News flashes

A grab-bag of news today. First there's my interview with Riccardo Scaringi above, in which we talk about Vulcanverse, Lovecraft, Buffy, Rifkin's Festival, The Seventh Seal, Captain America: Civil War, robotics, post-scarcity, the simulation hypothesis, Whispers Beyond the Stars, and a few other matters.

(The "OK, boomer" moment: at 6m59s I say that Alex Dragan, the protagonist, could be male or female. What I should have said is they can be any gender. Consider me corrected.)

Other news: James Desborough's Stray Crows is currently on Kickstarter. This is a roleplaying game set in the Japan of the Sengoku and early Edo periods. Unlike most Japan-set RPGs, it isn't populated with 21st century Westerners cosplaying at being ronin and ninja. Mr Desborough believes in striving for authenticity, as do I. We may not be able to fully recreate the mindset of a 16th century samurai, but we can surely do better than James Clavell and Justin Marks, at least. Back Stray Crows now if you care at all about real roleplaying. I also think it's the most elegant and dramatic set of rules designed yet for such a setting, and the proof of that is in this sample combat.

One of my favourite podcasts is Fantastic Fights. Hieronymous (sic) J Doom's reviews of gamebooks are excellent and his insights into gamebook design are useful even to a forty-year veteran of the field like me. Mr (or maybe Doctor?) Doom mostly covers Fighting Fantasy books, which I'll confess aren't my cup of tea, but this month he's taken a look at Mark Smith's Coils of Hate. That was one of the books in the Virtual Reality series, my own titles from which have been resurrected as Critical IF, but Mark's Coils of Hate and Green Blood are hard to find in print these days.

Coils is a particularly tricky one, so here are some tips on how to survive it. Listening to HJD's very smart analysis of the book's problems was a bit triggering for me. I did make a half-hearted effort to get it into vaguely playable shape, given that some of the handwritten pages just ended with lines like: "Various options here, turn to ?" I was at my desk at 7am every day for a fortnight to devote a couple of pre-breakfast hours to trying to make sense of it while also facing a deadline for a book of my own. The published version of Coils of Hate was an appalling mess even so, and I'd rather have been hired as official editor and been given a month to fix it properly, but the publisher wasn't paying anything for that and they refused to wait, hence the botched version that still makes me want to hide in a storm cellar every time it's mentioned. Here's an account of my very minimal involvement in the book and how I'd have advised Mark to restructure it if there'd been more time.

What I do think is that Coils has some of the best writing, best characterization, and best worldbuilding you'll see in any gamebook even to this day. And Mark had the courage to tackle a serious issue -- not just intolerance, but the way that hatred and tribalism are auto-immune diseases of society that eventually harm not just the scapegoated target group but everybody else, even the haters. It's a long, long way from the old man in the tavern who tells you to collect five items so you can beat the evil guy who wants to take over the world.

Now that we're talking about Coils, there's something I ought to clear up. I sometimes get credited with being Mark's co-author, so just to be clear: I had no hand in the writing. I didn't even rewrite any of the sections I was given in hand-written form; I just typed them up and tried to figure out how to connect one to another when all I had to go on was "turn to ?" It's all Mark's work. The flashes of real genius are his. If only he'd written it as a novel instead of a gamebook! Luckily Stuart Lloyd has rescued the book, doing all the editing work I didn't have time for thirty years ago, and he has made his version available free on DriveThruRPG. Without him, Coils of Hate would probably have been forgotten. Stuart, you are a star.

In other news, the chapbook series from Fabled Lands Publishing now has over a dozen titles, as illustrated above, so if you suffer from the collecting bug those might be worth a look, either on Amazon or DriveThruRPG.

Lastly, a new Casket of Fays is always a treat, and the latest issue features the usual fine selection of articles including an in-depth look at Gully's Inn by Shaun Hately. It's a useful location for any medieval fantasy setting, whether or not you use the Dragon Warriors or Jewelspider rules. There's even a map. What are you waiting for?

