Here's a Legend scenario that originally appeared on my Patreon page. Sign up there (you don't have to pay anything) if you want to get these goodies early. We keep hearing these days about fantasy roleplaying being 'colonial'; here's an adventure where the colonials get their comeuppance!
The characters are in Outremer when they learn of the siege of Asun, a city on the coast of the Sea of Lament. It has been blockaded for months by a mercenary fleet financed by trading houses of Ferromaine, and now a Crusader army is closing in on it by land with the intention of wresting it from Zhenir at least long enough to sack the place.
The characters have heard of the wizard Zakhar (his name is actually Zakariya) whose magnificent House of Wonders stands in the Old Quarter of Asun. ‘Too many treasures there for Zakhar to salvage them all,’ reckons one authority on the subject. ‘He’ll escape with the choicest items, but there’s a chance his library will still have a few works not seen in the West for centuries. That’s if the Capellars don’t torch all the books as soon as they get into the city.’
It doesn’t matter whether or not the characters join in the capture of Asun, though it will be more effective if they do, especially if they have to circumvent some magical trap left by Zakhar to protect his home. At any rate, they either find or are subsequently offered a curio found behind a brick in the House of Wonders: a double-shelled bottle with an outer surface of swirling turquoise glass with gaps that reveal a secretive shell of black crystal beneath. The stopper is a gold plug stamped with a sigil unfamiliar to the most learned Coradian scholars. (Or even Ta'ashim scholars, come to that.)
If the stopper is removed, time stands still for all but the characters around the bottle. They become aware that their company now includes one who was not there before, though they have no memory of him joining them.
If they insist on giving him a name, he suggests they could call him Samum. ‘At this hour, when you gather, think on the wish of your hearts. Three wishes I will grant, but only when you speak together, and the wish shall be as the words you speak.’
They awake, realizing they had all dozed off, and the other is no longer with them. Nor can they remember his face.
The jinni will come each day at the same hour, but only if they are all gathered together. They can make one wish each time, and when all three wishes have been spoken the jinni will then bring about the exact opposite, one wish at a time on each of the next three days, the jinni manifesting now beside the bottle at the appointed hour whether or not all the characters assemble there.
Why the reversed wishes? Because the situation was not as it seemed. They did not free the jinni because it was never really trapped in the bottle in the first place. The stopper was a fake – that’s why no one can identify the sigil. The Ta’ashim wizard Zakariya, knowing his city was going to fall to the Coradians, left the jinni as a booby trap. He commanded it (using the last of his own three wishes) to pretend to be imprisoned until the stopper was removed, then to learn the three desires of the Coradians and do the opposite to what they want.
(Was this not a way of Zakariya effectively using his last wish to obtain three more wishes? Jinn are usually alert to such wiles, but in this case the jinni approves so greatly of the malice and ingenuity involved that it's prepared to overlook that.)
If the characters can find the original stopper with Suleiman’s seal (they would know him as 'Salamin', if at all) they might be able to fix things. Zakariya left it with a servant who was supposed to throw it in the well, but instead he sold it to a trader in curiosities in Asun market.
Armed with the genuine stopper, they could trick the jinni into returning to the bottle using the old ploy of ‘I can’t believe you could fit inside this…’ The jinni appears each day at the same hour, even after hearing the three wishes and then conjuring their opposite, in order to relish their misery. Naturally the jinni is just as aware of old myths as they are, but will happily enter the bottle because it thinks they have only the fake stopper, which has no power to seal it inside.
If they succeed in trapping the jinni and then release it for real, it is obliged to grant three wishes – this time playing it straight and doing exactly as they ask, not the reverse. It’s quite likely they’ll need at least one of those true wishes to fix the trouble the bad wishes caused, and of course if a wish is not phrased just right it can cause fresh problems of its own, even when granted properly.
How should the jinni look? You may have quite a job reclaiming the terrifying majesty of the concept from the creaky stage and screen versions we’re all used to. In movies jinn are almost never depicted as native to the region where they were originally minor deities. In Pasolini’s Il Fiore Delle Mille e una Note, the jinni has red hair. My favourite screen jinn are both played by John Leguizamo in Peter Barnes’s Arabian Nights miniseries, but Leguizamo is Spanish-Columbian. The Thief of Bagdad began a long tradition of having African-Americans play jinn (the magnificent Rex Ingram in this case) and I shudder to think that’s perhaps because Hollywood producers associate commanding a jinni with having a slave though, to be fair, later Arabic folktales also often portray a jinni’s natural form as black-skinned.
I like this sinister, mouldering, bandage-wrapped interpretation from the videogame The Thaumaturge. It does seem more Egyptian than Arabian, but neatly gets around any accusations of racism. And it fairly reeks of sorcerous power.
But how about if we look back to the original myths? Jinn there are creatures of smokeless fire (which is possibly how ancient Arabs described light) so maybe the jinni could manifest as a dazzling glow with a flickering face inside. Trouble is, that’s getting too FX-ish, which is the very opposite of magical. So in the end I opted to just make this one the classic shape changer, so protean that it was like an ambiguous figure met in a dream. And the jinn freely change their appearance in The Thousand and One Nights, so who could hope to pin them down any more than we can know how many quarks are dancing on the head of a proton?
