Deities acute and obtuse

Here's a question that we really ought to settle once and for all. Richard Hetley, who is a veteran of Fabled Lands campaigns on Kickstarter and has been invaluable to us as an editor and design consultant, recently asked about Ebron, the god of Uttaku who crops up in The War-Torn Kingdom:

Richard Hetley: "I mention this delightfully angular deity because he came up in discussion about the Fabled Lands app. Replies there said 'Yes, it's been confirmed by the authors that Ebron has angles, not angels. Must be some sort of Lovecraftian non-Euclidean god.' I was fairly certain that this was not the case. I had even corrected the misconception where possible. But then I couldn't find a reference in our e-mails, so I didn't say anything. Care to clarify, for the ten thousandth time, whether Ebron was in possession of angles or angels?"

Jamie Thomson: "It most definitely is angles! And it first made an appearance in the Heart of Harkun radio play. And yes, he is a kind of non-Euclidean deity, that's a nice way of putting it, but not Lovecraftian. Imagine it more as a Zen koan, like you meditate on the mystery of how god can have fourteen angles in the same way the early Christian Greek churches used the Trinity as a mystery to meditate on, but not to be taken literally. Of course, the Western Christians decided to do just that, and so you get the Nicene creed, where they actually conceive of a threefold god."

To Carry A Sword

Cast your mind back to last year when we were talking about the early-release version of To Carry A Sword, a CRPG by Fabled Lands team stalwart Richard Hetley.

In the game you're one of the guards protecting a caravan in medieval times. Think Wagon Train meets The White Queen. You'll make tactical decisions but you'll also be dealing with relationships between the characters along for the ride. "Swords and words", if you want a genre label for it.

The game is out on Valentine's Day. Available to order now on Steam.

Sittin' on a board eyein' the weather

Richard Hetley, who is a long-established and valued member of the Fabled Lands ground crew, has news of a game he's been working on that I'm sure will be of interest to FL players. I'll hand over to Richard for the details:

"In To Carry a Sword you are the the guard of a medieval caravan on a journey where the social connections you make are just as important as the money. You can help the people who hire you in ways far beyond swinging a sword and scaring bandits for them, including tending to their animals and telling stories to their kids. Strategically plan your route across a procedurally-generated world, taking advantage of the text events you encounter to pursue your own goal, whether that is to become skilled and famous enough to join the escort of Her Majesty the Queen, or to see a religious pilgrimage to its destination. In the end, it's about the people who need you.

• FTL meets The Oregon Trail in medieval Europe. 
• Rely on your social skills as much as your battle prowess to see caravans safely to their destination. 
• Serve the needs of the land's factions, aiding the Noble, Criminal, Religious, and Heathen. 
• Select routes and explore the procedurally-generated map, seeking the clues to advance each questline. 
• Relax in a self-paced narrative experience of over 85,000 words. 
• Mod the narrative and add your own text events (release version only). 
• Join us in the final stages of development as our team brings the game to life!

"This is a student project now being made into a full videogame experience. We are playtesting a browser-only version of the game as we finish development. You can play it here. During development, that page will also link you to a feedback survey and a Twitch page where we stream about development. For longer feedback or to follow along with the fun, please feel free to join us on Discord.

"To Carry A Sword is developed by We Three Nouns, a group of graduate students in Game Design & Development at Rochester Institute of Technology. I've edited gamebooks for years before coming to RIT, and I edited The Serpent King's Domain (book 7 in the series) for Fabled Lands LLP. Paul Gresty, the writer of that book, graciously agreed to edit To Carry a Sword. And yes, I've kept everyone's book 7 feedback in mind while writing the game!"

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.

Have your say on the next Fabled Lands book

A guest post today from Paul Gresty, author of The Serpent King's Domain, the seventh Fabled Lands book, which has been funded by the generosity of Kickstarter backers. As the book is nearly ready for release, Paul recently posted a KS update in which he canvassed the opinions of the backers on several rules points. Then we realized that there are a lot of other experienced Fabled Lands players out there who for all sorts of reasons may not have backed the KS campaign, but who might still have useful answers to those rules questions. So take it away, Paul..

