What I like about the new generation of open-world books is the way they take the concept as a springboard, not a straitjacket. Steam Highwayman gives you a role to fill in the world, though you have considerable freedom in deciding how you go about it. Alba is a more directed story experience, like a literary The Long Dark. And Legendary Kingdomshas a party of characters with their own relationships and an epic story set in a detailed fantasy world.
Oh, and there's Vulcanverse of course, which has companions and a story arc that builds in from the first four books to culminate in a finale that the MCU wouldn't be ashamed of. And there's never been a better time to try it out, incidentally.
But I digress. Now comes Expeditionary Company by celebrated gamebook authors David Velasco and Riq Sol. This is more than just a gamebook, though. It's almost a mash-up of roleplaying game, boardgame and multiple-choice adventure, with notes of Expedition and To Carry A Sword. Download the free demo and see what I mean.
But it looks to be much more than just a blend of those elements, with a compelling lore and world all its own. What I especially like is the depth of the backstory: a mystery to be uncovered that not only sets up some dubious saviours (or more likely outright scheming bad guys) in the form of the Auric, it also provides the dramatic tension between travelling to make money and exploring the wilderness to find out more. It's a background that would do justice to a series of fantasy novels. This is how gamebooks grow up.
Tragically the Kickstarter was cancelled, so we can only hope the authors find another way to fund this innovative project. Perhaps a games publisher will get behind it, or maybe a new crowdfunding effort will raise the money needed. It's not easy (I can't even figure out how to Kickstart any of my own projects) but I'm really rooting for this one.
September is kind of gamebook month, what with International Gamebook Day (okay, that was August) and then the Fighting Fantasy convention. I didn't make it along to FFF -- after all, I only wrote half of one Fighting Fantasy book, so my connection to it is rather spurious -- but to do my bit I've reduced, nay slashed, the price of The Hammer of the Sunwhile stocks last or until October 1, whichever comes first.
You can play the Vulcanverse books in any order, going back and forth on multi-stranded quests just like in Fabled Lands, but The Hammer of the Sunis the big one. At 1706 sections it's like two FL books combined. The discount applies to the paperback edition, which you can get at one-third off the usual price (UK) or almost half-price (US) for this month only.
And while we're on the subject of open-world gamebooks, here's some more good news. Martin Noutch, author of the superb Steam Highwaymanbooks, is creating a new four-book series called Saga for Spidermind Games, who publish the hugely successful Legendary Kingdoms gamebooks. Saga is set in the days of the Vikings, is described by the author as "atmospheric, morally ambiguous, and written with a love of place", and if like me you're an enthusiast for all things Norse then you'll want to bookmark that right now.
(Image by Wombo Dream, which has nothing to do with The Hammer of the Sun but I've been playing with it this week and I liked the Ditko-ness of this one.)
If that picture rings a bell, you may have an eye like an A.I. but you'll also appreciate that gloomviles from an early Golden Dragon gamebook have found their way into the latest issue of Dragon Warriors magazine Casket of Fays. This issue has a sandbox campaign (my kind of game, that) set on the moors, magic items, creatures, adventure seeds, and a feature on the games that characters (not players) enjoy in the lands of Legend.
And while you're on DriveThruRPG don't fail to pick up Paul Partington's latest Dragon Warriors gamebook Scourge of the Shadows. It's a 480-section adventure set in Ereworn and, like Casket, it's absolutely free.
Also, though it's not related to Dragon Warriors or Fabled Lands, don't forget to check out the Kickstarter for the third Legendary Kingdoms book, Over the Bloo-- no, I mean Pirates of the Splintered Isles. Open world gamebook adventure, except with a party of characters instead of a single PC. You can get a sense of what it's like from the playthrough here:
In case the title isn't enough of a hint, LK is an open world gamebook series in the style of Fabled Lands. What that means is that you can start in lots of different places, take the kind of character you want, pick your own goals, and explore the world however you choose by going back and forth between the books, each of which covers a different region.
The grandfather of open world gamebooks is Eric Goldberg, who pioneered the idea (though he may not have realized it) in 1985 with his boardgame Tales of the Arabian Nights. That seemed to me what gamebooks ought to be: a roleplaying campaign in solo Choose Your Own Adventure form.
