Some stocking fillers

With Christmas coming up, I feel I should suggest a few presents. Christmas Eve is the perfect time for weird tales, and they don't come any better than John Whitbourn's Binscombe Tales -- the perfect blend of eeriness, wit, charm and chills. But don't overlook the same author's novel Babylondon, which I sometimes categorize as Doctor Who meets A Matter of Life & Death:

"1780, The Gordon Riots: London is on fire and in the hands of the mob. Babylon rises from the Infernal depths to replace England’s capital and rule forever. Enter the enigmatic Cavaliere, sent to sort things out, armed only with a swordstick—and frightfully good manners."

Also recommended is his short story collection Altered Englands, "where traditional ghost stories rub shoulders with alternate histories, science fiction, fantasy, and tales of the supernatural. Expect blood to be chilled, pulses to quicken, and wry smiles to be raised. Includes the concluding—and revelatory—story from the Binscombe Tales series, ‘England Expects!’"

John Whitbourn doesn't only write for grown-ups. Like many authors, he has shared the tales he told to his own children. Look for Amy-Faith & the Stronghold and Amy-Faith & the Enemy of Calm.

Also imbued with the magic we expect of the season is Roz Morris's delightful short novel Lifeform Three, in which a robot and an animal together remind the humans of the future what really matters in life. Roz also wrote a charming and quirky travel memoir, Not Quite Lost, in which the Morrises explore odd corners of the UK; think Bill Bryson with more focus on the lives and eccentricities of the people met. Of course, I'm not impartial.

Another timeless classic guaranteed to bring thrills and laughs: Jamie Thomson's Dark Lord novels. Supposedly for kids but loved just as much by grown-ups, the series makes ideal reading for Christmas.

If you're not into fiction, regular readers will remember that I have previously praised Andy Fletcher's memoir-cum-life-guide How To Back Horses & Yourself. As I put it in my Amazon review, reading it is like going for a pint with somebody who is expert in their subject and is also a dazzling raconteur who can be funny and insightful while telling you all the ins and outs of their subject.

There's nothing Christmassy about Fights in Tight Spaces, but it is a fun little game that Jamie and I have been enjoying recently, and if you're too lazy to do any shopping it has the advantage that you can just download it. It reminds me a little of the classic boardgame Gunslinger, given that your tactical moves are played in the form of cards with an action point cost (though in Gunslinger you choose the round's cards rather than having them dealt randomly and most cards can be played in more than one way). The developer is currently polishing a follow-up called Knights in Tight Spaces, which I can see myself losing many hours to.

Or what about a gamebook? Some of the best available are Martin Noutch's Steam Highwayman series, rich with enough period atmosphere, innovative fantasy, exhilarating adventure, and vivid characters to draw comparison with Dickens. Playing these is like diving into your own Christmas Day movie.

Possibly the ultimate in depth of both setting and gameplay is Expeditionary Company. This series is complex but rewards the care and attention you'll put into every detail, even down to the NPC guards you'll pick to defend your caravans: some of the NPCs are arrogant and hard to get along with but consummate fighters, others have valuable skills like healing, survival, tracking and trading. There's a huge range of downloadable extras you can find here. What would be even more perfect to turn Expeditionary Company into a Christmas gift would be if there was a boardgame adaptation (maybe a Kickstarter for 2025 there?) but with a little imagination you'll find the gamebooks are all you'll need to carry you off into a whole other world of fabulous adventures.

Another innovative gamebook is In the Ashes by Pablo Aguilera. I say gamebook, but this really is a solo RPG with a fascinating admixture of boardgame elements. I intend to talk more about both this and Expeditionary Company when I get time to analyze them in detail, but suffice it to say that In the Ashes is a physically gorgeous artefact that would make an ideal Christmas present.

Or for something visual that's both disturbing and charming at the same time, let me recommend Ryan Lovelock's brilliant Kadath Express. Ryan has provided a free digital version (hit the link) for you to try online, but consider splashing out for the hardback because it really makes a gorgeous gift.