* * *

Excellent news. I heard from Kevin Jenkins recently that he's expecting to send us the finished cover for The Serpent King's Domain in the very near future. Once that's done, we're pretty much ready to move on to printing and shipping to Kickstarter backers. That's the Megara hardcover edition. A paperback edition from Fabled Lands Publishing will follow soon after.

We're fortunate in that the crowdfunded development of this book, in which backers are aware of each stage of the process of creation, allows the opportunity for a dialogue with the book's ultimate readers. Your viewpoints are, frankly, a valuable resource, one that we'd be crazy not to tap into. And so, before we move on to printing, I'd be very curious to get feedback from you on a couple of points of game mechanics.

CALCULATION OF DEFENCE

We've already talked about this on the Fabled Lands blog and the FL Facebook page, but I think the point remains somewhat ambiguous. For a long time there's been debate concerning whether any bonuses to COMBAT conferred by a character's weapons are added to the character's Defence score. I think even Dave and Jamie have found the point somewhat contentious – take a look at the wording of the front matter of the different editions of the various FL books, and try to spot the differences.

Dave, Jamie, Richard S. Hetley (editor of The Serpent King's Domain -- demo here) and I have discussed this point at some length lately – and the ultimate ruling is that any COMBAT bonus from weapons does not count towards Defence. The logic of the matter is as follows, as explained by Richard:

"Nothing else in the game gets two categories of items to boost it. I always presumed that armour existed to raise Defence since weapons have their own use. The numbers bear this out. Thanks to the documentation efforts of others, I see that the highest enemy Combat in the first six books of the Fabled Lands is only 15, so enemies roll 27 at their best; the highest player Defence item is already +10; plus your personal Combat of (probably) 12; plus Rank of a mere 5 and you're at 27 with plenty of slack and no need for a weapon. The absurdity was only visible after multiple books, where the enemies are unable to match a player using all these statistics together. Given that players get this strong after adventuring for long enough, enemies should have been made stronger in the first place to match them."

So, let me throw this open to all Fabled Lands players. What are your thoughts and opinions on the subject?

THE CASE OF THE JADE DEFENDER

A couple of people have pointed out that the description of the Jade Defender, a weapon obtainable in The Court of Hidden Faces, specifically states that a weapon's COMBAT bonus does count towards Defence. That is, it's a COMBAT +3 weapon, that possesses an additional quality of adding an extra +3 to a player's Defence – making it a COMBAT +3, Defence +6 weapon in all.

We've talked about that too. And the overall view is that, in light of the most recent analysis of the rules, that description was incorrect. Should the Jade Defender itself therefore be considered a COMBAT +3, Defence +3 weapon, in that case, to account for that extra Defence bonus – or can it still be viewed as a COMBAT +3, Defence +6 weapon? Me, I'd probably opt for the latter view, even considering that this greatly increases the weapon's value. Retconning the rules is one thing, downgrading that hard-won weapon you've come to rely on is something else.

HOW DIFFICULT SHOULD WE MAKE SPIRIT COMBAT?

The mechanic of spirit combat is a new addition for The Serpent King's Domain. This was partly conceived as a way of presenting enemies that would be a threat to even very experienced characters. A player's spirit combat values are calculated quite differently from physical combat. Rank has no bearing on spirit combat; a player's base Defence score is equal to either the base MAGIC or SANCTITY score (whichever is higher). The player's Nahual value is used in place of the COMBAT stat – and opportunities to increase Nahual are rare (and the player may not want to increase Nahual to its highest level). The choice of weapons and armour that the player may use in spirit combat is limited.

A little background on the evolution of these combats: Richard was the first person to playtest the book, and he found that these spirit combats, while challenging, were also fairly tedious – in some cases, players and enemies would miss each other round after round, only occasionally getting in slight, scratching blows that took a long, long time to whittle down Stamina. And so he rewrote the stats for every spirit combat in the book, increasing each enemy's offensive punch, while also reducing their Defence. In essence, he made it so that enemies hit harder, but die faster.

Some of the combats are difficult. They're meant to be. But this is where, again, I ask your opinions. Can a fight be too difficult? When you, as a player, run up against a really hard fight, is it a welcome challenge – or is it just flat-out frustrating?

