A faerie contest

Talking the other week about Mark Smith's Virtual Reality gamebooks reminded me that I was also called in to do some editorial work on the first one, Green Blood. In the original version, your only chance of dealing with the elves was if you'd picked SWORDPLAY, SPELLS or UNARMED COMBAT at the start of the book. Given that you create a character by picking four out of a list of twelve skills, that means that more than one in four randomly chosen characters wouldn't be able to complete the adventure.

Mark's argument was that a player would be crazy not to start with at least one of those skills, but I was more used to roleplaying games like RuneQuest, and there the whole point is to customize the character by picking skills. It's never a given that you have to be a fighter or a wizard, as in D&D. Even one of the pregen characters in Green Blood (the thief) couldn't have finished the adventure.

It's really no fun to learn halfway through a gamebook that you never had a chance, so the publishers asked me to create some other contests you can use to best the elves using FOLKLORE, CUNNING or ARCHERY. You can play that sequence of the book here -- start at 21, and if you don't use any of the options I added then you'll eventually be sent to 18, which was the entirety of the original contest. 

You can also read the whole book here or try Stuart Lloyd's version Ravages of Hate, which weaves Green Blood into the material of Coils of Hate.

Ravages of Hate

It started with a throwaway remark that both of Mark Smith's Virtual Reality gamebooks are set in the same universe. Stuart Lloyd had got Mark's permission to revise the books and he mentioned that he was taking the opportunity to develop the part of Green Blood that takes place in the city of Godorno: "I'm going to let the character be able to explore Godorno and everywhere on the map before heading to the forest."

To which I replied: "If you’re bulking up the Godorno sections, and Godorno is also the setting for Coils of Hate, maybe there’s the opportunity to combine the two?"

"To make one mega book where the character can both save Godorno from Hate and the forest from the Westermen?" said Stuart. "It isn't beyond the realms of possibility. In Coils of Hate, the character has to flee the city due to the anti-Judain rhetoric. They then wander the surrounding area for a bit then go back. Maybe wandering the surrounding area could turn into a quest to save the forest as well? Then the character comes back? There are similar themes in the sense that human greed and hate are ruining things for everyone."

From that little acorn was to grow the magnificent blockbuster that is Ravages of Hate. You can get the first draft of the book here, and Stuart and Mark plan to run a Kickstarter to fund a print edition with new illustrations -- by real human artists, you'll be glad to hear, not Bing.

There was a third book, which I have mentioned before. I offered to help Mark flowchart that one before he plunged into the writing. I'll admit I had a little bit of an agenda when I made that offer. The publisher had made me fix the flowchart for Coils of Hate, or try to fix it, and I'd had to work on that while a deadline was looming on another book. So I was pretty frazzled after that, and given only two weeks before it went to press I hadn't really been able to make the flowchart work properly anyway. I dreaded having to do the same thing all over again, so thought the best thing would be to help Mark with the flowchart of the next one. At least that way I'd know how the story was meant to fit together, just in case the publisher expected me to clean up that one too.

But Mark couldn't work that way because it didn't fit with his creative process. He always took a novelistic approach to the writing, and having the plot constrained in gameplay terms from the outset would have hampered him too much. I didn't want to spoil that -- I've already said that I think the maturity of Coils of Hate's storyline and the richness of its characters are way ahead of anything I've seen in any other gamebook.

So when the publisher asked me, as I feared they would, to evaluate and edit Mark's third Virtual Reality book (titled The Mask of Death) I had to turn it down. I was still a nervous wreck from trying to knock Coils of Hate into shape. The manuscript went to VR series editor Ian Marsh. Had it come to me I would have kept a copy, being an inveterate hoarder, but sadly neither Ian nor Mark did, and now it's lost forever. (Unless, like one of those missing episodes of Doctor Who, it turns out that the publisher still has it in a desk drawer somewhere.)

It's a shame because Stuart could have included all three books in his magnum opus. Still, he's created a 1330-section gamebook as it is, so he deserves a break. Please let him have any playtesting comments (contact details on his blog) and be sure to back the Kickstarter. Maybe if the funding goes well, reconstructing that third book could be a stretch goal.

Completely unrelated to all the above, but as we're on the subject of old gamebooks, some readers of the blog have been asking about the HeroQuest series. The third of those is quite possibly the book I was meant to be writing when I was suddenly given the task of fixing the Coils of Hate flowchart. You can get them here: The Fellowship of Fear (book 1), The Screaming Spectre (book 2), and The Tyrant's Tomb (book 3).

