A gamebook giveaway

As a follow-up to the launch of the large-format Fabled Lands books, Jamie and I have two copies of The War-Torn Kingdom to give away.

All you have to do to win one of these large format books is go here and watch Marco Arnaudo's review of the Critical IF books - which is no hardship because his reviews are brilliantly entertaining and it's worth watching them all.

Every entrant has a chance of winning one of the new books; a 3 on 3d6 should about do it. So a critical, to you GURPS players out there.

But wait - that's not all. The Kindle edition of War-Torn Kingdom is coming out next Friday (Feb 5) and you can pre-order that right here.

And you thought Christmas was over...

Big issue

Here's something I didn't anticipate when I outlined Fabled Lands Publishing's plans for 2016: a new large format (8" x 10") edition of the existing FL books.

How it came about is that later in the year we're hoping to publish a paperback version of the new book, The Serpent King's Domain. And then Jamie and I realized we couldn't only do a 6" by 8" edition. What about all the FL readers who bought the original large format books back in the '90s - you're going to want book 7 to match those, am I right?

So as a kind of experiment, seeing as we have the text files already edited, we're releasing new 8" by 10" versions of the original books, starting with The War-Torn Kingdom and Cities of Gold and Glory. Now hang on, though. Don't rush out and buy these if you're already happy with the editions you've got. There's no new content here. And we haven't been able to duplicate the fold-out covers of the original Pan Macmillan editions; even though print on demand has come a long way, it isn't there yet. But if you had an incomplete collection of 8" x 10" books and prefer that format, now's your chance. Oh, and these new editions feature Russ's regional maps in full glorious colour, so there is that.

Take your pick. The new large format edition...



...or the 2010 standard paperback:

Duty calls

GURPS 4e is the rule set of choice in my gaming group. I don’t like everything about it (fights take up way too much time without actually feeling terribly exciting) but there’s lots of interesting debate to be had when you shine a light into the obscure nooks and crannies of the system.

Just one example. Characters can take a Duty. This is a disadvantage of variable points value; by taking it you get points to spend on attributes or skills. The more likely a Duty is to apply during a game, the more it’s worth. You get extra points if it’s extremely hazardous (ie you are at constant risk of death) and also if it’s involuntary. An involuntary Duty is one where the character has no choice in the matter. Their actions are coerced by threats to loved ones, mind control, or a curse.

One of the players in our Victorian campaign took a character who was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He argued that the Duty should count as involuntary and extremely hazardous:

"Since the penalty for abrogation of this duty is court-martial, punishable possibly by death (and the utter shame and ruin of his entire family and tarnishing of the reputation by association of his circle of friends) I think his duty is pretty much involuntary. 'Enforced by threats to you or your loved ones...' – GURPS 4e page134."

My counter to that was that the whole point about involuntary Duty is it's enforced – the cartel have a gun to your wife's head, the terrorists have strapped a bomb to you, that kind of deal. If you ask a British RN officer in the 1890s why he is carrying out his duties, he's not going to say, "I don't want to, but the British government are holding my life and family honour to ransom." So it's voluntary. The GURPS Compendium explains it pretty well:

Duty (Involuntary; an extra -5 points) Some duties are enforced by threats, threats to loved ones, or by exotic methods of mind control. Such a forced duty can result in difficult decisions or surprising insights for the affected character. An involuntary Duty would not include military service by draft (although service by impressment, as practiced by the British navy of the 18th century, would qualify), nor any other "normal" service. Only cases where life or sanity are directly at stake qualify.

The player disagreed. (When do they not, when character points are at stake?)

"It is involuntary! What you're talking about is Sense of Duty, which makes him feel he wants to do it. But he has no choice, and if he should be given an order with which he disagrees, or is too afraid to carry out, the true nature of the duty is clear. It's not just imprisonment or a broken relationship with his patron he has to deal with afterwards. Plenty of the fellows who sign up for the armed forces will attest to the level of choice they have. If it were WW1 and he were in the army, I don't think you'd try and sustain your case. The overwhelming horror of enforced duty tearing against the survival instinct is pretty well documented."

Sense of Duty is indeed another, quite different character trait in the GURPS rules. It’s mental, not social, and bears on whether you feel you ought to carry out the duty. This is where it gets interesting. Because all duties must have some degree of either voluntary or involuntary internal compulsion. That’s what the extra -5 points for an involuntary Duty is all about. But does the GURPS rulebook insist that all voluntary Duties are accompanied by a Sense of Duty? No. It is perfectly possible to take a voluntary Duty without having a Sense of Duty.