For roleplaying into the New Year, I like the look of Postmortem Studios' Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned. It's sort of the horror reversal of Mirabilis (see below) as the comet of 1666 causes the dead to rise from their graves. The rising is worst in England, where the dead from the plague and the recent Civil War overwhelm the city of Whitchester, which is subsequently sealed up tight and walled off, becoming Wightchester. The city is now a prison for criminals tasked with reclaiming it and facing certain death from the undead should they fail. (And for further ideas to keep the campaign going once Whitchester is purged of zombies, you could do worse than plunder the imagination of Pat Mills in his comic Defoe: 1666.)

If you're looking for books of mine (and bless you, if so) then the ones I'd most recommend for Christmas are Mirabilis: Year of Wonders volume one and volume two. And if comics are not your thing, the Edwardian fantasy of the Mirabilis universe is also on show in A Minotaur at the Savoy, a collection of quirky vignettes. Or if it's a virtual stocking you're looking to fill, try the online version of Heart of Ice generously coded by Benjamin Fox.

And for viewing on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, here are a few things I've enjoyed over the years while recovering between bouts of turkey and pudding. Wine may also have been involved.

• 101 Dalmatians
• Catch Me If You Can
• First Men in the Moon
• A Ghost Story for Christmas (especially "The Ash Tree")
• Inside Number 9 (like M R James, ideal for Christmas Eve)
• Knight & Day
• The Ladykillers
• The Lost City
• Passengers
• Robin Redbreast
• Spy
• The Stone Tape
• Survivors (1975)
• The Time Traveler's Wife
• The Woman in Black (1989)

Finally, a freebie: my pulp-era SF pastiche "Cubic Capacity". It's not specifically set at this time of year but it has got a lacing of whimsy such as readers used to find in Unknown, which seems appropriate to the season, and being free it counts as a gift. I was 15 years old when I wrote the story and I'm not sure I could do it any better today. A ghost of Christmas Past, then.

Maps of the mind

Martin Noutch, author of the wonderful Steam Highwayman books, is a true scholar of the craft of gamebook writing. One of the reasons his own books are so good might be because he has thoroughly analyzed the works of other writers in the field. The shoulders of giants and all that.

So that you can benefit from his studies too, Martin recently posted his story maps of the Fabled Lands books. Looking at those prompted me to dig out some of the maps I used to plan the books. Astonished that I still have this stuff after 30 years? I'm working on that hoarding obsession.

Trust me when I say that you haven't seen the full possibility of storytelling married to open world gamebooks until you've played the Steam Highwayman series.

Steam Highwayman in the US

Steam Highwayman in the UK

And if you like the idea of steam-powered vehicles and picaresque adventures in an early 19th century setting (or style thereof), I recommend Keith Roberts' seminal SF novel Pavane. (It is SF, incidentally, and not steampunk, which is really a branch of fantasy because physics, but I don't want to give any spoilers. Read it and see.)

Pavane in the US

Pavane in the UK

Expeditionary Company is in need of goldash

Only three decades after Jamie and I more or less invented the open-world gamebook genre, suddenly you can't move for new ones.

I'm not complaining. Books like Steam Highwayman are more than worthy successors to Fabled Lands, in the same way that Citizen Kane didn't need to spend too long genuflecting to Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed.

What I like about the new generation of open-world books is the way they take the concept as a springboard, not a straitjacket. Steam Highwayman gives you a role to fill in the world, though you have considerable freedom in deciding how you go about it. Alba is a more directed story experience, like a literary The Long Dark. And Legendary Kingdoms has a party of characters with their own relationships and an epic story set in a detailed fantasy world.

Oh, and there's Vulcanverse of course, which has companions and a story arc that builds in from the first four books to culminate in a finale that the MCU wouldn't be ashamed of. And there's never been a better time to try it out, incidentally.

