Two styles of gamebook design

A few people have asked about the differences between my Vulcanverse books (The Hammer of the Sun and The Pillars of the Sky) and Jamie's (The Houses of the Dead and The Wild Woods). When we wrote the Fabled Lands series our styles were pretty similar, so you can't always spot where I (or in several cases Tim Harford) wrote parts of Jamie's books. 

Nearly thirty years on, we write very differently and I'd be surprised if somebody playing the Vulcanverse books couldn't tell which of us wrote what. It would be hard nowadays for Jamie and me to split a book down the middle, as we did with The Keep of the Lich Lord, and not have readers spot the join.

On a trivial level, I notice that Jamie will put things like, "if you have codeword X, read on," so you get to see in the same section various alternative outcomes that you shouldn't really know. Of course, that only matters if you cheat by reading on when you don't have the relevant codeword. Here's an example from The Wild Woods:

On the other hand, I plan the logic diagram as if it were to be handed to a coder, separating each step in the process into its own section. In an example like the one above, I'd split those filters (the codeword, the title, the tickbox) into separate sections, like so:

One advantage of that is it's a lot easier to bug-check the book. If the Vulcanverse gamebooks are ever turned into a CRPG, in mine those logic gates are already fully planned. Jamie's approach uses up fewer numbered sections, and means less page-flipping for the reader, but it can lead to some very long chunks of text.

Jamie uses a lot more codewords; I use a lot more tickboxes. That's because tickboxes are fine for any non-global change, and so I tried to limit the number of times the player would need to refer to the codeword list (codewords being necessary for something that changes the world in more than one location). Neither approach is wrong; it's just a stylistic choice. And some people have told me that the "elegant logic" argument doesn't persuade them in favour of tickboxes because they don't like writing in their books.

Another difference is that Jamie's Vulcanverse books are much more comedic (as you'd expect of the winner of the Roald Dahl Award) so he'll have gods and other mythological figures talking in modern slang. No less a talent than Joss Whedon did the same thing with the Greek gods in his (unproduced) Wonder Woman script, and it's the entirety of Taika Waititi's approach to his Thor movies. Which is not to say that my own Vulcanverse books are without humour, but it's more character-humour in my case, so a bit like Thor: Ragnarok compared to the first Thor movie. Take your pick, or better still enjoy both.

Also, I do a lot more with companions in the Vulcanverse books than Jamie does. Instead of companions, he tends to have more localized character-based stories -- the insolent butler, the orphan you have to return to his uncle, the sick child whose father is destroying the woods, and so on. The trade-off is between highly focused mini-narratives and the more general interactions you get with companions, of whom only Loutro (in The Hammer of the Sun; I picture him played by Toby Jones, incidentally) is guaranteed to get a full character arc.

And there are differences too in the way we construct our books; Jamie tends to have fewer and longer sections. Still, just as you get different styles between the writers on a TV show, hopefully the variety only goes to enhance the whole.

I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous

I knew if I waited long enough Brexit would give me something to laugh about, and this video is worth the price of -- admission isn't the right word, I guess. The opposite.

If you've been curious about my and Jamie's new gamebook Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? now is your chance to try it out as a free online PDF. (Oh, and incidentally if you need to backtrack you can use Alt + left arrow in a PDF just like the Back button in a browser. That's for PCs. There are options for other devices but you don't need me to tell you about those; you've got the internet after all.)

Share the PDF if you like. This book took us a year to write and, although I'm aware most gamebook readers would rather we'd done something with goblins, I think it's kind of important. Possibly the most worthwhile book we've written, in fact. With just six months to go before the UK and the EU part company, we now just want as many people as possible to get the chance to play it. And don't be put off by the sheer mind-crushing horror of Britain's current political fubar. Can You Brexit? may not be quite as laugh-out-loud as the Titanic video, but we've done our best to inject it with plenty of humour along with all the informative stuff.

And the print book is still on sale for another six months if digital gaming just doesn't do it for you:



And finally, as the newscasters used to say, there's this too. Oh, I can see Brexit is going to usher in a whole new era of deliciously bitter satire:

How to stop your RPG sessions turning into Thor: Ragnarok

I’m glad it’s not just me. In this episode of the Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice podcast, Messrs Cule and Bell-West talk about how irritating it is when players break out of character for jokes and facetious banter.

Most definitely I’m not against joking at the table. In-character humour is not only essential and lots of fun, it’s pretty much the Turing Test of roleplaying. If you can see things from inside your character enough to crack a joke like him or her, you’re doing it right.

That's like the first Thor movie. All the humour there was great because it came from character. Later the film-makers saw that they’d get more tweetage if all the characters spoke like Joss Whedon was writing their lines – which in many cases he was. What even Joss forgot was that flip, high-school comedy shtick made sense for Buffy and the Scooby gang because they were high-schoolers. Coming from Thor or Captain America it’s just dumb. If it were a roleplaying game not a movie, that would be their players just not bothering.

But what do you do? Michael Cule asks if you should bang on the table. But you have enough on your mind running the game without taking on the role of kindergarten teacher as well, and as Roger Bell-West points out, once the suspension of disbelief is broken it's a bit late to get it back. Maybe instead we need to look at why players might want to break character. It means either they’re bored or else they’re embarrassed by the make-believe and need an escape. Listen to the podcast, it’s all discussed there.

Maybe part of the problem is the trend in modern drama for every character to behave like a teenager with ADHD. And maybe that is caused by the tweetability of 21st century life. People talk all the way through movies, TV shows and roleplaying games now because they’re accustomed to providing the world with a streaming commentary of their entire lives. Sitting still and concentrating on one thing for a chunk of time measured in hours must seem like Swamp Thing waiting for a judgement from the Parliament of Trees. I’m a lot less connected than the average person (you should see my cellphone) which may be why I’m mostly happy to stay in character for the evening.

Incidentally I'm not discussing this because my own players are offenders. We do have a lot of humour in most sessions, but it's almost always in character and we don't, thank goodness, have one of the compulsive comedians Mr Cule describes in his groups. That said, I've noticed that when side discussions spring up between a couple of players, time was they'd be talking about something in the game (very often in character, too) whereas these days it will likely be something they're watching on TV or saw on Facebook. Attention spans are rotting away the world over, or so the anecdotal evidence goes.

Cnut couldn’t stop the tide. All you can do is make your games more engaging so that players don’t feel the need to step out of character and make jokes. Throw in more outrageous surprises, and be less forgiving if players were nattering and missed what just happened. Or you could have NPCs react to all those funny meme references as if the character really said them out loud. A little time with the Inquisition (or your world’s local equivalent) is a surefire cure for compulsive hilarity.

And if that doesn't work, switch to playing boardgames, where there's no suspension of disbelief to break. In which case, here's just the thing.

Laugh? My head fell off

I was talking last time about Paranoia, "the role-playing game of a darkly humorous future", currently returning in a new edition thanks to Kickstarter. I've never played Paranoia and it has about as much appeal for me as a game of soccer (a bit below root canal work, in other words) but it has got me thinking about how to set a role-playing campaign in a dehumanizing world "designed by Kafka, Stalin, Orwell, Huxley, Sartre and the Marx Brothers", to quote the KS page.

Actually, let's leave the Marx Brothers out of it. For me their movies go straight into Room 101. And also forget about Kafka and Sartre, who after all didn't write about the kind of purposefully malevolent state ruled over by a guy like Stalin, for whom death quotas and torture were part of the apparatus of effective government. The torture of existence in a Kafkaesque society comes from running up against people like this.

Okay, so we're talking about truly unrelenting totalitarian regimes. Is there humour to be found there? Any unchallenged political ideology will soon make paranoia the default mental state of the entire populace. To drive home its beliefs against the flow of common sense, the regime is willing and able to twist logic into unrecognizable Escher-shapes. Law becomes corrupt, identity disintegrates, truth is raped and ruined. Living in such a warped society can eventually push anyone to the kind of hysteric laughter where you want to claw your own face off. Satire may thrive, but this article suggests that it's fuelled by an uncomfortable sense of humour with a distinct smack of sweaty fear.

In North Korea, high-ranking officials would dive into the shrubbery when they saw Kim Jong-il coming. Better to risk a grass-stain than to run into the Supreme Leader in a bad mood.. It was a riot as long as he didn’t spot you. Under the bloody rule of the Khmer Rouge, men and women were beaten to death by screaming guards because they were spotted reading the labels on an orange crate, an act of subversion that showed them up to be dangerous intellectuals. See how easily that could become a gag on Mrs Brown's Boys? I don't even want to get on to the excesses of ISIS, wagging a finger in the air on YouTube as they mansplain why sawing people's heads off is a righteous act. The ghastly comedy there is that apparently one under-35 Briton in seven sympathizes with them. Hydra should be out in London recruiting right now.

And there’s an arsenical lacing of humour in novels like Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Nabokov’s Bend Sinister – even humour of a Milliganesque sort – but that taut grin curdles into a rictus of horror when the characters rebel and the regime exercises its penchant for casual, heart-stopping brutality. It’s Brazil without the comforting zaniness.

So, how to use all this in role-playing? For starters I wouldn't even attempt a sustained campaign, because the players would either have to side with the regime, which will pall pretty quickly, or they oppose it, in which case they will be crushed. (You could allow them to lead a successful revolution, but that would be fake. We all know people like Stalin live to see the good guys buried and then go off to die in their beds.) James Wallis's Alas Vegas provides a good template. There the campaign is planned to run over a set period and to reach a definite conclusion, the way a cable TV drama (say The Shield) aims to tell a given story rather than extend off into infinity like network serials of old (Columbo, etc). The end is going to be bloody, but there are all sorts of ways to die. It's up to the players to find whatever scrap of triumph they can in this scenario.

As for humour, I don't see it as my role to build that into the tone of the game. In fact playing for laughs is the surest way to make the whole experience deeply unfunny. (See reference to Mrs Brown's Boys above.) No, I'd be inclined to run it pared-down and very bleak, like having dinner with Pol Pot when he has a migraine coming on. I'm confident that my players would find humour in the gaps between tragedy and horror - and, arising out of character, that comedy would have the ring of truth. Which is really the whole point of role-playing.

Surely you jest?

I've been thinking a bit about what Fabled Lands should be like if we can ever get the remaining books funded.

Earlier caveats apply: thus and so. Bringing Fabled Lands back to life by crowdfunding alone would be a struggle. Two hundred backers, even if willing to pay $50 for a hardcover edtion of book 7, would mean maybe $3000 to spend on writing, copy-editing, illustrations, cover art and typography. And there are EU minumum wage regulations to take into account. Problems...

One way Jamie and I considered tackling that is by licensing Fabled Lands apps and/or computer games. Those could potentially find a bigger market than the books, and since new content would have to be created for the apps anyway, it would then become feasible to do more books.

Another possible solution would simply be to create new books that appeal to a larger market. That's the direct approach: to make more books, we have to sell more books. So far our print gamebooks have really sold only to a small, devoted circle of readers who probably bought these books originally when they were kids. The new edition FL books, for example, are now selling about thirty copies a month each. It's not bad, but it won't fund a series.

But here's a thought...

The big trend in gamebooks now is towards send-ups. Fluffy rabbits fighting zombies. HG2G clones. Hamlet in cheek. Those are the clear frontrunners. So, if Fabled Lands were to return, should we inject a shot of Jamie’s trademark Dirk Lloyd comedy? Make Ankon-Konu a satire of feckless colonials ransacking ancient cultures? Tell stories of punctured pomposity from the supposedly refined civilizations of Atticala? Of bureaucratic idiocy among the demons of the Underworld?

You can probably tell that. where humour is concerned, I take to parody like a duck to lava. “Take That You Fiend” makes me want to punch the game designer, not attack the troll. And even though Jamie won the 2012 Roald Dahl Prize, and can do enough funny for both of us, it remains to be seen whether his flair for laugh-out-loud comedy will translate to the kind of spoof fantasy that is currently playing well with gamers. Still, the choice seems to be between selling a couple of hundred copies of a serious gamebook or several thousand of a send-up one. And it could be worse; we might have to try erotica. Put like that, gimme a jester’s hat and I’ll bring my bladder. So to speak.

The Lloyd of Dirkness

A while back we told you about Dirk Lloyd, another of the many projects that Jamie and I dreamed up for the ever-growing stable of fantastic Fabled Lands properties. At least, as we sat in the back yard clutching our bottles of Becks a few years ago, we thought it was our idea. But now we realize that we were in the grip of a mind so powerful, so insidious and so diabolical that we are but his cringing slaves.

The first Dirk Lloyd novel (written by the lord of evilness himself, channeling his dark intellect through the trembling fingers of Mr Thomson) has now been signed to Usborne and Jamie is screaming to be let out of the dungeon where we've locked him up to write the sequel. In the mashup between Dirk's ruthless fanaticism and Jamie's teetering sanity has emerged the most brilliant fantasy-comedy since Terry Pratchett first donned his famous wide-brimmed hat.

Watch for the first Dirk Lloyd book from Usborne Publishing in October next year. We'll bring you more news throughout the year. And in the meantime, connect with the junior lord of illimitable evil on Facebook - if you dare!