"Samum" incidentally is a desert wind that brings sickness. A player might look that up and suspect a trap, but after all isn’t it exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a jinni to be called?
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.
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.
There seems to be a buzz around the Critical IF gamebooks, and in particular Heart of Ice. Here's yet another rave review, this time on the Solo Adventures with Livi channel. You want spoilers? OK, it ends with, "Solidly a 10 out of 10."
You can't please everybody. One comment below Livi's video was "Let the buyer beware." Yikes! Well, actually that's always good advice when picking up any book. Another comment, this time about Fabled Lands, raises an interesting point. Kosteri X said: "I found the Fabled Lands demo devoid of any emotion and all the NPCs were lifeless words. [...] A few more adjectives can go a long way of painting a scene or motif. Most story writers for board games fail to put any effort into painting a picture."
The template Jamie and I used for writing Fabled Lands was Eric Goldberg's boardgame Tales of the Arabian Nights. The descriptions therein are economical but effective, allowing Mr Goldberg to fit hundreds of quests into the space most gamebooks use for one little dungeon. Since each Fabled Lands book has to cover an entire country and allow freedom of choice and almost unlimited play, we knew we couldn't write it the same way we did books like Down Among The Dead Men or The Renegade Lord. It's like the compressed vs decompressed storytelling in comics.
I'm thinking a lot about this at the moment because I'm trying to recapture that compressed idiom for the Vulcanverse gamebooks. They're like Fabled Lands in having an open-world structure and each book being set in an extensive region. But, conscious that some readers miss the strong character relationships you get in books like Heart of Ice, I'm using much more dialogue than in Fabled Lands. So the Vulcanverse books (which I talk a bit about here) will weigh in about 50% heavier than FL even if we can keep them down to around 750 entries each. Hopefully that will strike the right balance for all tastes. You'll be able to judge for yourself in just a few months.
This made for a lovely start to my year: an in-depth, considered and very flattering review by D F Chang of my four Critical IF gamebooks. "Compelling characters, perfectly plotted, amazingly written..." I didn't bribe him to say that, honest. Mr Chang's comments on Once Upon A Time In Arabia are more than fair, and three out of four A-ratings is nothing to gripe about. I just came across the video by accident, but you can bet modesty won't stop me sharing it every place I can.
Mr Chang raises a few interesting points, some of which have been addressed in earlier blog posts but this is a good opportunity for a recap. There were six Virtual Reality gamebooks but I only wrote the four that were republished as Critical IF; Mark Smith wrote Green Blood and The Coils of Hate. I wrote Down Among The Dead Men first, then Necklace of Skulls, then Heart of Ice, and finally Twist of Fate -- which was retitled Once Upon A Time In Arabia for the new edition.
Mr Chang has some valid criticisms. He doesn't like 'Necklace of Skulls' as the wizard's name. My only defence is that the nobles and kings of the Maya tended to be called things like that, if we interpret their names literally: Bird Jaguar, Sky Witness, Centipede Claw, Shield of the Sun, Curl Snout. It was anyway fashionable to translate them like that in the '90s, rather than attempt to recreate the sound of the names (K'inich Kan B'alam, for instance) which are even more deeply lost in the mists of time.
I agree that my inspiration was flagging when it came to the Arabian book. Or maybe I was trying too hard to recreate the picaresque feel of the Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame, where the goal is likewise to scoot all over the world in order to achieve riches and honour. Probably I lavished too much energy on Heart of Ice and had nothing left to spare for the final book, and the deadline didn't permit me to take a break and recharge. That's why, when editing the new edition of Twist of Fate, I took the opportunity to change the lame title and rewrite the introduction to the story.
But how marvellous it is to hear of readers still getting pleasure from books I wrote twenty-five years ago and more. I'm nearer the end than the start of my writing career, but that reward never gets old.
Here’s a sandbox roleplaying
campaign I ran a few years back. The setting: Baghdad in 800 AD (183-184 in the
Hijri calendar). I often like to start out with just a setting and characters, and the
intrigues that go with them, then I throw out a bunch of threads and see which
the players will grab hold of. The advantage of that approach is they’re
familiarizing themselves with the background at the same time as various
adventure leads are warming up.
The deep background to the campaign postulated a forgotten era when aliens travelled to Earth and enhanced some
humans (the likes of Gilgamesh) to assist them in returning to the stars. Some
of that ancient technology yet remains if the characters know where to look.
There’s no magic in
this setting, but psionics exist (though very rare). Still, you don’t need to
stick to any of the assumptions or storylines here. Just chuck some of these
ideas at your players. All they have to do is react in character and the story
will shape itself.
BAGHDAD LOCATIONS OF INTEREST
The Shammasiyah Quarter. The inhabitants of
these suburbs are Armenian Christians, transplanted en masse by order of
the Caliph from their original village. The centre of the community is the Samalu Monastery. Any Christians among
the PCs can get lodging here if they need it, but the practices of Armenian
Christianity are different from those of the Franks and tensions could soon
develop.
