On the road

Suppose you’re writing a gamebook and you want the player to be able to travel from Wishport to Haggart’s Corner on this map. In its simplest form that would require a section (A) for Wishport, a section describing travel on the road (D) with possible side encounters, and a section (F) for arriving at Haggart’s Corner.

In an open-world gamebook it gets a bit more involved. Now you might be travelling on that same stretch of road either north to Haggart’s Corner, or in the other direction south to Wishport. In Fabled Lands we wanted to have random encounters occur when the player is travelling, so we needed a section (C) to handle those. Each encounter could be an entire side-adventure, though the two in this example are both very short. Once the encounters are resolved, or if you didn’t get an encounter, you’re routed to section D and can decide which way to head. Like this:

A

Wishport is a picturesque town set at the back of a bay rimmed by white cliffs. Fish, oil, dyes and other commodities are packed here for transport inland. You can buy a town house here for 100 Shards. If you decide to do that, cross off the money and put a tick in the box by the town house option below.

[Various options in the town]         …

Leave Wishport                           turn to B                  

B

From Wishport, you have the option to put to sea, take the road to Haggart's Corner, or travel cross-country. In order to go by sea, you must either possess a ship which is docked in the harbour (check the Ship's Manifest) or find a captain who is willing to take you as a passenger.

Go to the harbour                                 turn to ---

Take the road north                              turn to C

Go west towards Metriciens               turn to ---
    Go east into the Magwort Fens           turn to ---

C

The road follows the ridge of low hills extending out into the headland of Knucklebones Point.

Roll two dice for encounters:

Score 2-5         Eerie things                            turn to X

Score 6-8         Uneventful journey              turn to D

Score 9-12       Penniless adventurers          turn to Y

 

D

You are on the road between Wishport and Haggart's Corner.

Follow the road to Wishport              turn to A

Go north to Haggart's Corner             turn to E

Go due south towards the coast          turn to ---

Go east into the Magwort Fens           turn to ---

E

The town of Haggart's Corner stands at a place where three roads meet. Here, in certain seasons of the year, the trau are said to come and trade their marvellous trinkets in exchange for human favours.

Stop at Haggart's Corner            turn to F

Continue on your journey          turn to G

F

Haggart's Corner is a pretty, pastel-hued town. Houses with high gables and mullioned bay windows are set around a series of courts where fountains splash dreamily in the sunlight.

[Various options in the town]         …

Leave Haggart's Corner              turn to G

G

The fey, sleepy, whimsy-tainted air of Haggart's Corner is soon forgotten as you turn your face to the wind and journey onwards.

Take the road to Metriciens                turn to ---

Head to the Monastery of Molhern    turn to ---

Take the road to Wishport                  turn to C

X

Misshapen sprites with grotesque faces come scampering out of the hedge beside the road. Tittering to themselves, they prod you with gnarled fingers and discuss whether you are worth eating.

`Give us an emerald and we'll let you go,' pipes up one of the sprites.

It seems they will accept a green gem to leave you in peace.

Give them a green gem            turn to D

Make a break for it                      turn to Z

Y

Three penniless wanderers tell you a tale of being washed up on a lonely shoreline. ‘Still, we're determined to make names for ourselves,’ they vow. Their predicament reminds you of your own early career, so you give them a tenth of any cash you have on you (rounding fractions up). Only later, while passing through a village, do you remember seeing their faces on a wanted poster.

Turn to D.

Z

Guffawing, the sprites let you go. You run pell-mell until there's no breath left in you. Only then do you notice that they stole one of your fingers. Lose 1 from THIEVERY (down to a minimum score of 1) and turn to D.

This example is a simple one, but as I said those encounters could be entire quests in their own right. That creates some difficulties. First of all, once the player has dealt with a major quest such as exploring a ruined castle we may not want them to experience it again. One way to deal with that is to put a check box in the first section of the sub-quest – something like this:

Section R is the ‘defused’ version of the encounter – the castle is empty, nothing to see here, back to D. That’s assuming you only want the player to have one crack at exploring the castle. If it’s possible for them to fail – and flee, or die there – then you might need to filter it with a keyword, so that they only go to the defused version of the encounter once they’ve handled it successfully. Incidentally in Vulcanverse, where I needed to stop the keywords from proliferating to an unmanageable degree, I used a structure like this instead:

There you embark on the sub-quest at 306. No matter how many times you come back here, if you haven't successfully completed the quest you'll go to 306. When you do complete the quest you'll be told to turn to 41 and tick the box. Section 476 gives you the spiel for having just completed the quest. Section 734 is for if you return here subsequently. (Incidentally I used a similar mechanic in Can You Brexit? to determine when the player had resolved one of the UK/EU negotiating points.)