And quite right too. I know people who were in the British armed forces, ordinary squaddies who joined straight from school. If they had failed to do their duty they could in theory have been court-martialled and imprisoned, but I don’t think that was any kind of motivating factor. They did their duty voluntarily and effectively without any overwhelming sense of duty (a typically British mentality!). They were conscientious, but when they got a better offer they quit the services and did that instead.

The acid test for an involuntary Duty would be "can you resign?" In almost all modern armed forces you can. Being press-ganged on a pirate ship or British navy vessel of the mid-18th century are notable exceptions. A Royal Navy lieutenant of the 1890s is not, if you’ll pardon the pun, in the same boat.

It begs another question: why are involuntary Duties worth -5 pts more anyhow? A person who is coerced into doing his duty is less effective than somebody who does it voluntarily. Also, involuntary Duty could be lifted by removing the coercion. "We have your wife and kids safe, sir. You can put down that gun." So you'd think involuntary Duty would be less of a disadvantage, points-wise.

The player had also claimed his Duty as a naval officer to be “extremely hazardous”, which the GURPS 4e rules define thus:

Extremely Hazardous: You are always at risk of death or serious injury when your Duty comes up. There are significant penalties if you refuse to take these risks: dismissal in disgrace, imprisonment, perhaps even death. The GM has the final say as to whether a given Duty is “extremely hazardous” in his campaign.

You can see why that would be worth extra points, at least. And certainly if the lieutenant failed to do his duty he would face the possibility of disgrace, imprisonment or death. (In point of fact, the standard penalty for failure to do one’s duty in the Royal Navy is up to two years’ imprisonment, but that only if the court finds you deliberately at fault.)

But that’s mere plot detail. What interests me about this is the whole question of volition when carrying out a duty. Reading Sassoon on his moral objections to the Great War, or Max Hastings on his various relatives' reactions to fighting at the front shows there's a stew of motivations and conflicts going on there. Did the Twin Towers attackers act voluntarily? If you asked them, they'd probably have said yes, this way lies paradise. But the truth was, how could they back out? To do so would mean not just facing retribution from their al-Qaeda commanders - that's nothing, it probably never crossed their minds - but the much scarier prospect of sweeping away a whole bunch of simplistic beliefs on which their entire identities were built. So I'd say they probably had both involuntary (sic) Duty and Sense of Duty. Humans are wonderfully screwed up pieces of work, aren’t they?

There are a lot of interesting and complex aspects to dutiful behaviour, and we can hardly expect a set of game rules to get to grips with them. But it’s fascinating to come across these questions, discovering all kinds of philosophical and moral matters lurking amid the numbers and mechanics, and the fact that I am continually able to do so is one of the things I love most about role-playing.

Harry Potter vs Huckleberry Finn

There's an article by Colleen Gillard over on The Atlantic that raises some interesting points. Ms Gillard's contention is that British kids' literature is more fantastical than American, and that the innate pragmatism and Puritanism in the American soul means that fantasy fiction produced there is less magical, more practical. It's the difference, I suppose, between a wizard and a "magic-user".

'...the difference between the countries may be that Americans “lack the kind of ironic humor needed for questioning the reliability of reality”...

Well, maybe. Although if you read Steinbeck's story "The Affair at 7 Rue de M — "or "Miriam" by Truman Capote, or anything at all by Ray Bradbury, you may feel that there's no one-size-fits-all here. And after all, wasn't the colonization of fantasy by logic and taxonomy begun by Tolkien, as British a writer as they come?

“American stories are rooted in realism; even our fantasies are rooted in realism." 

The debate will rage on, but Colleen Gillard has hit on a kernel of truth here, I suspect. At any rate, it's well worth taking a look at the piece and, if you have any thoughts on the subject, jump in and join the discussion below.

The year in view

From time to time we get queries about various projects of Fabled Lands Publishing, so it struck me that a good way to kick off 2016 would be with an overview of all those projects and if/when they're going to see the light of day. Happy New Year, by the way.

The big triumph of 2015 was the Kickstarter for Fabled Lands book 7: The Serpent King's Domain. Currently this is being written by Paul Gresty and illustrated by Russ Nicholson. When it's ready (spring or early summer, if I have to guess) Megara Entertainment will release a hardcover edition, and Fabled Lands Publishing will follow up with the paperback.

