative and uncanny, go to X”.

Similarly with equipment, where it is useful to have a generic way of identifying whether something can be used as a weapon, or has a blade, or reflects like a mirror, or is made of iron, and so on – rather than having to list the items for each applicable function (such as “if you have the polished shield, the silver mirror, the jade looking-glass…”). Ruth's Multi-Function Item tool covers that one, and could be extended to keywords describing the character’s current status to solve problems like the altered-face one above.

Vulcanverse also used the Current Location feature, a box on your adventure sheet where you record a section number that you are routed to after the current subquest you're on is complete. This allows for encounters to happen at different points around the world, for instance when you're acting as go-between carrying love tokens from Eros to Psyche in The Hammer of the Sun. The Current Location can be used for a lot of things, a common example being when you have a wandering NPC whom the player has to meet up with from time to time, because the different stages of the player's dealings with the NPC don't have to be tied to the geography of the world. You just tell the player to record a Current Location number when the subquest is triggered, then when the next part of their interaction with the NPC (or whatever) is done, you send them back to the Current Location and they resume their travels.

I was going to compile a list of gamebook design resources, but they are many and scattered far and wide. Here are a few to get started. If you know of any others, link to them in the comments.

• "Writing gamebooks" on Lloyd of Gamebooks
• "Wamt to write a gamebook?" on Lloyd of Gamebooks
• "Fetch quests" in the Steam Highwayman books
• "Ambush sequences and the noted passage mechanic" in Steam Highwayman -- which, now that I've seen the article, I realize features the same tool that I call current location (Martin's nomenclature describes it better!).
• "Learning from better gamebooks" on Rand Roll

And while we're on the subject of gamebooks, the Blood Sword 5e hardcover book has just been released in the UK and US. You can buy it at Orc's Nest or from GMS Tabletop Games. The book is a complete 5e roleplaying campaign based on the gamebooks and features some absolutely top-notch design, writing, artwork and production. If you're starting to think about Christmas presents, it's the perfect gift for the avid gamer in your life. Just be aware: they're going to need a bigger stocking.

Roots & Claws

One for the diehard Fabled Lands players this week, as I came across the original titles that Jamie and I were considering for the later books in the series. We must have drawn up this list right after writing FL books 1 and 2. The books up for discussion, clockwise from top left, later became known as Over the Blood-Dark Sea (book 3), The Serpent King's Domain (book 7), The Plains of Howling Darkness (book 4) and The Legions of the Labyrinth (book 10, still unpublished).

I've already recounted our struggles to get the publisher to accept Devils & Howling Darkness as the title of book 4, but WH Smith's were worried that any mention of devils might scandalize fundamentalist religious groups. Jamie and I didn't think they'd buy the FL books anyway, but we argued the point in vain.

The notes refer to our editor, Ian Marsh, who also helmed the Virtual Reality gamebook series. I believe he also digitally typeset the books, though I don't suppose the publishers paid him anything extra for doing that.

My biggest regret here (other than the book 4 title) was not being able to use The Blood-Dimmed Tide for book 3. Jamie and I are both fans of Yeats, as you will have noticed if you read The Chronicles of the Magi novellas -- but there I had to pay out of my own pocket to use the poem, because Yeats's work didn't enter public domain till 2009, and we'd have hit the same problem with FL book 3. So we borrowed a line from Homer instead (oînops póntos) and took liberties with it: haîmops póntos, I suppose it would be, "the blood-eyed sea". Given that the book takes place on the Violet Ocean, maybe wine-coloured would have been a better fit.

Snake charmer

Big news for Fabled Lands fans: Prime Games have released of the expansion pack for The Serpent King's Domain. Paul Gresty's expansive and ingeniously plotted adventure is now available for players of the FL CRPG. The new DLC includes 180 new items, 34 new achievements, a huge expansion to the explorable world, along with the following:

• 17 new quests
• 4 new titles 
• 48 new enemies
• 6 new music tracks

There's also new markets, new weapons, new rules (including heat penalties for heavy armour in the jungle), new kinds of blessing and much more. Don't take my word for it -- all the details are here.

Maps of the mind

Martin Noutch, author of the wonderful Steam Highwayman books, is a true scholar of the craft of gamebook writing. One of the reasons his own books are so good might be because he has thoroughly analyzed the works of other writers in the field. The shoulders of giants and all that.

So that you can benefit from his studies too, Martin recently posted his story maps of the Fabled Lands books. Looking at those prompted me to dig out some of the maps I used to plan the books. Astonished that I still have this stuff after 30 years? I'm working on that hoarding obsession.

Trust me when I say that you haven't seen the full possibility of storytelling married to open world gamebooks until you've played the Steam Highwayman series.

Steam Highwayman in the US

Steam Highwayman in the UK

And if you like the idea of steam-powered vehicles and picaresque adventures in an early 19th century setting (or style thereof), I recommend Keith Roberts' seminal SF novel Pavane. (It is SF, incidentally, and not steampunk, which is really a branch of fantasy because physics, but I don't want to give any spoilers. Read it and see.)

Pavane in the US

Pavane in the UK

The Hole in the World

A few months ago we were looking at some of Russ Nicholson's magnificent oeuvre and Jamie mentioned how one of the iconic features of the Fabled Lands came about:

"Russ was doing a map and blotted it by accident. Me and Dave immediately came up with 'The Hole in the World' so it looked like it was deliberate."

That came about because Russ drew the first ever tidied-up version of our world map. For some reason the publishers didn't want to hire him to draw the world map for the books, but they finally gave way and admitted his map was much better than the one they commissioned. Naturally.

Russ needed to draw the whole world first because he was doing all the regional maps and wanted to be consistent about how they looked. Jamie and I used Russ's sketch map for planning all the books. That's why the copy below is covered with our annotations.

He showed us marvels

It’s impossible to imagine the Fabled Lands without the involvement of Russ Nicholson, who died this month. His filler drawings are my favourites, little vignettes necessary for gamebook layout so that options don’t spill over a page, but also perfect for evoking the ambience of each book’s setting. He always put something extra into all the pictures: comic book style inserts, fragments of unknown scripts, characterful onlookers in the background of a scene, a thousand touches that convey personality, colour, humour and reality.

For some reason we had a struggle getting the Pan Macmillan art director to let us use Russ for the world maps. They had a different illustrator lined up but, as you can see by comparing the first four FL books with the last three, Russ’s cartography was streets (and forests, and mountains) ahead. In FL book 3 they printed the two halves of their map the wrong way round, at which point they admitted that maybe we’d been right all along and Russ should handle it.

I put a personal tribute to Russ on my Patreon page (unlocked) and I asked other members of the Fabled Lands team to contribute their memories. Here’s Paul Gresty:

“I first met Russ in 2010, when I was his interpreter at a gaming event in Paris. He’d illustrated many, many books that I owned and loved, and I was incredibly excited to spend a weekend with him. Throughout that event, Russ was interesting, and kind, and humble; whenever a fan of his work asked him to sign a book, Russ also took the time to draw an illustration in there, too.

“At some point that weekend I asked Russ if he’d sign a copy of Citadel of Chaos for me. I was expecting a signature, and perhaps a quick sketch. Instead, Russ took the book back to his hotel room so that he could spend some time on a picture. When he returned the book to me the next day he’d drawn a phenomenal illustration (an axe-wielding warrior and a dragon) right across the book’s copyright and title pages – and he actually apologised that it wasn’t as good as he’d hoped. The paper in the book wasn’t ideal for ink drawing, he explained; the ink had bled on the page a little. I guess that’s an artist term. Bleeding ink or not, I was overjoyed with the illustration.

“I’m happy and grateful that I was able to work with Russ after that, and to meet him in person a few more times. He was a creative powerhouse, and a joy to be around. Incidentally, it was Russ who introduced me to the Fabled Lands books, showing me a book that somebody had brought for him to sign. He (correctly) told me I’d enjoy reading them.”

Jamie Thomson adds:

“A sad loss indeed, both personally and professionally. I remember meeting him in our White Dwarf offices a few times way back when, just a nice guy and so talented. Iconic game book and WD illustrator. I guess the ink blot story is my favourite. He was doing a Fabled Lands map and blotted it by accident. Me and Dave immediately came up with 'The Hole in the World' so it looked like it was deliberate. Well, I think we did, maybe it was Dave or Russ that came up with it, I can't remember. Anyway, there were quite a few things that we added to the stories and the lore that came from Russ; he inspired us too.”

At first I wasn't sure about Jamie’s recollection there because Russ's world map for FL didn't appear in print until books 5 and 6, so how come he drew the Hole in the World before anyone else? It's probable that he drew his own version of the world map right from the outset in order to have a context for the regional maps in each book. It's typical of Russ's boundless enthusiasm for and professional pride in his work that he'd do that even without a commission from the publisher. He improved every idea we gave him. He was our Jack Kirby, our Billy Preston, the Eno to our Roxy Music. As film directors value a great cinematographer, we valued Russ – as a good friend as well as a collaborator. He won’t just be missed, he’s irreplaceable.