The other problem with putting sub-quests on a random encounter table is that the player might just walk back and forth among that same section of road repeatedly until they get the special encounter they want. In Fabled Lands that’s a passage of time issue, similar to the way we don’t want players to make investments at the merchants’ guild and walk back in minutes later to collect a windfall:

Notice those keywords Almanac, Brush and Catalyst. You can only get those by travelling to a distant port. Then when you return you get to roll to see how your investments have been doing:

You could use the same mechanic to prevent the player repeatedly traversing the same stretch of road to get that lucky encounter roll. Just mark the encounter as only happening if the player has the keyword Afar or whatever, and remove Afar after they’ve been along the road – so then they’ll have to voyage off to Sokara in book one to collect Afar again.

It’s not ideal, because it’s contrived. We’re trying to represent passage of time, which a paper gamebook obviously can’t do directly, so we say that if you’ve visited a distant location, which we can keep tabs on, then time must have passed. But the player is bound to wonder why going to a specific location in book one arbitrarily unlocks an unrelated quest opportunity in book two. It breaks suspension of disbelief.

If you can think of a better solution, I’m all ears.

Dragons in the Dark

A lot can change in forty years. Attitudes and opinions especially. I was reminded of that when I came across the March 1986 issue of a fanzine called Dragons in the Dark, edited by Henk Langeveld, and flipped it open to discover a letter from my very much younger self. So what games were grabbing the attention of the Dave Morris of four decades ago? Let's find out...

"I agree with what Mike Williams said about getting the rules out of the way of role--playing. I have enjoyed several games where there was no dice-rolling at all -- not because the players didn't get into combats, but because the game was flowing along so smoothly that I decided not to break it all apart by insisting they get out the figurines and the dice. Games can't always work out like that (my sessions have their share of dungeoneering too), but at their best they are pure role-playing, an improvised story created jointly by the players and the GM. Some letters in White Dwarf objected that this type of gaming is just chaotic – no rules. There are rules, I have found, but rules of a very subtle sort that arise out of the nature of storytelling. A player may spontaneously invent some power, item or general get-out if he thinks the others will accept it. As GM, I cannot just take the item away from him without forcing a re-take in the adventure, so I have to be inventive and twist things against him again. I really think that for a group of experienced gamers who are used to one another’s foibles, this gives an opportunity for imaginative gaming and shared fantasy that the old rule systems (that mostly developed out of wargames and table-topping) do not allow. This is one of the reasons that I'm against things like fatigue points – who can be fagged to calculate all those numbers and things during a game that should represent the triumph of imagination?"

Here in 2026 I'm still in favour of improvisation, but not in the authored sense described there. I value roleplaying precisely because it is a work without an author, so I would rather not have players seeing their characters as pieces to move around a story. I want them to improvise in character. You know, the way we do in real life.

Anyway, back to 1986:

"I didn't invest in RuneQuest 3 (though I have looked through it) because I didn't see that much wrong with RQ2. The RuneQuest Compendium could have handled any necessary adjustments and expansions, but instead wasted itself with useless padding on how to cook a walktapus and suchlike. Since the world of Glorantha is defined by the game, it means that the old Glorantha has gone – the world must now be a very different place. If the POW gain for priests has been changed there will be fewer priests of great power, for example.

"For me, the main role-playing event of 1985 was the publication of Swords and Glory, M.A.R. Barker's complete reworking of his Tekumel game. Greg Stafford was right to call Barker a genius – he developed Tekumel as a real place and his rules merely interpret that into a game. 'Game' Tekumel is asymptotic to 'real' Tekumel, but there is no sense that with a new set of rules the whole world has changed."

