Portal fantasy

In the first six seasons of Doctor Who (that's the First and Second Doctor episodes, if like me you had no notion at the time about TV seasons) the TARDIS control console was largely for show. Sometimes the Doctor claimed to have ended up where he intended, but he was either unable or unwilling (and probably both) to plonk his passengers back where they started. When Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright blundered aboard, they had no idea of how long it would take for them to get back to Shoreditch in 1963.

Now suppose that's you. You've stumbled into what looks like an old police telephone box to find it's bigger on the inside. The doors, decorated on this side with huge roundels, are already closing. In a few moments the TARDIS will be dematerializing and if you go with it you might never return home (this being the First or Second Doctor, remember). Your friends and family won't have any idea what happened to you. So... will you jump back out? Or will you stay on board?

It's a variant on one of two what-if questions I'm fond of posing to party guests. Here's another one for would-be time travellers courtesy of the artist John Vernon Lord, grandfather of Inigo Hartas: you can go back to any year in history and be present as an observer at any place in that year. All languages are intelligible to you and you cannot be seen or touched. (So you're a bit like Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros.) When would you pick?

If those have whet your curiosity, the Greater Good Science Centre at UC Berkeley has a whole bunch of questions like them. And here's another bit of Gedankenvergnügen while we're at it:

You may feel you'd rather just head down the pub, but if you want to join in please leave a comment.

Casket of Fays #17

There's a new Casket of Fays just out with the usual blend of high-quality writing and art, this time with some gorgeous full-colour pieces by Inigo Hartas for Jewelspider. 

I won't list all the good stuff on offer, but among the articles I liked were Alistair Smith's thoughts on how to cut the "Gallows Wood" scenario from The Elven Crystals down to a single session's gaming. Alistair makes some good points, and I should have done it forty years ago on our DW promotional tour when I had to run the adventure every evening for sales reps and book buyers -- and invariably ran out of time.

Casket of Fays issue 17 is now available on DriveThruRPG.

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

Stranger than fiction

For Legend games I’ve always liked taking a seed crystal of historical fact (or anecdote) and growing an adventure around that. When a friend of mine told me a story about Notker the Stammerer and a stolen relic, I had the basic set-up for “A Box of Old Bones” right then and there.

Real history offers plenty of inspirational snippets like that. How about these, taken from a review in The London Review of Books of Martyn Rady’s book The Habsburgs?

“Werner the Pious was the first fabricator in the family, forging a charter that confirmed him as the hereditary abbot of the local abbey (where the Emperor Karl’s heart rests today). But this was small potatoes compared to the heroic efforts of Rudolf the Founder, who had his scribes concoct five interlocking charters claiming that previous emperors had confirmed the Habsburgs as hereditary archdukes of Austria, bolstered by letters supposedly written by Julius Caesar and Nero.” 

“Cymburga, the Polish mother of Frederick III, renowned both for her beauty and for her ability to drive nails into planks with her bare fists; Frederick the Slothful, who travelled his realm with his own hen coops to save on buying eggs; the Habsburg knights who had to cut off their fashionable long toe-pieces when forced to fight the Swiss infantry on foot; Margaret of Parma, another illegitimate child of Charles V by a different serving wench, who grew and carefully trimmed a moustache to provide her with an air of authority when her father made her governor of the Low Countries.” 

“The slaughter of thirty thousand in the Lutheran stronghold of Magdeburg led to a new word being coined, ‘Magdeburgisierung’. Invaders bombarded cities with shells of poison gas, a fetching compound of arsenic and henbane. After the war, France and Germany signed the Strasburg Agreement of 1675, the first treaty to ban the use of chemical weapons.”

There are ideas for Legend there almost in whole cloth. But they’re trumped by another of Notker’s accounts which is pretty much a ready-to-run adventure:

“In one particularly bad crop year, a certain greedy bishop of Old Francia rejoiced that the people of his diocese were dying because he could sell the food from his storehouse to the survivors at exorbitant prices. Amidst this climate, a demon or spirit started haunting the workshop of a blacksmith, playing with the hammers and anvil by night, much like a poltergeist. The blacksmith attempted to protect his house and his family with the sign of the cross, but before he could, the demon [Notker describes it as ‘pilosus’, ie hairy] proposed an arrangement of mutual benefit: ‘My friend, if you do not stop me from playing in your workshop, bring your little pot here and you will find it full every day.’ The starving blacksmith, ‘fearing bodily deprivation more than the eternal damnation of the soul’, agreed to the demon’s proposition. The demon burgled the bishop’s storehouse repeatedly, filling the flask and leaving broken barrels to spill on the floor. 

