Fighting Fantasy Fest

Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 is coming up in just over a week. As you may have realized, it's the 40th anniversary of my first gamebook, Crypt of the Vampire. Oh, and it's the 40th anniversary of something called Deathtrap Dungeon, which accounts for why Fighting Fantasy author Sir Ian Livingstone and artist Iain McCaig are the guests of honour.

Originally the plan was for me to be on a panel discussion with Jamie Thomson and Paul Mason, perhaps reprising some of our talk from MantiCon in 2018. (Video above if you can't make it to Ealing for FFF.) Plans changed and now I think the panel involves Paul, Steve Williams and Marc Gascoigne, while Jamie is going to give a talk and I'll be there to answer questions. So in the last six years I'll have attended conventions in Germany, Italy, France, and now Britain. At my age it might be time to slow down. Cutting out air travel would be good for the planet, too.

I'm not specifically at FFF to sign books, apart from a brief slot from 10:30 to 11:00 just before Jamie's talk, but if you happen to bring a book along and I have time then of course I won't refuse. Jamie and Paul are probably planning to be there all day, so if you have limited space in your bag I'd advise bringing Way of the Tiger or Robin of Sherwood rather than any of mine.

Now, about that 40th anniversary of Crypt of the Vampire. I ought to do something to mark that, you say? Watch this space.

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.

The Land Below the Sunset

Ophis was where Oliver and I planned to take Dragon Warriors next, if the series had continued beyond book 6. Originally conceived and written as a supplement for Questworld, a RuneQuest spinoff collaboration between various game publishers of the early 1980s, it was one of those Games Workshop projects for which we never got a contract or payment. Naive? Well no, because RPG projects were forever falling through in those days; it was better to retain ownership of your work until the cat was definitely in the bag.

The setting was a continent far, far to the west of the known lands of Legend - and possibly not even geographically in the same world. Pilgrims fleeing the judgement of the Last Days had fled across the sea, arriving at the edge of a vast continent from which flowed the mighty Ophis river. As the refugees built a new civilization from their major city of Deliverance, they explored upriver and encountered the fringes of an older civilization, now decaying, whom they called the Ancients - and were called, in their turn, the Invaders.

As Legend is a dreamlike distortion of the medieval European and Middle Eastern world, so Ophis could be seen as a fantasy interpretation of Europeans settling America and Australia - if the aboriginals of those lands had a civilization as sophisticated as ancient China or Egypt.

Along with scenarios and source material, Oliver and I began a novel, The Land Below the Sunset, set in the world of the Invaders & Ancients. Here is an excerpt that is closest to being a typical roleplaying adventure. To provide some context, the Old City comprised ruins across the river from Deliverance - a settlement of the Ancients long abandoned, and now used as a necropolis by the rich families of Deliverance. It is guarded by a regiment of tomb police called the Interficers. Why would a man take such a job? Well:

There were twenty vaults along the Avenue of the Esteemed Dead. At either end stood pikemen hired by the Exequial Guild to keep away graverobbers. Under the wide-brimmed helmets their faces were sweat streaked and morose. Only the eyes were animated, darting, luminous with wild emotion in those expressionless faces, like someone staring through eyeslits in a painting. These men, known as Interficers, were recruited directly from the Tower of Jalef where the city's lunatics were kept. Their madness was a better deterrent to grave robbers than any judicial punishment would have been. There were tales of tomb guards devouring prisoners or bricking them up alive in narrow cervices. No graverobber ever came to trial.

And here is a chapter from the novel. This bit was based closely, I would think, on one of our own games:

In the course of his life Azimbo Canitis had made a small fortune. Unfortunately he had also spent it, frittered away on gambling and gifts for a dozen girls who all looked the same. But it wasn't so bad. Azimbo was never short of company. He could live on his reputation. There were always people eager to hear his tales. He never needed to buy supper or a tankard of ale. Beyond that, there wasn't much of value that money could buy - or so Azimbo told himself.

Here were two more now. They pushed under the sacking covering the doorway and for a moment the pipe smoke and hubbub of the taproom entered Azimbo's snug.