But I digress. Now comes Expeditionary Company by celebrated gamebook authors David Velasco and Riq Sol. This is more than just a gamebook, though. It's almost a mash-up of roleplaying game, boardgame and multiple-choice adventure, with notes of Expedition and To Carry A Sword. Download the free demo and see what I mean. 

But it looks to be much more than just a blend of those elements, with a compelling lore and world all its own. What I especially like is the depth of the backstory: a mystery to be uncovered that not only sets up some dubious saviours (or more likely outright scheming bad guys) in the form of the Auric, it also provides the dramatic tension between travelling to make money and exploring the wilderness to find out more. It's a background that would do justice to a series of fantasy novels. This is how gamebooks grow up.

Tragically the Kickstarter was cancelled, so we can only hope the authors find another way to fund this innovative project. Perhaps a games publisher will get behind it, or maybe a new crowdfunding effort will raise the money needed. It's not easy (I can't even figure out how to Kickstart any of my own projects) but I'm really rooting for this one.

It's that man again

I was interviewed by Olly McNeil of the Storymaster's Tales for International Gamebook Day 2021. Lots of good questions meant that I didn't have to repeat my limited store of Games Workshop anecdotes too much. You can get the video here and buy Olly's Weirding Woods game here.

And the very same day, Martin Noutch joined Olly to talk about the Steam Highwayman books, my own favourite of all the successors to Fabled Lands -- not least because the action starts out in a corner of Buckinghamshire that happens to be where I was born and where a lot of my family live. And Martin shares my preference for low fantasy, the English landscape, and personal-scale stories, as he expatiates on here:

And our friends at Cubus Games will shortly be releasing a Steam Highwayman mobile game that looks absolutely amazing. Great music too. (And is that Boris Johnson I spotted in the NPC rogues' gallery there..? Worth stoking up your steam motorbike just to hold him to account, I'd say.)

Wide open worlds

The Kickstarter for Legendary Kingdoms ends in a few hours. Better get over there right now if you want to back it.

In case the title isn't enough of a hint, LK is an open world gamebook series in the style of Fabled Lands. What that means is that you can start in lots of different places, take the kind of character you want, pick your own goals, and explore the world however you choose by going back and forth between the books, each of which covers a different region.

The grandfather of open world gamebooks is Eric Goldberg, who pioneered the idea (though he may not have realized it) in 1985 with his boardgame Tales of the Arabian Nights. That seemed to me what gamebooks ought to be: a roleplaying campaign in solo Choose Your Own Adventure form.

Jamie and I pitched an open world gamebook series called Hero Quest to publishers in 1987, and later repackaged the concept as Knights of Renown in 1989, but with still no takers. It wasn't until six years later that we convinced Pan Macmillan to do the Fabled Lands series, and by then the gamebook craze was dying out. That's why we only managed the first six books of the planned twelve.

All went quiet for a couple of decades, and then like long-awaited buses came The Serpent King's Domain, Steam Highwayman, Alba and Legendary Kingdoms. And, not to be left out, Jamie and I are writing an open world series of five books for his Vulcanverse fantasy setting, and we're hoping that Prime Games's CRPG version of the original Fabled Lands books might rekindle enough interest in those that we can finally finish off the series.

Meanwhile I'd be quite keen to write the Victorian survival horror gamebook Shadow King (think: H G Wells meets The Long Dark) but I'm too averse to social media and too deficient in marketing nous to run the Kickstarter campaign needed to fund it. Fans of open world gamebooks won't be short of alternatives. It may have taken three decades for the wider reading public to catch up with the concept, but I'm betting it has a bright future ahead.

Gamebooks are growing up

Some gamebook news today, and here's one that ought to be of interest to Fabled Lands readers. Apart from the Steam Highwayman series (excellent and highly recommended btw) there haven't been a lot of open world gamebooks, in the sense of giving complete freedom to travel where you want, go back and forth without limit, and pick up whichever quests appeal to your character. But here's a new one called Alba with a post-apocalyptic setting, and it must be doing something right because in fund-raising terms it has far surpassed other print gamebooks (open world or linear) of recent times.