I'm going to quote some points from a recent email discussion we had on this subject because I feel that, without giving away stats or spoilers, it demonstrates the sort of threat levels the player may run into. Dave asked if a player could always back away from a spirit combat if they didn't feel ready. Richard's reply:

“You can retreat from one introductory-level fight and one significantly harder fight. The introductory-level one, hopefully, teaches you just how much you need to strengthen yourself before doing the rest. The harder one is escapable. Two other fights are ones that you initiate when you are ready. They are another introductory-level one and, well, a certain other one that's really tough. And the remaining two fights are each unique. One is introductory-level and you can't escape. Another is really tough, but you can only get it after completing major plotlines in other books.”

What do you think, as players of the FL books? Your views would be much appreciated and could make a big difference to this next book and the direction the series takes from this point. You can post comments as replies to this post or on Facebook page (link above). Or, of course, feel free to contact me directly at paulgresty {at} gmail . com (no spaces).

And in particular I'd like to thank the Kickstarter backers for their ongoing support and patience throughout the development of The Serpent King's Domain. They're the ones who have made this book possible.

Paul Gresty

Fabled Lands rules, old and new

Recently Jamie and I had a chat about the forthcoming FL book 7 with Paul Gresty (who wrote it) and Richard S Hetley (who is editing it) and an often-asked question arose...

Paul Gresty: “The precise calculation for Defence in Fabled Lands came up on the FL Facebook page about a month ago, and it’s come up again during playtesting of The Serpent King’s Domain as a point of ambiguity. To quote the books: ‘Your Defence score is equal to: your COMBAT score plus your Rank plus the bonus for the armour you’re wearing (if any)’.”

Jamie Thomson: “The question a lot of people ask is whether that COMBAT score includes weapon bonuses – that is, does your Defence score factor in bonuses from weapons and armour, or just from armour?”

Paul: “Right. And with the release of book 7 we’ve got the opportunity to nail this point down. Given the new mechanic for spirit combat, in which Defence is calculated a little differently, it’s important to be specific as regards weapon bonuses.”

Jamie: “If weapon bonuses counted then players could too easily become unbeatable. We should have made it clearer in the rules that you’re supposed to use your innate COMBAT score when calculating Defence.”

Dave Morris: “Also, if the rule worked that way, then logically magic weapons should cost twice as much as magic armour, because they would count for Defence, just like the armour does, and for attack too.”

Jamie: “Right. So to be clear: weapon bonuses do not count towards Defence, ie when calculating your Defence you use your native COMBAT skill without weapon bonuses. Which also makes calculating Defence straightforward, as it doesn’t change every time you switch weapon.”

Paul: “If you use the wrong calculation for Defence, it’s possible for your character to become untouchable in combat. Notably there’s an opponent in FL6, a giant called Big Boy, who is really dangerous in combat, and who inflicts permanent damage to the player’s Stamina with each hit. I’ve found that it’s possible to beat him without taking a scratch - although it seems that the player is supposed to find the clever, non-combat way to beat him.”

Dave: “Jamie and I just assumed players would take it as read that they were to use base COMBAT when calculating Defence. In other words, we didn’t notice there was any ambiguity. It’s no excuse, of course. If there is any point to rules at all, they need to be unambiguous. If an ambiguity makes no difference, the rule itself is superfluous.”

Jamie: “Well, we’re kind of fixing it now. Though in retrospect the system breaks down at these very high levels anyway.”

Richard S Hetley: “I’ve been playtesting all the physical fights in Serpent King’s Domain using the rule that weapon bonuses don’t add to Defence.”

Paul: “I think it’s safe to assume that 95% of players coming to SKD will already own and be very familiar with books 1-6. The new mechanic of spirit combat is intended to provide a few fights in which the player’s combat ability is determined in a much more closed and manageable way. Rank has no bearing on these fights, and only certain items are permissible. The only real advantage that very high-Rank characters get is that they’ll go into these fights with a much higher Stamina. There aren’t so many of these spirit combats in the book, but they should provide a challenge to even very powerful characters.”

Dave: “I’m reminded of spirit combat in Runequest. That was always hair-raising, seeing as if you lost the fight you were annihilated.”