"Master Canitis?" ventured one. Azimbo sized them up at a glance. Youthful and wide-eyed; raw recruits. The blue doublets with the badge of the hawk and dolphin in gold marked them out as city militia. The shortswords with blade-catching prongs at the hilt meant that they'd just come off duty. Eventually, if they lived long enough, they'd learn that The Singing Fish wasn't a place to stop for a casual drink on the way home to a better part of town.

Azimbo gave them an ironic salute. An age ago, he'd been a militiaman too. He moved the bench opposite out with his foot. "Set yourselves down there, my lads, and set that mug of ale down here, and you can tell me what I can do for you."

They sat down hesitantly, just boys really. "We heard you used to be a tomb robber," said the taller of them. His eyes were half hidden under an unruly shock of curls.

"Come to arrest me, eh?" said Azimbo.

The youth took him seriously. "Oh no, no, sir..."

The other butted in. He had a clever cavalier look about him. But not as clever as he fancied himself. "What my friend means is, we were hoping you could tell us what it was like. How did you get by the Interficers?"

"You couldn't always. Once I had to kill a couple." Azimbo basked in the look of respect that appeared in the eyes of the two young men. "Oh, they weren't the worst of it. Got any pipeweed?"

The taller youth jumped up, almost banging his head on the low beam. "I can get you some, sir."

"Nah, what I've got'll do fine. Sit down, then, and I'll tell you a tale to think about on dark nights." Azimbo leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. The ale could wait a while. He enjoyed reminiscing. "It was the last time I went to the Old City. There was me, Beergut Barino and Eresh the Whisper, though neither of them'll mean much to you.

"There were a few spots of rain as we set out and barely a grumble of thunder over the hills, but it was cutting up pretty rough by the time we got across. The weather wasn't a problem, it was on our side. The Interficers couldn't see our boat in the rain."

"What about patrols on the bank?"

"You're getting ahead of things, lad, and in any case there aren't any patrols. You don't suppose the Interficers stay in the place after dark? They get the job by being crazy, not stupid. Once it's nighttime they keep to the river and once you've made the run across it's not them you've got to worry about. Anyway, we put in at a quay with a kind of cloister round three sides. I saw then that Eresh was going to be a problem. He'd taken a dose of some stuff he'd got off a trader from upcoast and he was starting to lose it. If not for the rain I'd have gone straight back, but it was coming down too heavy by now. The only thing for it was to do a night's work and get going as soon as it let up.

"We came out of the cloister passage and something scuttled off. It was big and it went on all fours. That was a bad moment as you can guess, lads, but it was just a leper. I remember that leper's face to this day because he had a big mad grin like nothing I can describe. I guess he knew what it was like to be turning into a monster.

"Well, we headed across a square that I used to call Bone Yard because of another time. The rain was driving in our faces and the trees were shaking about like crazy women. There was a sheet of lightning right overhead - it was just like the day came back for an instant - and we saw these three big statues made of green stone. They weren't human statues. Something else. They were facing out towards the river. Eresh chuckled to himself and told us they were Vaals, but I still don't know what that means. A mystery for you lads to clear up one day, hmm?"

"Vaals..." said one of the youths seriously.

"Something like that. Anyway, there's a fountain in that square with a sculpture in the middle. What a sculpture! She could stir your loins even in as desolate and blood-freezing a spot as that. Chizzi, we used to call her, like in that old song:

"Chizzi'll be waiting, boys,

'till you come back to dock;

drop your anchor there, my boys,

and give 'er - "

"I'll get some more ale!" cried the curly-haired youth, jumping up suddenly. This time he did bang his head. He went out to the taproom with his hand pressed to his head, but it didn't hide the blush that had shot up into his face at Azimbo's ribald song.

