To take you in the sun to promised lands

Okay, you Fabled Lands devotees were unfairly worked up to a lather by that "Serpent King arises" headline. Now it's Valentine's Day and you want some love. In particular, you want to know when the Fabled Lands role-playing game will be out. And the answer, I am at last able to tell you, is June this year. Yep, only four months to go. Greywood Publishing are starting off the series with the rulebook and the Sokara sourcebook, which is the first of twelve supplements covering the whole of the known Fabled Lands.

These will be released as both print books and PDFs. So everyone's happy. And if you choose the PDFs you get the bonus of Greywood's eye-poppingly gorgeous colour design, plus the option to buy just the parts of the rules that appeal to you. For all my championing of ebooks, I'll be getting the print edition myself and I expect it to get well-thumbed and lovingly battered very quickly as my role-playing group tear through the world of Harkuna for a change.

The game system is by Shane Garvey and the scenario and background material is by Jamie Wallis. Not James Wallis; he's the erstwhile Dragon Warriors impresario. Whole other RPG designer and publisher. No relation. And if that seems like an unlikely coincidence, what about there being two Steve Jacksons who both wrote Fighting Fantasy books? Spooky.

Return to the Fabled Lands

We had a good old run of Dragon Warriors stuff lately, and you Fabled Lands aficionados have been very patient, so here's some news worth waiting for. Greywood Publishing are creating an all-new Fabled Lands roleplaying game, based on either their own QUERP system or the rules in the FL books, or maybe a little bit of both, for release early in 2011. Co-designer Shane Garvey promises some cutting-edge streamlined design, with semi-freeform magic and a combat system that amounts to "more than just stand and swing, though everything is based on 2d6 and the difficulty mechanic familiar from the gamebooks."

To support the core RPG there'll be a series of sourcebooks for each nation, so you'll be be able to get a bunch of friends together for adventures in Golnir, Sokara, and so on, and then on to Ankon-Konu and beyond. The guys at Greywood are still trying out a few layouts, so no final decision has been taken on cover design (the picture above is just a mock-up) but we do know they will feature some sumptuous and scintillant digital artwork from the forthcoming Fabled Lands apps by Megara Entertainment, made available courtesy of Megara's heroic and gentlemanly patron, Mikael Louys.

But that's not all; we're also going to be reissuing the FL gamebooks. These will be standard paperback format, which ought to make them more accessible to readers of conventional-sized gamebooks, and they'll be on sale on Amazon from early December priced around $7.99 each. The covers will feature the original paintings by Kevin Jenkins, who's taking a quick time out from his packed movie schedule to give them a retouch that'll make them more eye-poppingly stunning than ever; and the interior illustrations will of course be by the da Vinci of Fabled Lands, Russ Nicholson. Yep, the gang's all here.

Wait, there's more. If those first six books sell well enough, the management of Fabled Lands LLP are talking about giving Jamie and me the green light to complete the series with books 7 to 12. So it could be quite an eventful year ahead for Fabled Lands fans. For further info, keep an eye on the Fabled Lands Facebook page and the Fabled Lands website (soon to have a major overhaul).