Hero twins of the One World

Mayan history – the part of it we still have that wasn’t burnt by Christian missionaries – is not like modern history. Since Herodotus, the First World has had the tradition of objectively establishing facts from multiple sources, reporting events in a dispassionate register that opens a window upon the past. But reading the history of the Maya is like reading one of those Ancient Egyptian historical accounts in which untrustworthy foreign diplomats become snakes and a severed tongue can still tell a tale. It’s as much a magic realist novel as an account of what really (Calvino or Borges would insist on inverted commas there) happened.

Take the story of the hero twins from the Popol Vuh. Is this a holy book, a work of fiction, an allegory, or a chronicle? All of the above. The Mayan scholar-priesthood drew no distinction. They’d had no Plato to say that poetry tells lies. They used drugs and blood-letting to reach a point where hallucinations revealed the deeper truth beneath the veneer of ordinary events.

The hero twins’ father has annoyed the lords of the underworld by making too much noise while playing in his ball court. They invite him to play a match against them, misleading him into taking the black road into Xibalba, the Place of Fear. That’s where it all goes south, or rather west, as the twins’ father is subjected to various ordeals and finally sacrificed and his head hung in a calabash tree.

At this point in the story, the twins’ father is dead but (bit of a snag) they haven’t been born yet. A maiden goes to pick calabash gourds. She might in fact be the moon, but that’s a detail. The father's skull spits into her hand, or maybe she eats it thinking it’s a fruit, and she's sent away to live in the upper world when her mother notices she’s pregnant.

The twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, grow up to be star ballgame players like their dad, annoy the lords of the underworld in just the same way, and get invited to Xibalba. But these hero twins, they’re clever. They send a mosquito to bite the underworld gods, who call out each others’ names, allowing the twins to greet them correctly. They foil the ordeals, using red macaw feathers to make it seem that their cigars have stayed lit all night. When one of the twins is decapitated (even the Popol Vuh must have an “all is lost” moment), the other temporarily reanimates his body with a squash for a head and, forced to play a match using the brother’s head, substitutes it and brings him back to life. The twins then trick one of the lords of the underworld into allowing himself to be killed. They subjugate the Place of Fear, at which point we discover it isn’t just the mythical land of the dead, it’s also a hostile nation whose power over the Mayan city-states has now been broken.

So that’s the flavour I wanted to capture when I started writing Necklace of Skulls. I’d just got back from honeymoon in Central America, and having gone to the top of every Mayan pyramid I could find, and into the tunnels inside them too, I felt exactly ready to do it. What I wanted to avoid was that kind of wasted cultural appropriation you get in so many roleplaying games, where a minor deity like Xiuhcoatl would get a Monster Manual write-up as “a” xuih dragon, with 8 dice hit points and a fiery breath attack, located in a Pre-Columbian themed corner of the game world like one of the zones in Disneyland. You know what I mean. When I roleplay, I want to go the fount of ideas, not have it brought to me in a plastic bottle.

In Necklace of Skulls you play a Maya called Evening Star whose twin has gone missing in the far western desert. As in all the Critical IF books, you get to customize your character by picking your skills, and you can choose to be either sex, as it is never stated whether you’re Morning Star’s twin brother or twin sister. Sneaky, huh? (There’s actually a precedent for that in the Popol Vuh, Xbalque’s name translating as either “Little Sun Jaguar” or “Lady Sun Jaguar”.)

While you’re trying to find out what happened to your brother, the big event happening in the background is the collapse of the Great City, which is sending out ripples of chaos and fear even as far as your own Yucatan home. History buffs may think that this ties the book to 540 AD and the fall of Teotihuacan, but I couldn’t possibly comment. My version of the One World of the Maya is not an archaeologist’s version, in any case. This is a setting the ancient Maya themselves would hopefully recognize, in which heads grow on trees, a sinkhole can be a shortcut into the land of death, and playing a game in the ball court is a ritual as potent as any spell.

That’s why I’m so delighted with the app version of Necklace of Skulls, published today by Cubus Games to (belatedly) mark the Mexican Day of the Dead. This is much more than just a gamebook ported over to mobile devices. The Cubus team, headed up by Jaume Carballo, have taken the original book as a foundation and built a fabulous, beautiful interactive story game on top of that. Combat, for example, uses a mini-game of brinkmanship and tactics instead of digital dice. You select one of several Mayan icons to create a persona for your hero-twin. And the text itself has been rewritten and sharpened to make it more immediate, better suited to reading on a phone or tablet rather than a printed page.

