Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 5

The Walls of Spyte is the last installment in Oliver Whawell's series of rules conversions from Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors rules. The stat blocks are available in PDF form here.

I had a lot less to do with the writing of the fifth book than the rest of the series. Oliver Johnson was supposed to write it, but ran out of time. Luckily Jamie Thomson was on hand to step in, but necessarily it was a rush job so he didn't have time to read the earlier Blood Sword books. I came in right at the end to tie up the last 40 sections or so.

Patreon backers can see how I'd have liked the series finale to pan out. Tambù's Blood Sword 5e campaign and rulebook drew on those notes, and I have a feeling so will Prime Games' forthcoming CRPG.

Various player-characters guest starred in the Blood Sword books, in a manner of speaking. This time it was the turn of Zaraqeb (Zara in the book) and Karunaz, who were played in my and Steve Foster's Empire of the Petal Throne campaign by Gail Baker and Paul Mason. The original PCs weren't a lot like their gamebook incarnations, incidentally. The real Zaraqeb wasn't a sorceress and wasn't that nasty; the real Karunaz was neither posh nor noble, though he was a much more interesting kind of hero because of that.

Countdown to the Apocalypse

 

Last chance to jump aboard the Blood Sword 5e Kickstarter, which ends tomorrow. It surpassed its target twice over in just the first twenty-four hours, so it's fair to say it is already a big success. I had the opportunity to play with the design team in the Quickstart game and it was amazing: packed with atmosphere, vivid NPCs, intriguing moral challenges, eerie experiences, and intriguing plot hooks. I hadn't played D&D in decades, and I'd never played 5e, but if other sessions are as good as that it won't be the last time. Authentic Legend flavour? You bet!

If you don't just want to cheer from the sidelines, and you're keen to grab all those goodies like the card deck and map pack and miniatures and not forgetting the dreaded blood dice -- don't delay, if for no other reason than that if the funding reaches 375% that will unlock a very special stretch goal: a complete reworking of The Walls of Spyte using my own notes for how I would write it today.

Crossing the Cauldron

If you missed out on the Kickstarter for Blood Sword 5: The Walls of Spyte back in 2019, here's your one and only chance to jump aboard. Just 250 colour hardbacks were printed* but there was one duplicate**, and it's available on eBay till Sunday.

Alternatively you could be a cheapskate and just get the paperbacks. But that hardback is a thing of beauty, believe me.

I didn't personally have a lot to do with The Walls of Spyte, but while editing the book for re-release I had a whole lot of ideas for what I'd have liked to do to make it fit in better with the rest of the Blood Sword series. If you're interested then there's an article on my Patreon -- or you could wait (see cheapskatery, above) and eventually I'll probably post it here.

*Actually it was probably more like 260 copies, as some of the 250 backers ordered an extra copy, but I'm rounding it off. And only about seventy were signed. 

** I goofed, if you must know, and did one of the signature orders twice. Duh.

God's favourite angel

In last year's Kickstarter for The Walls of Sypte, the apocalyptic finale to the Blood Sword gamebook series, the top reward was for a personalized piece of artwork by Russ Nicholson. The price tag was €600 -- which might sound steep but, trust me, it's a bargain for a Nicholson one-off. Teófilo Hurtado obviously thought so too, because he snapped it up almost as soon as the Kickstarter was launched. The original artwork now presumably hangs in his home, but Russ has kindly given permission for me to show it here. (The Magus in the middle has Teófilo's own face, which must make for a spooky sensation when he's eating his cornflakes.)

Over to Yeats for some lines that didn't in fact inspire me when I created the Magi of Krarth, but easily could have done:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, 

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones 

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky 

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, 

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side, 

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more, 

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied, 

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Blood Sword redux: The Walls of Spyte

"A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations."

That was the author Paul Valéry. His quotation is usually attributed to da Vinci (well, it's always Leonardo, Churchill or Wilde, isn't it?) and given in the snappier paraphrased version that Auden came up with:

"A work of art is never finished; it is only abandoned."

More relevant to The Walls of Spyte is Valéry's other comment on this theme:

"In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished (a word that for them has no meaning) but abandoned. And this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public, and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver, is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reverie that fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless."