Jamie and I pitched an open world gamebook series called Hero Quest to publishers in 1987, and later repackaged the concept as Knights of Renown in 1989, but with still no takers. It wasn't until six years later that we convinced Pan Macmillan to do the Fabled Lands series, and by then the gamebook craze was dying out. That's why we only managed the first six books of the planned twelve.
Meanwhile I'd be quite keen to write the Victorian survival horror gamebook Shadow King (think: H G Wells meets The Long Dark) but I'm too averse to social media and too deficient in marketing nous to run the Kickstarter campaign needed to fund it. Fans of open world gamebooks won't be short of alternatives. It may have taken three decades for the wider reading public to catch up with the concept, but I'm betting it has a bright future ahead.
When no less an authority than Guy Sclanders says he's "blown away" by a new open-world gamebook series, it's worth taking notice. And even as I write this several thousand Kickstarter backers have done exactly that, propelling the second Legendary Kingdoms book to more than fifty times its funding goal within two days.
The campaign runs until April 15, so if you're into multi-part solo gamebooks set in a modifiable sandbox world with all the traditional fantasy trappings (and if you're not then what brought you to this blog?) then you might want to give this one a spin.
Still need convincing? Take a look at Marco Arnaudo's review on YouTube. I'll just cover a couple of points Mr Arnaudo raises there. First the use of "you" to refer to a party of characters in a gamebook. I did that in Blood Sword, where up to four people can play together, and in English it presents no problems. It's how you address a group of characters in a roleplaying game, after all: "You advance along the chamber towards the sound of chiming and the smell of musty cinnamon" or whatever. Of course, in a gamebook it calls for judicious phrasing. "You take a sip of wine and lean forward to address the king" sounds ridiculous if applied to several characters at once -- that's synchronized sipping, an Olympic event! But most of the time it's fine. Indeed, how else could you address the players as a group?
Mr Arnaudo also raises an old bugbear for Fabled Lands players, namely the way that fights in later books are impossibly tough for those coming from Book One, and fights in earlier books childishly easy if you start in, say, Book Six. Well, we thought about it. If I was writing the books now I'd probably not have characters get so powerful, D&D-style, as they go up in rank. The challenge would be flatter across all the books. You don't get to superhuman skill-levels in Dragon Warriors or Tirikelu, where any fight could always be deadly.
What I wouldn't do is the combat matrix Mr Arnaudo suggests, where the monsters scale up in proportion to the player-characters' power level. All that achieves is breaking the suspension of disbelief. If you're going to do that, far better just to make combat ability fixed or nearly flat, as I said. It achieves the same effect without rubbing the reader's nose in it.
That said, the Fabled Lands books are numbered; the difficulty level is right there on the spine. If you want to play without cheating you can just take a character in Book One and work your way out from the safer and more civilized lands to the more dangerous ones covered by later books. I'd rather have had a series where you can start anywhere and play through in any order, and that would have meant rules that added more versatility as you levelled up rather than increasing your raw power. But I don't think the way the FL books did it is a fundamental flaw.
In other news, Jamie and I are hard at work on the Vulcanverse gamebooks. These have a Graeco-Roman fantasy vibe that at first didn't excite me; I usually prefer either original worlds like Tekumel, Abraxas or the Dying Earth, or else historical settings like Sparta. But Jamie reminded me that Greek myth isn't the defanged heroes-and-monsters playground of kids' picture books. The real myths are dark, bloody, nightmarish tales full of vengeance and atrocity. I should have remembered that from the haunting Wrath of the Godscomic strip (falsely attributed to Michael Moorcock) that was filled with stuff that would give you cold sweats in the still hours of the night. That's the flavour we're aiming for, not the literal myths but a new and twisted version of them that evokes the feel of God of Warand Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
The Vulcanverse gamebooks are open-world, like Fabled Kingdoms and Legendary Lands, but there's an overarching plot that builds over the whole series as you uncover an ancient mystery that threatens the stability of all the realms. Jamie's first book in the series is called The Houses of the Dead and is set in the mist-shrouded underworld of Hades. My own contribution is set in the Desert of the Sphinxes. We're yet to settle on a title for that but I can tell you it's going to be twice the size of a typical Fabled Lands book -- and as the series is backed by the Vulcanverse online project we're confident that it won't take us twenty years to finish it. In fact, the first two books will be out by this summer. And in the meantime don't forget the Fabled Lands CRPG, which should be released in just a couple of months from now.
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