Where troubles melt like lemon drops

What is it about magic and colour? At a role-playing convention years ago, Greg Stafford described to the breathless Glorantha groupies a scene in a RuneQuest movie that was pitched to the deaf ears of Hollywood. Something has happened to remove magic from the world, said Stafford, and the movie would show this by switching from colour to black-&-white.

It made me think first of A Matter of Life and Death (the difference between monochrome and colour is used more interestingly there) but the very next neuron to fire recalled SPI's 1975 boardgame Sorcerer, in which wizards attuned to different colour frequencies vied for power by enticing each other to battle in zones whose hue favoured their own magic. Sorcerer created quite a stir among us boardgamers because it was SPI's first foray into fantasy gaming - which, as they usually catered for the hardcore wargamer, was a crisis of confidence brought on, no doubt, by the growing success of grungy dungeon games. If you're interested, you can get a glimpse of the rulebook here.

A few years after that, in 1986, Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson came out with the Duel Master series - for me, their best gamebooks, and probably my favourite gamebooks ever. The first (and best) of these, Challenge of the Magi, involved two duelling sorcerers of the Rainbow Land (part of which unaccountably overlapped with Warwickshire and/or the poems of Thomas Lodge) whose magic obeyed a chromatic taxonomy:

• Red for fire
• Black for death
• Blue for illusion
• Green for nature
• White for... um, "holy" stuff

There were two books. Each player took one and you chased each other around the map of the Rainbow Land, trying to fake out your opponent so he didn't guess the colours on which you were strongest. OK, in the era of videogames that probably doesn't sound too impressive, but we had to make our own fun* in those days. And anyway, books are like radio: the pictures are better.

To this day I never figured out how Mark and Jamie made those books work. There was some kind of crazed obsessive-compulsive genius at work in the amazingly detailed rules (which were, nonetheless, easy to use) and the complex intricacies of the flowchart (likewise). And they were meaty, these tomes: 800 sections each. And you got a solo option.

They should have been a massive success, but the tragedy of gamebooks was that the craze didn't last long enough to really support any of the interesting things they were evolving into. That's why it surprises me when some modern revivals of the medium seem to aspire only to setting the clock back to simple dungeon-bashing. By the late-'80s gamebooks were already way beyond that.

(For the sake of balance I should add that there are plenty of modern gamebooks that have continued to innovate in terms of rules, setting and, most interestingly, the depth and quality of the storytelling - just look at the quality of most Windhammer Prize entries, for example.)

Fabled Lands LLP has the rights to the Duel Master books and they are cherry-ripe for conversion to apps. A little bit of handheld tech is perhaps all they needed to get the success they deserved. Twenty-seven years on, we'll see what we can do.


* Although, as Mamet says, everybody makes their own fun; if you don't make it yourself it isn't fun, it's entertainment.

Kickstarter - the results are in

No need to look glum. I don't know what's going on with quiff boy and those other fellows in Bob Harvey's picture above, but the Way of the Tiger campaign on Kickstarter has now concluded and it was an outstanding success.  If you didn't have enough money to buy one of the full-cover hardbacks, don't despair. There will be a paperback edition from Fabled Lands Publishing sometime next year.

Fabled Lands book seven? It's the inevitable question. We're certainly considering it. But if you're thinking it would be a shoo-in on Kickstarter, I do just have to point out a couple of caveats.

Nobody actually gets to take home forty thousand dollars for The Way of the Tiger. Kickstarter takes a fee off the top. Artists must be paid. The text must be scanned, cleaned up and edited. Printing, packaging and postage eats up most of what remains.

And Way of the Tiger was already written - six books of it, at any rate - and the new artwork was able to build on what Bob Harvey and the cover artist had aleady done.

In contrast, FL book 7 needs to be written. It must have all-new illustrations by Russ. (Everyone agree? Thought so.) An awesome cover image too that must hold its own beside Kevin Jenkins's classic paintings. And then there's editing and typesetting. That all has to be paid for by the profit margin, not the whole amount raised.

Profit is not the right word anyway, as the hundreds of man-hours that Richard S Hetley, Mikaël Louys, David Walters and others put into running the WOTT Kickstarter campaign were purely a labour of love You could say, in effect, that Kickstarter took all their unpaid efforts at one end and turned those into a couple of thousand bucks to pay editors and artists with.

Of course, that's not all a Kickstarter campaign does. Its main value is as a publicity campaign to make people aware that Way of the Tiger is back. If new readers flock to join the nostalgia buffs willing to spend $50 a book, then it becomes a viable business.

About a decade ago, there was a show on British television called Restoration.The idea was to get the viewers to vote which of several worthy but crumbling old buildings would get lottery funding. Each project had to explain how the restored building would save itself from sliding off into penury again. In most cases you had well-intentioned twits pitching the repurposing of (say) an 18th century Shropshire manor house into an arts commune. "Artists will live here and paint and the public can come and buy their work, and that will pay for maintenance of the property." They might just as well have dynamited the bloody building right there and then.