“The bishop discovered the theft and concluded, based on the excessive waste, that it must be the work of a demon rather than a starving parishioner. So he protected the room with holy water and placed the sign of the cross on the barrels. The next morning, the guard of the bishop’s house found the demon trapped in the larder. It had entered during the night, but, because of the holy protections placed by the bishop, was unable to touch the stores nor exit again. Upon discovery, it assumed a human form. The guard subdued it and tied it up. It was brought to a public trial where it was publicly beaten (ad palam cesus). Between blows, it cried out: ‘Woe is me, woe is me, for I have lost my friend’s little pot!’ “

If we read that with a modern sceptical eye we can work out what had really happened, but the motif of the devil and the blacksmith is common in folklore, and the world of Legend is the Middle Ages as the people at the time believed it to be, not as it really was. That said, I doubt if any demon or goblin in my game would be quite so easy to deal with.

This is a repost of a piece on my Patreon page, proceeds for which will support the artwork (by Inigo Hartas; sneak peek at the top of this post) for the Jewelspider roleplaying game which is due for publication later this year.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 4

We've got another set of stat blocks from the Blood Sword gamebooks, as converted to Dragon Warriors rules by Oliver Whawell. This time it's the turn of Doomwalk (the one where they go to the land of the dead) and you can get the PDF here.

The original 1980s covers were always an oddity, as they were completely different in tone from the books themselves. Blood Sword was verging on grimdark (well, the nearest you could get in a book sold to 10-12 year-olds) before the term was even invented. The covers on the other hand were cute and funny. I'm not sure what the art director at a publishing house actually did in those days. Took long lunches, I suppose.

Thanks to Wombo I've been having a ball rejigging the cover art to suit the interiors. Use of AI art infuriates some people to the point of hysteria, but you can see that (a) it's not going to replace human artists just yet and (b) these aren't for commercial use, so it's not taking away a job that I'd have otherwise hired anyone to do. However, let me just assure General Ludd's followers that I'm doing my bit as the forlorn hope against the forces of AI art by engaging real-life illustrator Inigo Hartas for the Jewelspider project.

In the video below, Grim expresses pretty much how I feel regarding the use of AI art. But I'm open to debate on this, so let me know what you think.

Many a good hanging

Just a brief reminder that if you want the two books collecting our game write-ups over the years, those are available to backers of the Jewelspider Patreon page, but only till Twelfth Night. (By that I mean the evening of January 5, of course, as the medieval day traditionally began at sundown.) 

Hopefully you're not one of those people who'd pledge $5, grab the free books, and then unsubscribe -- but it has been pointed out to me that there are nihilists out there as well as good folk, so I can't grumble if you do. I will just say that if you remain a backer you'll get first look at the Jewelspider RPG, as well as a bunch of scenarios, special access to the Vulcanverse adventures, rules and setting discussions, and all the things you get here on the FL blog for nothing only with an added je ne sais quoi.

And don't let the AI art above put you off. For one thing, it's really 99% "A" and only 1% "I". But more importantly, all the artwork for Jewelspider is being created by real human artistry, notably Inigo Hartas who, as a historian, folklorist and the son of Leo Hartas who was the principal illustrator of Dragon Warriors, could not be bettered as visualizer of this new visit to the lands of Legend. Patreon backers' funding goes to ensure that talent like his is not usurped by machines.

Verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways

John Whitbourn, like his Binscombe Tales character Mr Disvan, seems somehow to know just about everything that's going on. Out of the blue he sent me a clipping from the 2023 Salute show guide. 

It was gratifying to see a nod to Dragon Warriors from esteemed author Sarwat Chadda, and all the more so because it sounds as if DW helped to teach him the right lesson about both writing novels and running roleplaying campaigns, namely that "character is king" and it's the player-characters and not the plot that should drive the flow of the narrative.

We've talked long and often about the importance of going with the flow, how games best create stories, narrative emergence from character, and embracing chaos as the way to drive the story forward. It's the key to how Stan Lee swept Marvel to success in the 1960s, as Reed Tucker explains in his book Slugfest:

I was always concerned that the scenarios in the original Dragon Warriors books mustn't give first-time GMs the impression that adventures should be planned out like that. To me the prepared adventure is the safety net, the characters are the trapeze artists, and ideally the net doesn't need to be used -- or at most is the MacGuffin that gives the characters an ostensible reason to interact.

That's even more the underlying ethic of Jewelspider, my second look at the lands of Legend through a more folkloric lens. The Jewelspider book is being illustrated by Inigo Hartas (Leo's son) and you can see from his blog that it's in safe hands. The Patreon page pays for the art and maps, and as well as the prototype versions of Jewelspider you get regular articles and adventure seeds, access to various things I've worked on over the years, and rough cuts of upcoming work such as the endlessly-deferred Tetsubo. Tempted to quit the well-travelled path and strike out into faerie woods? Then join us.