An evening with the RPG Blokes

I had the opportunity recently to sit down for a natter with the RPG Blokes. Not in the same room, unfortunately, and the internet connection over Zoom gave us a hard time, but Mark and the guys cleaned up the audio to make a seamless confabulation (in the real sense, not the dopy AI developer jargon). Join us and listen in as we natter about Dragon Warriors, Jewelspider, and all things roleplaying.

And in the same week there's an interview with my Dragon Warriors and Golden Dragon co-creator Oliver Johnson. You can listen to that or read the transcript.

Yet another salvo from me

There I was last week finding my way around Duncan Thomson's Rand Roll site, and the next thing you know I'm being interviewed. You may feel you've heard it all before, especially if you've long been an habitué of this blog, but go as well for insightful interviews with Jonathan Green, Martin Noutch, Mike Shea, our own Mr Thomson, and many other interesting folk.

Coming up tomorrow, we've got -- well, here's a clue:

Hammer and anvil

More from Fighting Fantasy Fest 5, and this time it's my chat with Gil Jugnot from Le Marteau et l'Enclume. Pay close attention and you'll get a scoop about the 40th anniversary of The Crypt of the Vampire -- but more of that anon.

Ohnoitshimagain

If you can stand another interview with me about gamebooks, roleplaying games, comics, and so forth -- and if you haven't heard it all already -- then here I am talking to the good folks at Refugio Seguro, aka Safe Haven. (Non-Spanish speakers could use Google Translate, but if you scroll down you'll find they have given the full interview in English too.)

Under the sun

London lies hushed and shivering under a blanket of snow, so it's pleasant to remember the warm weather and even warmer hospitality of Lucca Comics & Games just over a month ago. Here I am being interviewed in Italian, which perhaps accounts for why I was completely stumped by the question 6m 35s in. Hopefully my answer still made some kind of sense!

Reversal of meaning

Fighting Fantazine issue 17 is now out. It's great, the artwork is fabulous, there are some epic gamebook adventures to play through, in-depth reviews, and it's free to download. What more do you want?

If you answered, "An interview with Dave Morris" then you're in luck, they've got that too. But I will just draw your attention to an erratum. Asked about my Jewelspider RPG, the reply printed is:

"I think Jewelspider will appeal to simulationists who have yet to see something to admire in Powered by the Apocalypse..."

But wait. What what I actually said was:

"Jewelspider will appeal to simulationists who yet see something to admire in Powered by the Apocalypse’s streamlined let’s-get-on-with-the-story approach."

Quite a difference! I do admire PbtA, you see, despite being a simulationist. My reason for favouring simulationism is not because I'm a wargames nerd but because I want rules that procedurally create a story without authorial steering. So on the spectrum of roleplaying, I'm probably nearer to the PbtA end than the GURPS end. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I'm in a superposition of states; I like both.

Anyway, I just wanted to set that straight in case anyone bothered to read that far into the interview and thought I was some daft old fogey dissing the new(ish) trends in roleplaying.

The artwork above is by the very talented Johan Tieldow, incidentally. I hope if I ever write another gamebook that I can get him to do some of the illustrations.

A divine wind

If you haven't followed the Tetsubo saga, it starts here and until recently ended here. The tishatsu version: Jamie and I wrote a Japanese-flavoured supplement for the Warhammer. That's way back in the early '90s. It was never used, the rights reverted to us, and parts of it appeared in Robert Rees's fanzine Carnel.

The rest is told in the links to those two earlier posts, and during lockdown I made a start on adapting it to fit with Paul Mason's Outlaws RPG. If not for the Vulcanverse books it would be finished and on sale by now. Oh, and Jewelspider. And some bits of paid work too. Stuff got in the way, in short, but I'm hoping to get it done sometime in 2023. So, only about thirty years late.

A couple more links. This week I'm interviewed on the Awesome Lies blog about Tetsubo's past and future. My thanks to Gideon of Awesome Lies for the opportunity, and if there are any questions he missed -- well, you know where the comments are. I also enjoyed this article on putting Warhammery concepts of Chaos into a Japanese setting (despite the author's conclusion that "Tetsubo shows that slavishly copying Japanese culture and folklore into Warhammer doesn't really make for a satisfying result") though if and when Tetsubo does get an official release it won't any longer be trying to fit into the Warhammer universe.

