Bound about with a napkin

My credo is that roleplaying is about everything, so I was intrigued to come across this in a letter that Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jacques Barbeu-Duborg in April 1773:

"A toad buried in sand will live, it is said, till the sand becomes petrified: and then, being enclosed in the stone, it may still live for we know not how many ages. The facts which are cited in support of this opinion are too numerous and too circumstantial not to deserve a certain degree of credit. [...] A plant, with its flowers, fades and dies immediately if exposed to the air without having its root immersed in a humid soil, from which it may draw a sufficient quantity of moisture to supply that which exhales from its substance and is carried off continually by the air. Perhaps, however, if it were buried in quicksilver, it might preserve, for a considerable space of time, its vegetable life, its smell, and colour. If this be the case, it might prove a commodious method of transporting from distant countries those delicate plants which are unable to sustain the inclemency of the weather at sea, and which require particular care and attention.

"I have seen an instance of common flies preserved in a manner somewhat similar. They had been drowned in Madeira wine, apparently about the time when it was bottled in Virginia to be sent hither (to London). At the opening of one of the bottles, at the house of a friend where I then was, three drowned flies fell into the first glass that was filled. Having heard it remarked that drowned flies were capable of being revived by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment upon these: they were therefore exposed to the sun upon a sieve, which had been employed to strain them out of the wine. In less than three hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life. They commenced by some convulsive motions of the thighs, and at length they raised themselves upon their legs, wiped their eyes with their fore-feet, beat and brushed their wings with their hind-feet, and soon after began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how they came thither. The third continued lifeless till sunset, when, losing all hopes of him, he was thrown away."

What does this tell us, other than that Franklin held no prejudice against a dangling participle? If it was anybody else I'd dismiss the story of the flies out of hand. We know that fruit flies can survive three days of drowning. Is it credible a bluebottle could last a year?

I suspect that Franklin is confusing two memories. (He doesn't tell Duborg how long ago this happened.) Perhaps on one occasion he saw the flies tipped out of the Madeira bottle, and somebody talked about how long they might survive. Later, he tried immersing and reviving some flies and found it was possible - but after a few hours, not months.

I recall a story, though cannot find the source now, of an officer killed during the retreat from Moscow whom Napoleon ordered sent back in a butt of wine for proper burial in France. What with one thing and another, the body got forgotten in the corner of a regimental cellar for a few decades until the barrel split open, perhaps from the gases released by putrefaction (got to hope nobody had been drinking from that barrel), and the dead officer spilled out. His beard, according to the fabulous account given by a witness, had grown to several feet long.

It wasn't an isolated case. Military campaigning meant that officers' corpses often had to be preserved, as this account by Napoleon's valet of the post-mortem experiences of the Duke of Montebello shows:

"In a few hours putrefaction became complete, and they were obliged to plunge the mutilated body into a bath filled with corrosive sublimate. This extremely dangerous operation was long and painful; and M. Cadet de Gassicourt deserves much commendation for the courage he displayed under these circumstances; for notwithstanding every precaution, and in spite of the strong disinfectants burned in the room, the odour of this corpse was so fetid, and the vapor from the sublimate so strong, that the distinguished chemist was seriously indisposed.

"Like several other persons, I had a sad curiosity to see the marshal's body in this condition. It was frightful. The trunk, which had been covered by the solution, was greatly swollen; while on the contrary, the head, which had been left outside the bath, had shrunk remarkably, and the muscles of the face had contracted in the most hideous manner, the wide-open eyes starting out of their sockets. After the body had remained eight days in the corrosive sublimate, which it was necessary to renew, since the emanations from the interior of the corpse had decomposed the solution, it was put into a cask made for the purpose, and filled with the same liquid; and it was in this cask that it was carried from Schoenbrunn to Strasburg. In this last place it was taken out of the strange coffin, dried in a net, and wrapped in the Egyptian style; that is, surrounded with bandages, with the face uncovered."

Plenty of inspiration there for something creepy, or simply a melancholy memento mori episode to give your players a shudder?

The illustration above is by the late Martin McKenna. Martin wasn't a roleplayer (surprisingly) but he would have loved all this stuff about resurrected insects and pickled heroes. I'm still finding it a wrench that he is no longer in the world, and that painting has particularly fond memories because we came up with the concept for it together as part of our Frankenstein's Legions project. So the lesson as the year draws to an end is to hold onto your dear friends - but not to the extent of preserving them in brandy. Happy Christmas!

The dawn of the Frankenstein Wars

It’s hard to put a precise timeline to it, but say the first real gamebooks appeared in the early 1970s. That means they’ve been around for as long as the gap between a one-minute amuse-œil like The Miller and the Sweep (1897) and Citizen Kane (1941).

Given that, it’s reasonable to ask when we’re going to see the grown-up classics of interactive literature. Early gamebooks were aimed at kids, after all, and there’s a limit to how many times you can save the world from the orc army in a sub-sub-Dungeons and Dragons setting. No, I don’t mean we need more sympathetic orcs. Just as Alan Moore utterly shook up the world of superhero comics with Watchmen, I want to see gamebooks that move beyond solve-the-plot. Gamebooks with three-dimensional characters, tangled relationships, complex motivations, difficult moral choices, and a story that really takes you on a journey.

The Frankenstein Wars is that gamebook. Written by Paul Gresty, who’s already proved his Wellesian creative chops with richly imagined gamebooks The ORPHEUS Ruse and MetaHuman Inc, this is the story of two brothers caught up in a wave of Napoleonic conquest as Victor Frankenstein’s resurrection technology ushers in an era of total war.

If that sounds familiar – yes, it’s my Frankensteinian alternate history of the early 19th century. Originally I created this as a computer game, then later tried getting it off the ground as a movie or a novel, then as a comic book, and even as a tabletop RPG which was to comprise two rulebooks, French and English, each with its own slant on events. I never expected it to be a gamebook app, but now that I’ve seen the fabulous job Paul and Cubus Games have done, I’m fired up to return to the Frankenstein Wars universe and see what else I can do with it.

As well as a sophisticated storyline that would do justice to any blockbuster novel, the app boasts tactical maps, weather effects, astounding artwork, all wrapped up in a cutting-edge design ethic that shows Cubus Games are now one of the leading developers of interactive literature.

It’s impossible here to give a summary that would do justice to Paul’s writing. As I said earlier, this is a story that will really take you on a journey. For my money it’s destined to be a genre-defining classic, and next week Paul will be here with a guest post to give you just a taste of all the marvellous work that has gone into creating this truly unique interactive adventure.

