On behalf of the group, I hope we passed the audition

I intended to put this up to commemorate the start of the Interregnum (and also the anniversary of the Beatles’ last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records) but missed that target by a whole month. Better late than never (maybe) here’s my wife Roz and I on Leo Hartas’s radio show. Tune in every week to hear the Bantering Boys, Thursday at 9pm GMT on 10Radio. When you're listening late at night, you may think the boys are not quite right - but that's just the beer before the show, and anyway it's banter; it's not meant to make sense.

The biggest gamebook ever

I mentioned a little while back how UK author Michael J Ward is single-handedly aiming to turn the tide in favor of print gamebooks with his impressive epic new series Destiny Quest. And Andrew Wright, genre historian and writer of the latest Gamebook Adventures app, has an in-depth interview with Michael Ward over on his Fantasy Game Book blog, covering how the DQ series was conceived and written as well as (of equal interest to many of you, I suspect) the inside dope on its publication. If that whets your appetite, Destiny Quest 1: The Legion of Shadow is available on Amazon and there's a wealth of material on the DQ website.

And talking of gamebooks, this seems to be a good place to link to the Slate article about the origin and (possible) future of gamebooks, flagged up in a recent comment by Mike Mielke. I noted this bit

"Researching interactive books," Demian Katz, gamebooks archivist, says, "There's pretty much the same pattern in every country. A few come out, they become explosively popular, a flood of knock-offs are released, they reach critical mass and then drop off into nothing. When I first started cataloguing them, around 1998, it was happening in the Czech Republic. That was one of the last booms."

and couldn't help wondering if China has had its gamebook craze yet...

In the thick of battle

If you're interested in the statistics of medieval warfare but don't want to go so far as to actually join the SCA, here's an in-depth CSI-style analysis of the Battle of Towton in 1461.

Some highlights:

"[He] suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal."

"In a letter sent nine days after the battle George Neville, the then chancellor of England, wrote that 28,000 men died that day, a figure in accord with a letter sent by Edward IV to his mother. England’s total population at the time is thought not to have exceeded 3 million people. George Goodwin, who has written a book on Towton to coincide with the battle’s 550th anniversary in 2011, reckons as many as 75,000 men, perhaps 10% of the country’s fighting-age population, took the field that day."

"The men whose skeletons were unearthed at Towton were a diverse lot. Their ages at time of death ranged widely. [...] The youngest occupants of the mass grave were around 17 years old; the oldest was around 50. Their stature varies greatly, too. The men’s height ranges from 1.5-1.8 metres (just under five feet to just under six feet), with the older men, almost certainly experienced soldiers, being the tallest. As a group the Towton men are a reminder that images of the medieval male as a homunculus with rotten teeth are well wide of the mark. The average medieval man stood 1.71 metres tall—just four centimetres shorter than a modern Englishman. It is only in the Victorian era that people started to get very stunted. [The Towton soldiers'] health was generally good. Dietary isotopes from their knee-bones show that they ate healthily. Sugar was not widely available at that time, so their teeth were strong, too."

"Arrows were not the only things flying through the air that day. Some of the first bullets were, too. The Towton battlefield has yielded up the earliest lead-composite shot found in England. [Archaeologists] think [they] may have found a fragment of a handgun, which was small enough to be carried around and probably set down on a trestle table or small carriage to be fired."

"The stress of [close quarters] fighting was immense: a few of the Towton skeletons had been clenching their teeth together so tightly that bits of them splintered off."

Fabled Lands on your phone

News so hot you could cook a roc's egg on it: Megara Entertainment, the development wizards behind the Fabled Lands HD game for iPad, are right at this moment putting the finishing touches to the iPhone version (which will also run on iPod Touch, of course). This will be submitted to Apple tomorrow and should therefore be on sale within a matter of weeks. Building on the roughly 12,000 man-hours of work that went into the iPad app, this version features a completely new UI to fit the smaller screen and of course has all the extra content from the updates to the app over the last month.

