That's neat

“At the time, ninjas were new and exciting and everyone loved them […] So basically ninjas meets Lord of the Rings was what we came up with and it turned into a hugely successful game book series.”
-- Mark Smith 

A part of our rapid-fire countdown to Christmas, here's a look at Gremlin Graphics' Way of the Tiger computer game from the 1980s.

Having played very briefly in Mark Smith's Orb campaign, I always thought it was a pity it got overshadowed by martial arts mania. There weren't any ninja in the original Orb setting, which was a masterclass in how to use Tolkien-like fantasy elements in a D&D game. Prancing around flinging shuriken and flash powder was far less interesting than all the richly original flourishes Mark had put into his world.

The gamebooks are still available, and there's occasional talk of publishing an Orb RPG. (Basic Roleplaying or Mythras would get my vote.) Fingers crossed -- and I'm not talking about the kuji-no-in.

Simulation vs abstraction in game design

This is an excerpt from Game Architecture & Design, an industry textbook I co-authored with Andrew Rollings. (I wrote the game design bits, Andrew dealt with code, tech and development practices.) The book was originally published in 1999 and a revised edition came out in 2004. In the intervening two decades, a lot has changed, but it's also interesting to see what hasn't...

If I throw a ball and take many high-speed photographs of its flight, I'll see that the trajectory the ball took is a parabola. But the ball didn't follow that path because gravity told it: "Move in a parabola." A parabola is just a symbolic concept in the analytical domain of mathematics, and the universe doesn't know anything about mathematics or analysis or symbols; these are human concepts. In reality, there are just a bunch of physical processes, each of which deals only with the processes and circumstances just before and just after it. So, the ball is at one position, and gravity tells the ball's velocity to change, and the ball's velocity tells its position to change. The balance between kinetic and potential energy over the time the ball is in the air gives you what we call a parabola.

This is the opposite approach to that taken in most software applications. There, processing power is at a premium, so the sooner you can go to symbolic modelling rather than step-by-step simulation, the better. The tradeoff is that software can crash when your symbolic "shortcut" misses something that the one-step-at-a-time approach would have taken in its stride.

Researchers in Artificial Life have identified an analogous problem:

"The classical AI approach has been criticized because the symbols and symbol structures on which planning and decision making are based are not grounded in the real world. The problem is that unequivocally decoding sensory data into a symbol and turning a command without error into its intended action may be unsolvable."

- Luc Steels, "The Artificial Life Roots of Artificial Intelligence" in Artificial Life (MIT Press, 1997)

One big advantage of the way that reality does things is that the universe, being non-symbolic, cannot crash. As an example of the principle at work in a game, suppose I am putting a monster into my new Frankenstein adventure and the idea is that it will jump out of its vat when the player enters the laboratory. Instead of putting in a lot of complicated AI to do with detecting humans and having the goal of wanting to kill them, I just choose the short cut of placing a trigger tile inside the laboratory door. When the player steps on the trigger, the monster will appear and attack.

Okay so far, but what if the player manages to get onto the tower roof, jumps down, and, by some fluke, manages to land safely on the balcony of the laboratory? Now they can explore the lab, get all the power-ups, and read the journal about the monster (an entry that is supposed to be poignant if they've just fought and killed it, but that is meaningless otherwise). Only when the player goes to leave via the door does the monster climb out of its vat and growl, "You shall not steal my master's secrets!"

In the past, the nonsymbolic, step-by-step approach was not practical. The the processing capability wasn't available to deal with that and graphics too. But now much of the graphics work is done by the video card, and computers are doubling in power every eighteen months or so. At last, it is starting to be possible to create "uncrashable" games by avoiding the need to design using symbolic shortcuts.

Comparing Nonsymbolic And Symbolic Design

In the original Warcraft, peasants collected gold by entering a gold mine and bringing sacks back to your town hall. At the start of the game it was always worth spawning peasants because, the more peasants you had, the greater your revenue stream. However, there came a point when the peasants started to get in each other's way. Adding more peasants would then lead to “traffic jams” as the peasants encountered each other on the streets of the town and would have to back up to let others get past. The situation was alleviated by leaving wide streets. Additionally, it was not a good idea to place your town hall too close to the gold mine – giving a little more space also helped avoid traffic congestion.

Now, an economist could derive an equation to describe the flow of gold to the town hall. The factors would be the number of peasants, the placement density of the town buildings, and the distance from the town hall to the mine. We can imagine that it would be a pretty complex equation. The point is that the designers of Warcraft never needed any such equation.* They simply programmed in the basic rules and behaviours and the economic simulation emerged directly from those.

Contrast this with a game like Caesar II, which used underlying equations to create a simulation of an ancient Roman city. This approach is less satisfying because the player is not directly viewing the reasons for success and failure. Instead, when playing a game like Caesar II (or any simulation of its type) you are trying to build an abstract match to the game’s underlying equations in your head. The simulated economy and the gameplay are less visible, lessening the sense of immersion.

And you know what? The same goes for stories. If you construct them from symbolic forms (arcs, paradigms, act breaks) you'll end up with less robust and varied stories than if you allow each micro-event to trigger the next and see where it goes. Which is why in roleplaying terms I'm a simulationist rather than a narrativist. Hey, if it's good enough for reality then it's good enough for me.