I guess I'll stand by most of that, except that Barker has nowadays been cancelled for his assumed views so we're not to mention him, and anyway if I were still playing Tekumel-based games I'd use the Tirikelu rules rather than S&G. 

Moving on, we get to a kind of cultural appropriation that still makes me seethe:

"I cannot say that I'm waiting for Chaosium's feudal Japanese supplement to RQ3 with much enthusiasm. Bushido seems to handle this setting very competently and evocatively anyway. The attitude towards Japanese culture and folklore that shows through published Chaosium material is not particularly auspicious in this regard. I found the dragonewts write-up in – was it Different Worlds or Wyrm's Footnotes? Can't remember – pretty offensive. Dragonewts, these utterly unhuman creatures, apparently fight with katanas, perform seppuku, compose haiku... all things that maybe seem utterly unhuman to the Californian mind, but personally I think don't measure up. Probably these Japanese elements are grafted onto dragonewt culture in a spirit of amused incomprehension rather than outright chauvinism, but I am not impressed. Returning to the example of Tekumel, Barker manages to make his nonhumans (the ssu, the hlüss, the pe choi, etc) look and feel alien without recourse to traditional Western myth or swiping from non-European cultures."

And the letter rounds off with a last little bit that's of historical interest because it pins down my and Jamie's inspiration for creating open-world gamebooks:

"Tales of the Arabian Nights by West End is well worth a look, though pricey. It is an original concept, attractively presented and great fun. I bought it a month ago and have been playing three or four times a week since then."

That would have been in the autumn of 1985, two years before we pitched a gamebook series we were calling Hero Quest. It's interesting to look back now and see the glint in my then-youthful and sparkling clear eyes.

Oh, you're wondering about that cover? The image above is ChatGPT's retconned version, but for the sake of historical interest here's what RPG fanzines actually looked like in the days of typewriters, Letraset and Cow Gum:

A toolkit for open-world gamebook design

The earliest true gamebook (with rules, that is, and disregarding mere multiple-choice texts) was probably Steve Jackson's Death Test in 1978. That allowed players to backtrack and visit the same location multiple times, but throughout the 1980s the main evolution of gamebooks detoured down a different branch with series like Fighting Fantasy, where the arrow of narrative time pointed in one direction. It wasn't until 1995 that the first open-world gamebooks appeared -- followed by silence until, decades later, series like Steam Highwayman and Legendary Kingdoms took up the torch. Finally it seems that open-world gamebooks might be becoming the dominant form.

I have been sent a succinct and comprehensive toolkit for open-world design that would-be gamebook writers will find very useful. Not just would-be writers, either; I've been doing this since the last millennium and even I found it had some handy tips. You can find that toolkit here. The author prefers to be known only as Ruth, so I will respect her anonymity, though it can only be a matter of time before her own open-world gamebook series appears.

In the Vulcanverse books, when I used what Ruth calls Local Changes, typically I'd include another entry:

So you’d arrive at the location and be presented with the situation that could lead to a change. If you complete that correctly you’re told to turn to the original location and tick the box. Then you get a one-off scene that explains the change and assigns any relevant keywords. If you return to the location subsequently you go to X*A which is the location in its changed state.

Regarding keywords, it’s worth differentiating (and incidentally I say this with 20/20 hindsight) between keywords used as logic flags to denote that an event occurred (“a tidal wave hit the city”) and keywords used to indicate a current state (“the city is in ruins”). In Vulcanverse I could have used keywords and titles respectively for those two functions. I didn’t, which meant that sometimes I’d remove a keyword that was no longer applicable, only to realize later that I’d still like to know if the player had originally had that keyword. Eg if I complete a quest for the king and so he makes me the court champion, even if later on I lose the court champion keyword I still need to have the keyword that says I did the quest. (I'll discuss flags and states in more detail in a future post.)

Regarding rules mechanics generally, I keep promising that next time I’ll create an object-oriented rule set so that I could keep track of, say:

• having one’s face stolen by a mujina
• getting cursed by a fairy to have a donkey’s head
• acquiring blue skin
• being body-swapped into another form

Variously those conditions could mean:

• You’re not recognized by somebody who should know you
• You’re mistaken for someone else
• You are treated differently from other people (potentially in several different ways)

In Fabled Lands I ended up filtering for all those statuses every time I asked the player to check them, whereas if they had been properly organized I could simply have asked, “If you have a status that is listed as transformative and uncanny, go to X”.

Similarly with equipment, where it is useful to have a generic way of identifying whether something can be used as a weapon, or has a blade, or reflects like a mirror, or is made of iron, and so on – rather than having to list the items for each applicable function (such as “if you have the polished shield, the silver mirror, the jade looking-glass…”). Ruth's Multi-Function Item tool covers that one, and could be extended to keywords describing the character’s current status to solve problems like the altered-face one above.

Vulcanverse also used the Current Location feature, a box on your adventure sheet where you record a section number that you are routed to after the current subquest you're on is complete. This allows for encounters to happen at different points around the world, for instance when you're acting as go-between carrying love tokens from Eros to Psyche in The Hammer of the Sun. The Current Location can be used for a lot of things, a common example being when you have a wandering NPC whom the player has to meet up with from time to time, because the different stages of the player's dealings with the NPC don't have to be tied to the geography of the world. You just tell the player to record a Current Location number when the subquest is triggered, then when the next part of their interaction with the NPC (or whatever) is done, you send them back to the Current Location and they resume their travels.

I was going to compile a list of gamebook design resources, but they are many and scattered far and wide. Here are a few to get started. If you know of any others, link to them in the comments.

• "Writing gamebooks" on Lloyd of Gamebooks
• "Wamt to write a gamebook?" on Lloyd of Gamebooks
• "Fetch quests" in the Steam Highwayman books
• "Ambush sequences and the noted passage mechanic" in Steam Highwayman -- which, now that I've seen the article, I realize features the same tool that I call current location (Martin's nomenclature describes it better!).
• "Learning from better gamebooks" on Rand Roll

And while we're on the subject of gamebooks, the Blood Sword 5e hardcover book has just been released in the UK and US. You can buy it at Orc's Nest or from GMS Tabletop Games. The book is a complete 5e roleplaying campaign based on the gamebooks and features some absolutely top-notch design, writing, artwork and production. If you're starting to think about Christmas presents, it's the perfect gift for the avid gamer in your life. Just be aware: they're going to need a bigger stocking.

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.

Getting started in the Vulcanverse

As with a lot of open-world gamebook series, you can begin your adventures in any of the Vulcanverse books. In each case you play through your childhood, your choices in those early flashback years shaping the kind of character you're going to start as -- your skills, deity, any starting gear, and so on. It's a little more involving than just rolling a bunch of dice.

In the first four books, whichever you pick, those childhood events are more or less the same. In Workshop of the Gods, though, it's a little different. Now you're not starting in a rural area; you grew up in the biggest city in the Vulcanverse and your family and home there provide a base you can return to.

Your early-life choices in the city are different from the other four books. Having defined your initial abilities, you're then presented with a couple of opportunities to acquire mentor characters. First, when watching your uncles play a board game, you notice a strange antique coin and if you ask about it you may end up meeting a veteran who will guide you through quests in Book 2: The Hammer of the Sun. Then later, shopping with your aunts, you can ask them about the land of Arcadia and thereby acquire a mentor who'll prompt you to undertake quests in Book 3: The Wild Woods.

In both cases you get the option to ignore the cue, thereby avoiding these mentors. Game designer Ernest W Adams has pointed out that when presented in a game with, say, an interesting inscription, there's no point in giving the player the choice of "look at the inscription" or "don't look". That's a non-choice, because why wouldn't the player look unless there's some other cost to doing so? (For example, unless they're being chased and stopping to study an inscription puts them at risk.)

But I still give players the choice of passing on the mentors for two reasons. First because your decisions at this stage of the book aren't only setting your starting stats; they're also shaping how you think about your character. Do you look after your younger brother with love, or through a sense of duty, or do you leave him to fend for himself? Making that choice will determine the character you're playing not only in game terms but in your own conception. Ignoring the cues from your uncles and aunts tells us the kind of self-sufficient person you might be.