Sermons in stones

I had forgotten that Mark Smith's Virtual Reality books were both set in a world which may very well be part of the Rainbow Land of his and Jamie Thomson's Duelmaster series. The name of the Palayal River by the city of Godorno suggests Tekumel, but nothing else about the setting does. The Forest of Arden features in both, though whether it's Shakespeare's, the one by the Avon, or some third high-fantasy variant is not clear.

It does feel quite Shakespearean, these books being very strong on atmosphere. That's especially true of Godorno in Coils of Hate, a city that resembles a nightmarish version of Venice where the walls fairly drip with a dank ambience of distrust and fear. I could ask Mark about the intended setting (possibly it was an unmapped corner of Orb) but it was twenty years ago and he's not likely to remember now.

Mark's titles in the series were Green Blood (love that title) and Coils of Hate. They were the nearest to being interactive novels - rather stronger on the novel side than on the interactivity, to be honest. The characters and locations would make a superb role-playing sourcebook, which is one clue that Mark might have taken them from his notes for the Orb campaign. (Which was not, as I never tire of telling people, even remotely Oriental, despite the Way of the Tiger books.)

And these maps..! I challenge any role-player to look at Godorno and not want to spend a few evenings adventuring there. One of Mark's biggest literary influences is Fritz Leiber Jr, and there's more than a hint of Lankhmar to those streets and canals. It does no harm to have the maps beautifully rendered by Leo Hartas, too.

The first tree in the greenwood

Mark Smith and I co-created the Virtual Reality gamebook series, but we wrote our books separately and took a very different approach. The original pitch to publishers was that VR would be like interactive novels. What we meant by that was that if you took all the sections in a given read-through and pasted them together, you could give that to a friend and they could read it the same way they would a novel. (Not that you would, of course. It was a thought experiment kind of thing.)

In Green Blood, Mark frequently used a second-person variant of free indirect style: the text describes the world exactly as the character is intended to feel about it. At least one reviewer took Mark to task for use of "weasel words" because of this. In fiction there is no claim of objectivity, but gamebooks are an interesting grey area. The author, like the referee of a role-playing game, is the reader's only source of information. If that information becomes suspect, or seems to be chosen and slanted to nudge us into feeling a certain way, then we react much as we do if a politician or salesman starts trying to bamboozle us.

As I began to write my first VR book, Down Among the Dead Men, I saw that if I stuck to my role-playing principles of giving the player control of their own persona, the text resulting from stitching all your choices together as you went would be more like a great game write-up than a novel. I could describe events that happened to you, fine, but unlike a novel writer I couldn't prescribe all your moral, emotional and life choices or it wouldn't be a gamebook.

Mark went the other way. Whichever character you pick at the start of Green Blood, you soon learn that after a promising start at a good school for orphans you have been raised in the city slums and are disgusted with "the cesspools and plague pits" of your fellow man. The ways of city folk, you are told, revolt you. Throwing your bag over your shoulder, you set off for the Forest of Arden to seek out the elves. The story is extremely slanted against humans and in favour of self-righteous, tree-hugging elvenkind. This is the sort of thing that makes me prefer Tekumel and the Dying Earth to the heavily moralistic settings typical in high fantasy - but that's just personal taste. I do think that Green Blood has been unfairly maligned because of the lack of freedom of choice. As Dostoyevsky and others found, the theme of a young hero driven by poverty and squalour beyond bitterness into insanity is ripe for literary exploration. If Green Blood had been a novel, it would have worked just fine. It's just the game aspect that lets it down.

A big for instance: in the first draft, it was impossible to get through the adventure unless you picked both WILDERNESS LORE and SWORDPLAY among your four skills. Any other character was doomed from the start. With eleven skills (it should have been twelve, in three groups of four, but that's a detail) that leaves a less than twenty-five percent chance that a randomly selected character has any hope of surviving.

I didn't agree with Mark about that, but I had my own books to worry about, and it's not up to me to ride another man's horse or shoot his bow. There it would have remained, except series editor Ian Marsh found some crash-bug type errors that needed to be dealt with before the book could be sent for typesetting. Mark was by then deep into writing Coils of Hate, so it fell to me to fix the Green Blood flowchart.

While I was doing that, I noticed Mark had included a short sequence where you meet the elves on midsummer's eve and have to convince their king to help you in your quest. Without the Elf King's help, there is no chance of a successful conclusion. In the original, you had to have SWORDPLAY to do that, but I saw an opportunity to let other skills have a look-in. By adding a whole range of different challenges to the sequence, I made it possible for any character to get through to the end of the adventure. And, as the New Year's freebie has become a tradition on the FL blog, here is that sequence. Feel free to cheat.