* This gives me an excuse to digress onto the topic of AI. Foundation models (or indeed any deep neural net) are sometimes referred to as algorithms. I find that term misleading. In principle you could express all the weights of a billion-node net in the form of "an algorithm" but that's not really an accurate way of talking about what the AI is doing in, say, ChatGPT, which is akin to (though much more complex than) the peasants collecting gold in Warcraft. That too is governed by multiple algorithms (for route-finding, collision detection, etc) but it would be more accurate to talk of it as a model. An algorithm could be derived to express the rate of gold production in terms of all those variables, but the Warcraft system doesn't have that algorithm built in, and nor do AI systems. There is an example here, where the article refers to "a separate algorithm" where they really mean " a separate model".

Principle of Least Action image by Maschen CC0, 

Wide open worlds

Over the next ten years, artificial intelligence looks set to radically transform almost every field you can think of. Astrophysics. Materials science. Medicine and health. Education. Communications. Particle physics. Energy production, storage and transmission. Space exploration. And, um, war.

Entertainment is low on the list of priorities, but of course I'm interested in the possibilities for games, and I'm delighted to see that Sir Demis Hassabis (my former employer at Elixir Studios) is still excited by that stuff too -- and that he's talking about open world games.

The most revolutionary thing about open world games is not the ability to go in any direction or to make persistent changes to the world. As in real life, what we most care about interacting with aren't things but people. Stories are compelling, at their heart, because of character, not because of plot. 

AI opens up a host of new opportunities there. When I'm running a roleplaying game, I conjure up NPCs as needed. Some NPCs turn out to be more than walk-on parts. They can become as important to the story as the player-characters, which means I need to remember their background and goals. I need to keep them as personae that I can slip on at any time. AI can do that. You leave a magic sword at a farm, say. The farmer's lad you regaled with tales of adventure finds the sword. Much later, you might run across him -- now a renowned adventurer in his own right, jealousy guarding that sword that he really hopes you won't ask him to give back.

But the AI can do more than keep track of NPCs and their relationship to you. It can function as the game referee, judging when you need clues to steer you on the right track or when a lull in the action calls for a random encounter. This is what Jamie and I called the "god AI" when we compiled our design wishlist for the Fabled Lands MMO we hoped to develop at Eidos in the late 1990s. It only took thirty years, but now it's finally within our grasp.

Dalek City

So here's a blast from the distant past, one of the game design concepts I was spitballing with and/or pitching back in the mid-'90s at Eidos Interactive: Dalek City. It would of course have been a spinoff from the BBC's series Doctor Who. That show was pretty much dead and buried back then, so getting the rights wasn't a complete impossibility. And I was pretty sure Terry Nation, who created the Daleks and had joint control of the rights with the BBC, would be keen to hear any ideas for exploiting them.

"It's set on Skaro, the Dalek planet," I began. "The Daleks have been mutated by nuclear war and can only move about in mechanized travel machines. At the start of the game they pick up power by induction, so they can't leave the city."

"Yep, got it." said the Eidos executive I was explaining this to, who may or may not have been a famous gamebook pioneer. "So you have to get upgrades to let them travel outside the city."

"Well, it's certainly possible for the Daleks to get those upgrades. But you don't play the Daleks in this game."

"What, then?" 

"There are all kinds of threats to the Daleks. Various mutants live in the jungle around the city. Natural disasters like meteor showers can occur. There's another race, the Thals, who are their ancient enemies."

"You play the Thals, then?"

"Not really. You don't play anybody. You can step in and help the Thals if you want. Or you could spawn lots of mutant monsters to overrun the Dalek city."

This at least sounded like familiar territory. "That must cost you resources."

"No, your resources are unrestricted, up to whatever the game engine can handle. You could just send in so many monsters, raiders, and natural disasters that the Daleks would be wiped out right at the start. The point is, say you do that a few times. Then you try something different: sending in just one monster to begin with. The Daleks kill it and take it to their labs. They start researching it. Pretty soon they don't have any trouble dealing with that kind of monster—and what they've learned will help them in other ways, too."

"I see; it's one of these Artificial Life things," he said. (It was more of a growl, really.)

"Well... kind of. The Daleks are prime candidates for A-Life because their psychology is so simple. They're paranoid, inquisitive, power-hungry and they hate everything. And their society is like a type of insect hive. The aim of the game, you see, is whatever you want it to be. You can just observe the Daleks going about their duties, like your own little formicarium. Or you can trash their city and watch the little buggers get stomped. Or you can test them with various threats and see how they learn and develop. It's the cruel-to-be-kind method. Eventually you might find you've nurtured them to the point where they can take anything you throw at them. Played that way, the ultimate aim of the game is to make the Daleks into an opponent you can't beat."

For a long while he said nothing. I almost thought he might be considering it. Then he shook his head. "Players don't like games without a clearly defined objective."

New kinds of interactivity promise a world of possibilities that we have hardly begun to explore. To fully realize those possibilities, though, we have to be prepared to let go some of the control that we have come to expect, both as designers and as players. A quarter of a century on from that meeting, I'd like to think game publishers would be more willing to entertain left-field ideas, though I'm not sure how often that's true!

Plunge right in

At last, the moment we've been waiting for: the full release of the Fabled Lands CRPG on Windows and MacOS. After years of amazing work by Prime Games, this beautiful and immersive game is available for players to plunge into. The launch content includes the whole of the northern continent (FL books 1, 2, 4 and 5) with the Violet Ocean and Akatsurai to follow as downloadable add-ons.

This is the ultimate incarnation of Fabled Lands that Jamie and I dreamed of twenty years ago, when we pitched the FL computer game concept to Eidos as "characters exploring and adventuring across a gloriously coloured map of the world". It's been a long road, but Prime Games have brought that vision to life more vividly than we could ever have hoped.