Also, not all players are going to want mentoring. You can strike out into the other regions of the Vulcanverse and just discover quests at random. That's fine if you have the time for exploration and you don't need any hand-holding. Others will appreciate being given some hints -- and if so you can pick up more hints, though of a less structured sort, by talking to the Oracle at the temple of Apollo.

When out in the world you can find companions who will travel with you. They sometimes offer advice, but usually only after you've already embarked on a quest. They don't tend to nudge you towards any particular goal. If you like setting your own goals, forget the mentors but it's still worth picking up a companion. There are a couple you can find fairly easily if you look around the south-eastern part of Notus in The Hammer of the Sun.

Mentors differ from companions because they don't accompany you. They'll look at what you've achieved so far, suggest the next stage of a quest and give you some clues as to how to go about it, then with a pat on the back or a kick in the pants they'll send you off to try it. You can return to the city and seek them out if you're having trouble. The advantage of doing it that way is you get quests sliced up into readily achievable chunks, which a lot of players prefer to just playing on till they're tired. The mentor lets you know when you've hit a convenient episode break.

So, whether you're a self-starter or whether you like taking advice from a friend, either way you should find what you're looking for in Vulcanverse Book Five: Workshop of the Gods. Still, the books in the Vulcanverse series are not self-contained; they comprise one vast connected saga.

To give you an idea of the sweep and scope of that saga, think of the Sorcery! series by Steve Jackson. That's four big gamebooks to start off with. Now add the original six books of the Way of the Tiger series. Then pile on top of those the first four of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf books. All together that lot is as long as the Vulcanverse series. Vulcan City is a good place to begin, but you'll soon need to venture into the the other realms, so start off with a couple of books and bear in mind you'll need all five to complete the full adventure.

Actions and consequences in an open world

When I mentioned on social media that Vulcanverse would be the first open-world gamebook series to be finished, somebody rightly pointed out that "finished" is a moot term when we're talking about open-world adventures. Fabled Lands, for example, is famously incomplete -- but all that actually means is that you can only explore about two-thirds of the areas shown on the map. If and when we ever type "The End" on Fabled Lands book 12, that wouldn't constitute an ending in the way a linear story ends. You can go round and round forever. That's what open worlds are all about.

Vulcanverse is different. Superficially it is like Fabled Lands, a sandbox for adventuring in, but that's deceptive. It's actually more like an open-world CRPG where you can take up quests in any order, but they feed into a central story thread that will lead you to a grand finale. Minor quests allow you to qualify for major quests, and some of those have payoffs that change the landscape of the game (literally) or win you allies who may rally to your side at the showdown with the Big Bad.

The last half of Workshop of the Gods (around 880 sections out of 1667 in total) is devoted to that endgame track, and once you complete it the game is over. You can bide your time entering the endgame, gathering everything and everyone you think you'll need, but once you're on it the structure is pretty linear. It's like a traditional gamebook from that point, sacrificing complete freedom of choice in favour of a dramatic conclusion.

I got to wondering how many quests are up for grabs in the whole five books. One clue might be in the codewords that we use to keep track of earlier decisions. For instance, if you begin your adventures in Book Five you start with the codeword Reverie. That remembers that you have a home and family in the city, and that you are familiar with the main landmarks. Titles such as Amazonian Queen or Tricked by a Water Nymph serve a similar function, the main difference being that you can see what the title records whereas the function of a codeword is usually not obvious immediately.

There are about two hundred codewords and seventy-odd titles across the five Vulcanverse books. As a quick yardstick, that might suggest around 250 quests (given that you might pick up more than one codeword on the bigger quests) but actually it's the tip of the iceberg. We only use codewords and titles when a player choice can have consequences anywhere in the Vulcanverse. All sorts of people you meet will react differently if you're the Amazonian Queen, for example.