It's that man again

I was interviewed by Olly McNeil of the Storymaster's Tales for International Gamebook Day 2021. Lots of good questions meant that I didn't have to repeat my limited store of Games Workshop anecdotes too much. You can get the video here and buy Olly's Weirding Woods game here.

And the very same day, Martin Noutch joined Olly to talk about the Steam Highwayman books, my own favourite of all the successors to Fabled Lands -- not least because the action starts out in a corner of Buckinghamshire that happens to be where I was born and where a lot of my family live. And Martin shares my preference for low fantasy, the English landscape, and personal-scale stories, as he expatiates on here:

And our friends at Cubus Games will shortly be releasing a Steam Highwayman mobile game that looks absolutely amazing. Great music too. (And is that Boris Johnson I spotted in the NPC rogues' gallery there..? Worth stoking up your steam motorbike just to hold him to account, I'd say.)

Problematic pomegranates

In case you missed this in the sidebar, here are Jamie and I talking to Grim and the T-Shirted Historian on Dungeons & Discussions.

Right at the end Grim asks about the difference between British and American fantasy gaming styles, so here and here are some earlier thoughts on that. When writing Dragon Warriors I never thought of it as particularly British or European -- well, the setting obviously is European to the core, but is the tone of the game distinctly non-American too? People say it is, but as I grew up reading Stan Lee and a host of mostly US-based science fiction authors, it's not something I'm aware of myself.

And while we're about it, don't forget to back Grim's Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned campaign book, which still has a month to run on Indiegogo.

The art of the possible

It was a pleasure and a privilege to be invited by Ralph Lovegrove onto his Fictoplasm podcast recently. Normally the structure of an episode involves Ralph reviewing a novel and then considering how it might inspire roleplaying games. Particularly recommended: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mythago Wood, The Tremor of Forgery, The Chronicles of Prydain, Kill the Dead, The Eclipse of the Century, Lyonesse, and Elric of Melnibone. Talking of that last one, Ralph is currently embarking on a marathon read-though of Moorcock classics, so stay tuned.

A previous guest on the Fictoplasm podcast was my wife Roz Morris so to balance things out I guess Ralph just had to ask me. Tune in here for our long discussion which takes in Brexit (鎖国), Tetsubo (鉄棒), my planned Sparta RPG (Λ), Mirabilis (☄), Frankenstein (🧠), Tirikelu (₸), and of course Jewelspider (💎🕷 or 宝石クモ, take your pick). We also talk about politics, gamebook design, the Congo, Nazis, Sagas of the Icelanders, and roleplaying in soon-to-be-sunken lands from Abraxas to Lyonesse but I've got no kanji or other symbols for those.

Jamie mentioned after listening to the podcast that I came across a bit like Tony Blair at times. Apparently he meant because of my vocal inflection rather than my politics. I suggested we might do a regular Fabled Lands podcast. (Jamie would be the Gordon Brown of the partnership, presumably.) So far I haven't been able to convince him, but maybe if there's enough demand...

Yakety yak

A little while ago, I was asked by my Italian publishers to do an interview for Tom's Hardware. Then it occurred to me that some of the answers might be interesting to readers of this blog, so if you don't speak Italian here's the meat of it:

Dave, in Italy, you’re known especially for the Blood sword series. Since those books were originally published a lot of time has passed. How do you think gamebooks have evolved? What was the market like in the ‘80s and how is it different today?

It was totally different. Gamebooks were a huge craze among what we now call “middle grade” kids (roughly 9-12 years old) and you pretty much only had to walk into a publisher with an idea to get offered a contract. Gamebooks would sell hundreds of thousands of copies. I think it was because kids were ready for videogames but those were still quite expensive and the graphics were quite primitive. So gamebooks filled a gap.

Blood Sword was the first multiplayer gamebook. How did you transform a solitary experience like a gamebook into a shared game?