All right, enough from les éminences grises. Clearly some works of art are abandoned earlier than others, and The Walls of Spyte is the literary equivalent of a baby left on a church doorstep in midwinter. What went wrong?

If you'll allow me to be highfalutin here, I signed off as Blood Sword's showrunner with book four. Whatever came after that, I was but an onlooker, like RTD watching Moffat episodes of Who. When Oliver Johnson and I originally pitched the series to Hodder, we had intended to work on it equally, but Oliver's job started to take up more of his time, with the result that I wrote books two through four single-handed. Then Oliver thought he'd have time to do book five, and we realized that would mean he'd have ended up contributing a quarter of the total work so we could switch our royalty split from 50/50 to 75/25. Nice and simple.

How often do simple plans gang na agley? Oliver had got about a third of the way in when a family holiday pulled him away from ice-bound horror to sea and sunshine. I was busy on other projects, but I agreed to step in and write the finale -- just forty sections, starting from the point where you meet Karunaz and Zaraqeb. I'd already tied up the storylines I was interested in, so it was just the showdown with the Magi. Oliver enlisted Jamie Thomson to pitch in with a hundred sections or so in the middle. I have no idea what shape the manuscript was in when it went to the publisher, but they clearly didn't have time to fix it, or even to proofread it. You cannot, in fact, get through to the end of that original edition without cheating.

The title is an obvious homage to "In the Walls of Eryx" and the story should echo At the Mountains of Madness, but instead of a Lovecraft homage the book came out as really more of a Ross Rocklynne concept rewritten by Robert Lynn Asprin. (You see, I just can't help griping. But, after all, Taika Waititi had a smash hit by turning the end of the world into a silly comedy, so maybe I'd better just go with the flow here.)

I'd always had this idea of astral forces gathering above an Arctic wasteland, and a few years later I got to do it my way in Heart of Ice -- also destroying the universe at the end, you'll note. The idea of the Five having engineered the Blasting in order to Phoenix themselves up to a level of power where they could challenge God -- that bit will have been me. At the time I was probably thinking more of Odin on the tree than self-reincarnating Marvel characters, but that's a detail.

Talking of the Five Magi, W B Yeats's poem seems like it must be the inspiration for them, but in fact I only came across it years later, when I was writing The Chronicles of the Magi. The real seed for the Magi came from a campaign that Oliver ran at Oxford back in the early '80s after we'd all been enthusing about Riddley Walker and Mad Max 2. (Oh yes, about that...) In the campaign we were all feral mid-teen scavengers of a post-apocalyptic tribe, wandering across a landscape of bomb-wrecked highways and nature blighted with chemical weapons. In the sky at night we saw fleeting coloured satellites for which we all felt a degree of "fix". We didn't know what fix was, but any change in fix (as in, "gain +2 Fix with Plague Star") was to be dreaded. I remember an encounter with a local bogeyman we called Smiler, whose face was eaten away in a ghastly rictus and who dwelt in an old bomb shelter permanently shrouded in toxic gas. Oh, if only more of that grim tone had found its way into The Walls of Spyte.

I'm frequently asked about the connection between Dragon Warriors and Blood Sword. They share the same setting, certainly, but I'm not sure I'd class most of Blood Sword as "canonical" Legend. If DW is Robin of Sherwood, which is a pretty apposite comparison, then Blood Sword is the BBC's 2006 show Robin Hood. Or if DW is The Shield, maybe Blood Sword is The Rockford Files . (Both shows I like, incidentally.) On that axis, The Walls of Spyte was Police Squad! -- sorry, there I go again. Anyway, the new edition of the book dispenses with the more knockabout comedy elements (what we used to call "silly dungeon" tone) so maybe it's time to let that go.

What else? Unlike the other Blood Sword redux posts (which incidentally are reprinted at the back of the new edition of The Walls of Spyte) I don't have a lot to say about the writing because most of it wasn't me. Karunaz and Zaraqeb, mentioned above, were characters in my Tekumel campaign, played by Paul Mason and Gail Baker respectively. Gail had recently dumped Paul rather brutally, so I probably let his character behead hers as a salve for a wounded heart.

Oliver must have got the idea for the giant red bat that bedevils you at the start from the Crimson Bat in RuneQuest. I'm just grateful he forgot about the ducks. I also remember Jamie telling me how he was working the word "aoristic", which I think he'd picked up from Greek grammar at school, into one of the riddles. I'm still not quite sure what it actually means, so if anyone can drop a sentence illustrating the aoristic tense into the comments, please do.