The Mamuni Palace is on the east bank of
the Tigris opposite the Palace of Eternity. This is Jafar’s residence.
The Bab-at-Tak, the high arched gate at the eastern end of the Main Bridge, is renowned as a meeting place for poets.
The Palace of Eternity (Kasr-al-Khuld) was built twenty-five years ago in the reign of Harun al-Rashid's grandfather, the Caliph Mansur. Its majestic gardens are said to rival the beauty of paradise, and it stands high above the Tigris opposite the Khurasan Gate, free from the gnats that swarm in lower-lying areas.
The four Houses of Wisdom stand south of the Gharabah Gate. Each has a professor and seventy-five students, and in the entrance hall to the campus rests a famous water-clock called the Chest of Hours. The libraries of the Houses are arranged and catalogued to make information easy to find, and for a price the students can copy any work that characters require.
For colour the referee may wish to allude to markets and professional quarters such as the Needle-makers Wharf, the Market of the Perfumers, the Date Market, the Cotton Market, and the Tuesday Market. Also canal names such as the Fowls' Canal, the Canal of the Dogs, the Canal of the Cooks, and the Thorn Bridge over the Nahr Isa canal, adjoining the Market of Shawk-Sellers, these thorns being used as kindling for ovens and public steam baths (hammams, a staple of daily life to be found throughout the city).
The Kufah Gate ("Pilgrims' Gate") in the south-west is where those setting out for Mecca leave the city. And no tour of 9th century Baghdad is complete without mentioning the Office of the Poor Tax (Diwan-as-Sadakah) which stands opposite Dromedary House.
PRINCIPAL NPCs
HARUN al-Rashid (37) the Caliph.
JAFAR al-Barmaki (33) the Vizier.
ABBASSA (28) the Caliph’s favourite sister; very smart.
ASMA (32) another of the Caliph’s sisters; schemer but not very effectual;
resentful.
MAMUN (20) the Caliph’s eldest son; good at statecraft, sciences and arts, but
no soldier. Likes astronomy. Mother: Marajil,
a Persian slave. Advisors: Fahl ibn Sahl
and Hasan ibn Sahl
AMIN (17) the Caliph’s second son; good military mind, poor at politics & leadership; a bit strident. Mother:
the Princess Zubaida.
QASIM (15) the Caliph’s third son. Honest, trustworthy – far too much for his
own good. Tutored by Prince Malik
(see below). Mother: Qasif, a
lowborn slave.
MUTASIN (12) the Caliph’s youngest son.
COURTIERS & GENERALS
TAHIR ibn Husayn (30): a Persian general, known as Zol-Yamanein
(“the warrior with two right hands”) as he fights with a sword in each
hand.
ALI ibn Isa ibn Mahan (34) a general of Bedouin ancestry, secretive
and inscrutable, loyal to Prince Amin’s faction.
Prince MALIK ibn Salih (50) a troublesome
character – effective general, member of the Abbasid family, proud, he chafes
and gets impatient when not given a task. Has mentored the Caliph’s third son, Qasid, since he was a child.
KHUZAIMA ibn Khazim (48) grizzled chief of police, cautious, plays
the political spectrum and is careful not to offend any powerful factions.
IN KHORASAN
FADL ibn Sahl and HASAN
ibn Sahl
Brothers (Zoroastrian
converts) who are destined to advise Mamun
as viziers – assuming that the player-characters do nothing to change the
course of history. (As if.)
OTHER BAGHDAD NOTABLES
AHMAD ibn Hanbal (20) an Arab of the Banu Shayban tribe; young
zealous scholar who regards the sect of the Caliph to be heretical, and openly
preaches such, but is too popular simply to throw in prison.
ALI al-Rida (45) an imam and Dean of the House of Wisdom, seventh descendent of the
Prophet, rather unworldly mystical type, mentor of Maruf al-Kharki.
MARUF ibn Firuz (42) “al-Kharki”, a Persian convert from
Christianity, extremely ascetic, a hardliner who looks for heresy and impiety.
He was formerly the slave of Ali al-Rida.
SARIK al-Saqati (33) disciple of Ali al-Rida and
bodyguard to Maruf ibn Firuz. He is a Sufi martial artist and also has a
psionic power to make people forget their family and become detached.
Archdeacon BARADAN (60) of the Samalu Monastery, a shrewd
operator who keeps a low profile.
Vazak, Musheg
and Sahak (all mid-30s):
assistants to the Archdeacon.
OTHER MONARCHS
The Byzantine Empire
is ruled by Irene of Athens (42),
who recently (797 AD) deposed her son Constantine VI and had him blinded and
imprisoned. She pays a tribute to the Caliph to avoid war (the Byzantines
already have their ongoing war with the Bulgars and rivalry with the Franks to
contend with) but it’s known that her finance minister, Nikephoros (45), opposes this.
Charlemagne (58) has recently been crowned Emperor of Rome.
Al-Hakam I (33) rules as Emir of Al-Andalus (Iberia) which is the last surviving
stronghold of the Umayyad dynasty which formerly ruled the entire Muslim world,
until the Abbasid rebellion in which the Umayyad line were hunted and
massacred.
Idris II (16) rules as Caliph of the Berber kingdom of Morocco. His father was
poisoned by an assassin sent by Harun al-Rashid sixteen years ago, so there’s
no love lost there. Still a teenager, Idris is said to be “a person of almost
magical ability”.
Ibrahim I (44) is due to be installed as Emir of Ifriqiya (modern Libya and
Tunisia) to rule there on behalf of the Abbasids, a response to the ongoing
rebellion of the Berbers against their Arab governors.
Krum the Horrible (43) is Khan of the Bulgars. Said to drink
from cups made by lining his enemies’ skulls in silver. The clue is in the
name.
Obadiah (30) is Khan of the Khazars. Like most of his nobles, he is a convert
to Judaism, but most of the Khazars are Tengrists (kind of ancestor-worship
meets animism).
She (Hiya = “she” in her native Arabic) is ruler ofthe lost civilization of Kôr in the heart of Africa. She is an immortal, born 900
years ago in Arabia, but who has gained access to some ancient (and possibly
non-terrestrial) technology and has been busy learning about it.
In Kôr, Hiya has a Chamber of the Far-Travelling
Carpet which has a pattern of tiles on the floor that create a dimensional
“carpet” which allows her to travel across great distances. The effect is like
teleportation, and the portal remains hanging in the air until she returns to
it. Using this, she has been disrupting the Silk Road trade from a hidden
mountain fortress above Samarkand.
She wants the arrow (qv)
from Nubia, and has sent an android assassin and three mortal but devoted
followers to get it. The android is a killing machine with ebon hair and paper
white skin. In ordinary human terms she is mindless, and cannot speak or
interact socially; nor can she be
detected with ESP. (Tekumel fans may recognize the type.)
ADVENTURE SEEDS
These aren’t presented in any particular order, but note that some are
dependent on earlier threads having been picked up.
The Envoy from the West
Charlemagne (known in
Baghdad as “Shah al-Ma'in”) has crowned himself Emperor of Rome, and has sent emissaries
with gifts for the Caliph. If any of the player-characters are to be European
Christians, that’s how they come to be travelling to Baghdad.
Order of Succession
The Caliph is due to
announce this shortly. Not even Jafar knows what he’s planning. Traditionally,
the eldest son, Mamun, has been the heir apparent, but his mother was a slave
whereas the mother of the second son, Amin, is an Abbasid princess.
The ceremony involves
the closing of the four gates of the Round City (see below). The Caliph then
proclaims that Amin will be heir, and the order of succession will thereafter
pass to Mamun, who in the meantime will go to the city of Merv to take up the
governorship of Khorasan (Persia). Tahir of the Two Swords comes to Baghdad to
fetch him.
The Gates
To mark the
announcement of the order of succession, the four gates of the Round City are
all closed at noon prayers. It can be seen that each gate is covered in an
array of cuneiform-style glyphs.
On close examination:
the metal
of which the gates are made is an unknown alloy.
they are
covered with some kind of graphical cipher, perhaps indicating coded charts.
History: the gates
were brought by order of the Caliph’s father from the town of Wasit, which stands on the site of Zandawad, a city built by order of King
Solomon. (Unknown history: they were
brought originally from Uruk.)
Deciphering the glyphs
reveals a kind of stylized map centred on the site of Uruk. It’s clear that
there must be a fifth set of gates somewhere, containing missing information
required to complete the map, and after consulting the records the characters
find that these other gates were sent to the Mosque of Mansur but never fitted. The Imam, Alial-Rida, refers
enquiries to Marufibn Firuz, who of course refuses all
requests to see the gates.
The fifth gates are
being kept at the Bukhariot Mosque
in the Lion & Ram Quarter, west of the Round City. Even having found out
that much, the characters have to somehow get to see them – not easy, as they
are packaged, piled up and far too heavy to lift, and of course the imam of the
mosque, Halba ibn-Jubaya, has been told not to grant access.
The fifth set of
glyphs firmly pinpoints a location at modern-day Warka, which will lead the
characters to the Hairy Man adventure
(see below).
A Hairy Man
The ruins of a huge
city wall are found by workmen digging irrigation channels for the modern town
of Warka. This is part of the ruins of Uruk. This is not widely reported, so
unless the characters have deciphered the map on the gates (qv) they
will never get to hear about it.
If the ruins are excavated,
a tomb is revealed in which lies the perfectly preserved body of a big (7 foot)
hairy man with strong, almost ape-like teeth. This is Enkidu, an immortal, who has remained in a state of suspended
animation for millennia. The characters may be able to revive him, but ensuring
he becomes an ally rather than a rival or enemy is not so easy.
Running Amok
There have been
several violent incidents in the Atikan Quarter. The first few were individuals
running amok, then larger groups. Usually the pattern is attacks on property,
escalating to violence or even murder, and afterwards the perpetrator claims to
have only a vague memory of their actions, as in a dream. All except the first
incident happened on a Friday.
First of the
perpetrators was Hisham of Basra, who is due to be executed in three days. He
didn’t kill anyone, but was heard shouting blasphemous remarks. If questioned,
he may reveal that he had gone to the Jewish Quarter to try to catch a glimpse
of a girl he’d seen.
The actual cause is a teenage
girl, Anonui bat-Ezra, who is developing psionic powers that as yet are not
under her conscious control. She belongs to a wealthy Jewish family (her
father: Ezra bar-Adom) and travels to the bath-house each Friday in a covered
litter. One incident occurred on Friday evening outside a house in the Jewish
Quarter used as a synagogue.
The Road to Samarkand
Reports are starting
to trickle in of disruption on the Silk Road. Caravans have been attacked by
bandits out of the hills, who seem to have become unnaturally bold of late. The merchant Yao ZHANG, who claims to be an
emissary of the Chinese Emperor Dezong, recently arrived with a report of
having been overtaken by a sandstorm crossing the Karakum Desert, and his
companions were whisked away “by bridges that walk” – or, at least, the
translator thinks that’s what he said. This connects to The
Forty adventure.
The Caliph’s New Palace
The Caliph no longer
wishes to reside in the Golden Gate Palace, but instead plans to move out of
the Round City to the (larger) Palace of Eternity on the west bank of the Tigris.
Naturally this raises concerns about security.
The Arrow
A dignitary from Egypt
brings the Caliph an arrow that can cut almost anything. (This is literally
true; it’s like a vibroblade.) He says it was brought by a traveller from
Nubia. The Caliph orders it placed in the palace vaults.
Cursed Ship
Reports from sailors
in the Gulf describe a “high, bronze-hulled” vessel, “like a floating castle”.
Prince Mamun's farewell party
This episode follows Order
of Succession and The Arrow. There is a party for Mamun on the eve
of his departure for Khorasan.
During the party, a guard
staggers up from the vaults where the Caliph's treasures are kept. He collapses
in front of one of the characters, revealing two long deep sword-cuts across
his back.
In the vault there is
a circular pattern of rainbow light on the floor. An albino warrior with a
fixed, insane expression stands ready to fight as three men with jet-black skin
search the racks and boxes. This is the group Hiya (“She”; qv) has sent
to fetch the arrow, and can ultimately connect to an adventure based on H RiderHaggard’s novel.
The Forty
This is the eventual
result if the characters investigate The Road to Samarkand adventure
seed or travel to Persia and end up investgating attacks on the trade routes.
In the hills above
Samarkand, the Forty are a group of heretical rebels from Afghanistan. They
have come across an ancient alien facility with a huge circular door that opens
on a voice command. (One door only partly opens. There’s a smaller postern gate
but they don’t know the command for that.)
FORTY THIEVES
Sword 18 2d+2 cut
Knife 17 2d-1 cut
Javelin 16 2d+2 impale
(with thrower)
HP 15 Parry 13,
Dodge 12, Perception 17, Stealth 15
Armour: Kevlar-like material (7,
weight 20) on torso; mail (4) on limbs, head.
Inside: a tunnel
thirty feet tall with gantries (partly collapsed, but now reinforced with
wooden poles) to a series of apartments. There are lighting globes, about half
of which still work. At the end of the tunnel is a hangar where the Big Spider (a sixty-foot-tall military robot) is housed.
All its attacks can
only be defended against with Dodge.
*If both darts
penetrate armour, delivers electrical stun (3d direct to Fatigue) and reels
victim in. Victim has two rounds to break free: ST vs effective ST of [damage
taken x d6]. Then reaches blades and is wrenched: roll ST or HT vs effective ST
of 30 or take 4d crush to neck or limb.
**Used when victim
reeled in; remember that these are monomolecular and halve armour.
The Big Spider is not
under the control of the Forty, but it recognizes that they control the doors.
When the doors are open, it periodically patrols its route and attacks people
crossing the border without authorization (ie everybody). It collects all their
items, brings them back, but then discards them as nothing matches the items it
is programmed to search for. When “parked”, the spider also projects a local
view (5 mile radius) of the terrain as seen from a satellite.
The Forty therefore
have treasure here worth about 5 million dirhams in the form of gold, gems,
spices, silks, artworks, weapons, etc. This wealth is what enables them to
bribe a network of informers in Samarkand, allowing them to cow the government
there by assassination or bribery.
Samarkand
The city is ruled by a
Council of Three: Arash, Jamsid and Kazem, all of the House of Aramanth. As
it’s Persian, politics is less religiously dominated, though it is not so free
and cosmopolitan as Merv or Nishapur.
The Grand Imam is
Ardeshir al-Yaha, a moderate, originally from Baghdad.
The leading light in high society is
Princess Parisa Esfani, mid-40s, bossy, rich.
The local agent of the
Barmaki clan is Sitvar ibn Ghabani, a young and very serious fellow, more
resourceful than his callow appearance might suggest.
WHAT HAPPENED IN OUR CAMPAIGN
The player-characters realized the
trouble in the marketplace (Running Amok) was caused by a psionic and identified the likely
culprit as Anonui, daughter of Ezra the rug merchant. But they couldn’t get
access to Anonui until her two older sisters were betrothed, whereupon it would
be possible for a third suitor to visit Anonui. So they went to Ezra and three
of them asked to marry his daughters.
Charlemagne’s two
emissaries, Lanterfrid and Sigimund, were due to return home. The Caliph (at
Jafar’s instigation, after a recommendation by the player-characters) appointed
Ezra to take some fine rugs to the new Roman Emperor as a gift. Oh, and a white
elephant called Abulabaz as well. That gave Ezra and incentive to marry his
daughters off, so that they would be taken care of while he was away from
Baghdad.
However, Anonui was by
now learning to control her power, even though largely unaware of it. She caused
Ezra to demand an impossibly huge dowry of 30,000 dirhams for each of her sisters (Buran and
Huldah).
Two of the PCs now decided
that the best way to deal with Anonui bat-Ezra, the nascent psionic in the
Jewish quarter, was not to marry her but to kill her. Yes, I know; I thought it
was a dark turn too. They sneaked off without telling the others, crept into her bedroom at night, and smothered her
with a pillow. When the other PCs confronted them about this, they fell back on the argument that it was better than waiting
till she grew too powerful. (You may recall Nick Fury saying something along those lines. Cap wasn't impressed.)
Hashim was still
executed for blasphemy, as the presiding judge Maruf ibn-Firuz (aka al-Kharki)
would brook no plea for leniency. But it’s not clear whether Hashim’s fate ever
figured in the characters’ calculations anyway. As one of the players put it in
the write-up:
“We killed the carpet
seller's daughter, making it seem that she died in her sleep. We tried to paint
her as a witch to exonerate the young man due to be executed from blasphemy. He
was executed anyway.”
At the ruins of Uruk, their
map guided them to a hill which turned out to cover a huge man-made dome. They were
able to break into this and lower themselves fifty metres to the floor below.
Some falling rocks gave them gashes and bruises, but that was nothing compared
to the sentry spider-robots that attacked using circular blades on their legs.
They entered what some
might have considered a burial chamber, though it was obviously built with a
different purpose in mind. Banks of instruments on the walls were now so
damaged that only an occasional light blinked on and off. Waking up the power
source briefly displayed a holographic star map filling the whole room which
showed a planetary system located close in to the galactic core – not that they
were able to interpret what it meant.
On a catafalque lay
the hairy body of Enkidu. (His hair having continued to grow very slowly over the
centuries he’d been in “Odinsleep”.)
A player said in the
write-up:
“I think we activated
a homing beacon, but it seemed to point straight up into the night sky where
there are no ships. Are there? And we saw something that might have been a star
map, but there just aren’t that many stars in the sky. Are there?”
Thereafter, having
been afflicted by a device called the Eye of Humbaba, they travelled to the heart of Africa to seek help from Hiya. Or did they go to steal her power? It
depends which of the players you ask.
The Fabled Lands were created over whiskies, like a lot of the things Jamie and I worked on back in the mists of the late twentieth century. (Less whisky, maybe less misty – who knows.)
It wasn’t done with the books in mind, not to start with. Jamie had a fantasy radio serial that he needed to write for the BBC, and the first step was designing a world. Tolkien had years to noodle around with Middle-earth, of course, but the BBC operate on less leisurely principles. Hence the whisky bottle and the midnight oil.
‘What’s a good name for the unknown lands across the sea?’ said Jamie. ‘Inconnu,’ I said, and so we got the continent of Ankon-Konu. There might have even been a circumflex accent on it in those days. You know, the exotic touch. Akatsurai was named after a bottle of saki I had sitting on a shelf. And the Violet Ocean because they can’t all be “wine dark”, and honestly, would you drink that plonk anyway?
That was months before we went in to see Mary Tapissier at Pan Macmillan. We pitched the idea of a big, open-ended gamebook series, something that reflected our own role-playing tastes where the players’ goals drive the story. Mary ran the show at Macmillan Children’s and she loved it. Having the land of Harkuna (it was probably Hârku’una in the radio play) to pull off the shelf meant we could get cracking straight away.
Eric Goldberg’s boardgame Tales of the Arabian Nights (reviewed here on Stargazer's World, whence comes the accompanying pic) was probably the biggest influence on the writing style. We couldn’t afford to be decompressed, wasting hundreds of words on long conversations or scene-setting. So our first pass on the books was to tear through the world giving just one or two sentences to each location. “The rolling fields of the west stretch off to the sun, and by night the only sound is of the crickets in the long grass.” That sort of thing.
And we’d lay out the random encounters without any thought yet as to what they’d be: “A cantankerous merchant. A trio of lost maidens. A piercing sound in the darkness.” I’d get Jamie’s and he’d get mine – challenges to each other to get creative. As I refereed a largely improvised role-playing game once or twice a week in those days, the Muse was always nearby ready to lend a hand.
They were a success, those six gamebooks, even though the craze was dying out. We caught the readers who had started out on the dungeon-bashing gamebooks of the 1980s and were now ready to move on. The trouble was the production costs. For not much more than the price of a regular paperback, we had these large-format books with fold-out map covers and lots of artwork. Strong sales didn’t save us. Halfway through, the series was cancelled.
It wasn’t a guillotine blow, more a wasting illness. Marion Lloyd, the editor at Macmillan, came up with a plan to repackage Fabled Lands in smaller format. Bigger margins, with those sales figures, would have let us continue. But publishing by then was all politics, and not enough support could be drummed up at the courts of Uttaku – in other words, the publisher’s Fulham offices. And I can’t blame them. Adventure games and CRPGs were stealing the gamebook thunder. After Lords of the Rising Sun, darkness fell.
Still, Fabled Lands is not unfinished in the way that a TV series like Cupid or Awake or Deadwood is unfinished, canned before its story could be told. In Fabled Lands there is no story – or rather, a hundred story threads from which the player gets to weave the narrative they choose. You bring the motivation, we’ll give you the plot seeds. If we had gone on to twelve books, readers would have got twice as many adventures. But as it is there are almost 4400 sections. That’s equivalent to eleven ordinary gamebooks. Plenty to get on with.
Videogames did sweep away the demand for gamebooks, but twenty years is long enough for an industry to turn right around. The resurgence of vinyl shows that music buyers value a physical artefact considerably more than they do the content itself. And gamebook collectors are rushing to invest in deluxe print editions offered on Kickstarter. So maybe, just maybe, crowdfunding of print books will be the key to resurrecting the Fabled Lands. However, as I've argued before, the only way to make that work is if it goes hand in hand with a digital version.
In the meantime, text-based open worlds are enjoying a resurgence - and why not? It's the only medium that at reasonable cost allows the polymorphously rich and diverse variety of storylines that interactive fiction needs. So if you've been hankering for more Fabled Lands all these years, why not dip into Meg Jayanath's marvellous Indian dream-tapestry Samsara, Gordon Levine's wild western Zero Summer, Yoon Ha Lee's icy apocalyptic SF saga Winterstrike, Alex Livingston's cyberfaerie science fantasy The Annwn Simulation 1985, or the source from which those all flow, Failbetter's massive and brilliant Fallen London? Or, if none of those tickle your fancy, how about Meg Jayanth's project with the fellows at Inkle: the steampunk reworking of Jules Verne's 80 Days. With over 4000 sections and nearly 500,000 words, 80 Days is as big as the existing Fabled Lands series with the evolutionary adventage that, being an app, it can adapt the pace and the quests to fit what you're doing. That's real interactivity, that is.
This is a topic we've been discussing in comments for a while now (here, here and here). But let's first agree on definitions. Gamebooks are evolving, just as the whole object class of books is evolving, and some of the directions they’re going may not use text at all. So, to describe the core medium of prose-plus-choices, I'm going to use the term interactive literature. (And by literature I don’t of course just mean Dostoyevsky. For the purposes of this discussion, Dan Brown is literature too.)
Okay, so here’s the problem. These days you’re as likely to read a gamebook – sorry, a work of interactive literature – on a liquid-crystal display as a printed page. And something happens to the way we read these things in the new medium. There’s a tendency to skim the text and just look for the next set of options. The author puts: “Something whistles out of the darkness of the roof opposite. You twist aside, feeling it graze your scalp. An arrow! The figure is outlined for a second against the moon. Another arrow is already in his hand. What will you do?” And what the reader sees is: “Guy on the roof shot at you and missed. What now?”
How come that doesn’t happen with a novel? I can happily read War and Peace on an e-reader with no impulse to skip ahead. Why, reading a gamebook on-screen, do we suddenly acquire the attention span of a toddler on a sugar rush? As Ashton Saylor pointed out in the comments on a recent post, it doesn't help that gamebooks have an obvious marker (the options) to skip ahead to if the text is boring. So it's even more important than in a regular novel that the text is not boring.
If people aren’t going to read all the text, maybe we could just put in less of it. Jamie and I admired the cut-to-the-chase brevity of Eric Goldberg’s Tales of the Arabian Nights, a big influence on Fabled Lands, but that’s not really a solution to the interactive literature problem. If you write a gamebook that way, it’s tantamount to saying, “Okay, we all know text is boring, but at least there’s not too much of it.” And on-screen the reader will still skim. Even if the text comprises the most elegant little couplets since Will Shakespeare needed a chat-up line you’d skim it, because all you’re looking for is the information content:
There is a gate in the wall. The guard is here.
How about writing gamebooks with better prose? Let's get some of today's top-flight writers on the job. Would that encourage readers not to skim? Not on its own. If a beautiful turn of phrase was all it took to get us reading, narrative poetry would still be on the bestseller lists. It's not less text or better text we need, but a whole different kind of writing.
There’s a big difference between interactive literature and the traditional kind. The fact is, gamebooks have generally omitted most of the elements that make the reader want to take in every line of a good novel. Those elements are:
Scene-setting
Action
Exposition (past action)
Speech
Interior monologue
Historically, gamebooks have mostly used just the first two on the list: scene-setting (describing where the main character is) and action (what is happening). That’s because 1980s gamebooks evolved out of Dungeons and Dragons as it was played in the mid-seventies. They often read like a dungeon adventure without the character interplay. If you took all the sections you played through in an old-style gamebook and stitched them together, you wouldn’t get a novel. You wouldn’t even get a very good game write-up.
In a novel, those various elements don’t exist in isolation. Descriptive passages aren’t only for scene-setting. Take the opening of Bleak House. “London… Implacable November weather. As much mud on the streets as if
the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth…" Dickens isn’t just telling us where we are. He’s introducing the perspective (one of several) that we’re going to have on the story, he’s expressing its themes, and he’s giving some clues to what has gone before.
As Hilary Mantel says: "Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action."
I used the same principle for the descriptive passages in my Virtual Reality books, especially Heart of Ice, but that alone doesn’t make a compelling novel. What about those other elements? What’s the magic ingredient that compels us to read without skimming?
Well, here’s an important pointer: readers prefer talk scenes...
“Put that away.”
“Don’t try anything. At this range, a 357 Mag will turn your face to hamburger.”
– is way better than the narrator telling the reader that Joe draws a gun.
It’s not easy to write a novel using only dialogue. Ivy Compton-Burnett used to come close, and it’s a little too much of a good thing. That’s why authors make such a big deal about the narrative voice: it allows all of the descriptive stuff to share the urgency and characterful appeal of dialogue. It’s also why you get so many books written in first person. That way, the narrator is directly addressing the reader. First person is sufficiently compelling that authors choose it even though it denies them the most interesting tools of storytelling: dramatic irony, simultaneous action, multiple character viewpoints, and so on.
Very often the old-time gamebooks featured an anonymous, blank-slate character, which made dialogue tricky as it would mean putting words into the character’s mouth. That's going to lead to a disconnect if the reader has been picturing their alter ego as a sneak-thief type and suddenly finds they're bellowing angry challenges at an ogre. You could try using conversation trees, allowing the reader to select every response, but that makes for a long, slow read and hardly results in a smooth flow of dialogue. Some adventure games get around it by having the player set the conversational attitude (aggressive, friendly, guarded, etc) and that determines what the character says. But now you’re outside the character looking in – which is okay for a videogame where the connection with the character is empathic, as in cinema, but not in second-person interactive literature, where the goal goes beyond empathy to full identification.
With a predefined character, it’s less of a problem. As gamebooks started to include character classes or skills, it was possible for the author to build in some assumptions about the character. In Necklace of Skulls, selecting the Etiquette skill means you are of noble birth, and that has a bearing on your conversations with other characters. In Blood Sword, I knew that the Trickster would countenance a whole bunch of dastardly options that the Warrior would dismiss as dishonourable.
Taking a step back, what’s so special about that second-person viewpoint anyway? It’s only there because the early gamebooks were dungeon bashes: “After a few yards you arrive at a junction. Will you turn west or east?” In Frankenstein I used a first-person narrator and to-the-moment writing, both techniques so new that they have only been in use in fiction for about three hundred years.
I’m back at the house. I don’t remember whether I walked or took a carriage after the boat docked. They are bringing Elizabeth’s body here, I know that. The lawn is still strewn with the debris of the wedding breakfast. A string of coloured paper flags, hanging lank in the dew. An ashtray with the squashed stubs of cigars nestled in damp ash. A champagne coupe lies trodden into the flower bed. Amazingly, it seems unbroken, a perfect crystal of aqueous brilliance in the blue shadows under the bushes. * Pick it up. * You have to talk to your father.
The theory here is that the whole book is a dialogue between you and Victor Frankenstein. So unless you’re the type who uses the time the other person talking to think about what you're going to say next, you are going to read it without skimming. (I said it’s a theory.)
Another option, which I discussed in a post a while back, is to go with a third-person viewpoint. The trouble is, this tends to jerk the reader out of the story every few paragraphs in order to force them to take an authorial role. I was interested in it as an experiment but, as Paul Mason rightly pointed out, it breaks the experience. In order to get the reader to read all the text, we need the interactivity to mesh seamlessly with the prose. One minute I’m curious to see what Cugel does, the next I’m being asked to decide what he does. In Frankenstein there’s a justification for making choices in that you are Victor’s confidant. Confidants exist within a story; authors (though not narrators) exist outside them.
The only early-80s gamebooks written with a real narrative voice were Herbie Brennan’s Grailquest series, probably because Mr Brennan already had a dozen years’ writing experience when he started them. I have a feeling that when those books appear in digital form, readers won’t be nearly so likely to skim the text. And, happily, we should find out for certain very soon.
Possibly the best advice, then, is to write interactive literature with the same depth you would give to any mainstream novel. The final word goes to Michael Moorcock, whose tip on how to write original fantasy/SF could apply equally to writing interactive literature:
"[This advice] was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies [...] Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt."