Azimbo roared with laughter, and his big stomach was still quaking when the youth came back sheepishly with a second foaming flagon of ale. "Where was I?" he said as he poured himself a mug. "Ah, that statue in the fountain. She had limbs that went on and on, reaching up to the sky..." He grinned at the embarrassed youth and decided to spare him. "The fountain itself was full of muck and slime, but to Eresh in his addled state it must have looked like sweet water. He leaned over and suddenly he was staring into the water with eyes as wide as a doxy's legs. His mouth was open like he was trying to scream except nothing came out. Then he was off and running. He went into a low building with narrow windows and we decided not to follow. You get a feel for certain places and this was one of them.

"There's a building with tall towers on the side of the square. I think it was a temple in the old days. Me and Beergut waited under the colonnade in front watching the rain. There were swarms of gnats and kissgiss and a whole lot of fat brown snails like oak apples. Eresh didn't come back. After a bit the wind turned and started throwing the rain in on us so we decided to go inside for a look. There was a smell from an old drifter who'd crawled in there and died. There were more of those snails all over the body. We got a couple of lilac opals out of a face carved in the wall and Beergut didn't see me pocket a string of prayer beads that I later got twenty Argurs for.

"The storm was over, the clouds breaking up. You could see the stars like little bits of glass and the wet paving just gleamed. We decided to head back before the moon got too high, though with the Interficers it's often hide-and-seek out and a straight race coming back. Anyway, then Beergut grabbed my arm all of a sudden - like that - and he pointed up to the parapet of the nearest building. You know what? Eresh the Whisper was dancing and leaping about up there like a bloke that's backed the winning chariot on Foundation Day. But then it was like he just froze, his arms dropped and his head went back and he came tumbling down. Crunch. A body makes a hell of a crack from that height."

"Was he dead?" asked the youth with the mop of hair.

"Dead? Of course he was dead! His head had come open like a melon and a dog would've turned its nose up at what was left in his brain-pan."

"What did you do?" said the other youth and, to show he wasn't as naive as his friend, he added, "You couldn't get the body back."

"Nah. Who'd have wanted it anyway? We left his cash - well, most of it - in case he needed it in the afterlife, but we did take a ruby scarf-pin and this silver ring I'm wearing.

"You think that's it? Well, lads, you don't know anything about the Old City in that case. It never is easy, and always in a way you didn't expect. When we got back to the quay, there was Eresh sitting in the boat with his head in one piece and a strange thoughtful smile on his lips. We just stood there, Beergut and me, and he kept on looking back at us without a word. Eventually Beergut took me aside and he said, 'Whatever we thought we saw we can't have seen, right?' 'Right,' I said. 'And we don't want to stop here until the Interficers have got their boats out.' 'That's true too,' I said.

"'So come on,' says he and we got into the boat. By this time I guess we'd both decided it must have been somebody else we saw fall off the roof. I'd seen enough weird things over there in my time.

"The storm had passed over and the sky was like black glass. Beergut kept an eye out for patrol boats while I rowed. We were past midstream and in the clear when I saw Beergut tense up. Something behind me. So I looked over my shoulder and there was Eresh getting slowly to his feet, just as slowly as a curl of smoke rising from this pipe, and without rocking the boat even a bit. I reached for him in case that stuff had got him so stoned that he was going to take a dip. But then..." Azimbo shook his head.

The young militiamen waited as long as their impatience allowed. "Then?"

"You know what it's like when you wake up in the middle of a dream? There can be a face in front of you and it just sort of sloughs away. Suddenly it wasn't Eresh anymore. It wasn't anything natural. It was like a shadow standing up in the prow of the boat. Beergut was one of those people who get real angry when they're afraid. He pushed past me and went for it with his sword. I started trying to get one of the oars loose so I could shove the thing overboard. The tricky part for us was that we had to keep low so as not to upset the boat, whereas whatever it was really didn't seem to have any more weight than a shadow. Beergut yelped as it snatched at him. It had sliced off a couple of his fingers somehow, though I didn't see a knife. Beergut fell back into me and I got knocked over. I was lying in the bottom of the boat and I saw Beergut lift his sword high over his head, screaming all the time. He was going to cut that thing in two if he could.

