Recently (here and here for example) we've listened to some of the Deep Dive podcasts that Google's NotebookLM can generate. Fun as they are, I didn't want anyone to go away with the idea that's all NotebookLM can do. As a friend who uses NotebookLM for work put it, the audios are just a party trick. What's much more useful (and reliable) is the ability to get it to read a bunch of source texts and then answer questions about what's in them.
I'll give you an example. A few years ago, I was part of a team working on an adaptation of Jack Vance's Lyonesse setting to the Mythras RPG system. I was responsible for the chapters involving the Ska, an austere race of invaders, and the city of Ys. The first thing I did was go through all the books, which I'd been given in digital form, to pull out any references to Ys or the Ska. So I ended up with fifty pages of notes like this:
Fifty pages is a lot to wade through. Four years on, how much easier it would have been with the help of NotebookLM. I uploaded the three Lyonesse books and then asked, "What do we know about Ska warships and naval tactics?"
Each of those numbers opens a quote from the source text. The first note, for example:
"The Smaadra, unable to outrun the Ska ship, prepared for battle. The catapults were manned
and armed, fire-pots prepared and slung to booms; arrow screens raised above the bulwarks.
The battle went quickly. After a few arrow volleys the Ska moved in close and tried to
grapple.
The Troice returned the arrow fire, then winged out a boom and slung a fire-pot accurately
onto the longship, where it exploded in a terrible surprise of yellow flame. At a range of thirty
yards the Smaadra’s catapults in a leisurely fashion broke the longship apart. The Smaadra
stood by to rescue survivors but the Ska made no attempt to swim from the wallowing hulk of
their once-proud ship, which presently sank under the weight of its loot."
You can see how much time that would have saved me and the other Lyonesse designers. Dedicated large language models like NotebookLM are going to be indispensable to writers, especially if you're working on an ongoing series or doing the worldbuilding for an RPG or videogame. A lot of people protest about the use of AI in creative fields (just look on social media; there are more Dunning-Kruger AI pundits there now than there were overnight "experts" in immunology during the covid pandemic) but by that argument it's cheating to have an index or contents page in any reference book. The truth is that the time the LLM is saving is just the drudge work. It's essentially doing a researcher's job, which leaves the writer more time and energy to be creative. And I call that progress.
The image is Mick van Houten's painting for the cover of The Green Pearl.
The Fabled Lands CRPG has been on early access for a while now, but in just a few weeks you'll be able to buy the full release in all its glory. Initially the game will feature all the content from The War-Torn Kingdom, Cities of Gold & Glory, The Plains of Howling Darkness, and The Court of Hidden Faces. The plan is to add Over the Blood-Dark Sea and Lords of the Rising Sun as DLCs later in the year -- and after that, who knows? Possibly all-new FL adventures if the 23,000 people who have wishlisted the CRPG all buy it. Find it on Steam here.
If paper-&-pencil games are more your thing, this is a good opportunity to mention the Lyonesse RPG based on the fantasy novels by Jack Vance. I contributed to the book but it's the work of divers hands, all of them very talented and with the forceful gust of Vance's imagination to fill their creative sails. Video reviewer Pauli Kidd gives a good idea of what to expect:
When the waters became calm, Ys of the Ages, Ys the Beautiful, Ys of the Many Palaces, was sunk beneath the sea. In later times, when the light was right and the water clear, fishermen sometimes glimpsed the wonderful structures of marble, where nothing moved but schools of fish.
I don't have the rights, so we're plumb out of luck as far as the gamebook goes, but Lawrence Whitaker of The Design Mechanism has just published a Lyonesse RPG based on Mythras, the current incarnation of the game formerly known as Runequest. If the video whets your appetite, you can buy it on DriveThruRPG. (Full disclosure: I was one of the writing team and penned the sections on Ys and the Ska. But I'd be recommending it anyway, because it's Vance.)
The new RPG offers an exhaustive (500-page) guide to the world, but what if Mythras/RQ isn't your beaker of the blushful? Once you're read the Lyonesse books you'll no doubt have your own take on how to run it. There was another set of roleplaying rules published in 1999 by Men in Cheese, If you want to focus on the activities of sorcerers and their associates, Lyonesse would be a great fit with Ars Magica, I'd love to see a Powered By The Apocalypse version, and you might even use Dragon Warriors. Whatever your favourite system, just dive in. It's a world that is guaranteed to catalyze your creativity.
