Do I need to say it twice? Get it on Steam, FL fans.
The early access edition features all character professions, the only limitation being that your adventures are restricted to two regions: the kingdom of Sokara and the the Great Steppes of the North. That's about twelve hours of content for a successful start-to-end playthrough that unlocks all forty game objectives.
All of the game's core features are integrated: exploration, combat, items, sailing, active and passive skills, resurrection deals, blessings, potions, tutorials, everything you might want. And the full version will open out to include Golnir and Uttaku, ie all the regions of the northern continent. And later expansions should extend across the Violet Ocean to Akatsurai, Ankon-Konu, and even those regions yet to be covered by the books.
Victor Atanasov and his team at Prime Games have done an amazing job, and they're just getting warmed up. Still need convincing? There's a playthrough by the utterly compelling master of stories Guy Sclanders here. Beats a box set of Marvel TV shows in my book. Better acting, too.
When no less an authority than Guy Sclanders says he's "blown away" by a new open-world gamebook series, it's worth taking notice. And even as I write this several thousand Kickstarter backers have done exactly that, propelling the second Legendary Kingdoms book to more than fifty times its funding goal within two days.
The campaign runs until April 15, so if you're into multi-part solo gamebooks set in a modifiable sandbox world with all the traditional fantasy trappings (and if you're not then what brought you to this blog?) then you might want to give this one a spin.
Still need convincing? Take a look at Marco Arnaudo's review on YouTube. I'll just cover a couple of points Mr Arnaudo raises there. First the use of "you" to refer to a party of characters in a gamebook. I did that in Blood Sword, where up to four people can play together, and in English it presents no problems. It's how you address a group of characters in a roleplaying game, after all: "You advance along the chamber towards the sound of chiming and the smell of musty cinnamon" or whatever. Of course, in a gamebook it calls for judicious phrasing. "You take a sip of wine and lean forward to address the king" sounds ridiculous if applied to several characters at once -- that's synchronized sipping, an Olympic event! But most of the time it's fine. Indeed, how else could you address the players as a group?
Mr Arnaudo also raises an old bugbear for Fabled Lands players, namely the way that fights in later books are impossibly tough for those coming from Book One, and fights in earlier books childishly easy if you start in, say, Book Six. Well, we thought about it. If I was writing the books now I'd probably not have characters get so powerful, D&D-style, as they go up in rank. The challenge would be flatter across all the books. You don't get to superhuman skill-levels in Dragon Warriors or Tirikelu, where any fight could always be deadly.
What I wouldn't do is the combat matrix Mr Arnaudo suggests, where the monsters scale up in proportion to the player-characters' power level. All that achieves is breaking the suspension of disbelief. If you're going to do that, far better just to make combat ability fixed or nearly flat, as I said. It achieves the same effect without rubbing the reader's nose in it.
That said, the Fabled Lands books are numbered; the difficulty level is right there on the spine. If you want to play without cheating you can just take a character in Book One and work your way out from the safer and more civilized lands to the more dangerous ones covered by later books. I'd rather have had a series where you can start anywhere and play through in any order, and that would have meant rules that added more versatility as you levelled up rather than increasing your raw power. But I don't think the way the FL books did it is a fundamental flaw.
In other news, Jamie and I are hard at work on the Vulcanverse gamebooks. These have a Graeco-Roman fantasy vibe that at first didn't excite me; I usually prefer either original worlds like Tekumel, Abraxas or the Dying Earth, or else historical settings like Sparta. But Jamie reminded me that Greek myth isn't the defanged heroes-and-monsters playground of kids' picture books. The real myths are dark, bloody, nightmarish tales full of vengeance and atrocity. I should have remembered that from the haunting Wrath of the Godscomic strip (falsely attributed to Michael Moorcock) that was filled with stuff that would give you cold sweats in the still hours of the night. That's the flavour we're aiming for, not the literal myths but a new and twisted version of them that evokes the feel of God of Warand Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
The Vulcanverse gamebooks are open-world, like Fabled Kingdoms and Legendary Lands, but there's an overarching plot that builds over the whole series as you uncover an ancient mystery that threatens the stability of all the realms. Jamie's first book in the series is called The Houses of the Dead and is set in the mist-shrouded underworld of Hades. My own contribution is set in the Desert of the Sphinxes. We're yet to settle on a title for that but I can tell you it's going to be twice the size of a typical Fabled Lands book -- and as the series is backed by the Vulcanverse online project we're confident that it won't take us twenty years to finish it. In fact, the first two books will be out by this summer. And in the meantime don't forget the Fabled Lands CRPG, which should be released in just a couple of months from now.
We've been seeing some glimpses of Prime Games' forthcoming Fabled Lands CRPG, and shared some of Guy Sclanders' wonderful FL playthroughs, so you won't want to miss Guy taking the alpha of the CRPG for a spin. Thanks to Victor Atanasov and the team for a truly marvellous-looking game.
Part two here:
I see in the chat window that Guy was reminded of the music accompanying Igrayne's dance in John Boorman's Excalibur. Judge for yourself below. (And, Guy, you're dead right; it is the best Arthurian movie ever.)
"Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."