"But he never got the chance. It was a clear sky like I said, so I don't see how it could've been lightning - but what else? There was a hot blinding light and the boat flew apart like a giant had gone - " He banged his fist on the table. "Next thing, I was gulping water and when I got to the surface there was nothing left to see. I swam back to shore and got back, as I've told you, with a bit of treasure but minus my eyebrows and two old friends. And that, my fine lads, was the last time I went to the Old City."

"Until tonight," said a voice from the doorway.

The newcomers had entered without any of them noticing. One was a rose-tinted Ancient, long and insubstantial within a sheath of silken robes. Wisps of lank hair hid his pale heavy lidded eyes. The other was a lean young woman whose high leather boots and close-fitting brocade jacket suited her tomboyish figure. The brooch at her throat, her one item of jewellery, bore the crest of one of the first families.

The two militiamen shot to their feet, torn between distaste for the Ancient and deference to the lady. Deference won out. They attempted a gallant bow in unison. "Ma'am," said the tall youth with old fashioned courtesy, "you would do us an honour to join this gathering."

"Leave us, please," she said. "We have business with this man."

The militiamen nodded. "Of course." They snatched up their swords and helmets, almost falling over themselves in their haste to comply.

When they were alone in the snug, the Ancient came forward, bowing under the low rafters. Azimbo scrutinized him in the smoky light. "Chendu. I never thought to see you back in Deliverance."

"This is Mistress Seraphine," said Chendu. "We need to go over the river, Azimbo."

"My lady, will you sit?"

Nephithia glanced at the beer-stained bench, planted a boot on it and rested her arms on her knee. She nodded for Azimbo to sit back down. "Did you hear what he said? We need to cross to the Old City. Tonight."

Azimbo gave an uncomfortable laugh. "You don't want to put too much store by those tales I tell, my lady. That's just a way for a fellow to scrape a living."

"Azimbo has acquired the virtue of modesty since last we met," said Chendu to Nephithia. "The truth is he was the best ever to ply the trade of tomb robber. He is wily and he has luck on his side too, as the story we just heard attests. Most importantly, he knows his way around the canals where we'll hope to lose the Interficers.

"That's a good combination of skills. How about it, Azimbo?"

"You want me to come along? No! I'm retired. I don't need it."

A bag of coins smacked onto the table. Azimbo stared at it keenly like a cat discovering a sleeping mouse. There was an unmistakable heaviness in the sound it had made...

"Yes," said Chendu, "it's gold."

"But," began Azimbo, then his mouth went dry. His instinct was always to haggle, but they were already offering more money than he would ever have dared to ask for. More than he had seen in five years.

He snatched the purse, drained his beer and got up. "Let's go," he said.

They stepped out of The Singing Fish. The day had gone and the sky was like old silver. A few high thin clouds caught the last rays, becoming plumes of black smoke limned with fire. Those thin rails of light only served to quicken the retreating sun, leaving the deep streets draped in dusk.

Half a dozen men emerged from nowhere. "You got a pretty package there, Azimbo," said one.

"Yeah, and the purse too," snorted another.

The first man moved a little nearer and stood in a loose cocksure stance. "Hand it over, old man." He had a thin bullying voice, the kind that sniggers at another's misfortune. The details of his face were lost in shadow, but they could see the yellow gleam of teeth and the iron bar in his hands.

"Can we cut the pasty, Frovel?" asked another of the gang eagerly. "I want to see what color blood he's got."

There was a frozen moment as both groups confronted each other in silence. Then a massive figure detached himself from the shadows around the side of the tavern and lumbered into view. His face looked like a crag with a patch of grey moss growing on top of it. In his hands he swung a spiked mace. It looked as if he would need no effort to push a man's face through into the back of his skull.

"You better keep out of this, pal," said Frovel.

"Get back to the gutter, you rodents," said Taltivin.

He had the kind of voice that didn't give a second warning. Frovel took a step back before he could stop himself. That made him feel humiliated and angry. He had his reputation to think of. "Deshok and Holmar, both of you - "

Nephithia drew her sword. She put her hand on Azimbo's shoulder and moved him aside. Frovel gave a high titter of laughter. "You let girls do your fighting for you these days, Azimbo?"