He leaves behind his partner Jacqui. His wife, I should say, as they had planned to get married while Russ was in hospital, only he got moved to another ward which couldn’t accommodate a bedside ceremony. Had he come home I’ve no doubt they would have had the wedding then, but sadly he died in hospital. Fans will remember him fondly, friends with love, but the real wrenching loss is Jacqui’s.

However, as long as we have Russ’s art we can still see the expression of his personality. In that sense he’s with us always. Here is a small selection of illustrations by him that you might not have come across before.

This from the summer 1978 issue of Fantasy Tales:

This from A Dying Trade:

A sample page Russ did for The DFC:

Two more sample pages for The DFC, this time for the John Blake strip:

A test page for Mirabilis, because in the early days we thought Leo and Martin would be too busy on the gazetteer book to handle the comic strip chores as well:

Layout page for “Rich and Strange”, one of several Mirabilis standalone stories I wrote to run in The Guardian newspaper:

(Only one story, “A Wrong Turning”, was ever fully illustrated, and that by Martin McKenna whose loss we also mourn.)

Part of the layouts for the Camelot Eclipsed comic book (originally The New Knights of Camelot):

Some concept art for Shadow King:

A rough that Russ prepared for A Town Through Time, a project we pitched without success to publishers in the late ‘90s:

You can see how much on-spec work an artist has to produce in order to nab a few paying gigs. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here's another -- Russ's drawings for the Conquerors game.

Got it covered

Whatever I work on, people ask me about more Fabled Lands books. The sticking point isn't the writing. Paul Gresty, who wrote The Serpent King's Domain, has completed work on a new Fabled Lands Quest based on my Golden Dragon gamebook Castle of Lost Souls. He's also made a start on The Lone & Level Sands, and all that industry has stung me into talk of turning The Eye of the Dragon into another FL Quest to tie in with book 8.

The snag is that artwork is expensive. That bedevilled the Vulcanverse books, which I thought looked amazing with Mattia Simone's atmospheric filler artwork. Myself, I prefer fillers, like the little vignettes Russ Nicholson does for the Fabled Lands books, but most readers demand drawings that illustrate specific scenes in the book. (It's less bother than reading prose.) Also they'd like a lot more illustrations than the Vulcan Forged company were willing to commission for the gamebooks. So how to pay for all that art?

Perruno suggested turning to AI. I'd been thinking about that, though I'm not sure if it saves a lot of money. You can see from the examples here what Wombo Dream came up with off the top of its artificial head. It could be a lot better if I spent a few months practising. But even if that gave us cover art we could use, there's no way any Fabled Lands book could come out without interior illustrations by Russ; he's an integral part of our creative team. And what about maps? The AI is still a few years off (I'm just guessing) being able to handle those.

Then there's the cost of editing and typesetting. And I haven't even talked about paying the writers. After forty years in this business I'm used to the idea that nobody wants to pay the writer, but I'd love to bring in today's top gamebook talent to work on future Fabled Lands books. Paul Gresty of course, but also people like Jonathan Green or Martin Noutch of Steam Highwayman fame or H L Truslove, author of Alba. I have no idea if they'd even be interested, but I wouldn't insult them by asking until I knew I could write a cheque.

Kickstarter doesn't cut it, as I've explained before. I guess we could wait till AI can do the whole job including the writing, but by then the AIs will be the ones reading the books too.

Vulcanverse

Golden Dragon

Fabled Lands

Lords of the Rising Sun arrives as DLC

Players of the Fabled Lands CRPG by Prime Games can now head to fresh adventures in the distant east with the new downloadable content comprising Akatsurai, a feudal country on the brink of civil war. New lands to explore, new quests to find, new enemies to fight, and new loot to plunder. Banzai!

To help you rig your vessel for the trip, the base game currently has its biggest discount ever and Steam are providing a daily deal for the DLC. Grab your dai-sho and get over there.

One life is enough

We included resurrection deals in Fabled Lands because we wanted a diegetic way of saving your character. Because coming back to life is part of the fantasy world, not a meta-event, the idea is that it doesn't break immersion the way a videogame-style save point would.

The drawback is that in the early stages of the game, before you're rich enough to pay for resurrection deals, death is unforgiving. Players of Dungeon Crawl Classics will be familiar with the funnel, a baptism of fire for 0th level characters, but I can see how it's a pain in FL. In retrospect, we should have started you off with a free resurrection deal in each book.

Players of Prime Games' Fabled Lands CRPG mostly enjoy testing themselves against the brutal vagaries of fate, and somebody has now done a walkthrough that shows how you can get all the achievements in the game without dying once. I didn't even imagine that was possible. There's a tsunami of spoilers there, naturally, but if you're frustrated with your progress and don't mind benefiting from a helping hand then give it a try.

