The wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking

I think I picked up a love of literary sailing from Jack Vance. Or maybe it was earlier, as I've been on Captain Bligh's side since the first time I heard the story of the Bounty.

So it was inevitable that Fabled Lands would feature seafaring adventures like you get in Blood Sword and Down Among the Dead Men. Connective tissue though it is for the rest of the series, I think I enjoyed writing Over the Blood-Dark Sea best of all the FL books.

If you've got the brine in your system too, Prime Games have an update on the Fabled Lands CRPG and it's all about the high seas. Hoist the mainsail!

Coming up tomorrow: how dungeons are a simple container to shape stories, and whether it's better to author a character or just play them.

For art's sake

Finally all the pieces are in place and The Serpent King's Domain, seventh book in the Fabled Lands gamebook series, is about to hatch out into the world. Thank you for your patience – and there I’m not just talking about the two years since the Kickstarter campaign, which is actually a pretty quick turnaround by KS standards, but the twenty-year gap before that. When Pan Macmillan pulled the plug on the FL series back in the ‘90s, Jamie and I thought it was stone dead. Various attempts over the intervening decades to bring it back as a massively-multiplayer game, a CRPG, an app, etc, only raised hopes to dash them again. And then crowdfunding came along and opened up a new way of funding books. Not a particularly efficient way, admittedly – most KS projects are still barely-funded labours of love and/or duty – but it did the trick.

We’ve had Paul Gresty’s finished text for some time now. Richard Hetley meticulously edited it (all 1200 sections) by setting up spreadsheets to keep track of stats and make sure this is the best-balanced and most challenging FL book of all. I typeset it over a month ago, for both the paperback editions (large and regular format) and Megara’s hardback edition for backers. Russ was held up on the interior illustrations for a while for personal reasons, but happily he returned to the job with renewed energy and has delivered some of his best work.

And the final piece of the puzzle arrived at the start of this month. Kevin Jenkins, who these days is swamped with work on Marvel and Star Wars movies, graciously found the time to provide us with three different cover designs, one of which he painted up in some detail before deciding that it would make an interesting change to go for a night-time effect. I've got both paperbacks set up on our print-on-demand service ready to go on sale on Amazon in the New Year, and meanwhile Mikael Louys can be getting on with shipping out deluxe hardbacks to all the backers.

Some people have asked why the new cover isn’t a panorama like the first six. The fact is we have no way of printing books with fold-out covers like the Pan Macmillan editions. The back cover of the large format paperback will be needed for the colour map, in any case.

I’ve never actually seen the physical paintings for the first six books, but I know they’re big. I met Kevin once, back in 2010, to ask if he could help us find clean, text-free copies of the cover art for our new paperback editions. “I’ve got them in my attic,” he said. And he dug them out, set them up in his studio, and spent a good chunk of his weekend photographing them for us to use. How much did he want for us to re-use them? Not a penny. That’s one of the reasons I insisted that he and Russ should be fairly recompensed at their normal rates for work on this book. I’ve seen artists and writers exploited far too often, the people who actually make the content struggling to pay their bills while publishers luxuriate in second homes, which is why I won’t be a party to it.

Some FL fans have asked how the Kickstarter funding will be shared out to pay for the content. The campaign was run by Megara Entertainment SARL, not by Fabled Lands LLP directly, but I can share the details as they have been stated throughout to all backers on the Kickstarter page. The campaign was a model of transparency, thanks to Richard S Hetley, who managed it under the express instruction of Mikael Louys of Megara, who decided to take a back seat following his summary cancellation of the Crypt of the Vampire campaign back in June 2015.

Richard began by showing backers how their pledges would be spent:

That's nicely straightforward, isn't it? As I have commented before, the tricky thing about a Kickstarter for a new book is that you have to pay for writing, editing, typesetting and artwork on top of print and shipping. This pie chart explains where the money is going to be spent in terms anyone can understand.

But wait, it's not quite as simple as all that, because not everybody was simply pledging €35 for a copy of the book. There were other pledge levels such as personalized character drawings. So for the sake of further clarification, Megara maintained an art meter on the page:

That's how it looked by the end of the campaign - gratifyingly full. In the early days there was no guaranteeing it was going to get that far, so Megara identified the two highest art priorities:

First, a new regional map by Russ Nicholson. As the KS page stated: "You cannot play a location-based game if you cannot see a map. At [€550 on the art meter] we will be able to afford a new map. It will be printed in the book as black-and-white, but Russ will draw it in color for the map print also available during this campaign."

Next, upon reaching the €1150 mark on the art meter, €650 could be set aside as the base cost of "a new cover painting by Kevin Jenkins. To be clear: a painted cover by a famous artist costs far more than the above. If we reach the meter mark, we will continue to pay half of all art funding to Kevin Jenkins after this point on the art meter."

Well, the campaign raised €30,589. So, by the art meter formula that was made explicit to backers, the final allocation results in €3300 being owed to Kevin Jenkins for a new cover. Russ's map and interior illustrations meant that €7209 was set aside to pay him. Meanwhile Paul Gresty's 10% share as author netted him €3058.

It's not much considering the talent and creative work involved, is it? Of the total raised, after content costs, Megara has €17,000 left that's earmarked to pay for the printing and shipping of around 490 hardbacks. In other words, the physical production costs are considerably more than the amount allocated to the creative team. So you can see that it's only possible to do a project like this, and attract art and writing skills of this calibre, because of the love and commitment those guys have for the series. In fact, Russ and Kevin were better paid than this back in the mid-90s when they originally helped us create the Fabled Lands series. When you consider that UK inflation since then has been a whopping 78%, our stalwart creatives are getting barely £1000 each in 1995 terms. That's why I'm so grateful to them for agreeing to work at the rates specified on the Kickstarter page, and thus for lending their names and reputations to make the campaign a success.

And by the way, that  €17,000 left for printing and shipping might look like a windfall, but bear in mind these are quality hardbacks and they're being sent to backers all over the world. At least €10,000 is probably eaten up just by printing and postage costs, and that's before you even get to the organizational side of it: spreadsheets of addresses, tracking who paid for what reward, signing bookplates and producing other extras. Even if you ran a successful Kickstarter like this every month, the "profit" isn't enough to run a company on. That's why I've said that it's simply not possible to run a publisher using Kickstarter as the core funding model. Something like this has to be done from the heart. If you've seen Mikael Louys's comments on Kickstarter and Facebook where he lays into me and Jamie, that's my response. I take my hat off to him.

A Kickstarter campaign is a public contract with backers. It tells them what they will get for their money. If they like the deal, they pledge. If not, they click on to another project and spend their money there. It's incredibly refreshing to see a campaign like this where the contract with the backers has been so open throughout. Many projects avoid making promises because they know that Kickstarter's Terms of Use require them to fulfill those promises or refund the money, but Megara has shown exemplary transparency in putting those promises front and centre from day one.

The devotees of the Fabled Lands obviously liked the deal being promised because you pledged in your hundreds to revive the Fabled Lands series. I only hope that if and when Fabled Lands LLP launches our own Kickstarter campaign for book 8, The Lone and Level Sands, that Paul, Richard, Russ and Kevin are still so amazingly generous with their time and effort. It's really because of their help that we are able to do projects like this at all. And because of the passionate intensity of Mikael Louys, who kept asking us if he could publish some of our old gamebooks and finally convinced us to authorize a new one. And, last but very far from least, because of all the FL fans who are willing to put down their hard-earned dollars (okay, euros) to see more exhilarating artwork and thrilling prose by our dedicated creative team.

Uncovering Fabled Lands book 7

Happy Christmas. I know you'll have presents to open and crackers to pull, so I won't keep you. I just thought you might like this glimpse of Kevin Jenkins' cover for The Serpent King's Domain.

Well, sort of. The fact is that Kev changed his mind about the cover after painting this rough, so the finished article looks quite a bit different. You'll see that soon enough. (If you're one of the Kickstarter backers you'll have already seen it.)

In the meantime, if you've been given any book tokens then why not take a look at our US or UK gamebook stores? Or browse through some gamebook and RPG goodies on the Spark Furnace site.

OK, that turkey ain't gonna cook itself....

Latest news on Fabled Lands book 7

The internet is buzzing (quietly) with gossip about the forthcoming Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain. But why make do with hearsay when you can get it straight from the horse's mouth? So here's the author, Paul Gresty, with another update...

Working on a series like Fabled Lands, a moment occasionally comes along that makes you squeal in fanboy (or fangirl) delight. One of those 'squeal' moments came early on for me, in the planning stages of The Serpent King's Domain, when Dave and Jamie opened up their treasure trove of notes of what they'd originally had in mind for the second half of the series. Being able to freely quiz Dave and Jamie regarding their thoughts on, say, the inhabitants of The Desert of Bones, or the theology of Chrysoprais – that's pretty squeal-inducing too. Working with Dave and Jamie to explore and develop these unknown quarters of their great big sandpit has been enormously fascinating, and a huge amount of fun.

But then there's also the flip side to that. There's the gruntwork that's involved in writing a book. Checking punctuation. Checking that every paragraph number that should be in bold text actually is in bold text. Verifying there are no broken 'turn to X' links in the book – for the second time, because you're afraid that a software gremlin has made a change you didn't intend it to. As fun as this work is overall, these are the tasks that make you want to repeatedly bang your head against the wall just to hold the tedium at bay. And, because that's the stage we're currently at, they've been pretty frequent of late.

The good news: the text of The Serpent King's Domain is finished, done, finalised. So too are Russ Nicholson's interior images, and Dave is now diligently slaving away on the final page layout for the book. We're reserving the right for any last-minute minor changes – alterations to the difficulty numbers of tests; things that won't hugely impact the number or length of lines of text in the book. But for all intents and purposes, yes, we're done. As I write this update, I'm also writing the book's back-cover blurb in another window on my computer. That's the point we're at, now.

The only thing we don't yet have is the final cover for the book. But that's moving along too. Kev Jenkins recently sent us an updated image for the cover, now in full colour. It's not absolutely finished yet – but it looks really, really great. I'm looking forward to the moment when we can finally unveil it.

So what comes next? On the creative side of things, Russ still has to do a few direct commissions for high-level backers; we've been talking with the people concerned about that. But that aside, the creative element is pretty much done. Once Dave has finished the page layout, and once we have the final cover, everything is passed across to Megara Entertainment, whose Kickstarter campaign it was and who will handle printing and shipping. There are a handful of smaller miscellaneous project rewards to deal with as well – the artbook PDF, the high-resolution map file, the cross-promotion with The Good, The Bad and The Undead. Megara will shortly be handling those too.

And that's it. Printing and shipping will surely take a while, but after that, we'll be done. With this seventh book in the Fabled Lands series, at least.

As always, thank you, our supportive backers, for helping and allowing us to reach this point.

- Paul Gresty

Have your say on the next Fabled Lands book

A guest post today from Paul Gresty, author of The Serpent King's Domain, the seventh Fabled Lands book, which has been funded by the generosity of Kickstarter backers. As the book is nearly ready for release, Paul recently posted a KS update in which he canvassed the opinions of the backers on several rules points. Then we realized that there are a lot of other experienced Fabled Lands players out there who for all sorts of reasons may not have backed the KS campaign, but who might still have useful answers to those rules questions. So take it away, Paul..

* * *

Excellent news. I heard from Kevin Jenkins recently that he's expecting to send us the finished cover for The Serpent King's Domain in the very near future. Once that's done, we're pretty much ready to move on to printing and shipping to Kickstarter backers. That's the Megara hardcover edition. A paperback edition from Fabled Lands Publishing will follow soon after.

We're fortunate in that the crowdfunded development of this book, in which backers are aware of each stage of the process of creation, allows the opportunity for a dialogue with the book's ultimate readers. Your viewpoints are, frankly, a valuable resource, one that we'd be crazy not to tap into. And so, before we move on to printing, I'd be very curious to get feedback from you on a couple of points of game mechanics.

CALCULATION OF DEFENCE

We've already talked about this on the Fabled Lands blog and the FL Facebook page, but I think the point remains somewhat ambiguous. For a long time there's been debate concerning whether any bonuses to COMBAT conferred by a character's weapons are added to the character's Defence score. I think even Dave and Jamie have found the point somewhat contentious – take a look at the wording of the front matter of the different editions of the various FL books, and try to spot the differences.

Dave, Jamie, Richard S. Hetley (editor of The Serpent King's Domain -- demo here) and I have discussed this point at some length lately – and the ultimate ruling is that any COMBAT bonus from weapons does not count towards Defence. The logic of the matter is as follows, as explained by Richard:

"Nothing else in the game gets two categories of items to boost it. I always presumed that armour existed to raise Defence since weapons have their own use. The numbers bear this out. Thanks to the documentation efforts of others, I see that the highest enemy Combat in the first six books of the Fabled Lands is only 15, so enemies roll 27 at their best; the highest player Defence item is already +10; plus your personal Combat of (probably) 12; plus Rank of a mere 5 and you're at 27 with plenty of slack and no need for a weapon. The absurdity was only visible after multiple books, where the enemies are unable to match a player using all these statistics together. Given that players get this strong after adventuring for long enough, enemies should have been made stronger in the first place to match them."

So, let me throw this open to all Fabled Lands players. What are your thoughts and opinions on the subject?

THE CASE OF THE JADE DEFENDER

A couple of people have pointed out that the description of the Jade Defender, a weapon obtainable in The Court of Hidden Faces, specifically states that a weapon's COMBAT bonus does count towards Defence. That is, it's a COMBAT +3 weapon, that possesses an additional quality of adding an extra +3 to a player's Defence – making it a COMBAT +3, Defence +6 weapon in all.

We've talked about that too. And the overall view is that, in light of the most recent analysis of the rules, that description was incorrect. Should the Jade Defender itself therefore be considered a COMBAT +3, Defence +3 weapon, in that case, to account for that extra Defence bonus – or can it still be viewed as a COMBAT +3, Defence +6 weapon? Me, I'd probably opt for the latter view, even considering that this greatly increases the weapon's value. Retconning the rules is one thing, downgrading that hard-won weapon you've come to rely on is something else.

HOW DIFFICULT SHOULD WE MAKE SPIRIT COMBAT?

The mechanic of spirit combat is a new addition for The Serpent King's Domain. This was partly conceived as a way of presenting enemies that would be a threat to even very experienced characters. A player's spirit combat values are calculated quite differently from physical combat. Rank has no bearing on spirit combat; a player's base Defence score is equal to either the base MAGIC or SANCTITY score (whichever is higher). The player's Nahual value is used in place of the COMBAT stat – and opportunities to increase Nahual are rare (and the player may not want to increase Nahual to its highest level). The choice of weapons and armour that the player may use in spirit combat is limited.

A little background on the evolution of these combats: Richard was the first person to playtest the book, and he found that these spirit combats, while challenging, were also fairly tedious – in some cases, players and enemies would miss each other round after round, only occasionally getting in slight, scratching blows that took a long, long time to whittle down Stamina. And so he rewrote the stats for every spirit combat in the book, increasing each enemy's offensive punch, while also reducing their Defence. In essence, he made it so that enemies hit harder, but die faster.

Some of the combats are difficult. They're meant to be. But this is where, again, I ask your opinions. Can a fight be too difficult? When you, as a player, run up against a really hard fight, is it a welcome challenge – or is it just flat-out frustrating?

I'm going to quote some points from a recent email discussion we had on this subject because I feel that, without giving away stats or spoilers, it demonstrates the sort of threat levels the player may run into. Dave asked if a player could always back away from a spirit combat if they didn't feel ready. Richard's reply:

“You can retreat from one introductory-level fight and one significantly harder fight. The introductory-level one, hopefully, teaches you just how much you need to strengthen yourself before doing the rest. The harder one is escapable. Two other fights are ones that you initiate when you are ready. They are another introductory-level one and, well, a certain other one that's really tough. And the remaining two fights are each unique. One is introductory-level and you can't escape. Another is really tough, but you can only get it after completing major plotlines in other books.”

What do you think, as players of the FL books? Your views would be much appreciated and could make a big difference to this next book and the direction the series takes from this point. You can post comments as replies to this post or on Facebook page (link above). Or, of course, feel free to contact me directly at paulgresty {at} gmail . com (no spaces).

And in particular I'd like to thank the Kickstarter backers for their ongoing support and patience throughout the development of The Serpent King's Domain. They're the ones who have made this book possible.

Paul Gresty

Rumble in the jungle

A picture is worth a thousand words. More than a thousand when it's by a master artist like Kevin Jenkins. So I'll keep this short. Kev has been madly busy on visual design for the next Star Wars movie - or maybe the next but one - but he cleared some time recently to do a few sketches of the cover for the seventh Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain. And when I tell you this is one of the designs we rejected, you'll get a hint of how amazing the finished cover is going to look.

Kev says of this one: "Our hero is taking down an attacker while being surprised by a second assailant, below massive jungle waterfalls with temples carved with massive stone faces." Of course we apologized for dragging him away from a galaxy far, far away but he added, "Believe me, after four years on the same subject it was nice to sketch a dragon."

An awesome guy and an awesome talent. We're lucky to have him. And anyway, I'm a Trekker.

Baby steps in the Weeping Jungle

If you've been waiting for news of the seventh Fabled Lands book - and I know you have - then stop chewing those nails and take a look at this. Paul Gresty has cleared time from his very busy schedule to write us a guest post updating everybody on the book's progress. The nutshell version: the manuscript is finished and it's on to the final furlong. For the juicy details I'll hand you over to Paul...
 

Dave has been kind enough to allow me to write a few words here on the Fabled Lands blog to talk about where we're up to with The Serpent King's Domain. And, this time around, it's big news: we have a finished draft of the book, and we're well into editing. Our editor, Richard S Hetley, is the first adventurer to leave Dunpala for the wilds of the Weeping Jungle. He's currently trekking through the Feathered Lands, and putting the seventh book in this series through its paces.

In editing terms, this brings about a lot of fine-tuning. There' a lot of back and forth discussion right now about the economic consequences of two ports, Dunpala and Begotombo, being so close to one another; about whether a score of ghouls should have a higher Stamina score than that big bull in Cities of Gold and Glory; about whether the new Obfuscation blessing is too similar to the Immunity to Injury blessing in The Court of Hidden Faces.

I've intentionally geared the book towards throwing up some challenges for very high-rank characters, and so it's fascinating to see how Richard tackles it with somebody newly created at 7th rank. The number of locations to visit in the Feathered Lands is considerably higher than in the first six books of the series; consequently, some quest-important items or codewords are proving really hard to track down. Some opponents are probably too tough for a character that's just starting out (hey, that's what resurrection deals are for) and, frankly, there are more than a few paragraph links that are flat-out broken, and need to be fixed. That's where we're at with the text of The Serpent King's Domain right now – we're addressing all of these points.

Dave and Jamie have also been giving valuable input on the setting of Harkuna as a whole – notably how the Feathered Lands relate to other regions in the world, and some details on how the different faiths fit together. This has, dare I say, even allowed for a little tentative planning of books 8 to 12.

As regards the interior artwork, Russ has completed about half the necessary pictures, including all of the high-level backer rewards. The latest news is that he's working on rough outlines of the remaining full-page pieces, and the smaller filler pieces that will intersperse the text.

Kev, our cover artist, is in a similar position. Before Christmas I wrote up a comprehensive brief for him about the setting, and the notable people and places within the Feathered Lands; he's now partway through his black-and-white roughs. He'll be back in touch with us shortly, with a more complete image.

I'll take the opportunity to address a point that Michael Hartland brought up on the Kickstarter page (and that was somewhat echoed by James Cartwright): "What's the chance of getting the book finished by June, do you think?" On the writing side of things, it'll be finished way before then. I'm hesitant to make grand promises on top of that, because there are still things like artwork and page layout to consider, and then hiccups can always occur with printing and shipping. But I'll provisionally say that the chances are really good.

And I'll conclude with a point of precision about how to most efficiently direct questions about The Serpent King's Domain. Asking questions here on the FL blog is fine; better yet is to contact Mikael Louys at Megara Entertainment, as Megara are responsible for running the Kickstarter and publishing the book. That can be done through Megara's website or the Kickstarter page. At this stage all questions are likely to be referred back to me anyway, so please feel free to go ahead and contact me directly. I welcome and encourage all inquiries, comments and criticisms, and I'll get back to you as soon as my frail mortal body will allow.

As always, huge thanks to all backers for your support in this process, and for your patience so far. The Serpent King's Domain would not exist without you.

- Paul.

Checking in on Fabled Lands book 7

A guest post today from Paul Gresty, who is currently chained to his desk completing The Serpent King's Domain, the long-awaited seventh book in the Fabled Lands series.

Dave has kindly invited me to write a few words on the Fabled Lands blog to talk about progress on The Serpent King's Domain. If you've been following the Kickstarter backer updates, some of the information here will be familiar – and some will be brand new.

It's been a busy year in Ankon-Konu. The Serpent King's Domain will be longer than any of the Fabled Lands books so far. Currently, the draft of the book is sitting at one-thousand-and-something paragraphs. And we're really into the home stretch now – the random encounters are finished, all the main quests are done; we're at the point where we're fleshing out the cities a little, and adding some of those touches that every Fabled Lands book needs (“How much does it cost to book passage to Smogmaw?”).

It's hard to talk about my progress on Fabled Lands without also mentioning The Frankenstein Wars, another Kickstarter project that took place around the same time, and my other big project of 2016. Both projects are moving steadily towards their conclusion; the deadline for a full draft of both texts is imminent (for more information on TFW, feel free to go check out this project update that recently went online.

Regarding The Serpent King's Domain, one of the jobs that remains is to go back and fill in some of the treasures that the player can discover, and include some new and interesting magic items – things that fit neatly alongside the artefacts that you can discover in the first six books, but that also have a healthy dose of originality as well.

I'll confess that item creation is an area I've found surprisingly challenging. I don't want to make SKD into some sort of arms race – the player's focus shouldn't solely be on picking up super-powered items; nor do I want every player to have the same list of possessions once they've thoroughly explored the book. One tentative idea is to include items that have both advantages and disadvantages, such as:

373 

If you possess (XXXXXXX ITEMS TO CONSTRUCT CLOAK) Bellentacq can, quite reluctantly, create a darkling cloak. Such a cloak will grant a +7 bonus to your THIEVERY score while you possess it, but it will also temporarily reduce your SANCTITY score to 1, and prevent your SANCTITY score from rising by any means (including bonuses from other items). Note that you need not actually wear the cloak to receive this effect; so long as it is in your possession these changes to your Ability scores will apply (also note that, of course, leaving this cloak in storage will remove its effect from you). If you ask Bellentacq to carry out this work, remove the requisite items from your Adventure Sheet. In their place note darkling cloak (+7 THIEVERY, SANCTITY temporarily reduced to 1). Should you discard the cloak, or store it somewhere, you lose the bonus to THIEVERY, but your SANCTITY score will return to its normal value. Turn back to 167.

So, you have an item that grants a great big bonus to THIEVERY – but your SANCTITY will take a hit. Is the gain worth the loss? I'm guessing that some players will think it is, and some won't.

Another way to differentiate equipment lists for different playthroughs might be to include items that have various powers for different professions – which has a handy knock-on effect of helping to distinguish the various professions at higher ranks. For example:

711 

The sacrosanct sabre will grant a COMBAT bonus equal to half the wielder's SANCTITY, rounding down, and not including bonuses from items. So, a wielder with a SANCTITY of 11 would use the sabre as a COMBAT +5 weapon. In addition, if a Priest possesses this item, this will allow him or her to have a maximum of two SANCTITY blessings at any one time (rather than the normal maximum of one).
If you keep this item, note the sacrosanct sabre (COMBAT bonus = half SANCTITY) on your Adventure Sheet.
Turn to 488.

The specific advantage for a Priest character is not enormous here; it's more a distinction that adds flavour rather than one that grants world-shattering power. Certainly, the item should be cheaper, or easier to acquire, than some of the COMBAT +6 weapons that appear in the first books (since that's the maximum bonus it'll have anyway).

For a while I've been thinking about opening a discussion on magic items on the Fabled Lands Facebook group – but then I got angry at the internet and deleted my Facebook account. Regardless, I'll open up that conversation here, instead – what sort of items do people want to see in The Serpent King's Domain? Feel free to chime in in the comments section below, or even to contact me directly by hitting the link.

Really, if people have any ideas for magic items – maybe something that isn't too powerful, that fits in with the jungle-themed setting – I would love, love, love to hear them.

So, to round up: the text is nearing completion. Expect a full first draft around Christmastime – which will then have to go through editing and page layout and whatnot. Regarding artwork, we've been talking to both Kevin Jenkins (cover) and Russ Nicholson (interiors) recently. It's a little soon to make big pronouncements, but that's moving forward as well. I'll tentatively say that project backers will have a book in their hands in the early part of 2017.

We'd like to thank...

The Kickstarter to fund The Serpent King's Domain has closed to the accompaniment of tickertape, fanfare and the popping of champagne corks. Although the campaign was run by Megara Entertainment, not by me and Jamie, naturally we're delighted to see that there's still life in that series we created two decades ago. And there are some people we need to thank for that.

First Mikael Louys, founder of Megara Entertainment, who has been a champion for the Fabled Lands series for many years. Mikael isn't just the prime mover of Megara and the guy who nagged us until we agreed to do it, though. He also now has the hard work of typesetting, printing and shipping out all those books. If you've seen any of Megara's collector's edition hardbacks you'll appreciate that they take quite a bit of set-up, and that's all down to Mikael. It's no exaggeration to say that without his energy and enthusiasm, this Kickstarter would never have happened. So a big thank you, Mikael!

Thanks also to Richard S Hetley, who has planned and run the Kickstarter campaign as well as catching typos and keeping everybody calm and civil to each other through the fraught times of bitten nails, torn hair and clacking worry-beads. I have always admired Richard, but never more so than in the last month. His ability to remain courteous, good-tempered, professional and insightful, often in extremely trying circumstances, has won the respect of the whole creative team. If you want to hire Richard to run your own Kickstarter, or for his skills as an editor of books and games, go right ahead - you'll never regret it. Just leave him some time free to work with us, won't you?

Then there are our artists, Kevin Jenkins and Russ Nicholson. When we relaunched the Fabled Lands series a few years ago, we asked Kevin about reproducing his magnificent cover paintings. He was right in the middle of work on a motion picture (possibly Thor: The Dark World - see picture above) but he spent a precious weekend getting the paintings out of the loft, remounting them, and photographing them for us. When we offered payment, Kev wouldn't hear of it. A world-class talent and a thorough gentleman into the bargain.

And Russ, of course, is really the third member of the Fabled Lands creative core team. It's inconceivable that there could be a new FL book without Russ to bring the scenes to life visually in his fluid, characterful and imaginative style. Bear in mind that any Kickstarter for a print book has only a very narrow "profit margin", so Megara can't afford to have as many illustrations as in the original Pan Macmillan books of the 1990s, but thanks to Russ for clearing his schedule in order to produce a new batch of dazzling pictures and maps.

At the head of all of those guys, Paul Gresty is the one who actually has to write the book. He's doing that for next to nothing (that imaginary profit margin again) and he already wrote the demo for free. Writers often have to labour for nothing but a thank you, and sometimes not even that. So huge thanks, Paul - we know that the Fabled Lands is in safe hands with you.

And naturally we also want to thank everybody who actually pledged to make the campaign a success. But out of all those wonderful folks I particularly want to tip my hat to Gavin Orpin (who backed The Frankenstein Wars KS that we did with Cubus Games recently) and Ella Jennings, who gave freely of her time to advise the Megara team on how to turn their publicity machine up to eleven.

No time to rest now, though. As one door closes, another swings open - and already the Kickstarter for The Good, the Bad and the Undead by Ashton Saylor and Jamie Thomson is shooting towards its target. Check out the demo here. And in case you're wondering: yes, of course there will be a Kickstarter for the eighth FL book, The Lone and Level Sands. That campaign won't be run by Megara Entertainment, though, because they're going to have their hands full with a series of Kickstarters involving one of the top names in '80s gamebooks. (I don't think I can say who it is yet, but you'll be amazed.) We wish them well, and Fabled Lands LLP will be retaining the team of Paul, Russ, Kevin and Richard to launch our own Kickstarter for FL8 as soon as FL7 is out in paperback.

Illustrations by Fabled Lands cover artist Kevin Jenkins

Fabled Lands at #1

More news about the Kickstarter being run by Megara Entertainment (based in France) to create a new Fabled Lands book. We could already see the campaign was going great guns (already at 340% of its intial target as I write this) but now Richard S Hetley, who planned and is running the campaign for Megara, tells me that it is the top-rated project originating in France that's running on Kickstarter at the moment. Not near the top, right there in pole position. Formidable!

The campaign may have attained its initial target (within 45 minutes of launch, as a matter of fact) but when you're climbing the mountain of launching an all-new book from scratch, every pledge counts. More money raised means the book can have more artwork and more story content, some of it in the form of personalized locations and characters.

Personally I'm hoping for a full triptych painting by internationally renowned movie concept artist Kevin Jenkins (see below) as well as maps and interior illustrations by Russ Nicholson (who else?). And a high enough final figure means that Jamie and I can seriously reopen the possibility of completing the series. Want to see that happen? You can pledge here.

 Concept art by Kevin Jenkins

Take another kick

You don't need to be Clint Barton to have spotted the new Kickstarter tab in the sidebar. Under licence from Fabled Lands LLP, Megara Entertainment are looking for backing for a new Fabled Lands book. See, it only took nineteen years.

The Serpent King's Domain is being written by Paul Gresty (pictured below with me and Jamie). I've just been reading the 127-section playable demo that he's already finished. Take a look at that demo and you'll see that Paul's writing style achieves the perfect blend of modern, up-to-date immediacy and prose quality (something the old '80s and '90s gamebooks were always weak at, to be frank) while retaining the authentic feel of classic FL-style encounters and characters. The best parallel I can think of is the Battlestar Galactica reboot: a thoroughly fresh and exciting new take that still manages to show warmth and respect for the original.

The Kickstarter page itself is here. It's not running for a whole month like a lot of KS campaigns; the last day is August 3. If you're interested in backing it, then, it's probably best to get over there sooner rather than later.

So is the money being raised to pay Paul? Not really; he's working on this mainly as a labour of love. So is it for typesetting? No, Mikaël Louys at Megara will be doing that. Mostly the Kickstarter is centred around the 'art meter' which is a nifty little financial instrument that Richard S Hetley has devised so that you can see how your pledges go towards funding a magnificent colour cover by Kevin Jenkins (that's his work above from Guardians of the Galaxy) and of course maps and interior artwork by Russ Nicholson. There's a pie chart on the Kickstarter page on which Megara Entertainment set out exactly how they are going to spend every dollar raised. So here's hoping that 7 is a lucky number.

It's in the trees

More than two decades the Serpent King has been out there in the jungle waiting for us to come find him. And now at last the machetes are ready, the insect repellent is packed, and the team is ready to set out. The Kickstarter campaign for The Serpent King's Domain will run through July and, with your help, a new corner of the Fabled Lands will be opened to explorers.

Who's on the expedition? Jamie and I are at the wharf to wave off the intrepid Paul Gresty; he'll be your guide. We're hoping to have Russ Nicholson along as cartographer, and with a cover painting (sorry, I can't keep the metaphor going) by Kevin Jenkins, concept artist on such blockbuster movies as Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: The Dark World, Edge of Tomorrow, World War Z and others. No promises, we're still negotiating, but hopefully they'll be on board by the time the campaign launches.

This is going to be one of Megara Entertainment's "collector's edition" hardbacks, and the tricky thing about crowdfunding a book like that is that you have to pay for the printing and shipping, leaving not a whole lot to pay for writing, editing, typesetting and art. Of course, all that anybody on Kickstarter really cares about is art (ooh, shiny things) so Megara have come up with an art meter that allows backers to specifically pledge for extras that will largely go towards paying for artwork.

Talking of collector's editions, Megara have The War-Torn Kingdom and Cities of Gold and Glory (Fabled Lands books 1 and 2) for sale in uniform format with the new title. You'll have to do some rooting around on their site to find the books, but if you're willing to venture into the dark interior of Ankon-Konu then a little bit of online store navigation shouldn't present too many challenges.

So, while making sure to keep enough to pledge for The Frankenstein Wars and The Good, the Bad and the Undead, remember that July is the last best hope for Fabled Lands book 7 and spare some shards for a good cause, guv. I'll leave you with some stirring words from Jamie Thomson that, if I wasn't one of the authors, would certainly convert me to being an FL fan:

"The Fabled Lands are, for me, the best game books we ever wrote, a vast, sprawling sandbox world of adventure and exploration with a big streak of dry, wry humour. And all of it done with words. No computers, tablets or iPhones. Just words. It’s a wonderful thing to see it rise again with The Serpent King’s Domain. Hopefully this will be the beginning of the completion of the rest of the series."

Unearthing the Lich Lord

Oliver Johnson’s Lord of Shadow Keep was supposed to appear as a Fighting Fantasy book, but it got switched to the Golden Dragon series at the thirteenth hour. I wonder if that was why, when I finally got around to co-writing a Fighting Fantasy book, I called it The Keep of the Lich Lord...?

Probably not. Jamie and I submitted a whole bunch of concepts to the editors at Puffin, and Keep was a long way from being our favourite. It was rather odd that they picked it, come to think, as a quick glance on Wiki suggests that, Black Vein Prophecy excepted, the surrounding books in the series were all horror-inflected fantasy built on the very similar premise of raiding a monstrous super-villain's secret base. I guess Jamie and I aren’t the only ones who spent our formative years steeped in 007 and Hammer movies.

The deal with those FF books was that the authors got 60% of the royalty and Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson got 40%. Or possibly it was the other way round. You can’t really copyright a concept, but they established the brand and the split struck us as more than fair. When Icon Books picked up the series from Puffin (which, incidentally, is a bit like the BBC throwing Doctor Who to Canal+ in the early ‘90s) authors were offered a deal to sell their rights. Jamie and Mark Smith gave up Talisman of Death and Sword of the Samurai, but I make a point of never parting with copyright unless I’m paid crazy money. So Jamie and I kept Keep.

When I was prepping The Castle of Lost Souls for re-release, I briefly entertained the notion of relocating it to Golnir. The tone of the book just felt too whimsical for Fabled Lands, so that plan got dropped, but Jamie and I continued tossing around some other ideas. And we kept coming back to The Keep of the Lich Lord.

Obviously Fighting Fantasy fans would rather see Keep re-released using the FF world and system. I appreciate that. We can’t because we don’t have the rights, and anyway we have a gentlemen’s agreement not to make a big deal about it having been an FF book when publicizing the new edition. Not that we ever do any publicity per se, but you get the picture.

All of which is why Lord Mortis is now rising from the dead on an obscure but strategically important archipelago close to the Unnumbered Isles. You can start the book with a new character, or you can get an existing FL character to Dweomer and pick up the story there. We’re calling these single-story specials Fabled Lands Quests – though I admit to being slightly at a loss as to which other books could be adapted in the same way. Maybe a new version of Castle of Lost Souls, or the long-awaited reworking of Eye of the Dragon? Suggestions welcome!

To fit the adventure into the Fabled Lands, I wrote a new introduction set in Dweomer. But what to do with the old intro..? Recently on the blog, MikeH was asking about extras in our books. Well, Mike, you’ll be pleased to know that we have shamelessly swiped your idea and stuck our own names on it. This new edition of Keep has a wealth of cool stuff including the original introduction as an appendix, a section describing all the other concepts that could have become Fighting Fantasy #43, and a foreword in which I talk about the process of adapting the book from Titan to the Fabled Lands.

Anything else you want to know? Oh, artwork, of course. We don’t have the rights to the original FF illustrations so we couldn’t use those. Obviously, this being a sort-of Fabled Lands book, some new pictures by Russ Nicholson would have been great, but all-new art is expensive. We have the next best thing: thanks to the generosity of our friends at Megara Entertainment, the new edition features artwork from their Keep of the Lich Lord app of a few years back. Leo Hartas kindly let us use his gorgeous map, which appears in its full-colour glory on the back cover. And the front cover painting is courtesy of Kevin Jenkins, being the inside flap detail (as if you didn’t know) from the triptych of Over the Blood-Dark Sea.

Zero Dark Zombie

If you're any kind of a gamebook fan, you don't need me to tell you that this is another of Leo Hartas's fine fantasy maps. In fact, I see he even signed it, so that'd be the tip-off then.

Stayng Island (named after Jamie's shirt front when he's been eating spaghetti bolognese) was the setting for Fighting Fantasy book 43: The Keep of the Lich Lord - the only one that I wrote. Or co-wrote, rather. The adventure involved a commando raid on an undead warlord's fortress. Jamie did the first 200 paras up till the fortress gate, I wrote the rest. (More or less, though we no doubt did little extra bits in each other's section to make sure it all meshed together.)

When Icon Books started republishing the FF series, Jamie and I kept the rights to Lich Lord. You may even have seen the Megara app a few years back that was loosely based on it. Now we're thinking about republishing it, probably whisking it out of FF's world of Alan and dropping it down someplace in the Violet Ocean. Maybe right in the middle. That way, everybody who says there are no complete adventures (really?) in Over the Blood-Dark Sea will have to eat their words.

The only hold-up is artwork. Megara produced some nice full-colour illustrations for the app, but those were fairly low-res and I don't know how well they would reproduce in black and white. Also, we don't have a cover and, much as I'd like to get original FL artist Kevin Jenkins to do one, he's far too busy (and expensive) these days. But those hitches aside, I think you'll be seeing this back in print before too long.

Kickstarter - the results are in

No need to look glum. I don't know what's going on with quiff boy and those other fellows in Bob Harvey's picture above, but the Way of the Tiger campaign on Kickstarter has now concluded and it was an outstanding success.  If you didn't have enough money to buy one of the full-cover hardbacks, don't despair. There will be a paperback edition from Fabled Lands Publishing sometime next year.

Fabled Lands book seven? It's the inevitable question. We're certainly considering it. But if you're thinking it would be a shoo-in on Kickstarter, I do just have to point out a couple of caveats.

Nobody actually gets to take home forty thousand dollars for The Way of the Tiger. Kickstarter takes a fee off the top. Artists must be paid. The text must be scanned, cleaned up and edited. Printing, packaging and postage eats up most of what remains.

And Way of the Tiger was already written - six books of it, at any rate - and the new artwork was able to build on what Bob Harvey and the cover artist had aleady done.

In contrast, FL book 7 needs to be written. It must have all-new illustrations by Russ. (Everyone agree? Thought so.) An awesome cover image too that must hold its own beside Kevin Jenkins's classic paintings. And then there's editing and typesetting. That all has to be paid for by the profit margin, not the whole amount raised.

Profit is not the right word anyway, as the hundreds of man-hours that Richard S Hetley, Mikaël Louys, David Walters and others put into running the WOTT Kickstarter campaign were purely a labour of love You could say, in effect, that Kickstarter took all their unpaid efforts at one end and turned those into a couple of thousand bucks to pay editors and artists with.

Of course, that's not all a Kickstarter campaign does. Its main value is as a publicity campaign to make people aware that Way of the Tiger is back. If new readers flock to join the nostalgia buffs willing to spend $50 a book, then it becomes a viable business.

About a decade ago, there was a show on British television called Restoration.The idea was to get the viewers to vote which of several worthy but crumbling old buildings would get lottery funding. Each project had to explain how the restored building would save itself from sliding off into penury again. In most cases you had well-intentioned twits pitching the repurposing of (say) an 18th century Shropshire manor house into an arts commune. "Artists will live here and paint and the public can come and buy their work, and that will pay for maintenance of the property." They might just as well have dynamited the bloody building right there and then.

Faced with the exact same problem, the Landmark Trust came up with an ingenious solution. Charitable donations pay to restore old buildings, which are then rented out to the public as holiday homes via a second, non-charitable organization whose profits go to sustaining the buildings. This works because it is a real business. A successful Kickstarter needs to be less like Nigel Means-Well, more like the Landmark Trust.

What that boils down to is whether Way of the Tiger or Fabled Lands can make the next step. Can they go from having a hundred or so fans who remember them with open-walleted affection to several thousand fans who will buy the paperbacks and apps at a moderate price? We'll test the water with WOTT paperbacks next year, and that may indeed point the way to Fabled Lands books 7, and 8, and 9, and...

Whoops, mustn't get carried away!

Some like the perfume in Spain...

Listen carefully. I shall say this only once...

Who am I kidding? I'm sure to keep saying it. Jamie and I would love to continue the Fabled Lands series. We have some ideas of our own, and more importantly we have a team of trusted writers who we could work with so that it wouldn't take till the first peal of eternity to get it all finished.

Here's the but. Writers need paying. Even if Jamie and I don't pay ourselves, as we often don't, the writers and artists we work with have mortgages, kids, cats and goldfish to feed. I know what you're thinking. Feed the goldfish to the cats; it's a logic puzzle. Unfortunately, mortgage lenders don't accept repayment in the form of children, however much we all wish they would.

So, what about Kickstarter? The sonic screwdriver of funding, answer to every problem.

I did a post this week over on the Mirabilis blog about using Kickstarter to fund a publishing operation. (The t-shirt version: you can't. The longer version: unless you're famous.) This is not to say Kickstarter isn't a grand idea. You may remember that our good friends at Megara used it to launch their Arcana Agency gamebook, The Thief of Memories, and that was a very successful campaign. My buddy James Wallis used in to get the ball rolling on his Alas Vegas role-playing game. And just today - just today! - Sandy Petersen raised $231,000 for his Cthulhu Wars boardgame.

Let's not try to draw the graph that goes through that last one. It's Cthulhu, after all, and Mr Petersen has a track record adapting Mr Lovecraft's creations to a gaming context. It's an average of $195 per backer - significantly higher than usual for a game project. That doesn't necessarily mean Sandy will be on a Gulfstream to the Bahamas this weekend. The money "raised", you see, actually has to pay for stuff. Manufacture of playing pieces, a board, payment to the artists, postage.

In short, a business with a turnover of a quarter of a million is not making a profit of a quarter million. Or anything like.

Most gamebook Kickstarters begin with books that are already written, or (as in the case of Arcana Agency) that are being funded by enthusiam and willing work as much as by upfront cash. The snag about Fabled Lands is that we have six books to write, each around 750 sections. And then there's the art. Six lovely colour paintings - well, we can't get Kevin Jenkins back, much as I'd like to, as he's an art director at Framestore now and FL couldn't even pay for him to do a sketch on a napkin. And call it a hundred and twenty interior illustrations. Once those are all in, we can set somebody to do the typesetting.

And after all of that is done, we can launch a Kickstarter.

Jamie and I do plan to do something on Kickstarter. But to begin with it needs to be with books that are already written. If we raise some staggering sum and if, after parcelling up all those copies of Blood Sword or whatever, we are left with anything resembling a profit, you can be sure we'll plough it back into new projects.

What Kickstarter really is, and what it works brilliantly at, is a combined tool for pre-subscription sales and publicity. (Hmm, could that be why they gave it the name? Exactly what it says on the tin, right?) Moreover, this is publicity that generates money instead of costing money - though admittedly with a strong upfront risk component. So that's how Jamie and I are planning to use it. We want to build awareness of our many classic gamebook series. Yes, I know you know, but if we expect to get all the way across the Violet Ocean we're going to need a bigger boat. So expect to see some of our work appearing in Kickstarter campaigns over the next six months. And, if you like what you see, throw a few shards our way. You can have a free ride on our Gulfstream, honest.

Fabled Lands Book 6 is back in print

The new edition of Fabled Lands Book 6 goes on sale today. As you can see from Kevin Jenkins's cover, the action takes place in the Oriental land of Akatsurai, which has a strong flavour of Heian and Kamakura Japan with a little bit of Thai, Burmese and Chinese folklore thrown in for good measure - although, to avoid the usual archly indulgent exoticism of a Western writer looking East, I mostly avoided Japanese terms. So no ninja, samurai are "knights", and the Emperor is referred to as the Sovereign, a better translation of the role in the period I was drawing on for inspiration. (Sixteenth century explorer Will Adams thought the Japanese Emperor was more like a Pope.) I would have used the term Lord Protector instead of Shogun, too, except that might have caused confusion with the title of General Marlock in Book 1.

The blurb is a bit small to read on the image here, so to save you eye-strain:

The LORDS OF THE RISING SUN rule the exotic kingdom of Akatsurai. But proud warrior clans constantly seek to overthrow them. In the turmoil of war, there are countless opportunities for a quick-witted adventurer. Will you spy for the Shogun? Become one of the Sovereign's chivalrous knights? Or just play one side against the other in your pursuit of riches and power? 

Track down the elusive, raven-winged Tengu to learn the secret arts of sorcery and swordplay. Defeat the vampires, skilled in martial arts, who guard the Lost Tomb of the Necromancer. Enter the dreadful cloisters of the Noboro Monastery, where you will fight the most dangerous opponent of all — yourself.

The proof

Proofs, plural, that should be. Not long now...!

Arachnophilia

No prizes for spotting where the image above comes from. Unfortunately, as the new paperback editions of the Fabled Lands books don't have the large format and fold-out cover flaps of the original books, this beautiful big mother got the chop. Unlike the notorious Lorna the Leprechaun, however, I cut her with a heavy heart.

Once upon a time in the East

A mock-up cover image just to show that this one is coming along too. At current estimates, I'd reckon on early September for The Court of Hidden Faces and sometime in October (maybe November) for Lords of the Rising Sun.

While editing the book I came across a passage that seems best to invoke Kevin Jenkins's atmospheric cover - a scene inspired, as cineastes and wuxia enthusiasts will not need to be told, by King Hu's classic A Touch of Zen:

"You are standing in the weed-choked courtyard. Pampas grass stands all around to the level of your shoulders, dampening your clothes with dew as you press forward. Clouds of midges rise like smoke into the air to swirl about in the low sunlight..."