No BS

As sure as men walked on the Moon, we now have incontrovertible evidence that the English edition of Blood Sword 5e exists. One of my gaming pals sent me this photo of the pack he just received. Others in our roleplaying group confirmed they also got their copies, and I'm hoping at least one of them will try running the campaign for their kids.

As to whether the book will be available to non-Kickstarter backers -- well, yes, that would make sense, 5e reputedly being a popular choice of rules, and it's a beautiful volume with detailed spells like Fairy Stride, Pillar of Salt, and (of course) Summon Faltyn, along with monastic orders, character backstories and birthmarks, guilds, blood feats, monsters, rules for magic items, colour maps of places like Crescentium, Sheol and Spyte -- along with lots of Russ Nicholson's best work, all on glossy high-quality art paper, and of course the whole Blood Sword saga converted to a 5e campaign.

It really is a labour of love by the creative team involved, and what I find most interesting is seeing a version of the lands of Legend that draws solely on the Blood Sword books and not on Dragon Warriors. This high-fantasy Legend is a very different place from the world of DW and Jewelspider, but no less brilliantly conceived and inspiring for that. I'm awed, flattered and humbled by the care Valentino Sergi and his team have put into every aspect of the design. In the ongoing absence of new official DW material, Legend players could do worse than embark on a Blood Sword 5e campaign.

How to buy a copy? You could try contacting the publishers, Tambù, but I suspect after two and a half years they've got other priorities. Maybe they'll license a paperback edition if enough people ask. For those who want to roleplay in the Blood Sword universe but simply can't get the 5e book, Oliver Whawell has converted the encounters to Dragon Warriors rules. Download those here:

The Battlepits of Krarth

The Kingdom of Wyrd

The Demon's Claw

Doomwalk

The Walls of Spyte

My backers on Patreon got to see how I'd have written that final book, a more flashback-heavy, character-focused version that would probably be a better fit for a roleplaying campaign than the dungeon crawl that actually got published. And talking of book 5, Edizioni Librarsi have just published an all-new edition (based on my revised text of 2019) with a gorgeous Mattia Simone cover showing the Ghosts of the Magi in ominous conjunction on the last night of the world. (The hopes and fears of all the years...)

If you need maps of Legend, there's a wealth of cartographic treasures freely available on Lee Barklam's site The Cobwebbed Forest. And there will be some truly scrumptious maps in the forthcoming Blood Sword CRPG -- but now I'm getting ahead of myself. More news on that to come. Oh, and if all the above is like a coded message in Cabbandari and you're asking what Blood Sword even is, here's a podcast review by Mr H J Doom to get started.

Darkness visible -- at last

It turned into a real labour of Hercules -- sorry, Herakles -- but it was worth it because now I can say: the Vulcanverse series is complete! The fifth and final book, Workshop of the Gods, is finally available in either colour hardcover edition or in paperback. As the blurb puts it:

Vulcan City is a place of striking contrasts. A metropolis where marble palaces and gilded rooftops soar against the sky, whose walls and towers seem to approaching travellers like the flanks of mountains, where gold and jewels overflow the coffers of wily merchants, and where nobles in silk finery indulge in epicurean pleasures to rival the banquets of Olympus.

But it is also a place of teeming streets and plazas where cutthroats and spies hide themselves amid the crowds, where narrow alleyways can lead to stinking, maze-like warrens where the unwary visitor is soon as lost as in the deepest wood. In candlelit taverns you may overhear whispered secrets that can make a fortune or ruin a reputation. And here in the magnificent hub at the centre of the Vulcanverse, life is often as cheap as a trinket sold on a marketplace stall.

Meet up again with old friends and bitter enemies. Uncover long-buried secrets, hunt down thieves and murderers, wrestle with demons, cross swords with assassins, join criminal gangs – even come face to face with the spectre of your own death.

Visit the puppet shows where you’ll find hints about the fate of a universe. Seek counsel from the oracle who is privy to the insight of the gods – if you can afford it. Venture into the prison that holds the cleverest man alive, knowing that you must either befriend him or kill him. Lay claim if you can to a mansion brimming with treasures and traps. Rise in society, making alliances among the ruling factions. And attend the glittering party at Vulcan's palace, whose location is hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals, where you will set out on a perilous journey through space and time to reach the crucial, cataclysmic battle between light and darkness towards which all your choices have been leading.