The Frankenstein Wars is out now for iOS and Android.

Success has many fathers

Games and interactive story apps are media in which it's easy for the wrong people to get the credit while genuinely valuable input may be overlooked, so I'm going to spell out the creative provenance of The Frankenstein Wars for all to see.

The original concept of a world in which Victor Frankenstein's discovery was used to create an army of resurrected men dates back to around 1999. Martin McKenna and I cooked up the idea as the basis for a PC strategy game while freelancing on Plague (later released under the name Warrior Kings) at Eidos.

Martin and I tried various routes to getting the concept, which we called Frankenstein's Legions, started up as a game, movie or comic book. Martin is not very keen on drawing comics - which is a pity, as he's really rather good at it, but instead we roped in Russ Nicholson to work up some rough pages. (I'd say pencils, but Russ never uses pencils.)

Lots of people liked the story premise. Iain McCaig suggested that Victor Frankenstein's discoveries should extend far beyond the secret of life and death. I'm not sure if there are any greater secrets than that, but Iain is a creative powerhouse and so I'm always willing to listen to what he has to say. Martin's friend Jamie Mathieson, writer of Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, thought it was a mistake not to have one of Victor's descendants at the heart of the story:

"I am reliably informed by Martin that Frankenstein left no heirs as far the original novel is concerned. I also understand that Dave is not keen to invite any Young Frankenstein ridicule. However, if we make our central character/s descendants of Frankenstein's assistant I think we lose quite a bit of dramatic potential. They have no Frankenstein blood in their veins, they're not cursed down the ages, they're not fated to repeat their ancestor's mistakes etc; they're just unlucky enough to have a grandfather who did odd jobs for a nutter and nicked his stuff after his death. I realise that if we invent a son for Frankenstein, we're directly contradicting the official novel continuity, but given that we completely change the outcome of the Napoleonic War, I've got no problem with such a comparatively small tweak, that will reap potentially much bigger dramatic rewards. It also a much simpler sell – potential audiences/buyers would get it instantly. “He's Frankenstein's grandson.” is much easier to get across than “He's the grandson of Frankenstein's assistant.” “Why?” “Well, Frankenstein had no children in the novel, but this guy's granddad was there, he helped him ...wait, no, come back with that big fat cheque.” 

Henry Clerval had never been Victor's assistant, in fact. In the novel he's just his best friend, knowing nothing about the experiments Victor has been doing, but in the 1973 movie Frankenstein: The True Story he is the real originator of the life-creating process. The reason Henry's son was one of the main characters in my Frankenstein's Legions story is because he might credibly stumble across notebooks that Victor have left in Henry's care.

I didn't much like Jamie Mathieson's suggested approach myself, for much the same reason that I didn't want to see Davros come back in every Dalek story after Genesis. It turns it all into a pantomime. If I'm creating a story about nuclear destruction, I don't need to have Oppenheimer's great-grandson poised over the button, or Einstein's great-great-granddaughter swinging into action to thwart him. I wanted Frankenstein's Legions to feel like reality with fantastic elements. But it should be noted that at this stage (2005 or so) I still had never read Mary Shelley's novel, so I was still largely churning through half-remembered Universal and Hammer horror flicks. I still supposed Victor was a baron, for one thing.

While out in LA following the collapse of Elixir Studios, I mentioned the concept to movie producer Michael Levy and, with the help of a games documentary maker called Olly Quinn we made an audio demo to pitch to studios.

When I handed the commission to write the Frankenstein's Legions novel to John Whitbourn (we're into 2006 now) I said I'd stay out of his way and I did. Nothing kills a creative project faster than having too many hands on the tiller. John drew his inspiration more from the Hammer movies than Mary Shelley's story, in that the resurrected soldiers were nearly mindless monsters rather than the perfectly human but inhumanly mistreated wretches that I'd envisaged. He also had Frankenstein's nephew front and centre - though with the ironic twist that young Julius Frankenstein had inherited absolutely none of his uncle's scientific genius. Other people just assumed there was something in the Frankenstein blood and so they were all chasing after a piece of him - figuratively, that is.

Shortly after that I encountered the Muse while out walking in the fog on Hook Heath - her usual kind of reverse mugging, in which she stuffs my head with unwanted ideas - and returned with the plot for Frankenstein's Legions reimagined as a YA trilogy. The problem was, it had gone all airships and steam-weapons, the focus now really on girl genius Ada Byron rather than the whole Frankenstein thing. Young Adult literature has more than enough steampunk trilogies already, but try reasoning with the Muse.

On to 2010, and Michael Levy had hooked up with a comic book company called Ape Entertainment. We had a whole lot of Skype calls about a Frankenstein's Legions comic, I did a draft script of the first issue, and even started to rethink the story in a US Civil War setting, but it came to nothing.

How does all this connect with my Frankenstein interactive novel app? Not at all, is the answer. In 2011 I pitched the idea of interactive classic novels to Michael Bhaskar, who was then digital director at Profile Books. I didn't particularly want to adapt Frankenstein, having had enough of it (or so I thought) over the last twelve years. But when Michael said that was the one he really wanted, I decided I'd better finally get around to reading the Mary Shelley novel. That was an eye-opener. Instead of the crackly Gothic body-horror nightmare presented in the movies, I found a fresh, modern psychological drama of a divided self - more David Fincher than Herbert West.

Nobody else had input into my Frankenstein app. I used Inkle's markup system to write it all, but the Inkle team had no role in the concept, design or writing. Nor did I get any feedback from Profile's editors, as they couldn't parse sentences like this:

The fiend can cut the knot of my happiness, but {demonize:it|he} cannot unpick this truth: that we were wed, {victor_empathy < -1:as my mother desired|and loved each other}.

Getting left alone to write is just fine by me. After doing this job for thirty years I don't really need a copy editor, and I always have my Fabled Lands cohort Jamie Thomson to bounce story ideas off to see if they work. (Jamie and I were originally going to write the Frankenstein book app together, but in the end he was busy working on the Dirk Lloyd series.) As I recall, the only suggestion from Profile and Inkle was to put a Twitter button at the end of every chapter of Frankenstein so that the reader could tweet things like, "I just helped Victor Frankenstein steal a body from the morgue." Thankfully we authors have something called the moral right of integrity, which basically means you get to tell people to keep their hands off your work. The app was released sans Twitter buttons.

