Credit where it's due

Originally published in 1985, Dragon Warriors returned in 2008 in a deluxe hardback edition. Here is my foreword to that volume:

As Dragon Warriors is coming up to its quarter century, it’s now almost as venerable as those classic original role-playing games—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, Traveller—in whose company it was once a cheeky whippersnapper.

Those who enjoy Dragon Warriors respond to something unique about it. Which sets us to wondering: what is the essence of Dragon Warriors? Most certainly that essence doesn’t lie in armour bypass rolls or other game mechanics. Indeed, the best Legend campaigns we’ve played in have used the GURPS system. And the rules mean nothing to those who live in the Dragon Warriors world, for whom ‘mystic’ and ‘warlock’ and ‘sorcerer’ are all interchangeable shorthand for a guy you really should steer well clear of.

So, is DW then defined by the world of Legend? We think not. Some of the great role-playing games are completely identified with an entire fantasy sub-creation. Tekumel and Glorantha spring to mind. The world of Legend, on the other hand, was always intended to be this world—only skewed.

Some parts are closer to the 10th century, others to the 14th, but the point was always to create a backdrop that would be recognizably and convincingly medieval. It was never about creating a place that was alien and strange. The familiarity of Legend is what gives players freedom to create their own stories there.

Not rules nor setting details, then. From a personal perspective, the important thing for us has always been the flavour. That, for us, is the essence of Dragon Warriors. Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme-park taverns, comedy dwarves and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made Legend as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with a European folktale sensibility. The flavour of what fantasy ought to be.

In Legend, faerie creatures are as amoral as cats and as heartless as children. A goblin in the rafters can spoil a whole night’s sleep, while a troll under the bridge ahead is reason to change your travel plans. And these creatures are rare. Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.

This is a world in which human emotion is just as strong as magic. The scenario ‘A Box of Old Bones’, which originally appeared in White Dwarf magazine in 1985 and which is bound to re-emerge before long, makes it clear that the miracles associated with holy relics are sufficiently rare and vaguely manifested that a fake relic can go unnoticed for years, getting by on the strength of its placebo effect and the willingness of clergy and believers to collude in seeing evidence where they want to see it. Our rule was never to evoke magic if a non-supernatural plot point would do.

Fantasy games like D&D—or, these days, World of Warcraft—belong to the George Lucas or Chris Columbus branch of role-playing. Dragon Warriors would be a movie by Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton. In literary terms, if D&D is Eragon, then DW is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Now that the righteous passion of youth is mellowed somewhat, we see that neither approach is right or wrong. Fantasy has room for all flavours. Take your pick.

Turning now to thanks, regrets, and reminiscences… Dragon Warriors owes its existence to Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, whose brainwave was to see that role-playing could be smuggled into bookshops. We were never that interested in solo gamebooks, but as soon as we saw the first Fighting Fantasy book we started planning the pitch for Dragon Warriors.

The game system too owes a debt to Livingstone and Jackson, interestingly enough. We had self-published a little RPG called Mortal Combat in the late 1970s. This came to the attention of Games Workshop, with whom we discussed a UK rival to D&D. Workshop’s working title for this was ‘Adventure’. The deal never happened, but it gave us an excuse to focus our role-playing sessions towards creating a set of rules and a world (in fact, several worlds) that ultimately evolved into Dragon Warriors.

With hindsight, there are things we would do differently. Oliver always argued strenuously against polyhedral dice, but Dave resisted a pure d6-based system—wrongly, as he now admits. As the whole point of Dragon Warriors was to be accessible to everybody, the low price-point of the books was pretty much invalidated when you had to go searching for twelve-sided dice. Democratization of the dice supply would also have helped to break the authority of the GamesMaster—a term we abhor, preferring ‘umpire’ or ‘referee’ as more indicative of the group story-creation that we feel good roleplaying should be.

Philippa Dickinson, our editor at Transworld, recognized that role-playing broke the normal publishing rules about age groups. That’s why the original DW books showed no sign of being targeted at 11-15 year olds, even though those were almost certainly our main market. We played it ourselves, after all, and our friends—and we were twentysomethings, as I hope were many of those who bought the books first time round.

Completists may wonder what other DW books are out there. We used Legend as the setting for our Blood Sword series of gamebooks (Knight Books, 1987-88), where we elaborated the end-of-time storyline that hangs over the world as the year 1000 approaches. Later, some of the story threads in Blood Sword were used for three novellas called The Chronicles of the Magi (Hodder, 1997). We’re still not sure if we consider Blood Sword to be canonical— or whether the year 1000 would really pass in Legend with much hysteria, and not a little magical mischief, but maybe sans the direct intervention of God Almighty. The flavour of DW can be grim and horrific as well as whimsical, but such grimness is usually on a personal level. A character’s soul can be in peril, lives can be threatened by treachery, individuals can be torn by loyalties and inner conflicts. And yet, in a Legend campaign, it is not usually the fate of the world that hangs in the balance. Not merely the fate of the world, at any rate.

At the risk of evoking comparison with Robert E Howard’s estate, whose discovery of new stories seems almost to have dwarfed Howard’s output while alive, there was also an entire world of DW rules and adventures, much more extensive than in the original six books. This is the Invaders & Ancients book, which was to have been incorporated into Chaosium’s Questworld project. When that deal failed to come about, we reworked the material into a massive sourcebook, called Ophis, that would have comprised some of DW books 7-12.

If you’re interested, a little glimpse of that continent of Ophis features in Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig (Insight, 2008). But that is all there is, alas, as in those days we did our work in nonelectronic form. The manuscript may have taken the train to Dumfries or been used to lay the cornerstone of a church or used to light a fire on an especially cold winter’s night—all those fates that the one and only copies of things are wont to suffer. But, like life, the loss is what makes the rest of it so precious.

For the resurrection of Dragon Warriors we particularly want to thank James Wallis, who needs no introduction as one of the great luminaries of gaming. We are honoured that Dragon Warriors is appearing as one of the first publications of Magnum Opus Press, and grateful to James for lavishing such attention to make it a truly mouth-watering edition. We also must thank Ian Sturrock for editing, revising and improving our original material into a new edition for a new era of gaming.

And we are most grateful to have such excellent companions in our ongoing exploration of Legend— in particular Steve Foster and Tim Harford. Steve has been with us from the very beginning, designed Mortal Combat and in fact originated several of the most colourful characters of the Dragon Warriors world including Tobias of the Knights Capellar and arch-wizard Cynewulf Magister. Tim has woven some of the eeriest, most exciting and most affecting campaigns of Ellesland and enhanced it immeasurably with his ideas. Along with them, we are privileged to have adventured with Aaron Fortune, Paul Gilham, Frazer Payne and Tim Savin—heroes of Legend, dear friends, stalwarts all.

Returning to it another seventeen years on, what would I add? First I'd have to reiterate my thanks to James Wallis. He had the idea of bringing Dragon Warriors back, assembled the very best team of writers, artists and editors for the job, and produced a stunningly beautiful series of books. Without him, DW would probably still be languishing in semi-oblivion.

I'm grateful to Lee Barklam for keeping the flame alight with his Cobwebbed Forest site, where you can find maps, scenarios, source material and links to other DW resources. Likewise profound and profuse thanks to Shaun Hately not only for The Library of Hiabuor but also for his contributions to DW lore as a writer. Along those lines, Red Ruin Publishing have continued James Wallis's work as a labour of love, producing Casket of Fays (not fey, please note; one is a noun, the other an adjective) and a number of fine scenarios and solo books (of which The Horned Ram by Paul Partington is the latest).

And I mustn't miss out the folks at Alkonost, who are not only bringing Dragon Warriors back in a French edition (Les Terres de Légende, that is) but are also publishing two all-new volumes. With more focus on the social and political aspects of the game than on old-style dungeon bashes, we can really say Alkonost are ushering DW into the 21st century.

Published game sessions, both audio and video, have helped spread awareness of Dragon Warriors, and I'm particularly indebted to Grim Jim Desborough and Roger Bell-West for making their games available online.

It would be remiss of me not to thank the artists who have brought Legend to life. I'm convinced that Jon Hodgson has visited Legend often; his illustrations seem to have come direct from my and Oliver's dreams. In the early days we benefited from the work of Bob Harvey, Leo Hartas, Russ Nicholson and Alan Craddock. And here is an especially beautiful map of Legend by Patrick Crusiau. There are many others, and we salute them all.

Personae

Maskwitches Of Forgotten Doggerland is exactly the sort of setting I love, just 'cause it's different. Oh, and because it looks a bit desperate and bleak, it's steeped in dreamlike deep myth, and it's about the infinite variety and weirdness of humankind. (Though personally I'd forget all about the 1970s stuff, that Stranger Things/Paper Girls shtick getting a bit threadbare* by now, and just play it all out in the Mesolithic.)

Bonus points because it evokes Jack Vance's story "The Miracle Workers", which you should hunt down and read if you can but if not here's an audio version. I also liked Jon Hodgson's recap on Twitter of some surprising historical facts:

Ack! I just read a really good thread about historical wargames and overcoming players’ natural but incorrect assumptions about historical fact. I learned so much researching Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland! Three (it might be five) facts that were new to me: 🧵

— Jon Hodgson (@JonnyHodgsonArt) September 22, 2022

*I know they're set in the '80s. But it's the same thing.

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless

Jon Hodgson's artwork looks to me like Dragon Warriors was always waiting for it. I remember an evening back in the '80s. Oliver and I were working on the first DW book at his mother's place in Frensham. It was at the top of a meadow with the landscape of southern England spread out below us. A haze of rain was blowing in across the downs, trees swaying, grass rippling in the wind. Anything could have been out there in the twilight. Goblin magic was in the air. It was the kind of view we could imagine our characters having as they travelled the byways of Ellesland.

Thirty-some years later, I saw Jon's art for the new edition of Dragon Warriors, masterminded and produced by James Wallis, and I knew he'd seen into the same imaginary worlds as we had. Now Jon has a boxed set of DW art coming out in a limited edition of just fifty copies. You get eight signed prints, an art book, and some extras -- a real collector's edition and a window onto a magnificently evocative vision of fantastic places.

It's in the trees

I've shown you this before, sort of. While working on a book I like to print up prototype versions rather than read the text on-screen. The upside is it provides a different perspective. The downside is that by the time the print company gets the book to me, often I've changed most of it.

I prepared these two copies of the Jewelspider RPG (2nd edition Dragon Warriors, if you prefer) so that my group could start playtesting the rules. I'm sorry to say the finished book probably won't have Jon Hodgson art -- I don't have the money to pay him, and if I did I'd spend it on Mirabilis -- but for private use around the gaming table I can indulge my wildest dreams. And I really wanted to have a proper look at that gorgeous Players Guide artwork without the book title inexplicably covering up half the image.

Some people have asked about the new rules. Details are still changing week by week, but the core of the system seems pretty solid now. There are eight abilities, ranging from 2 to 18, which determine your chance of succeeding in any action. There are also four qualities, ranging from -3 to +3,which don't affect your chance of success but rather your degree of success. So if you attempt an action using Agility (ride, dodge, climb, etc) or Dexterity (shoot, cut a purse, pick a lock, etc) then having a positive score in the Graceful quality would make any successful roll more effective.

There are also masteries, ranging from 0 to 6, which give the character more control over how they use their abilities for actions relevant to that mastery. Mastery in swordplay, for example, lets you finesse your Dexterity rolls when attacking or parrying with a sword. The way a mastery works is that you can trade off chance of success against degree of success, up to your level in that mastery.

The system is designed for ad hoc play. Any action you want to attempt will be governed by one of the eight abilities, and masteries can be extemporized too.

That's not quite all. There are two very rare qualities, Holy and Fey, that can be unlocked and give access to actions that ordinary people can't attempt. You can't have both at once, of course, and Fey doesn't necessarily indicate faerie blood, it's just the Jewelspider equivalent of DW's Psychic Talent.

When will all this be available to the public? I'm currently running a short campaign with junkable characters. Then Oliver Johnson is planning to run a Jewelspider campaign through through the autumn, and Tim Harford will hopefully give the rules a spin in one of his eagerly-awaited Christmas specials, and then I'll go back and revise the whole caboodle in light of my players' comments. So not till next spring, at the earliest. But, as you know, nothing's forgotten and it's coming.

Critical IF cover design

Following on from the previous post, here are the cover briefs I sent to Jon Hodgson when Fabled Lands LLP decided to republish the Virtual Reality books overselves rather than partnering with Osprey to do them.

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These are my initial ideas. I’m open to any suggestions or changes, as the briefs were originally prepared on the assumption I’d have to hand them off through a chain of editors and art directors at Osprey and would get no direct communication with the artist. Hence I’ve probably over-managed the details... however, here’s the cover Osprey intended for Down Among the Dead Men so you can see why I’m getting a tad control-freaky.

The top third of each cover will need to be for the author and title, and the logo extends about 2.5cm from the bottom. Maybe we should have the background and main foreground elements on separate layers, so that a hydra’s head or a sword could partially overlap the title lettering if necessary.

Ideally each book should each have a unique palette with one predominant colour to help it stand out.

Necklace of Skulls

I based the new design on the original Virtual Reality cover with these changes:

• Removed the second (kneeling) figure. Now it's just the warrior.
• The warrior is holding a flaming torch and a sword.
• The view is straight-on from directly behind the warrior to make the threat of the hydra more dramatic.
• I've put the warrior on a raised ledge of rock a few feet above the desert floor. This allows the hydra to be nearer to him and to appear to be rearing up out of a chasm.

But... it would be better not to be looking at the back of the hero’s neck. If (unlike in my sketch) one of the hydra heads were further forward, the hero could be partly turning to keep an eye on it, giving us the opportunity for a partial or full profile – just to create more engagement with him as a character:

Background and palette - as we’re looking up past the hero with a slightly low-angle shot, I think the background should be a midnight blue night sky dotted with stars. It reinforces the desert setting and astronomy is part of the mythological context of the adventure. The hydra dark-scaled. The torchlight picks out the blaze of colour (feathered head-dress, etc) in the warrior’s garb and his glistening skin, the yellow light picked up in the sand and rocks where he’s standing.

The Maya sword is made of hardwood with sharpened spikes of knapped flint or sharpened volcanic glass fixed along the edges. Just the thing for killing a hydra.

Down Among the Dead Men

A pirate fantasy adventure, a little bit earlier in history than Pirates of the Caribbean – think Elizabethan/Jacobean period. It’s pretty obvious how I’ve changed this one from the old Virtual Reality version:

• The zombie pirate is looking straight at us.
• He’s closer, more threatening.
• He’s already climbed halfway over the rail.
• The rail tilts up left to right rather than down as on the VR cover - more dramatic that way.

Put a few wisps of mist in the foreground, picking up the fog in the background. Also the original colour scheme is a bit of a dog’s dinner. We need a more limited palette to give the image more impact.

Once Upon a Time in Arabia

The classic Thief of Baghdad type adventure. It’s not even worth looking at the original cover – I never liked it. So, on to new ideas...

This drawing is a bit sketchy, so I’d better explain what’s going on. It’s a aerial shot above an Arabian Nights city looking steeply down at the towers and domes below.

Our hero is flying on a magic carpet, the wind whipping at his clothes. In one hand he has a sword. From a ring on the other hand he has called forth a genie - the swirl of smoke curls out of the ring and under the carpet, solidifying into a giant demonic figure who is ready to assist the hero.

I don’t think the hero should have a full beard (though the genie can). He should either be clean shaven or have a little hipster goatee. Or it could be a heroine (no goatee in that case). The traditional Douglas Fairbanks Arabian look, ie flowing white like the Prince of Persia used to wear before he went all moody black leather.

I envisage the genie as taking shape out of smoke that looks like a storm-cloud – dark violet/black shot through with inner flashes of lightning suggesting violence and magical power.

Overall colour palette: how about that haze of golden yellows and ochres that you get in hot, dusty climates as the sun is close to setting? If that suffuses the background, we can then pick out some bright colours (the carpet, jewels on the hero/heroine) and contrast that with the white flowing clothes of the hero/heroine and the black, billowing smoke of the genie.

Heart of Ice

The idea here is we’ve got a guy slogging through a blizzard out on the Saharan Ice Wastes towards a city in the distance. Deep snow. He’s dressed in arctic weather clothing: parka, fur-lined hood, snow goggles, etc.

He’s heard something and he’s turning back to face us to shine a flashlight at whoever or whatever is coming. (So he’s twisting at the waist, insofar as his bulky clothing will permit.) In his other hand (held out to the side so we can see it) is a barysal gun - the raygun of the 23rd century.

In the background is the place he was heading for – the city of Du-En, abandoned and empty for a hundred years. A bit Gormenghast, a bit Mountains of Madness. Massive walls, so hazed by distance and snow that the architecture (half sci-fi, half ‘30s futurist fascist) seems to render our human endeavours and dramas insignificant. We can’t see the city walls and towers that clearly because of the snow-haze.

This is a variant cover I did. Disregard the image/concept here, but I do like the colour scheme of the background. I’m thinking that this one can be the most monochrome of the series - all icy blues, whites, greys. Even the figure shouldn’t be too colourful, and possibly the only variation might be a bit of backlight from the flashlight reflected in his tinted goggles or something.

By the way, that figure - he could be the hero, he could just as easily be one of the adversaries. This is quite a morally ambiguous book and the anonymity of the figure reflects that.

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The brief isn't the end of the story. Just like with game design, where you come up with an initial plan but then have to work out during development how to implement that and which parts work and which need changing, the cover concepts go back and forth before you arrive at something that everybody's happy with.

Take Once Upon A Time In Arabia. Jon's first sketch featured a female protagonist in historically credible but determinedly unsexy garb. Well, fair enough; we're not in the 1980s now. As Jon said:

"I went for a female character on Once Upon a Time in Arabia, which I'm kinda regretting - maybe a male would have more appeal to the readership, and I'm not keen on making a 'sexy' female character."

I agreed that a young male hero might be better, not least because I thought Jon might be more comfortable making him attractive and athletic. I went on to say:

"His clothing probably needs to be as much like the Fairbanks-style stereotypical 'Arabian adventurer' costume as you can bear to go. I know it's not historically accurate, but I'm minded of what Jonathan Miller said when staging Anthony and Cleopatra: 'I'd like to dress her in Greek-style clothing, but audiences think it's wrong if she's not in Hollywood's idea of Ptolemaic fashion.' Also, the image is going to work better if the flying carpet is moving left to right. And can we add the jinni's taloned hands for extra impact?"

Of the first Heart of Ice sketch I said:

"I like the icy colours in the cover, but would like to get a real raging blizzard. It makes the situation more life-or-death -- will this lone figure even survive to reach that city..? -- and injects some doomy apocalyptic feeling into the scene."

I'm very pleased with the end result, but you can judge for yourself whether our cover creation process was a success - Jon's final book covers are here.

Another look at Dragon Warriors

I recently cracked open the beautiful hardback edition of Dragon Warriors produced by James Wallis’s Magnum Opus Press. As a matter of fact there are some copies on sale on DriveThruRPG at the moment – not at all cheap compared to the fiver my Tirikelu rules will set you back, but definitely worth it.

In the preface I talked a bit about my and Oliver Johnson’s thinking when designing the game:

“Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme park taverns, comedy dwarves, and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made Legend as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with a European folktale sensibility. The flavor of what fantasy ought to be.

“In Legend, faerie creatures are as amoral as cats and as heartless as children. A goblin in the rafters can spoil a whole night’s sleep, while a troll under the bridge ahead is reason to change your travel plans. And these creatures are rare. Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.

“In the world of Dragon Warriors, human emotion is just as strong as magic. The scenario ‘A Box of Old Bones’ makes it clear that the miracles associated with holy relics are sufficiently rare and vaguely manifested that a fake relic can go unnoticed for years, getting by on the strength of its placebo effect and the willingness of clergy and believers to collude in seeing evidence where they want to see it. Our rule was never to evoke magic if a non-supernatural plot point would do.”

It’s nice to see old work you did getting some love. Normally when that happens people are heaping praise on the land of Legend. The Dragon Warriors rules themselves get overlooked, even by me. (Especially by me, in fact, since I’m forever kicking myself for not listening to Oliver when he said we should dispense with the polyhedral dice.) But then I came across this in-depth review by Charles Akins in which it’s the DW system as much as the world that grabs him. If I ever get around to finishing Jewelspider for publication it’s going to have a new D6-driven system, but Mr Akins’ comments still give me a warm glow inside. As does this mini-review on Legacy Game Mastering:



And if you should feel like a return to the lands of Legend, Serpent King Games have made the core Dragon Warriors rulebook available free as a PDF until the end of this month. That's better than a dragon spitting in your eye. (Although I should add that in all my time in Legend, the nearest we've yet got to a dragon is hearing an ominous slithering in a ditch in the forest one time. Gotta love that low fantasy.)

Pillow fight

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow, but in the meantime I had to show you this. Dragon Warriors pillows. I know it sounds like a kenning for gold coins, but no, it's a real thing in Jon Hodgson's Redbubble store. You can also get t-shirts and other stuff. No Armour Factor, but they look cool.

Talking of Dragon Warriors, we've got something very old skool tomorrow. It even predates DW. Don't miss it!

A noose of light

I probably don’t have to declare at this stage that I’m kind of an admirer of Russ Nicholson’s artwork. I’ve wanted his illustrations in my books since way back in 1984, when I had to track him down to Papua New Guinea to get him to supply the drawings for Eye of the Dragon.

And everybody knows that as far as the Fabled Lands series is concerned, Russ is “the third author” (it’s like being the Fifth Beatle, only with less hair). His imagination made it real, gave it substance, and that’s not just my and Jamie’s opinion – just look at how the apps drew on his original art.

Likewise Leo Hartas, not just an artist who is brilliant at conveying charm in his quirkily imaginative scenes, but one of my closest friends and, of course, my creative partner on projects like Mirabilis.

As I was lucky enough to get these guys as the illustrators of my Virtual Reality books in the mid-90s, you can bet that I wanted to retain their illustrations in the new incarnation of those books under the Critical IF imprint. And yet, Once Upon A Time In Arabia (the book formerly known as Twist of Fate) does not feature Russ’s great pictures, instead relying for visual embellishment on the more obscure (these days) William Harvey. No, not the blood guy.

I am very conscious that gamebooks are all about the nostalgia. Switching things around is as welcome to most gamebook aficionados as a bacon sarnie to a Salafi. So why the change?

To explain that, first I must ask you to cast your mind back – or, indeed, just click the link – to the announcement that Fabled Lands LLP would be partnering with Osprey Books to bring back Virtual Reality in digital format. Because the original plan to do them in HTML5 was deemed too expensive, we decided to go with EPUB3 format, which we thought would be cheaper. (It wasn’t, but that’s a detail.)

It soon turned out that we wouldn’t be able to have much interior artwork in any EPUB3 versions. As in, no art at all once you were past the prologue. So each book was to have two or three black and white illustrations. These were not by Russ or Leo and I wasn’t involved in commissioning them. No big deal, I thought, as I could still use the original artwork in the print editions. Then it turned out there were to be no print editions after all, only the ebooks.

Dry your tears. For various reasons, the planned partnership was abandoned and the ebooks canned. Still, we had the books all edited and ready to go – and Createspace makes it very easy to publish paperbacks and distribute them via Amazon. So, after quickly striking agreements with Russ and Leo, we were back in business.

Except… These are pictures you don’t want to mess up. Only sharp high-resolution images would do. I finally got the best quality my scanner is capable of by razor-blading copies of the VR books to pieces and scanning at 600 dpi. It worked out fine for Heart of Ice, Necklace of Skulls and Down Among the Dead Men. The snag is that I had no spare copy of Twist of Fate (I hope you’ll forgive me not wanting to mutilate the only one I had left) and it would cost $150 to buy a spare on Amazon. Hence the decision was taken to resort to the illustrations of Mr Harvey, which had the benefit of being (a) specifically drawn for the Arabian Nights and (b) out of copyright for seventy-seven years. Oh, and pretty good. Not Russ or Leo quality, but evocative enough.

As Scheherazade’s beleaguered heroes are fond of saying, God alone is all-powerful. OK then. But I managed three out of four, and I can live with that.

Your wish is my command

If you already own a copy of the Virtual Reality gamebook Twist of Fate, a couple of things... First, let me shake your hand. Not a lot of those babies made it out into the world. The original '80s gamebook boom was dying out (well, it was 1994) and this was last in the series, too.

Secondly, I'll understand if you don't want to shell out for the recent Critical IF edition (now titled Once Upon A Time In Arabia) just to read the new prologue. The rest of the book is slightly revised, but substantially no different from the 1994 version.

At the same time, if you're a collector you won't want to miss that new prologue. Here's the solution. You can download a free PDF version right here. That'll give you the prologue, the character sheet and Jon Hodgson's vertiginously amazing new cover. Those were the three wishes you had in mind, right?

You wait for a gamebook and then four come along at once

I think we pitched the Virtual Reality books as "like novels only you get to make choices". Mark Smith certainly wrote his that way. The Coils of Hate in particular has some beautifully evocative descriptions and sharply tuned dialogue, though even after struggling from dawn till midnight for weeks on end I don't think I managed to fix its dysfunctional flowchart.

My own VR books were not so much novels as role-playing adventures. Heart of Ice in particular was based on a Tekumel campaign that I ran many times, except that for the book I moved it to a near-apocalyptic future where the world may end with a bang or a whimper, and which of those fates it will suffer is largely up to you. I always saw it as a Sergio Leone movie with operatic sweep and pragmatically amoral heroes. In the new edition, I've corrected one logical flaw and in the process added yet another possible ending with the obligatory nod to Blade Runner.

Down Among the Dead Men is an adventure with pirates, magic and the undead. Pirates of the Caribbean in those days was still just a ride at Disneyland, and I don't know if I'd even heard of On Stranger Tides. If this one were a movie it'd be directed by Tim Burton. The setting is about a century before the powdered wigs era popularized by Hollywood. Think Drake and Raleigh and Doctor Dee.

I researched Necklace of Skulls while on honeymoon in Mexico and Guatemala following the Maya trail. Spirtually it owes a debt to Professor M A R Barker - as do all my books, really - but there's nothing there that came directly from our Tekumel role-playing games. There are two main routes through: one the underworld of Pre-Columbian myth, where I aimed for the logic of dreams, and that's contrasted with the "reality" option of the everyday world of the hero's clan and the historical backdrop of the collapse of Teotihuacan. Director of the movie? Jan Švankmajer or Terry Gilliam, maybe.

For the new edition, I've retitled Twist of Fate as Once Upon a Time in Arabia and I've given it a completely new prologue. The core of the adventure is unchanged, though: a whirlwind of encounters with a 1001 Nights flavour involving ghouls, djinn, flying carpets, magic rings, lost palaces, strange lands, devious villains and brave comrades. Well, you've seen the movie and played the boardgame I'm sure.

All four of my VR books return to print this week as Fabled Lands Publishing's new Critical IF series. These are completely re-edited versions, in many cases with new sections, and with brand spanking new covers by Jon Hodgson. All but Once Upon a Time in Arabia have the original illustrations, and they are formatted to fit on the shelf along with the new edition Fabled Lands and Golden Dragon books.

And if you're into the digital era of reading, all four books are also out on Kindle. Even better, they're included in Amazon's new Matchbook bundling program, meaning that if you buy the print book, you get the Kindle version for no more than 99c extra.

And, and, and - this weekend only, you can pick up a FREE Kindle edition of Down Among The Dead Men. This is what heaven is like for e-gamebook fans. But just till midnight on Sunday, mind you.

These are some of my very best gamebooks, so I'll hope you'll check them out - or, if you already read them, maybe you'd like to go put a review on Amazon? If so, may your barysal gun never want for charges.



Sorry about all these covers. I know it looks like a supermarket shelf, but I wanted to be sure everybody had easy access to at least the US and UK links. (Hey, I could have added Italian, German, Canadian...)

Virtual Reality gamebooks return as Critical IF

Lots more Way of the Tiger news coming up over the next couple of months, but first here's a peek into the near future. There'll be four Critical IF paperback books (with covers by the awesomely talented Jon Hodgson, interior art by Leo Hartas, Russ Nicholson and William Harvey) and at least one of the four is out in revised Kindle and paperback editions that you can get right now (see below). The rest are coming in just under a month.

Feel free to spread the word and please, please, please circulate the image above everywhere you can. The more people who hear about it, and who review it on Amazon, the more chance we have of bringing back other classic gamebook series like Blood Sword and Falcon.

We'll never reach infinity

You can't keep a secret in the internet age. I'd barely heard the news myself when readers of this blog started asking why the Infinite IF gamebooks had disappeared from the Osprey Adventures site. Weren't we going to team up with Osprey to bring back the Virtual Reality and Way of the Tiger books in digital form? That was the plan last summer. So what happened?

Now it can be told. Fabled Lands LLP won't be partnering with Osprey after all. It was an amicable parting and we wish them huge success with the Osprey Adventures line. Think Nazi occult secrets, zombie hunting guides, Cthulhu investogators' handbooks, dossiers that lift the lid on Area 51 - all coupled with the awesome full-colour artwork you'd expect of any Osprey book.

It became clear that gamebooks didn't really fit in there. Personally I wish we'd realized that before I spent eight months writing tedious Javascript and pasting it tediously into Excel because that's the way the toolset for these books worked. Oh, and it was undocumented. And occasionally the syntax would change. So that was a lot of fun. But it wasn't anybody's fault. Sometimes you get into something - pointing a gun at an archduke, digging a trench in the Somme valley, and the next thing you know it's out of everyone's hands.

When we finally had breathing space to sit back and look at the almost-complete e-gamebooks, that was when we saw they didn't have a natural home alongside either myths and legends or dark Fortean stuff. Had I written all-new gamebooks it might have been different. I wish I had done that, in fact, because the Dark Osprey books in particular are a really cool genre to work in.

The silver lining is that this change of plan means there will be print editions of those books. The Infinite IF series was going to be epub3 only, but now that I have the edited and revised text of the books, it's not too arduous to set them up in paperback on Amazon. Those should be ready in time for Christmas. More news about that in a month.

If you actually prefer digital gamebooks, I have nothing to promise right now, but don't give up hope. Jamie is looking into various other ways to get those versions completed and published. Meanwhile, I'm just happy to swap Javascript for Serif PagePlus (my DTP software of choice) and to set up some covers featuring Jon Hodgson's glorious artwork.

Flying carpets

I spent a good chunk of the last nine months labouring over the Virtual Reality and Way of the Tiger gamebooks in order to convert them to Epub3. It was like steering a helicopter in to land using your feet. No, worse than that: using somebody else's feet. They do say, never say never again, but in this case, believe me: Never. Again.

Still, all that Javascript, Excel and ever-changing tools is now a thing of the past. The books are converted, and if you have an iPad you'll be able to read them when they're released. Unfortunately, apart from iBooks there aren't any ebook apps that are reliably compatible with Epub3, though you'd have to hope Google might champion a good one for Android soon. Or maybe Epub3 is just going to be that firework that never catches light.

Don't ask me the release dates, as this isn't my day job any more. If and when I know, you'll hear it here first, but all we'd better say for now is "spring" and leave the rest blank. In the meantime, here's a look at one of Jon Hodgson's cover paintings. This one is for Twist of Fate, renamed Once Upon a Time in Arabia for the ebook edition. The original paperback now sells for a few hundred dollars, but if you're the sort of person who can see the girl in the red dress amid the stream of numbers, just take a look at the flowchart here. (Blimey. Somebody has flowcharted about a hundred gamebooks? There's dedication.)

A saga of the hero twins

I've been doodling some sketches for the covers of the Infinite IF books. This one, for Maya heroquest adventure Necklace of Skulls, is going to be painted by my favourite Dragon Warriors artist, Jon Hodgson. Which is really rather exciting, actually.

There will be few interior pictures this time out, so if you want to appreciate the great job Russ Nicholson did in evoking the One World when the book was first published, I recommend snapping up a secondhand copy on Amazon. Or you could wait for Russ to post those illustrations up on his blog, which he plans to do shortly.

I'll sign off with the doubtless du Maurier inspired opening of the book:

Last night you dreamed you saw your brother again. He was walking through a desert, his sandals scuffing up plumes of sooty black sand from the low endless dunes. It seemed you were hurrying to catch him up, but the sand slipped away under your feet and you could make no headway up the slope. You heard your own voice call his name: 'Morning Star!' But, muffled by distance, the words went rolling off the sky unheeded. 

You struggled on. Cresting the dune, you saw your brother standing close by, staring at something in his hands. Your heart thudded with relief as you stumbled through the dream towards him. But even as your hand reached out for his shoulder, a sense of dread was growing like a storm cloud to blot out any joy. You saw the object Morning Star was holding: an obsidian mirror. You leaned forward and gazed at the face of your brother reflected in the dark green glass. 

Your twin brother's face was the face of a skull. 

 

A Ballad of Times Past - part three

Second Part: Waylaid at the Inn
In the early evening of the first day, you reach the junction of two rivers. There are a few cottages, an inn, and three boats down by the river, which is not frozen over. Osric suggests stopping at the inn, and also enquiring there about hiring a boat.

The low-ceilinged inn is murky with smoke from the fire in the grate, but gloriously warm. One or two figures sit drinking at crude wooden benches. The innkeeper, Owain, greets you, observing that you are not the peasants or impoverished travellers he usually caters for. Osric does not introduce himself, but orders cups of mulled wine.

As the wine arrives, two of the other patrons leave. But another figure you hadn’t noticed sits alone in the shadows away from the fire. He is dressed in a rough garment like a monk’s habit, with the cowl pulled over his head. His face is not visible, but with a sudden tension you feel sure he is watching you. Abruptly, he straightens and raises his clenched right hand. You stare directly into his eyes; clear, sky blue, and alive with glittering malice. He begins the words of some invocation. A sparkling dust falls from his fingers...

GM: Anyone who says they’re diving for cover at this point automatically evades Caedmon’s Deathlight spell. Osric is quick-witted and will have done this. Other characters will need to roll as normal.

With a crack like thunder, an incandescent white bolt leaps from the wizard towards you. Utter confusion follows. After you pick yourselves up, the wizard has gone; the door bangs open in the wind.

GM: If the characters follow, they see Caedmon getting into one of the boats, a hooded figure (Erik Iceheart) already at the oars. The boat moves off upriver. The other two boats have been sabotaged. Any character with a bow has time to fire 4 arrows before they’re out of range. The first two will miss automatically as the archer adjusts for the wind. The remaining shots are at –4 to hit. If hit, Caedmon will retaliate by Enslaving one of the party who will then try to stop his friends from firing. 

 Inside, Owain is inspecting the damage. Several beams are charred and a few stones around the fireplace are cracked. Shrugging, he begins to set the scattered stools upright. You spot a very small leather pouch on the floor near where Caedmon was sitting. It is empty but for one or two grains of golden dust.

GM: Since he seems relatively unperturbed, Owain may be suspected of having known Caedmon’s intentions. But the innkeeper will maintain (truthfully) that Caedmon, a regular if infrequent visitor, has used his sorcery often enough for Owain not to be startled by it. If asked about the pouch, he will add that Caedmon always wears a number of such pouches at his belt, but on this visit he seemed to have only four. The pouch they have found contained the dragon dust used to cast the Deathlight.

Third Part: The Vough
The next day is even more bitterly cold. You trudge through sparse woodland under a bleak, grey sky. Snow threatens. You spy a splash of red ahead, gleaming against the snow. A wild rose. More are scattered along in a winding trail, though there is no sign of footprints. Examination reveals that the roses have been cut rather than plucked.

GM: It is up to the player-characters whether they investigate this. Osric will go along with the majority decision.

The trail of flowers leads to a stagnant pond in a small copse. The pond is iced over—black, with a powdery sprinkling of freshly fallen snow. It is eerily quiet. As you watch, a cold wind swirls the snow in patterns across the ice. Slowly the patterns coalesce and rise into the silver, spectral image of a beautiful woman. Her hair is long and black; her skin, like alabaster. The only colour is the rubies set in tarnished silver links about her pale throat. Her expression is infinitely sad.

GM: If anyone has collected a rose, she drifts towards them, holding out her hands, imploring. If anyone reaches out to her (perhaps to hand her a rose), she matches her magical attack against their magical defence; if she is successful, they are drawn onto the ice, which has a 15% chance of breaking per person on it. If no one reaches out, she pauses at the edge of the pond for a few moments, then starts to fade. Suddenly (automatic surprise), the ice shatters and a rotted crone, clad in decaying rags, mud and tangled weeds, leaps from the black waters. Her dread shriek chills the blood; match her magical attack against each character’s magical defence, with success meaning that the character stands stock-still, paralysed with terror, for 2d4 combat rounds.

This foul undead being can create Illusion (Dragon Warriors, p. 82) at will. Her chilling touch works in exactly the same manner as a wraith’s (Bestiary, p. 86). She takes no damage from the first hit on her struck by each opponent, but takes double damage when hit by anyone who bears a holy relic of any kind. If slain, she rapidly decomposes into muddy slime.

If she is slain, any roses collected by the party or left lying in the snow will have vanished.

Fourth Part: In the Heart of the Forest
At nightfall, having gathered fuel, you sit around your fire devouring stew. A lone peasant comes into sight gathering wood. He greets you and asks to share the fire for a while. He is fairly young, below-average height, and wears dark green garments of coarse wool.

GM: If questioned, he says he will tell a tale of past and present, a tale of a dragon. Any who listen (Osric and any NPCs will) will fall asleep. The next thing they know will be when they awaken beside the burnt-out fire under a cold afternoon sky. Any player who says their character is turning his attention to anything else as well as, or instead of, listening to the tale will notice the others dozing off. If he asks, he should be told that he feels drowsy himself but can jerk himself back to wakefulness to see a premature smile of triumph on the face of the young ‘peasant’(actually a faerie creature). A single shout will rouse those asleep, but the faerie will have vanished completely, without a trace.

If the party succumb to sleep, they will lose six hours, waking early the next afternoon. This must be made up by pushing on quickly and perhaps even marching on after nightfall. Characters will fight at –1 attack and defence, and be down 1-3 Heath Points, through fatigue after such exertion, until they get a full night’s sleep.

Final instalment in three days. The artwork of the vough is by Jon Hodgson and if it makes you shiver, so it should. And by the way, if you're looking for Dragon Warriors books to run this adventure and you don't hold with piracy, you can buy the legitimate rulebooks from Serpent King Games here and help ensure there are more releases to come. Thanks!

A Ballad of Times Past - part one

Among the beautifully produced and re-edited Dragon Warriors releases from Magnum Opus Press a few years back, you may not have noticed In From the Cold, an anthology of White Dwarf scenarios by me, Oliver Johnson and Mike Polling. The book is currently out-of-print (really, that can still happen even in 2012 – I was amazed too) but hopefully it’s only popped out into the snow to relieve itself and will soon be stomping back over to the fireside and ordering ales all round, courtesy of Serpent King Games, who inherited the DW publishing licence from the éminence grise of British gaming, James Wallis. In the meantime, somebody styling himself the Dark Cavalier has become the self-appointed “publisher” and is offering it to anybody who cares to risk a download from his site. (Cheers, Cav; hope I get the chance to nick your Blu-ray player and laptop some time.)

Still, while not necessarily subscribing to the cause espoused by the brethren of the coast, I can see that, at this time of year, yes, content does want to be free. And in that spirit – and incidentally as a roundhead, not a cavalier – in the run-up to Yule I’m serializing “A Ballad of Times Past”, a seasonal standalone scenario in a world with very little magic. Today we’ve got the background and cast of principal NPCs, then the adventure itself in three instalments over the next nine days, giving you plenty of time to arrange a solstitial RPG session.