I'm disappointed I never got the Blood Sword characters to Ellesland. Or Ferromaine, come to that. There's no sign of Cynewulf, Montombre, Jewelspider Wood, or those other staples of most Dragon Warriors campaigns. On the plus side, I did get to explore the Ta'ashim lands and faith in these books, and that part of Blood Sword -- that is, everything that happens in the muck and mire of the cities of Outremer and the Middle East -- is definitely canonical Legend.

Oh, about that... "Why do the characters refer to their world as Middle Earth?" I'm sometimes asked. "Why not Legend?" Well, Legend of course is a non-diegetic name for the setting, something I'm guilty of with Fabled Lands too. To most DW characters, their world is "the middle earth", ie between heaven and hell. I knew that Tolkien used it for his world, of course, but I also thought everyone knew that he just got it from Middle English literature. Nowadays people think it's his proprietary brand, so where possible I've switched it in this book to other terms like "the mortal world".

Overall, if I'd known the Blood Sword books would still be read today by thirty- and forty-somethings, I’d have been bolder about dispensing with the orcs, goblins and dungeon trappings and made it more like "real" Legend. Especially for the Judgement Day finale, which was much better served in my opinion by Tim Harford's Redemption campaign, of which I've offered snippets here from time to time.

That said, Oliver and Jamie delivered a top-class instance of a dungeon adventure in this book. If I'd played in a D&D game half that good back in the mid-'70s, I might never have spurned it for Tekumel and Traveller. And in the new edition, the more obtrusive Pythonesque bits are gone, Russ Nicholson's marvellous illustrations are reproduced via crisp high-quality scans, and as a bonus you actually can get all the way through to the end. It's still Doomsday, but at least you won't miss it.

Midnight on the Day of Judgement

"Don't talk to me about spoilers. Winter has been coming for -- "

Oh, well maybe I shouldn't go quoting the Axis of Awesome. Not on a family blog, eh? The point is that after thirty-one years The Walls of Spyte, fifth and final book in the Blood Sword series, is back in print thanks to two hundred and fifty stalwart Kickstarter backers. (You know who you are, and thank you.)

A by-blow of the campaign was the Blood Sword Battle Boards, a large-format book collecting all the combat encounters from the series. Fat? It makes Jamie look like Ebony Maw. (By the way don't you think that sounds like the name of a '70s Motown singer? Not Jamie, I mean. The other one.)

All those unstintingly beneficent backers whose pledges funded the re-editing of the book have now got their exclusive, full-colour, hardcover, collector's-edition copies of The Walls of Spyte, but if you missed the campaign don't go pledging your soul to the nethermost darkness just yet. A paperback edition is available and it's every bit as good as the hardcover except for little details like colour, durability, signatures, things like that. But you do still get Russ's matchlessly brilliant art and the opportunity to complete the epic Blood Sword quest there in the steaming, sulphurous heart of the Cauldron on the last day of Creation.

A slip of the pen

The Kickstarter campaign for the fifth Blood Sword book, The Walls of Spyte, offered a genuine collector's edition, as I only ever plan on printing the 225 copies pledged for by backers. That's the colour hardback version of the book. The paperback will be available for anyone to buy in a month or so.

Of those hardback copies, about 50 needed to be signed. Engage brain before putting pen to paper, I should have told myself. In particular, check the spelling of each backer's name before writing it in one of those expensive collector's editions. Oops.

Well, I have about a dozen copies still to sign and I only made one mistake. That copy (with the klutzed flyleaf carefully removed) is now up for grabs on eBay. So if you missed the Kickstarter and you've been kicking yourself for that, here's your chance -- a probably never-to-be-repeated chance -- to get one of these exclusive hardcovers.

Oh, and while we're here I might as well mention that the latest issue of Librogame's Land has an interview with me. You can find that right here.

At last, Spyte

Too many cooks spoil the broth, as you know, but it can be just as much a problem when you've got too few, and that's what happened with The Walls of Spyte. Originally Oliver Johnson and I were going to write the Blood Sword gamebooks between us. In hindsight that was probably never a realistic plan, seeing as how in our earlier series (Golden Dragon Gamebooks and the Dragon Warriors RPG) I'd written two books for every one that Oliver finished.