"Think about this," said Nephithia. "Before you bring us down, at least three of you will be dead."

Frovel couldn't understand what there was about the lean young woman that made him feel afraid. He hated her for her aristocratic self-assurance and for her lack of fear. "You won't be dying, bitch, not till you're begging for it."

"That really is no way to speak to a lady."

Frovel turned his head towards the young man at the entrance to the alley. "Scutri's balls!" he screamed. "Is there anyone in this whole pissing city that doesn't want to muscle in?"

The two militiamen chose that moment to step out of the tavern. With their smart uniforms and their helmets tucked under their arms they looked like two cavalry captains on parade. The shorter of the two, obviously not as sharp as he liked to think, said in a bemused voice, "What's going on?"

It was enough for Frovel and his gang. They beat a hasty retreat along the alley and ducked through a hole in a fence.

"A timely intervention," said Nephithia with a smile, not to the militiamen but to the man at the entrance of the alley.

"If you're planning that boat trip," replied Kethar, "I think I'd better come along."

When we crossed the sea of stars

You Dragon Warriors enthusiasts have sat quietly while we worked our way through all that Abraxas stuff, so you must be wondering when we’d get back to the Ophis campaign material. Extensive as the concept art and background for Abraxas is, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to Ophis, which was fully-fleshed out and even playtested (using RuneQuest rules) by me and Oliver and would easily make a whopping great 300-page hardback. And maybe, one day…

In the meantime, here’s another amuse-bouche. A couple of years back, while preparing his eye-poppingly brilliant book Shadowline, original Ophis artist Iain McCaig got in touch about showcasing some of the work there. These are the notes I sent him:

First the name. The world is defined by the Ophis River, miles wide at its mouth, that snakes right back into the interior through marsh, jungle, mountains and finally the high desert where the Ancients live. The first and largest of the Invader city-states, Deliverance, is on the south side of the delta at the river mouth, facing the ruins of an Ancient city which has become the necropolis of the Invaders. The Ophis is the thread that both divides and connects the Invaders and Ancients. Hence that is the name of our project: Ophis. The title Invaders & Ancients refers to the first campaign book.

We already said a little bit about the habdigar slave-race on whose backs the civilization of the Ancient Race was built. Habdigar natural society is organized around alpha males. The Ancients partially castrate habdigars in infancy to prevent the emergence of alpha males, who would be hard to control. The disposition of habdigar beta males is to attach themselves to some authority. In the absence of the natural leaders of their own species, they associate that authority with the venerable houses of the Ancients. If we lived among habdigar, we might admire this trait and have expressions such as "loyal as a habdigar". But the Ancients are too decadent to venerate a quality like loyalty.

The habdigar are given names that describe their function. Third Cupbearer of the House of Vodallion. Lord Yeshtar's Cloak-Train Holder. etc. Think of the servants in Gosford Park, then turn that up to eleven.

Habdigar are not allowed writing, but they are allowed to sing. In song, they record their history. As they are long-lived, an old habdigar of Sardonyx might remember a song sung to him by his own grandfather of the coming of the Invaders - even though that was over four hundred years ago. A huge ship - an "ark" or “incunabula”, the songs call it - was swept up on the shore near the mouth of the Ophis. It was many stories high, and said to be crewed by children, though it is not clear whether that is literally true, or simply the way that a habdigar, long-lived and brought up to be part of the traditions of the Ancients, would view these brash newcomers.

What our elderly habdigar probably wouldn't know is that the Invaders have stories of their own that describe how they came to this land. On the journey there were adults. Some stories say the journey ("the Crossing") took many generations, and by the time it ended all the adults were dead. The oldest children, like Merendaum in this story, were the ones destined to become the new colony's leaders. Incidentally, in Sovereign myth ("Sovereign" being the Invaders' own name for themselves) the Crossing was over a sea of stars. Make of that what you will for now, as the secret is not to be unveiled in the first book. However, this excerpt from our novel The Land Below the Sunset may inspire some theories of your own:

"Each of the Founders had his sacred treasure. In all other cases these were artifacts they had possessed in the Aforetime, but not so Astralis... Ah, but you must have heard the priests at the Chapel speak of this many times."