(Oh, fun fact: I wrote the whole of Frankenstein standing up because of a back injury. And I fixed the problem of how Clerval's body gets from Orkney to the very beach in Ireland where Victor's storm-tossed boat washes up. Mary Shelley had thirteen years to work on the second edition and she didn't spot that, so booyah.)

After Frankenstein, I didn't feel any pressing need to go back to Frankenstein's Legions. Been there, done that, got the bolts in the neck to prove it. But then the fellows at Cubus Games asked if I'd like to get involved in launching an interactive story app on Kickstarter. I told them about Frankenstein's Legions and we quickly decided that, to avoid confusion with John Whitbourn's novel, we should call this new story The Frankenstein Wars. Jaume Carballo and I kicked ideas back and forth, but then I realized my work schedule wasn't going to give me enough time to write it. We turned to Paul Gresty, author of Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories and I sent him all my notes and the longest of several story outlines, and as I write this he is wrangling his own ideas into that framework. What you finally see - assuming the Kickstarter campaign is successful - will be the equivalent of a "script by Paul Gresty, from a story by Dave Morris and Paul Gresty".

And that, friends, is the definitive list of credit where credit's due in the long patchwork story of The Frankenstein Wars. And there's still time to pledge for it on Kickstarter - but don't delay, those criminal brains are counting on you.

A brandy with the monster

I've talked about Frankenstein's Legions on this blog before. Here, for instance. And here. I'll be talking about it more over the month ahead because I'm involved in a Kickstarter with Cubus Games, who will be creating an interactive story set in that world, under its new title The Frankenstein Wars.

The concept is simple. In the 1820s, Victor Frankenstein's secrets are recovered. Some of them, anyway - specifically, the ability to sew a body together from scavenged parts and bring it back to life. In France, a new revolution brings the Zeroistes to power. Named for the their "Year Zero" mentality, they are willing to do whatever it takes to usher in a new society. And that includes recycling the bodies of those killed in battle to create an endlessly-respawning army.

And what about Frankenstein's monster? He represents something more than a patchwork revivified man. In Mary Shelley's novel he was a new lifeform, a homo superior, with greater strength, endurance and intellect than any normal man. If you want to read his origin story, it's a lot more interesting than the Universal sparks-n-stitches version, and my interactive novel is as good a place as any to start.

But here in The Frankenstein Wars, the monster is thirty years older. He's learned to be warier and more ruthless - and this is a guy who was willing to strangle kids and murder innocent people even in his formative years. He calls himself Mr Legion now. Here's a scene between him and Lord Blakeney:

That night. Blakeney warms himself in front of a crackling log fire, a glass of brandy cupped in his hand. In the leather armchair opposite him sits Mr Legion, also slowly swirling a brandy. His cigar glows in the gloom of the dining room, where they have just finished a meal.
“I think Miss Byron’s vacation might need to come to an end quite soon,” remarks Blakeney.
“You know, Blakeney, when I was thirty years younger I would have thrown you in the fireplace, burned down the house, and killed every man between here and Hastings. I also would have settled for the cheap brandy.”
“Why is that? The burning and the killing, I mean.”
“You were expecting them to kidnap Ada Byron.”
“Not exactly. I merely made sure we had a contingency in case you failed. As sometimes you do.”
“And now you’d like her back.”
“Her improved revitalizing serum, at any rate. I’m sure Napoleon doesn’t care for the cheap stuff either.”
Mr Legion blows a smoke ring and watches it drift in the firelight, like a god contemplating the constellations he has made. “You’re not counting on Clerval for that?”
Blakeney smiles. “Doctor Clerval is one of those men you can count on utterly. Their moral code is so predictable.” Blakeney gets up and walks to the window, pulling aside the curtain to gaze into the night. “And he’s a man who doesn’t shirk from a challenge. So also there’s that. But what’s really at the bottom of it all, I suppose, is love.”
Legion drains his brandy in one gulp and tosses the cigar stub into the fire. “All right,” he says, rising. “I have my own reasons, of course.”
Blakeney watches the door close behind him. “Of course you do," he says to the empty room. "But in your case it's a long way from love.”

Lord Blakeney, as you will have guessed, is the former Scarlet Pimpernel. Now in his mid-60s he commands the British secret service (officially known as the Alien Affairs Committee). In a very real sense he is the “M” of his day.

The Frankenstein Wars app is based on my world and story, but that's not all. It's being written by Paul Gresty, who is also the talent behind the new Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain. At Cubus's request, Paul is adding some steampunk tech to the mix. There was a little bit there already in my story outline, in the devices Ada Byron had constructed. Personally I'd have have left it at that, not feeling the need to add a gilding of steampunk to the lily of Frankensteinian body horror. But I'm not writing it so I've given Cubus and Mr Gresty carte blanche to take whatever liberties they need to. Without a doubt Paul will be adding his own unique style of interactive storytelling to the bare bones of the plot and characters that I provided.

You'll be hearing more of The Frankenstein Wars over the next few weeks - not just here but on the project's Kickstarter page as well.

Monster-crewed airships of the Georgian Fleet Air Arm

There have been enough posts about Frankenstein's Legions of late that I probably don't need to recap it here. In case you missed the details, it's not my recently-revamped example of next-gen interactive literature, published by Profile Books, which was not a genre work, but instead a steampunk universe in which Frankenstein's technology is used to create armies of endlessly recycled body parts.

The novel, by award-winning SF author John Whitbourn, has been available on Kindle for some time. But not everybody likes an ebook (it has been forcefully brought home to me in comments here) so this month Spark Furnace has published a whopping great paperback edition of the book. It's a large-format, 356-page monster that you will need to keep chained in the cellar if you have any pet hunchbacks you're worried about.

To give you an idea of what it's like, here's a scene where Julius Frankenstein, nephew of the illustrious/infamous Victor, is escaping across the English Channel in a small boat with Ada Lovelace, whose murder he is investigating. (Yes, murder. In a world of Frankenstein science, homicide victims can sometimes cooperate in tracking down their own killers.) A navy cutter spots them and opens fire, and as if that wasn't bad enough, they then attract the attention of a galloon - a lazaran-powered airship of the Fleet Air Arm - which descends to the attack:

* * *

One of Julius’s father’s favourite maxims was ‘never argue with policemen or lunatics.’ He had imbibed that from earliest years, along with ‘Do what you want—but don’t whine about the bill.’ 

So instead he stood and took aim at the galloon. 

