Walking the Sacred Way

Players who have completed the Vulcanverse usually tell me that they made dozens of pages of notes on all the quests. That's not surprising considering there are over 6100 sections in the whole series; I reckon that counts as a true epic. In a CRPG you'd have a quest log that automatically updated as you played. The equivalent in Vulcanverse are the companions and mentors who will nudge you in the right direction based on the titles, items and codewords you've acquired.

The snag is that you might be focused on one quest when the companion decides to give you a clue about another. So then it's back to the notebook. And not everyone likes taking copious notes (me, for one) so I got to thinking that a Guide to the Vulcanverse might be a handy adjunct to the series.

But how to do it? In an app I could easily hide spoilers. It's not that hard in a Kindle book either, where every clue could have its own page so you only see as much as you want. Here's one way it might work -- and be warned there are spoilers ahead.

Your brother's story

A tragic, multi-book quest concerns the death of your brother and your subsequent hunt for vengeance. The quest is tracked by three codewords: Ostrich, Quibble and Quad. The first of those triggers the quest, and the last means you have successfully completed it. This quest is only open to worshippers of Ares.

A death on the road

In the deserts of Notus (The Hammer of the Sun), you cross paths with a stranger whose face is obscured by a cloth. Later, after his death, unwinding the cloth from his face, you discover to your horror that he was your own brother. As his jaw gapes open, you realize he did not speak because someone had cut out his tongue.

The codeword Ostrich tracks your guilt at your brother's death and your vow to find the person who mutilated him. You are now a grieving sibling on a quest for justice. There are multiple circumstances that reflect your trauma and your thirst for vengeance:

• The Seer's Advice (The Hammer of the Sun): When you speak to the seer Antiphantes, he questions your responsibility for the death, but advises that before answering that, you must "find the one who cut out your brother’s tongue".
• The Furies (The Houses of the Dead): If you venture into the abyssal prisons of Tartarus where the Furies (the winged goddesses of retribution) nest and punish the wicked, the game checks if you possess Ostrich but do not yet have Quad. Since you are carrying the burden of guilt, this alters your encounter with them.
• Counseling the Dead (Workshop of the Gods): You can speak with the weary authority of someone who intimately knows grief and suffering. It grants you a bonus to your CHARM roll when trying to convince a despairing shade to cross over rather than fade into nothingness.
• Homecoming (Workshop of the Gods): The Ostrich codeword is checked when you return home (if you began your adventures in Book 5, in which case you'll have the codeword Reverie). Your sisters mournfully break the news that your brother was found dead by the roadside, mistakenly believing that "robbers stabbed him through the heart".

The hunt for the mutilator

In the realm of Boreas (The Pillars of the Sky) you encounter two men holding an amulet that belonged to your brother. When you threaten them, one of them breaks and confesses that he was given the amulet by a Halizon named Belus, a man with a purple tattoo of a crow's beak across his face. This news awards you the codeword Quibble. You have identified the man who mutilated your brother and you now have a specific target to hunt down in the Borean mountains. 

Having the codeword Quibble opens up specific avenues of investigation in the Halizon stronghold. For example, it allows you to make discreet enquiries about the crow-tattooed Halizon, leading a loquacious slave to inform you that the vicious Belus hangs out at the Inn of Prokoptas.

Vengeance is yours

When you finally confront Belus, he reveals a bitter truth: your brother was actually a highwayman who robbed travellers alongside him on the western road. Belus cut out his tongue so he wouldn't reveal the magic password to a hidden door where they stashed their loot. In a fight to the death, you cut Belus down and leave him choking on his own blood. Upon his death, you gain the codeword Quad. Your quest is complete and your brother's soul can rest easy.

The codeword Quad acts primarily as a resolution filter to turn off the ongoing vengeance-based encounters:

• Bypassing the Furies: As noted above, encounters like the Furies in The Houses of the Dead explicitly check if you have Ostrich and do not have Quad. Having Quad signifies your guilt has been expiated, meaning the Furies no longer pursue you.
• Family Reunion (Workshop of the Gods): As mentioned before, if you return to your childhood home in Vulcan City your sisters mournfully break the news to you that your brother was found murdered in Notus with his tongue cut out. If you possess the codeword Quad you can comfort your family with the knowledge that you have already tracked down Belus and exacted retribution.

You can see how a full guide to all the quests, NPCs, and items could easily fill a book. I should have written it at the same time as Jamie and I were working on the books. (Hindsight is a wonderful thing.) On the other hand, I now have NotebookLM, which makes sorting through all the references a lot easier and a lot more fun than it used to be with a simple Word search.

