It's all Greek

I was asked to prepare a bunch of posts for a Facebook group to promote the Vulcanverse gamebooks, but as nobody in their right mind goes onto Facebook (aka the Dunning-Kruger National Park) anymore, here are those posts with links.

“You will encounter friends and foes, develop relationships throughout your adventure, and the choices you make will have a lasting effect on you and the people you meet. There is an ongoing story arc, which runs through all five books and builds towards an epic climax, but of course you'll be free to wander off the main thread to explore side quests or investigate whatever takes your fancy.” (You can start with any of the Vulcanverse books and play them in any order.)

The world of the Vulcanverse: mountains and deserts. 

The world of the Vulcanverse: forests and the underworld. 

Vulcanverse includes both companions who accompany the player-character, providing help and clues and unlocking special options, and a current location mechanism to allow subquests that the player can access from different places all around the world. 

“It’s possible to join the Amazons, and you can become their champion, and even take the throne the way Conan would (if he identified as female). But you can also get banished from the tribe, and if you reach a position of authority there are decisions you’ll make that will have a lasting effect on the world and the people in it.” 

“The Vulcanverse is not your father's Greek mythology. It’s a Matrix-style virtual universe created by the god Vulcan using his hyper-accelerated development of today’s information technology. Go behind the curtain and you won’t find oxen turning wheels and steam-powered colossi from the old legends – you will find something startling and amazing and all-new. Something that coruscates with Kirby Krackle, that whips the rug out from under you, that takes your breath away and blows your mind for good measure. This is not some lame old 1950s stop-motion movie with a bleeping owl. It’s the American Gods or Anansi Boys of Greek myth, the reboot that brings it up to date at warp speed.”

A brief history of open-world gamebooks. 

Other open-world gamebook series #1: Alba.

Other open-world gamebook series #2: Legendary Kingdoms.

Other open-world gamebook series #3: Steam Highwayman. 

“So you want to take your Fabled Lands character into the Vulcanverse? OK, here’s how.” 

Vulcanverse adventure sheets and more. 

Jamie talks about Vulcanverse and other gamebooks on the Instadeath Survivors podcast. 

All you could possibly want to know on the Vulcanverse YouTube channel. (Scroll down for Jamie’s personal fireside chats.)

However I will say one thing for Facebook: at least there you can make comments and ask questions; it's too bad we can't have that on the FL blog anymore. A notable example:

Want to know what happens when you get the codeword? That would be telling. Better to find out for yourself.

Hold that thought

You might have noticed that we're not running comments any more. I enjoy the conversations that take the week's post as a starting point (the more discursive the better) but there are better places on the internet nowadays for most of the rest of it.

If you've got gaming experiences you want to share, or general chit-chat, here are some Facebook groups that are ideally suited to that kind of conversation. 

Dragon Warriors group

Advanced Dragon Warriors group

Fabled Lands group

Tekumel group

Role-Playing Games group

Tabletop Role-Playing Games group

Gamebooks group

Stuart Lloyd has kindly provided the link to a Facebook group for The Way of the Tiger, and I'm sure there are forums for it. There's even a blog. Likewise Bloodsword. There are probably more up-to-date sites too, but I'm going in the other direction from social media myself, as most of what you find posted there wouldn't even pass the Turing Test.

If you're up for stimulating discussions about roleplaying, the best place for that these days is the Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice forum. Or why not come over to the Jewelspider page on Patreon? Maybe I'll see you there. No cat pictures, I promise.

Party like it's 1982

Thirty-eight years ago today, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson shook up the gamebook scene with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which combined the interactive stories of Choose Your Own Adventure with the dice-rolling of Dungeons & Dragons. To mark that publishing milestone, gamebook author Jonathan Green has organized International Gamebook Day, of which he says:

"We have interviews, read-throughs, giveaways and other things planned throughout the day, but please feel free to post on the event page on Thursday yourself. If you are an author, post links to your books. If you are artist, feel free to post images of your illustrations and links to your gallery. If you are an editor, post stories of your experiences commissioning gamebooks. And if you are a fan, post links to and images of your favourite series and photos of your collections."

