Caught red-handed!

There was panic at Fabled Towers this week when reader Gabriel Chase pointed out that the new edition of The Court of Hidden Faces (Fabled Lands book 5) was missing section 614. Cue some hasty reformatting, so the book you order now is complete. To those who bought the flawed edition, I can only apologize and offer the consolation that maybe scarcity will make your copy worth more in years to come.

The missing section (complete with overlooked lexical repetition - oops) reads:

614

You are caught red-handed with the jewellery box in your hand. The masked lord calls for his retainers, and you are seized by many armed men.

     Make a CHARISMA roll at Difficulty 15. If you succeed, you end up thrown into the dungeons of Aku – turn to 350. If you fail, you are sold into slavery in Aku – turn to 321.

Books with backbone

I said it probably wouldn't hold delivery up for more than 24 hours, and already Amazon have the slightly revised edition of Book Five back on sale, now with altered spine font to make it consistent with Books 1-4. (Oliver, you can stop brushing your teeth now.)

But I'm not bothered about fonts and point sizes, you're saying? What about the content, you ask? Well, the new edition has attractive greyscale maps which are a big improvement on the pure black-&-white of the first four books.

And it also has the six pre-generated characters from the original 1996 Pan Macmillan edition - one of whom (see if you can guess) is Jamie's own all-time favourite player character from our roleplaying campaign.

Silver linings

Okay, the bad news first because it isn't that bad. Amazon is listing Book Five as "currently unavailable". This is just for a day or two and is while we get our new printer to sort out a couple of minor details. You can still place orders, and it probably won't delay delivery by more than 24 hours or so.

The good news is that this should improve consistency of printing between the first four books and these latest ones. So please bear with us - it's a learning curve, but it's an upward one. And another bit of good news is that we're now expecting to have Book Six on sale before the end of September. Tell your friends. Come to that, tell your enemies.

Back in print: The Court of Hidden Faces!

Back on sale today for the first time in at least a decade, it's Fabled Lands Book 5: The Court of Hidden Faces, and I don't think I could do better than quote the back cover blurb:

SET OUT ON A JOURNEY OF UNLIMITED ADVENTURE

At THE COURT OF HIDDEN FACES, no one is who they seem. The sinister lords of the Uttakin go masked to hide their treachery. The secret police of the god Ebron kill those who flout their fanatical codes. In this tyrannical realm of betrayal and assassination, life is cheap. But rich rewards await the adventurer courageous enough to penetrate this hostile land.

Will you uncover the secrets of the High King’s citadel, where no mortal has trod for ten generations? Or wrest the holy sword from the crypt of Kizil Irmak, the Harbinger of War? Or find the key that unlocks the greatest secret of all – the means to open the Gate of Time and travel back into the past?

Your fate is in your own hands. You choose your skills, your goals, where you will venture and what you will do. The only limit is your imagination. The choices are all yours. And success will give you the power to venture ever deeper into the amazing role-playing world that is Fabled Lands.

Book 6 isn't far behind - it's already at proof stage, so with luck and a following wind it could be on sale in just a few weeks. I know, I know - we should have had them both out last year. But better late than never. Let's light a taper now and pray to Ebron that sales will allow us to restart (or should that be kickstart?) the series.

Actually, you could help with that. Jamie and I believe that Fabled Lands are some of the best gamebooks out there. Nothing else is like them, that's for sure. But they came late in the big gamebook boom of the '80s and early '90s, and because of that they aren't nearly as well known as our other work, even though we think they are as fresh and innovative today as they were back then.

If there's one single thing that will bring Fabled Lands to a wider audience, it's reviews - especially on Amazon. I appreciate that old-time fans of the series won't necessarily want to buy the new edition, but that's no reason not to drop onto Amazon and say what you thought of one of the books. It doesn't need to be an essay for the Times Literary Supplement, just a star rating and a couple of sentences will do. It takes about as long as brewing a cup of tea.

The more reviews we get, the higher we climb on Amazon's recommendations list and so the more people will get to hear of the books. Just twenty or thirty reviews can make a significant difference, so if you know anybody who has enjoyed an FL book but hasn't got round to a review: please feel free to pester them, shame them, hassle and hector them mercilessly until they give in. And then award yourself a free blessing of your choice, for verily you will be a hero of the land of Harkuna and your glory will be shouted in its halls.


We hope that the book will soon also be available from Amazon Italy, Amazon Germany, Amazon France and Amazon Spain. As we're using Createspace as the printer, and Amazon own Createspace, distribution to European Amazon outlets should follow pretty swiftly after the US and UK.

The proof

Proofs, plural, that should be. Not long now...!

Big triptych

And here, to compare with the sketch by Russ featured in the last post, is Kevin Jenkins's full finished art for The Court of Hidden Faces, sans text. These covers were produced before digital art, remember - or when you needed a Cray to run Photoshop, anyway, so Kevin created them the old-fashioned way, using enamels and oils and tufts of camel-tail. And they're big. Kevin had to haul the paintings out of his attic, each in three sections, stack 'em up against the wall, and snap them with his Canon EOS 400D.

So, behold: the Garden of Exotic Fragrances. I wonder whether we shouldn't run off some full-size posters. Any takers?

The mask of time

I can't remember whether this image has appeared on the blog before. This is Russ Nicholson's rough layout for the cover of The Court of Hidden Faces, of course. It was a good long time ago, so hard to say now whether this was done before or after Kevin Jenkins drew his pencil version. I used to design the covers myself, so it's possible that I sent that sketch to Russ along with the descriptions for the interior illustrations and he decided to have a go at it.

Publishers' art directors used to have a fixed sense of whether an artist could do maps, drawings or paintings. They might allow that somebody could do two of those, but never all three. Jamie and I, having worked with Russ on many projects, know how incredibly versatile he actually is, but even so it took us until the last two FL books to get the publisher to let him do the world maps.

One nice little detail you can see here: the mechanical buttresses on the palace that enabled it to walk. That was Russ's idea, and one we happily incorporated into Harkunan mythos. And it must have been a decade before Mortal Engines, too. And did Edgar Rice Burroughs get there even earlier, or was that a Disney retcon?

An open secret

Things have been quiet around here for a few days because I've been working around the clock on something. The picture is all the hint you need...