The indigo triremes of Atlantis

"Experience swords and tragedy in the vein of Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné and Tanith Lee’s Night’s Master."

How did I miss this? I first fell in love with science fantasy through the Kane of Mars books by "Edward Powys Bradbury" (in reality our old mucker Mike Moorcock) which I discovered when I was about nine years old. Immediately my heart was whisked away to an exotic world of red deserts, soaring towers, flashing blades and ancient wonders. (Was Kane an aspect of the Eternal Champion? Of course not. Revisionist/marketing nonsense, that. He was his own man, and all the better for it.)

In Rose Bailey's game Bright & Terrible you wander the ancient world as an exile of lost Atlantis. It reminded me a bit of Abraxas (a lost continent of the world of fifty thousand years ago) where the players can travel to the mainland and interact with Neanderthals and Cro Magnon tribes to whom the inhabitants of Abraxas seem like gods. The difference is that Bright & Terrible is not set in deep imaginary prehistory like Abraxas but instead overlaps with the Bronze Age. All the action takes place in exile in that new world around the Mediterranean where the characters have only memories of the old world they've left behind -- a perfect springboard for stories.

Rose Bailey also wrote Cavaliers of Mars, set on "a planet of flashing swords and choking sands, of winking courtesans and lantern-lit canal cities." If you're as big a fan of science fantasy as I am there's no need to say more -- other than to thank Roger and Mike on Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice for pointing me in the right direction. Now I just have to find somebody else who loves this stuff as much as I do and maybe I can get a game going...

Personae

Maskwitches Of Forgotten Doggerland is exactly the sort of setting I love, just 'cause it's different. Oh, and because it looks a bit desperate and bleak, it's steeped in dreamlike deep myth, and it's about the infinite variety and weirdness of humankind. (Though personally I'd forget all about the 1970s stuff, that Stranger Things/Paper Girls shtick getting a bit threadbare* by now, and just play it all out in the Mesolithic.)

Bonus points because it evokes Jack Vance's story "The Miracle Workers", which you should hunt down and read if you can but if not here's an audio version. I also liked Jon Hodgson's recap on Twitter of some surprising historical facts:

Ack! I just read a really good thread about historical wargames and overcoming players’ natural but incorrect assumptions about historical fact. I learned so much researching Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland! Three (it might be five) facts that were new to me: 🧵

— Jon Hodgson (@JonnyHodgsonArt) September 22, 2022

*I know they're set in the '80s. But it's the same thing.

Some day my prints will come

We're big fans of Gary Chalk around here, not just for his astonishing artistic talent but because he's a true gentleman and a huge personality loved by all who know him. So it's a pleasure to spread the word about his new online shop where you can buy giclée prints of some of his best-known pictures. While stocks last, as they say, so don't delay.

A glimpse of the Vulcanverse

The Vulcanverse gamebooks so far have met with a mixed reception. I'm currently writing the final book in the series, Workshop of the Gods, and mindful of those readers who don't enjoy discovering quests for themselves I'm putting a lot of hand-holding in this one. Not quite to the extent of an old man running into a tavern to give you an adventure, mind you, but a cast of characters who will give you plenty of hints if you're gaming in a hurry and just want to motor through the the big plot points.

But it wasn't just the text that bothered some readers. Everybody seems to agree that Mattia Simone's artwork (the colour image above, for instance) is sensational but "there's not enough of it" complained many readers. We didn't have a budget to illustrate every scene even if we'd wanted to (and I tend to think, after all, that's what prose is for) but the French editions forthcoming from Alkonost are going to fix that. Each book in the series will have forty fabulous drawings by the immensely talented Gaucelm de Villaret. For example:

I don't want to give too much away here. If you want to savour Gaucelm's illustrations you'll have to buy the books. But the one below is my personal favourite. It shows the player-character's family as encountered at the start of books 1-4:

And here are those aunts and uncles brought to life:

And if you haven't yet ventured into the Vulcanverse, you've still got one week left to scoop up The Hammer of the Sun in paperback at the special knockdown price before we come to our senses.

Expeditionary Company is in need of goldash

Only three decades after Jamie and I more or less invented the open-world gamebook genre, suddenly you can't move for new ones.