Lieutenant Neave hadn’t been expecting that. His own shot went wild. What with the waves and it being extreme range for a mere pistol, Julius’s shot was impressive. Its bullet shattered the pilot’s windscreen—but not, as intended, his head. Lieutenant Neave was duly impressed, amongst other sentiments. 

‘What the—!’ said Mariner.

‘Stop that,’ ordered Frankenstein, meaning the slackening of speed. The authority of education and class was backed by a second, still loaded, pistol.

‘One shot: that’s all it’ll take,’ Mariner advised, meaning the closing cutter, not Frankenstein’s far lesser weapon. ‘We’ll be nothing but blood and splinters.’

Even so, he withdrew his hand from the ropes retarding their progress. Unlike the cutter’s cannon, Julius’ gun was both near at hand and near his head.

‘Since we’re all good as dead anyway,’ observed Frankenstein, ‘I can’t see that it matters.’

Mariner deferred to his logic. Having got his way in that respect, Julius returned to the galloon question. Lieutenant Neave was frantically reloading as best his confined cabin allowed. Frankenstein took the opportunity to take extra careful aim.

Neave’s nerve snapped first. ‘Up!’ His command to the crew could be heard loud and clear through the pierced screen. ‘Up—damn your undead eyes!’

Prow first, the galloon made an emergency ascension, gas valves being flung open as they came to hand, regardless of grace and stability. The lieutenant, on whom Julius was drawing bead, was flung back out of sight in the interior of the cabin.

Frankenstein could have fired anyway, but now there was a new fish to fry. The cutter roared again, and this time unmistakably in earnest. The heat of the ball as it passed not far above caressed all their faces. When they then looked up, as a natural reaction to still having heads, it was to note that most of the mast was no longer with them. Such was the force of the shot, it had not snapped or splintered but had simply been swept away in silence.

* * *

Creative doctrine for Frankenstein's Legions

I alluded last time to the fact that, in developing any creative project that entails a group of people, you have to do an awful lot of work that won't appear on the screen or the page. Today I'm posting the "design doctrine", an evolving document that shows everybody what makes the show, game or (in this case) comic they are working on unique.

*  *  *

Frankenstein's Legions: creative doctrine

First and foremost: they're not zombies.

Zombies you can get elsewhere. Everywhere. There's no shortage. What Martin McKenna and I thought when we looked at the original Frankenstein: "This is science fiction."

So it's not about undead, it's about conquering death. The "lazarans" or "revenants" brought back by the Frankenstein tech, they are living men. That's the tragedy. Because other people don't treat them like living men. They treat them as soulless monsters, despised and feared. We know that humans don't need much of an excuse to put a label on others, to dehumanize and enslave them.

That's part of it. The other part is how you would feel, yourself, brought back from the dead. Physically there may not be any reason to feel differently about yourself. But say it happened next year. You die in an accident, you're on a slab for a couple of weeks, and then some new technology brings you back. Your family would already have begun the grieving process. Think they'd welcome you back? Think you'd feel the same as you did before?

How about those guys who have a hand transplant, or a face transplant. They're still the same person. But they need counselling not to want to cut a piece of themselves off. And this is the 21st century. Think what it'd be like in the mid-1800s, if you've been ripped apart on the battlefield, stitched back together from the body parts of your buddies, and jolted back to life. That tattoo on your new arm, that's the name of your best mate’s wife - the arm was all that was left of him. As for the souls of the dead, who knows where they are. People tell you you're a monster now, a second class citizen whose only home and family now are his battalion.

Some thoughts arising from this:

The emotional charge in the story is about the anguish and despair of living. Frankenstein's Legions is about the unbearable position of the monsters - about the terrible and very personal things that have been done to them, the awful things they themselves have done, and about the power and violence that only fantasy lets you resort to, as a vent for your frustration. These monsters are heroes of pain.

So the stories need to get inside their heads, sympathising with their stories, understanding their disgust - at humanity and at themselves - and then letting all hell break loose in righteous, visceral wrath. It's a story for the outsider in all of us. If you look at the green "vat monster" painting: I asked Martin for the image of two scientists, staring in horror at what they've achieved. And then you notice the reflected eyes in the glass and you realize that you are the head waiting to be attached to that torso in the background.

There are two levels of horror in Frankenstein's Legions. The first is the body-horror of the pieced-together abominations that we’re looking at. The second is the individual's moral horror at what they have done and what they are forced to do. Imagine a tortured soul who has had an awful life, finding himself woken in a monstrous body, dragging himself around because he must, loathing himself and everything around him... The life the monsters are forced to live is just unbearable.

For me, a big inspiration is the early Hulk stories. I'm talking about right back at the beginning, the Kirby issues, where it was all about this tortured nightmare self. A lot of that probably came from stories like the Karloff Frankenstein movies. We don't have to be sappy about making the monsters likeable. They can rip off innocent heads like daisies. That only makes them more interesting. They are entitled to treat "the living" (us) with savagery, when you look at how they have been treated.

So don't let's have the noble savage who just wants to be left alone to love. Let's have the men who, loathed as monsters, will take every chance to act as monsters. The dirtiest dozen you can imagine, the Inglourious Basterds turned up to eleven. And make the reader side with them so that we, too, despise "the limps" who expect us "stiffs" to fight their wars for them.

About the imagery: Gothic has been way overdone. Castles, dungeons, darkened labs... we can't make a brand from clichés. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at the end of the Age of Reason. The Georgians built geometrically regular houses, very modern in their tastes. Napoleon held conferences on river boats. Ballrooms would be well-lit, brightly painted. This was not the Dark Ages. I say that because when a lazaran platoon marches onto the lawn of a chateau, the intrusion of the horrific into everyday, orderly life will be all the more shocking.

We should decide: is this to be set in 1830s Europe? It could as easily be set in 1860s America, Victor Frankenstein's notebooks having been brought over by Clerval's family fleeing the wars in Europe. And just when one institution of slavery is being abolished, suddenly a new and more widely acceptable version is found...

All the above is my vision for what makes Frankenstein's Legions stand apart from other interpretations of the genre. I'd like it to shake up the Frankenstein story the way District 9 shook up SF movies. Not to be Van Helsing or The Wolfman, another tired retread of that whole played-out Gothic horror vibe, but to bring something fresh, visceral and at the same time thought-provoking.

Story development for Frankenstein's Legions

For the last couple of weeks we've been looking at the Frankenstein's Legions game design document, which dates back to the late '90s when I was working alongside Martin McKenna on a bunch of games at Eidos, notably Plague, which later became Warrior Kings.

About a decade after we dreamt up Frankenstein's Legions, Martin and I had a go and rethinking the idea for comics. This got a little further along, and you can even find a link to part of the script here, but we soon found that the artists whom the comic book company had hired were not familiar with our Napoleonic Wars setting. Instead it was all massive Civil War sideburns and zombies torching Atlanta.

Well, if we learned one thing in big development teams it's how to be flexible. And, short of waiting for the long-promised Temeraire movie to come out, we couldn't see any way of bringing the (American) artists up to speed. So we started thinking about how we could move the whole caboodle over to the US during the 1860s. Here's the first of two story development documents that might interest you if you want to find out what a lot of iceberg goes under the surface of the comic book, movie or game that you get to see.

* * *

Frankenstein's Legions: US Civil War story notes

In the treatment, the setting was Napoleonic Europe and there were two distinct threats. First, the left-wing revolutionaries of the French government (kind of Khmer Rouge extremist communists, if you like!) were willing to use the Frankenstein tech in really horrible ways: grafting human heads onto giant eels, dog heads onto human bodies, etc. In real life, those were the same guys who invented industrialized executions 150 years before the Holocaust, so it makes sense they would blithely authorize experiments that would horrify any normal person.

I wanted that because we have a world in which horrific things are happening - the dead being brought back to life to serve as slaves and soldiers. So pretty soon that becomes the new status quo and we need something even more horrific, like creating hybrid monsters, to define our bad guys for whom fanatical logic dictates the unthinkable.

Secondly I had Napoleon as a personified bad guy. The French revolutionary government sent a commando team to bring his body back from St Helena, where he died in a British prison. After being restored to life, he had to be kept in a tank of preservative chemicals because he'd been in the grave a while. He was slowly recovering his memory, so whereas the fanatics thought they'd just acquired a kind of military strategy computer, they didn't reckon on him hatching plans to overthrow them.

I needed both those elements, the fanatics as a group and Napoleon as an individual, because the story couldn't just be "the Brits are good, the French are evil". Both sides use the Frankenstein tech, and the villains are individuals or creeds who go a step further. I think you'll need to keep this idea in the Civil War version. Most Confederates were not evil racist autocrats; most Unionists were not fighting like paladins with the lofty goal of emancipating the slaves. There is good and bad on both sides. You may need an equivalent mythic figure to Napoleon (perhaps from the War of Independence? though I guess the world has had few dictators of Napoleon’s calibre) and an equivalent to the extremist fanatics of the French revolutionary government. It needs to be a creed, not just a few mad scientists. Maybe a crazed cult who believe God has authorized a new Eden on Earth and it's okay for mankind to play around creating abominations.

Incidentally one of the key ideas in Frankenstein's Legions is that you aren't just brought back to life by the technology. When you get off the slab, you don't know who you are. It's a new you. Like Frankenstein's monster - he didn't think, "Oh, my brain came from a criminal who was hanged" or whatever. The brain got rebooted, so in a sense it's a newborn person getting off that slab. Lazarans are like amnesiacs in that they know the skills they had before – how to shoot a gun or play the piano, how to speak – but specific personal memories are lost. The tragedy is that they may encounter their loved ones, but they don't remember them. There may be snatches of memory, that's all.

So the search to recover memories is one way a resurrected character may go. Another might want to shun anything to do with who he used to be: "today is the first day of the rest of my life". Interesting character tensions.

As far as the artwork we've seen so far, it's important that the lazarans don't look like zombies. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Civil War zombie books out there already, and we need to be brandably distinct. A resurrected guy may have scars if he was stitched together from separate parts, so some of the ones who've been resurrected many times could be quite monstrous: hands or arms out of proportion, different skin tones, asymmetric bodies, etc. Others who died a clean death could look almost normal. Almost. Here is Mary Shelley's description of the original creature:

I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they  were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

I like the idea that such a face, with skin taut on the veins and muscles, could be both ugly and beautiful at the same time. In some cases, the yellowish skin colour (caused by their differently colored blood) might be the only sign at first glance that the person is a lazaran. Most certainly they aren't undead – the opposite, in fact: full of vigor, intimidating to ordinary men because of their raw energy and animal strength. They are the homo superior of their time, and it's only a matter of time before we see a lazaran Magneto, or even some people who are willing to kill themselves in order to get the enhanced strength, speed and senses that come with resurrection.

Okay, so back to that prologue. A raid on a remote farmhouse where lazaran hybrids are being created? Or perhaps a cult who have their own unique interpretation of Revelation 20:6:

Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of the Lord and will reign with him for a thousand years.

So these cultists are deliberately committing suicide, performing surgery to enhance the bodies, and resurrecting each other as the new "chosen ones" who believe they're going to reign for a thousand years. (Obviously you'd need to have some normal, sane preachers on the good guys' side to show that this cult is a definite aberration!) We start with a small band of Civil War deserters looking to raid a remote homestead. They sneak inside, bit of banter, the place seems deserted – then they are picked off one by one, fast like Alien, and that pre-title sequence ends with the last of them being leapt at by a horrible hybrid: human head, wolf-like body, serpents growing out of its back or whatever. Let Martin have some fun here! Then cut to the opening we have already, a quieter scene with a family pushing the body of their loved one in a cart.

Frankenstein's Legions game overview Part 5

Today's post is the final part of the Frankenstein's Legions high concept document. In a parallel universe, Eidos did this game instead of - well, take your pick!

The Notebooks of Doctor Frankenstein

“A dream has power to poison sleep.” – Mary Shelley

Tom Clerval, raised in the United States by his father, an exiled French aristocrat, enlists as a surgeon on the British allies’ side during the Promethean War of 1821-36.

Clerval has inherited the notebooks of his godfather, Victor Frankenstein. Although familiar with Frankenstein’s experiments, he has never put the resurrection procedures to use – not even when, a few years before the start of the game, his fiancée Victoria died by drowning.

When, after fourteen years of war, the fanatics of the Second Convention that governs France restore Napoleon – “the Boney Man” – to life, Clerval gives in to pressure from his own side and agrees to release the Frankenstein notebooks. Clerval insists, however, that the use of resurrected men in battle remains limited and Sir Percy Blakeney, the head of military intelligence, concedes.

Clerval and his platoon of monsters become a legend on both sides. He rises swiftly through the ranks, turning the tide of war with a series of decisive pitched battles coupled with daring raids behind enemy lines.