In the event, before the ink was even dry on the contract Oliver got a full-time office job so he was only able to write about a quarter of The Battlepits of Krarth and none at all of books 2 through 4. We were approaching the deadline for the final book and I had lots of other work on, so Oliver said he'd take a holiday and do the whole thing. That way he'd end up having written a quarter of the series rather than half, and we could amend the royalty payments accordingly.

You know what Rabbie Burns said about foresight. Oliver couldn't get as much time off as he thought -- or maybe his wife insisted that part of the holiday should be spent, you known, holidaying. And I'd already booked up to work on something else. Oops. Luckily Jamie Thomson had a few weeks to spare and he jumped in to take up the slack.

Jamie wouldn't have had time to read the other Blood Sword books, though. Cranking out half a book in a couple of weeks must have been hard enough. So I expect Oliver put a pin in the flowchart, said, "Can you give me a generic 200-section dungeon that I can fit in from here to here," and Jamie came through. But by then Oliver must have thought somebody else was going to do the editing, because there were a lot of things intended to be filled in later (such as numbers on a segmented rod, which got left as "XX" in the printed copy) which meant the book was unplayable.

That's why, when I revised the Blood Sword books for republication a few years back, I pretty much threw up my hands when it came to The Walls of Spyte. That one was obviously going to take more work than the other four books combined. You'd already entered a realm of dreams, faced heroes on the mythic plane, and gone down to the land of Sheol to have it out with the Angel of Death. Did you really want to cap all that with a knockabout dungeon and silly jokes?

It turns out a lot of people did. As I was explaining for the umpteenth time why I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for getting Spyte into a publishable state, it suddenly occurred to me it would eat up less time if I just got on and did it. Hence this Kickstarter.

The Kickstarter is for a limited edition full-colour hardcover. That's going to be a genuine collector's edition, as it will only be available to backers of the Kickstarter. The paperback will go on sale as soon as all the hardcover copies have gone out to backers. So if you just want a paperback copy of The Walls of Spyte, you don't need to back the Kickstarter, you just need to wait a few months.

The Kickstarter for The Walls of Spyte collector's edition will run until March 16th.

That was the year that was

"Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue."

Like H G Wells's time traveller, we've careened through another year. There should be a lever to slow this thing down, shouldn't there? But as "minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring" I've had the chance to glimpse a few standout moments of 2016.

My best roleplaying experience was getting to sit in on a session of Dom Camus' Earth Force campaign. This is a modern take on superheroes, with a dash of existential threat and a background swirl of geopolitics. I played a scientist and got through without actively needing to use my powers, but nonetheless getting multinational backing for my open source research program, which made me feel quite Tony Stark. The whole thing was helped along by an elegant, streamlined system that did everything you need of rules and kept out of the way of the roleplaying. I hope Dom will publish it.

Talking of sweetly simple rules, my favourite new game system has been Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders. If you're familiar with the sagas, this captures them perfectly. I ran it straight -- no fantasy, no 21st century mores, just bleak neighborhood struggles against the unsentimental elements and your fellow man. It's quick, easy, atmospheric, and the perfect antidote to decades of GURPS.

Proudest achievement of the year was publishing Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? This is my and Jamie's first gamebook in more than twenty years. I have no idea what will happen to the UK in 2019 (good luck -- by then I should have regenerated as an Irishman) but I am sure that the book will give you a better understand of the Brexit process than any of the government ministers charged with negotiating it. And Britain's godfather of gamebooks, Ian Livingstone himself, has taken a look at Can You Brexit? and pronounced it "very clever". He may be partial, of course.

Around the time I was finalizing Can You Brexit?, Ashton MacSaylor was getting ready to deliver on his Kickstarter for The Good, the Bad and the Undead. If you've hung around the saloon for a while, you'll remember that was the Wild West gamebook that Jamie was going to write but couldn't get beyond the outline. Ashton took it over, roped and threw and branded it, and now it's riding in out of the desert with a mean eye and a belt full of bullets.

Talking of gamebooks, I wrote two audio adventures for the Amazon Echo, one an all-new interactive drama, the other a reskin of my first ever gamebook Crypt of the Vampire. With very tight deadlines those were hard work, but luckily I like hard work, as long as it's work on something that interests me.


