I'm accustomed to describing Vulcanverse or Blood Sword as "epic". Vulcanverse is as long as fifteen or sixteen Fighting Fantasy books. Blood Sword is equivalent to six or seven. But if you want a true gamebook epic, what about the thirty-two (and counting) volumes in the Lone Wolf saga?
Joe Dever left copious notes detailing how he planned to conclude the saga, and now his son, Ben Devere, and gamebook author Vincent Lazzari have teamed up to write that story. Light of the Kai is the first part of the Lone Wolf finale, the culmination of more than forty years of adventuring in the world of Magnamund.
Ben says:
"We spent over two years piecing together Dad’s ideas, updating the mechanics, and staying true to his vision. It’s a real labour of love - and a way to say thanks to all the fans who’ve stuck with us. Expect familiar terrains, fresh challenges, and the same epic feel that made Lone Wolf so special."
Players can take a new character or play the part of Lone Wolf himself. (Or herself? I'm not sure if Lone Wolf's sex is ever given in the books...) The action takes the player into the forsaken north, where old foes stir and long-buried secrets await.
There will be a collector's edition, a standard hardback, and a limited number of signed copies. You can also order art prints by Gary Chalk. Yes, you read that right. Mr Chalk, the original and definitive illustrator of the Lone Wolf series, is returning to bring these final chapters of the story to life.
I promised we’d get the skinny on what Jamie has been getting up to. He was reluctant to emerge from his lair and tell me, so I sent Dirk Lloyd round to prod him. Hard.
DIRK:So, you vile tentacled freak, what's this new book project you're working on with Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson?
JAMIE: I've been tapped by my old bosses, Ian Livingstone (or my 'Dark Master' as I call him) and Steve Jackson, to write up the history of one of our country's most iconic games companies, Games Workshop. Well, at any rate, its history up to 1985 or so, when Ian and Steve sold it for a lot of gold pieces. We've launched the book on Unbound.
DIRK:As usual, I'm not really getting what you're talking about. What's Unbound? Is it like Kickstarter?
JAMIE: It's pretty much a Kickstarter for books, but only books and nothing else. Unbound are more involved in the whole end-to-end process than Kickstarter, though. They're more like a crowdfunded publisher than just a commercial process for crowdfunding, if you see what I mean. So, if a given book project gets funded they will also do the printing and distributing of the book, and then sell it afterwards, usually in conjunction with a mainstream publisher. A bit like what we do with our Fabled Lands stuff, though we haven't got the reach or the contacts that Unbound has. Maybe one day!
DIRK:You're so old and decrepit now, like some kind of shambling, Alzheimery troll thing, I'd forgotten you ever actually held down a job. How did you first get involved with Games Workshop?
JAMIE: Hah, now that's a story. Way back when I left university, around 1980, I was flailing about pretty cluelessly trying to work out what to do with my life. I spent most of my time playing a game I'd got recently, in a little white box with three little ochre-coloured booklets inside...
Which I'd bought from GW, as it happens. Along with my White Dwarf mags. Instead of job hunting, I was painting figurines. My mum pointed out an ad for a job as a features editor on that selfsame magazine. I thought to myself I'd have no hope whatsoever of ever getting that job. It would be like a miracle, a dream job, working with people I admired from afar. So I gave up on the idea pretty quick. But my mum had other ideas. She had to get her nerdy, 21-year-old, paint-stained son out of the damn house, as soon as. So she rang Ian Livingstone.
And they chatted, and Ian said sure, send him up for an interview. And I went up there, had the interview, got the job! And that's how I ended up as assistant editor on White Dwarf in the early ‘80s. All thanks to my mum.
DIRK: Watching you dribble your food down the front of your shirt for the umpteenth time, I'm surprised you can remember any of that, let alone the rest of it. But anyway. What sort of stories will be in the book? Can you give us a teaser? And photos, presumably? Fresh young faces with flares and big afro 'dos?
JAMIE: Well, it won't just be how the company developed and grew and so on – the business narrative. There will be a lot of that obviously, but also there'll be stuff like the anecdote about how I got the job, for instance, but not just me. There'll be the experiences of the people that worked there. Sure, mostly Ian and Steve, but there were a whole bunch of other folk back in the day, people I'm still in contact with. Like Gary Chalk, Russ Nicholson, and Joe Dever too, though he's sadly left us now, but I've still got a story or two to put in about him. And a bunch of other folk working for or associated with GW. Including Dave Morris, White Dwarf contributor extra-ordinaire!
Here's a pic from the heyday, 1983. Gary Chalk, me, Steve and Ian front row, middle, with dear old Joe Dever standing behind Gary.
Mind you, most of the book will be the early days, about the start of it all. Like this photo of the first ever customer in the first ever Games Workshop. Apparently that bearded fellow had been queuing all night...
Not to mention all the ins and outs of the directors and the day to day running of the company...
Games Workshop Board Meeting
And we won't be shying away from those controversial moments too…
That's the Mail for you, mind. Hasn't really changed much, has it?
DIRK: Assuming you're actually still capable of writing a book, when will this be out?
JAMIE: That kind of depends on when the funding goals are reached, but probably summer/autumn of next year. To be part of this exciting new venture, and to help me pay my grocery bills for another few months, shoot over to the official Unbound site where you can pledge for a copy of The Dice Men.
DIRK: Never mind your pointless little hobbies. People should spend their money on my darkly glorious works. Or else.