Although kept strictly under guard at Versailles, Napoleon succeeds in restoring his former lieutenant, Marshal Ney, to command of the French cavalry in place of the Convention’s general. Internal political divisions within the revolutionary government begin to pave the way for Napoleon’s return to power.

After a year when the fate of Europe hangs in the balance, the Allies (Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria and the United States) finally manage to split the Convention’s forces and defeat the army of Citizen Valdemar at Crecy. However, Napoleon seizes power in Paris and returns with a new army raised from the dead.

Clerval is betrayed. When he encounters other monsters on the Allied side but not controlled by him, he realizes that his best friend has given the technology to the government. Angrily he vows to wage a war to end all wars. He swears to Blakeney that, when Napoleon is defeated, he will destroy Frankenstein’s secrets for good. It seems an empty boast.

During an expeditionary attack in Eastern Europe, Clerval’s army is seemingly surprised by Napoleon’s larger force. Defeat seems inevitable, but Clerval retreats into the steppes as winter closes its grip. The intense cold of the Russian steppes disables Napoleon’s cannon – his “beautiful daughters” on which his tactics depend.

Clerval defeats Napoleon’s army only to discover that the Emperor has fled. He overtakes him on the road to Paris. Marshal Ney, sickened by the barbarity into which the war has descended, offers Clerval a duel and is killed. Clerval destroys Napoleon with a bomb that blows his body to pieces.

A last mission, this time in the English countryside. Clerval locates the laboratory where the Allies are creating monsters and destroys it, ensuring that Frankenstein’s notebooks go up in flames. Clerval’s last remaining monster sacrifices itself to save him from the flames.

* * *

Epilogue: Napoleon’s personal physician arrives by carriage at Vilnius in Lithuania to oversee a huge excavation. A tall figure emerges from the carriage – Marshal Ney, but now with his head shaved and a scar indicating cranial surgery. He surveys the excavations, which are revealed to be the mass graves of the Imperial Guard, crack troops of the Grande Armée who had died of starvation during the retreat from Moscow more than twenty years before.

These are the best troops the world has ever seen. They lie in the soil, still with their weapons and uniforms intact.

“The cold has kept them young,” says Ney, although he speaks now with a Corsican accent and a cadence that is instantly recognizable. “Glorious sons of France, now you can arise and go home at last…”

The Emperor raises his face to the west. We go close on his eyes, which are burning with an inner light as he speaks over the open graves:

“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me – he shall never die.”

Smash cut to black. Music and end credits.

Look & Feel

“What disturbs our blood is but its longing for the tomb.”

In the gothic romances of the early 19th century, nature is seen as immense, remote and daunting. Man is a speck in the eye of an uncaring universe. Against this world view, the idea of a mortal man daring to usurp the power of life and death becomes both inspiring and doomed to catastrophe.

Weather and environment in the game convey the gothic view of heightened reality. Fast-moving clouds send ragged shadows racing across the hills. Rain gusts in horizontal sheets and sluices off gutters. Snow swirls like fine desert sand in the wind. Fields become mires of mud or featureless blisters of rock-hard frost.

The interface utilizes a crackling, dynamic, scratched-negative effect. Icons seem to flicker unwillingly into life, accompanied by a mournful electrical hum.

The main game screen will present a behind-the-character 3D view of a nightmarishly ravaged European landscape – blasted heath, craggy hills, unkempt cemeteries, wild forests, sullen cities. The colors are stark and desaturated. On the surface this is the mid-19th century, but in spirit it calls to mind the horrors of modern mechanized warfare from 1914 onwards.

Frankenstein’s Legions will employ a stark visual style to evoke hyper-real images of a landscape blasted and laid waste by war. Common images: storm clouds over churned mud, stumps of splintered wood in the earth, barbed wire, mountains shouldering the sky, carts carrying body parts from the front, gibbets creaking in the wind, shrapnel whip-cracking the air, handkerchiefs covering the face from the stench of formaldehyde, lightning rolling along the hills, the hollow stare of patchwork soldiers driven beyond madness, the unease of living officers in command of reanimated men.

Sounds: sullen mutterings of villagers, keening wind, weeping from mourners at the graveyard, the distant rumbling of thunder, the howl of wolves, the shriek and snort of frightened horses, muffled voices from taverns at night, forlorn cries from mountain caves, the thunder of cannon, the whistle and crump of exploding shells, pebbles clattering down a steep cliff, the relentless wail of dying men, the dismal groans of the resurrected. During gameplay, the only sounds will be environmental: wind, gunfire, footsteps, the shouts of men, the snarl of monsters, and so on. The use of incidental music is restricted to inter-level cutscenes.

* * *

I can't wrap up this saga of the Frankenstein's Legions game without mentioning that I originally conceived it, not as a squad-based tactical game, but a classic eye-in-the-sky RTS game. In that version, players chose to be one of three "races": Prometheans (creating Frankensteinian monsters), Artificers (creating armies of proto-industrial robots) or Expurgators (religious zealots opposed to meddling with nature in any form). At the turn of the millennium, however, there was a sense that the time of those old cerebral games was passing. Game design has its fads like anything else. The character-based game into which FL evolved would cost millions to develop, though, whereas the RTS could be perfectly adequate as a tablet game with almost retro graphics à la Starcraft. A famous game industry figure was fond of saying in the late '90s that platform games were dead, then a few years later that classic RTS was dead, but I would say: never say never!

Frankenstein's Legions game overview Part 4

Gameplay features

Assembling monsters

Monsters are created at the player’s laboratory between levels. The player has a set number of heads and can choose what body parts to attach to them. Regardless of the body parts, it is the head that defines the monster.

The heads set the behavior protocols of the monster and the weapon and clothing that the body will be equipped with. Each head type has its own combat abilities and maneuvers. The five heads you begin the game with are:

name	personality	characteristic behavior
Stubbs	Cunning	Good vision and stealth
Caulder	Insane	Good in attack; tendency to berserk; cannot be hypnotized
Graves	Cautious	Favors missile weapons; avoids close combat if outnumbered
Newman	Belligerent	Extremely good in close combat, but slow to take initiative
Rackstraw	Steadfast	Good vision, best suited to patrol and sentry duty

Each monster is characterized both by body language and the sounds it makes. Stubbs is breathless, twitchy, looking around, always thinking on his feet. Caulder lopes along cackling wildly. Graves glowers at you and is apt to respond to orders with a suspicious grunt or a contemptuous hiss. Newman snarls and stamps his feet continually, barely able to contain his rage. You can see that he’s eager to crush men’s skulls with kicks from those huge hobnail boots. Rackstraw is given to acquiescent groans and will howl dolorously if you leave him behind.

