Things from another world

Now that we’re just past midsummer, up here in the northern hemisphere anyway, how about an Antarctic horror to cool the blood? I came across this piece (which uses Runequest stats, but should be easy to adapt) in White Dwarf #48 while rooting out “The Lone and Level Sands” scenario. I was inspired by John Carpenter’s movie The Thing, obviously, but the timing seems off. The Thing was released in the UK in the summer of ’82, this appeared in White Dwarf in December 1983. Maybe I watched it on home video, then a technology in its early stages, but as I’m such a stickler for the cinematic experience – and was a fan of John Carpenter’s work – that’s a little unlikely. Another mystery whose answer is lost in the murk of memory.

I based my version of the creature on one interpretation of what’s going on in the movie. In the original 1938 short story by John W Campbell it works a bit differently, devouring and imitating prey rather than infecting them. Take your pick. In the absence of a name for the species I called my version the "jesmai", probably as a riposte to Jamie (who edited WD) for insisting that I give it a name at all. But all Campbell tells us is that it is

These creatures are usually encountered in remote territories – arctic climes, lonely heaths, or high mountain peaks. They can appear to be normal humans (or other animals) and are always encountered singly, often passing as hermits or trappers.

When attacking they grapple their opponent and then, if successful, lash out with a razor sharp proboscis hidden at the back of the creature's throat. Damage done by the proboscis is determined solely for the purpose of puncturing armour – the victim takes no actual damage as the proboscis only penetrates a centimetre or so, but a venom with potency equal to the Jasmai's CON is injected.

If the venom overcomes the victim's CON they black out and must roll CON as a percentage to come round. This roll is attempted at the end of each round until the character recovers. After recovering, the character experiences no ill effects from the venom for 2d6 days, whereupon they will suddenly lapse into a terrible fever characterized by alternating bouts of sweating and uncontrollable shivering. At this point the character can still be cured with a Dispel Magic 8, but if the fever is allowed to progress then the character lapses into a coma within 1d4 hours and then loses their own identity as they transform into an exact duplicate of the creature that infected them. The transformation takes one hour and can be reversed only with Divine Intervention.

At the end of the transformation the character will have all the skills, memories and motivations of the original creature. The character's own soul/ identity has been destroyed.

The creatures can be distinguished from humans when cut. Instead of bleeding they exude a greenish sap, and the inside of the body is a homogeneous pulp without bones or organs. They take 1d3 CON damage per full turn for every 10° Celsius above freezing.

A wind age, a wolf age, before the world goes headlong

A comment from Efrem Orizzonte recently reminded me that we discussed Heart of Ice at some length during his interview with me a few years back. I've always thought of this as my best gamebook, with its emphasis on character interplay and on who to trust (and who to backstab) when you're stuck with a pack of the most ruthless and power-hungry people on the planet.

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Efrem: "Heart of Ice is arguably the most mature gamebook ever written. The plot is superb, character design and development is among the finest ever seen, the atmosphere is perfect and the multiple endings mean that if you survive to the end, you can always 'win' – if you can call any of the ambiguous, bittersweet finales a victory! Heart of Ice is a story full of deeper meanings, and it is so good that it may even have inspired a movie, called Post Impact. What inspired you to write such an original and mature story in gamebook format? Is there some particular message you wanted to convey to your readers?"

Dave: "I’m not so much into trying to give my readers messages, I just have certain topics that interest me and I like to get readers thinking about them. [What interests me are] questions, not answers. Heart of Ice got started as a role-playing session. I can pinpoint it exactly to Christmas 1976. I was back home after my first term at college and I needed a scenario for a large number of players. Believe it or not, I started with the idea of doing a serious version of It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, kind of the way Failsafe Point is a serious version of Dr Strangelove. The idea of Du-En came from marvelling at the buildings of Christ Church, absolutely deserted late on a frosty night after the end of term, with the buildings lit up pale against this immense field of stars and the unyielding smell of cold sandstone, I love that.

"After the first game session, I was walking home with one of the players and he said how he was imagining Du-En as a movie, and what he liked was that the focus of the session had been in the tension among the characters camped out in this ruined, snow-filled city. It was big end-of-the-world action but it was centred on a small group of characters. And a mere 18 years later I took all that and put it into the book.

"I’d had an idea in my mind of [it] as [...] a [Sergio] Leone movie. It’s that combination of operatic/ mythic significance with ordinary messy human life – the fly walking in the sweat of a man’s face. Leone’s films are all about how the stories we construct make sense of what would otherwise be a short, meaningless existence."

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It's interesting that in all of that interview I never mentioned The Thing, which surely had an inspirational effect on the tone of the book. There are no actual shapechangers (unless you count the option to genetically upgrade with Chameleon Skin) but the twisty, slippery, scratchy sense of uncertainty and paranoia is there all right.

Heart of Ice is back in print again this week (and on Kindle too) so if you missed it first time round and you like the idea of a world where ultimate power is up for grabs if only you can prove more cunning than your rivals - okay, here's your chance.