Paul: “Just on the basis of the Dunpala demo, I’ve already had an email about with a rules question asking, ‘Can I use my +8 White Sword in spiritual combat? I think I should be able to, because it was created by a god.’“

Jamie: “Hah! Worth a shot, I guess. What did you tell him?”

Paul: “I gave him a variation of that opening to the Blood Sword books, something like, ‘I’d personally say no – but it’s your book, play it however you want.’” 

Richard: “In spiritual combats in this book, Sanctity or Magic of at least 9 is required to defeat the weakest enemy you’ll face. A starting character in The Serpent King’s Domain can reach that without effort, or can make up the difference by finding high-powered spiritual weapons and armour. But to overcome the strongest enemy you need to have the highest possible Sanctity or Magic and the strongest possible arsenal from this book, as well as a healthy amount of bonus Stamina.”

Jamie: “Which is how it should be. Players want to face a real challenge. The ultimate boss in a book mustn’t be a pushover.”

Richard: “Just as we expect the player to become unbeatable in physical fights by gaming the system, in spiritual fights the player is eventually going to max out stats just the same. On top of which there’s the modifying factor of Lone and Level Sands. Even if this enemy is the strongest in Serpent King’s Domain, what happens if book 8 comes into existence and then the player gets an arsenal even stronger than that here? Now the boss fight in this book becomes easier.”

Jamie: “Maybe some bosses are so tough that you need a multi-book quest before you can face them. We might need to do that to make later books a challenge.”

Dave: “As long as you get the chance to turn away from those fights if you’re not tough enough yet. If you only find out you weren’t ready for the fight by getting killed, that’s a swizz. I know we have resurrection deals but even so you should get plenty of hints beforehand so you can judge the power level needed.”

Jamie: “Or the chance to run away and come back when you’re tough enough.”

Richard: “All this does mean that a player who expects to be invincible but has Sanctity or Magic topped at 5 or 6 is going to be mighty disappointed. I propose telling the fans this before the book is printed and seeing what they say.”

Where to buy a blessing

You’ll be pleased to hear, especially if you were one of the people who backed it, that The Serpent King’s Domain is nearing completion. Paul Gresty has delivered the manuscript to editor Richard S Hetley, Russ Nicholson is more than halfway through the interior illustrations, and Kevin Jenkins is clearing a space in his busy Hollywood schedule to paint the cover. 

I'm not in charge of the production (the Kickstarter was run by Megara Entertainment, not Fabled Lands LLP) but at a guess the backers might have their copies by the summer, and paperback editions could be on sale in the autumn. Fingers crossed, anyway.

In the course of editing, Richard is coming across some interesting points which force us to revisit some of our rules choices. I say “force”, but to be honest it’s fun having these intensive game conversations. The process is making us all quite eager to run a Kickstarter for The Lone and Level Sands – though maybe this time we should get the book nearly complete first.

* * *

Richard: I continue to proofread by playing, and… ack! It's not so easy to keep track of blessings anymore!

Paul, is the plan that all these new deities would be worshipped in book 8 as well? Or, Dave and Jamie, would it be culturally appropriate? If so, then good. That makes this change much simpler for the reader.

Likewise, you added more than one new type of blessing. Would these blessings (no more and no fewer) be available in book 8? Also good from a game design standpoint, because then they would be “special blessings you get from the southern continent” instead of “weird quirks this new author added for one book.”

And questions which might involve Dave and Jamie:

The price on these blessings keeps changing. I depended on stability in pricing in the northern continent to allow me to update my budget without flipping through too many pages: “Oh, Tyrnai in this port? Combat blessing restored for 25 Shards.” Should “inflation” be allowed in these blessings for the higher-level books? And whether yes or no, should there be such variation from one town to the next?

And this isn't about gods necessarily, but is the entire world called Harkuna or just the northern continent? Book 1 is ambivalent on this.

Dave: I can see that it makes sense to have widely varying prices. On the northern continent cities are linked by trade, stabilising prices to a large extent. In the south, the jungle tends to isolate each community into its own pocket economy. Less trade means less standardisation -- and an opportunity, of course, for daring merchant-adventurers to make a profit.