Throughout, the gameplay evokes a world in which characters are really responding to your presence, each with their own personality which the player will come to recognize and use to best advantage.

Body parts

Body parts have a mix-n-match effect on the monster’s attributes:

Arms	can be asymmetrical; thinner arms strike faster; muscular arms have more strength, longer arms give greater reach
Torso	a larger torso means more hit points but also more mass, reducing mobility
Heart	large hearts allow more frequent paroxysm attacks (see below) but use up galvanic charge faster
Legs	long shanks mean a long stride, fast on the flat; shorter limbs are more effective on slopes; thickly muscled legs are slower but good for leaping and climbing

Subject to the body parts available, the player can choose any combination of physical characteristics with any of the heads. This makes a very wide range of different monsters possible within the game. The gameplay trade-offs are subtle and can be exploited by the player: extra mass means lower speed, long arms mean greater reach but may be brittle, and so on.

Electricity

Monsters need galvanism (electricity) to function at full effectiveness. Without any galvanic charge, a monster is a match for half a dozen men. With a full charge, each monster is a regiment in itself.

Each monster has both a hit point bar and a galvanic charge bar. Galvanic charge is expended making special attacks called paroxysms. A full charge makes the monster less prone to combat effects such as stun, knockback, and so on. Galvanic charge also functions as armor, absorbing some of the damage from direct impact attacks (but not from acid, fire, etc).

Injured monsters slowly recover hit points, like human characters, but only if they have a galvanic charge. The rate of recovery is proportional to the remaining charge. When a monster has used up its charge, it will no longer recover hit points. Damage at this stage can cripple or sever the monster’s body parts.

Heroes of Pain

Paroxysms are special attacks, unique to each monster. One kind of paroxysm is a direct assault whereby the monster wades into the enemy, dismembering men and scattering the bloody stumps in all directions. This can have a significant effect on morale. Other kinds of paroxysm have special effects. Stubbs leaps in among the enemy from behind, slicing down individuals and then darting off into concealment before attacking from another direction. Whereas Graves’ paroxysm causes him to dig into the earth and leave a deadly fizzing bomb that your own side can see but the enemy cannot.

Morale

The morale of human troops is a significant factor in the game. You will more often see units break and run than stand to be destroyed to the last man.

Monsters are immune to morale effects. The player’s goal is to direct his monsters around the battlefield to support wavering friendly units while inflicting maximum casualties and loss of morale on the enemy. This is in line with our intent that the game will convey the immediacy, feeling and personal experience of war, rather than simply the tactical choices.

Morale means that tactical choices can have a far-reaching effect. An unsupported cavalry charge on infantry in good defensive order (such as Ney undertook at Waterloo) leads to the cavalry taking far heavier losses than they inflict. This lowers the cavalry unit’s morale. If it routs back through its own lines, other units will be affected because morale is catching. The result is that combined arms strategies that make best use of different troop types will yield more success.

Morale is outside the player’s direct control and provides rich emergent gameplay. The player will have the choice of fighting a slow but effective war of attrition by attacking enemy units at the front and flanks – or alternatively, a riskier strategy of surgical strikes against key targets deep into the heart of enemy territory, where morale is harder to break.

Terrain & weather

The terrain on most levels depicts a rugged landscape of ditches, mud, sunken lanes, crags, high brows of hills, etc. Simply picking the fastest legs for your monsters is not always the best choice. Sometimes the monster with squat, powerful legs will make better headway.

Terrain and weather interact to create a wide variety of game challenges. Rain can make a field impassable. Frost can harden the ground to the point where boots cannot grip. Winds can be so powerful that ordinary men are beaten back. By contrast, bright sunlight will slowly sap the galvanic charge of monsters but raises the morale of human troops.

Weapon types

In addition to firearms and melee weapons, soldiers and heroes can use other weapons. Some of these are restricted to unique situations. Others require the player to have captured the necessary technology in an earlier level.

• Bombs: Effective against men and monsters, generating plenty of spare body parts for carts to harvest.
• Fire: Frightens monsters, who will not cross
• Barbed wire: Inflicts damage to cross and drains monsters’ galvanic charge
• Smoke: Affects visibility – can create “friendly fire” situations
• Acid gas: Dissolves body parts off monsters; does general damage to men
• Cannon: Cannonballs better vs monsters (can knock off body parts) but less likely to hit than canister, which is more effective vs men

The goal of the design is to create interesting trade-offs with all such features, as in the best strategy games. However, a deep tactical understanding of terrain, weather and combined arms is not the only way to achieve victory. A player who prefers fast-paced action can still win by boldness, persistence and fast reactions. The difference is in whether the player wants a victory that feels as if it was won by carefully considered means, or by luck and reckless courage.

Active camera

During a level, if the player hasn’t taken any action for a few seconds, the Active Camera AI cuts in. This allows the camera to track or cut away to show other scenes that may affect the player. For instance, the camera might do a fast-track over to a hostile cannon that is being swung round towards the player’s position. Typically this allows impressive cinematic visuals that also serve to give the player advance warning of certain events. The moment the player touches the controls again, the view switches back to him and Active Camera switches off.

Frankenstein's Legions game overview Part 3

Battles

Combat is presented in third-person. Clerval leads his squad of monsters around the battlefield and can have a decisive personal effect on the outcome. Other friendly units behave autonomously according to the tactics selected before the battle.

The play can zoom out to a map showing the whole battlefield, and can see where friendly officers are in trouble. The player will need to direct his squad to address problem areas in order to achieve victory.

Solo missions

Solo missions take place in a variety of locations: Highgate Cemetery, the Limehouse Docks in London, an isolated chateau, the Latin Quarter in Paris, the Versailles Palace.

Solo missions very often involve an element of stealth. Success in the mission typically unlocks later missions and/or provides help in battles, in the form of new technology, information or special items.

For example:

• Clerval must attend a dinner-dance at the Savoy and speak with Ada Lovelace. She can help in later levels by providing decoded information from the enemy.
• A rival officer in Clerval’s regiment challenges him to a duel. If Clerval wins, he will have a greater influence over troops in subsequent battles.
• Traitors drug Clerval and abduct Lady Lovelace to ransom her to the French. In the role of one of Clerval’s monsters, the player must get her back without panicking the citizens of Mayfair.
• Clerval goes alone to meet a spy in no man’s land. However, the rendezvous turns out to be a trap and he has to escape and evade his way back to safety.

