News flashes

A grab-bag of news today. First there's my interview with Riccardo Scaringi above, in which we talk about Vulcanverse, Lovecraft, Buffy, Rifkin's Festival, The Seventh Seal, Captain America: Civil War, robotics, post-scarcity, the simulation hypothesis, Whispers Beyond the Stars, and a few other matters.

(The "OK, boomer" moment: at 6m59s I say that Alex Dragan, the protagonist, could be male or female. What I should have said is they can be any gender. Consider me corrected.)

Other news: James Desborough's Stray Crows is currently on Kickstarter. This is a roleplaying game set in the Japan of the Sengoku and early Edo periods. Unlike most Japan-set RPGs, it isn't populated with 21st century Westerners cosplaying at being ronin and ninja. Mr Desborough believes in striving for authenticity, as do I. We may not be able to fully recreate the mindset of a 16th century samurai, but we can surely do better than James Clavell and Justin Marks, at least. Back Stray Crows now if you care at all about real roleplaying. I also think it's the most elegant and dramatic set of rules designed yet for such a setting, and the proof of that is in this sample combat.

One of my favourite podcasts is Fantastic Fights. Hieronymous (sic) J Doom's reviews of gamebooks are excellent and his insights into gamebook design are useful even to a forty-year veteran of the field like me. Mr (or maybe Doctor?) Doom mostly covers Fighting Fantasy books, which I'll confess aren't my cup of tea, but this month he's taken a look at Mark Smith's Coils of Hate. That was one of the books in the Virtual Reality series, my own titles from which have been resurrected as Critical IF, but Mark's Coils of Hate and Green Blood are hard to find in print these days.

Coils is a particularly tricky one, so here are some tips on how to survive it. Listening to HJD's very smart analysis of the book's problems was a bit triggering for me. I did make a half-hearted effort to get it into vaguely playable shape, given that some of the handwritten pages just ended with lines like: "Various options here, turn to ?" I was at my desk at 7am every day for a fortnight to devote a couple of pre-breakfast hours to trying to make sense of it while also facing a deadline for a book of my own. The published version of Coils of Hate was an appalling mess even so, and I'd rather have been hired as official editor and been given a month to fix it properly, but the publisher wasn't paying anything for that and they refused to wait, hence the botched version that still makes me want to hide in a storm cellar every time it's mentioned. Here's an account of my very minimal involvement in the book and how I'd have advised Mark to restructure it if there'd been more time.

What I do think is that Coils has some of the best writing, best characterization, and best worldbuilding you'll see in any gamebook even to this day. And Mark had the courage to tackle a serious issue -- not just intolerance, but the way that hatred and tribalism are auto-immune diseases of society that eventually harm not just the scapegoated target group but everybody else, even the haters. It's a long, long way from the old man in the tavern who tells you to collect five items so you can beat the evil guy who wants to take over the world.

Now that we're talking about Coils, there's something I ought to clear up. I sometimes get credited with being Mark's co-author, so just to be clear: I had no hand in the writing. I didn't even rewrite any of the sections I was given in hand-written form; I just typed them up and tried to figure out how to connect one to another when all I had to go on was "turn to ?" It's all Mark's work. The flashes of real genius are his. If only he'd written it as a novel instead of a gamebook! Luckily Stuart Lloyd has rescued the book, doing all the editing work I didn't have time for thirty years ago, and he has made his version available free on DriveThruRPG. Without him, Coils of Hate would probably have been forgotten. Stuart, you are a star.

In other news, the chapbook series from Fabled Lands Publishing now has over a dozen titles, as illustrated above, so if you suffer from the collecting bug those might be worth a look, either on Amazon or DriveThruRPG.

Lastly, a new Casket of Fays is always a treat, and the latest issue features the usual fine selection of articles including an in-depth look at Gully's Inn by Shaun Hately. It's a useful location for any medieval fantasy setting, whether or not you use the Dragon Warriors or Jewelspider rules. There's even a map. What are you waiting for?

The darkening land

A poem today to summon the spirit of Halloween. This is by Thomas Hardy:

Tree-leaves labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.

A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,

And nobody pulls up there.

"Nobody Comes" was written in October 1924, and it makes me wonder if Hardy ever visited Binscombe...

I always say that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is not a horror story in the way that Dracula is, for instance. But I also love James Whale's movies and, even more so, the Hammer series with Peter Cushing as an ennobled and deliriously driven Victor Frankenstein -- and Hieronymus J. Doom shares my geeky obsessions, as you'll see from this characteristically discerning, witty and well-argued review of my interactive take on Frankenstein:

As if that's not enough of a Samhain fix, Frankenstein was recently featured on the blog here.

Other sources of delectable chills for the time of year are:

• The Collected Short Stories of Saki by H H Munro
• Fancies & Goodnights by John Collier
• Japanese Ghost Stories by Yakumo Koizumi (aka Lafcadio Hearn)
• "A Wrong Turning" by Martin McKenna and Dave Morris
• "Waiting for a Bus" by John Whitbourn (from The Binscombe Tales)
• Headcases:  A Bestiary of Flying Nightmares from World Folklore

And true connoisseurs of contemporary fantasy will be pleased to find an all-new weird tale by John Whitbourn, Britain's peerless modern master of the genre, in Wrong magazine from November 5th onwards.