Oliver Johnson and I always start the planning process for one of our gamebooks by thinking about events we’ve used in our roleplaying games, so multiplayer comes naturally to us. I was also aware when we wrote Blood Sword that a lot of the readers would be people who already played Dragon Warriors (set in the same fantasy universe) which meant that they probably would have gaming friends who they wanted to share the adventure with. We made sure that every character type has a chance to shine, and if you are playing it as a team there are some sections that only one character gets to read. We find that a dash of secrecy and competitiveness adds an edge to any roleplaying game.

Recently you ran a Kickstarter campaign for a new edition of Blood Sword 5 The Walls of Spyte. Why that book in particular?

I’d already edited the rest of the series for re-release in 2014, but when I got to the fifth book I found that the work needed to make it playable was more than the other four books put together. There were parts of the flowchart that simply didn’t link up. If I’d left it till I had time to revise The Walls of Spyte then none of the books would have got back in print, so I published the first four and put book five aside. I kept meaning to return to it but there was so much work involved that I couldn’t justify it as something to do in my spare time. The Kickstarter provided the funds needed to do it properly.

What should a gamebook have today to be current? Do you think that classic forking-path stories are still enough, or should gamebooks dare to try something new?

I’m always interested in something new. In my Frankenstein digital gamebook, the focus is not on solving “the problem of the plot” but on your relationship with Victor Frankenstein, the narrator. The variables are things like Trust, Hubris and Alienation. If you give Victor bad advice, he loses trust in you and that affects whether he’ll listen to your suggestions in future.

Recently I wrote Fright Tonight, which is billed as an interactive drama for the Amazon Echo, but it’s effectively still a branching-path gamebook in terms of structure. I’ll be releasing that as a Kindle book later this year, and one of the things that makes it different is there are no stats, no character sheet, no dice. You just answer yes or no to the characters’ questions. Trust me, it’s as gripping as any gamebook I wrote back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Some say we are living through a renaissance of gamebooks. What do you think about that? In a world dominated by videogames and mobile games, do you think is there any space for gamebooks? What kind of appeal can they have for new, especially young, players?

Fewer people are reading books these days, and on average those people read fewer books per year, so it looks as if gamebooks will have to come up with some new tricks. For one thing, there’s not really a lot of point doing more fantasy quest-style gamebooks. Computer games do the same thing and they do it better. Gamebooks have traditionally tackled stories from a problem-solving angle. That’s natural given the menu of choices structure, but again it’s not enough to entice somebody away from a computer game or a movie, or even playing Fortnite on their phone. So how do we write gamebooks that offer the reader something they can’t get elsewhere?

One clue to the answer comes from looking at how television drama competes with cinema. Even the most lavish TV show can’t match the budget of a Hollywood blockbuster, so it has to play to its strengths. A 13-hour TV drama has a lot more room to explore character complexity than a 2-hour movie, with the result that if you sit down to watch Mission Impossible after The Americans, or Warcraft after Game of Thrones, it’s like going from a novel to a newspaper cartoon. Gamebooks can do something similar, involving the reader in difficult moral choices and options that will change other characters’ opinion of them. Modern audiences in all media expect this emotional depth. As a medium, gamebooks have to grow up.

You have written scores of books; gamebooks, novels, comics, and RPGs in your career. What have been the most difficult things to write? And of which are you particularly proud?

Most difficult was my recent gamebook Can You Brexit? as I had to research all of the details of immigration, free movement, defence, policing, trade, and a dozen other things – and then make them both amusing and comprehensible to the reader. Of all my gamebooks I’m most proud of Heart of Ice, just because it came out exactly how I wanted it. You can’t always count on that as there’s a tension between delivering the sense of real freedom of choice while (in old-style gamebooks) keeping it all down to about 500 sections or less. Heart of Ice was loosely based on an old roleplaying campaign of mine and many of my players’ characters were the inspiration for the player’s rivals in the adventure. To keep myself interested while writing, I changed the setting from the fantasy world of Tekumel, which it had been in my campaign, to 23rd century Earth. That gave me a story structure to work from while still having plenty of scope to improvise details as I worked.