I haven't seen the book myself, but from the Kickstarter page it looks like it has a lot of legacy game elements such as stickers that mark items or locations on the map. (And to think players used to grumble about having to tick boxes in Fabled Lands books back in the day.)

The writing style is of  higher quality than the purple prose of yore, and it looks as if the blocks of prose between choices are longer, making this more of a weighty novelistic experience than a CRPG in book form. Think Telltale Games' The Walking Dead rather than The Witcher. Here's the author, Harley L Truslove, talking about the books.

One obvious difference from old-style gamebooks is that in Alba your character can't die. That's a gripe about FL that we still hear. Somebody on Facebook recently was disgruntled because the skeleton pirates in Over the Blood-Dark Sea had carted them off to a life of undeadtured (sic) servitude with no hope of resurrection:

It used to be that whatever happened to you was part of the story, even when that story ended in tragedy and/or horror. But those were times when PCs in roleplaying games might get killed at the drop of a bascinet, and when we could reasonably expect Bucky to stay dead. We're in different times now, and Jamie and I have taken that on board with our new Vulcanverse gamebooks, which should eventually consist of around a 4000-section adventure in which you cannot die permanently, not even if the Furies and Nemesis team up against you. The worst you'll suffer is being sent to the naughty corner (aka Tartarus) for a brief spell.

I'm being facetious, but the Don't Kill Me players are right. A single-story game (Heart of Ice, say) shouldn't require trying-&-dying till you find an optimum path through. Every time the PC snuffs it in a book like that it's a failure on the writer's part. And even in an open-world gamebook, where death might be the appropriate ending for a given character's story, it can't just be random and unavoidable. Good god, that would be too much like real life.

But it's not just the legacy features and the immunity from death that have propelled Alba to unprecedented success for a print gamebook. The main difference is that it's not the usual hokey old '80s-era D&D kind of fantasy, but instead a vivid, gritty and character-driven narrative in a setting that feels contemporary. (The excerpt is quite well-hidden on the Kickstarter page, but you can download it here.) If Alba was a TV show it'd be a talked-about cable drama, whereas most gamebooks would be a cheaply-animated Saturday morning cartoon that you dimly remembered from your childhood.

In the '80s heyday of CYOA and Fighting Fantasy, gamebooks were hugely successful. Pretty much every series was guaranteed to sell in the tens of thousands per territory. Gamebooks could still matter to a sizeable readership if they moved on from their origin as kids’ books. Interactive stories like The Walking Dead can deal with whether you’ll commit murder to save a friend. Firewatch can tackle loneliness and hope. In games from Assassin's Creed to Bioshock the player is confronted with real feelings and choices more intense than any movie.

And meanwhile gamebooks* are mostly still about which key opens which chest or which item will defeat the Big Bad. Who cares? Crosswords and sudoku already have the puzzle market covered**. It's time for gamebooks to grow up the way that computer games have. That's what makes Alba exceptional. It's about an emotional journey, as all the best stories are. Only connect, that's the way forward.

* Print gamebooks, that is. For some time now Choice of Games have been producing interactive stories with more depth in digital book format, not the least of their titles being The ORPHEUS Ruse, a superbly gripping adventure by our own Paul Gresty.

** Unless you go full-on puzzle book, that is. I'd probably quite enjoy something like Journal 29, but it has stripped out all the story. And Alex Bellos's column in The Guardian satisfies my brain-training needs.

Games people are playing

I haven't played it, so don't take this as an endorsement, but indie developer Panic Barn have announced a "post-Brexit Papers Please" called Not Tonight. Apparently they're expecting "a flurry of negative reviews". Well, all publicity is good publicity, so that's a better thing to hope for than the crashing silence Jamie and I got in response to Can You Brexit?

Probably the mistake we made is that we made our political gamebook (there's a very nice custom "character sheet" for it here, incidentally) fairly balanced. The media really aren't interested in something unless it gets them spitting with outrage. You can judge for yourself in this episode of the Brave New Words podcast from Starburst magazine. The presenters start the show with a trigger warning, if that's any guide.

Speaking of trigger warnings, the trailer above opens with footage of Nigel Farage. In my house that can provoke a reaction that scares cats and breaks crockery. But hey, your tolerance levels may be different.

Other interactive things I haven't played include Charlie Higson's stab at a Fighting Fantasy book, The Gates of Death. It's for younger kids than the original '80s FF fandom - or maybe kids are just kiddier these days. Anyway, apparently that means fewer gory/scary encounters and more pop culture references and bottom jokes. Try it on your kids and see what they think. You may first need to convince them it's not a Miss Marple mystery, though, judging by the cover design.

I'm told by Mark Lain, aka Malthus Dire, that his gamebook Destiny's Role is the first of a planned series. There is very little about it on the web, but from the Amazon product page I've gleaned that this book comprises four different adventures in different genres, including a noir-style private dick scenario. (That's dick as in detective, of course, not what it would mean in a Higson book.) Marco Arnaudo's video review below should give you an idea of what the adventures are like.


French company Celestory, who seem to be a European answer to Choice of Games, have announced a forthcoming academic book called Interactive Story which will be published in both Europe and the US around Christmas 2018..

And while we're doing a round-up of games and gamebooks, let me put in another plug for Martin Noutch's excellent Steam Highwayman, in part inspired by Keith Roberts' SF classic Pavane. The Highwayman is building up pressure for another outing, so if you're a Fabled Lands player and you're into steampunk, this is for you.

Stand and deliver

"Your adventure is only limited by your success in pursuing your own goals. You have no single quest to complete and there is no fixed 'story', but you will encounter many quests, missions, puzzles and mysteries throughout the book. Your journey through these becomes your 'story' and when it comes to an end, you can begin once more and explore what might have been."

That's new gamebook author Martin Noutch describing his upcoming project Steam Highwayman. It sounds like it will appeal to fans of open-world gamebooks, as well as to steampunk aficionados, and if either or both of those ticks your boxes, you want to head over to Kickstarter and back the first volume in the series, Smog and Ambuscade, right now.

I've seen parallels being drawn with Fabled Lands, and certainly Steam Highwayman is an open world -- more of a solo RPG than a gamebook of the Fighting Fantasy single-quest model. But Martin has made a significant innovation. Where Fabled Lands leaves you to define your own character and goals (a degree of absolute freeform that many find too daunting), Steam Highwayman is more like a structured roleplaying campaign in which you are given a pre-defined role. You're not just presented with a world and told, "Go." You're a figure in that world and your choices fill in the character background. Kind of like being given Robin Hood to play, but whether he's a peasant or a dispossessed Saxon nobleman is left up to you. And that difference will, I think, make Steam Highwayman accessible to a lot of people who wouldn't know where to start with Fabled Lands.

Still need convincing? Then try this taste of what Martin has in store:

"Steam Highwayman is an adventure gamebook in which the reader explores an alternate 19th century England on a steam motorbike. You can choose to rob the rich, give to the poor, or to pursue and punish evil-doers. Will you side with the Compact for Workers' Equality and work to bring about revolution in England? Will you find a place in high society and become famed for your gallantry and style? Will you find your own path through the smog of the cities and beneath the branches of the quiet woods?"

I detect notes of H G Wells, Keith Roberts, maybe even a dash of William Morris. It sounds like a glorious immersive adventure which Martin has enriched with a depth of characterization you just didn't get in those old '80s gamebooks. And from his proficiency with accents in that YouTube trailer, I bet his roleplaying sessions are a blast too.