Plug in to comedy and adventure

Looking for a story you can really immerse yourself in? How about Meta: Game On, an hilarious new novel by Xander Black? This audio drama treat is expertly recounted by the mithril-tongued Rob Rackstraw, master of a thousand voices, who may well be channelling the likes of Brian Blessed, Eartha Kitt, Stephen Fry and the Emperor Palpatine. 

Really, you don't want to miss the comedy-adventure of the next Swinging Sixties - 2060s, that is. Grab it right now, before they demolish Earth to make way for a hyperspace freeway.

The year 2065: The streets are abandoned, shops are empty, parks are silent. But is that really much of a surprise when you can connect to the Cybernet?

Everyone can turn on, log in, and drop out.

Cyrus, a failed physicist, and dropout game designer Everett are on the cusp of their big breakthrough into the meta ranks of Neverborn, the world’s most popular game.

But when several high-profile avatars disappear and their human counterparts are found dead, Cyrus and Everett find themselves under suspicion. They must clear their names and unravel the deeper mysteries of Brith and the Neverborn. In doing so, they will uncover a dark secret that threatens not only the game-world, but the safety of their physical realm.

By the light of the night it'll all seem all right

A few weeks ago I got a call from Amazon to talk about the Halloween releases for Alexa. They’d seen my Frankenstein app and wondered if it could be turned into an interactive audio story.

I’d already talked to a few audiobook companies about that. Frankenstein is tailor-made for audio. It’s narrated by Victor Frankenstein, whose confidant and advisor you are, and written “to the moment” (ie in the present continuous tense). And I’ve been banging on about audio adventure games since I worked at Eidos in the mid-90s. So Amazon’s suggestion was perfect, except…

It’s over 150,000 words. That’s about twenty hours of audio. I’d have to edit all the text, it would need to be cast, recorded, have sound effects added, coded – and all that within five weeks, assuming one month was enough for testing.

So naturally I said I’d do it. Not only that, I’d recently talked to a company called Mythmaker Media about working on an interactive audio project, so how about hooking them in?

“We already have a developer in mind for Frankenstein,” the Amazon guy said, “but why don’t I talk to Mythmaker anyway? Maybe there’s another project you can do with them.”

A few days later, that one got the green light too. Now, as well as editing Frankenstein, I had to write an interactive audio drama from scratch. Only seven thousand words, but it had to be scary (Halloween, remember) and it had be a completely innovative model of interactive storytelling. (Otherwise why do it?)

Skype chirruped again. “What about your gamebook Crypt of the Vampire? That could be an Alexa app, couldn’t it? Can you get that ready for Halloween?”

I said yes on the basis that you can’t have too many irons in the fire; something always goes wrong. And a few days later the Frankenstein developer, having run the numbers for actors’ fees and studio time, asked if it would work with synthesized speech.

“Not really. Victor has to come across as impassioned, driven, stressed, increasingly desperate… But look, the story is in six parts. The second part is different from the others. It’s the monster’s story told in second person, so you are the monster. That might just work with synthesized speech. And it’s just thirty thousand words, so I’d have time to edit it and add markup. Pauses, interjections, that kind of thing.”

They lost interest. Not to worry, as I still had the drama with Mythmaker Media (that’s called “Fright Tonight”) and the gamebook, by now retitled “The Vampire’s Lair” because it’s snappier. Or bitier.

For The Vampire’s Lair I’ve teamed up with a programmer called Kevin Glick. We decided to strip out all the game-heavy mechanics: hit points, skill rolls, things like that. It’s audio, after all, though in fact there’s a Fire Tablet option with some toothsome graphics by Leo Hartas. The way it works now, you play until you die, and you can then either buy another life and keep going, or you can restart from the beginning. (And, yes, of course it’s possible to play right through to the end without having to buy a single life.)

