Far in the pillared dark

A repost from my Patreon page today. This is from the Jewelspider RPG but could apply to any quasi-European medieval setting. Jewelspider has no character classes as such; forester is just a job description. The illustration is from Gaston III's Livre de Chasse (14th century, strictly speaking a couple of hundred years late for the world of Legend) 

A forester is usually of yeoman class and at various times might serve as lawman, hunter, gamekeeper, soldier and bodyguard. Some foresters may hold a royal warrant, in which case he or she is more or less an independent agent who will be treated as a social equal by the lords of manors adjoining the forest. Others, engaged by the lords themselves, are usually freemen who might be assigned escort duty, told to bring a rare herb, expected to supply the manor with meat and furs, sent to deal with outlaws, drive off poachers, and so on – still entitled to respect like all expert craftsmen, but without the special privilege that direct servants of the crown enjoy.

At one extreme are those foresters who are primarily administrative officials, rarely venturing into the woods, and at the other there are solitary hermits with one foot in the faerie realm. But most conform to the popular image of the tough, taciturn, self-sufficient, competent woodsman:

‘He was clad in coat and hood of green.
A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen
Under his belt he bore most carefully.
(Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly:
His arrows drooped not with feathers low; )
And in his hand he bore a mighty bow.
A shaven pate had he, and a sun- brown face:
Of woodcraft he knew well all the ways:
Upon his arm shone a fine shield,
By his side a sword and buckler did he wield,
And on the other side a dagger bright,
Well sheathed, sharp as a spear’s point in sunlight:
St Christopher on his breast of silver sheen.
A horn he bore, the baldric was of green:
A forester he was indeed.’

The forester’s duties include providing winter feed for the deer, apprehending poachers and robbers, driving off wolves, organizing pollarding and the maintenance of paths, preventing illegal logging and grazing that would damage the vert, and ensuring that commoners’ cattle are driven out of the forest during fence month (fourteen days either side of Midsummer Night) when no man, beast or stray dog is permitted there – this to ensure the deer are not disturbed while calving.

Not every forester fits into manorial society. Other options include:

Outlaw – forced to hide away deep in the wildwood, you will have experience in hiding, survival, hunting and ambushes.

Forsaken – your local manor was depopulated by plague or warfare, leaving you increasingly isolated from contact with your fellow man. This option might suit a mystic or woodland priest.

Loner – in childhood you found any excuse to take yourself off to the forest. Your knowledge of woodcraft is self-taught.

Charcoal burner – the lowest of the low in feudal society, often working in the heart of the forest and emerging only occasionally to sell your wares.

Wodewose – the semi-mythical wild man, shunned and dreaded by civilized folk who believe you to be dangerous, depraved, pagan in your beliefs, and possibly cannibalistic.

A neck romancer

I think of Crypt of the Vampire as my first gamebook, but it’s moot. I’d already written the magazine version of Castle of Lost Souls. That was serialized in White Dwarf in the summer of 1984, several months before the Golden Dragon series launched, and later got reworked as the sixth GD title. But Crypt was the first time I’d taken on a whole book.

Those were busy times. I had to turn down designing the PC game “Eureka by Ian Livingstone” because of all my magazine and book commitments. Maybe that was a mistake, as my friend Steve Foster, who wrote it in my place, told me he bought his first house on the proceeds. (The picture below, that's us back then in our slimmer days. I'm the one reading Captain America.) But at least with Golden Dragon I got my name on the title page. The road that’s grassy and wants for wear, you see.

Crypt and the later books nearly didn’t happen. In spring of 1984, while I was writing the first instalments of Castle of Lost Souls, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson offered me a contract to do a series of gamebooks for Games Workshop. I’d done bags of work for GW before – an entire role-playing game in 1980 called Adventure (never published; GW acquired the RuneQuest rights) and then in 1983 an entire Questworld campaign pack with Oliver Johnson (never published; GW lost the RQ rights). In the case of the gamebooks, though, they seemed to be serious. They were willing to pay an advance, and that was a first.

Except… it was £350 per book, which was a pittance even in the ‘80s. And it would have been an exclusive contract, meaning I couldn’t work with any other publisher. “Why would Ian and Steve want to compete with Fighting Fantasy?” I wondered. For whatever reason, I dragged my heels about signing and was mighty glad I did, as a matter of weeks later I went to see Angela Sheehan at Dragon Books, had a nice long chat, and walked out with a two-book deal.

Originally Temple of Flame was down as the first book in the series, and the contract describes the other as “Dungeon of the Undead”. I think it was probably my dad who said, “Put ‘vampire’ in the title, it’ll grab people more than ‘undead’.” The publishers wanted to call it Crypt of Dracula, but I wasn’t having that. These books would be read by kids, and I didn’t want their first experience of Bram Stoker’s creation to be in a gamebook. Dracula was already in public domain, Stoker having died seventy-two years earlier, but I believe writers owe a creative courtesy to each other that lasts a lot longer than the term of copyright – though, regrettably, not everyone shares that view.

For the new edition, I’ve revised the text slightly to excise the trad fantasy elements (a hobgoblin, an elf) that seemed most intrusive. Now the atmosphere is very slightly more Gothic, the setting less definitely medieval. “Ah!” the DW players will say, “but isn’t Wistren Wood in Ellesland?” And so it is, but my Legend games have moved on – past the Last Trump at the end of The Walls of Spyte, even – to a time of matchlocks and sabres*.

But that’s getting close to a foolish consistency. Whether or not Crypt of the Vampire is set in Legend, at heart it belongs to the lurid fairytale world of Hammer horror, where Cushing’s alert, flashing gaze locked with the fiery brooding in the eyes of Lee, and dark ivy-choked halls waited in the depths of darker woods. I like what Johnny S Geddes said about Crypt on Demian Katz’s gamebook page:

“Every now and then around midnight, and especially when there's thunder outside, I go back and take another tread through the enchanted forest leading to a dark mansion.”

That’s how I like to think of it being enjoyed. And, with Halloween almost upon us, here’s the chance to curl up with something creepy. The new edition also has Leo Hartas’s illustrations, incidentally – it was Leo’s first book as well as mine. Start as you mean to go on, that's our motto.

* Update 2024: In fact that gunpowder-powered version of Legend never came about, as I realized that the kind of campaign I was planning to run wasn't a good fit with the tastes of some of my players. So the Legend you'll see in my Jewelspider RPG is the original Dark Ages/early medieval setting familiar from Dragon Warriors.