For art's sake

Finally all the pieces are in place and The Serpent King's Domain, seventh book in the Fabled Lands gamebook series, is about to hatch out into the world. Thank you for your patience – and there I’m not just talking about the two years since the Kickstarter campaign, which is actually a pretty quick turnaround by KS standards, but the twenty-year gap before that. When Pan Macmillan pulled the plug on the FL series back in the ‘90s, Jamie and I thought it was stone dead. Various attempts over the intervening decades to bring it back as a massively-multiplayer game, a CRPG, an app, etc, only raised hopes to dash them again. And then crowdfunding came along and opened up a new way of funding books. Not a particularly efficient way, admittedly – most KS projects are still barely-funded labours of love and/or duty – but it did the trick.

We’ve had Paul Gresty’s finished text for some time now. Richard Hetley meticulously edited it (all 1200 sections) by setting up spreadsheets to keep track of stats and make sure this is the best-balanced and most challenging FL book of all. I typeset it over a month ago, for both the paperback editions (large and regular format) and Megara’s hardback edition for backers. Russ was held up on the interior illustrations for a while for personal reasons, but happily he returned to the job with renewed energy and has delivered some of his best work.

And the final piece of the puzzle arrived at the start of this month. Kevin Jenkins, who these days is swamped with work on Marvel and Star Wars movies, graciously found the time to provide us with three different cover designs, one of which he painted up in some detail before deciding that it would make an interesting change to go for a night-time effect. I've got both paperbacks set up on our print-on-demand service ready to go on sale on Amazon in the New Year, and meanwhile Mikael Louys can be getting on with shipping out deluxe hardbacks to all the backers.

Some people have asked why the new cover isn’t a panorama like the first six. The fact is we have no way of printing books with fold-out covers like the Pan Macmillan editions. The back cover of the large format paperback will be needed for the colour map, in any case.

I’ve never actually seen the physical paintings for the first six books, but I know they’re big. I met Kevin once, back in 2010, to ask if he could help us find clean, text-free copies of the cover art for our new paperback editions. “I’ve got them in my attic,” he said. And he dug them out, set them up in his studio, and spent a good chunk of his weekend photographing them for us to use. How much did he want for us to re-use them? Not a penny. That’s one of the reasons I insisted that he and Russ should be fairly recompensed at their normal rates for work on this book. I’ve seen artists and writers exploited far too often, the people who actually make the content struggling to pay their bills while publishers luxuriate in second homes, which is why I won’t be a party to it.

Some FL fans have asked how the Kickstarter funding will be shared out to pay for the content. The campaign was run by Megara Entertainment SARL, not by Fabled Lands LLP directly, but I can share the details as they have been stated throughout to all backers on the Kickstarter page. The campaign was a model of transparency, thanks to Richard S Hetley, who managed it under the express instruction of Mikael Louys of Megara, who decided to take a back seat following his summary cancellation of the Crypt of the Vampire campaign back in June 2015.

Richard began by showing backers how their pledges would be spent:

That's nicely straightforward, isn't it? As I have commented before, the tricky thing about a Kickstarter for a new book is that you have to pay for writing, editing, typesetting and artwork on top of print and shipping. This pie chart explains where the money is going to be spent in terms anyone can understand.

But wait, it's not quite as simple as all that, because not everybody was simply pledging €35 for a copy of the book. There were other pledge levels such as personalized character drawings. So for the sake of further clarification, Megara maintained an art meter on the page:

That's how it looked by the end of the campaign - gratifyingly full. In the early days there was no guaranteeing it was going to get that far, so Megara identified the two highest art priorities:

First, a new regional map by Russ Nicholson. As the KS page stated: "You cannot play a location-based game if you cannot see a map. At [€550 on the art meter] we will be able to afford a new map. It will be printed in the book as black-and-white, but Russ will draw it in color for the map print also available during this campaign."