Wrt the name of the world... I think Harkuna is just the northern continent. It certainly isn't a word that southerners would use. However, ambiguity exists in real scholarship and can do in FL too. When the Maya spoke of “the One World” did they mean just Central America, or all the Americas, or the entire planet? The fact is that usage changes to fit changing ideas of reality, so you might find one sage who'll tell you that Harkuna means all the lands, where others might say it's just the northern part. Jamie, any thoughts?

Blessings... well, I doubt if the regions of book 8 will have many deities in common with book 7. They're different geographies with little commerce between them, except perhaps along the coast. Blessings acquired in any book to date have worked in all books, regardless of whether the deity in question is locally worshipped, but it's possible we could have blessings that are more restricted. (In one of my Tekumel games, players came from a small island where they grew up worshipping a local god; once they travelled to the mainland he had no power to aid them.)

Jamie: “Originally there were three gods, those who created the world. These are hardly mentioned in the legends. They are dim, shadowy figures of a primordial age. Even their names bespeak dream-like obscurity: Harkun, He Who Is Like Harkun, and The Third God. These three having died, their place was taken by powerful demiurges, each with his or her own delineated jurisdiction. Thus there is Tyrnai, overseer of war; Elnir, lord of the sky; irascible Maka, who brings disease and famine if not appeased with sacrifices; Lacuna, lady of the hunt; Nagil, king of the dead; wise Molhern, deity of craftsmen; Sig, who guides the soft footsteps of thieves; the Three Fortunes, goddesses of destiny; and the twin gods Alvir and Valmir, who rule the land under the waves. Those, at least, are the gods of the northern continent...” (3:357 ).

But the idea about the original three, a kind of Trinity (actually something similar to Finnish old gods if I recall correctly) were the creators of the whole world of Harkuna through their deaths. Harkun falls from 'heaven' or 'the land of the Gods' and his spine becomes the mountain range that runs through northern Harkuna ie the Spine of Harkun. His blood is the ocean and so on. But as Dave says, it's the northern folks word for Earth or the 'One World'. I don't think the southern continent would actually call it Harkuna, though they could. They ought to have a similar kind of back story as it were. A different name, but still 3 elder gods. I say 'ought' and not 'must' or 'should' so it's not that important. Some southerners might also name a mountain range after the bones of Harkun and scholars would argue endlessly about who was right. Perhaps fight a war about it, that kind of thing.

The Uttakin take a different view of course... And we shall have to wait and see what the scientists and scholars of book 8 think about that too. Also Atticala and Chrysoprais would have their own versions as well.

As for Blessings, having different prices is fine. But bear in mind that you could start in book 8. That is of course a problem with our whole system - getting to very high levels. And starting with a level 8 character and then just sailing straight to book one makes things a lot easier. But still. Not sure what we can do about that.

I'd think about getting rid of the one god rule perhaps? You can have one God per 'culture' as it were? That means you could have multiple blessings, but hopefully that won't be too unbalancing because it would be very hard to get another blessing of Tyrnai for instance if you are inland. Except of course Ebron where you can never worship anyone else without renouncing him and becoming an Apostate.

Dave: We can't change any meta-rules (like having one god) because those are written into the start of each book. But you can build in special casing within any book, of course -- Ebron being an example of that.

As for the creation myths - well, we can say that's one story. Other cultures will have different stories. The people of Dangor think that the rest of the world outside their city state hasn't been fully created yet, but is just a dream their god is having. Q: “Is the whole world called Harkuna?” A: “No, it's called Dangor.”

Jamie: I meant just for books down south as it were. Part of the problem being that you'd be unable to renounce Enlil for instance whilst in Dunpala. You can have local gods on top of your legacy gods from books one to six. And of course, yes, each culture has their view on the world, like Ebron etc.

Paul: In some (most) cases in FL7, the blessings you get are the same as in the earlier books, so that only the source is different. You can get a THIEVERY blessing from Ko, a SCOUTING blessing from Kel Kin, etc. So it's rarely a problem that you'll need a blessing, but can't get hold of it without crossing the world.

The Sage of Peace in book 6 is a good example of how you can use a specific case to change the meta-rules - it specifically says that you can be an initiate of the Sage of Peace as well as an initiate of another faith, at the same time.