The etiquette of roleplaying

Inigo Hartas, who is the son of my dear friend and long-time colleague Leo, is a roleplayer. My position as Inigo’s godfather is ironic, given that I’m not religious (if you don't count an atavistic reverence for Odin - or maybe I mean Alan Moore, if indeed they're not one and the same on the mythago level), but perhaps I can take credit for having helped inspire his favourite hobby at least.

I began roleplaying when I was a little older than Inigo is now. He often says things that are a lot smarter than I would have come out with at his age. The hobby wasn’t invented back then, that’s my excuse. We had to work it all out from first principles.

There are a few pointers I’ve learned over the years that are de rigueur for a good roleplaying campaign. I don’t think players like Inigo need me to tell them this stuff; they’re breathed it in as they played since their pre-teen years. But it’s the nature of experience to want to share itself around, so here goes.

Oh, first a couple of preambles. I don’t use the term games-master or dungeon-master. The role has too much control anyway, and that just makes it an excuse to boss players around with your sublimated ambitions as a frustrated novelist. Call them referees or umpires.

Also, when a referee foists a plot on the players and has them jump through all his or her story hoops, I call that a “thatched” game, after the way the late and unlamented British prime minister ran her Cabinet. If you want to write a novel, please go right ahead – it’s easier today than it has ever been. But don’t co-opt me to be one of your shoe-horned characters. I’m here to roleplay.

Okay, to the tips:

Focus 
Keep your mind on the game, stay in character, don’t suddenly start yakking on about how something that happened in the game reminds you of a trailer on YouTube. Honestly, you can natter any time, but to do it during the game is rude to the other players. Also, it wastes 90% of the power of what a roleplaying campaign can deliver. Imagine a play if the actors kept running to the front of the stage to tell you about their day. Commit to the experience, remain in character throughout, and you will go places no movie or novel or videogame will ever take you.

Don’t block
This is from improv, and it’s about keeping a smooth flow. If a player says, ‘I call my butler,’ the referee shouldn’t say, ‘You don’t have a butler.’ That’s jarring. If the player-character’s finances don’t stretch to manservants, now there’s a plot thread to develop. What happens when the butler asks to be paid? If the character can’t afford it, maybe the butler goes off disgruntled – and he’s armed with the secrets that have been discussed among the PCs while he poured their drinks. Thus the plot will thicken.

Don’t be authorial
Players need to think about the character from the inside. It should be, ‘I do this,’ not, ‘Geralt does this.’ For this reason I dislike the mental disadvantage rules you find in games like GURPS where being shy, for instance, or sadistic gives you extra points to spend on your character build. The rationale is that NPCs’ reaction rolls will be adversely affected by knowing you’re prone to get off on watching toenails being pulled out. Well, balderdash. First because no referee makes a habit of rolling NPC reactions, second because most of those authored traits will get forgotten in play because they were only taken for the points bonus, and third because all that character stuff should come across in the roleplaying anyway.

Maintain the atmosphere
This is for the referee. You are your players’ eyes and ears. Evoke the scene for them. This isn’t about purple description, it’s about clarity and verisimilitude. As a corollary, don’t lie to players about what they would know. ‘The axe chops you in half. Only kidding, you get to roll dodge,’ is not much funnier than telling a blind man that the kerb he’s stepping off is a ten foot drop. Don’t abuse the power you have as referee, instead help everyone to immerse themselves seamlessly in the events of the game.

Respect the rules
Like Hammurabi, I don’t want to be ruled by whims but by laws. The rules are the court of appeal that allow the players to know that the game world is fair and that they really have agency and aren’t just getting to sit in on the referee’s thatched storyline. You can have house rules, of course, but make sure everybody is aware of those before the game starts.In short, dear referee, don't be arbitrary. People came to play a game and participate in the creation of an emergent narrative, not to give your ego a stroking.

An example: I ran a Dark Ages scenario where the characters were up against a near-immortal time-travelling foe who had a thousand years’ greater experience and skill than they did. At one point, a lone player crept into the enemy base. Unknown to him, this immortal foe was there. The player-character came across him, facing the other way along a passageway. On his own, he stood no chance. But he rolled for stealth, the immortal rolled for perception and – against the odds, he tiptoed right up behind him and killed the guy before he could react. Was I tempted to thatch it, having devised this top bad guy only to see him cut down by one surprise attack? Sure, but I knew that we were now in unplanned territory, and that always makes for a more interesting game. Trust the dice and the rules to be the wings of inspiration.

