An evening with the RPG Blokes

I had the opportunity recently to sit down for a natter with the RPG Blokes. Not in the same room, unfortunately, and the internet connection over Zoom gave us a hard time, but Mark and the guys cleaned up the audio to make a seamless confabulation (in the real sense, not the dopy AI developer jargon). Join us and listen in as we natter about Dragon Warriors, Jewelspider, and all things roleplaying.

And in the same week there's an interview with my Dragon Warriors and Golden Dragon co-creator Oliver Johnson. You can listen to that or read the transcript.

An old soul reborn

We'll have an in-depth report on this in a month or so in the form of a guest post by author Paul Gresty, but I couldn't let the summer pass without letting you know that The Castle of Lost Souls has been completely reworked as a Fabled Lands Quest.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that it was originally published in four parts in White Dwarf magazine from April to July 1984. I revised it for the Golden Dragon series the following year, but those changes were nothing beside the transformation that Mr Gresty has wrought. The book is now more than twice as big at 700 sections, the action takes place in Golnir in the Fabled Lands, and you have the option of dropping in and out of the adventure at several points.

To quote from the blurb, this edition of The Castle of Lost Souls sports "a huge amount of original content, including resurrection rules, the ability to travel back and forth between this book and others in the Fabled Lands series, a range of completely new magical items for the Fabled Lands setting, and much more." And that's without mentioning all the scrumptious Leo Hartas illustrations, which haven't been seen since the original 1980s edition.

Halloween treat, no trick

Forty years ago I wrote my first gamebook. I was a roleplayer and board gamer. I’d played the Fantasy Trip solo adventures, and even wrote a short solo dungeon for my friend Steve Foster (designer of Mortal Combat) when he had to spend a week in hospital, but I’d hardly noticed the growing kids’ gamebook craze until Ian Livingstone asked me to write a serialized solo adventure for White Dwarf. That was The Castle of Lost Souls.

It wasn’t long before almost everyone I knew was signing up to write a gamebook series. Joe Dever and Gary Chalk left Games Workshop to do Lone Wolf. Jamie Thomson too, teaming up with Mark Smith (who was another stalwart of our Tekumel campaign) to create Way of the Tiger and Falcon. You can see why Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (UK) might have felt a bit miffed. They’d started a trend and now half their workforce was deserting the ship to jump on the bandwagon – if that isn’t mixing metaphors.

I used to freelance for White Dwarf a lot in those days, but once Jamie quit the editorial chair I didn’t have as much reason to show up at the office. Then Steve Jackson asked me to come in to talk about a series of gamebooks that he wanted to publish. He and Ian were committed to doing more Fighting Fantasy for Puffin Books, so these would be Games Workshop’s own series.

Steve was always coming up with fascinating game mechanics. He told me about a little tactical combat system he’d thought of when stuck in a motel in the middle of America. You had a tactical diagram that showed which actions were permitted in a combat round. So from EVADE you could move to DEFEND, REST or NORMAL ATTACK. From DEFEND you could only move to EVADE or NORMAL ATTACK, and so on.

When the player’s action was compared with the opponent’s, that gave the number of hit points each combatant lost. ‘Do you think you could use this for a gamebook?’ Steve wondered.

I went away and did a little work on it. I can’t remember how I handled the NPC adversaries, but this was a 1980s gamebook so there wasn’t going to be any AI. Probably the NPCs just acted randomly each round, and that was cross-referenced with the player’s action to give the outcome for that round. That would eat up a lot of paragraphs if every encounter had its own set of action entries, so I imagine I had a few dozen entries for each of several types of monster. They could be customized by SPECIAL ATTACKS, which would vary depending on the monster.

‘Looks good,’ reckoned Steve, ‘but I’d like to see a sample. Fifty or sixty sections, say.’

I went home, sat down at my Olympia Traveller typewriter, and began: ‘Dusk in Wistren Wood…’ and launched into a solo adventure in a vampire’s mansion. When I showed it to Steve he liked it and proposed a contract for Vampire Crypt, as it was then called. When the contract came it had a clause preventing me from writing gamebooks for any other publishers. I’m glad I never signed it, as if I had then my writing career would have been over before it began. (You may have noticed that Games Workshop never did get around to publishing their own gamebook series.)

