Lords of the Rising Sun arrives as DLC

Players of the Fabled Lands CRPG by Prime Games can now head to fresh adventures in the distant east with the new downloadable content comprising Akatsurai, a feudal country on the brink of civil war. New lands to explore, new quests to find, new enemies to fight, and new loot to plunder. Banzai!

To help you rig your vessel for the trip, the base game currently has its biggest discount ever and Steam are providing a daily deal for the DLC. Grab your dai-sho and get over there.

Headcases (3)

The floating head goblin encountered throughout South-east Asia occurs in a much more Shinto-friendly sanitized form in Japanese folklore. No pus-dripping entrails here, no blood and childbirth, just an eerie flying head as described by Lafcadio Hearn in Kwaidan:

Gently unbarring the door, Kwairyo made his way to the garden, and proceeded with all possible caution to the grove beyond it. He heard voices talking in the grove; and he went in the direction of the voices, stealing from shadow to shadow, until he reached a good hiding-place. Then, from behind a trunk, he caught sight of the heads—all five of them—flitting about, and chatting as they flitted. They were eating worms and insects which they found on the ground or among the trees. 

Presently the head of the chieftain stopped eating and said, "Ah, that travelling priest who came tonight—how fat all his body is! When we shall have eaten him, our bellies will be well filled. I was foolish to talk to him as I did; it only set him to reciting the sutras on behalf of my soul. To go near him while he is reciting would be difficult, and we cannot touch him so long as he is praying. But as it is now nearly morning, perhaps he has gone to sleep. One of you go to the house and see what the fellow is doing."

Another head—the head of a young woman—immediately rose up and flitted to the house, lightly as a bat. After a few minutes it came back, and cried out huskily, in a tone of great alarm, "That travelling priest is not in the house. He is gone! But that is not the worst of the matter. He has taken the body of our chieftain; and I do not know where he has put it." 

At this announcement the head of the chieftain—distinctly visible in the moonlight—assumed a frightful aspect: its eyes opened monstrously; its hair stood up bristling; and its teeth gnashed. Then a cry burst from its lips; and, weeping tears of rage, it exclaimed, "Since my body has been moved, to rejoin it is not possible. Then I must die! And all through the work of that priest. Before I die I will get at that priest! I will tear him! I will devour him! And there he is behind that tree!—hiding behind that tree! See him—the fat coward!"

In the same moment the head of the chieftain, followed by the other four heads, sprang at Kwairyo. But the strong priest had already armed himself by plucking up a branch, and with that branch he struck the heads as they came, knocking them from him with tremendous blows. Four of them fled away. But the head of the chieftain, though battered again and again, desperately continued to bound at the priest, and at last caught him by the left sleeve of his robe. Kwairyo, however, as quickly gripped the head by its topknot, and repeatedly struck it. It did not release its hold; but it uttered a long moan, and thereafter ceased to struggle. It was dead. But its teeth still held the sleeve; and, for all his great strength, Kwairyo could not force open the jaws.

With the head still hanging to his sleeve he went back to the house, and there caught sight of the other four Rokuro-Kubi squatting together, with their bruised and bleeding heads reunited to their bodies. But when they perceived him at the back door all screamed, "The priest! the priest!" and fled through the other doorway out into the woods.

* * *

Notice that Hearn calls it a rokuro-kubi, rokuro being the Japanese word for a potter's wheel and kubi meaning neck. Technically (if folktales can ever be subject to technical analysis) the word rokuro-kubi ought to describe another Japanese goblin that sends out its head by night on the end of a long stretching neck, like Mister Fantastic, and the proper term for one of these things with a fully detachable head is nuke-kubi. I'm not sure that a Japanese storyteller would bother with the distinction, though. Hearn certainly didn't.

Less viscerally terrifying than the penanggalan this may certainly be, but I prefer it. Like a lot of Japanese folklore it's more dreamlike, less shlock-horrific and so far creepier. Hence it was the nuke-kubi that I used in Lords of the Rising Sun - as brilliantly illustrated here by Russ.

The Land Below the Sunrise

Want to pick up a big, sumptuous full-colour map of Akatsurai to go with the newly reissued FL Book 6: Lords of the Rising Sun? Thought so. Well, hit the link and it's yours. Mythic cartography courtesy of Russ Nicholson as usual.

While you're at it, and if that low, low price of free appeals, why not grab a copy of Tetsubo, the Oriental-themed RPG that Jamie and I wrote originally as a Warhammer supplement. We delivered our first draft the day the commissioning editor left Games Workshop, so it ended up cast into the oblivion of a Nottingham filing cabinet. (Or so I like to think. More likely it just lay on the floor under a desk for a year.) It's only a work-in-progress, and it's full of all that Dungeons and Dragons stuff like alignment, ho hum, but there's enough there to get an Akatsurai role-playing campaign going if you're so inclined.

The Oriental RPG I'm really waiting for is Paul Mason's Outlaws, based on the exploits of the Water Margin heroes. I ran my own Kwaidan variant of Outlaws at just about the time I was writing Lords of the Rising Sun, so (as usual) a lot of the ideas for the gamebook came from our role-playing sessions.

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.

Multi-storey artwork

I wouldn't even try to pick a favourite Russ Nicholson picture. He is so versatile that there are a least a dozen "best" images executed in completely different styles. That's one of the reasons he is the definitive Fabled Lands artist as far as Jamie and I are concerned - not only for the fresh inventiveness of his ideas and the humanity and humour in his character studies, but because he chose a different style to reflect the flavour of each region of the world of Harkuna. Man, that's an artist.

As a body of work, Russ's illustrations for Lords of the Rising Sun comprise the high point in the FL series for me, in large part because of the bold brush-stroke inking that reminds me of the work of Chic Stone. My favourite of all of the Book 6 pictures is this one showing four floors of a palace (or is it?) that has been invaded by a dragon (or is it?). You'll have to play the adventure to find out:

‘The dragon has entered the palace!’ screams a footman. The courtiers fly to and fro in panic while you marshal the best of the paladins and lead them down the long staircase. The dragon squats in the vast hall below chewing the palace’s valiant defenders in its maws. Its head alone is longer than your ship! You give the order to attack, leading the paladins down the staircase in a reckless charge. The dragon bares its fangs and spits venom. Make COMBAT and CHARISMA rolls, both at a Difficulty of 15...

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..."