"No, they told plenty of stories about the founding of Deliverance, Merendaum's battles against the Ancients. Nothing that took place before the Crossing."

"Before the Crossing?" Chendu chuckled. "It would be a rash man or the greatest of sages who would speculate on those times. No, this occurred during the Crossing. Astralis was only the apprentice to Merendaum's original navigator - did you not know that? His master died on the voyage and, with an infinity of sea and stars surrounding the fleet, it was left to Astralis to scry out the route to dry land."

Hearing the tale, Kethar felt once more like a child, huddled by the warm grate letting the fire paint imaginary pictures against the darkness. He could almost see Astralis, standing proud and tall on the deck of Merendaum's flagship. Previously when listening to the old myths he had always envisaged him with a face like Propriano's father. Now it was with Propriano's own youthfully earnest features.

"And then they made him one of the Nine Founders?"

"No. He was still an apprentice. Many argued that the responsibility of chief navigator was too much for one so young. They said that the fleet had lost its way, that another among them should be given the task. They said that Astralis did not enjoy the favor of the gods.

"For a long time it seemed they must be right. Supplies aboard the ships dwindled. Day by day it grew colder, and the stars wheeled overhead in unfamiliar patterns, and still they had no sight of land."

"Ah, but then the Celestial Beacon - "

"Patience, that was much later. There was no sign of any kind to guide them. They wandered on the grey swell, lost, frightened, abandoned by the gods. A storm sent rails of rain to pelt the decks. Others had advice to offer Merendaum, but only Astralis knew what must be done. You may have heard that, to this day, when storms carry a ship out of sight of land, the sailors will sacrifice an animal to propitiate the spirits of the sea. It's a practice that has its origins in older, wilder times. Then, more often than not, the sacrifice was human. From birth Astralis had been steeped in sea-lore; he understood his duty. And so he stood without sleep or shelter for three days and nights until his waking moments had become blurred with dream, then he cast himself into the sea and was borne away on the waves.

"The fleet fared on for three days more, and then they came to a great pinnacle of ice jutting from the sea. It was like an island of glass, so vast that in its bays there was safe harbor for all the fleet. While they waited there for the storm to blow itself out, Merendaum sent his men to explore the island. Skidding from ledge to ledge, they found a cliff inside which the sunlight marked a human figure. They hacked away the ice; the man dropped in their midst. He was clad in marvelous war-gear but his skin was lavender and chill. They bore him back to the flagship and warmed him by the stove, and the sheath of ice cracked and fell away from the features of their young comrade Astralis."

"I've never heard this tale," breathed Kethar in awe.

"It is part of the Church's clandestine lore, not usually revealed to outsiders. But I am widely read."

"The caparison of war he was wearing when they found him - ?"

"The priests declared them artifacts of the gods. Astralis resumed his post as navigator and none now questioned him. When he had steered the fleet to anchorage at the mouth of the Ophis, Merendaum acknowledged him as the ninth of his champions."

Our habdigar holds a bundle that he says he has stolen from his former masters in their grand house in Sardonyx. He may have seen a habdigar who stole food from the kitchens and was flayed alive for it. And he remembers an Invader who came to Sardonyx, pretending to trade, and stole a jeweled sword. For that outrage, the Ancients had his limbs removed, the wounds cauterized. They drove him mad with drugs and had him tied to a pole in the midst of the poppy fields, so that he could live out his days as a living scarecrow, screaming into the wind.

Our habdigar says, "They will not do that to me. They will not look for me when I am gone, nor send out agents to punish me. This treasure is one they do not value - the most precious thing in their household, and yet they care less for it than one grain of gold, or the tiniest ruby. For they are monsters, truly, these creatures called Man."

And then he shows us the bundle of "treasure": the glimpse of a baby's face in the folds of the blanket he's holding.

And that's where we cut.

Slaves of Sardonyx

Here's some more unearthed material from the Invaders & Ancients campaign setting that was to have formed later books in the Dragon Warriors series. The picture above (by Russ, of course) shows the wharf at Tamary, a depot town halfway up the huge River Ophis where intrepid merchants of the two coldly warring civilizations come to trade.

The nonhuman there is a habdigar. These creatures are slaves of the Ancients, who without them would have been overrun by the Invader race long ago. The habdigars, unlike the Ancients and the Invaders, are of a completely nonhuman evolutionary branch. They are short but thickly set, with powerful muscles running in bands across their back that give them a hunched appearance. They walk upon two long hind legs, using their shorter forelimbs for carrying objects. They have a snout with upcurving tusks and a vestigial horn. The eyes are forward-looking with multiple nictating membranes which filter light in a range of illumination levels. When these membranes are drawn across they make the habdigar's eyes seem to glitter like pearls. The habdigar's auditory organs are set in bony chambers which form a kind of segmented crest running laterally across the top of its head.

The first of the pictures below is by Iain McCaig and depicts a group of adventurers of the Invader race who have been invited to dine in one of the great houses of Sardonyx, the Ancients' capital. You can see a more polished version of this drawing, and some more of Iain's artwork illustrating the Invaders & Ancients world, in his book Shadowline. Hmm, I only just noticed how appropriate that title is, seeing as how so much of the DW2 material was inspired by the works of Joseph Conrad. Iain's way ahead of me as usual.
To close off, an excerpt from The Land Below The Sunset, a novel Oliver and I started writing that was set in the Ophis campaign world. Here are our heroes encountering one of these strange critters for the first time over in the Old City, the ruins across the river from Deliverance that are nowadays used as the Invaders' necropolis. It has been the scene of many a harrowing moment in our games, I can tell you:

The four of them ran along a ruined colonnade and out into dazzling sunshine. They were on a terrace overlooking a vast square. Some way to the right, a dark hunched figure was scurrying down a flight of steps. Every so often it would pause to pick its way slowly past a clump of weeds, and then take a long grasshopper jump that carried it half a dozen steps at a time.

"It's not human!" said Nephithia.

The creature stopped as it reached the square to look back at them. The broken flagstones blazed like polished metal in the sun, making its heavy black features difficult to see. They got an impression of tusks, a bony crest, eyes like black opals. The body was squat, with long backward-flexing legs and small forelimbs.

"A habdigar," said Chendu, out of breath as he caught them up. "The Ancients use them as servants."

From standing poised like a statue, the creature came back to life and bounded along the side of the square. Its path would take it right below where they were standing. Taltivin bent and put his arms around a block of shattered masonry, raising it above his head with a grunt of effort. He stood with muscles bunched. The veins standing out on his neck made it look like the stump of a strong tree. He sucked in a lungful of air, pulled back, and with a great roar flung the rock into space.

The habdigar stopped short at once as it heard the sound, freezing stock still and swiveling its head around. That reflex, which for its ancestors might have been a survival trait, was its undoing. The block of masonry smashed into its shoulders with a muffled crack, pinning it to the ground like a crushed bug. Nephithia grimaced in disgust to see the hideous flurry of its limbs as it jerked over onto its back. The long legs pounded futilely at the air.

Its muscles locked rigid as it gave vent to a long agonized howl that ripped through the silence of the Old City. The howl went on and on and then suddenly stopped, like a trumpet blown until it breaks. The habdigar's body lapsed into spasmodic twitching.

"Shall I get the body, sir?" asked Taltivin without enthusiasm.

His words were all but drowned out. A chorus of howling welled up from every empty window and doorway throughout the derelict buildings across the square. The sound grew, a deafening wave of noise in answer to the dying call of the habdigar that lay squashed on the stones below them. It was not so much terrifying because of any suggestion of danger as for the quality of utter alienness. That strange ululation might not have been a threat, might not even have been a lament for a slain comrade. It came from nonhuman throats, resounded from bony cavities no human skull possessed, had its origin in thoughts and feelings no human could even guess at.