Props to Mikael Louys, Roland Derhi, Richard Hetley and the rest of the Megara clan for their amazing job in getting this conversion done in such a short time. They've been working around the clock these last few weeks, hyped up by musical accompaniment from Messrs Clapton and Knopfler, and can now take a well-deserved evening off at their local Thai restaurant. Just don't fall asleep in the tom kha gai, fellas. All that work was because you demanded it, FL fans, so please be sure to give them your support.

This Tin Man's got heart

Gamebooks are alive and thriving in 2011, as you can see from this dramatic trailer for Tin Man Games' upcoming iOS gamebook Catacombs of the Undercity, the fifth in their Gamebook Adventures series that began with An Assassin in Orlandes. The blurb ought to whet your appetite for some serious sword-n-sorcery action:

Captured by one of Orlandes City's most infamous brotherhoods, the Red Hand Guild, you are thrown to the mercy of the subterranean world deep beneath the streets of the great capital. Wading through the sewers and other dark menacing places, your goal is to reach Undercity, the City beneath the City. Only there can you find the help you need to escape this underground horror and bring down the dark brotherhood from within.

The author of Catacombs is none other than Andrew Wright, whose Fantasy Game Book blog keeps the interactive literature torch burning very bright. Want to know more? Of course you do - and the Tin Man Games blog will beam you up fast.

To take you in the sun to promised lands

Okay, you Fabled Lands devotees were unfairly worked up to a lather by that "Serpent King arises" headline. Now it's Valentine's Day and you want some love. In particular, you want to know when the Fabled Lands role-playing game will be out. And the answer, I am at last able to tell you, is June this year. Yep, only four months to go. Greywood Publishing are starting off the series with the rulebook and the Sokara sourcebook, which is the first of twelve supplements covering the whole of the known Fabled Lands.

These will be released as both print books and PDFs. So everyone's happy. And if you choose the PDFs you get the bonus of Greywood's eye-poppingly gorgeous colour design, plus the option to buy just the parts of the rules that appeal to you. For all my championing of ebooks, I'll be getting the print edition myself and I expect it to get well-thumbed and lovingly battered very quickly as my role-playing group tear through the world of Harkuna for a change.

The game system is by Shane Garvey and the scenario and background material is by Jamie Wallis. Not James Wallis; he's the erstwhile Dragon Warriors impresario. Whole other RPG designer and publisher. No relation. And if that seems like an unlikely coincidence, what about there being two Steve Jacksons who both wrote Fighting Fantasy books? Spooky.

All together now

Hot news from Mikael Louys, the business and creative dynamo in charge of Megara Entertainment. The Fabled Lands HD game for iPad is at #24 in the App Store RPG charts! That ranking reflects the incredible hard work that Mikael and his team put into their adaptation - indeed, their spectacular reinvention - of The War-Torn Kingdom, which is a thing of beauty that Jamie and I never dreamed of when we originally wrote the FL books.

So here's the thing. If a game can get into the Top Ten then it bobs up onto everybody's radar and it's got a good chance of staying there. And if Fabled Lands HD can get there, with just a little push, that could mean thousands of new FL fans who will help sustain the wave of RPGs, CRPGs and gamebooks that has already begun.

I know what most of you are thinking: "But I don't own an iPad." Okay, well, apart from advising you to sell your wristwatch to buy one, I'm going to say that you can certainly reach out and influence somebody who does. If not in your immediate circle of friends, family and co-workers, how about on blogs where you're leaving a comment? Or failing that, just open the window and shout.

Mikael already has his team back in harness on Cities of Gold & Glory, for which I've seen some of the truly sumptuous artwork, and there's an iPhone conversion coming in the next few months too. Getting Fabled Lands HD into the Top Ten ranking in iTunes RPGs would be a great boost for those guys, and it'd help ensure the future of Fabled Lands releases (both print and digital) as well.

So let me plead with you: if at all possible, can you try and coax at least one person to buy Fabled Lands HD this weekend? It's a steal at $7.99, and this app is no mere ebook but a full-on, full-color, atmospherically soundtracked, immersively art-intensive 2D CRPG with new extended descriptions providing dozens of hours of play. All that for less than the cost of one of the new edition FL books. No wonder the Megara staff know their boss as "Mad Mikael"!