Joe Dever died this week. I'm not greatly familiar with his work, but if
you're a fan of gamebooks then you will already know much more than I
could say anyway. He wrote what must be the most epic gamebook saga
ever, and he was probably the first to use an original and fully
detailed campaign setting and an ongoing character across multiple
gamebooks. A true pioneer of the medium.
We didn't know each other very well. He wasn't part of the roleplaying social circle that included me, Jamie, Oliver Johnson, Mark Smith, Paul Mason and Steve Williams. Joe and I chatted a couple of times back in the '80s about gamebook ideas, but our paths had never crossed before that at Games Workshop, where he and Gary Chalk were working when they came up with Lone Wolf.
Gamebooks were big business then and every publisher was desperate to have their own series or three. I admired the solid design that Joe and Gary put into the underlying mechanics - the clear rules for where inventory was listed on the character sheet, things like that.
We're getting our money's worth out of Paul Gresty - or would be, if we paid him anything. He's writing both The Frankenstein Warsapp and the new Fabled Lands book The Serpent King's Domain - which is currently soaring towards the skies on Kickstarter, in a campaign that has been planned and run by Megara Entertainment, as if you didn't already know. This week Paul has written a guest post explaining how he came to be locked in the FL dungeon - er, I mean how he came to be working with us on gamebooks that he loves.
* * *
A LATECOMER TO FABLED LANDS
The Fabled Lands series completely passed me by the first time it was published. I don't know how that happened. It might simply have been because my local bookshop didn't have any in stock, back in those dark, pre-internet days. Or maybe it was because back in the mid-90s I was busy dyeing my hair bright colours and learning to play guitar, and I didn't have time for gamebooks. But for whatever reason, while readers and adventurers were taking their first steps into Sokara and Golnir, I remained ignorant, quietly teaching myself to play Soundgarden songs.
Y'see, the Blood Sword books were my gamebooks. This, not Fabled Lands, was the series that had a colossal impact on my reading habits, perhaps on my youth as a whole. Yes, I also liked the Fighting Fantasy books, and Lone Wolf, and The Way of the Tiger. But it was Blood Sword, with its multi-player mechanism, that I would badger my friends into playing with me, and that I played innumerable times on my own, with every possible combination of characters. My first ever role-playing game was one that my brother and I invented ourselves, using the rules from the Blood Sword books. When the fourth Blood Sword book, Doomwalk, proved impossible to find, I spent a good ten years tracking it down.
I'm sure I would have loved the Fabled Lands books as well. Fabled Lands and Blood Sword did, after all, share an author and an artist. I just didn't know they existed.
It was Russ Nicholson himself, the books' illustrator, who recommended Fabled Lands to me. Which is a crazy way to hear about the series, actually. Russ had done some artwork for Loup Solitaire, the French edition of the Lone Wolf RPG; in 2011 he and Joe Dever were invited to a trade show in Paris by the game's publisher, Le Grimoire. I was living in Paris by then, and I'd done some translation work for Le Grimoire, so they asked if I'd come along to interpret for Russ, and to generally be on hand in case of any language difficulties.
That was a fun weekend. I pestered Russ with a whole bunch of questions about Blood Sword, and Dragon Warriors, and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. And Russ showed me one of the Fabled Lands books for the first time - one of the large-format editions from the '90s, that a fan had brought along for him to sign. 'You should keep an eye out for them,' Russ told me. 'They're worth a look.'
Man alive, was that ever the understatement of the year.
The first four Fabled Lands books had recently been republished - and, fortunately, the internet had been invented - so I ordered them as soon as I got home. When they arrived, I put them on my shelf and left them there awhile. I work from home a lot, and I'm not great at doing things in moderation; any time I get sucked into a game, my level of productivity takes a battering. I don't play a lot of computer games for just that reason, and I was worried that Fabled Lands would have much the same effect.
But curiosity is sometimes as distracting as gaming. At last I pulled the books down from my shelf, and tentatively crept into the world of Harkuna.
My productivity took a battering. I don't regret it. I've never really left Harkuna yet.
* * *
You can read Paul's brilliant Dunpala demo for The Serpent King's Domain here. Did I mention that Megara Entertainment still need backing for great art, a colour cover, magnificent Nicholsonian maps, etc? Oh, I did? Okay then.
For once it's not Kickstarter but Megara's own home-grown crowdfunding platform. In effect you're pre-subscribing to buy a copy of the book when it's ready, and for 29 euros you'll get a PDF and a black-and-white hardback with two dozen all-new Gary Chalk pics, plus fillers.
The new book is by Martin Charbonneau and features the adventures of a female Kai monk. I mean nun. She begins her adventures by picking a thoroughbred from the monastery stables, so a bit of a risk taker, then - which is just as well, as it looks like this mission will take her to the Darklands and beyond.
Money raised will go towards the purchase of dipthongs, digraphs and apostrophes... but more importantly, to pay for those lovely illustrations, meticulous editing by Richard S Hetley, and the deluxe printing we've come to associate with Megara. Oh, and the whole shebang is being overseen by Joe Dever, who will check every detail to ensure this fits in as an official part of the Lone Wolf canon.
I'll finish with Gary's own words, as he knows this world better than almost anyone:
"It’s great to have the chance to go back to Magnamund again, although this time my drawings will be featuring a new character: Autumn Snow. The servants of the Darklords and the warriors of Sommerlund are some of my favourite subjects, so I’d better start sharpening my pencils."
Read more about The Pit of Darknesshere and you can place your order for a copy here.