Faced with the exact same problem, the Landmark Trust came up with an ingenious solution. Charitable donations pay to restore old buildings, which are then rented out to the public as holiday homes via a second, non-charitable organization whose profits go to sustaining the buildings. This works because it is a real business. A successful Kickstarter needs to be less like Nigel Means-Well, more like the Landmark Trust.

What that boils down to is whether Way of the Tiger or Fabled Lands can make the next step. Can they go from having a hundred or so fans who remember them with open-walleted affection to several thousand fans who will buy the paperbacks and apps at a moderate price? We'll test the water with WOTT paperbacks next year, and that may indeed point the way to Fabled Lands books 7, and 8, and 9, and...

Whoops, mustn't get carried away!

In his house at R'lyeh

Having mentioned Old Ones, I can't let Halloween pass without recommending I N J Culbard's fabulous graphic novel adaptation of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. We never got del Toro's long-promised Mountains movie - not yet anyway - but this is the next best thing.

The universe has never seemed a more alien place than it is in Lovecraft's Antarctica, and crucially Culbard adds to the terror of the story by humanizing the tiny, helpless protagonists in the midst of a continent of unknowability. I'm not sure I'd agree with Rachel Cooke's review in The Observer newspaper that draws comparisons with Tintin and Boy's Own. Ms Cooke must have been reading Tintin and the Pit of Eldritch Horror, or else was thinking of all those Old Ones running curio shops and talking in mockney. But hey, she liked it.

While we're on the subject of the Cthulhu mythos, I found that the gamebook/Dungeons and Dragons variant spelling of shoggoth is not as risible as it seems. Well, it is, but it's also slightly supported by canon. (I'm not casting the first stone, me. If I'd known more Romany in the 1980s, at least one country in Legend would have had a different name. And no excuse for that, really, as I had a schoolfriend who called all us Anglo kids "gaujoes"; he could have told me.)

The original Mountains novella is worth a look too, and may be a good place to start if you've never read Lovecraft. There's an excellent article by M Christian that includes some of the illustrations from the  Astounding Stories publication in 1936. Mr Christian notes:

"What’s particularly interesting about At the Mountains of Madness is how it forms a bridge between Lovecraft’s mythology. Before it, his 'horrors from beyond' were more mythological, but with At the Mountains of Madness he instead moves in a more science fiction like direction - a change many other reviewers have called extremely significant for his very long-lasting popularity."

The last word goes to Ech Pi El himself:

"For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls..."

Brr. Happy Halloween.

WOTT no excuses?

If you don't know by now that the Kickstarter campaign for The Way of the Tiger has but a day or two to run, there's really no point me telling you again, is there? But you might want to hear it from the mouths of the chaps who originally conceived of the most famous non-violent professional killer in the whole of gamebook fantasy. For lo, here are interviews with Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith.

Jamie and Mark talk about the origins of the (very neat) tactical combat system, how the books were written, the real nature of the world of Orb (more Greek city-states than Oriental fiefs), and the plans for new books and apps.

There's still (just) time to get in on the act. Here's that link again. And if the total hits $40,000 (which it very well might) there'll be a video interview with Jamie and Mark giving away even more Orbsome secrets.

My work here is done.

Time's running out

"'Ere, mush, have a shufty at this little bargain. Nice, eh? It's a Kickstarter for Way of the Tiger, and you don't get many of them to a tenner. Only got a few days left on the clock, an' all, so you better get moving. Me? I'm an Old One, aren't I? Yeah, an Old One running a shop. What's wrong with that, then? Gotta make a living, en't I? I've got some nice elder things here if you're interested. Knick-knacks yer granny would love - if she's a freakin' Innsmouth mutant, that is, har har. Oh, that Lovecraft geezer, 'e gave us Old Ones such a bad press, you'd think we was all monsters, eh? Talking of 'love crafts' and that, if you want to step around back I've even got a shaggoth. Yes, I said shaggoth. 'Ere, who you callin' a perversion..?"

OK, I don't know what an Old One is doing in Way of the Tiger either. A lot of dope got smoked in the eighties. To many gamebook writers, the decade is a complete blur. Luckily, in these much sharper times you're unlikely to zone out Cheech and Chong style and miss the closing hours of the WOTT Kickstarter campaign. Still, best not take any chances. It really would be an unnameable horror to wake up on Friday and realize you failed to secure your very own gorgeous colour hardback edition. And after all, it's only a few squid.

Way of the Tiger closes in on stretch goal five

The Way of the Tiger campaign on Kickstarter is entering the final stretch and for me the most exciting goal is finally within reach. If the pledge total reaches $35,000, Leo Hartas will be commissioned to create a map of Irsmuncast, which is one of the WOTT cities.