So I hauled out a copy of Crypt of the Vampire, my first ever gamebook from way back in 1984, and embarked on what I thought would be a simple editing job. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, as they say, the enemy in this case being reality. Too much of Crypt was a dungeon bash when what Kevin and I needed was a haunted house adventure. Too many encounters depended on dice rolls. All of that needed to be rewritten. Also, it needed to be scary. Fun-scary, you understand, like pumpkin lanterns and spray-can cobwebs. The orcs had to go.

Luckily I wrote “Fright Tonight” first, because plunging into the flowchart for Crypt and completely rewriting about half of the book would have burned out my creative psyche for weeks. But I got it done, and the result should be soon available on Amazon as an Alexa Skill. (Yeah, don’t blame me; that’s what they call them.) Just say, “Alexa, enter The Vampire’s Lair,” and get ready for some agreeable chills.

Videogames killed the radio star?

Crossing Tom Quad, deserted and sparkling in the December night, gave me the visual inspiration for the roleplaying scenario that eventually became Heart of Ice. The germ of the idea had already come from the briefest of references in Empire of the Petal Throne to “hex 6029: the walled ruins of the Mad City of Du’un”. And the story itself, as I’ve described elsewhere, was an adaptation of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, in the sense that only one person could have the ultimate prize but to reach it meant cooperating with others along the way.

The original Du’un adventure was pretty old school, as you’d expect for something written in the mid-70s, and in fact the first time I ran it really was at my old school, in the Eastgate block at the RGS, where the Guildford War Studies group used to meet. But I digress…At the end of an embrangling underworld filled with interdimensional pathways, the characters had to fight past an avatar of the god Hrsh to win through to the Chamber of the Heart. Alliances died at the door. Beyond that point it became a cathartic free-for-all.

Primitive though the scenario was, it became the one players talked about. I was persuaded to run it two or three times more for different gaming groups. Probably it was the theme of the scenario that made it really memorable. That heart of ice isn’t really the magic crystal McGuffin buried down deep in the catacombs, it’s the cold ruthlessness needed by the winner.

In the original 1976 scenario that gem of ultimate power was the Heart of Durritlamish, the Black Angel, Opener of Catacombs. In the gamebook it became the Heart of Volent, a cult god of the 22nd century. And in the 1990s radio play “The Heart of Hark’un” it transmogrified into this:

“The god Hark'un once ruled the heavens, but the young gods were jealous of his power and plotted to overthrow him. Defeated in a celestial war, Hark'un fell from the heavens, down through the black sky, until he struck the barren lifeless lands. But as he died, Hark'un’s blood brought the world to life. His spine formed the mountains of the world. His veins became the roots of living things. The body of Hark'un became the world of Harkuna. Every part of the slain god became the seed for new life – except for the heart of Hark'un. That remained whole. Untouched by decay, it still beats on. To touch the heart of the god Hark'un would be to destroy the world. But also to take on the power of a god.”

The play, by Jamie and his brother Peter Thomson, featured some characters based on (or at least named after) player-characters in our Tekumel campaign. Kadar was an older, more embittered version of Jamie’s character Qadarnai, while my own character Shazir became the villain – of course! Arcos I’m not sure about, but he may have been one of the PCs in Mark Smith’s Orb campaign.

The point of all this is to say that you can now listen to all six episodes of “The Heart of Harkun” (let’s leave the grocer's apostrophes out of it, eh?) over on the Spark Furnace website. And if you don’t have the patience for podcasts, the comic book version is still available: issue #1 and issue #2. Or there’s the Heart of Ice gamebook, of course. At some point I might even run the original Du’un scenario that started it all, if I can lay my hands on the underworld maps.

Listen up

AudioGo have just released two BBC audiobooks in the Dark Lord series. These aren't just written by Jamie, they're narrated by him too. Normally you'd have to be 9 years old and go to a posh school to get the chance of having Jamie come in and do all the voices for you (which are brilliantly funny btw - well worth the school fees) but now the books are available to hoi polloi to download for the cost of a double whopper, cheese and a Coke. Which is where Jamie is heading on the bus there. Ding ding.