And the art… Everything I said above about wanting to evoke a setting that has the feel of both reality and dream, history and myth – you only have to look at any one of the images to see how brilliantly Xavier Mula has achieved that. I want to see gamebooks pull up their old gnarly roots, shed the ‘90s scales, and become something fresh and exciting. This app shows that Cubus are right at the forefront of that revolutionary movement, and I’m proud to have the book that was born out of my honeymoon emerging in a new glittering incarnation, its old bones suddenly sprouting new foliage and bright flowers – just like, in fact, one of the Mayan hero-twins.

You can get the Necklace of Skulls app on iTunes USA or iTunes UK. Or anywhere else in the world come to that. And for Android users, the Google Play link is here. Or there are the print books, of course:


[Photo of Xiuhcoatl by Tony Roberts; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.]

Step into myth

If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video must go at least an order of magnitude beyond that. So instead of my customary long screed, this time I'm just going to leave this trailer from Cubus Games and this sample image by Xavier Mula to tell their own story.

Necklace of Skulls

This is one of my very favourite Russ Nicholson illustrations for one of my favourite gamebooks. It's a Maya nobleman who tries to commandeer your boat to evacuate his family after the fall of Teotihuacan in Necklace of Skulls.

Two days' sailing brings you to Tahil, a busy trading settlement on the far coast. The others squint warily as they bring the vessel in to the harbour. You can see at once there is trouble here. Instead of the stacks of trade goods that would normally be piled up along the quayside at a port like this, there are milling crowds of refugees carrying everything they own on their backs. As you tie up at the quay, a man whose elegant clothing marks him as a lord of the Great City comes striding towards you.

We're currently formatting this book, along with three other titles from the Virtual Reality series, for re-release in the autumn. These were originally supposed to come out as part of the Infinite IF gamebooks we planned with Osprey, but that turned into a digital-only venture and I think readers prize these books enough to want to own physical copies.

Fabled Lands LLP's agent is talking to other traditional publishers, because it would be great to get proper bookstore distribution - for as long as high street bookstores survive, anyway. If those talks go nowhere, Fabled Lands LLP will publish the books, the only difference being that you'll have to order them from Amazon.

The four books have all-new covers by Jon Hodgson and if Fabled Lands LLP publish them I'm going to spend some of my spare time cleaning up some crisp 600dpi scans of Russ's original drawings. After twenty years, the VR books are a bit yellow and blotchy (just like Jamie) so getting a good scan involves razor-blading them apart, followed by far too much time in Photoshop - and me an author, not a graphic designer, after all.

If you just can't wait, Russ has put up all the Necklace of Skulls images on his blog. And thanks to the magic warehouse robots of Amazon, you can still buy the original mid-90s edition.(That's UK; US readers go here.)

A saga of the hero twins

I've been doodling some sketches for the covers of the Infinite IF books. This one, for Maya heroquest adventure Necklace of Skulls, is going to be painted by my favourite Dragon Warriors artist, Jon Hodgson. Which is really rather exciting, actually.

There will be few interior pictures this time out, so if you want to appreciate the great job Russ Nicholson did in evoking the One World when the book was first published, I recommend snapping up a secondhand copy on Amazon. Or you could wait for Russ to post those illustrations up on his blog, which he plans to do shortly.

I'll sign off with the doubtless du Maurier inspired opening of the book:

Last night you dreamed you saw your brother again. He was walking through a desert, his sandals scuffing up plumes of sooty black sand from the low endless dunes. It seemed you were hurrying to catch him up, but the sand slipped away under your feet and you could make no headway up the slope. You heard your own voice call his name: 'Morning Star!' But, muffled by distance, the words went rolling off the sky unheeded. 

You struggled on. Cresting the dune, you saw your brother standing close by, staring at something in his hands. Your heart thudded with relief as you stumbled through the dream towards him. But even as your hand reached out for his shoulder, a sense of dread was growing like a storm cloud to blot out any joy. You saw the object Morning Star was holding: an obsidian mirror. You leaned forward and gazed at the face of your brother reflected in the dark green glass. 

Your twin brother's face was the face of a skull. 

 

Face off

I can never look at this picture from Necklace of Skulls without seeing red.

That's not Russ's fault, I hasten to say. It's always an honour and a delight to have one of my books illustrated by him. I can still remember the thrill I got whenever a package of new pictures from him would drop through the letterbox. He is, as I have said before, the consummate visualizer of fantasy worlds, and the only reason he's not doing the illustrations for the new editions is that I didn't negotiate the contract.

In the case of Necklace, I'd just returned from honeymoon in the Yucatan. Russ handed in this picture. Everyone was happy except for the art director, who declared that the faces of the children at bottom left were "too oriental", the ridiculous implication being that this was potentially racist. Evidently she was unaware of the racial provenance of pre-Columbian peoples. At any rate, she had Russ repeatedly Tipp-Ex (oh yeah, none of your fancy digi-drawing in those days) and redo the faces. Finally he delivered what you see here. To begin with the kids had looked just like the Mayan children I'd seen on honeymoon, and very charming they were too. Now that they had more Anglo-Saxon features, the art director declared herself satisfied. She pulled the same trick on another child's face in the same book. I don't know why the art directors in British publishing so often mess up everyone else's work (I refer m'lud to numerous exhibits including the logos of Golden Dragon and Blood Sword) but they do. I usually have to wait for the French edition to see how the artwork should have been treated.

Anyway, short of setting up my own publishing house and hiring the art director myself (now there's an idea) I am resigned to such farragos. Here's a little bit from the early part of Necklace in case you don't want to buy it now and would rather wait for the iBooks edition:

The high priest winds a white cloth across your eyes and leads you through to the inner shrine. A deep chill abides here; the thick stone blocks of the Death God's temple walls are never warmed by the sun. The sweet tarry smell of incense hangs in the air. You feel a hand on your shoulder, guiding you to kneel.  

A long period of utter silence ensues. You did not hear the high priest withdraw from the chamber, but you gradually become sure that he has left you here alone. You dare not remove the blindfold; to gaze directly on the holy of holies would drive you instantly insane. 

A whispering slithers slowly out of the silence. At first you take it for a trick of your unsettled imagination, but by straining your ears you begin to make out words. 'The way to the west lies through the underworld,' the whispering tells you. 'Go to the city of Yashuna. North of the city lies a sacred well which is the entrance to the underworld. Take this path, which is dangerous but swift, and you will emerge at the western rim of the world. From there it is but a short journey back through the desert to your goal.' 

The whispers fade, drowned out by the thudding of your heart. Frozen with terror at the words of the god, you crouch motionless on the cold flagstones. The cloying scent of incense grows almost unbearable. 

Suddenly a hand touches your shoulder. After the initial jolt of alarm, you allow yourself to be led out onto the portico of the temple, where the blindfold is removed. You blink in the dazzling sunlight. You feel as weak as a baby and the smell of incense clings to your clothes. After the cool of the shrine, the heat of the afternoon sun makes you feel slightly sick. 

The podgy priest is looking up into your eyes. 'You heard the voice of the god,' he says simply.

Cities of Abraxas: Tamo Anchan

Tamo Anchan is set atop a granite plateau above a sweeping jungle. Much of the city is built of a dark blue stone, which in the case of the noblemen's palaces is inlaid with rectangular gold plaques. The major buildings stand on pyramidal platforms, with high stairways simulating the city’s own position above the Tershen forest, and have tall Mansard-roofs, often adorned with "horns" along the ridge. Arches are corbeled or trefoil. Wide esplanades open from the streets around the perimeter of the city, the parapets of which overlook the jungle.

Throughout the city are parks planted with bright green moss. Here and there can be seen the ivy-twined stela which depict the rulers of ancient times and, in hieroglyphics, relate the great deeds they accomplished.

To the north is the great Lake of Stars, down towards which is directed a giant viewing scope. This device, left over from ancient times, monitors the pattern of stars in the lake (which do not mirror the stars above) and represents them as a three-dimensional matrix in the tower that supports the scope. The Anchan priests believe the lake is a portal through to another place, perhaps the underside of the world, and that the stars shown there have a sacred influence on their dream lives, just as the stars above affect their waking lives.

Government: The city's king is called the Deodand. He is appointed by a council of high priests and clan-chiefs, who take advice from astrologers. As long as his rule goes well, the Deodand enjoys the luxurious comforts of a god on Earth. But in times of trouble he must be sacrificed, the theory being that his soul can then go to plead the city's case in the Court of the Gods. From this custom derives the euphemism, "He has been sent to petition the gods," said of anyone dying violently or unexpectedly.

The clans of Tamo Anchan are: the Blood Ritual Clan, the Celestial Beast Clan, the Ceraunic Beast Clan, the Serpent Guide Clan, the Clan of the Vision Quest, the Axis Tree Clan, the Bird of Time Clan, the Manta's Spine Clan, the Fruiting Body Clan, and the Jade Skull Clan. Highly trusted individuals can be appointed Ahau, or "bannermen", by the clan-chief. Bannermen have special status. There are very severe penalties for a non-bannerman (of any clan) who insults or harms a bannerman, regardless of circumstances.

People: Anchans tend to be shorter than average (5'5") but nonetheless sturdily built. Noses are slightly flattened, eyes oriental, full-lipped mouths; skin color is glossy ochre; hair blue-black. Hair is straight and worn long. Facial hair is uncommon. Clothing is often woven of flax or feathers from the jungle birds, dyed in brilliant colors and set off with fire opals and black pearls from the lake.

Anchans set great store by personal bravery in battle. The highest honor to which a young warrior can aspire is to earn his place in one of the War Lodges, each dedicated to its own totem constellation or planet.