Still, I was left with the beginning of a gamebook. When I signed with Grafton Books a few months later to do the Golden Dragon series, those fifty sample sections let me get a head start on the tight deadlines. Of course I couldn’t use Steve Jackson’s clever rule system, but Golden Dragon needed something a lot simpler anyhow. And thus Crypt of the Vampire was born – or spawned, or sired, or whatever the appropriate term is for vamps.

(Yes, these are the original maps and notes. I'm that much of a hoarder.)

And here we are at the 40th anniversary. To mark it I dug out a reboot of the book that I wrote for Amazon a couple of years ago. They wanted apps for Alexa (for some reason they call them skills) so I turned Crypt of the Vampire into The Vampire’s Lair, a consciously old-school adventure in audio form. Rather than retain the dungeon fantasy flavour of the original, though, I leaned into the influences of those Universal and Hammer monster movies I loved as a kid, when horror was delicious shuddersome fun and before it became synonymous with serial killers, torture porn and (yawn) demonic possession.

The text I wrote for that is now on sale for Halloween in a slim paperback with Leo Hartas’s original illustrations reworked in full colour. (My generous Patreon backers get to read it for free -- just sayin'.) It was Leo’s first book too. I’d seen his portfolio when he came into the White Dwarf offices one day, and when my editor at Grafton, Angela Sheehan, asked me if there were any artists I wanted for the series Leo's name sprang to mind. And because of that I began a close and dear friendship, a friendship which also now forty years old. If it were a marriage that means Leo and I would be celebrating our ruby anniversary – a very suitable hue given the blood-sucking tastes of the sinister count.

Dusk in Wistren Wood

This year is the fortieth anniversary of my first published book, Crypt of the Vampire. I've blogged about it before, and longtime readers will already know the story of how it came to be written -- and revised (in 2013) and later expanded (in 2016) by David Walters.

And if you're familiar with the Mirabilis blog you'll also know how the Golden Dragon Gamebook series led to my lifelong friendship and creative partnership with Leo Hartas -- which also weaves back into the present day and my Jewelspider RPG, which is being illustrated by Leo's son Inigo. Everything's entangled.

In the introduction to David Walters's 2016 version I wrote:

"As my preference when running role-playing games is to let the players drive the story, I dispensed with the long introduction usual in gamebooks at the time. There’s no spoon-feeding here, no overt mission. You aren’t told your history. You are the hero, as the back cover blurb used to say, so your background and motivation are up to you. I’m not saying it works. You as the reader must decide that. I’m just saying it was deliberate. Crypt of the Vampire is my love letter to Hammer horror, and I wanted it to have the pace, vigour and dislocating dreamlike quality of the best of those movies."

Is there anything more to say? Yes, plenty. The full origin story of Crypt of the Vampire has yet to be told, but it's coming soon. With Samhain approaching, expect to hear the creak of a coffin lid, the howl of wolves, and the flapping of leathery wings. There's no escape -- so stock up on garlic and hawthorn stakes now, and watch this space.

While you're waiting -- have you tried this Golden Dragon mini-adventure, "The Island of Illusions", that Oliver Johnson and I wrote back in 1984? And listen to this comparative analysis of two very different Gothic novels by the virtual hosts on NotebookLM.

To get you in the mood for Halloween, here are some vampire movies I've enjoyed. Got your own favourite? That's what the comments are for.

• A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
• Count Dracula
• Cronos
• Dance of the Vampires
• Let The Right One In
• Mr Vampire
• Nosferatu the Vampyre
• Shadow of the Vampire
• Viy

Hammer and anvil

More from Fighting Fantasy Fest 5, and this time it's my chat with Gil Jugnot from Le Marteau et l'Enclume. Pay close attention and you'll get a scoop about the 40th anniversary of The Crypt of the Vampire -- but more of that anon.

Polished scales

Following on from last time, some of the Golden Dragon Gamebooks now have a new look. And to commemorate the 39 years since the first two came out, there's a full-colour hardback edition of The Temple of Flame for the wealthy collectors out there.

Impressed? Wait till you see our plans for the 40th anniversary.

Games that gloomviles play

If that picture rings a bell, you may have an eye like an A.I. but you'll also appreciate that gloomviles from an early Golden Dragon gamebook have found their way into the latest issue of Dragon Warriors magazine Casket of Fays. This issue has a sandbox campaign (my kind of game, that) set on the moors, magic items, creatures, adventure seeds, and a feature on the games that characters (not players) enjoy in the lands of Legend.