The highlight of the summer was travelling to Germany for Manticon. Good beer, nice people, an open society, fabulous landscapes, and the best trains I've ever been on. I might move there. (See Brexit, above.)

Earlier in the year, I got a call from Lawrence Whitaker at The Design Mechanism, publishers of the Mythras RPG. (Yes, I know; apologies for the spelling. I have to grit my teeth every time I type it, but it's the Runequest system with Glorantha stripped out, so it actually is rather brilliant.) TDM have acquired the licence to do a roleplaying game based on Jack Vance's fantasy trilogy Lyonesse, and having heard me talk about it on the Fictoplasm podcast they thought I might like to contribute a section to the book. You bet. I owe Jack Vance a huge creative debt and it's an honour to pay a little of that back.

Then there was Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios getting in touch to bring Tetsubo back from the Land of Roots. Nothing's forgotten, as we Robin of Sherwood fans know. Watch for that in 2019, if you still have money left after food and medicine rationing.

I also got roped in by Ian Turnbull, one of the Black Cactus co-founders, to do some work on a Virtual Reality game. Don't reach for your Oculus headset just yet. The developers originally hoped to get the game ready by October this year, but Ian's and my combined half-century in game development told us that was never going to happen. Maybe next October. My role was, as it often is these days, to clarify, simplify and focus the design and creative goals of the game. (And to chuck out all the bloody cutscenes on the principle of "discover, don't tell".)

In October my time machine lurched off into a pocket universe of misery for a few weeks when I came down with a nasty virus followed by a racking cough. It stopped me from going to TekUKon, which was a blow, but every cold has a silver lining. Unable to get on with any of my new projects, I whiled away the time for the fluid link to repair itself by editing the fifth Blood Sword book, The Walls of Spyte. It's still a slapstick dungeon bash but at least the flowchart now makes sense and the pieces of the key you find are properly numbered, so for the first time ever you can actually complete the adventure.

Surprising creative experience of the year was discovering I still have a copy of the Lord of Light boardgame that Nick Henfrey (creator of Spacefarers) and I pitched to Ian Livingstone (yes, 'im again) and Steve Jackson back around 1980. We didn't have the rights, which might or might not have been a problem. Nowadays there's always Kickstarter, so who knows?

And entertainment highlight of 2018 was discovering Guy Sclanders' hilarious Fabled Lands playthroughs on YouTube. Many of the comments focus on how nasty things used to happen in games in the old days. Well, nasty things are more fun. Whatever doesn't kill you helps you level up.

And on that note, best wishes for the year ahead. See you on the other side.

The year in view

From time to time we get queries about various projects of Fabled Lands Publishing, so it struck me that a good way to kick off 2016 would be with an overview of all those projects and if/when they're going to see the light of day. Happy New Year, by the way.

The big triumph of 2015 was the Kickstarter for Fabled Lands book 7: The Serpent King's Domain. Currently this is being written by Paul Gresty and illustrated by Russ Nicholson. When it's ready (spring or early summer, if I have to guess) Megara Entertainment will release a hardcover edition, and Fabled Lands Publishing will follow up with the paperback.

A lot of people ask me about Blood Sword 5: The Walls of Spyte. I'm on record as saying that tonally and plot-wise it doesn't fit with the rest of the series, but that isn't the reason for the delay in re-releasing it. I found while flowcharting the book that there are a lot of sections with pretty garbled logic, so all that needs to be fixed. Not least of the errata is in section 62, where a placeholder "XX" was left in the text (it should read "100") but there are other sections that only make sense when re-flowcharted. Even so, if it were only that then the book would be out in a few weeks but there's also an Augean stable of typesetting and picture-scanning to be handled. It's not a spare time job and Fabled Lands Publishing doesn't have the resources to pay for the work right now. So put that one in the category of "to be released - no date set" and if you can find a pirated PDF, grab it with my blessing. In fact, what do you know - here's one.

Then there's Falcon. The first book, Renegade Lord, didn't sell like hot cakes, or even lukewarm cakes, so the rest of the series is definitely on the back burner. Don't expect those in 2016.