This is a good time to own up to a few errata from the Vulcanverse books namely:

The Houses of the Dead 182 should have the two initial codeword filters the other way round, ie:

• "If you have the codeword Negate ► 656 immediately. If not, read on. If you have the codeword Newhouse or Nimbus ► 343 immediately. If not, read on."

The Houses of the Dead 629 should begin as follows:

• If you have the codeword Nought or Nervous or Nefarious ► 587 immediately. If not, read on.

The Hammer of the Sun 474 should include this line, which should be deleted from section 6:

• Note the knotted rope on your list of possessions.

Thanks to the anonymous reader who spotted those. A much bigger howler is in Workshop of the Gods, where one of the endings couldn't be reached. Teófilo Hurtado, who has surely walked the Sacred Way many times, pointed out the problem. It requires a slight amendment to Workshop of the Gods 973, the options for which should read:

Make a STRENGTH roll at difficulty 16 to endure her punishing onslaught.

Success  ► 458 if you have the codeword Rhombus, and ► 1531 if not.

Failure  ► 385

Get a complete list of Vulcanverse errata here.

Confounding expectations

This is my favourite Vulcanverse gamebook cover and the book doesn’t even exist yet. This is just a mock-up made using a thumbnail sketch by our artist, Mattia Simone.

Why do I like it? Partly because anyone who thinks the Vulcanverse is just a retread of Greek myth (yeah, I’d be yawning too) is going to do a double take when they see this. It doesn’t look like a classical Greek city? No, it looks a million times more exciting than that. Marble colonnades and hypostyle halls evoke the slap of sandals on a sound stage, the unconvincing clash of prop swords wielded by bad actors. Whereas Mattia's cover looks like the set of an MCU blockbuster. That could be Ronan the Accuser in front of the core of the Supreme Intelligence. It’s an image that promises nonstop excitement.

And it’s absolutely right that the fifth book should upend expectations. The Vulcanverse isn’t the world of Greek myth. It’s a Matrix-style virtual universe created by the god Vulcan (well, Hephaistos) using his hyper-accelerated development of today’s information technology. Go behind the curtain and you won’t find oxen turning wheels and steam-powered colossi from the old legends – you will find something startling and amazing and all-new. Something that coruscates with Kirby krackle, that whips the rug out from under you, that takes your breath away and blows your mind for good measure. This is not some lame old 1980s stop-motion movie with a bleeping owl. It’s the American Gods or Anansi Boys of Greek myth, the reboot that brings it up to date at warp speed. And that’s why Mattia’s cover is so perfect. It says: this is not your father's Greek mythology.

While we’re talking about the Vulcanverse books, eagle-eyed gamer Teófilo Hurtardo has pointed out some sloppy syntax in the second one, The Hammer of the Sun. If you get yourself killed, your god arranges to resurrect you and the text says:

‘If you were wounded, untick that box on your Adventure Sheet, but add 1 to your total scars because none returns from the land of death without being marked.’

What I meant there was that everybody coming back to life gets a scar, regardless of whether or not you were wounded when you died. But Teófilo rightly pointed out that’s not what I said. It might just about pass in everyday conversation, but not in a book where the precise logical syntax matters.

So what it should say is:

‘Add 1 to your total scars and, if you were wounded, untick that box on your Adventure Sheet.’

I’ll correct it in future editions. And this is a good moment to thank John Jones, who generously cast his diligent eye over the Vulcanverse books and caught a number of critical errors in The Wild Woods, some of which spread back in time to book one, The Houses of the Dead. For example, there's the ubiquitous demon Wolfshadow, who was supposed to be killed (in book one) based on advice given to you in book three by King Lykaon -- except that advice and the associated codeword had been missed out. Eek. John suggested a good way to fit the advice into the long spiel that King Lykaon actually delivers in book three:

'Despite my title, there is one wolf I do not rule...' leading into telling you about Wolfshadow and, 'Hey, take one of these arrows of Artemis to King Midas's tomb in Hades to maybe get gold-plated so you can kill that nasty thing why don't you? Oh, and don't forget to fetch along an actual bow, either.'

Unfortunately I'd already done the page layout, so I couldn't make use of John's elegant suggestion and we have to make do with Lykaon just mentioning Wolfshadow in passing. But at least you get the codeword so the book isn't actually broken.

John also took us to task, and rightly so, over the random permadeath the player suffers if they stray into the Slimeswamp without any vinegar. The only possible way to find out that you need vinegar there is to lose a character and have to start all over again. Not a lot of fun if you've just spent hours questing around the other books. John proposes this fix, which we fully endorse. Paste it into your copy of book one if you wish:

I'm barely scratching the surface of all the help John has given us with these books. He's the true hero of the Vulcanverse, and you can bet that after the final book is out I'll resign the position of gamebook editor permanently -- and thankfully!