And while you're on DriveThruRPG don't fail to pick up Paul Partington's latest Dragon Warriors gamebook Scourge of the Shadows. It's a 480-section adventure set in Ereworn and, like Casket, it's absolutely free.

Also, though it's not related to Dragon Warriors or Fabled Lands, don't forget to check out the Kickstarter for the third Legendary Kingdoms book, Over the Bloo-- no, I mean Pirates of the Splintered Isles. Open world gamebook adventure, except with a party of characters instead of a single PC. You can get a sense of what it's like from the playthrough here:

Winning the smart way

Quite a few reviews of my second-ever gamebook, The Temple of Flame, claim that it's too difficult. You have a series of metaphorical fiery hoops to jump through at the end that are sure to whittle away your few remaining hit points. Mission utterly impossible, right?

Well, after thirty-three years of silence I'm here to tell you it ain't so. There's a clever way to win, and it's not listed as any of the options in those fight paragraphs. Look away now if you haven't played the adventure yet and want to test your mettle.

So here's the thing. Before your final showdown with Damontir the Mad, he summons a doppelganger to fight you:

‘Damontir,’ you say flatly. ‘You will die by my sword.’

He looks at you sharply, then laughs without mirth. ‘Dragon Knight of Palados! Were we to cross blades, perhaps you might be the victor. But I have a dozen sorcerous ways to kill you before you reach me.’ He draws something from his tunic. Light flashes across your face as he turns it towards you. ‘The Mirror of the Moon.’

Damontir carefully angles the mirror to reflect your own gaze back at you and then releases it. Instead of falling to shatter on the hard stone floor, it floats in mid-air. It starts slowly to rotate, growing larger as it does so until it seems a swirling pool of quicksilver filled by your image. Then, as you stare in stunned incredulity, your own reflection steps out of the mirror and stands before you. Illuminated by the unearthly half-light of its mirror world, it does not quite seem to be your twin. Rather, it looks like a vivid portrait of yourself rendered in unnatural hues.

‘This is your simulacrum,’ explains Damontir. ‘A soulless duplicate of yourself.’ The simulacrum utters an unreal cry and advances on you with a look of wild malice. ‘It is an unreasoning automaton, quite dedicated to its single purpose. Killing you.’

Contemptuously, he turns away from the fight and resumes his translation of the runes on the podium. The simulacrum has the same VIGOUR as you have at the moment. It is like you in every respect, except that it has neither soul nor intellect, and does not cast a shadow. You prepare yourself for battle.

Turn to 43. 

So reviewers sometimes grumble that means a fight at fifty-fifty odds followed by having to take on Damontir himself. Did you spot the exploit? Earlier in the adventure you should have picked up a Ring of Healing, which you can use at any time to restore your VIGOUR to full. The simulacrum has the exact same stats as you have at the moment that Damontir creates it. So just hold off using that ring. Make sure you have only a few VIGOUR points left when you catch up with your foe, that way the simulacrum will be created with the same VIGOUR. You can use the ring (the clue is in that line "prepare yourself for battle") to make that a very unequal fight, then you're ready to tackle Damontir almost at full strength.

A near disaster

I don’t think this merits a featured post of its own, but it’s a curiosity that might interest dyed-in-the-wool gamebook otaku. Back when Oliver Johnson and I started writing the Golden Dragon gamebooks, we were learning the ropes about book production at the same time. Manuscripts had to be ready months ahead of publication, and cover copy and artwork were usually the first thing you had to think about.

Series editor Angela Sheehan asked me to come up with a cover idea for The Lord of Shadow Keep. I tend to prefer visual imagery to prose, in fact, hence the frequent references here to movies, television and of course comic books. But I had no clear idea of what was going in the book, and when inspiration fails it really tars and feathers you. Case in point, this absolutely epic fail of a cover concept. A back view of a dark lord gazing out at the countryside in contemplative mood? What in actual frell?

Luckily the cover artist Bruno Elletori had the sense to ignore my notes and instead fix us up with a full-tilt action scene which conveyed a sense of immediate danger. All I can say is that usually I did a lot better job of coming up with a cover concept – consider Lords of the Rising Sun, for instance, or all the new Critical IF gamebooks. But when you know what you’re doing, and you still drop the ball, that’s when it lands with the most resounding of thuds.Still, it could have been worse. Check out this cover of the Berkley edition that was released in the US.