Next, upon reaching the €1150 mark on the art meter, €650 could be set aside as the base cost of "a new cover painting by Kevin Jenkins. To be clear: a painted cover by a famous artist costs far more than the above. If we reach the meter mark, we will continue to pay half of all art funding to Kevin Jenkins after this point on the art meter."

Well, the campaign raised €30,589. So, by the art meter formula that was made explicit to backers, the final allocation results in €3300 being owed to Kevin Jenkins for a new cover. Russ's map and interior illustrations meant that €7209 was set aside to pay him. Meanwhile Paul Gresty's 10% share as author netted him €3058.

It's not much considering the talent and creative work involved, is it? Of the total raised, after content costs, Megara has €17,000 left that's earmarked to pay for the printing and shipping of around 490 hardbacks. In other words, the physical production costs are considerably more than the amount allocated to the creative team. So you can see that it's only possible to do a project like this, and attract art and writing skills of this calibre, because of the love and commitment those guys have for the series. In fact, Russ and Kevin were better paid than this back in the mid-90s when they originally helped us create the Fabled Lands series. When you consider that UK inflation since then has been a whopping 78%, our stalwart creatives are getting barely £1000 each in 1995 terms. That's why I'm so grateful to them for agreeing to work at the rates specified on the Kickstarter page, and thus for lending their names and reputations to make the campaign a success.

And by the way, that  €17,000 left for printing and shipping might look like a windfall, but bear in mind these are quality hardbacks and they're being sent to backers all over the world. At least €10,000 is probably eaten up just by printing and postage costs, and that's before you even get to the organizational side of it: spreadsheets of addresses, tracking who paid for what reward, signing bookplates and producing other extras. Even if you ran a successful Kickstarter like this every month, the "profit" isn't enough to run a company on. That's why I've said that it's simply not possible to run a publisher using Kickstarter as the core funding model. Something like this has to be done from the heart. If you've seen Mikael Louys's comments on Kickstarter and Facebook where he lays into me and Jamie, that's my response. I take my hat off to him.

A Kickstarter campaign is a public contract with backers. It tells them what they will get for their money. If they like the deal, they pledge. If not, they click on to another project and spend their money there. It's incredibly refreshing to see a campaign like this where the contract with the backers has been so open throughout. Many projects avoid making promises because they know that Kickstarter's Terms of Use require them to fulfill those promises or refund the money, but Megara has shown exemplary transparency in putting those promises front and centre from day one.

The devotees of the Fabled Lands obviously liked the deal being promised because you pledged in your hundreds to revive the Fabled Lands series. I only hope that if and when Fabled Lands LLP launches our own Kickstarter campaign for book 8, The Lone and Level Sands, that Paul, Richard, Russ and Kevin are still so amazingly generous with their time and effort. It's really because of their help that we are able to do projects like this at all. And because of the passionate intensity of Mikael Louys, who kept asking us if he could publish some of our old gamebooks and finally convinced us to authorize a new one. And, last but very far from least, because of all the FL fans who are willing to put down their hard-earned dollars (okay, euros) to see more exhilarating artwork and thrilling prose by our dedicated creative team.

Wrap up warm

You've heard quite enough about Kickstarter of late, and probably more than enough about my old gamebook Heart of Ice. A lot of people have said it's a good adventure. Many have even said "best gamebook ever" - but the competition for that accolade gets fiercer every year, so I couldn't possibly comment.

Megara Entertainment, who ran the recent campaign for The Serpent King's Domain, are now doing a pop-up 15-day Kickstarter campaign for hardback versions of Heart of Ice in French and English. Look at that positively arctic Sébastien Brunet cover. Brrr.

Anyway, if you're not thoroughly fatigued by the long hot summer of Kickstarter gamebook offerings, this looks good and, modesty aside, it is just about my own favourite of all my gamebooks. I'm also probably not going to authorize any more Kickstarters based on my old books after this, so you really will be getting a collector's edition.