There is a loophole to getting out of the church of Ebron without becoming an apostate, for the record - you become an initiate of Ebron in book 5 as normal, but instead of renouncing the faith as normal you head over to book 2, and have the encounter with the 3 knights of Nagil. They give you the option of becoming an initiate of Nagil on the spot, which replaces the god you're currently an initiate of - that is, you can leave the faith of Ebron without picking up the necessary codeword to say that you're a heretic.

You want loopholes in FL1 - 6? I got 'em.

Jamie: Hah, though not in the eyes of the Expungers! But that’s typical of a lot of stuff – book 2 having been written before book 5 came along and buggered around with the rules. That could be fixed in a later edit though. However, it’s a mild problem in the grand scheme of things I think.

Dave: We really should have written all twelve books and fully standardized the rules before releasing the first one. Not that videogame developers work that way either, but patches for print gamebooks are harder to deliver.

Richard: Yes, well, if you want to change the history of the real world, I can think of more important things to perfect than the development of Fabled Lands. I wouldn't stop you from the latter, of course…

Before commenting on these blessings, I used the search button to look for familiar blessings (Combat and so on) in books beyond what I'd read in 1-3. I saw things like randomized blessings, which is fine. What I didn’t see was “Yes, you non-initiates need to pay thirty Shards on this page, but thirty-five Shards on this other page in the same book. Gotcha!” Remember that, unlike with checking a local market, the player needs to go through (to use a computer metaphor) sub-menu after sub-menu to find the price on just one local blessing, then repeat this from the top for the next one. So, inflation for the book as a whole might make sense, but I'd argue that the gameplay benefit of standardization between cities would benefit players greatly, despite the “sense” of local supply and demand.

I'm not too concerned about difficulties in renouncing worship. The biggest ticket items are resurrections, right? I'd sail across the ocean for several hundred Shards; that's the amount you make from cargo anyway. And you also get a free teleport to the location of the temple when you die so you can change things without losing that cash. Otherwise, getting a discount on exactly one blessing out of the crowd has never seemed important enough to risk the opportunity cost of “Oops! I didn't realize I'd want to become the Chosen One of Nagil! Missed opportunity for this Alvir and Valmir initiate, here.”

In books 1 to 3, I felt little reason to the “God” box outside of resurrection. If this changed in 4 to 6, I wouldn't know. (And then there's Illuminate of Molhern, which doesn't go in that box at all and is just good to have.) Thus, in books 7 and onward, I still wouldn't see myself becoming an initiate of anybody without a higher reason: Huan-da and In-da giving Nahual is one such reason. Unless other gods give powers or Chosen One-style plot events, I don't see players choosing them, especially if there's another new crowd in the next book too.

I really like the idea of Obfuscation as a blessing type. I'd want it in there somewhere for the name alone! If it's too similar to other types, though, perhaps players would like to see an older blessing reappear: some overlap in “quirks” with another region in the world. The Clarity blessing, of course, being relevant to Nahual combat, surely would reappear in all subsequent books that use such combat.

I'm noting the conversation about Harkuna. Bumping against the southern edge of “the world of Harkuna” got my attention. For loopholes, well, I'm trying to catch any in this book as I read. Obsessive gamers will always find them…

Baby steps in the Weeping Jungle

If you've been waiting for news of the seventh Fabled Lands book - and I know you have - then stop chewing those nails and take a look at this. Paul Gresty has cleared time from his very busy schedule to write us a guest post updating everybody on the book's progress. The nutshell version: the manuscript is finished and it's on to the final furlong. For the juicy details I'll hand you over to Paul...
 

Dave has been kind enough to allow me to write a few words here on the Fabled Lands blog to talk about where we're up to with The Serpent King's Domain. And, this time around, it's big news: we have a finished draft of the book, and we're well into editing. Our editor, Richard S Hetley, is the first adventurer to leave Dunpala for the wilds of the Weeping Jungle. He's currently trekking through the Feathered Lands, and putting the seventh book in this series through its paces.

In editing terms, this brings about a lot of fine-tuning. There' a lot of back and forth discussion right now about the economic consequences of two ports, Dunpala and Begotombo, being so close to one another; about whether a score of ghouls should have a higher Stamina score than that big bull in Cities of Gold and Glory; about whether the new Obfuscation blessing is too similar to the Immunity to Injury blessing in The Court of Hidden Faces.