Plunge right in

At last, the moment we've been waiting for: the full release of the Fabled Lands CRPG on Windows and MacOS. After years of amazing work by Prime Games, this beautiful and immersive game is available for players to plunge into. The launch content includes the whole of the northern continent (FL books 1, 2, 4 and 5) with the Violet Ocean and Akatsurai to follow as downloadable add-ons.

This is the ultimate incarnation of Fabled Lands that Jamie and I dreamed of twenty years ago, when we pitched the FL computer game concept to Eidos as "characters exploring and adventuring across a gloriously coloured map of the world". It's been a long road, but Prime Games have brought that vision to life more vividly than we could ever have hoped.

How do you follow something as fantastic as this? Well, Prime Games still have a way to go with Fabled Lands -- including, perhaps, the southern continent. But as soon as I saw those tactical maps and started hurling some spells around, my first thought was how brilliant it would be to give Blood Sword the same treatment. Who knows?

Set out on a journey of fabulous adventure

The Fabled Lands CRPG has been on early access for a while now, but in just a few weeks you'll be able to buy the full release in all its glory. Initially the game will feature all the content from The War-Torn Kingdom, Cities of Gold & Glory, The Plains of Howling Darkness, and The Court of Hidden Faces. The plan is to add Over the Blood-Dark Sea and Lords of the Rising Sun as DLCs later in the year -- and after that, who knows? Possibly all-new FL adventures if the 23,000 people who have wishlisted the CRPG all buy it. Find it on Steam here.

If paper-&-pencil games are more your thing, this is a good opportunity to mention the Lyonesse RPG based on the fantasy novels by Jack Vance. I contributed to the book but it's the work of divers hands, all of them very talented and with the forceful gust of Vance's imagination to fill their creative sails. Video reviewer Pauli Kidd gives a good idea of what to expect:

Find out more on The Design Mechanism's website.

Deities acute and obtuse

Here's a question that we really ought to settle once and for all. Richard Hetley, who is a veteran of Fabled Lands campaigns on Kickstarter and has been invaluable to us as an editor and design consultant, recently asked about Ebron, the god of Uttaku who crops up in The War-Torn Kingdom:

Richard Hetley: "I mention this delightfully angular deity because he came up in discussion about the Fabled Lands app. Replies there said 'Yes, it's been confirmed by the authors that Ebron has angles, not angels. Must be some sort of Lovecraftian non-Euclidean god.' I was fairly certain that this was not the case. I had even corrected the misconception where possible. But then I couldn't find a reference in our e-mails, so I didn't say anything. Care to clarify, for the ten thousandth time, whether Ebron was in possession of angles or angels?"

Jamie Thomson: "It most definitely is angles! And it first made an appearance in the Heart of Harkun radio play. And yes, he is a kind of non-Euclidean deity, that's a nice way of putting it, but not Lovecraftian. Imagine it more as a Zen koan, like you meditate on the mystery of how god can have fourteen angles in the same way the early Christian Greek churches used the Trinity as a mystery to meditate on, but not to be taken literally. Of course, the Western Christians decided to do just that, and so you get the Nicene creed, where they actually conceive of a threefold god."

The world expands

The most exciting news of 2022 is arriving early: it's the planned roll-out of content for Prime Games' Fabled Lands CRPG. As Prime Games CEO Victor Atanasov puts it: "Who doesn’t want to have their own castle? With knights, a smithy, temples, and their own magus?" And soon you can.

I'm sometimes asked what it would take to complete the Fabled Lands gamebook series. The simple answer is that we need more players. From there comes the revenue to pay for all the writing, artwork, editing, typesetting, and so on.  In the case of the Vulcanverse there was a multi-million-dollar company funding the books, but Fabled Lands has always relied on its fans and if the FL CRPG is as big a success as it's shaping up to be it could make that river flow, just as the success of MCU movies over the last decade has helped sustain the comic books.

Not that we're quite expecting the FL CRPG to rival the scale of Marvel's big screen success. But you never know.

A cartographic conundrum

Here's a mystery that maybe you can solve. While clearing out (aka moving files of old papers from one shelf to another) I came across these two maps. Both rather nice, I think you'll agree. But what are they?

My best theory is that they were samples sent to us by the editors at Pan Macmillan when the Fabled Lands books were originally in the planning stage. For some reason the editors didn't want Russ to do the world maps, perhaps because they were concerned at his workload as he was doing all the interior illustrations and the colour maps of the regions.