Come back on Friday for the main post, in which we’ll be taking a look at the work of a classic science fiction author whose bravura world-building makes for great roleplaying campaigns.

Eight crimson arrows

John Jones recently pointed out that there's a pretty glaring omission in the reissued edition of Castle of Lost Souls. Most of the illustrations are not in the paperback, for reasons I can't remember now but it may simply have been that I couldn't get good scans of them at the time. Okay, fine, you can use your imagination. So no harm done? Ah, but one of those illustrations contained a vital clue. Here it is, along with the corresponding section:

192

You go only a short distance before arriving at a door. On the floor in front of you, eight crimson-fletched arrows have been placed in an intriguing pattern. You can pick up the arrows if you wish; remember to note them on your Adventure Sheet if so. There is no other way on from here, so you step forward and open the door. Turn to 153. 

And while I'm about it, I should also thank John for having helped out with some very useful advice on The Eye of the Dragon, another of those '80s gamebooks that recently resurfaced from the tidal flats of time. It's thanks to him that the Dagger of the Mind spell now does 3 points' damage instead of 2. Mind you, if you find yourself thinking of using it as a free strike in combat then you might have trouble completing the adventure. Just saying.

Last of the Golden Dragons

The Eye of the Dragon didn’t start off as a gamebook. It was a scenario in my Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. The ruined city that the players had to visit was not Thalios but Ngala, out on the Flats of Tsechelnu about a hundred and fifty miles from Jakalla.

I can’t find any notes for the scenario, and that's probably because there weren’t any. Our main weekly game was held at Keble, first in Mike Polling's room and later with Jack Bramah, Robert Dale or Colin Williams hosting, and those games were on Sunday afternoons as a legacy from when we spun off from the Dungeons and Dragons Society at Jesus. I’d usually arrive to run the session after a leisurely start to the day and a long brunch, so there was rarely any preparation and we preferred it that way. For this scenario, though, I had at least drawn up a fairly detailed map of the ruins.

At a guess the game took place in late 1981 or early 1982, because it was obviously inspired by the movie Escape From New York. The players will have included Oliver Johnson, Mark Smith and Robert Dale. I doubt if there was any super-powerful ancient artefact at stake – more likely it was a routine escort mission for their temple. The twist, such as it was, lay in the fact that the players must have been anticipating trouble from an amphibious enemy such as the Hlűss or Hlutrgu, but it turned out they were up against a party of Grey Ssu. Hence all the hypnotic jiggery-pokery, and with it the seeping paranoia of never knowing whether the comrade right behind you might have already been got at. (John Carpenter movies were clearly a big influence on my umpiring style.)

For the gamebook I kept the unity of place and time, starting the adventure as you arrive at the ruins at dusk and finishing at dawn. The Grey Ssu became the Kappa – not the water-dwelling creatures of Japanese folklore, but pearl-eyed and coral-boned nonhumans whose name derived from the Greek letter, which seemed to fit with the vaguely Graeco-Roman flavour of the city.

Some nods to the scenario’s origins at Oxford can be seen in the Amber Pantechnicon (a wonky Radcliffe Camera), the crossroads of Carfax, and the talking sphinxes, inspired by the Emperors’ busts in Zuleika Dobson. For some reason the Sydney Opera House got a look-in too; maybe that was Russ’s idea.

The USP of Eye of the Dragon is that you are a sorcerer. In retrospect I could have come up with a more interesting way of handling that than the Vancean system – which is delightful in the Dying Earth stories, but doesn’t make for very interesting gameplay. In our Tekumel games at that time, magic involved the sorcerer constructing a number of mental “spell matrices”. After a spell was cast, the spell matrix became “fatigued” and you needed to spend time in meditation in order to restore it. You could still cast a spell using a fatigued matrix, but it cost twice as much energy. That would have been a better mechanic than the all-or-nothing approach I went with for the book.

Other snippets… Master Giru is based on Professor M.A.R. Barker, creator of Tekumel, to whom the book is dedicated. His player-character Firu Ba-Yeker is well known in Tekumel gaming circles. Lord Mantiss was a nod to Ian Livingstone, who often urged me to include a character called Mantis in Adventure, the role-playing game I was designing for Games Workshop – or, as it turned out, for myself – in the early ‘80s. (Years later, Ian was to return the gesture of homage by releasing his own version of The Eye of the Dragon. That's a joke by the way.)