Some people have noticed that when we republished the Golden Dragon series, The Eye of the Dragon was missing. One possible plan for that is to rejig it as a Fabled Lands Quest, as we did with Keep of the Lich Lord. But it's a big pile of work doing that - not just editing, flowcharting, artwork, proofing, but converting the whole thing to the FL game system. Also on the back burner, therefore.

Dragon Warriors reverts to me and Oliver Johnson in November, at which point I'd like to get it available on Amazon. If I can get the rights to the new books, I can upload the PDFs to Createspace right away - hell, I could do it in the next half hour and still have time to make a cup of tea - and the books would be on sale on Amazon a week later. As it is, we don't know who will end up owning all the new material such as Frazer Payne's "Darkness Before Dawn" scenario, so you might just see a re-release of the original six paperbacks.

Those are all the plans for now - such as they are - but we also have a new Dirk Lloyd book coming out, along with more DL adventures in The Phoenix comic, and an entirely new book series by Jamie with the working title A Shadow on the Heart. Plenty to look forward to, then - and if plans change (as they always do) you'll read it here first.

The Apocalypse is going to take a little longer

If you follow the comments on this blog, you'll already know the problem I have with Blood Sword book 5. It was supposed to be the end of the world, this book, but it looks like we packed up early.

The process for the new edition of Blood Sword involved Stanley-knifing my old copies apart, scanning each page by hand, cleaning up the inevitable OCR errors, remapping the flowchart to check it all worked, adding any new codewords and sections needed, then typesetting the definitive text file for printing.

It was meant to be a spare-time hobby. Instead it took a good chunk of the summer. As I started on The Walls of Spyte, I had an inkling it was going to take a bit more work. That’s why Fabled Lands Publishing got books 1-4 out first. “I’ll tidy up the problems with the fifth book over the next few weekends.” That's what I said. Famous last words.

What went wrong with book 5? I’ve been trying to figure it out. The whole Blood Sword saga builds to this huge climax on midwinter’s eve of the year 1000, when most people believe the world will end. The player-characters don’t just believe that, they know it for a fact. Their celestial foes the True Magi are going to reincarnate at midnight and then their plan is to get all Isil on humanity’s collective ass. “You have five hours to save the world…” This adventure should have been filled with terror, urgency, darkness, even (to use terms I never would in real life) good versus evil.

Instead it was an old skool dungeon. Well, you may say, The Battlepits of Krarth is a dungeon. True, but it’s not only that. The dungeon there is just the arena in which the real story of political machinations among the callous Magi plays out. More to the point, it’s full of traps and puzzles and whimsy because the Magi designed it that way. What’s Spyte’s excuse?

I can’t remember the exact circumstances of how the book got written – and, since I have a pretty good memory, that alone suggests that I was probably deep into writing other books like Knightmare and Heroquest. Most likely Hodder had been talking about when to schedule the last Blood Sword book for some time, and suddenly they needed it yesterday. That’s how publishers usually operate.

Oliver had been planning to take a holiday from his day job at Transworld to allow him to write the majority of this final book, so as to catch up on the fact that I’d written 90% of a series we originally planned to work on 50/50. But something messed up those plans. Oliver didn’t have as much time as he thought, and I was booked solid on other projects. At a rough guess, he did the first half, I did the last 50 sections or so. And to fill the gap, luckily Jamie was free and was able to jump in at very short notice, writing the remaining sections in about a week. Which, considering he didn’t even know the rules (and they do stretch to twenty pages, remember) was pretty impressive.

So to answer that question, what went wrong, I have a theory. I don’t think I told Oliver and Jamie what the story was. I probably said, “The PCs have to go through a ruined city fighting cultists and demonic guardians. They’re trying to stop a ceremony at the centre of the city, so get them to the top of the inner keep and I’ll take over.”

What I should have added: “It’s Doomsday. Make it about metaphysics, betrayal, and paranoia.”

Not knowing that, Oliver and Jamie created a dungeon full of weird experiences, dimensional gateways, riddling dragons, all that. Effectively, it was a second run at the Battlepits. The tone? All over the place. Instant and arbitrary deaths mix in with whimsical conversations with demons. At times the book verges on Comedy Hour of the Apocalypse. Other times it’s Grimtooth’s Traps. Then right at the end you get to my bit and we’re talking about Man judging God and whether self-sacrifice is the only way to beat the True Magi. It’s like three different gamebooks crashed into each other at high speed. The Walls of Spyte doesn’t really survive the collision.