Jamie and I looked at various map artists, all the while arguing that we really wanted Russ for the job. These two must have been our favourites. I can't remember who the editors hired in the end -- neither of these guys, by the looks of it. And then they printed the west and east sides of the world the wrong way round in Over the Blood-Dark Sea. Stab me vitals.

By the time The Court of Hidden Faces came out we finally had Russ drawing the world map as we'd intended all along. But, as Frost said about ice, these other contenders were also great and would have sufficed.

And yet -- what's niggling at me is the stadium at bottom left in the second map. Tékumel gamers like me are bound to look at that and think: Hirilákte. Surely it couldn't be...

Does anybody recognize these or the artists who drew them?

Return to Golnir

I'll just whet your appetite with this gorgeous Golnir map and then hand you over to Victor Atanasov, head of Prime Games, to explain about all the new adventures, new skills, new items and new gameplay features that are waiting for you right now.

Like the leaves, we'll ride the breeze

Exciting news from Prime Games: the early-access Fabled Lands CRPG is about to expand to include Golnir as the content from Cities of Gold & Glory gets added. You won't want to miss that, so grab it on Steam now before the Trau beat you to it.

And if you're wondering about the title of this post, here's the perfect musical accompaniment for a few hours' exploration of Golnir. And it's got Christopher Lee!

Travelling from Fabled Lands into the Vulcanverse

Just right out of the gate let me say this: I don’t recommend taking a character from Fabled Lands into the Vulcanverse books. They’re different worlds and you’ll enjoy the experience better if you stick to characters intended for each world. But after all, I would say that because I’m a purist and I always say less is more. I don’t think Professor Challenger inhabits the same London as Sherlock Holmes, nor that the Dollhouse exists in the Buffyverse. As for Doctor Who or Babylon 5 being compatible with Star Trek – ugh, that’s the worst kind of clodhopping fan indulgence. These fictional worlds are crafted to be their own thing, not a great swirling mass of tropes mixing like paint colours till all you’re left with is mucky brown.

Also, the Vulcanverse books start out with your character's childhood in that world and there are callbacks later to your family, even encounters with family members. None of that will make sense if you're playing somebody who has dropped through from a different universe, so transporting a character across is entirely unsupported.

Still, with that warning ringing in your ears, if you really want to throw a Fabled Lands character into the Vulcanverse, here’s how.

Start with abilities. Add up all the contributions from your Fabled Lands abilities (which range from 1-12) to find your scores in the Vulcanverse attributes (which range initially from −1 to +3).

For example, if you have Combat 8 and Scouting 9 in FL then your Vulcanverse Strength score is +1 +1 = +2.

Shards can be converted into “pyrs”, which are what coins are called in the cryptic world of the Vulcanverse. However, you can only take a maximum of 300 Shards as “pyrs” when you travel between the universes.

Rank in Fabled Lands translates to Glory:

Lastly, you can translate ability-boosting items into attribute-boosting items as follows:

Laurel wreath             any +1 or +2 Charisma-boosting item from FL

Golden lyre                 any +3 or better Charisma-boosting item from FL

Recurve bow               any +1 or +2 Scouting- or Thievery-boosting item from FL

Winged sandals          any +3 or better Scouting- or Thievery-boosting item from FL

Hornbook                   any +1 or +2 Magic- or Sanctity-boosting item from FL

Abacus                        any +3 or better Magic- or Sanctity-boosting item from FL

Hardwood club           any FL weapon with a Combat bonus of +1 to +3

Iron spear                   any FL weapon with a Combat bonus of +4 or more

You can convert one such item per attribute – so, for instance, even if you own a dozen +6 weapons in Fabled Lands you can only go across to the Vulcanverse with one iron spear.

God? The FL gods are unknown in the Vulcanverse. The Greek gods mean nothing to somebody who has travelled between the planes from Harkuna. So if you're doing this you will start out with no god to call on.

What about Stamina? One of our readers, James, pointed out there are no rules here for converting FL Stamina into some other form of hit points. That's true, and it's because the Vulcanverse rules do not have anything like a Stamina score. The player-character is either healthy, wounded or dead. 

And where would you start? Try 222 in any of the first four Vulcanverse books. And don't say I didn't warn you.

* * *

Over on Twitter (or "X" if you must), Teofilo Hurtado suggested an alternative approach, namely to translate from Vulcanverse attributes to D&D stat modifiers:

[VV and D&D] are built around -4/+4 modifiers, with +5 being "peak human" in the sense of Batman or Captain America, or a Greek demigod. Once we know that:
Strength = STR and CON
Grace = DEX
Ingenuity = INT and WIS
Charm = CHA

— Teofilo Hurtado - War of Ashird (@hurtado_teofilo) October 28, 2021