This is the city where all possibilities meet, where destinies are made, where the fate of the Vulcanverse will finally be decided.

In the Vulcanverse series, as in Fabled Lands, you can begin in any region and travel freely back and forth between the books to pursue your quests. But there are significant differences from the earlier series. In Fabled Lands there's no central storyline, whereas in Vulcanverse most of the hundreds of quests feed into a plot that builds across all five books to an epic finale that occupies the second half of Workshop of the Gods. Your choices in the books have lasting consequences, altering the fate of nations and even the very landscape. You'll develop relationships with recurring characters, both friends and foes. And you will bear the scars as well as carry the glory of your exploits through all 6115 sections (more than fifteen Fighting Fantasy length gamebooks!) and three quarters of a million words. Did I say epic? It's longer than The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit combined.

And what is your ultimate goal through the series? As you'll soon discover, darkness casts a lengthening shadow over the Vulcanverse, threatening all who dwell in the five realms. Queen Nyx, with her dread sons Death and Sleep at her side, has unleashed a devastating war that will sweep away both gods and titans and leave her the unchallenged monarch of all creation. You must hone your skills, win over allies, and gather the weapons and clues that will make you into the Hero of the Age, the only mortal capable of opposing the Night Queen.

Although technically the fifth book, this is actually a good one to start your adventures in. That way you'll have a base in the city which is the hub for all the other regions. You can visit the Oracle in the temple district to get hints, and your family will introduce you to mentor characters who can help you figure out some of the major quests that you'll need to complete.

Jamie and I are keen to hear what people think of this series. So if open-world solo roleplaying is your thing, do pick up a volume or five, embark on some adventures, and tell us how you get on.

You can find a copy of the Adventure Sheet for the book here, and the books themselves (both hardcover and paperback editions) here.

Confounding expectations

This is my favourite Vulcanverse gamebook cover and the book doesn’t even exist yet. This is just a mock-up made using a thumbnail sketch by our artist, Mattia Simone.

Why do I like it? Partly because anyone who thinks the Vulcanverse is just a retread of Greek myth (yeah, I’d be yawning too) is going to do a double take when they see this. It doesn’t look like a classical Greek city? No, it looks a million times more exciting than that. Marble colonnades and hypostyle halls evoke the slap of sandals on a sound stage, the unconvincing clash of prop swords wielded by bad actors. Whereas Mattia's cover looks like the set of an MCU blockbuster. That could be Ronan the Accuser in front of the core of the Supreme Intelligence. It’s an image that promises nonstop excitement.

And it’s absolutely right that the fifth book should upend expectations. The Vulcanverse isn’t the world of Greek myth. It’s a Matrix-style virtual universe created by the god Vulcan (well, Hephaistos) using his hyper-accelerated development of today’s information technology. Go behind the curtain and you won’t find oxen turning wheels and steam-powered colossi from the old legends – you will find something startling and amazing and all-new. Something that coruscates with Kirby krackle, that whips the rug out from under you, that takes your breath away and blows your mind for good measure. This is not some lame old 1980s stop-motion movie with a bleeping owl. It’s the American Gods or Anansi Boys of Greek myth, the reboot that brings it up to date at warp speed. And that’s why Mattia’s cover is so perfect. It says: this is not your father's Greek mythology.

While we’re talking about the Vulcanverse books, eagle-eyed gamer Teófilo Hurtardo has pointed out some sloppy syntax in the second one, The Hammer of the Sun. If you get yourself killed, your god arranges to resurrect you and the text says:

‘If you were wounded, untick that box on your Adventure Sheet, but add 1 to your total scars because none returns from the land of death without being marked.’

What I meant there was that everybody coming back to life gets a scar, regardless of whether or not you were wounded when you died. But Teófilo rightly pointed out that’s not what I said. It might just about pass in everyday conversation, but not in a book where the precise logical syntax matters.

So what it should say is:

‘Add 1 to your total scars and, if you were wounded, untick that box on your Adventure Sheet.’

I’ll correct it in future editions. And this is a good moment to thank John Jones, who generously cast his diligent eye over the Vulcanverse books and caught a number of critical errors in The Wild Woods, some of which spread back in time to book one, The Houses of the Dead. For example, there's the ubiquitous demon Wolfshadow, who was supposed to be killed (in book one) based on advice given to you in book three by King Lykaon -- except that advice and the associated codeword had been missed out. Eek. John suggested a good way to fit the advice into the long spiel that King Lykaon actually delivers in book three:

'Despite my title, there is one wolf I do not rule...' leading into telling you about Wolfshadow and, 'Hey, take one of these arrows of Artemis to King Midas's tomb in Hades to maybe get gold-plated so you can kill that nasty thing why don't you? Oh, and don't forget to fetch along an actual bow, either.'

Unfortunately I'd already done the page layout, so I couldn't make use of John's elegant suggestion and we have to make do with Lykaon just mentioning Wolfshadow in passing. But at least you get the codeword so the book isn't actually broken.

John also took us to task, and rightly so, over the random permadeath the player suffers if they stray into the Slimeswamp without any vinegar. The only possible way to find out that you need vinegar there is to lose a character and have to start all over again. Not a lot of fun if you've just spent hours questing around the other books. John proposes this fix, which we fully endorse. Paste it into your copy of book one if you wish:

I'm barely scratching the surface of all the help John has given us with these books. He's the true hero of the Vulcanverse, and you can bet that after the final book is out I'll resign the position of gamebook editor permanently -- and thankfully!

Buy the Vulcanverse books at Amazon.

Also at Blackwell's UK:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun
• The Wild Woods
• The Pillars of the Sky

And at Barnes & Noble in the US:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun
• The Wild Woods
• The Pillars of the Sky

Also of interest:

Circe by Madeline Miller

Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981)

Democracy by Abraham Kawa and Alecos Papadatos

Helen of Troy (Harrison, 2003)

Heroes and Mythos by Stephen Fry

Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves

Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963)

The Odyssey (Konchalovsky, 1997)

Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan

Hot off the anvil

The first two books in the Vulcanverse series are now out, with two more coming later this year. If you don't know what that means -- well hey, where have you been? (And check out previous posts here and here.)

There will be five books in the series, but they're open world solo roleplaying, which means you can start in any of the first four books and play them in any order. The numbers on the spines are just so you know where to put them on your bookshelf.

The art is by Mattia Simone, who also painted the cover for the Librarsi edition of Heart of Ice.

You'll be seeing more of Mattia's work on our future projects, I hope. Comments are open below if anyone has played Vulcanverse -- and there's a no-prize if you spot the itsy-bitsy deliberate mistake (I hope there's only one) in The Hammer of the Sun. 

If you want to order the full-colour hardcover editions, any bookstore should be able to do that for you and the details are:

• The Houses of the Dead  ISBN 978-1-909905-37-5
• The Hammer of the Sun  ISBN 978-1-909905-38-2

Or you can get the black-&-white paperback editions from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the usual places.

hardcover

 

  

Also at Blackwell's UK:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun

And at Barnes & Noble in the US:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun

paperback

And by the way you can get copies of the Adventure Sheets (including maps) for the books from the Spark Furnace website: The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun.

Lasciate ogne speranza

Edizioni Librarsi, who are the publishers of the Italian editions of Blood Sword and Fabled Lands, have revealed Mattia Simone's breathtaking cover for Cuore di Ghiaccio (aka Heart of Ice, as if you didn't know).

At last you see a streak of dark rubble against the dazzling skyline. You fear it might just be a line of hills or even a trick of the light, but as you approach on quickened footsteps it is possible to make out the details of brooding towers, empty palaces and gargantuan snow-bound walls. You have arrived at the lost city of Du-En.

You can find the English edition here or, if you're so hard up that you can't toss a few shekels to a starving writer, why not try Benjamin Fox's online version here? (And if you enjoy it, and can find the time to write an Amazon review, it all helps.)