For a while I toyed with the notion of giving the book a thorough overhaul. It could do with a bit more grit. The pally way the scholars talk to you at the start never rang true. More suspicion would have helped - and would have resonated with the pervasive distrust once you arrive at the ruins and find that so many would-be allies have been nobbled by hypnosis. I even jotted down a few notes:

The idea is that you’re different somehow. People treat you with fear, suspicion and loathing. We never say if it’s skin colour, a deformity, or what, but something marks you out as Other.

Oh, and you are a miracle worker, sorcerer, whatever. Maybe instead of being “of the Elder Race” this is more like being born a mutant.

So you’re recruited for this job. They don’t like you, but they need you.

You go and get the Eye, then at the end they ask you for it. And we end with you wondering whether to let them have it...

Another option was to rejig the book as a Fabled Lands Quest, with the action starting in Dweomer and then zipping over by means of one of those convenient dimensional portals to the vaguely Hellenic land of Atticala.

But in the end I realized that most people are buying these reprints to fill gaps in their gamebook collection. There isn’t a lot of appetite for revised versions. The Keep of the Lich-Lord was different – we had to rework that because we didn’t have the rights to the Fighting Fantasy setting. But The Eye of the Dragon is in its own universe – and it’s not Legend, at least not quite the low-fantasy Legend familiar to Dragon Warriors players, despite the reference to a place called Achtan. So in the end I changed only a couple of monster names (“dungeon devil” and “blood fiend” – must’ve been in a rush that day) but otherwise left the text unmolested.

The Eye of the Dragon is now available in paperback on Amazon:

Another bite of the cherry

It's dusk in Wistren Wood again. If you've been stymied by earlier false starts of the crowdfunding for Crypt of the Vampire (my first ever gamebook) then you'll be happy to hear that Megara Entertainment are running it again for real. The Kickstarter campaign is not just for a full-colour hardback edition of that book, but also to pay Leo Hartas to colourize his illustrations for the second Golden Dragon gamebook, The Temple of Flame.

Black and wight

A little while back I mentioned a Kickstarter campaign by Megara Entertainment for a hardback edition of Crypt of the Vampire, which was my first-ever gamebook and also Leo Hartas's first illustration job. That was the mid-80s and Leo was still at university at the time - as indeed I might have been, researching fundamental particles and the theory of everything, if I hadn't frittered away the time I should have spent revising for Finals on roleplaying, girls, and punting. But that's a detail.

Anyway, after tweaking the campaign a few times, Megara gave it up as a bad job. I could have told them. In fact I did tell them. A Kickstarter for Heart of Ice might have soared to great heights, but Crypt of the Vampire was written for 9-12 year olds, and they're not the demographic that's going to shell out $50 for a hardback book.

The saddest casualty of the aborted Kickstarter campaign is that we won't get to see Leo's colour versions of his original artwork. When I first heard about that I thought it was a terrible idea. Why not colourize Citizen Kane while we're at it? But I should have trusted more in Leo's talent. As this sample shows, he can do a lot more than drop in some tints using Photoshop.

You can't buy any of Leo's original artwork via Kickstarter, but if you wanted a piece to hang on the wall then you can contact Leo directly via his website. He's got drawings from the Golden Dragon books and from Down Among the Dead Men, as well as a drawer full of fabulous fantasy maps from Fighting Fantasy. It's as great a treasure as any Smaug ever made a pillow of, believe me. And what a great birthday or Christmas present (is it too early to mention Christmas? sorry) for a fantasy fan.

STOP PRESS: Would you believe there has been some talk this week about Megara restarting that abortive Kickstarter campaign? I wasn't going to authorize licences for any more of my old gamebooks, but Leo seems keen and I'd hate to miss the chance to see his colour versions of all those old pics. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

Quelle horreur!

Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once. No, honestly, because it's about a Kickstarter for Le Tombeau du Vampire, "premier livre de la série Dragon d'Or", currently being run by Megara Entertainment, and I suspect not that many of this blog's readers are fluent in French.