How do you follow something as fantastic as this? Well, Prime Games still have a way to go with Fabled Lands -- including, perhaps, the southern continent. But as soon as I saw those tactical maps and started hurling some spells around, my first thought was how brilliant it would be to give Blood Sword the same treatment. Who knows?

Sittin' on a board eyein' the weather

Richard Hetley, who is a long-established and valued member of the Fabled Lands ground crew, has news of a game he's been working on that I'm sure will be of interest to FL players. I'll hand over to Richard for the details:

"In To Carry a Sword you are the the guard of a medieval caravan on a journey where the social connections you make are just as important as the money. You can help the people who hire you in ways far beyond swinging a sword and scaring bandits for them, including tending to their animals and telling stories to their kids. Strategically plan your route across a procedurally-generated world, taking advantage of the text events you encounter to pursue your own goal, whether that is to become skilled and famous enough to join the escort of Her Majesty the Queen, or to see a religious pilgrimage to its destination. In the end, it's about the people who need you.

• FTL meets The Oregon Trail in medieval Europe. 
• Rely on your social skills as much as your battle prowess to see caravans safely to their destination. 
• Serve the needs of the land's factions, aiding the Noble, Criminal, Religious, and Heathen. 
• Select routes and explore the procedurally-generated map, seeking the clues to advance each questline. 
• Relax in a self-paced narrative experience of over 85,000 words. 
• Mod the narrative and add your own text events (release version only). 
• Join us in the final stages of development as our team brings the game to life!

"This is a student project now being made into a full videogame experience. We are playtesting a browser-only version of the game as we finish development. You can play it here. During development, that page will also link you to a feedback survey and a Twitch page where we stream about development. For longer feedback or to follow along with the fun, please feel free to join us on Discord.

"To Carry A Sword is developed by We Three Nouns, a group of graduate students in Game Design & Development at Rochester Institute of Technology. I've edited gamebooks for years before coming to RIT, and I edited The Serpent King's Domain (book 7 in the series) for Fabled Lands LLP. Paul Gresty, the writer of that book, graciously agreed to edit To Carry a Sword. And yes, I've kept everyone's book 7 feedback in mind while writing the game!"

Analyze this

Maybe you’re still in the halcyon days of roleplaying. I mean the Goldilocks time when you’re safely past the juggernaut of finals and have yet to be distracted by career or kids. The days of dossing around, some might call it. You get to see your friends all the time and together you can slip into the parallel life of your roleplaying world whenever it suits you. Nothing beats it for immersion. Arguably it’s the only true way to roleplay.

For me it was back in the ‘80s. We’d have at least one evening’s gaming a week with the whole group, and usually two or three side sessions featuring one or two players who could then flesh out their characters’ extracurricular activities. And after the big Thursday night game, often we’d sit into the small hours (or even dawn) talking about the world of Tekumel, or chatting in or out of character. It was at one such post-mortem gathering, after our characters had disrupted the summoning of the tempest demon Kirikyagga, that the wind started to pick up and somebody mentioned that Kirikyagga was annoyed. That was October 1987.

But I digress. The reason I mention all this is that there was an interesting difference of approach in those post-game chats. Some players (eg Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith) liked to talk about their characters’ goals and personality and what we’d nowadays call story arc. “As Jadhak I used to be very cruel,” Jamie might say. “But since that Llyani curse caused me to lose my sense of fear I'm much mellower. I was cruel out of fear, you see, as a defence mechanism, and now my need for that has gone.”

This was a foreign language to players like me and Paul Mason. We threw ourselves into the role while playing, but I didn’t ever think about my character in an authorial way. On reflection, that might just be because I don’t think about myself in an authorial way. I would never map out how my character was going to develop, or even have any interest in analysing his behaviour. “You must have planned it that Drichansa is always kind to children,” Jamie might protest.

Drichansa was my character. All I'd started with was a mannerism: tugging at my earlobe when really trying to get to grips with a problem. Everything else about Drichansa I discovered as I played him. Jamie found the kindness to children surprising because Drichansa was otherwise notably lacking in tenderness.

“Kind to kids? I suppose I am,” I said. “I never thought about it.”

“You told Jadhak you were adopted. Could that be why?”

“Maybe. Want another whisky?”

You might think it’s odd that an author wouldn’t go in for that kind of character analysis, but I don’t tend to do it with the characters I write about either. Sitting at a keyboard making stuff up can get boring if the characters don’t surprise you from time to time.

This could explain why I’m not much interested in narrative mechanics for roleplaying. I don’t want to control my character like an author; I want to be them. I recently saw the latter method derided as the Actor Approach, and the person went on to say, “That’s not even how real actors do it.” Quite right. An actor has a script (most of the time) and even if they’re in a Mike Leigh or Christopher Guest movie they’ll have sat through extensive character workshops and discussions of the storyline first. But the attraction of roleplaying for me is to be neither author nor actor. It’s more like life: fielding stuff as it comes at you, and finding the story (or rather, stories) that emerge from all that noise only when you look back at it – and even then only if looking for story patterns is your thing.

But that style of playing is not so easy once you’re out of the sweet spot between college and adult life. We get fewer opportunities for gaming (my sessions are down to once a fortnight) and less time (no more playing till after midnight). No wonder that today’s games look for ways to jump-start inter-PC relationships and squeeze your fantasy life into the familiar shapes and tropes that stories take in creative writing courses.

And it occurs to me that’s what dungeons were, back in the dim mists of roleplaying history: a story shape, admittedly crude and built out of rooms and ten-foot corridors, that led you to a Big Bad at the end and allowed for campfire moments back at the town in between expeditions. A three-act structure in architectural form.

Modern games do a lot better – although arguably a physical environment is just as effective a way to shape a story as using plot points and scene breaks. Still, I gave up dungeons pretty early in my roleplaying career and I enjoy the emergent unpredictability of just-dive-in roleplaying stories too much to want to wrangle them with plot paradigms. Also, one of my day jobs is sitting with other writers planning characters’ story arcs. I enjoy that exercise of craft very much, the problem-solving and the personality construction, but I can’t see an evening spent doing pretty much the same thing as relaxation.

An example: not long ago I came very close to running a campaign from a published book complete with pre-planned adventure. The book begins by saying that each player should pick one of the other PCs as their closest friend, and another who they most trust, and so on. For me that should all happen in-game. I don’t want written backstories, I want players to forge those relationships out of their experiences as they play. Then they’ll really feel it. If somebody at my table says, “Out of game for a moment, I think my character would…” then I feel like I’ve failed. They should be leaving their everyday life behind. If they’re stopping to view the characters from outside then they’re distanced from the fantasy, and that means the game isn’t working.

By the way, this applies to writing too. If you start a novel or script with two characters already in love, that won’t have anything like the impact of having them fall in love in the course of the story. Games likewise. A year or two back I consulted on the design of a computer game that began with a long cutscene explaining how the player had a pet dog called Jack who was your best pal, and together you got stranded on a desert island. I threw out the cutscene. “Have the player get shipwrecked and then find Jack trapped under an overturned lifeboat," was my advice. "You get to free him -- that's the first time you've met him, and so the bonding between you happens in-game rather than before the game starts." That way the player will actually care, because they experienced it rather than just being told about it. (Game storytelling 101, that, but you'd be surprised how many developers don't know it.)

Some people enjoy being the author of their character’s life, and/or bringing a five-page backstory to the first session, or calling time out to explain (often in third person) how their character arc dovetails with something that's happening in the game. They are more comfortable with the distance that brings. Well, fine -- you should play the game whatever way lets you get most out of it. But given all the RPGs these days that are designed to conform characters to types and tailor events to an archetypal narrative, maybe you should try it at least one time without preconception, script, or safety net. Just put on the persona and be that character. The worst that can happen is you'll lose yourself in the game.

You won't want to miss...

We've been seeing some glimpses of Prime Games' forthcoming Fabled Lands CRPG, and shared some of Guy Sclanders' wonderful FL playthroughs, so you won't want to miss Guy taking the alpha of the CRPG for a spin. Thanks to Victor Atanasov and the team for a truly marvellous-looking game.

Part two here:

I see in the chat window that Guy was reminded of the music accompanying Igrayne's dance in John Boorman's Excalibur. Judge for yourself below. (And, Guy, you're dead right; it is the best Arthurian movie ever.) 

Dragons ahoy!

Here's a moment that every adventurer in the Fabled Lands has experienced: the confrontation with Vayss the Sea Dragon. (Yes, I know he's a sea dragon and he lives in a lake -- but I'm not going to argue with him.)

This gorgeous piece of artwork is by Renie Aganchyan, whose brother Bernar Aganchyan is the game's art director. That's one talented family!

It's just a taste of the goodies Prime Games have in store when their Fabled Lands CRPG erupts from the depths early next year. Players will be able to explore the lands of Sokara, Golnir, the Great Steppes and hopefully Uttaku too. And that's just for starters. Further releases will add other lands, and Jamie and I are looking at writing all-new books in the series if the CRPG kindles fresh interest. The year ahead could be a great time to explore uncharted waters.

The fire-god's forge

If you listened to Jamie's interview on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, you might have been intrigued by the glancing reference to a project called Vulcanverse. I'll let Jamie explain it:

"The world itself is based on the premise that the god Vulcan is tired of mankind embracing virtual worlds and pushing the gods out of their lives, so instead of fading into the sunset, he embraces it by creating these four quadrants of land. The books will be a prequel to the virtual game, documenting the journey from technology and atheism taking over to the point when the old gods must choose either to fade into memory or to take things into their own hands."

In strictly game-terms it's a Second Life type virtual world in which players can own land and construct and trade their own assets. As this article explains, there are in-world creatures called vulcanites, virtual pets that I'm hoping could mean that something like my Mean Genes idea could finally get developed. (In a nutshell: players can breed and train a stable of nonhuman gladiators who then compete online, and others can watch the gladiatorial battles as a virtual sport whether or not they actually compete themselves.) I thought that one up at Eidos over twenty years ago but couldn't get anyone then to understand it. Now that e-sports are big business and Minecraft has shown the value of user-created content in virtual "playground worlds", maybe these guys will make it happen. Ian Livingstone, who was chairman of Eidos back then, is also involved in Vulcanverse so I'm keeping my fingers (and claws, and mandibles, and tentacles) crossed that we'll see a lot of gaming there.

Of course, in a freely configurable virtual world I could put Mean Genes together myself. That's the beauty of these virtual environments. They are (as I tried explaining to the Eidos execs in the original Mean Genes overview doc back in 1997) the equivalent of a playing field and a ball -- and lots of other things besides -- and you can use them to create games or theatre or tourist spots or sports or political rallies or discussion groups or whatever you like, just the way you can in the real world. I don't know what Vulcan would think of that, but Prometheus would surely approve.

CORRECTION (15/09/20): Ian Livingstone is not a partner in the Vulcanverse venture, at least not at the time of writing. I know it says so in the press release I linked to above, but it also says I'm a partner and in fact I only heard about it last week! So, well worth investing in (I hear they raised over a quarter of a million dollars from sales of plots on the first day) just don't expect a Fighting Fantasy connection.

Gathering steam

The Fabled Lands CRPG that is currently in development at Prime Games is now on Steam. It's not going to be ready for a few months yet, but you can sign up so as not to miss any updates.

If these screenshots don't excite you, what can I say? You don't deserve to be an initiate of Nagil, or to have dinner with the worshippers of B-----r the Unspoken! Jamie and I have been playing it and it's everything we could have wished for in a Fabled Lands CRPG.

If the FL game sells well, hopefully Prime Games will follow up with a Blood Sword CRPG. But that could be a year or more off, so in the meantime take a look at Adam Samson's playthrough on YouTube:

An epic quest begins!

If you're on Facebook or Gamebook News you'll have already seen the big announcement that Prime Games are working on a Fabled Lands CRPG. Unlike previous digital versions of FL, this isn't just an enhanced book, it's a proper computer game. This is what Jamie and I have been hoping to do with our world for -- oh, only the past two decades or so.

Prime Games' founder Victor Atanasov gives more details on the company's blog, so scoot over there for answers to all the questions that I'm sure you're eager to ask. Just to recap the bullet points here, the game will include:

• An interactive world map that will become the heart and soul of the game with locations from the books.
• Branching text visualized in a modern, user-friendly fashion. 
• Turn-based tactical combat system adapted for PC gamers, retaining and expanding upon the balance achieved within the books. 
• Reworked classes and character progression skill trees.
• Resource management systems (inventory, blessings, hideouts, resurrection deals, skills, abilities, cargo, etc).
• Save/load for normal mode and, of course, the lack of such for Iron Man mode.
• Visual effects and animations.

Jamie and I absolutely love the art style for the game. And if you scroll down to the end of Victor's blog post you'll catch a glimpse of the interactive map of the Isle of the Druids on the screen in front of us. Whetted your appetite yet?

The other side of reality

I finally got around to watching Stranger Things. After all the hype it came as a disappointment. I get that it's a pastiche of '80s movies, but I like my pastiches to be more than just familiar ingredients slung together and reheated. Nostalgia doesn't rule out putting something fresh in the mix. Think of Super 8, or even Fargo (season 1, obviously). Without the spark of originality, you might just as well be listening to greatest hits covered by a tribute band.

But I digress. I don't want to talk about 1980s, Stephen King, or pastiches in general. It's just that the Upside-Down in Stranger Things jogged my memory about a game concept I sketched out at Eidos in the mid-'90s. We needed a quick-n-dirty game (famous last words that have brought many a developer low, those) to show off Sam Kerbeck's cutting-edge 3D engine. It needed to be a realtime strategy game because that's what our game Plague, later renamed Warrior Kings, was. Sam happened to flip the landscape upside-down while showing off what it could do, and something in my brain put that together with the Aztec land of death.

We never got around to doing the game, as Eidos shut down internal development a few months later and Sam went off to do other things. His engine got used for another RTS game, Warzone 2100, but never in the freaky way I had in mind.

AZTECS

A variant on Plague set in pre-conquest Mexico, using the same engine and basic game design principles. It's anticipated that Plague will make quite a splash, and Aztecs will satisfy demand for follow-ups in the long wait for Plague 2.

Aztecs will however not be simply a copy of the original game swapped into a different setting. The Mesoamerican world is uniquely colourful. The architecture, costumes and imaginative mythology have rarely been used in computer games and merit a product that stands alone.

City management will be less intricate than Plague. This will be a game of warfare and keeping the gods happy.

All flesh is grass
Villages supply food. Food is not an explicit resource in the game as with Plague but is simply shared out to any units within range of your buildings. Rather than bothering with quantitative measures, you can tell how well the farms are doing by the landscape textures used: rich green if there's plenty of food, dusty scrubland if times are hard. Lack of food leads to loss of hit points; an excess is required for units to recover from injury.

As long as your people are healthy and well fed, new Aztec children continually appear in the School. You can pick these up and drop them onto other buildings, which will determine their fate in life. For example, a child dropped onto a Temple becomes a Priest, one dropped onto the War Lodge becomes a Soldier, etc.

Do it this way
Units are given orders through a (graphic) verb/adverb icon system. This means you can tell a unit to Attack (the verb) and just leave it at that, or you can go to the next level of icons to specify how the attack should be carried out: Aggressive, Balanced or Defensive (the adverbs). As with Plague, what you don't specify is left up to the individual unit's AI.

An eye in the sky
Your view is provided by a flying camera giving an eagle's-eye view of the world. You can fly the camera anywhere, but how much you get to see depends on whether you have any units nearby. Within range of a friendly unit, the camera can see enemy units and the condition of enemy farms and buildings. Outside this range the view enters the Fog of War; it becomes sepia-tinted, buildings appear stylized without hit point info, and enemy units freeze and gradually fade as if from a persistence of vision effect.

Trading in secrets
Merchants were notorious in the Aztec world for spying. This is reflected by allowing all players to have a clear view, free of the Fog of War, when within range of any player's Merchants. Thus the Merchant who increases your wealth by trading with another city will also allow you a clear view of that city's defences during his visit there but this advantage is a two-edged sword.

Discriminating views
View of enemy units is subjective. This reflects Aztec warfare, where experienced soldiers were needed to recognize details of enemy deployment. In the game, you can only distinguish the enemy's elite units (Eagle Lords, Jaguar Lords, Arrow Knights and Hummingbird Priests) if you have elite units of your own near at hand. Otherwise all the enemy's troops appear as generic soldiers and you won't know where the danger lies.

The flipside of reality
Slain units become Skeleton Warriors in the Underworld: a subterranean mirror-image of the living world, where mountains ridges become narrow defiles and vice versa. You view the Underworld by flipping the world around to see the underside. The Underworld is another front where you must fight wars, because the concentration of your Skeleton Warrior forces in the Underworld affects the power of your Wizards' magic in the world above. You have only very limited control of your Skeleton Warriors: you can order them to move, but once they get where they're going they'll just attack any other tribe's Skeleton Warriors that are nearby - even if the other tribe are your allies.

Open heart surgery
Morale is improved by human sacrifice, making it worth capturing foes and taking them back to your Temples. This also prevents the slain foes from becoming Skeleton Warriors in the Underworld, as well as earning you the favour of the gods. You can see this as a strengthening of the glowing aura around the shrine on top of the Temple, which is what your Priests draw on to cast their prayer-magic.

Visitors from heaven
Sometimes, when a Temple's aura is very strong, a Hero will emerge from inside it. These Heroes are beings sent by the god to aid you. They have special strengths in battle, magic, etc, depending on the god. (There are gods of Rain, War, Sun, Learning and Luck.) However, the main advantage of a Hero is that they can dreamwalk. This is essentially a way of setting up a long string of orders for the Hero to follow: a dream-self (Nahual) is created which you can run rapidly around the map, giving it a sequence of orders which it will remember. When the dreamwalk ends and the dream-self merges with the Hero's physical body, he carries out the orders you gave during the dreamwalk. This allows you to set up complex tactical patterns of attack and defence and hold them in readiness, waiting to awaken your Heroes at the moment of greatest need.

The nitty-gritty
There will be considerably fewer buildings and unit types than in Plague. The basic buildings featured in the game are:

• Palace School (spawns new units)
• Ball Court (increases public contentment)
• Skull Rack (each unit sacrificed adds a skull, boosting morale)
• Market Plaza (stimulates trade)
• Gladiator Platform (combatant is upgraded to veteran or killed)
• Wizards' Tower
• Priestly College
• War Lodge
• Temple (five types)
• Canal
• Well
• Road
• Causeway

Buildings concerned with resource production &/or processing:

• Farm (can be set to produce food or cash crop)
• Fishing village (produces canoes that can be seconded in wartime)
• Weaponsmith (upgrades swords, invents spearthrower)
• Cotton Mill (supplies cotton for armour)
• Quarry (supplies obsidian for swords and stone for buildings)
• Mine (supplies gold)
• Banner Maker (improves the commands you can issue to units)
• Aviary (supplies Banner Maker)

Resources that the player is told about in detail:

• Gold
• Stone
• Mana (decreases over time, but never below increasing limit based on total sacrifices)

Hidden resources that you have only qualitative control over:

• Food
• Cotton
• Obsidian

Basic unit types:

• Commoners
• Merchants
• Nobles
• Priests
• Wizards
• Scouts
• Swordsmen 
• Javelineers

And veteran units:

• Eagle Lords
• Jaguar Lords
• Arrow Knights
• Hummingbird Priests

Not all of those ideas would have made it into the finished game, of course. This is just a brainstorming pitch document to get the design process started. That's my favourite part of any project, incidentally, though I'm also willing enough to roll my sleeves up and keep toiling away to the finish line.

Dave's and Jamie's Christmas party

Every year at this time, Jamie and I get together for a marathon gaming session at his computer, which is nicknamed "the Beast" either because it's the real McCoy or because it's heavy enough to use in a smash-&-grab raid on a cash machine. This is our opportunity to catch up on some computer games we've missed, so we download a bunch and work our way through until we find one worth sticking with. It has to be said that usually the best games are the indies: Inside, Papers Please, This War of Mine, Pathologic -- though we have been known to binge on hours and hours of The Witcher too.

This year our serendipitous find was What Remains of Edith Finch. We thought we were getting a horror game, but it's much more intriguing than that. There are elements of horror, but also black comedy, tragedy, innocence, loss, grief, identity, madness, pastiche, and the awareness of the precious fragility of life. It's superbly written and voice-acted and you can play the whole thing in a few hours. We really enjoyed it.

Also on the theme of madness was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. We gave that an hour and then lost interest. Unaccountably it was about a 1st century BC Celt wandering around an 8th century AD Norse underworld -- called in the game not Niflhel, Hel or even Niflheim, but "Helheim", suggesting that historical research went no further than leafing through a heavy metal magazine. Still, you might like it if your paradigm of a game is a twenty-hour, one-note cutscene interspersed with occasional fights and arcade-style match-the-symbol tasks. Almost the opposite of Edith Finch in every respect, that.

And we finished off with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a monumental CRPG set in the Holy Roman Empire during the reign of Wenceslas IV (most definitely not the one in the carol). It's so thoroughly researched that you could use the source material text to run a tabletop campaign, and in fact the absence of magic/fantasy reminded me of a purist Legend campaign. The writing and acting are excellent, and if I had a spare one hundred hours I'd throw myself into it with gusto.

Other recommendations if you're looking for last-minute Christmas presents are Gregor's Vuga's gem of a roleplaying game Sagas of the Icelanders, David Nicholls' miniseries Patrick Melrose (the best thing on TV this year), and Posy Simmonds' long-awaited new graphic novel Cassandra Darke (surely soon to be "a major motion picture" with Gemma Arterton).

And if it didn't have a price tag in the stratosphere I'd have treated myself to the White Album, my old vinyl copy being scratched to acoustic fuzz by too much use over the years. If you've never listened to it, don't dip in track by track like some pill-popping Megacity juve perp with ADHD. Put on each side in turn and just sit back. People say it's not a concept album, but ninety minutes later you'll think differently. Good night, good night, everybody.

Almost too good to be true

If I told you there was a definitive history of computer roleplaying games available as a large format 528-page full colour book, you'd have your chequebook out and be asking me for the Kickstarter link, right?

Well, spring is here and with it a flowering of sweet beneficence. Because The CRPG Book Project, authored by divers hands under the editorial aegis of Felipe Pepe, is here right now and it's completely free. Don't believe me? I wouldn't blame you, so go take a look.

If you want a print copy you could probably fix one up for yourself on Lulu. Or just read the book on a tablet and let those colours glow the way they were always meant to.

Love and a sense of wonder

Unless you achieved full consciousness prior to 1977, it's hard to explain what science fiction was like back then. For one thing it was called SF not "sci-fi". And there was none of the Errol Flynn stuff we see today. Well, that's not quite true. There were throwbacks like E.C. Tubbs' Cap Kennedy series. Don Wollheim sent me a stack of those books back in the mid-70s when I'd made a slighting remark about space opera. Little did either of us know that the whole bloody field was about to be set back forty years by George Lucas.

SF was proper, you see. Interesting. Literate. Diverse. Unsettling. Brimming with wonder. I liked it because it stretched me more than the adventure stories I read as a kid. At its best it could boggle the mind and the imagination. The nearest we've got to that these days, outside of books, is Black Mirror.

That's why I like this Kickstarter, In Other Waters, a game by Gareth Martin in which a stranded xenobiologist explores an alien world. That sounds exactly like the kind of perfect science fictional setup that exists on the cusp between the awesome and terrifying infinitude of the cosmos and the all-conquering power of science and reason. Bleak and hopeful, if that makes sense.

The game is relationship-driven, which immediately ticks another box for me, and as well as the game itself backers can get a book detailing the strange lifeforms of this alien world.

I'm slightly wary of recommending In Other Waters because the Kickstarter campaigns I like tend to plummet like Icarus. But Cultist Simulator did okay, so maybe the jinx is broken. This one has a week to run, so if you grok grown-up SF you know where to find it.

And while we're talking crowdfunding, another project you might want to take a look at is Chernobyl, Mon Amour, "a roleplaying game of love and radioactivity set in the Zone of Alienation". I couldn't resist that and plonked my money down right away, so hopefully the Morris Effect won't scupper it. This one is by Finnish designer Juhana Pettersson, who was inspired by a Ukrainian urban myth about a criminal who fled into the Zone and became so radioactive that the authorities had to leave him there.

"You know that there is no return from the Zone. Your crimes are such that society will no longer accept you, and the only thing you have left is the possibility of a new life in the radioactive forest. As you settle into the Zone and meet its inhabitants, you start to yearn for something more. You want love."

Chernobyl, Mon Amour is on Indiegogo, but only for a couple more weeks.

The first glimmer of the Fabled Lands MMO

I was talking recently about the RTS game Plague that I worked on with Sam Kerbeck and Richard Fletcher at Domark (later Eidos). Around the same time, Jamie Thomson and I were trying to convince the Domark/Eidos management to start development on a multiplayer CRPG based on our Fabled Lands gamebooks.

This was around May/June of 1996. The Fabled Lands Otherworld Game, as we called it, was destined to mutate considerably over the next couple of years as the technology advanced by leaps and bounds. We changed to an all-new setting, the continent of Abraxas, which you can read about here. We massively expanded the scale of the game into a true MMO and we abandoned the top-down isometric view for true 3D. We began to use Propprian theory to develop the idea of a "referee AI".

It was all too ambitious for the Eidos senior management, who by then may have spotted that they didn't need to develop games to make money. Many internal teams were hived off into private companies like Black Cactus, the FL team was laid off, and the Fabled Lands MMO never happened. But, for no better reason than historical curiosity, here is the original pitch document that Jamie and I showed to Ian Livingstone in mid-1996.

Fabled Lands "Otherworld" Gaming

We say "role-playing" when we're talking about solo explore-and-level-up games, and "adventure gaming" when we really mean boring old crate-stacking and puzzles, which means that when it comes to real role-playing for the PC games market we don't have a term left. So let's call this "otherworlding": realtime multi-player role-playing, given a new lease of life by the medium of software to create a new kind of gaming experience.

The Fabled Lands Otherworld Game anticipates the gaming styles that will have become current two years from now, while not abandoning traditional gaming forms. I'll start by describing how the game would play in its solo form and then go on to cover future innovations.

The Solo Game

On the surface FL won’t look much different from a traditional CRPG. You choose a character from a gallery of races, classes and clothing styles and assign starting skills. (These are mix-&-match to allow multiple options, eg in favourite weapon.) Then you set out on your adventures, your adventuring persona represented by an animated sprite on isometric city streets and landscapes. Dotted around the world are many lost ruins, wizard's towers, haunted castles and other areas where you can gamble risk against reward. In the cities you can spend your treasure on new equipment and magic, resurrection deals, buy a townhouse or castle – or even ships to go trading and privateering across the sea.

Where it differs from ordinary CRPGs is in having a number of special partially-scripted adventures that a campaign "referee" (in the form of the game's AI) can bring in to liven things up whenever your character is having too easy a ride. These adventures are templates with slots to accommodate friends and enemies you've picked up in the course of your travels.

For example: you take a bounty hunter's job and go hunting bandits. You round up most of the horde but the leader, Black Nat Varley, escapes. Later, while implementing a random attempt on your life, the AI fills in the assassin's identity as being Black Nat. If Nat survives your second encounter, he'll eventually show up in another encounter and so on. (Adversaries who survive more than three encounters are classed as "dear foes" and have their own level increases tied to yours so as to always give you a good battle.)

And the referee AI will also take account of your character class, deity, etc, when introducing new missions and encounters. It can also randomly generate adventure locations as needed. This means that every campaign will be unique.

The Home Campaign

A bunch of friends arrange to get together and play a Fabled Lands Otherworld campaign on a regular basis. Say I'm the campaign manager; this means the campaign data is kept on my machine. Players come round once a week with their laptops, or maybe they dial in – or the campaign might be run on an office network a couple of evenings a week.

Within the game, players can get together for adventures or split up and go their separate ways. Some magical objects allow you to spy on the progress of other players, possibly with a view to ambushing them and grabbing their treasure. The magic level is high, permitting frequent teleportation and communication at a distance. Alliances and rivalries are equally possible. The game moves more swiftly than old style pnp RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. This allows players to move around the world quickly and have plenty of adventures every session. (The best way to explain this is as a combination of an RPG and an adventure boardgame like Eric Goldberg's Tales of the Arabian Nights.)

The Open Campaign

Almost a Multi-User Dungeon, except with the AI referee throwing in plenty of plotlines to keep the adventure fizzing. The way this would work is with a company picking up the licence to run a commercial Fabled Lands campaign. Such companies might have a couple of hundred participants in one game, all paying-to-play with a percentage coming back to Domark. (Distributed processing through the network would prevent the game from being frustratingly slow.)

The character-to-character interface will mean that when two adventurers meet they cannot immediately start typing messages to each other. To start with they have to go through a menu of greetings and responses, which will be decided by factors such as class, race and deity. For example, an elf meets a human. They're given possible messages and responses that, if followed appropriately, allow both players to reach a point where direct messages can be typed in. However, a human meeting a goblin would not be able to do this (the two races being mutually hostile) unless one or both was accompanied by a dwarf or other "neutral" race. This effectively provides a kind of "Turing Test" interface when first meeting a character whereby you cannot know if you're talking to another human player or a computer-controlled character.

What happens if you can't turn up (on-line or in person) for a game? This is the bane of the old-style roleplayers life, because his character misses out on treasure and experience awards. The way Fabled Lands solves this is to get every player to choose a Downtime Mode for his character when logging off. If you opt for "Sanctuary" then your character is retired from the game world until the next time you play. He gets no awards but cannot be attacked while you're off-line. "Training" means your character is in the arena or library. He gets some experience for any campaign time that passes when you're absent, but there is a chance of other players stealing from or assassinating him. "Adventuring" makes your character available for dungeon expeditions or other endeavours, making him an AI-run NPC for the duration, but although this means you can get your share of treasure and experience you also run the risk of logging on next time to discover your character has been killed in action.

Game mechanics

By basing the game on our Fabled Lands world – which we have developed over several years for radio plays, gamebooks and role-playing adventures – we make sure to avoid the cobbled-together warmed-over fantasy typical of the usual CRPG output. Fabled Lands is as detailed and unique a setting as you will find in any fantasy novel.

Begin by choosing your race (human, trau, merfolk, mannikyn people or whatever), country of origin (the four continents and many islands of the Fabled Lands world all have their own character), deity (there are over a dozen with a complex interplay of antagonisms and associations), and a name for your adventuring alter-ego.

Next the player sets his expertise in the five abilities: Combat, Magic, Charisma, Wayfaring, and Agility. Each of these governs your potential scores in the skills which are sub-groups of that ability. (For example, Wayfaring devolves to Sailing, Riding, Scouting, Survival and Streetwise.) By focussing in one field you can make yourself a master, but at the expense of your other abilities.

Higher ability scores bring in hero-level skills and spells that the player had no idea were possible, maintaining the excitement of discovery that is at the heart of the real role-playing experience.

The display is isometric and characters move in real time. A whole gallery of animated figures can be custom-coloured in the way that tabletop gamers like to paint their own figurines. In combat you can preset your fighting mode (ie, how much is put into attack and defence) or key in manoeuvres on the fly. More experienced adventurers can perform more effective fighting manoeuvres with just one keystroke, or unleash more devastating spells.

Expansion disks would introduce new quests, encounter areas, and characters while extending the map and including additional storylines for the referee AI to use.

Whereas CRPGs up till now have copied the sillier and more tedious aspects of early DnD (one dungeon level full of orcs, another full of lizard men, and so on...and on), Fabled Lands will emulate and expand on the things that made role-playing popular to start with. This means building up a character history: exploring exotic worlds, encountering friends and deadly foes, discovering magical artefacts and the excitement of researching ever more powerful spells. At the highest levels players can occupy their own castles, hire armies, wage wars or create their own "pocket universes" using the mightiest magic.

It will be a journey to a whole other world.