The work I am most pleased with overall, though, is my comic book epic Mirabilis – Year of Wonders. I care passionately about the characters, it’s exactly the blend of funny, scary, mysterious and thrilling that I was aiming for, and I think the artwork (by Leo Hartas, Martin McKenna and Nikos Koutsis) is beautiful. Unfortunately the project ground to a halt about a third of the way through for want of a publisher. In Britain, sadly, there’s not much of a market for comic books.

Is there a book you wish you had written?

I’d like to have done more Dragon Warriors books. There were originally supposed to be twelve books in the series, but the publishers messed up the distribution and then cancelled the series after six books. Oliver and I still use the setting for some of our own roleplaying games, and we’re thinking of releasing the Jewelspider RPG, which is a much more modern, freewheeling set of rules. And instead of all those polyhedral dice it just uses two six-siders.

My biggest regret, though, is not having been able to continue Mirabilis. Leo and I planned it as four seasons, but when I was halfway through season two the money ran out. It costs a lot to pay for all that art! I have the whole story blocked out and I love the characters, so maybe I’ll return to it as a prose novel – but that will be a shame, as I think it really works best as a comic book.

How did you get involved in gaming? What do you like so much about games?

That’s a very good question. I think it’s because I get to exercise my imagination and my analytic mind at the same time. It’s the same reason I design games and write fiction – you’re having to be creative and flexible while at the same time solving problems. And because they are all sorts of different problems I have to think on my feet, which I enjoy. It’s why I prefer real-time strategy games to turn-based, because of the adrenaline. In roleplaying games you’re constantly improvising, whether you’re playing in the game or running it, and I get fired up by that. Also there’s the social aspect of gaming. I like hanging out with my friends, and most of them are gamers. It’s just a shame that my wife isn’t into games, because if she did I’d happily play a boardgame most evenings.

What are your favourite games?

In face-to-face roleplaying: Empire of the Petal Throne, and other rules and spin-offs set in MAR Barker’s world of Tekumel. I like it so much I designed a set of rules myself for it, called Tirikelu, that are available free online. Recently I’ve also enjoyed Gregor Vuga’s Sagas of the Icelanders, which is an Apocalypse World variant.

As for videogames, I like What Remains of Edith Finch, Return of the Obra Din, Inside, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, The Witcher, This War of Mine, The Talos Principle – oh, too many to mention. Lately I’ve been getting into VR games as I’m doing some design work on one. My favourite computer game of all time: Outcast. That’s twenty years old and I still go back to it.

Do you still get time to play? What are you playing at the moment?

I host a roleplaying session every two weeks, and my group also try to fit in four weekend specials each year. It’s not like the old days when we could game several times a week, but everybody used to live nearby back then and none of us had families.

We’re currently playing an investigative campaign set in the 1890s. We use GURPS 4th edition for that, quite a crunchy set of rules but much better than 3rd edition. I recently wrote some chapters for the Lyonesse RPG, which uses a d100 system, but I probably won’t play it – even though Oliver and I are both devoted Jack Vance fans – because tonally the setting isn’t very different from our own world, Legend, and we really need to test out the Jewelspider system for that.

Is there a game (or even a setting) you haven't written yet but you definitely want to try?

I’d like to have a crack at a complete reboot of the world of Tekumel. As originally conceived it belonged to a style of pulp sci-fi of the mid-20th century. That’s not something that today’s players can really get into, yet behind the game lies Professor Barker’s concept of a “real” Tekumel. I think there’s a better way to present it to the current generation of roleplayers that strips away the slightly cheesy pulp style and makes it feel more solid.

Any advice for someone who would like a writing career?

I’d say, “Do you have a Plan B?” Harrison Ford trained as a carpenter, remember, so that he had something to fall back on if the acting didn’t pan out. These days, millions of books are being published every year – most of them self-published – so it’s very hard to get noticed.

If that doesn’t put you off, OK, write your book. Send it out to agents. While they’re looking at it, start writing the next book. If an agent or editor says that something in your story doesn’t work then you should listen to them. On the other hand, if they tell you how to change the book, be more sceptical – other people know if a story doesn’t grab them, but they can’t write the book your way.

Hopefully your agent will get more than one publisher interested. If they do, there may be a bidding war, which is the only way you’ll get a fair price for your work. Pay attention to contracts. What is the publisher agreeing to do, and what happens to your rights if the book isn’t successful?