Either Oliver or I should have been creatively directing this book. When he had to bow out early, I should have somehow rearranged my other deadlines in order to take over for the finish. The fact that one of the numbered rods you collect was left in the published book as having the label XX (it was supposed to read 100) suggests that each of us thought the other was responsible for checking the proofs. It wasn’t up to Jamie to fix it – he was just pinch hitting as a favour.

Some things are never going to get a shine however much you polish them. The Walls of Spyte doesn’t need a few corrective touches, it needs ruthlessly aggressive surgery. To make the book fit for publication, I ought to cut at least the central 300 sections and completely rewrite them.

But I’m very aware that people are waiting for this book. A rewriting job on that scale isn’t something to dash out over a weekend. I already have an outline for what I'd like to do with the book, but I’d have to clear a month at least to do it properly. If I was retired and only had matchstick models of the Palace of Westminster to fill my time it’d be easy, but when you’re a working writer there are few idle moments. Fabled Lands Publishing can afford to pay for the editing work to reissue old gamebooks like Blood Sword, Falcon and The Keep of the Lich Lord, but creating all-new gamebook material is a lot more work for, sadly, not much of a return.

If you’re desperate for book 5 in its original version then you’ll find plenty of people flinging free PDFs of it around on the internet. Personally I’d recommend waiting till I can fix it, though at the moment I’m not sure how to find (or fund) the time. I'd be tempted to say it's a job for Kickstarter, but I've already comprehensively debunked that as a viable way to fund print gamebooks.

Alternatively, since all the above is just my own personal taste and some people say they like old skool dungeons, I could just release the book without my name on it. If in a couple of months I still haven't figured out a way to clear enough time to rewrite it, that's what I intend to do, so either way it ought to be back in print by the spring. Who knows, it might turn out to be the most popular in the series, and all this agonizing is just me.

In the meantime, so as to have something to mark the season, here's a link to some of my Knightmare books. And I'll leave you with W B Yeats, whose poem "The Magi" did not in fact inspire Blood Sword, but fits it rather splendidly all the same. Happy New Year!

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Home of the Magi

More Blood Sword stuff, and this one's really for the diehards. It's Oliver's map of the chasm known as 'the Cauldron' that surrounds the ruined city of Spyte. For the purposes of the gamebook, the Cauldron was only a few hundred yards across - a bit of licence, that, as in Legend it's actually several miles across, and that's one of the reasons I don't consider the Blood Sword books quite canonical.

What happened with the Blood Sword books was they were originally meant to be written by me and Oliver together. But while I was a full-time author, Oliver had a job at Transworld Publishing (publishers of Dragon Warriors) and his workload began to mushroom, with the result that he had to back out after doing only about 25% of the first book, The Battlepits of Krarth. I then wrote the next three, but we always intended that Oliver would clear enough time that we could partner up on the finale of the series, The Walls of Spyte. Unfortunately, after drawing that first map and writing about half the book he had to drop out owing to a combination of career and personal pressures. That's why Jamie Thomson jumped in at short notice to help out with a couple of hundred paragraphs.

The Blood Sword books are probably quite hard to find these days (legally, anyway) but the first three were turned into my Chronicles of the Magi novels, available as PDFs for $4.95 each on DriveThru. Again, not strictly canonical Legend, but useful for roleplaying in Krarth, Wyrd, Outremer or the Ta'ashim lands. This taster should help you decide:

The heat of the day had long since fled from the desert, and under a sky of a million stars a man stood on the white sands beside a corpse.

In the man’s hand was a long knife, gently curved, whose blade shone dark and wet in the cold moonlight. Stooping, he dipped the knife in the corpse’s gaping chest and used its own blood to draw a circle around where it lay.

The task done, he raised his eyes to the heavens and spoke seventeen syllables in a guttural tongue.

A wind rose, pulling ripples of fine sand across the moon-bleached dunes.

The man directed the knife in turn to each point of the compass, his movements as graceful and precise as those of a dancer or a beast of prey. And as he turned he seemed to sing a spell under his breath in the same exotic language.

At his feet, the corpse’s eyelids rolled open and it stared in blind horror at the stars.