What are we looking at here? A good question. You know I was talking about having another crack at revising the Dragon Warriors system? More like completely rewriting it, in fact. It's a project I've returned to many times over the years, usually abandoned in short order as the need to actually crack on and run a fortnightly campaign gets in the way.
This time of going back to the well, I have a rules mechanic that I'm finding pretty neat. Those could be famous last words. I did remark to one of my gaming group that "designing a new set of rules is like doing a jigsaw. After early frustrating dead ends, everything seems to come together, gathers momentum, gets exciting – and then you see the gaps that the remaining pieces just won’t fit into. Rinse and repeat."
But I think I can punch through the doldrums of design to arrive at a workable set of streamlined rules that will fit any contingency. God knows we need it. The obscure rules lurking in the thousands of pages of GURPS books is starting to try the patience of most of my players. We only get a few hours' gaming every couple of weeks. We need something simpler.
So, that book in the picture. In order not to repeat the false starts I've made in the past, I took all the notes I've made on different versions of DW2 rules and collected them into one volume, which I then printed up on Lulu. I find having a physical book like that is easier than wading through multiple files on the computer. Just behind the rules book there you can see the homemade booklet I used to prep for writing a chapter in The Design Mechanism's upcoming Lyonesse RPG.
Just to give you a taste of all these notes, one of the briefest sections in the booklet is this overview I sent to Grenadier Models UK when we got to talking about collaborating on a new roleplaying game in the early '90s.
Everything is based on a skill system, so a character might be a Rank 3 Wizard and a Rank 8 Fighter, or whatever. Ranks are purchased with Improvement Points, which are acquired by training or experience. There are no "character classes". The cost to acquire ranks of different skills depends on the character's culture. So elves need fewer IPs to advance a rank of Wizardry, more to advance as Fighters.
Combat is handled by comparing Attack and Defence values. In some ways it is similar to the Dragon Warriors system, but characters can exercise a degree of choice in how much they concentrate on attacking as opposed to defending. The range of choice reflects different styles of combat. When a hit is scored, damage is determined by a single dice roll which is modified by the weapon used and the attacker's rank as a Fighter. Armour works by absorbing some of the damage.
I am in two minds about whether to include hit location or not. It adds a certain colour to any combat system, but it does tend to slow things up - and you get into problems where non-humanoid creatures are involved. The alternative system uses "wound values" - any wound causes Attack and Defence penalties, depending on how much damage is inflicted in a single blow. Characters are more likely to pass out from cumulative wounds than to fight on until cut to ribbons. This means that combat is fairly ferocious and damaging, but as long as the players' side wins in the end they will generally be able to heal up their fallen companions.
Magic is divided into three types. The first is Wizardry. This uses up no spellpoints, but requires a skill roll to work properly. It is also quite difficult to learn. It is the way a magic-user would contrive most of his "special effects" - weird events that are not directly related to combat. About a hundred Wizardry cantrips allow the magic-user to pass through locked doors, go unnoticed, conceal a trail through woods, and so on. I dislike the idea that wizards in many systems have to use up their spellpoints for quite minor effects. I cannot imagine Merlin or Gandalf crossing off a couple of spellpoints for an illumination spell, for instance. The Wizardry rules are intended to represent the popular fictional concept of the magic user more accurately.
The second branch of magic is Thaumaturgy. This is combat related magic. Wizardry illusions do not do real damage, for instance, but Thaumaturgy illusions can. Thaumaturges expend psychic points to cast their spells. The number of points available increases only slightly with rank, but what does increase significantly is the number of spell-matrices the Thaumaturge can hold in his mind. When a spell is cast, the mental matrix for that spell "fatigues". It will defatigue with sleep, but a further casting of the spell when the matrix is still fatigued will cost double points. Higher ranking Thaumaturges therefore never get to the kind of artillery-level capability of a D&D magic-user, as their power really lies in the greater versatility they get from having more spell-matrices available.
The last magical skill is Theurgy. This involves the manipulation of campaign magic. Such things might include gathering information about a foe's army or creating an enchanted artifact. Theurgy is often done in conjunction with other magic-users, as it involves a permanent loss of psychic strength and it is better if this loss can be shared between several characters. It takes long periods of time to work (and must often be performed on specific astrologically-favourable days) so it is useless within the limited time-frame of one adventure.
The idea is to capture all the rules notes from over the years so I can sort the wheat from the chaff. So I'm not sure which of the ideas here (if any) will make it into Dragon Warriors 2 but we'll see. I certainly want magic to be more mysterious, less "artillery".
"Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."
Like H G Wells's time traveller, we've careened through another year. There should be a lever to slow this thing down, shouldn't there? But as "minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring" I've had the chance to glimpse a few standout moments of 2016.
My best roleplaying experience was getting to sit in on a session of Dom Camus' Earth Force campaign. This is a modern take on superheroes, with a dash of existential threat and a background swirl of geopolitics. I played a scientist and got through without actively needing to use my powers, but nonetheless getting multinational backing for my open source research program, which made me feel quite Tony Stark. The whole thing was helped along by an elegant, streamlined system that did everything you need of rules and kept out of the way of the roleplaying. I hope Dom will publish it.
Talking of sweetly simple rules, my favourite new game system has been Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders. If you're familiar with the sagas, this captures them perfectly. I ran it straight -- no fantasy, no 21st century mores, just bleak neighborhood struggles against the unsentimental elements and your fellow man. It's quick, easy, atmospheric, and the perfect antidote to decades of GURPS.
Proudest achievement of the year was publishing Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? This is my and Jamie's first gamebook in more than twenty years. I have no idea what will happen to the UK in 2019 (good luck -- by then I should have regenerated as an Irishman) but I am sure that the book will give you a better understand of the Brexit process than any of the government ministers charged with negotiating it. And Britain's godfather of gamebooks, Ian Livingstone himself, has taken a look at Can You Brexit? and pronounced it "very clever". He may be partial, of course.
Around the time I was finalizing Can You Brexit?, Ashton MacSaylor was getting ready to deliver on his Kickstarter for The Good, the Bad and the Undead. If you've hung around the saloon for a while, you'll remember that was the Wild West gamebook that Jamie was going to write but couldn't get beyond the outline. Ashton took it over, roped and threw and branded it, and now it's riding in out of the desert with a mean eye and a belt full of bullets.
Talking of gamebooks, I wrote two audio adventures for the Amazon Echo, one an all-new interactive drama, the other a reskin of my first ever gamebook Crypt of the Vampire. With very tight deadlines those were hard work, but luckily I like hard work, as long as it's work on something that interests me.
The highlight of the summer was travelling to Germany for Manticon. Good beer, nice people, an open society, fabulous landscapes, and the best trains I've ever been on. I might move there. (See Brexit, above.)
Earlier in the year, I got a call from Lawrence Whitaker at The Design Mechanism, publishers of the Mythras RPG. (Yes, I know; apologies for the spelling. I have to grit my teeth every time I type it, but it's the Runequest system with Glorantha stripped out, so it actually is rather brilliant.) TDM have acquired the licence to do a roleplaying game based on Jack Vance's fantasy trilogy Lyonesse, and having heard me talk about it on the Fictoplasm podcast they thought I might like to contribute a section to the book. You bet. I owe Jack Vance a huge creative debt and it's an honour to pay a little of that back.
Then there was Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios getting in touch to bring Tetsubo back from the Land of Roots. Nothing's forgotten, as we Robin of Sherwood fans know. Watch for that in 2019, if you still have money left after food and medicine rationing.
I also got roped in by Ian Turnbull, one of the Black Cactus co-founders, to do some work on a Virtual Reality game. Don't reach for your Oculus headset just yet. The developers originally hoped to get the game ready by October this year, but Ian's and my combined half-century in game development told us that was never going to happen. Maybe next October. My role was, as it often is these days, to clarify, simplify and focus the design and creative goals of the game. (And to chuck out all the bloody cutscenes on the principle of "discover, don't tell".)
In October my time machine lurched off into a pocket universe of misery for a few weeks when I came down with a nasty virus followed by a racking cough. It stopped me from going to TekUKon, which was a blow, but every cold has a silver lining. Unable to get on with any of my new projects, I whiled away the time for the fluid link to repair itself by editing the fifth Blood Sword book, The Walls of Spyte. It's still a slapstick dungeon bash but at least the flowchart now makes sense and the pieces of the key you find are properly numbered, so for the first time ever you can actually complete the adventure.
Surprising creative experience of the year was discovering I still have a copy of the Lord of Light boardgame that Nick Henfrey (creator of Spacefarers) and I pitched to Ian Livingstone (yes, 'im again) and Steve Jackson back around 1980. We didn't have the rights, which might or might not have been a problem. Nowadays there's always Kickstarter, so who knows?
And entertainment highlight of 2018 was discovering Guy Sclanders' hilarious Fabled Lands playthroughs on YouTube. Many of the comments focus on how nasty things used to happen in games in the old days. Well, nasty things are more fun. Whatever doesn't kill you helps you level up.
And on that note, best wishes for the year ahead. See you on the other side.
I've been recording an episode of Fictoplasm with Tim Harford and host Ralph Lovegrove. If you've never caught one of these podcasts, Ralph and his guests take a story and consider both its literary qualities and how it could be used in a roleplaying game. I recommend them all (my own favourites are the Gene Wolfe and Mike Moorcock episodes) and if you want to hear ours, in which we talk about the Lyonesse novels by Jack Vance, it's right here.
One of the aspects of Lyonesse that we talked about was Vance's use of faerie creatures. They are, in a nutshell, droll, capricious and dangerous, just like fairies in Legend. And that in turn reminded me (there's an end point to this segue, believe me) of John Hagan's comment recently about W B Yeats's take on fairies as angels not good enough to be saved, nor yet bad enough to be damned. So I thought let's get a guest post from Yeats, him being dead and hence entirely biddable. So here it is:
The Trooping Fairies
The Irish word for fairy is
sheehogue [sidheog], a diminuitive of "shee" in banshee. Fairies are
deenee shee [daoine sidhe] (Fairy People). Who are they?
"Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved nor bad enough to be lost,"
say the peasantry. "The gods of the earth," says The Book of Armagh. " The gods
of pagan Ireland," say the antiquarians, "the Tuatha De Danan, who, when no
longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular
imagination, and now are only a few spans high." And they will tell you,
in proof, that the names of the fairy chiefs are the names of the old Danan
heroes, and the places where they especially gather together, Danan burying
places, and that the Tuatha de Danan used also to be called the
slooa-shee [sheagh sidhe] (the fairy host), or Marcra shee
(the fairy cavalcade). On the other hand, there is much evidence to
prove them fallen angels. Witness the nature of the creatures, their caprice,
their way of being good to the good and evil to the evil, having every charm but
conscience-consistency. Beings so quickly offended that you must not speak much
about them at all, and never call them anything but the "gentry", or else
daoine maithe, which in English means good people, yet so easily
pleased that they will do their best to keep misfortune away from you, if you leave
a little milk for them on the window-sill over night. On the whole, the popular
belief tells us most about them, telling us how they fell, and yet were not
lost, because their evil was wholly without malice. Are they "the gods
of the earth?" Perhaps! Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all
ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains
of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no
inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You
cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The
visible world is merely their skin. In dreams we go among them, and play with
them, and combat with them. They are, perhaps, human souls in the crucible—these
creatures of whim. Do not think the faeries are always little.
Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what
size or shape pleases them. Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and
making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one
industrious person among them, the lepra-caun --the shoemaker. Perhaps
they wear their shoes out with dancing. Near the village of Ballisodare is a
little woman who lived among them seven years. When she came home she had no
toes; she had danced them off. They have three great festivals in the
year--May Eve, Midsummer Eve, November Eve. On May Eve, every seventh year, they
fight all round, but mostly on the "Plain-A-Bawn" (wherever that is), for the
harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man told me he saw
them fight once; they tore the thatch off a house in the midst of it all. Had
anyone else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling
everything into the air as it passed. When the wind makes the straws and leaves
whirl as it passes, that is the fairies, and the peasantry take their hats off
and say, "God bless them". On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are
lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the faeries are at their gayest,
and sometimes steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides. On
November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for according to the old Gaelic
reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the
ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and
girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their
future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After November
Eve the blackberries are no longer wholesome, for the pooka has spoiled
them. When they are angry they paralyse men and cattle with their fairy
darts. When they are gay they sing. Many a poor girl has heard them, and
pined away and died, for love of that singing. Plenty of the old beautiful tunes
of Ireland are only their music, caught up by eavesdroppers. No wise peasant
would hum "The Pretty Girl milking the Cow" near a fairy rath, for they
are jealous, and do not like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips. Carolan,
the last of the Irish bards, slept on a rath, and ever after the fairy
tunes ran in his head, and made him the great man he was. Do they die?
Blake saw a fairy's funeral; but in Ireland we say they are immortal.
Last year (Dave here again now, not W.B.) I started writing a comic set in and around the faerie-haunted Jewelspider Wood. It was to be illustrated by Gary Chalk, but he didn't like the story so that collaboration never came off. Kind of a shame, as it had changelings, undead, faerie curses, forest monsters, and murder, all mixed up with the misadventures of a travelling theatre troupe. If I can find an artist maybe I should get back to it - though really I need to find a way to finish my Mirabilis epic first.