I've intentionally geared the book towards throwing up some challenges for very high-rank characters, and so it's fascinating to see how Richard tackles it with somebody newly created at 7th rank. The number of locations to visit in the Feathered Lands is considerably higher than in the first six books of the series; consequently, some quest-important items or codewords are proving really hard to track down. Some opponents are probably too tough for a character that's just starting out (hey, that's what resurrection deals are for) and, frankly, there are more than a few paragraph links that are flat-out broken, and need to be fixed. That's where we're at with the text of The Serpent King's Domain right now – we're addressing all of these points.

Dave and Jamie have also been giving valuable input on the setting of Harkuna as a whole – notably how the Feathered Lands relate to other regions in the world, and some details on how the different faiths fit together. This has, dare I say, even allowed for a little tentative planning of books 8 to 12.

As regards the interior artwork, Russ has completed about half the necessary pictures, including all of the high-level backer rewards. The latest news is that he's working on rough outlines of the remaining full-page pieces, and the smaller filler pieces that will intersperse the text.

Kev, our cover artist, is in a similar position. Before Christmas I wrote up a comprehensive brief for him about the setting, and the notable people and places within the Feathered Lands; he's now partway through his black-and-white roughs. He'll be back in touch with us shortly, with a more complete image.

I'll take the opportunity to address a point that Michael Hartland brought up on the Kickstarter page (and that was somewhat echoed by James Cartwright): "What's the chance of getting the book finished by June, do you think?" On the writing side of things, it'll be finished way before then. I'm hesitant to make grand promises on top of that, because there are still things like artwork and page layout to consider, and then hiccups can always occur with printing and shipping. But I'll provisionally say that the chances are really good.

And I'll conclude with a point of precision about how to most efficiently direct questions about The Serpent King's Domain. Asking questions here on the FL blog is fine; better yet is to contact Mikael Louys at Megara Entertainment, as Megara are responsible for running the Kickstarter and publishing the book. That can be done through Megara's website or the Kickstarter page. At this stage all questions are likely to be referred back to me anyway, so please feel free to go ahead and contact me directly. I welcome and encourage all inquiries, comments and criticisms, and I'll get back to you as soon as my frail mortal body will allow.

As always, huge thanks to all backers for your support in this process, and for your patience so far. The Serpent King's Domain would not exist without you.

- Paul.

Do I gotta draw you a map?

Actually, you'll be glad to hear that the map is by Russ Nicholson, not me. (As if you couldn't tell, right?) This is the one you've been waiting twenty years for: the map of Ankon-Konu, soon to be opened up to exploration by The Serpent King's Domain, seventh in the Fabled Lands series. Paul Gresty is hard at work on that now and it's shaping up to be the best FL book yet. Don't take my word for it, try the demo for yourself here.

The Kickstarter campaign was planned and run by Richard S Hetley, our editor, line producer, and invaluable consultant on the series. I asked for his thoughts on getting this dazzling new map from Russ:

"As always, it's been great to see new work from someone who helped build our favorite game worlds. It's also been interesting watching the notes from Paul, which quite literally were a printout of the old Ankon-Konu map covered with marker and pencil doodles, iterate into something that gives a sense of place. There was only one spot where I thought there was a bit of a hiccup: in Smogmaw of the first draft, there was a mysterious plain triangle sticking out of the top of the city. Was it supposed to be a rooftop? Perhaps a misplaced decoration like a flying bird? Or a gigantic pointy-cap mushroom? Russ took this feedback (I didn't mention the mushroom bit...) with all the rest and made the final version you see here. It communicates very well."

I'm not showing the whole map in all its multicoloured glory here because I think it's only fair that the Kickstarter backers get to see it first - as they will in the hardcover edition to be published by Megara Entertainment. A few months later Fabled Lands Publishing will release a paperback version, but for that one you'll have to make do with black and white.Still looks pretty spectacular, though, wouldn't you agree?

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

Fabled Lands at #1

More news about the Kickstarter being run by Megara Entertainment (based in France) to create a new Fabled Lands book. We could already see the campaign was going great guns (already at 340% of its intial target as I write this) but now Richard S Hetley, who planned and is running the campaign for Megara, tells me that it is the top-rated project originating in France that's running on Kickstarter at the moment. Not near the top, right there in pole position. Formidable!