But there are plenty of quests that don't have global repercussions, so to avoid having to check codeword lists too often we use a non-global logic filter: the tickbox. A tickbox is located "in the code". At the point that you arrive at a location, say, a tickbox could record whether this is your first visit (in which case you get the longer description) or a follow-up. Multiple codewords can be used to trigger different events each time you visit the location, as in the case of the tengu king's court in FL Book Six:

With a little extra tweaking, a tickbox can serve to filter a quest that is not yet complete, or that has just been completed, or that you completed a while ago. Here's an instance of that from Vulcanverse Book Four:

In this case, section 912 gives you the set-up conditions before the quest is dealt with and asks if you have what's needed to fulfil it. Usually you'll go away and come back later with what you need, though you might be lucky enough to have it already -- an item, a codeword, a companion, etc. If and when you do, 912 steers you to a section (or a whole subquest loop consisting of many sections) that if successful routes you back to 408 with the instruction to tick the box. At that point, you'll then go to section 1043 and be told the outcome and what reward you get. If you return to the Atlas tree later on, you'll see that the box is already ticked and so you'll go to section 1007, which tells you the new status quo that applies since you resolved the quest.

There are a lot more localized quests than globally significant ones, just like in a CRPG, so at a rough guess that means the whole Vulcanverse series comprises about six or seven hundred distinct quests. Some just earn you an item or a stat boost. Others unlock bigger quests. Each of the first four books features three major quests called labours, and when you've completed all twelve of those it unlocks the possibility to jump into the endgame in Book Five whenever you're ready.

I haven't seen a breakdown of the quest structure for something like The Witcher or Baldur's Gate, but I'm curious to know how the scope of those games measures up beside Vulcanverse. If you know the numbers, share them in the comments. And if you have a loved or loathed gamebook design feature -- maybe you can't stand writing in books, or you don't like logic gates -- let us know about that too.

Online Adventure Sheets

Tickbox and codeword spreadsheet for all 5 Vulcanverse books

Buy the Vulcanverse series on Amazon

Darkness visible -- at last

It turned into a real labour of Hercules -- sorry, Herakles -- but it was worth it because now I can say: the Vulcanverse series is complete! The fifth and final book, Workshop of the Gods, is finally available in either colour hardcover edition or in paperback. As the blurb puts it:

Vulcan City is a place of striking contrasts. A metropolis where marble palaces and gilded rooftops soar against the sky, whose walls and towers seem to approaching travellers like the flanks of mountains, where gold and jewels overflow the coffers of wily merchants, and where nobles in silk finery indulge in epicurean pleasures to rival the banquets of Olympus.

But it is also a place of teeming streets and plazas where cutthroats and spies hide themselves amid the crowds, where narrow alleyways can lead to stinking, maze-like warrens where the unwary visitor is soon as lost as in the deepest wood. In candlelit taverns you may overhear whispered secrets that can make a fortune or ruin a reputation. And here in the magnificent hub at the centre of the Vulcanverse, life is often as cheap as a trinket sold on a marketplace stall.

Meet up again with old friends and bitter enemies. Uncover long-buried secrets, hunt down thieves and murderers, wrestle with demons, cross swords with assassins, join criminal gangs – even come face to face with the spectre of your own death.

Visit the puppet shows where you’ll find hints about the fate of a universe. Seek counsel from the oracle who is privy to the insight of the gods – if you can afford it. Venture into the prison that holds the cleverest man alive, knowing that you must either befriend him or kill him. Lay claim if you can to a mansion brimming with treasures and traps. Rise in society, making alliances among the ruling factions. And attend the glittering party at Vulcan's palace, whose location is hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals, where you will set out on a perilous journey through space and time to reach the crucial, cataclysmic battle between light and darkness towards which all your choices have been leading.

This is the city where all possibilities meet, where destinies are made, where the fate of the Vulcanverse will finally be decided.

In the Vulcanverse series, as in Fabled Lands, you can begin in any region and travel freely back and forth between the books to pursue your quests. But there are significant differences from the earlier series. In Fabled Lands there's no central storyline, whereas in Vulcanverse most of the hundreds of quests feed into a plot that builds across all five books to an epic finale that occupies the second half of Workshop of the Gods. Your choices in the books have lasting consequences, altering the fate of nations and even the very landscape. You'll develop relationships with recurring characters, both friends and foes. And you will bear the scars as well as carry the glory of your exploits through all 6115 sections (more than fifteen Fighting Fantasy length gamebooks!) and three quarters of a million words. Did I say epic? It's longer than The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit combined.

And what is your ultimate goal through the series? As you'll soon discover, darkness casts a lengthening shadow over the Vulcanverse, threatening all who dwell in the five realms. Queen Nyx, with her dread sons Death and Sleep at her side, has unleashed a devastating war that will sweep away both gods and titans and leave her the unchallenged monarch of all creation. You must hone your skills, win over allies, and gather the weapons and clues that will make you into the Hero of the Age, the only mortal capable of opposing the Night Queen.

Although technically the fifth book, this is actually a good one to start your adventures in. That way you'll have a base in the city which is the hub for all the other regions. You can visit the Oracle in the temple district to get hints, and your family will introduce you to mentor characters who can help you figure out some of the major quests that you'll need to complete.

Jamie and I are keen to hear what people think of this series. So if open-world solo roleplaying is your thing, do pick up a volume or five, embark on some adventures, and tell us how you get on.

You can find a copy of the Adventure Sheet for the book here, and the books themselves (both hardcover and paperback editions) here.

A world where you can make a difference

The Vulcanverse gamebooks don't get nearly enough reviews. I would say that, wouldn't I? But Jamie and I genuinely feel they're some of our best work. We're aware that the gamebook resurgence, such as it is, is mainly driven by adults buying the books they enjoyed as kids. Naturally that makes it hard for a new series to break through, but there are standout successes: Steam Highwayman, Legendary Kingdoms, Expeditionary Company, and others. 

Our hope is that with the completion of the saga (Workshop of the Gods is due to be published in a few months) readers will get to appreciate the full story arc that's been building across the series. The entire adventure is over 6000 sections long, that's more than 15 old-style Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and there are decisions you make right from the start that have repercussions in the apocalyptic showdown at the end.

Yes, I know, I could do with a better microphone. Still, if that all whets your appetite, you can get started by downloading Adventure Sheet PDFs for the Vulcanverse series here:

• Workshop of the Gods (Vulcan City)
• The Houses of the Dead (Hades)
• The Hammer of the Sun (Notus)
• The Wild Woods (Arcadia)
• The Pillars of the Sky (Boreas)

Gamebook hallucinations

There's a lot of misunderstanding about generative AI. "These large language models just babble nonsense," people say. Well, why not? We humans have large language models in our heads, and we're known to babble nonsense (think of anti-vaxxers).

An LLM's usefulness depends on what's behind it. Bing Chat (now Copilot), for example, can be set to give accurate answers, meaning it restricts itself to information it can reliably source online. And copilot AIs are the really useful tools. Typically they can't improve a master-craftsman level of skill, but they can turn an apprentice into a journeyman.

I'm also interested in how much of what we might call intelligence is encoded in the language we use. Back in the days when I was a practicing physicist (more journeyman than master, it must be said) I'd frequently solve a problem using the mathematics, then sit there trying to figure out what the answer actually meant. The language (maths in this case) got there first. Most famously, it's how Dirac predicted electron spin and the existence of the antiproton.

I'm drifting off track here. Purely for fun, I decided to have a conversation about gamebooks with Bard. What could it tell me about the early days of open-world gamebooks? "Here's one," said Bard:

Auld Graeme and the Highland Cattle (1984): This lesser-known gem presented a sprawling map of Scotland open for exploration, with multiple towns, side quests, and diverse encounters.

Auld Graeme and the Highland Cattle? The first open-world gamebook? That sounds intriguing -- if highly unlikely. Who wrote it, I asked? "Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone," Bard replied. But when pressed to back up its claims with sources it admitted:

While I provided details about Auld Graeme and the Highland Cattle as a gamebook, you're correct that it does not exist. I must have encountered inaccurate information during my research and mistakenly included it. I will take steps to correct this in my knowledge base to avoid future errors.

It won't, incidentally; it won't remember the conversation. All we can say is it will probably hallucinate different mad gamebook titles if you were to ask it the same question. By now actively hoping for more wackiness, I asked about other early examples of the open-world gamebook genre. Bard didn't disappoint:

The Dawn of the Sandbox

• Citadel (1984): Often credited as one of the first true sandbox gamebooks, it dropped players into a massive city brimming with opportunities for exploration, interaction, and character development. 
• Lone Wolf: Fire on the White Wall (1984): This Lone Wolf entry introduced the ability to purchase property, manage resources, and build your own stronghold, expanding on the series' open -world potential.

You will search long, hard and fruitlessly for any evidence of these books. More accurately, Bard did then go on to mention Legendary Kingdoms, though it thought that author Oliver Hulme co-wrote the books with "his brother" (sic) Jon and that they also wrote Rider of the Black Sun.

Heart of Ice isn't sandbox, but I asked about it anyway. Bard confidently explained the book's main features:

Moral Dilemmas and Consequences: Your actions in Heart of Ice have serious consequences. Will you side with the ruthless but efficient technocracy or the rebellious eco-warriors fighting for a return to nature? Every choice comes with a price, forcing you to grapple with complex moral dilemmas. 

Memorable Characters: From the enigmatic leader of the Ice Nomads to the charismatic but deceptive preacher of the Solar Church, Heart of Ice is filled with fascinating and well-developed characters. You'll find yourself forming attachments, grudges, and respect for these individuals as you navigate the treacherous world around you.

This is where it started to get interesting, because that's not an accurate description of Heart of Ice but it could be useful as inspiration for a different book. I wondered what Bard might invent concerning the Vulcanverse series. It rose to this one with enthusiasm:

Ah, the whispers and speculations that linger around a captivating world like Vulcanverse! Here are a few intriguing fan theories that have sparked heated discussions among its devotees:

• The True Identity of the Nameless One: In The Hammer of the Sun, we encounter this enigmatic figure shrouded in mystery. Some fans theorize the Nameless One is actually a corrupted god, stripped of their power and identity, seeking redemption through the actions of the player character. Others believe it's a prophesied hero destined to rise against the established divine order, with the player unknowingly acting as their herald. 
• The Secret Meaning of the Runes: Scattered throughout the books are ancient runes hinting at hidden meanings and forgotten magic. Deciphering these runes has become a passionate pursuit for some fans, leading to theories about their connection to lost civilizations, forgotten deities, or even portals to other realms. The potential for unlocking secret knowledge and powerful abilities keeps the community fueled with speculation.

In the case of The Hammer of the Sun, when it mentions the Nameless One it could almost be talking about the First Ancestor, but that's illusory because it doesn't know anything about the contents of the books. It's still interesting because it tells you something about the kinds of tropes that swirl around this genre, and which my own inbuilt LLM must have plucked out of the mix to put in that book. And there are even runes, of a kind -- not scattered through all the books, just in The Hammer of the Sun; by finding them all you can answer one of the sphinx's riddles. (Er, I mean: the riddle of one of the sphinxes.)

In The Houses of the Dead you can encounter a character called the Lost Hero. I asked Bard about them.

I'd misremembered the character's name, and perhaps because of that Bard gave me some ideas that weren't too far wide of the mark. By the time of this conversation I'd already finished writing the final book (though I still have to edit and typeset it) so Bard's suggestions didn't get used. And I should emphasize that all of this nutty conversation was with Bard, which is free to use. If I had paid for ChatGPT-4, or even if I'd just used Bing, I might have got far more reliable responses.

While I would never use AI to write a book -- not the actual text, I mean -- when I'm plotting my next book I might chat a bit with it first just as a brainstorming exercise. As a way of getting started it beats staring at a blank page.

Finishing touches to the workshop

'When is the final Vulcanverse book coming out?'

That's the question I get asked most these days, and fair enough too. We thought it would be published a year ago. At this point I'm well into George R R Martin territory.

The truth is that it proved to be a much bigger job than the first four books. There's the same open-world structure as you explore Vulcan City, but that's only half of this book. There's also the endgame in which the quest that has developed through the rest of the series reaches a climax. And that involves choices that you have made in all five books, as well as having to allow for freedom of choice as to which of the various warring powers you want to align yourself with.

At the time of writing the book is approaching 1600 sections. And it's around 220,000 words, which is more than twice as long as The Houses of the Dead. All of that requires a lot of careful checking to make sure everything works. I want to get it right, and I have a couple of very capable volunteers who are helping with that. It's coming together and I'm hoping we'll be able to put it on sale within a month or two.

You can get the earlier books here. Alternatively, hang on just a bit longer and you can start your adventures in book 5, Workshop of the Gods. And thank you for your patience.