The adventure is set in Beorsca, a small kingdom in a land very much like Dark Ages Scandinavia. The practitioners of magic are even scarcer in this world than in Legend: all sorcerer, elementalist, warlock and demonologist spells above 2nd level require, as the material component, a pinch of dragon dust made from the powdered shell of an unhatched dragon’s egg (in hatching, the fledgling drains the magic from the shell). As obtaining dust would involve getting past a protective mother dragon, magic is very rare. One whole eggshell would provide one hundred pinches of dust.

Players should be told that spellcasters are almost unknown, but not why. Characters should be generated specifically for this adventure, and are 5th rank. They can be knights or barbarians (retainers of King Athelred involved from the start). There is also room for one mystic and/or one assassin (from the local abbey and minstrel troupe respectively, who join in as indicated in the text). Mystic spells do not require dragon dust, but in this world there are no mystic spells above 3rd level.

Needless to say, if you're going to be playing in this adventure you should stop reading right now and come back after Christmas!

THE CAST

Osric, the heir to the throne of Beorsca, is not quite 18 years old. A tall and handsome youth, he is probably the sort of warrior his father would have liked to be, for although Athelred has remained doggedly true to the new religion, he never has the effortlessly pure heart of his son. Osric’s long golden hair and grey eyes make him much like a younger version of his father, though he has not the king’s full beard or battle scars.

In his youth, Caedmon was a close friend of Athelred. When they befriended the dragon some 20 years ago, Caedmon was given fifty pinches of dragon dust. He now chafes at the fact that his former friend went on to win a kingdom while he lives in his tower in bitter and lonely seclusion. This resentment eventually drove him both mad and evil. He wants enough dragon dust to have a chance of taking over the kingdom, but failing that he will settle for enraging the dragon into causing widespread destruction.

Caedmon has not borne his 42 years as well as Athelred, He is frail and bent. His hair is sparse, and his complexion is unhealthily sallow. Only his eyes reveal the hidden energies within, for they are a clear and most startling sky-blue.

Erik is a slightly built man in his early thirties. He is of medium height with a handsome face and short, golden brown hair. A travelling mercenary, he came to Beorsca six years ago and fell in with Caedmon. He intends to help the wizard get the dragon dust (hopefully with minimum risk to himself ) and eliminate him once they have won the kingdom from Athelred.

Erik is utterly cold-blooded, and quite willing to dispatch anyone in the way of his plans, hence his nickname.

Erik’s sword, Ymir’s Fang, is a +2 two-handed sword. The sword has been passed down in Erik’s family for generations, but it cannot be possessed by an outsider. If Erik is slain and Ymir’s Fang examined, it will be found to be made of murky ice! It will then melt to a puddle of dirty water within minutes.

The dragon is 10 metres long with coppery-red scales along her body. She is only interested in guarding the egg she laid 18 years ago, which is now about to hatch. She can speak, is fully intelligent, if a little slow on the uptake, and can breathe flame.

Headcases (5)

The first evidence I can find of my predilection for severed-head monsters was way back in 1984 when I wrote the first Dragon Warriors book. That was the death's-head, pictured here by definitive DW artist Jon Hodgson. The description runs:

These vile supernatural creatures have the appearance of a human head with a long horn sprouting from the forehead and black bat-like wings behind the ears. They flap swiftly about their opponents, presenting a very difficult target (hence the high DEFENCE) and attacking with stabs of their sharp horn.

However, during the hours of daylight, the wings and horn of a death's-head become invisible and intangible, rendering it unable to fly. The monster gets around this problem by acquiring a host body. It devours the head of a victim and binds itself magically to the severed neck, using its sorcery to animate the body as a zombie. The death's-head then uses the host body to move around by day, passing itself off as human. It will always be on the lookout for a new host, however, as the decomposition of the body becomes obvious after a few days. A death's-head's disguise is thus 90% perfect on the first day after taking a new host, then 80% on the next day, and so on.

If attacked before sunset, the death's-head is bound to its stolen body and is thus less dangerous. It will use its host body to fight, using any weapon to hand, but the host body will have only the fighting skill of a normal zombie instead of the death's-head's own abilities given below. The fight is resolved just as though it were a combat with a normal zombie, except that any successful blow struck against the monster has a 10% chance of hitting the head and inflicting a wound on the death's-head itself. Otherwise the blow strikes the zombie body and reduces its Health Points.

The moment the sun sinks below the horizon, the death's-head regains its wings and horn and takes to the air. It will then scour the forests and lonely hill roads seeking a new host. It has a special spell, Spellbind, to help it overcome a foe without damaging his/her body. This spell is usable once per night, and cast with a MAGICAL ATTACK of 13. It has a range of 10m and, if successful, will cause the victim to stand in place while the death's-head kills him. Although a Hold Off the Dead spell will keep the stolen body of a death's-head at bay, it will not affect the death's-head itself as these creatures are not undead.

ATTACK 16    with horn (d10, 4 points)
DEFENCE 18
Armour Factor 3
MAGICAL DEFENCE 7
EVASION 7 
Movement: 
zombie host – 6m 
flying  –  30m
Health Points 1d6 + 2
Rank-equivalent: 6th

I'm not sure that I've ever used death's-heads in a game, though the Dragon Warriors scenario "The Honey Trap", written many years later, features a village of eerie critters obviously inspired by the penanggalan or the nukekubi. The reasoning there was probably that the players would expect some kind of vampiric nastiness, given that the adventure was set in Emphidor, but I obviously didn't want it to be too obvious. Come to think of it, I should have thrown in a harmless albino peasant just to incite the PCs into doing something they'd be ashamed of later. The differences from the usual South-east Asian flying heads (the sleepwalking, the taste for honey, bouncing like balloons) would be so that the knowledgeable Orientalists among the players (such as Paul Mason, Tim Harford or Jamie) couldn't accuse me of anatopism.