His dark dominions

Modern astronomy has put paid to the notion that heaven and hell are anywhere out there, relegating the abodes of the immortals and the dead to another plane of reality that's inaccessible from our universe by natural means, if not entirely imaginary. In older and simpler times it was still conceivable that you might climb a mountain and find the gods, and that on the far bank of a dark and sluggish river lay the dwelling place of those who no longer belonged among the living.

Thus it is in the Vulcanverse, where Hades's realm is a physical location. There are things there that do not sleep. Companions may desert you at the gates. Food in your backpack will rot and flowers wither. Even so one can simply walk into the land of death, a region that Homer tells us is "so dim, so dark, so loathsome; abhorr’d by men and dreadful even to the gods."

But where there is danger there are great prizes to be won, and glory awaits those courageous enough to venture among those "mouldy mansions so ghastly grim that even the gods shudder to think of them." So be sure to have the Hades gazetteer to hand (to be found here and here). And another resource that will be useful to explorers of the Vulcanverse is this list of tickboxes for books 1-4 so you don't have to mar your copies. (Thanks to John Jones for that.)

The Vulcanverse books are available on Amazon and from all good bookstores.

Vulcanverse erratum

 

To err is human, but it doesn't stop me from kicking myself when readers pointed out a mistake in The Houses of the Dead section 391 which routed the reader to 751 instead of 752 where they were supposed to go. What makes that infuriating, on top of the inconvenience to readers who rushed to get their copies early, is that I had spotted the mistake in the proofs and corrected it on a print-out -- and then failed to amend the file.

If that mistake is in your copy, the only consolation I can offer is that it might be worth something like one of those Lincoln pennies with a missing letter. The corrected section is above, and if you run across me or Jamie at a convention we will happily correct it and add our signatures.

We've corrected it in all copies ordered from now on but we think there might be as many as a hundred early editions out there with this erratum and not all of those readers will come across this blog, so please circulate the corrected image as widely as possible.

Hot off the anvil

The first two books in the Vulcanverse series are now out, with two more coming later this year. If you don't know what that means -- well hey, where have you been? (And check out previous posts here and here.)

There will be five books in the series, but they're open world solo roleplaying, which means you can start in any of the first four books and play them in any order. The numbers on the spines are just so you know where to put them on your bookshelf.

The art is by Mattia Simone, who also painted the cover for the Librarsi edition of Heart of Ice.

You'll be seeing more of Mattia's work on our future projects, I hope. Comments are open below if anyone has played Vulcanverse -- and there's a no-prize if you spot the itsy-bitsy deliberate mistake (I hope there's only one) in The Hammer of the Sun. 

If you want to order the full-colour hardcover editions, any bookstore should be able to do that for you and the details are:

• The Houses of the Dead  ISBN 978-1-909905-37-5
• The Hammer of the Sun  ISBN 978-1-909905-38-2

Or you can get the black-&-white paperback editions from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the usual places.

hardcover

 

  

Also at Blackwell's UK:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun

And at Barnes & Noble in the US:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun

paperback

And by the way you can get copies of the Adventure Sheets (including maps) for the books from the Spark Furnace website: The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun.

Something's coming

The first two Vulcanverse open-world solo RPG gamebooks are now available to pre-order in advance of publication on September 3. These are the full-colour hardcovers; the black-&-white paperbacks will follow in a few weeks. Jamie and I are pretty pleased with (and exhausted by) our work on these. We've each written about 250,000 words of Vulcanverse adventures this year, with books 3 and 4 to follow in time for Christmas. That's going to be around 4500 gamebook sections -- roughly six average Fabled Lands books. Better polish those dice!

 

In some territories you may have trouble pre-ordering from Amazon, but just try a different bookstore. For instance, US gamebook readers can order The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun from Barnes & Noble. You can also get them from Target here and here.

Oh, and somebody mentioned on Twitter they were pre-ordering copies for their kids. Well, forty years ago Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy were children's books. Since then gaming has moved on and the Vulcanverse books are not necessarily child-friendly. They have serious adult themes and language, so if you're going to unleash them on impressionable young minds you ought to blaze a trail yourself first.

And another cool solo RPG adventure that you can pick up absolutely free is the latest Dragon Warriors gamebook from Red Ruin Publishing. This one is Desolation of the God-King by Paul Partington, and it's 300 sections long in a hyperlinked PDF that does the page-riffling for you. And did I mention that it's free?