Sleep tight!

Gamebooks: a lightning tour

I've just heard about a great resource for gamebook fans: thirty-one themes in the medium, from horror to SF to modern to non-fantasy. Duncan Thomson's (no relation to Jamie as far as I know) in-depth post covers hundreds of different gamebook series both classic and modern. Check it out on Rand Roll here.

And if you want to write your own gamebook, Stuart Lloyd has compiled an invaluable reading list to get you started. And trawling through some old posts here (such as this one) might also prove inspiring. I also find it useful to listen to Hieronymus J Doom's perceptive analyses of gamebooks on the Haunted Phonograph and Ed Jolley's Adventure Gameblog.

Talking of gamebooks, have you been keeping up with Prime Games' development reports on the CRPG version of Blood Sword? The latest concerns my favourite character class to write, the Trickster:

"The Warrior holds the line. The Enchanter bends the arcane. The Sage unveils hidden truths. The Trickster thrives where no one else dares -- in shadows, in whispers, in the thin places between honour and survival. Assassin, Knave, Hunter, or something in between, the Trickster proves that guile can be sharper than steel."

Read more about the Blood Sword CRPG and add it to your Steam wishlist here.

No BS

As sure as men walked on the Moon, we now have incontrovertible evidence that the English edition of Blood Sword 5e exists. One of my gaming pals sent me this photo of the pack he just received. Others in our roleplaying group confirmed they also got their copies, and I'm hoping at least one of them will try running the campaign for their kids.

As to whether the book will be available to non-Kickstarter backers -- well, yes, that would make sense, 5e reputedly being a popular choice of rules, and it's a beautiful volume with detailed spells like Fairy Stride, Pillar of Salt, and (of course) Summon Faltyn, along with monastic orders, character backstories and birthmarks, guilds, blood feats, monsters, rules for magic items, colour maps of places like Crescentium, Sheol and Spyte -- along with lots of Russ Nicholson's best work, all on glossy high-quality art paper, and of course the whole Blood Sword saga converted to a 5e campaign.

It really is a labour of love by the creative team involved, and what I find most interesting is seeing a version of the lands of Legend that draws solely on the Blood Sword books and not on Dragon Warriors. This high-fantasy Legend is a very different place from the world of DW and Jewelspider, but no less brilliantly conceived and inspiring for that. I'm awed, flattered and humbled by the care Valentino Sergi and his team have put into every aspect of the design. In the ongoing absence of new official DW material, Legend players could do worse than embark on a Blood Sword 5e campaign.

How to buy a copy? You could try contacting the publishers, Tambù, but I suspect after two and a half years they've got other priorities. Maybe they'll license a paperback edition if enough people ask. For those who want to roleplay in the Blood Sword universe but simply can't get the 5e book, Oliver Whawell has converted the encounters to Dragon Warriors rules. Download those here:

The Battlepits of Krarth

The Kingdom of Wyrd

The Demon's Claw

Doomwalk

The Walls of Spyte

My backers on Patreon got to see how I'd have written that final book, a more flashback-heavy, character-focused version that would probably be a better fit for a roleplaying campaign than the dungeon crawl that actually got published. And talking of book 5, Edizioni Librarsi have just published an all-new edition (based on my revised text of 2019) with a gorgeous Mattia Simone cover showing the Ghosts of the Magi in ominous conjunction on the last night of the world. (The hopes and fears of all the years...)

If you need maps of Legend, there's a wealth of cartographic treasures freely available on Lee Barklam's site The Cobwebbed Forest. And there will be some truly scrumptious maps in the forthcoming Blood Sword CRPG -- but now I'm getting ahead of myself. More news on that to come. Oh, and if all the above is like a coded message in Cabbandari and you're asking what Blood Sword even is, here's a podcast review by Mr H J Doom to get started.

Pastiche in four flavours

In case you haven't seen it, Jody Macgregor has a review of HeroQuest: The Fellowship of Four on PC Gamer that's interesting for two reasons. First because the book came out 33 years ago (not that I'm complaining; a good review is worth waiting for) and second because Jody might be the first person in 33 years to spot the four literary antecedents that I drew on (oh, "swiped from" if you must) to spice up the narrative styles of the mage, elf, barbarian and dwarf.

That said, he did overlook the nod to Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses in the opening chapter, which begins with the narrator falling from an altitude of several thousand metres. I didn't attempt to emulate Sir Salman's prose style, which I'll confess is a mite too rich for my tastes.

There's little chance of the book ever being republished, nor the sequels, as the fellow from Hasbro really didn't like it much. Backers of the Jewelspider Patreon might have seen glimpses, but that's only a rumour and I can't possibly comment. And I see you can buy scans from HeroScribe.org. Failing that, listen to the insightful Mr H J Doom talk about it on Fantastic Fights.