Having said that, you might still want to check out the Kickstarter page because Leo Hartas is putting up some of his original pen-and-ink drawings for the book as one-off items you can buy - including my favourite one (possibly the first illustration Leo did for what was his and my first ever book) of the gate into the vampire's garden. And you can read that story here.

In a dragon's eye

It was the early 1980s, and children's publishers really didn't know what hit them. For decades they'd been turning out nice cozy books based on their mental picture of a short-trousered scamp with a cap gun in one hand and a bottle of ginger pop in the other. In fact, even that view may be too generous. Hardly a single children's editor was male, or under forty, and mostly I think all those nice ladies just wrote boys off as not wanting to read books. Their ideal reader was sweet, quiet and mild as milk. So, not really like most girls at the time either.

They got a rude awakening. Boys did want to read books, and tomboys too - just not the books the publishers had been churning out. They wanted blood, guts, gore, mayhem, violence, and gutsy action. And most of all they wanted to be the hero.

The younger generation of editors understood this. Philippa Dickinson was twenty-six years old when she commissioned The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A few years later, when she was publishing the Dragon Warriors series, Oliver Johnson and I were keen to stress that the covers should not give the sense of being "you know, for kids" and Philippa agreed about that. Dubious as she may have been about the buxom babes in the Alan Craddock paintings we showed her, she got that boys at that age (they were, let's face it, most of them boys, our readers back then) didn't see themselves as little kids any more. As this post by @burnedfx puts it: "Which cover would appeal to kids and which one is grandma going to pick up for little Bobby?"

Before Dragon Warriors, Oliver and I had been published by Grafton Books. I appreciated our editors there - Angela Sheehan and Gillian Appleby - but they definitely belonged to the old school of kids' publishing. I managed to get artwork by Russ Nicholson for one book, The Eye of the Dragon, and we were mostly lucky with Bruno Elletori's cover paintings, but I've ranted about that puppyish dragon logo before. And don't even get me started on the covers we were given by Pacer Books in the USA. "For young adults," said their logo (and that wasn't a term you heard much in the mid-'80s) but look at that painting in the middle! A boy in a frigging skirt. Wearing tennis shoes. Holding a little blue ball. By Azathoth, why? Especially when you consider that the rest of the image is fine, and if only little Bobby wasn't there in his pretty little dress then it could have worked.

Now compare my two covers to what Ian Livingstone got for his own Eye of the Dragon book. Okay, his came out twenty years after the Golden Dragon series, but even so. The salt in the wound is that I bet his cover cost a lot less too. As so often, less is more.

As we're talking about The Eye of the Dragon, you may be wondering why it wasn't reissued along with the other five Golden Dragon books last year. No? Well, I'll tell you anyway. Reviews by Mrs Giggles, the aforementioned burnedfx, and on Demian Katz's site point out some serious flaws in the book. Most egregious of all, it seems that the big finale depends on a one-in-three guess. Ulp.

If that's really true, I owe an apology to an entire generation, as a random choice like that would be hard to justify right at the start of a book, but is criminally wrong at the end. And while I'm checking that, and fixing it if need be, I might as well tinker with the magic system and make a bit more of the protagonist's unusual background. So The Eye of the Dragon will probably come out later this year in quite a different form. And now that there's a Fighting Fantasy book of that name, I think I'll change the title to something more interesting too. And ditch the Dungeons and Dragons brand of fantasy setting while I'm at it. And...

On reflection, it could be next year.

Clouds and silver linings

A couple of bits of gamebook news today. First, Fabled Lands LLP has secured a publisher (one of the Big Five, no less) for the ebook versions of the four Critical IF books and my Frankenstein interactive novel. Hang on, though. Before you get too excited: that's the good part, but there's a cloud hanging over the deal. The holdup is in actually taking delivery of finished versions of the ebook files. I'm told by Tim Gummer, who runs the business side of Fabled Lands LLP, that he has so far been unable to get definitive copies of the completed files. We were hoping to have them out in time for Christmas, but now, who knows?

Is this vexing? Considering that we have a shot at worldwide distribution with a major publisher, yes it is. But you can still get the books from Amazon (paperback and Kindle editions) so if the epub3 versions never see the light of day it'll be a pain, but not a total disaster.

The other news is all silver lining - well, a step up from silver, in fact. Tin Man Games, the undisputed kings of gamebook apps, will be releasing my six Golden Dragon gamebooks next year in the form of two compendium apps, each comprising three books. Read all about it on Tin Man's site, and while you're at it, be sure to check out their advent calendar, which trails a lot of gamebook goodies for 2014. The one that most interests me so far is Marie-Paule Graham's The Second Garden, a magical realist journey through seasons and stages of grief. No zombies or luck rolls in there, I suspect.

As it's Tin Man, who have a spotless track record for both reliability and innovation, you can be absolutely sure of seeing the Golden Dragon apps for both iOS and Android in 2014. And if the Critical IF ebook publishing deal does fall through, we'll probably be offering those books to Tin Man to turn into apps instead. What I'm really hoping for, though, is a Warhammer Quest style version of the Blood Sword series. If you agree, better start pestering Tin Man about it right now.

A neck romancer

I think of Crypt of the Vampire as my first gamebook, but it’s moot. I’d already written the magazine version of Castle of Lost Souls. That was serialized in White Dwarf in the summer of 1984, several months before the Golden Dragon series launched, and later got reworked as the sixth GD title. But Crypt was the first time I’d taken on a whole book.

Those were busy times. I had to turn down designing the PC game “Eureka by Ian Livingstone” because of all my magazine and book commitments. Maybe that was a mistake, as my friend Steve Foster, who wrote it in my place, told me he bought his first house on the proceeds. (The picture below, that's us back then in our slimmer days. I'm the one reading Captain America.) But at least with Golden Dragon I got my name on the title page. The road that’s grassy and wants for wear, you see.

Crypt and the later books nearly didn’t happen. In spring of 1984, while I was writing the first instalments of Castle of Lost Souls, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson offered me a contract to do a series of gamebooks for Games Workshop. I’d done bags of work for GW before – an entire role-playing game in 1980 called Adventure (never published; GW acquired the RuneQuest rights) and then in 1983 an entire Questworld campaign pack with Oliver Johnson (never published; GW lost the RQ rights). In the case of the gamebooks, though, they seemed to be serious. They were willing to pay an advance, and that was a first.

Except… it was £350 per book, which was a pittance even in the ‘80s. And it would have been an exclusive contract, meaning I couldn’t work with any other publisher. “Why would Ian and Steve want to compete with Fighting Fantasy?” I wondered. For whatever reason, I dragged my heels about signing and was mighty glad I did, as a matter of weeks later I went to see Angela Sheehan at Dragon Books, had a nice long chat, and walked out with a two-book deal.

Originally Temple of Flame was down as the first book in the series, and the contract describes the other as “Dungeon of the Undead”. I think it was probably my dad who said, “Put ‘vampire’ in the title, it’ll grab people more than ‘undead’.” The publishers wanted to call it Crypt of Dracula, but I wasn’t having that. These books would be read by kids, and I didn’t want their first experience of Bram Stoker’s creation to be in a gamebook. Dracula was already in public domain, Stoker having died seventy-two years earlier, but I believe writers owe a creative courtesy to each other that lasts a lot longer than the term of copyright – though, regrettably, not everyone shares that view.

For the new edition, I’ve revised the text slightly to excise the trad fantasy elements (a hobgoblin, an elf) that seemed most intrusive. Now the atmosphere is very slightly more Gothic, the setting less definitely medieval. “Ah!” the DW players will say, “but isn’t Wistren Wood in Ellesland?” And so it is, but my Legend games have moved on – past the Last Trump at the end of The Walls of Spyte, even – to a time of matchlocks and sabres*.

But that’s getting close to a foolish consistency. Whether or not Crypt of the Vampire is set in Legend, at heart it belongs to the lurid fairytale world of Hammer horror, where Cushing’s alert, flashing gaze locked with the fiery brooding in the eyes of Lee, and dark ivy-choked halls waited in the depths of darker woods. I like what Johnny S Geddes said about Crypt on Demian Katz’s gamebook page:

“Every now and then around midnight, and especially when there's thunder outside, I go back and take another tread through the enchanted forest leading to a dark mansion.”

That’s how I like to think of it being enjoyed. And, with Halloween almost upon us, here’s the chance to curl up with something creepy. The new edition also has Leo Hartas’s illustrations, incidentally – it was Leo’s first book as well as mine. Start as you mean to go on, that's our motto.

* Update 2024: In fact that gunpowder-powered version of Legend never came about, as I realized that the kind of campaign I was planning to run wasn't a good fit with the tastes of some of my players. So the Legend you'll see in my Jewelspider RPG is the original Dark Ages/early medieval setting familiar from Dragon Warriors. 

A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend...

What makes Oliver Johnson's The Lord of Shadow Keep so memorable? It's a question I've been asking myself for nearly thirty years. After all that time, the only answer I have, while not  particularly satisfying, is that it's talent. It's artistry. It's a dash of what we call genius.That's what makes the difference between a simple solo dungeon and an imaginative journey you can believe in.

You see - being honest now - Oliver is not great on rules. Unlike me, he won't do a detailed map and intricate flowcharts. Having a background in English literature, he doesn't share my scientist's delight at probabilities, patterns and problem-solving. And he doesn't write as fast, while I can churn this stuff out by the yard.

I'm not saying my writing is bad, mind you. People have been complimentary about lines like this:

By day you sail on lavender waves under a vault of azure and gold. By night the sails gleam dazzlingly white in the rays of the moon, and each star finds its twin in the dark ocean depths.

So there's some poetry in my soul too. It's not all equations and graphs. But literary talent has never been about pretty writing - it's about that and much more. It's the ability to convey a palpable atmosphere, a resonance of theme, to vividly evoke character, and to give the sense of the author's personal presence through the voice of their writing.

So if I had written Shadow Keep - or co-written it, as originally intended - you would have got an adventure with some clever puzzles, a map that made sense, encounters that were balanced according to the statistics of 2d6 rolls. Even nice writing. But you wouldn't have got that strange, Gothic-drenched, opiated dream quality that Oliver does as naturally as breathing, because it's something he absorbed into his pores while studying Byron and Shelley and those other poetical fellows. The only recent example of such exquisite pre-Victorian Gothic Romanticism to match it is in Fumito Ueda's Ico and Shadow of the Colossus games. Watch for that same flavour in Oliver's forthcoming fantasy series The Knight of the Fields.

The Shadow Keep cover painting by Bruno Elletori (or Elettori, or Ellitori, depending on how long the cover designer spent at lunch that day) is not really ideal. The illustrations should have been by a Victorian artist thoroughly steeped in Gothic. For the interiors on this new edition, we've used Irish artist Harry Clarke, best known for his Edgar Allan Poe illustrations. I know purists will grumble. We'll get some withering reviews on Amazon for changing things around. But you can still get the original version for a penny, so no harm done.

If you want to see the Gothic design for the new edition, it's out now from Fabled Lands Publishing. At a cost of more than a penny, I'm afraid, but we'll be sure to spend the profits on laudanum, quills and parchment for the next great Johnson opus.

Rearranging the Spark furniture

Spark Furnace is Fabled Lands Publishing's online storefront/catalogue site. With all the new stuff we've got coming along in the months ahead, it was time to give it an overhaul. Now you can find all kinds of stuff:

• A host of resources for Fabled Lands
• Maps and character sheets for the Critical IF gamebooks
• Details of the Golden Dragon reprints
• An inventory of Dragon Warriors material and a map of Legend
• The full story of how I rewrote Frankenstein as an interactive novel
• An audience with the Great Dirk himself

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. No rush, but drop by when you get a minute. And if you're thinking this is pretty lean for an FL blog post: don't worry, it's just a commercial break. There'll be the regular full-lengther on Friday.

Drac the Dane

More Way of the Tiger news on Friday, but here's a curiosity I wanted to share. Following on from the Danish edition of The Temple of Flame, it's Peder Bundgaard's cover for Crypt of the Vampire. Look for this one in October, along with four other revised, revamped and utterly awesome gamebooks. (Crypt would have been ready sooner, but I couldn't resist saving it up for Halloween.)

The vampire in the English version was named Lord Tenebron, incidentally, not Count Dracula. That was a deliberate choice that may baffle marketing experts, but seemed to me to be a question of creative integrity. Nowadays fanfic will happily appropriate even copyrighted characters, of course, but in the new edition he's still going to be Tenebron. He's not my most original gamebook vampire (that was the far more earthy Grim Dugald in "In the Night Season", the interactive section of my first Heroquest book) but hey, I was just starting out. I don't doubt there'll be more bloodsuckers to come.