I'm not complaining. Books like Steam Highwayman are more than worthy successors to Fabled Lands, in the same way that Citizen Kane didn't need to spend too long genuflecting to Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed.

What I like about the new generation of open-world books is the way they take the concept as a springboard, not a straitjacket. Steam Highwayman gives you a role to fill in the world, though you have considerable freedom in deciding how you go about it. Alba is a more directed story experience, like a literary The Long Dark. And Legendary Kingdoms has a party of characters with their own relationships and an epic story set in a detailed fantasy world.

Oh, and there's Vulcanverse of course, which has companions and a story arc that builds in from the first four books to culminate in a finale that the MCU wouldn't be ashamed of. And there's never been a better time to try it out, incidentally.

But I digress. Now comes Expeditionary Company by celebrated gamebook authors David Velasco and Riq Sol. This is more than just a gamebook, though. It's almost a mash-up of roleplaying game, boardgame and multiple-choice adventure, with notes of Expedition and To Carry A Sword. Download the free demo and see what I mean. 

But it looks to be much more than just a blend of those elements, with a compelling lore and world all its own. What I especially like is the depth of the backstory: a mystery to be uncovered that not only sets up some dubious saviours (or more likely outright scheming bad guys) in the form of the Auric, it also provides the dramatic tension between travelling to make money and exploring the wilderness to find out more. It's a background that would do justice to a series of fantasy novels. This is how gamebooks grow up.

Tragically the Kickstarter was cancelled, so we can only hope the authors find another way to fund this innovative project. Perhaps a games publisher will get behind it, or maybe a new crowdfunding effort will raise the money needed. It's not easy (I can't even figure out how to Kickstart any of my own projects) but I'm really rooting for this one.

The journey of a thousand miles

We got an interesting question about the Vulcanverse series this week:

"I understand that The Houses of the Dead is book one, so is there any difficulty jumping into that if I start from a later book in the series instead, say The Pillars of the Sky which is book four? I was wondering if I need to follow the order of the books for an optimal experience?"

OK, that's an important one so I'll answer it here. You can start with any book in the Vulcanverse series and move between them in any order. They don't escalate in difficulty the way Fabled Lands does throughout the series. The numbering of the series is just because bookstores like Amazon insist on a series having a book 1, book 2, etc -- it doesn't actually mean any more than that.

That said, the grand finale takes place in book five (Workshop of the Gods, due out early next year) and that does raise the stakes to epic proportions, and you'll need to be an experienced adventurer to tackle it -- but you can even start in that book, and you won't get access to the endgame until you are fully prepared by having completed the three labours in each of the first four books.

In short, you can't go wrong so just pick any book that appeals to you and dive in there.

Soldiers Three

H G Wells was a wargamer. Everybody knows that. And when you read something like this (from "With the Main Guard") you could almost believe Rudyard Kipling designed his characters as if they were going into a GURPS campaign:

In the Soldiers Three stories, Mulvaney, the Irishman, is the most interesting. He understands people instinctively and knows how to gin them up and calm them down. He is also subject to bouts of "the black dog", has a drinking problem, and reacts to violence by throwing up, all obvious GURPS disadvantages/quirks. Ortheris, the sharp-as-a-pin Cockney, is small and prickly but a crack shot. Learoyd, the Yorkshireman, is slow but strong. The character sheets write themselves.

The British Raj would make a great setting for a roleplaying campaign. Though I can't see SJG getting around to publishing a sourcebook any time soon, and even Osprey's books of the period seem to be out of stock, here are some weapon stats to get the ball rolling.

We can estimate Ortheris's shooting skill, incidentally. He says he can hit Mulvaney five times out of seven at 800 yards with a slightly substandard rifle. Assume an Accuracy of 4 (1 less than a brand new Lee-Enfield .303). Ortheris can aim for three rounds to get an extra +3 bonus, so he's rolling at +7 in all -- less the range modifier, which is -16. And let's give a +1 to hit Mulvaney because he's a big fellow. So the overall modifiers add up to -8. Ortheris is hitting 71% of the time, so his Guns (Rifle) skill must be 20.

Amazon US

Soldiers Three

GURPS Basic Set: Characters
GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns

Amazon UK

Soldiers Three

GURPS Basic Set: Characters
GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns