See what's on the slab

To give an idea of what makes The Frankenstein Wars such a revolutionary (no pun intended) development in gamebooks, I asked writer Paul Gresty to tell us about a scene in which Anton Clerval, one of the protagonists, and Mr Legion, the original Frankenstein creature, hunt each other in a ruined church. Take it away, Paul...


"Writing a gamebook and writing an app require two vastly different approaches. A gamebook, for all its branching interactiveness, for all that it places control of the story's direction in the hands of the reader, still has a beautiful simplicity. Limits to word count and page count impose a finite set of options on the player at each turn. The story itself tends to have just one satisfying outcome - or, on those rare occasions that there's some flexibility to the story's ending, that number of 'non-death' conclusions is still pretty small. An enemy's combat abilities, if such things are pertinent, tend to be described on a single line, or over a few lines at most. On the whole, gamebooks are fairly 'short form' writing. The focus is on concrete action, speech is reported rather than direct, characterisation is slim ('Why is Kaschuf the Deathless evil? Y'know, just because.'). And this is no bad thing - on the contrary, while the practical limitations of the format necessitate such a direct style, that stark, good-versus-evil simplicity is itself a source of considerable charm.

"A gamebook app - that is, an app written from scratch for that form, rather than a print-to-digital conversion - is a different beast. The writer has far greater scope for nuance. Freed from practical constraints of overall length, the number of variables that can influence the story is much, much larger. Similarly, rather than having a binary effect on the story ('if event X has occurred, goto...'), these variables can have a gradational impact. From memory, I think The Frankenstein Wars has around 450 different variables at work 'under the hood'. Some have a fairly minor effect, aiming for a shift in tone only. For example, one of the story's main characters is Tom Clerval. Depending on Tom's previously established position on the ethics of reanimating the dead, his conversational choices when later discussing that subject - or even his precise wording within those choices - can shift. Other variables have profound, game-changing consequences. Notably, and without getting too spoiler-y, rather than having just one single satisfactory ending, the game incorporates a spectrum of possible endings at the personal level, for the game's principal characters, and for the world as a whole, forever after.

"When I came on board to write The Frankenstein Wars, I already had a couple of original apps under my belt. And yet this was my first time writing something so technically demanding - working with interactive maps, for instance, and in-game countdowns. In that regard, Chapter 3 of the game has been by far the most challenging. My original concept of the scene was that the player, as Anton Clerval, and the mysterious Mr Legion would stalk one another around the interior of a church - hunting one another, playing hide-and-seek with guns. So I began by dividing the church into sixteen different areas. Mr Legion initially follows a track around the church until he and the player encounter one another. At which point there's combat, and if both people are alive and disengage, Legion might start out at a different point on the track. He'll be more wary the next time he comes near the player; he won't fall for the same tricks a second time. And so on.

"What took ages and ages to write was taking into consideration things like direction of movement, who's facing in which direction, how far they can see, whether anything is obstructing their view, things like that. The player and Mr Legion move at the same speed (which already is a simplification), so each time the player moves into a new area, the game code runs through a checklist of a dozen different points (has the player already visited this section? is Legion to the north, one area away? is Legion to the north, two areas away? if so, is the player moving quietly?) before actually moving onto the content of that area.

"Testing all of that out drove the guys from Cubus Games absolutely crazy! If I were writing that scene again now, I'd probably do it quite differently. In fact, in a way, I did. There's a large-scale battle later in the game. I'd originally intended to do the battle in a similar way to the church encounter, with enemy units wandering all over the battlefield. In the end I kept it comparatively simple. The enemies' area of allowable movement/effect is much smaller in each case, which allows me to devote more space to the player's actions, rather than writing thousands of lines to cover the enemy's reactions. Focusing on the player's options is never a bad thing.

"So writing The Frankenstein Wars, and writing that third chapter in particular, has been a learning experience, for sure. But I believe all goes in to improving the player's experience and creating an interactive story that is as deep and a world that is as richly textured as any novel, game or movie."

*  *  *

Dave here again: Michael Hartland brought up a good point last time about the long turnaround time for most Kickstarter projects. This has been a matter of concern for me and Jamie recently because we've been thinking about doing some crowdfunded gamebook apps, but I find myself torn. On the one hand the writers and coders and artists aren't getting paid much upfront, so unless they expect the app to sell really well on release -- and have a rich uncle to buy their groceries in the meantime -- it's impossible to knuckle down to working on it full-time. But on the other hand, any backer with enough belief in the concept to stake $20 to get it made has a right to expect they won't still be waiting for the thing three years later. What's the answer? I don't know. I'm chary of trying to use crowdfunding to produce print books, but in the case of apps at least all the money raised gets spent on the content. Even so, long development times are a big problem. You guys are smart, though, so all suggestions very welcome!

The Frankenstein Wars is available now for Android and iOS.

The dawn of the Frankenstein Wars

It’s hard to put a precise timeline to it, but say the first real gamebooks appeared in the early 1970s. That means they’ve been around for as long as the gap between a one-minute amuse-œil like The Miller and the Sweep (1897) and Citizen Kane (1941).

Given that, it’s reasonable to ask when we’re going to see the grown-up classics of interactive literature. Early gamebooks were aimed at kids, after all, and there’s a limit to how many times you can save the world from the orc army in a sub-sub-Dungeons and Dragons setting. No, I don’t mean we need more sympathetic orcs. Just as Alan Moore utterly shook up the world of superhero comics with Watchmen, I want to see gamebooks that move beyond solve-the-plot. Gamebooks with three-dimensional characters, tangled relationships, complex motivations, difficult moral choices, and a story that really takes you on a journey.

The Frankenstein Wars is that gamebook. Written by Paul Gresty, who’s already proved his Wellesian creative chops with richly imagined gamebooks The ORPHEUS Ruse and MetaHuman Inc, this is the story of two brothers caught up in a wave of Napoleonic conquest as Victor Frankenstein’s resurrection technology ushers in an era of total war.

If that sounds familiar – yes, it’s my Frankensteinian alternate history of the early 19th century. Originally I created this as a computer game, then later tried getting it off the ground as a movie or a novel, then as a comic book, and even as a tabletop RPG which was to comprise two rulebooks, French and English, each with its own slant on events. I never expected it to be a gamebook app, but now that I’ve seen the fabulous job Paul and Cubus Games have done, I’m fired up to return to the Frankenstein Wars universe and see what else I can do with it.

As well as a sophisticated storyline that would do justice to any blockbuster novel, the app boasts tactical maps, weather effects, astounding artwork, all wrapped up in a cutting-edge design ethic that shows Cubus Games are now one of the leading developers of interactive literature.

It’s impossible here to give a summary that would do justice to Paul’s writing. As I said earlier, this is a story that will really take you on a journey. For my money it’s destined to be a genre-defining classic, and next week Paul will be here with a guest post to give you just a taste of all the marvellous work that has gone into creating this truly unique interactive adventure.

The Frankenstein Wars is out now for iOS and Android.

Checking in on Fabled Lands book 7

A guest post today from Paul Gresty, who is currently chained to his desk completing The Serpent King's Domain, the long-awaited seventh book in the Fabled Lands series.

Dave has kindly invited me to write a few words on the Fabled Lands blog to talk about progress on The Serpent King's Domain. If you've been following the Kickstarter backer updates, some of the information here will be familiar – and some will be brand new.

It's been a busy year in Ankon-Konu. The Serpent King's Domain will be longer than any of the Fabled Lands books so far. Currently, the draft of the book is sitting at one-thousand-and-something paragraphs. And we're really into the home stretch now – the random encounters are finished, all the main quests are done; we're at the point where we're fleshing out the cities a little, and adding some of those touches that every Fabled Lands book needs (“How much does it cost to book passage to Smogmaw?”).

It's hard to talk about my progress on Fabled Lands without also mentioning The Frankenstein Wars, another Kickstarter project that took place around the same time, and my other big project of 2016. Both projects are moving steadily towards their conclusion; the deadline for a full draft of both texts is imminent (for more information on TFW, feel free to go check out this project update that recently went online.

Regarding The Serpent King's Domain, one of the jobs that remains is to go back and fill in some of the treasures that the player can discover, and include some new and interesting magic items – things that fit neatly alongside the artefacts that you can discover in the first six books, but that also have a healthy dose of originality as well.

I'll confess that item creation is an area I've found surprisingly challenging. I don't want to make SKD into some sort of arms race – the player's focus shouldn't solely be on picking up super-powered items; nor do I want every player to have the same list of possessions once they've thoroughly explored the book. One tentative idea is to include items that have both advantages and disadvantages, such as:

373 

If you possess (XXXXXXX ITEMS TO CONSTRUCT CLOAK) Bellentacq can, quite reluctantly, create a darkling cloak. Such a cloak will grant a +7 bonus to your THIEVERY score while you possess it, but it will also temporarily reduce your SANCTITY score to 1, and prevent your SANCTITY score from rising by any means (including bonuses from other items). Note that you need not actually wear the cloak to receive this effect; so long as it is in your possession these changes to your Ability scores will apply (also note that, of course, leaving this cloak in storage will remove its effect from you). If you ask Bellentacq to carry out this work, remove the requisite items from your Adventure Sheet. In their place note darkling cloak (+7 THIEVERY, SANCTITY temporarily reduced to 1). Should you discard the cloak, or store it somewhere, you lose the bonus to THIEVERY, but your SANCTITY score will return to its normal value. Turn back to 167.

So, you have an item that grants a great big bonus to THIEVERY – but your SANCTITY will take a hit. Is the gain worth the loss? I'm guessing that some players will think it is, and some won't.

Another way to differentiate equipment lists for different playthroughs might be to include items that have various powers for different professions – which has a handy knock-on effect of helping to distinguish the various professions at higher ranks. For example:

711 

The sacrosanct sabre will grant a COMBAT bonus equal to half the wielder's SANCTITY, rounding down, and not including bonuses from items. So, a wielder with a SANCTITY of 11 would use the sabre as a COMBAT +5 weapon. In addition, if a Priest possesses this item, this will allow him or her to have a maximum of two SANCTITY blessings at any one time (rather than the normal maximum of one).
If you keep this item, note the sacrosanct sabre (COMBAT bonus = half SANCTITY) on your Adventure Sheet.
Turn to 488.

The specific advantage for a Priest character is not enormous here; it's more a distinction that adds flavour rather than one that grants world-shattering power. Certainly, the item should be cheaper, or easier to acquire, than some of the COMBAT +6 weapons that appear in the first books (since that's the maximum bonus it'll have anyway).

For a while I've been thinking about opening a discussion on magic items on the Fabled Lands Facebook group – but then I got angry at the internet and deleted my Facebook account. Regardless, I'll open up that conversation here, instead – what sort of items do people want to see in The Serpent King's Domain? Feel free to chime in in the comments section below, or even to contact me directly by hitting the link.

Really, if people have any ideas for magic items – maybe something that isn't too powerful, that fits in with the jungle-themed setting – I would love, love, love to hear them.

So, to round up: the text is nearing completion. Expect a full first draft around Christmastime – which will then have to go through editing and page layout and whatnot. Regarding artwork, we've been talking to both Kevin Jenkins (cover) and Russ Nicholson (interiors) recently. It's a little soon to make big pronouncements, but that's moving forward as well. I'll tentatively say that project backers will have a book in their hands in the early part of 2017.

A damned nice thing

The Kickstarter campaign for The Frankenstein Wars has one day left to run. Jamie advised me, "Just sell it as zombies meet steampunk." He may very well have been right, but like James Wallis I incline to the doctrine of Madame Yevonde: "Be original or die." (James recently helped to raise $340,000 for a new edition of extended joke RPG Paranoia, which has never been to my taste, but good for him. It will help pay for James's own, much more original, projects.)

The Frankenstein Wars isn't about zombies. Nor is it really steampunk, unless steampunk now stands for "any Victorian or Regency setting with science fictional elements". What it is: a new generation of gamebook app with a richly imagined universe, a cast of fully rounded characters, and a premise that we can carry on into further chapters in both print and digital form. It's a very, very long way from an orc in a room with a riddle and a treasure chest.

The campaign has one day left to run and all you need to pledge to get the game is $4. On the Kickstarter page I describe it as "a dream project I've been waiting to do for over a decade" - and that pretty much sums it up. Now I get to see whether the gamebook projects that interest me these days can still find an audience! That awesome smoke-n-fury picture incidentally is by Rafa Teruel, and even if the campaign fails at least it's been a pleasure to see his visual genius bring the world of The Frankenstein Wars to life.

Success has many fathers

Games and interactive story apps are media in which it's easy for the wrong people to get the credit while genuinely valuable input may be overlooked, so I'm going to spell out the creative provenance of The Frankenstein Wars for all to see.

The original concept of a world in which Victor Frankenstein's discovery was used to create an army of resurrected men dates back to around 1999. Martin McKenna and I cooked up the idea as the basis for a PC strategy game while freelancing on Plague (later released under the name Warrior Kings) at Eidos.

Martin and I tried various routes to getting the concept, which we called Frankenstein's Legions, started up as a game, movie or comic book. Martin is not very keen on drawing comics - which is a pity, as he's really rather good at it, but instead we roped in Russ Nicholson to work up some rough pages. (I'd say pencils, but Russ never uses pencils.)

Lots of people liked the story premise. Iain McCaig suggested that Victor Frankenstein's discoveries should extend far beyond the secret of life and death. I'm not sure if there are any greater secrets than that, but Iain is a creative powerhouse and so I'm always willing to listen to what he has to say. Martin's friend Jamie Mathieson, writer of Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, thought it was a mistake not to have one of Victor's descendants at the heart of the story:

"I am reliably informed by Martin that Frankenstein left no heirs as far the original novel is concerned. I also understand that Dave is not keen to invite any Young Frankenstein ridicule. However, if we make our central character/s descendants of Frankenstein's assistant I think we lose quite a bit of dramatic potential. They have no Frankenstein blood in their veins, they're not cursed down the ages, they're not fated to repeat their ancestor's mistakes etc; they're just unlucky enough to have a grandfather who did odd jobs for a nutter and nicked his stuff after his death. I realise that if we invent a son for Frankenstein, we're directly contradicting the official novel continuity, but given that we completely change the outcome of the Napoleonic War, I've got no problem with such a comparatively small tweak, that will reap potentially much bigger dramatic rewards. It also a much simpler sell – potential audiences/buyers would get it instantly. “He's Frankenstein's grandson.” is much easier to get across than “He's the grandson of Frankenstein's assistant.” “Why?” “Well, Frankenstein had no children in the novel, but this guy's granddad was there, he helped him ...wait, no, come back with that big fat cheque.” 

Henry Clerval had never been Victor's assistant, in fact. In the novel he's just his best friend, knowing nothing about the experiments Victor has been doing, but in the 1973 movie Frankenstein: The True Story he is the real originator of the life-creating process. The reason Henry's son was one of the main characters in my Frankenstein's Legions story is because he might credibly stumble across notebooks that Victor have left in Henry's care.

I didn't much like Jamie Mathieson's suggested approach myself, for much the same reason that I didn't want to see Davros come back in every Dalek story after Genesis. It turns it all into a pantomime. If I'm creating a story about nuclear destruction, I don't need to have Oppenheimer's great-grandson poised over the button, or Einstein's great-great-granddaughter swinging into action to thwart him. I wanted Frankenstein's Legions to feel like reality with fantastic elements. But it should be noted that at this stage (2005 or so) I still had never read Mary Shelley's novel, so I was still largely churning through half-remembered Universal and Hammer horror flicks. I still supposed Victor was a baron, for one thing.

While out in LA following the collapse of Elixir Studios, I mentioned the concept to movie producer Michael Levy and, with the help of a games documentary maker called Olly Quinn we made an audio demo to pitch to studios.

When I handed the commission to write the Frankenstein's Legions novel to John Whitbourn (we're into 2006 now) I said I'd stay out of his way and I did. Nothing kills a creative project faster than having too many hands on the tiller. John drew his inspiration more from the Hammer movies than Mary Shelley's story, in that the resurrected soldiers were nearly mindless monsters rather than the perfectly human but inhumanly mistreated wretches that I'd envisaged. He also had Frankenstein's nephew front and centre - though with the ironic twist that young Julius Frankenstein had inherited absolutely none of his uncle's scientific genius. Other people just assumed there was something in the Frankenstein blood and so they were all chasing after a piece of him - figuratively, that is.

Shortly after that I encountered the Muse while out walking in the fog on Hook Heath - her usual kind of reverse mugging, in which she stuffs my head with unwanted ideas - and returned with the plot for Frankenstein's Legions reimagined as a YA trilogy. The problem was, it had gone all airships and steam-weapons, the focus now really on girl genius Ada Byron rather than the whole Frankenstein thing. Young Adult literature has more than enough steampunk trilogies already, but try reasoning with the Muse.

On to 2010, and Michael Levy had hooked up with a comic book company called Ape Entertainment. We had a whole lot of Skype calls about a Frankenstein's Legions comic, I did a draft script of the first issue, and even started to rethink the story in a US Civil War setting, but it came to nothing.

How does all this connect with my Frankenstein interactive novel app? Not at all, is the answer. In 2011 I pitched the idea of interactive classic novels to Michael Bhaskar, who was then digital director at Profile Books. I didn't particularly want to adapt Frankenstein, having had enough of it (or so I thought) over the last twelve years. But when Michael said that was the one he really wanted, I decided I'd better finally get around to reading the Mary Shelley novel. That was an eye-opener. Instead of the crackly Gothic body-horror nightmare presented in the movies, I found a fresh, modern psychological drama of a divided self - more David Fincher than Herbert West.

Nobody else had input into my Frankenstein app. I used Inkle's markup system to write it all, but the Inkle team had no role in the concept, design or writing. Nor did I get any feedback from Profile's editors, as they couldn't parse sentences like this:

The fiend can cut the knot of my happiness, but {demonize:it|he} cannot unpick this truth: that we were wed, {victor_empathy < -1:as my mother desired|and loved each other}.

Getting left alone to write is just fine by me. After doing this job for thirty years I don't really need a copy editor, and I always have my Fabled Lands cohort Jamie Thomson to bounce story ideas off to see if they work. (Jamie and I were originally going to write the Frankenstein book app together, but in the end he was busy working on the Dirk Lloyd series.) As I recall, the only suggestion from Profile and Inkle was to put a Twitter button at the end of every chapter of Frankenstein so that the reader could tweet things like, "I just helped Victor Frankenstein steal a body from the morgue." Thankfully we authors have something called the moral right of integrity, which basically means you get to tell people to keep their hands off your work. The app was released sans Twitter buttons.

(Oh, fun fact: I wrote the whole of Frankenstein standing up because of a back injury. And I fixed the problem of how Clerval's body gets from Orkney to the very beach in Ireland where Victor's storm-tossed boat washes up. Mary Shelley had thirteen years to work on the second edition and she didn't spot that, so booyah.)

After Frankenstein, I didn't feel any pressing need to go back to Frankenstein's Legions. Been there, done that, got the bolts in the neck to prove it. But then the fellows at Cubus Games asked if I'd like to get involved in launching an interactive story app on Kickstarter. I told them about Frankenstein's Legions and we quickly decided that, to avoid confusion with John Whitbourn's novel, we should call this new story The Frankenstein Wars. Jaume Carballo and I kicked ideas back and forth, but then I realized my work schedule wasn't going to give me enough time to write it. We turned to Paul Gresty, author of Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories and I sent him all my notes and the longest of several story outlines, and as I write this he is wrangling his own ideas into that framework. What you finally see - assuming the Kickstarter campaign is successful - will be the equivalent of a "script by Paul Gresty, from a story by Dave Morris and Paul Gresty".

And that, friends, is the definitive list of credit where credit's due in the long patchwork story of The Frankenstein Wars. And there's still time to pledge for it on Kickstarter - but don't delay, those criminal brains are counting on you.

So come up to the lab

In case you missed it, Paul Gresty has been spilling the beans (human beans) over on Lloyd of Gamebooks about the hopefully upcoming story/game The Frankenstein Wars that he and I are are developing with Cubus Games. Here's a taster:

"Imagine yourself in the place of a lazaran for a moment. One morning you wake to learn that your boss has grafted an extra head to your shoulders, and given you one extra arm. He's severed your own scrawny legs, and replaced them with the brawny limbs of a champion sprinter. All because he feels it will make you more effective in your work. How would you fight the wave of madness that such a change would surely engender? Could your husband or wife understand this transformation? How could you explain it to your parents, or your children?"

The story is about using the Frankenstein process to create an army of bioengineered soldiers - stronger, faster, more indifferent to pain than any normal man. If they fall in battle - even if they're killed - the body parts can be recycled to create the troops to fight on the next day. As Paul concludes:

"The conflict threatens to tear apart the heart of Europe. And yet the damage to humanity's soul may be far greater still."

You can read his whole article here and back the gamebook on Kickstarter here.

They're not zombies

Another taster bite from The Frankenstein Wars, the interactive adventure that Cubus Games are creating based on my story and world concept. This is Tom Clerval's first meeting with the creature created by Victor Frankenstein three decades earlier:

There was a creak on the companionway. Mr Legion filled the frame of the door, having to twist his hulking torso to enter the cabin so that for a moment he resembled one of those wretches who are unearthed after being buried alive, their rigorous limbs pressed taut against the confines of the wood. His flesh gleamed like oiled ivory in the lamplight. I noted fresh stitching where his arm had been wounded less than an hour before, the skin already healing over the hastily-worked sutures.

As he stepped in he was able to straighten up, but even so his big angular head still bumped against the cabin ceiling, and the very mass of him seemed to press the air and light away so that Blakeney and I sat closer against the narrow hull. I felt as an inhabitant of a doll's house might feel, when the wall is suddenly thrown open and a giant child intrudes its looming face and limbs and vital energy.

Imagine my even greater astonishment, faced by this gaunt apparition that had haunted my childhood dreams, when he drew a long thin cigar from his pocket, tilted back the hood of the lamp, and sucked it alight with all the delicacy of a toff in a Pall Mall club.

Blakeney must have sensed my confusion. "Mr Legion is hardly the simple-minded monster given life by your godfather's experiments, Dr Clerval. He was a child then; now he is a man. Of a kind."

The creature turned his eyes upon me. They held a look that burned with the fever-light of shrewd intellect and dark depths of resentment. When he opened his lips, I sat so transfixed that it took me moments to realize that the soft, rich tones were his speaking voice. His glance slid off me so that he addressed neither Blakeney nor myself, but an unseen audience: “Of a kind..? Unfinished! Sent before my time into this world scarce half made up, that dogs bark at me - why, I have no delight to pass away the time, unless to spy my shadow in the sun, and ponder on my own deformity…”

He blew out a smoke ring, watching it with a satisfied smile as it rose and grew diffuse. Was he ugly? Truly deformed? Though my godfather had not cast him to normal standards of beauty, nonetheless he had built something impressive. Viewed as an attempt at copying humanity, he was a monster indeed. But seen as a new thing, a species apart – then his long, harsh body took on the outlines of something noble, even divine.

Moving with the easy grace one sometimes sees in very big men, he turned to leave, adding over his shoulder, “And so I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

Blakeney filled the silence after his heavy tread had faded along the companionway. "That was all for your benefit. His sense of mischief, you understand. Theatricality, one might even say."

“He works for you?” I asked, still marvelling at the transformation. In my memory, I saw that same giant body pouncing like an animal from the mountainside, those lips parting only to issue a howl to chill the blood. If Blakeney had shown me an African lion smoking a cigar and quoting Shakespeare, I could not have been more amazed.

“Works for me, you say? Not that exactly. We have… an understanding.”

Something in Blakeney's calculating tone brought me out of my daze. “I’m not going to help you, Blakeney.”

“That’s just what he said. And yet we have our understanding.”

See, no zombie he. That's a mind-shattering revelation that the Twitterverse has been struggling with, for example in this brief overview on Pocket Gamer. Well, as Wilde said, it's worse not to be talked about, but I wish more people were familiar with Mary Shelley's brilliant novel about the creation of a new kind of man rather than with the "Hulk will smash" laboratory partwork that is the Universal or Hammer idea of the monster.

Actually, thanks to Project Gutenberg you can read Shelley's original Frankenstein free in almost any format you could ask for. For a shorter read, here's me explaining why this isn't yet another zombie thing. Because, yawn, there are far too many of those already. After all, the watchword is not "It's undead," but "It's alive!"

The start of the Frankenstein wars

In 1827, a terrible secret that has long stayed hidden is finally unearthed. The life-generating techniques discovered by Victor Frankenstein are seized by the radical Zeroiste faction, who raise an army of lazarans - resurrected men assembled from the bodies of the dead. As the tide of this unstoppable force sweeps across Europe, lives will be changed forever.

This is the gamebook I've wanted to do for over a decade. It's a true blockbuster that weaves the lives of ordinary individuals against a backdrop of hellish war with the soul of humanity at stake. And now, with the help of writer Paul Gresty, artist Rafa Teruel, and the unholy design and code talents simmering in the vats at Cubus Games, The Frankenstein Wars is about to burst into the light of day on Kickstarter.

I call it a gamebook, but this is no ordinary choose-your-own text. Cubus and the team are promising a raw, bloody, uncompromising epic of gritty 19th century sci-fi and face-clawing body horror in which you get to explore interactive maps, direct rival brothers through branching non-linear storylines, pit yourself against ever-shifting goals, attempt time-sensitive missions (the longer you take, the better prepared your opponents will be), direct whole battalions in strategic battles - all of it made nail-bitingly immersive by full-colour artwork and a movie-quality soundtrack.

Even if you're a gamebook fan, you've never seen an interactive blockbuster like this. It's a story with the sweep and scale of a whole alternate-history universe. It seems like the guys at Kickstarter must agree, because as I write this the project has only been live for a few hours and already it's been awarded a Staff Pick. And with your help this is only the beginning.

A brandy with the monster

I've talked about Frankenstein's Legions on this blog before. Here, for instance. And here. I'll be talking about it more over the month ahead because I'm involved in a Kickstarter with Cubus Games, who will be creating an interactive story set in that world, under its new title The Frankenstein Wars.

The concept is simple. In the 1820s, Victor Frankenstein's secrets are recovered. Some of them, anyway - specifically, the ability to sew a body together from scavenged parts and bring it back to life. In France, a new revolution brings the Zeroistes to power. Named for the their "Year Zero" mentality, they are willing to do whatever it takes to usher in a new society. And that includes recycling the bodies of those killed in battle to create an endlessly-respawning army.

And what about Frankenstein's monster? He represents something more than a patchwork revivified man. In Mary Shelley's novel he was a new lifeform, a homo superior, with greater strength, endurance and intellect than any normal man. If you want to read his origin story, it's a lot more interesting than the Universal sparks-n-stitches version, and my interactive novel is as good a place as any to start.

But here in The Frankenstein Wars, the monster is thirty years older. He's learned to be warier and more ruthless - and this is a guy who was willing to strangle kids and murder innocent people even in his formative years. He calls himself Mr Legion now. Here's a scene between him and Lord Blakeney:

That night. Blakeney warms himself in front of a crackling log fire, a glass of brandy cupped in his hand. In the leather armchair opposite him sits Mr Legion, also slowly swirling a brandy. His cigar glows in the gloom of the dining room, where they have just finished a meal.
“I think Miss Byron’s vacation might need to come to an end quite soon,” remarks Blakeney.
“You know, Blakeney, when I was thirty years younger I would have thrown you in the fireplace, burned down the house, and killed every man between here and Hastings. I also would have settled for the cheap brandy.”
“Why is that? The burning and the killing, I mean.”
“You were expecting them to kidnap Ada Byron.”
“Not exactly. I merely made sure we had a contingency in case you failed. As sometimes you do.”
“And now you’d like her back.”
“Her improved revitalizing serum, at any rate. I’m sure Napoleon doesn’t care for the cheap stuff either.”
Mr Legion blows a smoke ring and watches it drift in the firelight, like a god contemplating the constellations he has made. “You’re not counting on Clerval for that?”
Blakeney smiles. “Doctor Clerval is one of those men you can count on utterly. Their moral code is so predictable.” Blakeney gets up and walks to the window, pulling aside the curtain to gaze into the night. “And he’s a man who doesn’t shirk from a challenge. So also there’s that. But what’s really at the bottom of it all, I suppose, is love.”
Legion drains his brandy in one gulp and tosses the cigar stub into the fire. “All right,” he says, rising. “I have my own reasons, of course.”
Blakeney watches the door close behind him. “Of course you do," he says to the empty room. "But in your case it's a long way from love.”

Lord Blakeney, as you will have guessed, is the former Scarlet Pimpernel. Now in his mid-60s he commands the British secret service (officially known as the Alien Affairs Committee). In a very real sense he is the “M” of his day.

The Frankenstein Wars app is based on my world and story, but that's not all. It's being written by Paul Gresty, who is also the talent behind the new Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain. At Cubus's request, Paul is adding some steampunk tech to the mix. There was a little bit there already in my story outline, in the devices Ada Byron had constructed. Personally I'd have have left it at that, not feeling the need to add a gilding of steampunk to the lily of Frankensteinian body horror. But I'm not writing it so I've given Cubus and Mr Gresty carte blanche to take whatever liberties they need to. Without a doubt Paul will be adding his own unique style of interactive storytelling to the bare bones of the plot and characters that I provided.

You'll be hearing more of The Frankenstein Wars over the next few weeks - not just here but on the project's Kickstarter page as well.

Talking heads

There's been a slew of interviews on the Lloyd of Gamebooks site this month, and with so much going on you might have blinked and missed them. There's one with the redoubtable Paul Gresty, whom most FL blog regulars will know for Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories, and another with the very talented Michael J Ward, author of the Destiny Quest gamebook series. Oh, and not forgetting the master of death-rock space opera, Kyle B Stiff, creator of Sol Invictus.

And there's even an interview with yours truly, in which I spill the beans (well, one or two beans, not the whole can) about a couple of new gamebook projects I'm working on with the aforementioned Mr Gresty. One of those is the ever-so-long-awaited new Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain, for which we are hoping to team up with Megara Entertainment. (Incidentally, search around on Megara's site and you might even see The Thief of Memories on sale. Be prepared to do some Howard Carter level digging around to find it, though.)

And then there's the first mention of a gamebook app that I'm helping Cubus Games to launch on Kickstarter sometime soon. This is being written by Paul Gresty based on my setting, story and characters. The picture above is your teaser.

Best of all, though, there's an interview with Emily Short, co-creator (with Richard Evans) of Versu. She talks about someof her favourite examples of Interactive Fiction (capitalized here because it refers to the specific parser-type definition, rather than just "fiction that you can interact with" which is what I usually mean by the term) and anything in the IF field recommended by Ms Short has to be worth a look.

How to park a jumbo

We've talked about it before, the elephant in the room of gamebooks. Text is what I mean. Prose. Words words words. The "book part" of this strange hybrid medium that squeezed its way into existence at a time when people had got a thirst for interactivity but games still took twenty minutes to load up off a cassette tape.

Earlier posts have thrown the elephant a bun or two. We considered the problem that text gets in the way of interaction. In which case, do gamebooks even need text at all? And if we have to have text, how do we make people want to read it?

Jon Ingold of Inkle was discussing these points at GDC. You can see the talk here. It turns out he never liked what I did with Inkle's engine, namely my interactive reimagining of Frankenstein. Ouch. Turns out he also doesn't care for Crime and Punishment, though, which takes the edge off.

I got the same vibe from the editors at Profile Books (the actual publishers of Frankenstein, though you would hardly guess it). They loved Telltale's Walking Dead - and quite right too. Why couldn't I have given them that instead of 150,000 words of text? But, publishers, here's a tip: if you want videogame production values, you can't pay the typical minimum-wage advances to authors and expect them to return a few months later with a nifty 3D interactive movie.

All right, I'm being disingenuous there. These days you don't have to spend north of five million dollars to make a decent-looking game. Indie development has brought the focus off Uncanny Valley emulation of blockbuster movies and back onto gameplay, panache and style. Apotheon, say, or This War of Mine. This might be your Golden Age, gamers; make the most of it.

People think a writer's job is moving words about, but that's the first fix. In the very beginning, as you're laying the foundations and erecting the scaffolding of the story, what's churning around inside your skull is a flood of images, character traits, emotions. The shape starts to reveal itself in snatches of dialogue, mood, key events. When you're ready, when it's fully marinated, that's when you put it down in words. If your medium is the novel, it will all be rendered into words eventually - but even that is only a program, a code that will run in the reader's brain so that they can construct their own experience of your story. It's those cassette tapes all over again.

For writers working on a movie, or designers on a game, that process of communicating the final experience is far clearer. You know right from the get-go that all that documentation you're writing is not the thing itself, it's the blueprint that will be used to make the thing. It differs from a novel only in that the reader of a novel has to do for themselves, and in their imagination, all the work of the development team.

If gamebooks have a future, we can surely agree it will be in digital form. No one disputes that the medium is evolving and that its boundary with videogames is getting so blurred as to be meaningless. Is Sorcery a gamebook? With each instalment the prose fades further into the background. In a game like This War of Mine we don't even talk about a "text component"; the text is just one more way of presenting the game world to the player. So it must become with gamebooks. The writer must think in terms of all the media (text, audio, images) and mix them as the story and the budget allow.

I've recently been discussing a new interactive story app called The Frankenstein Wars with Jaume Carballo, content director of Cubus Games, and Paul Gresty, who will be writing it. Referring to how an all-new interactive story needs to be conceived right from the outset so as to make full use of all component media, Jaume said:

"Keep in mind that we have to write the text over a structure comprising interactive maps, plans, images and so on. We're not doing an adaptation of a '90s gamebook, we're creating an interactive story app, so the team must work together. We don't want to end up with tons of text written thinking just in the story and not in the mechanics."

With that, I'd say he bagged the elephant. And just before it could go into musth. Phew.