Read. You already read? Read more. Read really good authors: Hemingway, Calvino, Austen, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Dickens, Eco. Don’t only read your favourite genres or authors. Think about what effect the author was striving for and how they achieved it. Always be learning.

They say, “Never give up,” but I’ll say, “Don’t reinforce failure.” If you try one thing and it doesn’t work, try something else. Short stories, novels, flash fiction, poetry, theatre. Mix genres. Ignore genres. The point is that entertainment is a fashion-driven industry, and there’s no point in plugging away at one thing if the public aren’t buying it. I know a couple of great writers – we’re talking about award winners, best-sellers in their day – whose books are not getting publishing offers these days because fashions have changed and their style of fiction is out of favour. No writer should ever try to chase fashions – you have to give the readers or viewers or players something they didn’t even know they wanted. But, at the same time, be aware of whether you’ve set up your stall in right place to get noticed.

Last question: is there any secret project you’re currently working on and can share with us?

There’s the world of Abraxas that Jamie and I devised for a massively multiplayer game we were set to work on at Eidos Interactive in 1999. Eidos closed down internal development so we never got to do the game, but I like the setting, which is science fantasy in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett. So I’m going to release that as an RPG using a variant of my Tirikelu rules. I’ve commissioned a great cover by Tancred Dyke-Wells, so now it’s just a case of me finding a spare couple of months to write it.

I also want to do a gamebook (probably digital; think 80 Days rather than Tin Man Games) based in the village of Crossgate from my Dragon Warriors campaign. This would be an open world gamebook where you can have various NPC companions and your experience of the adventure is different depending on which of them is with you. There would be multiple side-quests that you can pick up in more than one location using a sort of object-oriented approach to the story rather than the usual procedural gamebook design. (Apologies to my coder friends; I’m using these terms very loosely!) The working title for that is Winter’s Rage, but it’s another project that will have to wait for me to free up some leisure time to work on it.

The Jewelspider RPG is likely to happen much sooner, mainly because it’s very light on rules so most of it will be adventures and background for the world of Legend. And I have a science fiction setting called Earthwrecked that I ran as a roleplaying campaign and that I really should dust off and write up.

A rare personal appearance

If I was a little more au fait with audio tech then I'd probably do podcasts rather than a blog. After a day spent writing, a blog post is often the last thing I feel like buckling down to. And podcasts are a natural fit for me anyway; I much prefer talking to writing, as anyone who's sat at a table with me and some wine bottles can attest.

My appetite for podcasting whetted by the Fictoplasm special about Lyonesse, I welcomed an invitation from the good folks at the Tekumel Foundation to appear on the Hall of Blue Illumination. We talked about my early roleplaying experiences, about various game systems, a little bit about Fabled Lands, the design choices in Tirikelu, and of course extensively about MAR Barker's amazing creation, Tekumel.

You can download or listen to it here.

The fantasy podcast

If you want to interview Jamie, invite him down the pub. Oliver McNeil, who recently ran a sort of theatrical Knightmare-type Kickstarter involving Tom Baker instead of Tregard, cornered the Thomsonian one in The Snowdrop in Lewes and there grilled him with questions about the Fabled Lands, Dirk Lloyd, and various other projects.

The only bit Jamie was evasive about is when Oliver asks him how he got his first job on White Dwarf. The truth is that Jamie's mum got him that job. Knowing that he wouldn't bother to apply, she rang up Ian Livingstone and told him all about her immensely talented, smart, personable, diligent son. Unfortunately his elder brother Peter couldn't make it to the interview, so Jamie got the job instead.

If you don't have the time to watch it, download the mp3 podcast here.

We Do Write interview

I was recently interviewed by Dorothy Dreyer on her blog We Do Write. As you might guess from the name, it's all about writing, not game design, so don't feel you have to. Highlights (or lowlights, depending on your tastes) are: Earl Grey tea, Ragnarok, Lawrence of Arabia, the day I saw a ghost, super powers, how I met Leo Hartas, horses, Alfred Hitchcock, and Philippe Starck furniture. Ouch.