The laboratory

Between levels, you get to repair or reconfigure your monsters in the laboratory. The lab is represented as a 3D environment that you can walk around. The lab is depicted as a gothic chamber with flickering tesla coils, bubbling fluids, and lightning flaring outside as rain beats on the shutters. In glass tanks around the lab float your monsters. A superimposed screen shows body parts in storage in your vats. Success in previous level provides you with new body parts and (more rarely) with new heads.

Body parts can be removed from monsters to the vats, or taken from the vats to attach to a monster. The heads define each monster. You can change any other body part, but each head remains suspended in its tank. Sometimes you won’t have enough spare parts in to field a whole team of fully-repaired monsters. The choice then is whether to go with a small team using all your best parts, or a larger group of half-made (and so weaker) monsters.

Each head is a named individual with his own history and, while they are this dormant state, you will sometimes hear them muttering as they dream of the life they had. The life story of each head develops over the course of several levels, as snatches of memory float to the surface. For a player who chooses to follow them, these life stories – some poignant, some brutal, some darkly funny – will each have as much depth as a good short story.

Sometimes you will acquire the head of an enemy or rival – or even a friend who features in the backstory. These heads may have special knowledge such as the layout of a chateau or a secret route behind enemy lines. Listening to their stories unlocks additional scenes in the backstory – which in turn may reveal unsettling things about Clerval’s own past.

Whenever you win new technology in a level, this is where it appears along with new options associated with it. For example, acquiring Moreau Hybrids allows you to attach bats’ wings or giant eel bodies to your heads, instead of human parts.

Cinematics

The cutscenes will be used to illuminate characterization and build the backstory, rather than to provide the player with superfluous mission briefings.

Many of these sequences will be flashbacks to Clerval’s past. Others show scenes whose significance will only become clear later. The cutscenes are presented in a style of “found drama”, in which the viewer is eavesdropping on secrets of great personal importance. Not everything is immediately explained. Some events seen may be subjective or open to various interpretations. This contrasts with the more common style of “staged drama” which resembles the storytelling grammar of a traditional movie.

Examples of this style can be seen in movies like Christopher Nolan’s Memento or Guy Maddin’s Careful. When successful, the effect is to intrigue and involve the viewer by presenting fragmentary scenes that can be gradually assembled into the complete story.

The player is free to skip the cutscenes. However, they should be a rewarding viewing experience in their own right. Even players who skip right through just playing the levels may later come back and watch the cutscenes like watching the extras on a DVD.

This innovative style will add to Frankenstein’s Legions as a groundbreaking, quality entertainment product unsurpassed by any previous videogame. It is especially appropriate to the lean-forward medium of games – where the plot-based, theatrical style of cinema-influenced cutscenes can often merely seem an unwelcome interruption.

Frankenstein's Legions game overview Part 2

A War Fought By Dead Men

Frankenstein’s Legions is an action-strategy game set in a gothic environment of moors, mountains and deserted villages. The style is a raw, modern take on Mary Shelley’s classic science fiction. Jittery Se7en style scratched-negative titles and icons, bleak war-torn landscapes, desaturated colors, haunting sounds of wind and rain, the howls and shrieks of reanimated men – all combine to evoke an eerie and highly original game experience.

The player takes the role of Tom Clerval, Victor Frankenstein’s godson. The game, presented throughout in third-person 3D, follows Clerval from army surgeon to high rank as officer in charge of a platoon of resurrected monsters.

Many levels consist of battles and sieges. During the action, the player controls only Clerval and his “dirty dozen” of monsters. Other characters are autonomous. However, Clerval’s orders will influence other soldiers on his side. His actions will affect their morale.

Other levels involve stealth or undercover missions, requiring the player to locate an item or person, perform an assassination, or gain information. Usually Clerval undertakes these missions alone or with just one or two of his monsters. The essential elements of stealth missions are always clearly defined – you locate the secret plans and the mission is complete. Incidental information that you discover along the way (in the form of rumors overheard from civilians, etc) can help in subsequent levels or add depth to the story, but will not be vital for completing the level.

Between levels, the player can repair and modify his monsters using body parts and new technology won during the level. He can also learn the monsters’ individual life stories – which will sometimes give a clue to special skills they can use.

Inter-level movies are not only used to give the player mission briefings, but principally as in a movie to fill out Clerval’s backstory in flashback and to show scenes that are happening to other characters.

There is additional story material in the form of each monster’s life story. The player can piece these together or ignore them as he or she chooses. After completing the game, it will be possible to go back and access all the monsters’ life stories, rather like unlocking extras on a movie DVD.

The built-in awareness of the brand will give Frankenstein’s Legions an appeal to a wide market beyond the gaming hardcore. The emphasis on story, atmosphere, a small core group of characters and simple gameplay mechanics will increase the appeal to this market.

“I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but by God they terrify me.” – the Duke of Wellington

All characters react to the player’s presence. Monsters cringe and howl as you issue them with orders. Friendly soldiers salute when you are near. Enemies glare and spit and shake their fists. Civilians avert their eyes and make the sign of the cross.

Monsters

Monsters are hulking creatures with ill-proportioned limbs. They howl in anguish at the heavens and rip each other to pieces in gory battles. When at full strength, monsters are the most powerful characters in the game. They have devastating special attacks and can hurl ordinary men around and tear them limb from limb. Each side in a battle will usually field only a half-dozen monsters.

Heroes

Heroes are stronger than ordinary men and may have special abilities. Senior officers on both sides are usually heroes. Tom Clerval himself is a hero. Others in the game include Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel), Isabel Blakeney and Citizen Auguste Blanqui. The reanimated Emperor Napoleon and Marshal Ney are also classed as heroes, although possessing many attributes of monsters also.

Soldiers

Types of soldier include: hussars, dragoons, light and heavy infantry, sappers, and artillerymen. A unit of soldiers consists of around twenty men, and there should be up to twenty units per side in large battles. Over the course of the game, soldiers become more accustomed to monsters and will not automatically panic when facing them. However, a full-force special attack by a monster is usually enough to cause a wavering band of soldiers to rout.

Civilians

Civilians are encountered both in stealth missions and (less frequently) on the battlefield. Civilians are frightened of monsters and will usually flee from them in panic, although sometimes they will band together, arm themselves with pitchforks and burning torches, and riot instead. Famous civilians in the story include Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Coleridge and George Stevenson.