Buy the Vulcanverse books at Amazon.

Also at Blackwell's UK:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun
• The Wild Woods
• The Pillars of the Sky

And at Barnes & Noble in the US:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun
• The Wild Woods
• The Pillars of the Sky

Also of interest:

Circe by Madeline Miller

Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981)

Democracy by Abraham Kawa and Alecos Papadatos

Helen of Troy (Harrison, 2003)

Heroes and Mythos by Stephen Fry

Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves

Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963)

The Odyssey (Konchalovsky, 1997)

Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan

Vulcanverse erratum

 

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

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

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

The book with Sig's blessing

Eagle-eyed Fabled Lands aficionado John Jones has spotted an error in the regular-format edition of The Serpent King's Domain. Luckily it's not a catastrophic crash-type bug -- you can still play the book -- but irritating nonetheless. I can only apologize to those who snapped up copies as soon as they went on sale.

The mistake is in section 929 where the negative modifiers for the CHARISMA roll have been missed out. That table of modifiers should look like this:

That only applies to the regular (5" x 8") paperback, not to the large-format (8" x 10") edition with the colour map on the back. And of course, all copies of both editions sold from now on have the modifiers included.

If you already bought the book and were stymied by that section -- well, why don't we say you got to make the roll with no negative modifier? So there's an upside for you rogues and low-rankers. And if you ever encounter me or Jamie and present us with one of the uncorrected copies, we'll sign and certify it as a special "Sig's blessing edition". Deal?

Eight crimson arrows

John Jones recently pointed out that there's a pretty glaring omission in the reissued edition of Castle of Lost Souls. Most of the illustrations are not in the paperback, for reasons I can't remember now but it may simply have been that I couldn't get good scans of them at the time. Okay, fine, you can use your imagination. So no harm done? Ah, but one of those illustrations contained a vital clue. Here it is, along with the corresponding section:

192

You go only a short distance before arriving at a door. On the floor in front of you, eight crimson-fletched arrows have been placed in an intriguing pattern. You can pick up the arrows if you wish; remember to note them on your Adventure Sheet if so. There is no other way on from here, so you step forward and open the door. Turn to 153. 

And while I'm about it, I should also thank John for having helped out with some very useful advice on The Eye of the Dragon, another of those '80s gamebooks that recently resurfaced from the tidal flats of time. It's thanks to him that the Dagger of the Mind spell now does 3 points' damage instead of 2. Mind you, if you find yourself thinking of using it as a free strike in combat then you might have trouble completing the adventure. Just saying.

Department of errata: Blood Sword book three

It's said that no work of art is ever completed, only abandoned. That used to be quite a problem for gamebooks, because a typo in the middle of a novel doesn't cause the whole thing to crash, but a wrong number in a gamebook can stop you dead in your tracks.

In the old days we couldn't recall a print run. If you spotted an erratum after the book shipped, too bad. Now we use print on demand, and just as well too because an anonymous commenter pointed out a glitch in the new (2014) edition of Blood Sword book 3: The Demon's Claw. Instead of an option to turn to 666 (which of course doesn't exist) if there's no Sage in the party, section 559 of that book should read as follows:

559

You are spoiling for a fight as you leap out at the bully-boys, but they lose all stomach for their job when they have to face alert and well-armed foes. They throw down their cudgels and race off into the night. You spit through the doorway and curse them for their cowardice, but you cannot summon any enthusiasm for chasing them down the unlit alleys of Crescentium.
   There is a moan from one of the Badawin. Nursing bruises and aching joints, they slowly sit up. ‘Those robbers would have slain us and taken all our money,’ says the leader of the group. You notice him wince as he is speaking, and you wonder whether it is because of the beating he has just received or the alcohol you tricked him into drinking.
   ‘My wrist is broken,’ puts in another. ‘I am in some discomfort, and urge that we visit a physician at once.’
   ‘There is one thing we must do first,’ chides the Badawin leader. He turns to you. ‘We owe you our lives. Accept this small token of our gratitude.’ He gives you a pouch containing twenty-five gold pieces. (If there is a Warrior in the party, he or she is handed the pouch. Otherwise it goes to the first player in the battle order.)
   If the Sage is in the party, turn to 514. If not, turn to 191.

Sorry about that. Please write the corrected option into your copy. Anyone who still hadn't ordered the book (and hey, why not?) can rest assured that all copies from this point on have the error fixed.