The campaign may have attained its initial target (within 45 minutes of launch, as a matter of fact) but when you're climbing the mountain of launching an all-new book from scratch, every pledge counts. More money raised means the book can have more artwork and more story content, some of it in the form of personalized locations and characters.

Personally I'm hoping for a full triptych painting by internationally renowned movie concept artist Kevin Jenkins (see below) as well as maps and interior illustrations by Russ Nicholson (who else?). And a high enough final figure means that Jamie and I can seriously reopen the possibility of completing the series. Want to see that happen? You can pledge here.

 Concept art by 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?

The Way of the Tiger continues

1987. It was the climax of the sixth book in the Way of the Tiger series. Having risen from orphan to pretender to king, the hero of the series, Avenger, travels to the Rift, a great chasm into the heart of the Earth, to rescue her (or his) comrade Glaivas the ranger. Plummeting down the precipices, Avenger lands on something soft. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's a web, in which she (or he) is stuck fast, and a colossal spider (and/or god) is coming closer, closer...

Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith got to there, section 424 in the book, and wrote, "The end." Other books in the series had an implied "to be continued", but this one bore a stamp of finality. There's a good reason; Mark and Jamie didn't expect to be writing another one. Knight Books, publishers of Way of the Tiger, had dragged their feet over whether to renew the contract. It's the eternal worry of the freelancer - a publisher or network executive twiddles their thumbs, unhurried as only a regular salary can make a person, while the writer or artist frets about where she (or he) will find the next mortgage payment.

Not knowing whether to commit to more Way of the Tiger, Mark and Jamie had pitched another series, Duel Master, and got an offer from Armada. So by the time the alarm clock went off at Knight Books and somebody remembered to phone up for a discussion about a chat about some thoughts regarding a possible book 7, Jamie was already deep into designing the rules and complex structure for Duel Master. Mark finished off Inferno, dumped Avenger into that web, and typed two three-letter words that stuck a generation of schoolkids on tenterhooks for twenty-seven years. He left the tiniest of get-out clauses, a faintly glimmering "unless" in the final sentence, but the truth is Mark and Jamie never expected to be coming back.

Never say never. All these years later, Fabled Lands Publishing got hold of the Way of the Tiger rights and enlisted the editing team at Megara Entertainment, headed up by Richard S Hetley, to fix some of the logic problems in Inferno, refurbish the text, and now we have an all-new edition to please the most demanding fan. (Not only that, author David Walters has permission from Mark and Jamie to continue the series and looks set to do that brilliantly, starting with book seven, Redeemer.)

The new edition of Inferno is on sale now. The cover took some thinking about, and in the end we didn't use any of the designs above. Initially we were going with the giant spider painting by Mylène Villeneuve, the artist for the other five WOTT covers. It's nice and sinister, but the problem comes when you see it in thumbnail, as it would appear on most online bookstores, whereupon the tiny figure of Avenger is lost and all the customer would see is a picture of a spider. And, as you can see, to use that painting we'd have needed to add a blank strip at the bottom, otherwise the text of the title would have obscured Avenger anyway.

So we turned to the rising star of Megara's art stable, Sébastien Brunet, who did the cover art for the new edition of the Blood Sword gamebooks as well as the interior illustrations in Inferno. But the first stab at using his picture (above right) didn't work. The conventional direction of movement implied the dragon/serpent trying to get somewhere and the swordswoman Cassandra trying to stop it. That may be the scenario in the story, but the cover becomes more dramatic when it's flipped the other way round. On top of which, it always looks odd when artists insist on having warriors fight left-handed. (Unless the author has specified that. I bet a hundred WOTT fans will now tell me Cassandra's a southpaw.) So finally we come to the cover above left, which is the one you'll get if you part with your hard-won oban. But don't empty the piggy-bank completely, as the coming weeks will see the re-release of Falcon 1: The Renegade Lord, a beautiful (and multi-platform) app version of Necklace of Skulls, and The Keep of the Lich Lord (formerly Fighting Fantasy Gamebook #43) as a Fabled Lands adventure. Christmas is indeed coming early.