Alternatively, if money's tight, there's always the paperback and Kindle versions:

We'd like to thank...

The Kickstarter to fund The Serpent King's Domain has closed to the accompaniment of tickertape, fanfare and the popping of champagne corks. Although the campaign was run by Megara Entertainment, not by me and Jamie, naturally we're delighted to see that there's still life in that series we created two decades ago. And there are some people we need to thank for that.

First Mikael Louys, founder of Megara Entertainment, who has been a champion for the Fabled Lands series for many years. Mikael isn't just the prime mover of Megara and the guy who nagged us until we agreed to do it, though. He also now has the hard work of typesetting, printing and shipping out all those books. If you've seen any of Megara's collector's edition hardbacks you'll appreciate that they take quite a bit of set-up, and that's all down to Mikael. It's no exaggeration to say that without his energy and enthusiasm, this Kickstarter would never have happened. So a big thank you, Mikael!

Thanks also to Richard S Hetley, who has planned and run the Kickstarter campaign as well as catching typos and keeping everybody calm and civil to each other through the fraught times of bitten nails, torn hair and clacking worry-beads. I have always admired Richard, but never more so than in the last month. His ability to remain courteous, good-tempered, professional and insightful, often in extremely trying circumstances, has won the respect of the whole creative team. If you want to hire Richard to run your own Kickstarter, or for his skills as an editor of books and games, go right ahead - you'll never regret it. Just leave him some time free to work with us, won't you?

Then there are our artists, Kevin Jenkins and Russ Nicholson. When we relaunched the Fabled Lands series a few years ago, we asked Kevin about reproducing his magnificent cover paintings. He was right in the middle of work on a motion picture (possibly Thor: The Dark World - see picture above) but he spent a precious weekend getting the paintings out of the loft, remounting them, and photographing them for us. When we offered payment, Kev wouldn't hear of it. A world-class talent and a thorough gentleman into the bargain.

And Russ, of course, is really the third member of the Fabled Lands creative core team. It's inconceivable that there could be a new FL book without Russ to bring the scenes to life visually in his fluid, characterful and imaginative style. Bear in mind that any Kickstarter for a print book has only a very narrow "profit margin", so Megara can't afford to have as many illustrations as in the original Pan Macmillan books of the 1990s, but thanks to Russ for clearing his schedule in order to produce a new batch of dazzling pictures and maps.

At the head of all of those guys, Paul Gresty is the one who actually has to write the book. He's doing that for next to nothing (that imaginary profit margin again) and he already wrote the demo for free. Writers often have to labour for nothing but a thank you, and sometimes not even that. So huge thanks, Paul - we know that the Fabled Lands is in safe hands with you.

And naturally we also want to thank everybody who actually pledged to make the campaign a success. But out of all those wonderful folks I particularly want to tip my hat to Gavin Orpin (who backed The Frankenstein Wars KS that we did with Cubus Games recently) and Ella Jennings, who gave freely of her time to advise the Megara team on how to turn their publicity machine up to eleven.

No time to rest now, though. As one door closes, another swings open - and already the Kickstarter for The Good, the Bad and the Undead by Ashton Saylor and Jamie Thomson is shooting towards its target. Check out the demo here. And in case you're wondering: yes, of course there will be a Kickstarter for the eighth FL book, The Lone and Level Sands. That campaign won't be run by Megara Entertainment, though, because they're going to have their hands full with a series of Kickstarters involving one of the top names in '80s gamebooks. (I don't think I can say who it is yet, but you'll be amazed.) We wish them well, and Fabled Lands LLP will be retaining the team of Paul, Russ, Kevin and Richard to launch our own Kickstarter for FL8 as soon as FL7 is out in paperback.

Illustrations by Fabled Lands cover artist Kevin Jenkins

New adventures with old friends

Today's the day. No, not George Osborne's budget plans for selling the United Kingdom to non-dom billionaires. Nor do I mean Greece's "hello, it's us again" to the EU negotiators. The red letter is because today Megara Entertainment are launching the Kickstarter campaign for an all-new Fabled Lands book.

There's a pie chart on the KS page showing exactly how Megara are promising to spend the money you give them: on a new cover by world-famous movie concept artist Kevin Jenkins, dazzling prose by the crown prince of 21st century gamebooks Paul Gresty, and maps and illustrations by our own Russ Nicholson. The entire campaign has been carefully planned by Richard S Hetley on behalf of Megara Entertainment, and Richard will be running it throughout.

More details to come, including a link to a free 127-section demo of the book. That's about, what, a sixth of the total? So dust off those 19-year-old character sheets now.

First, though, I wanted to share this lovely note from Mikaël Louys on his Facebook page. It really gives you a sense of the marvellous friends we have made as a result of the Fabled Lands, and of the boundless verve, joy and passion they bring to the project. Succeed or fail, it will have been worth the journey. But what am I saying - there is no try, right? So here we go on the next great Fabled Lands adventure!

Title fight

When Sylvester Stallone brought back his two most iconic characters a few years back, the movies in question were technically Rocky VI and Rambo IV, but they were released as Rocky Balboa and Rambo. The difference? Probably an extra 50% at box office.

Book publishers have long known that you don’t put numbers on the covers of a book series. This occasionally irritated me when, in younger days, I had to look inside to find which Elric or Ellery Queen book to read next. The publishers didn’t care because they already had me hooked; it was the non-fans they needed to attract. If somebody saw “James Bond book 5” on the cover and hadn’t read the first four, they wouldn’t bother to pick it up. If you number a series too conspicuously, the law of diminishing returns soon kicks in.

Some series can buck the trend. Toy Story and Star Wars movies don’t mind adding the weight of a Roman numeral to the poster. That’s because those series have already broken through to the real mainstream. If you’re going to see the next movie, it’s a dead cert you already saw the earlier ones.

This all came up recently in a discussion with the chaps at Megara Entertainment, who may be running a Kickstarter for a new Fabled Lands book later this year. Perhaps I should add a word of caution here before I overstimulate the hopes of FL aficionados. The problems I've already cited with Kickstarter haven't gone away. (Short version: even if you raise $50,000, after printing and shipping all those hardbacks you might have less than $5000 to pay for writing, art, editing and typesetting.) So we're still just at the discussion stage, figuring out how it could be made to work. Megara may decide to run a Kickstarter campaign for something else this year. Paul Gresty, who has volunteered to write the thing for nothing but love and praise, may yet come to his senses and focus on paid work instead. There are no guarantees in life.

If there are answers to the Kickstarter Paradox, they can only be found by a group of people proposing and debating different strategies, refining the best ideas, and all getting behind an agreed plan. I started this particular discussion off by saying that, given the twenty-year gap, we could hardly sail in with, “Here’s book 7” like nothing had happened. Most of the people we’ll be talking to would never have heard of Fabled Lands. And even for the fans – well, think of Sherlock Holmes. Does anybody want yet more formulaic adventures of the dear old bod? Even his creator was sick of those. When a new Holmes book comes out, what we look for is something interesting like Moriarty or A Slight Trick of the Mind. Nobody but a Baker Street Irregular is going to want Sherlock Holmes V – and they’d just swipe a copy without paying and then use it to cosh a tramp.

Anyway, here’s what the Megara team had to say. Joining in are Mikael Louys and Richard S Hetley, Megara’s CEOs in Europe and the USA respectively; Paul Gresty, the author of the new book whatever it ends up being called; and me and Jamie, as the ones to blame for all this FL stuff in the first place.

So: do we follow the lead of movie series like Bourne, Batman and Star Trek - and books like Tintin, Peter Wimsey, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc - in dropping the numeral?

Richard S Hetley: “That is an interesting possibility. Sure, the Way of the Tiger worked out very well, but ‘rebooting’ a series is often a peculiar thing psychologically. After all this time, why not act as though it were a standalone book? Part of the point is that they already are "standalone" in the sense that you can start from anywhere. So, ‘We acknowledge that it's been years and the initial plan of twelve books isn't getting completed. We are returning to the Fabled Lands for this one book. Sure, it connects with all those books, and it draws from the missing 7-12 domain, but we know things are different 25 years later and this book is its own thing.’”

Jamie Thomson: “I just don't see the value of not calling it FL 7. It's a series of linked books, each playable on their own anyway. Mucking about with it at this stage will only confuse people. Is it Fabled Lands or not? Or some new spin off? There's no need to complicate a fairly simple idea. There's a bunch of fans out there who want more in the series. We just give them the next one. Then we find out whether there's enough of them to justify the work, but hopefully there will be. And if so, they'll want the next, and we could even keep doing that until they don't want to fund any more. I can't see where the gain is. It sounds like we'd be saying, 'This isn't book 7, although actually it is.’ Unless we did it as a stand alone title, but it referenced all parts of the world, and wasn't just set in the Feathered Lands. You'd just have fewer adventures, but spread around a bit. It wouldn't actually be book 7 then.”

Mikael Louys: “The fans want it to be a Fabled Lands book not a standalone. I've heard this often enough over the last few years.”

Richard: “There was a recent movie called Tron: Legacy. It was not called Tron II. They didn't even try to get people to watch the original Tron first. That's what I mean by ‘standalone’.”

Paul Gresty: “Looking over the FL reprints, they aren't really called 'Fabled Lands 1', 'Fabled Lands 2' etc. The pertinent number appears on each book's spine, but that's the only place it does appear. The cover of Book 2, for instance, says: Fabled Lands: Cities of Gold and Glory. So, for the Kickstarter, it's easy enough to drop the 7. By the very nature of the FL series, The Serpent King's Domain could easily be considered the first book you play anyway.”

Dave Morris: “That’s what I’m saying. The fans already know The Serpent King’s Domain is the seventh book in chronological order of publication. They also understand they can start in any book. But somebody who has never played Fabled Lands before but does have an interest in gamebooks and is willing to support a campaign on Kickstarter – I submit that could be a respectably large set of potential backers, for whom seeing it described as ‘book 7’ will only put them off.”

Paul: “I think it would be particularly tricky to reboot Fabled Lands, given how interconnected the books are – far more so than, say, Golden Dragon. The as-yet-unpublished Lone Wolf 29 apparently takes place twenty-five years after Lone Wolf 28. A quarter of a century has passed in real-life, and it has passed in the life of the book's protagonist as well. Could something similar be done with Fabled Lands? For the moment, I'm failing to see how. As I say, the books are too interconnected, and non-linear, to make that sort of thing easy.”

Dave: “I don't think anyone is advocating an FL reboot. And I like the sound of what Joe Dever is doing there, letting the 25-year hiatus be a feature not a bug, but we can’t really do it with Fabled Lands because we don’t have a central character in that way. Short of adding show tunes or pop-up maps, what can we do to make this, not a reboot, but more than just ‘here’s more monsters and treasure’?”

Jamie: "I think we just have to say it’s book 7! You know what will happen if we don’t: ‘Is this book 7 in the series?’ ‘Can I go straight from one of the earlier books to this one?’ ‘Why isn’t this the next in the series’. ‘What is this?’ ‘Can I take my old Fabled Lands character into this book?’ ‘Is this set in the same time period as the original series?’ ‘This sounds interesting, but I really just wanted the next in the series’ and so on, and so on.

It seems the debate will rage on and on. Should the book be trumpeted on Kickstarter as "Fabled Lands Book 7" or as "Fabled Lands: The Serpent King's Domain"? Or should it even be a single volume that wraps up the whole Fabled Lands series once and for all? A lot depends on whether we are willing and able to reach out to a new bunch of readers, and thus inject the series with a fresh lease of life, or whether the market for Fabled Lands books is going to stay restricted to those players who have stuck around for the last twenty years. What do you think?

Another sneaky peek

More Way of the Tiger news, with a hot-off-the-presses view of Ninja, the prequel book written by David Walters. You get to play out Avenger's early life and find out how he/she came to be orphaned on the steps of a monastery dedicated to forgiveness, gnomic epigrams, and garotting.

This one is not going to appear in paperback (Fabled Lands Publishing only owns the rights to the original six books) so if you want a copy you'll need to hie your way over to Megara Entertainment and see if they have any spare after supplying the Kickstarter backers. In fact, I just this minute got an email from Mikaël Louys, who runs Megara, to say that he has a few copies of Ninja for sale. Better be quick!

The Grand Fromage of Megara

Another guest post from David Walters today in the run-up to the Way of the Tiger Kickstarter campaign that begins on Tuesday. This time David attempts the impossible: describing the founder, leader and human dynamo of Megara Entertainment, the charming and inimitable Mikaël Louys.

*  *  *

Commissioning artists in the pursuit of a common goal is a tricky job, and one that falls to the managing director of Megara Entertainment Mikaël Louys. He has a great many artists and tasks to draw together in one creative whole for the Way of the Tiger gamebook re-release and the forthcoming roleplaying game.

Mikaël is the man in charge of ensuring art and writing come together in an attractive display of ninja awesomeness. He has an established ethos that all the work should be in colour (part of the Megara philosophy), and strives to give the artists enough freedom to make their mark on the art whilst ensuring they have information to include details such as the insignia representing the gods of Orb.

Mikaël is a keen fan of the Way of the Tiger books, so he takes a personal interest in making sure that key scenes from the book are captured on the page and has a considerable knowledge of the source material upon which the artists can draw. Sometimes he commissions the artists to do a colour representation of artwork from the original books, and other times it is a dramatic reinterpretation based on the source material.

Either way his methodology is the same – give the artist guidance, check the draft, give further guidance and repeat this process until the work is finalised. Mikaël will also send drafts of the artwork around the writers to ensure that any discrepancies are caught early in the process.

His artist list includes Dominique Doms (mostly characters from the books), Lise Rafalli (places on the Island of Plenty), Tonio Di Lorenzo (monsters), Mylène Villeneuve (mostly scenes and characters), Aude Pfister (maps and characters), Eric Chaussin (pre-generated characters for the RPG), Faiz Nabheebucus (characters), Motise Musashi (Island of Plenty characters), and Mary Nikol (characters). Mikaël’s artists have a range of experience levels, and he always takes time to develop and improve less experienced artists, and counts them all very much as friends.

The artwork is not just for the books, as Mikaël is very much in charge of the business side of Megara too: T-shirts, jewellery and even a giant cloth map have been the canvas for some of the creative work sold via the Megara website. One of the crowning glories of the early artwork was a new map of Orb, a beautiful hand-painted piece of work by Aude Pfister.

As well as co-ordinating the artists, Mikaël co-ordinates the writers as well, ensuring that they have the assignments needed and that there is creative oversight of the work. On the few occasions where the artwork clashes with the writing or vice versa, Mikaël will get the work redone to ensure it is as true to the source material as possible.

Mikaël has many other parts of his role, including formatting the page layouts for maximum impact, deciding what is in (and out) of the roleplaying game both in terms of chapters and artwork, and also formulating the rules for the RPG from his extensive gaming experience.

Mikaël is known amongst the team for his encyclopaedic knowledge of tabletop RPGs, RPG computer games, boardgames, and casinos. He also runs a music fan club archiving almost all the live recordings from all the career of Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler. He is also a japanime expert, J-RPG expert and former editor at RPG Magazine, RPG Online and Gameplay RPG. He has developed a great love and appreciation for the Japanese culture, but of course it's not mandatory to have that to appreciate the Way of the Tiger gamebooks.

- David Walters 

ADDENDUM: As of midday September 27, after just 24 hours live, the Way of the Tiger Kickstarter campaign has reached 94% of its initial target. (Even Mikaël probably wasn't expecting that!) There are a host of stretch goals, though, and plenty of time left to pledge. The campaign will run till the end of October.

Tiger vs octopus

Just a few days now before the Way of the Tiger campaign launches on Kickstarter. I've seen a first draft of the prequel book, Ninja, by David Walters and it's everything you'd want it to be. David has also come up with the storyline for the seventh book, Redeemer, which will be written if the stretch goal is met.

More news next week and over the month ahead. First, though, you ought to meet Mikaël Louys, the driving force behind Megara Entertainment, who will be producing the hardback editions of Way of the Tiger. Pop back tomorrow to see what all the fuss is about.

The new covers (of which this is my favourite) are by Mylène Villeneuve. Awesome enough for ya?

Can he get out of that web? Shuriken!

Apart from those covers and a bad pun, I think I'll leave it there for now. Yeah, sorry. My lips are sealed. Maybe if you scoot over to Megara Entertainment's site you'll find out more. Or watch this space for more news later in the month. I see you shiver with anticip...

The French connection

With French films creating such a stir at the moment, here's one that role-players are going to like. It stars Megara Entertainment's CEO Mikael Louys taking us on a guided tour of the French edition of the Fabled Lands RPG by Greywood Publishing.

You'll be able to buy it from Megara and the English edition is of course on sale on Amazon (UK and USA). Personally I have just enough French to order a beer and a steak, but Megara's full-color production is such a thing of beauty that I think I'll have to get a copy myself.

Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy the film. And be sure to full-screen it for maximum viewing pleasure.

The colour of thunder

One of the many things Jamie and I have been holding under our hats lately is The Art of Fabled Lands, a lavishly produced, full-colour, 112-page book from Megara Entertainment that would do credit to anybody's coffee table. Currently it's only available on Lulu, but often that means there'll be a listing on Amazon before too long.

Mikael Louys, CEO of Megara, describes the book thus - and I wish my French was as half good as his English:

"When Fabled Lands was first published in 1995, it amazed readers with a rich, multi-book-spanning adventure far beyond the scope of traditional gamebooks. Now it has cracked its paper shell and spread its wings in the new realm of the digital, soaring on currents not only of text, but of music and colour artwork. From a team of visual artists with many skills and styles came a storm of hard work to vastly expand the original illustrations, giving graphics for text that had until then been untouched. This book holds a beautiful fraction of the artistic creativity that forms worlds within your mind. You submerge in the wonder of the moment: what creature is it that stands in those woods? Will this rain ever cease beating upon the fields? Sifting through the Art of Fabled Lands is like adventuring in the world already. We hope you enjoy the art and this perfect accessory for Fabled Lands gamebooks owners, with new text material included."

Golnir in July, Violet Ocean next after that

News from Mikael Louys, CEO of Megara Entertainment:

We can confirm release dates for Fabled Lands 2 as July 2011 for HD iPad and September for iPhone/iPod touch. Players of the first app will be able to save their character and continue adventuring in Golnir.

Artwork is already under way on FL 3. However, because we are constantly now working on the FL 2 beta, and because of its interrelation with the first Fabled Lands app, Fabled Lands 1.2 and Fabled Lands HD 1.5 are postponed. These updates for FL1 will only become available after the FL2 release.

The Mac version for Fabled Lands is postponed until after the release of FL2. The porting tools for the Mac store are not good enoughalso being at the moment to port such a complex engine of ours. We'll try again in some months, hoping that those tools have evolved.

The good news is that this will give us more time to throw in more content and polishing for the updates to FL 1.2 and FL HD 1.5.

Free Fabled Lands OST from Megara Entertainment

More staggering generosity from munificent Mikael Louys, madcap maestro of triple-A app developers Megara Entertainment. Hmm... sorry if that came out sounding a bit too Stan Lee; my only excuse is that I've been following his tweets. Anyway, Megara are making the original soundtrack to the Fabled Lands app (iPad here, iPhone here) available as a free giveaway. So you don't even need to buy the app now: you can just download the free soundtrack and listen to it while playing the print books, and all you'll be missing then is the additional flavour text, the scintillating colour artwork, the extra content and minigames, and the automated maps, ability roll resolution, character sheet and quest log. Or you could just get the app - which incidentally reached #3 in the Australian app store last week. What can I say? Them Aussies got good taste.

Fabled Lands on your phone

News so hot you could cook a roc's egg on it: Megara Entertainment, the development wizards behind the Fabled Lands HD game for iPad, are right at this moment putting the finishing touches to the iPhone version (which will also run on iPod Touch, of course). This will be submitted to Apple tomorrow and should therefore be on sale within a matter of weeks. Building on the roughly 12,000 man-hours of work that went into the iPad app, this version features a completely new UI to fit the smaller screen and of course has all the extra content from the updates to the app over the last month.

Props to Mikael Louys, Roland Derhi, Richard Hetley and the rest of the Megara clan for their amazing job in getting this conversion done in such a short time. They've been working around the clock these last few weeks, hyped up by musical accompaniment from Messrs Clapton and Knopfler, and can now take a well-deserved evening off at their local Thai restaurant. Just don't fall asleep in the tom kha gai, fellas. All that work was because you demanded it, FL fans, so please be sure to give them your support.

All together now

Hot news from Mikael Louys, the business and creative dynamo in charge of Megara Entertainment. The Fabled Lands HD game for iPad is at #24 in the App Store RPG charts! That ranking reflects the incredible hard work that Mikael and his team put into their adaptation - indeed, their spectacular reinvention - of The War-Torn Kingdom, which is a thing of beauty that Jamie and I never dreamed of when we originally wrote the FL books.

So here's the thing. If a game can get into the Top Ten then it bobs up onto everybody's radar and it's got a good chance of staying there. And if Fabled Lands HD can get there, with just a little push, that could mean thousands of new FL fans who will help sustain the wave of RPGs, CRPGs and gamebooks that has already begun.

I know what most of you are thinking: "But I don't own an iPad." Okay, well, apart from advising you to sell your wristwatch to buy one, I'm going to say that you can certainly reach out and influence somebody who does. If not in your immediate circle of friends, family and co-workers, how about on blogs where you're leaving a comment? Or failing that, just open the window and shout.

Mikael already has his team back in harness on Cities of Gold & Glory, for which I've seen some of the truly sumptuous artwork, and there's an iPhone conversion coming in the next few months too. Getting Fabled Lands HD into the Top Ten ranking in iTunes RPGs would be a great boost for those guys, and it'd help ensure the future of Fabled Lands releases (both print and digital) as well.

So let me plead with you: if at all possible, can you try and coax at least one person to buy Fabled Lands HD this weekend? It's a steal at $7.99, and this app is no mere ebook but a full-on, full-color, atmospherically soundtracked, immersively art-intensive 2D CRPG with new extended descriptions providing dozens of hours of play. All that for less than the cost of one of the new edition FL books. No wonder the Megara staff know their boss as "Mad Mikael"!

Fabled Lands in print and on iPad

New news! And today we have two items worth running up to the roof and shouting about. First, I heard from our printers that the files for Fabled Lands books 1-4 have been passed. Even now, proof copies are on their way to the Fabled Lands offices. Barring any unforeseen disasters, that means we are on course to have those books on sale by December 1st.

Second, I've just been told by Mikael Louys, indefatigable boss of Megara Entertainment, that the Fabled Lands iPad site is now live. There's plenty of incredible artwork, maps and other stuff to delight any FL fan, whether you've got an iPad or not. So why are you still here? Go feast your eyes on the goodies Mikael and his team have laid out for you.