You can find it on Facebook and and on Twitter at @GamebookDay. I expect most of it will be about Fighting Fantasy, but if you're interested in some of the series that I've worked on then here's one I made earlier:

That's me, Jamie Thomson and Paul Mason talking about a whole bunch of gamebooks including Fabled Lands, Robin of Sherwood, Way of the Tiger, Blood Sword, Golden Dragon, Falcon, Critical IF -- and, of course, the very best titles in the FF series too.

A fresh start for the Year of Wonders

I resisted Facebook for the longest time. It’s not that I don’t like tech, I just don’t care for people that much. (Only kidding. I like people just fine. It’s the pet photos and soccer chat I wanted to avoid.)

Finally I’ve had to succumb, and the reason is that Leo Hartas and I needed to set up a Facebook page for our comics saga Mirabilis: Year of Wonders (If you need a this-meets-that, try Tintin hunts Fantastic Beasts with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman).

This is part of our big push to get the Mirabilis project moving again. The story was originally serialized in weekly British anthology comic The DFC, published by Random House. When The DFC folded, our story was left unfinished but our rights were tied up in a complicated contractual tangle. It took me months of increasingly desperate negotiation to find a way out of that limbo, made all the more fraught by the fact that none of the people involved in the mess would even return my calls. Luckily I knew Philippa Dickinson, the original publisher of Dragon Warriors and one of the truly nicest people you could hope to work with, who by now had risen to be the head of RH’s children’s publishing division. She pulled strings with the powers that be and got me and Leo our rights back.

Thus unfettered I could stop chewing my nails, but it was still far from plain sailing. We secured a publisher for Mirabilis, but though they did a beautiful job of the production they failed to get copies into any shops. I had to lug a couple of bags stuffed with copies to the Gosh! Comics store in London – if you bought one of those, hang onto it like a Penny Black with Queen Vic in a hipster beard, because they were almost the only copies that ever saw the light of day. The rest, I hear, went astray between the printer (in Bosnia) and the distribution warehouse (in Lancashire) and may now be propping up wobbly café tables somewhere in Germany.

So, back to the drawing board. A comics publisher reached out, but the deal they offered was like a handshake from Don Corleone. We were expected to sign over all rights in perpetuity to them, even though there was no obligation for them to keep the book in print. After the epic struggle with Random House there’s no way Leo and I could accept terms like that. As a creator, all you have is your work. You can't let other people lock you out of it.

What about Random House themselves? Well, Philippa had retired by this point, and the mildest way to put it is that having escaped the clutches of the contract we didn’t really have a lot of friends there. We were in our gulag and, at any other time in history, there we might have stayed. But this is the 21st century, right - with social media and crowdfunding and shit. So Leo and I have spent the last few weeks getting ready for a full and concerted relaunch of this mighty fantasy saga. Our plans include:

• a Patreon page where aficionados can come and pledge as little as $1 a month to help fund new instalments. Pages of the comic go up there Mondays and Fridays with higher-level backers getting access to backstage blog pieces and other goodies.
• a new website where everyone can read the comic absolutely free – just a little way behind the paid-up supporters on Patreon, who also get higher-res versions of the art.
• the aforementioned Facebook page where you can get updates on Mirabilis and any other books, comics, movies or games that we thing might interest you.
• a Twitter account with daily instalments of the comic.

And we’re toying with the idea of a Kickstarter to fund a Mirabilis gamebook. Or app. Maybe a boardgame. Possibly all three and - I dunno, a roleplaying game too? The Patreon backers may get a say in that. The exciting thing is that it's a community where everyone gets a voice.

Here’s the thing. We could really use your support – which is, after all, the whole point and rationale of what we’re trying to do now. We’re bypassing the publishers and distributors and going straight to the people whose opinion and backing count most. That’s you, we hope. The readers. Already we've got backing from Jason Arnopp, the 21st century's Stephen King, from the Jedi Master of gamebooks Stuart Lloyd, and from musician, artist & game designer Frazer Payne, among others. Good company to be in, and an absolutely priceless vote of confidence when we're starting a new venture like this. Thanks, guys.

If you can spring for a few dollars to actually fund the work, then you’re our BFFs till the sun dies – but even if not, a like on Facebook costs nothing and can really help boost interest. You never know, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.