The youngsters among you may never have heard of Leo Hartas, so let me assure you he is possibly the world master of fantasy maps. OK, I haven't done a survey lately but he's certainly one of the masters. Twelve million Fighting Fantasy readers can't be wrong. You want a teeming warren of rogue-haunted streets, an oozy network of sluggish foetid canals, a suggestion of looming peak-roofed buildings, a scattering of creepy cemeteries, dour prisons and numinous temples? Leo's your fella.

As well as being an expert scribbler, Leo co-hosts a radio show called The Bantering Boys. Three chaps engage in wittily inconsequential chit-chat and play the odd bit of music. It's all very English. Tune in Thursday evenings at 9 pm if that's your cup of tea.

If you were thinking of investing in a hardback set of WOTT gamebooks, the city map is a reward worth raiding the housekeeping money for. I'm still hoping I'll be able to pay Leo to continue my Mirabilis comic book epic eventually. But for that I'd need a bigger Kickstarter.

A neck romancer

I think of Crypt of the Vampire as my first gamebook, but it’s moot. I’d already written the magazine version of Castle of Lost Souls. That was serialized in White Dwarf in the summer of 1984, several months before the Golden Dragon series launched, and later got reworked as the sixth GD title. But Crypt was the first time I’d taken on a whole book.

Those were busy times. I had to turn down designing the PC game “Eureka by Ian Livingstone” because of all my magazine and book commitments. Maybe that was a mistake, as my friend Steve Foster, who wrote it in my place, told me he bought his first house on the proceeds. (The picture below, that's us back then in our slimmer days. I'm the one reading Captain America.) But at least with Golden Dragon I got my name on the title page. The road that’s grassy and wants for wear, you see.

Crypt and the later books nearly didn’t happen. In spring of 1984, while I was writing the first instalments of Castle of Lost Souls, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson offered me a contract to do a series of gamebooks for Games Workshop. I’d done bags of work for GW before – an entire role-playing game in 1980 called Adventure (never published; GW acquired the RuneQuest rights) and then in 1983 an entire Questworld campaign pack with Oliver Johnson (never published; GW lost the RQ rights). In the case of the gamebooks, though, they seemed to be serious. They were willing to pay an advance, and that was a first.

Except… it was £350 per book, which was a pittance even in the ‘80s. And it would have been an exclusive contract, meaning I couldn’t work with any other publisher. “Why would Ian and Steve want to compete with Fighting Fantasy?” I wondered. For whatever reason, I dragged my heels about signing and was mighty glad I did, as a matter of weeks later I went to see Angela Sheehan at Dragon Books, had a nice long chat, and walked out with a two-book deal.

Originally Temple of Flame was down as the first book in the series, and the contract describes the other as “Dungeon of the Undead”. I think it was probably my dad who said, “Put ‘vampire’ in the title, it’ll grab people more than ‘undead’.” The publishers wanted to call it Crypt of Dracula, but I wasn’t having that. These books would be read by kids, and I didn’t want their first experience of Bram Stoker’s creation to be in a gamebook. Dracula was already in public domain, Stoker having died seventy-two years earlier, but I believe writers owe a creative courtesy to each other that lasts a lot longer than the term of copyright – though, regrettably, not everyone shares that view.

For the new edition, I’ve revised the text slightly to excise the trad fantasy elements (a hobgoblin, an elf) that seemed most intrusive. Now the atmosphere is very slightly more Gothic, the setting less definitely medieval. “Ah!” the DW players will say, “but isn’t Wistren Wood in Ellesland?” And so it is, but my Legend games have moved on – past the Last Trump at the end of The Walls of Spyte, even – to a time of matchlocks and sabres*.

But that’s getting close to a foolish consistency. Whether or not Crypt of the Vampire is set in Legend, at heart it belongs to the lurid fairytale world of Hammer horror, where Cushing’s alert, flashing gaze locked with the fiery brooding in the eyes of Lee, and dark ivy-choked halls waited in the depths of darker woods. I like what Johnny S Geddes said about Crypt on Demian Katz’s gamebook page:

“Every now and then around midnight, and especially when there's thunder outside, I go back and take another tread through the enchanted forest leading to a dark mansion.”

That’s how I like to think of it being enjoyed. And, with Halloween almost upon us, here’s the chance to curl up with something creepy. The new edition also has Leo Hartas’s illustrations, incidentally – it was Leo’s first book as well as mine. Start as you mean to go on, that's our motto.

* Update 2024: In fact that gunpowder-powered version of Legend never came about, as I realized that the kind of campaign I was planning to run wasn't a good fit with the tastes of some of my players. So the Legend you'll see in my Jewelspider RPG is the original Dark Ages/early medieval setting familiar from Dragon Warriors.