Freedom is everything
A roleplaying game is not a scripted story. Regardless of what the referee may have planned, the players should feel at liberty to act however they feel their characters really would. That’s why we call it roleplaying, not boardgaming. ‘But what if they ignore my plot?’ you cry. ‘What if they split the party? What if they do something that ends my campaign?’ My reply: they can’t. Because it’s not your campaign, it’s theirs. If they become wanted fugitives, that’s the campaign now. If they split into factions that want to kill each other, go with that and see where it leads. This has happened in my own games and because of that we’ve had experiences (such as a Tsolyani civil war and a long plan to drive a character mad) that none of us could have foreseen. To roleplay well, you must delight in the unexpected. (Control freaks sent into a panic by this concept, please see above re the ease of publishing your own novel.)

For the best advice on roleplaying, I recommend Paul Mason’s articles in this Imazine freeware archive.And for all the truly transformative experiences I've had in four decades of roleplaying, I'd like to thank those I've played with - including, but not limited to: Paul Mason, Steve Foster, Oliver Johnson, Robert Dale, Jack Bramah, Mark Smith, Mike Polling, Sheldon Bacon, Frazer Payne, Les Binet, Pauline Ashall, Penny Newman, Gail Baker, David Bailey, Dermot Bolton, Mark Wigoder Daniels, Tim Harford, Paul Gilham, Aaron Fortune, Zelah Meyer, Andrew Mounstephen, Tim Savin, Simone Cooper, Nathan Cubitt, Nick Henfrey, Andy Murdin, John Whitbourn, Steve Wilshire, Patrick Brady, Mark Wilkinson, Paul Deacon, Roz Morris, and of course Jamie Thomson. It was because of all the years we've spent in imaginary realities that Fabled Lands exists at all.

Further reading:

Play Unsafe: How Improvisation Can Change The Way You Roleplay

Blank slates

A while back, I was on the phone to Leo Hartas and he was telling me of an idea he'd had to extend his Playrama cut-outs range. What he had in mind was a series of cardboard figurines for use in role-playing games. Each character would have a name and a made-up background: Sir Percival of Dragonne, that kind of thing.

I was just about to say it myself when I heard Leo's son Inigo in the background: "That's completely wrong, Dad. The whole point of role-playing is that you get to make up your own character. You don't want to be told who you're playing."

Inigo's right. In my view, the referee of a role-playing game ("games master" if you must) gets to control the world, all of the events and the NPCs, but the PCs are sacrosanct. The players are in charge there. If I'm going to start laying down the law to my players about their own characters, I might as well stop running the game and spend my time writing a novel instead.

That's the same philosophy I applied to my gamebooks. It's not easy. On the one hand, you want the reader to feel in charge - that's the whole promise of "YOU are the hero". But to deliver a satisfying story, characters have to be changed by the things they experience. In a second-person gamebook, then, there's the dilemma. Do you make character development explicit in the text (which requires you to tell the reader how they feel about things) or do you let the text just describe what happens and allow the emotional and/or moral journey to occur in the mind of the reader?

It ought to be the latter, but many readers do seem to want spoon-feeding rather than the unfettered freedom implied by interactivity. "The book was unsatisfying," they may say; "it didn't tell me how I was supposed to feel." And in videogames these days we're used to having very strongly defined characters (Lara Croft, the Witcher) and only rarely get the protean possibilities of an enigmatic personality like everyman Gordon Freeman.

In Frankenstein I got the best of both worlds. Most of the book is narrated in first person, allowing Victor Frankenstein to develop just as a character in a novel should - the difference being that your advice shapes how he develops.And in one part of the book, you are given the traditional second-person treatment but even there the inner life of that character - vengeance or love, hope or despair, anger or pity - is entirely up to you:

A thaw sets in as the days start to become noticeably longer. One morning, you are cupping your hands to drink from a pond when a shaft of sunlight hits your face, which appears with fiery clarity in the water.

Of course you’ve seen your reflection before. But this time it comes as a shock. You are so used to spending the day watching the family that you have come to fancy yourself as one of them. The red, gristly countenance with the round yellow eyes and skeletal grimace is like some creature of the depths staring up at you from the water. You feel a thrill of fear, as if it might reach up and drag you down into a mire of darkness from which there is no escape.

You scurry back thirsty to your lair, pulling the twigs and leaves behind you as if that might shut out the scrutiny of some immense, unseen, celestial eye that is somehow judging you. And if such an eye exists, what does it make of you?

* That you are hideously ugly?
* Or rather that you’re different?

Many of my old gamebooks describe events in the character's past - a foe, a murdered friend, a missing brother - and even define a role such as the Dragon Knight of Palados in The Temple of Flame. But the character's emotional and moral reactions to what he or she experiences (and even gender) are left to the reader. The process of reading a book does not, after all, happen on the page but in the mind. The book is a key to unlock creative experiences of your own. Never is that more true than in overtly interactive fiction. The journey is not in the hands of the writer, it's up to you. But for that to work, you have to be willing to bring your imagination.

Illustration by Quentin Hudspeth and used under Creative Commons Attribution licence.