Like H G Wells's time traveller, we've careened through another year. There should be a lever to slow this thing down, shouldn't there? But as "minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring" I've had the chance to glimpse a few standout moments of 2016.
My best roleplaying experience was getting to sit in on a session of Dom Camus' Earth Force campaign. This is a modern take on superheroes, with a dash of existential threat and a background swirl of geopolitics. I played a scientist and got through without actively needing to use my powers, but nonetheless getting multinational backing for my open source research program, which made me feel quite Tony Stark. The whole thing was helped along by an elegant, streamlined system that did everything you need of rules and kept out of the way of the roleplaying. I hope Dom will publish it.
Talking of sweetly simple rules, my favourite new game system has been Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders. If you're familiar with the sagas, this captures them perfectly. I ran it straight -- no fantasy, no 21st century mores, just bleak neighborhood struggles against the unsentimental elements and your fellow man. It's quick, easy, atmospheric, and the perfect antidote to decades of GURPS.
Proudest achievement of the year was publishing Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? This is my and Jamie's first gamebook in more than twenty years. I have no idea what will happen to the UK in 2019 (good luck -- by then I should have regenerated as an Irishman) but I am sure that the book will give you a better understand of the Brexit process than any of the government ministers charged with negotiating it. And Britain's godfather of gamebooks, Ian Livingstone himself, has taken a look at Can You Brexit? and pronounced it "very clever". He may be partial, of course.
Around the time I was finalizing Can You Brexit?, Ashton MacSaylor was getting ready to deliver on his Kickstarter for The Good, the Bad and the Undead. If you've hung around the saloon for a while, you'll remember that was the Wild West gamebook that Jamie was going to write but couldn't get beyond the outline. Ashton took it over, roped and threw and branded it, and now it's riding in out of the desert with a mean eye and a belt full of bullets.
Talking of gamebooks, I wrote two audio adventures for the Amazon Echo, one an all-new interactive drama, the other a reskin of my first ever gamebook Crypt of the Vampire. With very tight deadlines those were hard work, but luckily I like hard work, as long as it's work on something that interests me.
The highlight of the summer was travelling to Germany for Manticon. Good beer, nice people, an open society, fabulous landscapes, and the best trains I've ever been on. I might move there. (See Brexit, above.)
Earlier in the year, I got a call from Lawrence Whitaker at The Design Mechanism, publishers of the Mythras RPG. (Yes, I know; apologies for the spelling. I have to grit my teeth every time I type it, but it's the Runequest system with Glorantha stripped out, so it actually is rather brilliant.) TDM have acquired the licence to do a roleplaying game based on Jack Vance's fantasy trilogy Lyonesse, and having heard me talk about it on the Fictoplasm podcast they thought I might like to contribute a section to the book. You bet. I owe Jack Vance a huge creative debt and it's an honour to pay a little of that back.
Then there was Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios getting in touch to bring Tetsubo back from the Land of Roots. Nothing's forgotten, as we Robin of Sherwood fans know. Watch for that in 2019, if you still have money left after food and medicine rationing.
I also got roped in by Ian Turnbull, one of the Black Cactus co-founders, to do some work on a Virtual Reality game. Don't reach for your Oculus headset just yet. The developers originally hoped to get the game ready by October this year, but Ian's and my combined half-century in game development told us that was never going to happen. Maybe next October. My role was, as it often is these days, to clarify, simplify and focus the design and creative goals of the game. (And to chuck out all the bloody cutscenes on the principle of "discover, don't tell".)
In October my time machine lurched off into a pocket universe of misery for a few weeks when I came down with a nasty virus followed by a racking cough. It stopped me from going to TekUKon, which was a blow, but every cold has a silver lining. Unable to get on with any of my new projects, I whiled away the time for the fluid link to repair itself by editing the fifth Blood Sword book, The Walls of Spyte. It's still a slapstick dungeon bash but at least the flowchart now makes sense and the pieces of the key you find are properly numbered, so for the first time ever you can actually complete the adventure.
Surprising creative experience of the year was discovering I still have a copy of the Lord of Light boardgame that Nick Henfrey (creator of Spacefarers) and I pitched to Ian Livingstone (yes, 'im again) and Steve Jackson back around 1980. We didn't have the rights, which might or might not have been a problem. Nowadays there's always Kickstarter, so who knows?
And entertainment highlight of 2018 was discovering Guy Sclanders' hilarious Fabled Lands playthroughs on YouTube. Many of the comments focus on how nasty things used to happen in games in the old days. Well, nasty things are more fun. Whatever doesn't kill you helps you level up.
And on that note, best wishes for the year ahead. See you on the other side.
It's strange to find yourself a fan of something that's based on your own work, but I'm completely addicted to Guy Sclanders' gripping weekly playthroughs of Fabled Lands.
It's not just self-indulgence; the bits I enjoy most are Guy's unexpected characterizations (Sean Connery as Estragon the wizard, for instance) and his hilarious asides. Every show has several laugh-out-loud moments, which is more than you can say for a lot of TV comedy these days.
If you haven't yet had the pleasure, start from the beginning and be prepared to lose a few evenings to unbridled fun. Some of the episodes can be hard to find on YouTube, so here are the links:
