"The Girl King" (a one-shot Arthurian scenario)

This is a very brief idea that I jotted down as an adventure seed, intending one day to develop it more fully as a one-shot scenario. If you're planning a mini-campaign then with careful watering it could grow into that.

The inciting incident is that time travellers arrive in the Arthurian age and fake the sword in the stone incident to make their candidate the King of Britain. So all the knights turn up to draw the sword, but before young Arthur gets his chance the time travellers use some kind of tech (laser drilling, hologram, whatever) so that their candidate (who happens to be a young woman) draws it.

Some of the player-characters should know what went on; others think it’s genuine. You'll need to give the former group a reason not to share the info right away. Maybe they saw the girl (let's call her Moira; Gwen would be signposting too much) with a group of strange folk with a weird device, and then when she steps forward and whips the sword out of the stone they suspect wizardry.

So Arthur remains a squire – but maybe nonetheless the best candidate, as after all he's the rightful King. Even though Moira champions a bunch of very worthy causes: feminism, tolerance, fair distribution of wealth, and so on, she isn't of this time. Good intentions alone aren't enough. Maybe she knows what needs doing but Arthur is the one who can actually do it.

The time travellers? I hadn't given them much thought, but that could be where Nimue and Viviane come into the picture. I envisage them as rather like management consultants, coming in with lots of ideas (some of them good) about how to improve society, but without the lifelong hands-on experience of the people who actually grew up here.

Ideally the adventure shouldn't come down too hard one way or the other between Moira and Arthur. This is two “good guys” in conflict (assuming that Arthur is ever made aware of the truth) while the real antagonist is the wretched status quo that both would like to fix. (If you want to embody all the problems in one figurehead villain, you could use King Claudas in league with the invading Saxons.) Perhaps by combining their strengths (insight into the future on one side, leadership on the other) Moira and Arthur can make it work -- but arranging that alliance will be up to the players.

Overview

A caveat first about structuring this scenario in three acts. For a one-shot, all right, I'll admit it does help to conceive of the narrative flow in advance, because you can't rely on players who have only just created their characters to get the wind in their sails and take things off in an entirely unexpected direction. But I still insist that applying the self-consciously authorial approach of act breaks and plot points to an extended campaign is selling roleplaying short. The best stories are not constrained to the shape of a Hollywood script paradigm or (essentially the same thing) a management memo. So you can imagine me gritting my teeth as we break the scenario down in this way.

OK, this one-shot adventure unfolds over three acts with room for subplots and player improvisation. It balances intrigue, ethical dilemmas, and action, while allowing players to shape the outcome. As far as rules are concerned I would probably opt for GURPS 4e but have given stats below for Pendragon because -- well, it would be rude not to.

Most of the player-characters should be native to the Arthurian setting (envisaged as more or less 5th century AD Britain) but if you have a large enough group then one PC could be part of the time travelling group (see below). The characters have not met each other before assembling at the stone to watch knights trying to draw the sword on May Day. (Traditionally the ceremony is at Christmas or New Year, but I think the year ought to start in spring and in any case it fits better with the rapid progression to possible open warfare.)

The time travellers are operating covertly and so are dressed in clothing appropriate to this era. They portray themselves as French to explain differences in manner, accent, and so on. Moira, although one of the time travellers, affects to be from northern Britain and pretends not to know them. Moira could be a player-character, and as it’s a one-shot the other players will not know that she’s from another time.

Act I: The Sword in the Stone

Scene 1: Gathering at the Stone

Nobles, knights, and squires gather to witness the attempt to draw the sword. This is an annual event. Arthur, still Ector’s squire, is present, as are Moira and the other disguised time travellers. 

Other knights try and fail to draw the sword from the stone. Before Arthur gets to try, Moira draws the sword with subtle tech assistance (holograms or a device concealed in the stone). 

Observant player-characters might notice these clues that something untoward is going on: 

• A faint glow or mechanical sound as Moira draws the sword. 
• A brief glimpse of the time travellers' unusual tools or attire. 
• Moira’s initial hesitation or a whispered exchange with her “advisors” – as she is supposedly a Briton and they recently arrived from France, she isn’t supposed to know them but is clearly familiar.

Scene 2: Reactions and Rifts

Ector and Kay are puzzled; Merlin told them Arthur was the true-born king. 

Arthur is privately disappointed but outwardly supportive; he has not yet learned he is Uther Pendragon’s son. Ector could reveal that to one of the player-characters, or they could overhear him telling Kay, making them privy to an important secret.

King Claudas, if present, sees an opportunity to sow dissent. 

The player-characters have choices to make:

• Investigate the strange occurrence. 
• Align with Moira, Arthur, or remain neutral. 
• Gather information on the time travellers.

Act II: Seeds of Doubt

Scene 1: The Truth Unveiled 

The characters may uncover evidence of time travel:

• Physical Evidence: A discarded high-tech tool (which will seem sorcerous to them). 
• Eyewitnesses: A peasant saw “those foreigners” working some strange magic when Moira went to draw the sword. 
• Dialogue: Perhaps Moira (if an NPC) confides in a trusted PC, revealing her mission.

Scene 2: Political Manoeuvring 

Moira promotes progressive reforms, gaining followers but also resistance. 

Arthur earns quiet support among traditionalists and those who value his character. However, Arthur himself may be reluctant to go along with his more ardent followers, as he values stability over personal ambition.

King Claudas and his Saxon allies exploit the division. Meanwhile, British nobles jockey for power, complicating alliances.

Scene 3: Merlin and Nimue’s Role

The time travellers (Nimue, Viviane, Moira and Bedivere) aim to guide history toward their vision but lack subtlety. But over time Bedivere and Viviane begin to admire Arthur’s potential, putting them in conflict with Nimue. They recognize that Moira, as a person of their own era, can have exemplary goals but lacks the cultural understanding to implement them. Possibly it would be better to deal with Arthur and try to influence him. They approach the player-characters, offering alliances or rewards to get them to act as intermediaries with Arthur.

The PCs must decide whether to expose Moira, back her, or support Arthur. Some of them might also want to leverage Nimue’s technology for their own goals.

Act III: The Saxon Threat

Scene 1: A Common Enemy 

The Saxons, aided by Claudas, launch a major attack. Moira and Arthur must unite their factions or risk annihilation. 

Several challenges confront the characters:

• Can they convince Moira and Arthur to cooperate despite their differences? 
• Can they rally disillusioned knights and commoners?
• How will they navigate betrayals among the nobles?
• Can they convince Arthur he must oppose the new "lawfully chosen" monarch?

Scene 2: The Final Battle 

This is the climactic encounter. The characters may take leadership or advisory roles, directing troops, or they might be sent on missions involving personal combat. Meanwhile the time travellers attempt to intervene with technology from their era, risking exposure. 

Ideally Moira and Arthur will combine their strengths, or else one takes the lead. The characters’ choices should determine whether Britain emerges united or fractured.

Key NPCs 

Arthur (17 years old): Humble, capable, and destined, though initially unsure of himself. 

Moira (18): Charismatic and forward-thinking, but arrogant and inexperienced in medieval leadership. Like her fellow time travellers she comes from the 25th century, where she is a D.Phil student in Temporal Studies & Interpretive Dance at Grainer College, University of Derby. Her real name is Jennie Hill.

Nimue (33), Viviane (37) and Bedivere (36): Moira’s fellow time travellers with advanced knowledge but limited cultural understanding. Their real names are Roberta Ford, Karen Darvill, and Roy Russell.

Ector (38): A steadfast and pragmatic guardian, torn between loyalty to Arthur and the knowledge that the kingdom needs stability.

Kay (19): Often brash and proud. He might resent Arthur or Moira’s rise and seek a way to distinguish himself. Ultimately, however, he is loyal to Arthur and will redeem himself.

Leodegrance (35): A noble supporter of the "rightful" monarch, potentially split between Moira’s apparent legitimacy and Arthur’s vision and destiny. His ties to Camelot could influence the players' choices and alliances.: 

King Claudas (31): A manipulative villain embodying the era’s worst traits.

Where is Merlin while all this is going on?

Nimue has trapped him in a “in a stone” (some kind of multidimensional matrix) or in cryogenic sleep. The implications of his imprisonment are: 

• Players may have the option to rescue Merlin, but doing so could risk coming into direct conflict with the time travellers. 
• If Merlin gets free he prefers to let events play out so as to to test Arthur and discover the time travellers' intentions. He might take the guise of a hermit, bard, or commoner. 
• Merlin could act as a distant advisor, communicating through dreams, omens, or letters. This approach lets the player-characters and major NPCs take centre stage, while Merlin remains an enigmatic presence. 

Here are some enemy knight stats compatible with the Pendragon RPG, with the proviso that I haven't played Pendragon in decades so am not rock-solid about the rules.

Generic Enemy Knight (competent but average)

• SIZ: 14 
• DEX: 9 
• STR: 13 
• CON: 13 
• APP: 10 
• Damage: 5d6 
• Hit Points: 27 
• Major Skills: 
• Sword: 15 
• Lance: 12 
• Horsemanship: 13 
• Awareness: 10 
• Battle: 8 
• Armor: Chainmail (10 points), shield (+6 points if used). 
• Personality Traits: 
• Valorous: 14 
• Proud: 13 
• Reckless: 10

Tactics: Such knights rely on straightforward combat techniques, usually charging with a lance before switching to sword and shield. They are loyal but lack deep cunning.

Elite Enemy Knight (a dangerous adversary) 

• SIZ: 15 
• DEX: 12 
• STR: 14 
• CON: 14 
• APP: 12 
• Damage: 5d6 
• Hit Points: 29 
• Major Skills: 
• Sword: 18 
• Lance: 16 
• Horsemanship: 16 
• Awareness: 12 
• Battle: 10 
• First Aid: 10 
• Armor: Chainmail (10 points), shield (+6 points if used). 
• Personality Traits: 
• Valorous: 16 
• Proud: 15 
• Honorable: 12

Tactics: An elite knight uses disciplined tactics, coordinating with allies and exploiting openings. He might dismount to fight in difficult terrain or switch to defensive play if wounded.

Sir Gerlach, Knight of King Claudas (named enemy NPC) 

Sir Gerlach is one of King Claudas’s most trusted knights, known for his ruthlessness and cunning. He is fiercely loyal to Claudas and harbours disdain for the ideals of chivalry espoused by Arthur’s circle. He could be a recurring antagonist, leading the Saxons’ elite forces or acting as Claudas’s enforcer. He might confront Arthur or Moira directly, forcing the players to intervene. His weakness is that he is fearful of sorcery -- which would include, in his eyes, any of the time travellers' "sufficiently advanced technology".

• SIZ: 16 
• DEX: 10 
• STR: 15 
• CON: 14 
• APP: 8 
• Damage: 6d6 
• Hit Points: 30 
• Major Skills: 
• Sword: 19 
• Lance: 15 
• Horsemanship: 14 
• Awareness: 14 
• Battle: 13 
• Intrigue: 11 
• Armor: Chainmail (10 points), shield (+6 points if used). 
• Personality Traits: 
• Valorous: 15 
• Cruel: 14 
• Reckless: 13 
• Deceitful: 12

Reputation: 1,000 Glory

Tactics: Sir Gerlach is a brawler who fights to win, not to preserve honour. He uses feints and dirty tactics such as attacking an enemy’s horse or taking hostages. His reputation might intimidate less-experienced knights.

(A different version of this adventure was originally published on my Patreon page.)

Try harder, Trekkers

Looking back from a quarter century on, it's hard to believe I cared that much. I'd just seen Star Trek Generations and I decided to tell Rick Berman what was wrong with it. Audacious, you might think. Pompous, even. But I stand by what I said then. If they didn't want constructive criticism, they could have written a better script. If any reader of Mirabilis has a bone to pick with me about mistakes in the story, I'll listen.

And I was aiming to help. They wanted to write a story of tragic sacrifice, but all they'd done was describe a high-stakes gamble that didn't pan out. The climax wasn't "a far, far better thing"; it was just "oops!" The letter went on:

"Mr Zimmerman is right. Heroic figures like Kirk and Spock have so often been seen to take extreme life-threatening risks that the only way to have them die in a way that works in narrative terms is when they are faced with certain death. When Spock died in The Wrath of Khan he knew in advance that his action would be fatal. But that wasn't the case with Kirk's death. Scrambling about on the collapsing bridge is the kind of thing he's done hundreds of times before. He knew he was taking a risk, but at no point did we actually get to see him make that crucial decision to sacrifice himself. In real life you could say that this turned out to be the one time his luck ran out, but the rules of real life aren't after all the rules of fiction.

"In this sense I believe Kirk's death was wasted. Obviously it is time to move on with the Trek movies now, but when a character like Kirk has been built up to such a genuinely mythic level the way he leaves life should be on a par with the way he's lived it -- full of sound and fury, and signifying a very great deal.

"This touches on a secondary problem I think you could have with subsequent Trek movies. You have a large cast there, and the awkward subplot with Data showed that it is not so easy to give time to every character and still maintain the narrative momentum demanded by a feature film. People aren't going to come into the theatres every two years to see the latest developments in an outer-space soap, and the more cerebral and complex character-based issues for which the TV series is justly famous are too subtle to carry an action movie. The best Trek films haven't just been TV episodes on a bigger screen, but stories with a big canvas and big ideas to fit.

"Mumon said, 'Do not shoot another's bow, do not ride another's horse, do not criticize another's work.' My suggestions are meant as constructive ones and I hope they don't give the impression that the movie as a whole wasn't good. It's just that I think it could have been great."

I even went so far as to enclose a five-page treatment for a follow-on Trek movie, in which the bad guys were the Yu, a neotic offshoot of humanity in the far future. Earth is now known as Terra, feared throughout the galaxy as the nerve centre of a ruthless empire. I described our time-travelling heroes' first glimpse of what was once their homeworld:

"Terra is not the blue jewel that it was in their own time, but a sinister shadow against the heavens, mustard yellow with pollution and crisscrossed by myriad lights marking out vast continent-spanning metropolises. A grim testament to the Yu's implacable totalitarian society."

A year and a half later, Star Trek First Contact came out. This time I realized the futility of firing off a letter about the flaws in the story. It would have had to be a much longer letter anyway. But there was one bit in the movie that got my seal of approval... No blue jewel, this.

The Cancel Crew

Here's a roleplaying campaign based around a time-travel agency. In the not-too-distant future, the world is run by Outthink, the crowdsourced gestalt decisions of groups of Humanities undergrads who have purged their professors and other patriarchal authority figures, along with oppressive cultural constructs like facts, knowledge and qualifications. (Think of the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree only without the intelligence part.) The PCs are agents of O.U.T.R.A.G.E. who receive instructions from Outthink. Each mission they are given the name of somebody they must go back in time to cancel. This is known as ‘deplatforming them from history’.

Three stipulations make the agents’ task a little harder than just murder hoboing. First, you have to get the person you’re cancelling to name names, ie speak on record about two acquaintances of theirs whose opinions on sensitive topics make them possible candidates for cancellation.

Second, you have to arrange the cancellation in such a way as to ensure the person is remembered by posterity (if they are remembered at all) in a way that belittles them. That ensures they serve as a lesson for others. Simply causing them to be forgotten by history is not as useful and may lead to you being assigned to self-criticism classes. (As for getting to them in childhood and steering them on a more acceptable path… oh no no no, where’s the satisfaction in that? They can repent, but they’ve still got to have done something to repent of.)

And that's the third stipulation: you score extra points if you can get them on record confessing the error of their ways so that posterity can see they were appropriately contrite for being so unwoke.

So to summarize:

1. Get them to give you at least two more names for the proscribed list. 
2. Don’t erase them from history, have their fame live on in a belittled and neutered form. 
3. Don’t mend their ways, have them admit the error of their ways.
4. Oh, and while you're in the past, be careful not to comment on the cuisine; that's culturally inappropriate.

It's okay to frame the target with a trumped-up charge, incidentally. A target's unpopularity alone is enough to make any charge stick. 'So what if it isn't true?' your superiors will say. 'It feels right to us, that's what counts.'

After each cancellation the present day will be subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) altered. It needn’t be a drastic world-shaking change. Life just becomes a little bit more impoverished with each sweep of the doctrinal red pen. The time travellers remember the timeline as it used to be, but nobody back home does, so gradually they’re drifting out of cultural sync with their era. If they don’t keep their mouths shut, eventually they’ll be up for cancellation themselves.

Possible candidates for cancellation? I’d steer clear of the big guns of history. Hitler, Stalin, Genghis, Mao – too obvious, not only from the GM’s point of view but from Outthink’s too. The defining characteristic of cancellation is its pettiness and futility – not correcting huge injustices for the benefit of humanity (sorry, hupersonity) but simply getting a boost of self-approval by sweeping history's dust under the carpet. So how about: Wernher von Braun, H P Lovecraft, Thomas Jefferson, Gandhi, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Disney, Thomas Malory, or Cecil Rhodes?

As an easy-in, you could start with contemporary figures whom the players might know of. That way if the campaign hooks them they'll be more willing to do some historical research further down the line. J K Rowling is a clear candidate by reason of egregious wrongthink. Both David Hume and George Bernard Shaw have excited the revisionists' ire. William Shatner supports an autism charity, but that can be exactly the same as supporting Nazism in O.U.T.R.A.G.E.'s book. Michael Richards is surely ripe for cancellation, and as a result the time travellers will return to a future where Seinfeld episodes are fifty percent less funny. They might have to chastise journalist Andy Ngo for assaulting Antifa activists' fists and boots with his face. Or maybe the singer Bryan Adams who, for pointing out that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a live animal market, was declared "so, so, so, so racist" by a clear forerunner of Outthink -- although Adams arguably perpetrated a more unforgivable offence by inflicting "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" on the world's music charts.

They can build up to cancelling Harlan Ellison for injudicious improv. And jolly good luck to them taming the robustly irascible Ellison. Later on see if you can find figures from history who the players have never heard of. That way they don’t bring any preconceptions to the table.

And here’s one further wrinkle in time to introduce as the campaign progresses: a further-future agency with very different mores is coming back to edit your timeline. ‘Who SJWs the SJWs?’ as Juvenal said. (That was in a cleaned-up version of his life; obviously the original Juvenal had to be cancelled.)

FAQs

What rules should I use?
Paranoia springs to mind, and GURPS has a whole campaign based around parallel worlds, but here are some other time-travel games. Or how about James Wallis's Fugue system, which is free on DriveThruRPG?

What's the PCs' time machine called?
Since you asked, it's the Huntigowk.

What does O.U.T.R.A.G.E. stand for?
I'll tell you after midday.

Back to the future

David Bailey is a man who gives the lie to the notion that accountants are boring. An inventive and artful referee of Tekumel games, he’s also an imaginative author, creative problem-solver, passionate fan of comics and science fiction, gifted photographer (less well-known in that field than his namesake, admittedly) and one of the founders of game developer Black Cactus. During his career as an accountant, he wasn’t working out how to get tax allowance for business expenses, either; he was a forensic accountant, more Inspector Morse than Spreadsheet Phil.

So when David comes up with an idea for a roleplaying scenario, I listen. His latest was a doozy – to send his Tekumel characters back thousands of years from the relative stability of the Second Imperium to the high adventure of the Time of No Kings.

“What about getting back?” I said. “Reverse the spell, and risk ending up lost in time? Or get frozen by Excellent Ruby with the chance that posterity misplaces the docket saying when to unfreeze you?”

David: “Well, I think they have to hope to get back, but throw in some wives and children, and affiliations and a decade of work…?”

“OK, so they’d potentially be there for a long while? There’s even the implication they’ve been brought through time, Corum-like, for a specific purpose.”

“Perhaps they do finally find a way to get back,” agreed David, “but at huge cost to the new friends and family they’ve made in the past? Maybe returning to their time will potentially trigger a devastating A-bomb level event? Can we create a mature enough scenario that the players are genuinely conflicted about returning?”



That’s a fine goal to aim for, and typical of David that he would be considering the tone and nuance of the scenario right up front. It got me thinking: what might deter somebody from wanting to get “back to the future” and how would we achieve that kind of dilemma in a movie or novel?

The most obvious way would be to make our time traveller a nebbish, passed over for promotion, frustrated in his ambitions, or just an under-achiever who never got the breaks in life. Then he goes back to the past and suddenly he's feted as a hero. Naturally he'd be tempted to remain there rather than go back to a dead-end future.

A more challenging (and interesting) approach would be to start with unlikeable characters, maybe criminals or terrorists of the most unpleasant stamp. The authorities are closing in. Perhaps the characters are trapped and it looks like the only outcome will be death in a hail of police bullets, but then they stumble on a strange machine and are whisked back through the centuries, and there in the past they get a stab at redemption. Having saved the people of that time they also find they’ve saved themselves, so returning to the future is unattractive not only because they’d be jumping back into a deadly shoot-out, but because to do so would imply returning to an identity that no longer fits with who they are.

Or there's the hard SF approach. The time traveller realises she has changed the past, which of course means the billions of dice throws that lead to her original timeline are gone. She can't return to her future because it is not the same future as the one she set out from. All the people she knew there would never have been born. In a movie, you probably wouldn't have her realise that till after she got back ("show not tell") so the third act would be all about trying to return to the past where she at least still has friends and loved ones.

But those are all ways to pull it off through storytelling, and it's neither possible nor desirable to exert that level of authorial contrivance where player-characters are concerned. Instead all you can do is run the game with a mature tone in mind, and be ready to seize on the character arc moments that the players themselves provide.



For instance, in David’s campaign Jamie Thomson plays a jajgi (a form of well-preserved undead like a vampire, say, or Ardath Bey in The Mummy) so perhaps he could come face to face with his living self back in the past. Jamie is a good enough roleplayer to get something really interesting out of the conflict between an unending but unvarying existence and the full-blooded, breathing life in which the chusetl (dream-self) and pedhetl (passions) yet endure.

In his original premise, though, David wasn’t only looking for reasons why the player-characters might not want to go home to their own time. He’s hoping for a genuine conflict. They might want to return but now they have two lives, two sets of friends and families. Which do they choose? It’s hard (but not impossible) to make that bite just with attachments to NPCs, but I suggest that the best hard choice is an old storytelling classic: somebody has to sacrifice themselves, staying behind so that the others can escape, like Cavor among the Selenites.

Time out

I'm sure nobody wants a reading list for the weekend. Oh, you do? Well, you're in luck. Below I've listed some of the top alternate history stories of the last decade or two.

In a nutshell, alt-fic is about that Sliding Doors moment when a choice turns out to be a keystone event: making a new friend or losing an old one, a betrayal that can't be forgiven or a good deed that will never be forgotten. Or apes taking over the planet. (Well, of course, they did that either way. But that's a detail.)

In a sense all these stories are about time travel, but time is just the setting for the stuff that really matters, which are those moments where "two roads diverge in a yellow wood". It could be Roman legions in airships, astronauts flipping up their visors to reveal lizard snouts - cool stuff like that. But those foreground alt-realities won't bite unless they resonate with the deeper character themes. Brian Cox (no, not that one) says it best in this rant from Adaptation. Ignore the book links below if you must, but you have to watch that. Trust me. It's less than two minutes.

As Cox/McKee says, all stories are about that. In a TV show that works, the central theme is seamlessly woven through the story world: Buffy, Elementary, The Shield, The Sopranos. Other shows (naming no names), it feels like they picked the setting because it was cool and then nailed the themes on afterwards.

And then there's Doctor Who. Is there a single theme running through the whole thing, or is the strength of the show not in the fact that they can rejuvenate the lead every few years, but in being able to refocus and tell a completely fresh story every time they bring in a new companion?

Food for thought. And while mulling that over, if you really really want, here are those alt-reality sources. Lots of "if the Nazis had won" stories here, strangely enough. I suppose in a hundred years it will be ISIS:

BOOKS


TV/MOVIES

The road more traveled by

Following on from the previous post, I don't want to give the impression that all of my collaborations with Jamie consist of me writing something and then him taking over and cutting out half of it. They do say murder your darlings and, as Hitchcock and Highsmith pointed out (above), it helps to get a friend to do it for you.

Here's a case where it went a little differently. We were talking to the Fabled Lands agent, Piers Blofeld, about digital gamebooks. I mentioned time travel and how for it to really grip as a story it has to be personal. We talked about the old Falcon gamebooks that Jamie wrote with Mark Smith in the 1980s, and how those were very much in the 2000AD adventure style, but how maybe they could be rebooted with a little more relatability for a wider audience.

So I wrote this as a possible new way in to the story of a protagonist who gets to "fix" mistakes in time:

You always had a sixth sense. And people laughed at you for trusting it. But you knew better. The time your friends at high school piled into Billy’s older brother’s car to drive out for a picnic, and Billy had only had one beer but you felt something like a physical dread. Couldn’t get in the car. You watched them drive off and six hours later you watched the crane haul the car out of the west river.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” the cop asked.

“I had to study.”

Because you’d already learned not to talk about your glimpses of the future, even then. When people thought you could see what was coming up, they blamed you if it went bad. Best to say nothing. Keep the sixth sense – or whatever it was – to yourself.

But you learned to trust that sense. Right up till the last day of your life.

Okay, so then there's an elision to a scene in which you are in a plane crash...

A bang. It just sounded like a tyre blowout until the gravity switched off.

You wake up in the wreckage. Not too badly hurt, as far as you can tell, but you’re completely trapped in a cage of twisted seats and crushed fuselage. A liquid drips on you, causing an icy stab of panic until you realize it’s not aviation fuel but some kind of air con coolant. Even so, you can dully hear screams through the wreckage, and the smell of burning.

An overhead locker pops open and a bald man in a neat dark suit and grey trilby hat drops into the crumpled seat beside you. “You’re thinking you should’ve trusted your instincts,” he says.

“What? Who are you?” You strain to look past him into the locker. Is there a way out?

“I’m just guessing,” he goes on. “I can’t read minds or anything. Though I know what you’ll do now.”

You strain as far as the vice-like grip of your crushed seat rest will allow. The locker is empty, no escape route through to the outside. “Where did you come from? What happened? Was it a bomb on the plane?”

“A bomb?” He’s amused. “Like a terrorist incident? That’s ego talking, my friend. No, no terrorists. The universe has plenty of ways to kill you all on its own.”

He drones on and you listen with half your mind. He's telling you that many pasts and futures exist. Likens it to driving along a motorway. Spacetime can drift like a driver who’s nodding off, and that’s okay as long as the driver gets jolted awake when the tyres hit the hard shoulder. But if not he can go right off the road. And then there’s no getting back.

“Romulus can kill Remus, or vice versa, and you’re still on the blacktop. But if the wolf eats them both – that’s what we call a train wreck for time.”

“I thought we were talking about cars?”

“Ha! You see, right there, that’s what I’m looking for. You keep your wits about you. And then there are your premonitions, of course, where you see a few tracks over, what might happen or what could have been… That’s why we want you to join us.”

“Join you? Who the hell are you?” You struggle in the seat, but a wave of pain tells you there are at least a few broken bones. To think, you’re going to bleed to death or burn in the wreckage and your last conversation is with a madman.

He takes out an old-style fob watch with too many dials. “I’ll need your answer within 32 seconds. The fire hits the tanks then. To answer your question: we are the Curators. We locate the precious key moments of time, and if there’s an instability – a crack, if you like – we fix it.”

“And you want me to do that? But I have a marketing meeting in Seattle in four hours.”

“No you don’t. You don’t have a future. You don’t have a life. And you most certainly don’t have four hours. You have – “ he consults the watch “ – fifteen seconds. Yes or no? In or out? Life or death?”

Either way, this is the last day of your old life. But you could have a new life. If you agree to his offer, turn to 1. Just don’t take fifteen seconds to think about it.

We didn't use it. Why? Because we realized that the folks buying those old gamebooks aren't looking for a reboot. They want the untouched text. The classic edition, if you like. That's why we eventually released Blood Sword without completely overhauling the baroque tactical combat rules that I loathed. And similarly, Falcon came back to life exactly as if the intervening 30 years had never happened. And that's real time travel, I guess.



POSTSCRIPT: The time repair agency concept is one that's often explored in classic SF. To take one example: Philip K Dick's characteristically paranoid  "Adjustment Team", which inspired the movie The Adjustment Bureau. A rather more successful film adaptation was Predestination, based on Robert A Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies".

You never have to wait for breakfast

The Thomson-Smith series everybody talks about is The Way of the Tiger. Fair enough. Mixing Japanese martial arts with Dungeons and Dragons doesn't do it for me - and the ninjutsu and bushido stuff was never part of Mark Smith's original conception of the world of Orb either. But in the '80s it was all black pyjamas and nunchuks. Even Daredevil seemed to be wall-to-wall ninja back then. Way of the Tiger rode that wave, and you can't blame them.

Another '80s fixture was British comic 2000AD. Of course Judge Dredd wasn't my favourite. I preferred Nemesis the Warlock (which felt a bit Moorcockian), Ace Trucking Company (definite shades of Keith Laumer), and the resolutely downbeat Strontium Dog, whose demise (later retconned as "legend") surely inspired Avenger's apparently sticky and sudden end.

More of the spirit of Johnny Alpha was evident in the Falcon gamebooks. Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson wrote these books around the same time as Way of the Tiger, but that series has always overshadowed them. It's a shame. Falcon's time-travel concept allows for a diversity of setting and tone that WotT could never achieve. There's a dry humour as well as a dark bite to Falcon's adventures, and with multiple timelines as the theme sudden death is no longer quite such a metafictional minefield. Put it this way: Falcon could make a respectable movie or TV show, whereas in the case of WotT you could hardly help asking why an Occidental-looking guy kept using Japanese words and was trying to drop-kick that shoggoth with an orc on its back.

Well, no need to pick sides. You can have your kēki and eat it, because Fabled Lands Publishing is bringing back the Falcon series, starting this month with The Renegade Lord. It's 3033 AD, you're an agent of the Temporal Executive, and you have to stop the time traveller who is trying to change history before he, she, or it deletes the present. The wrinkle in the time stream is that the miscreant you're after seems to be one of your own superior officers.

We had this book ready for release at the end of last year, but we didn't know what to do about a cover. Then Jamie happened to get in touch with Peter Andrew Jones, the near-legendary artist responsible for some of the great gamebook covers of the '80s and '90s. Mr Jones kindly offered to remaster the cover for the new edition. So that's a point in favour of Facebook, in case you're still missing your hoverboard.

A talk with Jaume Carballo

Still (sort of) on the Necklace of Skulls theme this month, I had a long chat with Jaume Carballo, creative director at Cubus Games. You can read the first part here. Jaume is an interesting guy - the first time we got talking by email he was quoting Hobbes, which is not something you often find in the games industry following straight on from a discussion of logic markup. He's a big Hitchcock fan too, so it didn't take us long to bond.

In our latest chat, we surprisingly don't get onto cinema or philosophy, though we do cover all kinds of topics involving games and stories, and the combination of both. Also quantum physics, Game of Thrones, comics, and what to do if we had a time-travelling DeLorean. (And we got into a very long digression about the Catalan question, but I suspect that the other fellows at Cubus will censor that bit.)

The picture? I didn't have one of Jaume, so that's me in a very cold, squelchy and un-Barcelona-like part of south-west England.