A lot of people ask me about Blood Sword 5: The Walls of Spyte. I'm on record as saying that tonally and plot-wise it doesn't fit with the rest of the series, but that isn't the reason for the delay in re-releasing it. I found while flowcharting the book that there are a lot of sections with pretty garbled logic, so all that needs to be fixed. Not least of the errata is in section 62, where a placeholder "XX" was left in the text (it should read "100") but there are other sections that only make sense when re-flowcharted. Even so, if it were only that then the book would be out in a few weeks but there's also an Augean stable of typesetting and picture-scanning to be handled. It's not a spare time job and Fabled Lands Publishing doesn't have the resources to pay for the work right now. So put that one in the category of "to be released - no date set" and if you can find a pirated PDF, grab it with my blessing. In fact, what do you know - here's one.

Then there's Falcon. The first book, Renegade Lord, didn't sell like hot cakes, or even lukewarm cakes, so the rest of the series is definitely on the back burner. Don't expect those in 2016.

Some people have noticed that when we republished the Golden Dragon series, The Eye of the Dragon was missing. One possible plan for that is to rejig it as a Fabled Lands Quest, as we did with Keep of the Lich Lord. But it's a big pile of work doing that - not just editing, flowcharting, artwork, proofing, but converting the whole thing to the FL game system. Also on the back burner, therefore.

Dragon Warriors reverts to me and Oliver Johnson in November, at which point I'd like to get it available on Amazon. If I can get the rights to the new books, I can upload the PDFs to Createspace right away - hell, I could do it in the next half hour and still have time to make a cup of tea - and the books would be on sale on Amazon a week later. As it is, we don't know who will end up owning all the new material such as Frazer Payne's "Darkness Before Dawn" scenario, so you might just see a re-release of the original six paperbacks.

Those are all the plans for now - such as they are - but we also have a new Dirk Lloyd book coming out, along with more DL adventures in The Phoenix comic, and an entirely new book series by Jamie with the working title A Shadow on the Heart. Plenty to look forward to, then - and if plans change (as they always do) you'll read it here first.

Life - it gets everywhere

Back in the 1980s I designed a few simple boardgames for Discovery, an educational partwork magazine for children published by Marshall Cavendish. This game, "Survival of the Fittest", was included in their Charles Darwin issue.

I don't make any great claims for this. I designed it in a day or two and it was only ever intended as a fun play-around with the concept of evolution. Judging by the illustrations on the counters (not included here) the editors seem to have assumed the player was taking the part of a species. In fact you are playing different biological domains (if not entirely different DNA codes) although on any given turn you are playing a species within that domain. Easy enough to survive in warm tropical oceans, but can you make it all the way to the South Pole? If you do you'll probably be lichen, but at least you'll be the winning lichen.

If you want to try it out, you can download the game board and attribute cards here. The rules are below. And happy Christmas!

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

A game of natural selection for 2 to 5 players

OVERVIEW

The track on the board represents different habitats across the globe. Players start in the OCEAN DEEPS and try to reach the POLAR ICE CAP. In doing so, they move through different habitats, and have to mutate (that is, change by developing new characteristics) in order to survive in new surroundings. The species most able to adapt to its surroundings – not necessarily the most complex – will be the one most likely to survive.

SETTING UP

Cut out the cards. (Do not cut along the diagonals – that is, each card should be rectangular.) You will also need dice and a counter to represent each player.

Each card shows two characteristics. All players must begin with a Swimming or Slithering characteristic, so put the seven cards with these characteristics face down. Each player takes one, and all the remaining cards are then put face-down beside the board. This is the Gene Pool.

HOW TO PLAY

Each player chooses a playing piece and places it on the OCEAN DEEPS space. Roll the dice to see who will go first. When each player has finished a turn, play passes clockwise to the next person.

Each turn, you can do one of three things:

1. Migrate
2. Mutate
3. Roll for a Global Change

Migrating allows you to move your playing piece to the next space on the track. Look at this space to see if it lists any of the characteristics shown on your card(s) as advantages (+1) or disadvantages (-1). If you have neither, you have to roll 4, 5 or 6 to move on. Add 1 to the number you roll for each advantageous characteristic you possess; subtract 1 for each disadvantageous characteristic. If you roll a 6, you can have another go straight away. In assessing your advantages and disadvantages, you must also take into account any Special Characteristics (see below ).

Example

A player has the Camouflage/Slithering and Pack Hunting/Courtship cards. This describes their organism’s current attributes. They are on the TIDAL FLATS space and want to migrate to the EVERGLADES space, and are lucky enough to have two characteristics listed as advantages (+1) for EVERGLADES. If the player rolls a 2 or more, they can  move to this space.

Mutating gives you a chance to change the characteristics of your organism. You use your turn to take a random card from the Gene Pool. If neither of the colours on the new card matches one you already have. you must return the card to the Gene Pool. If the new card matches, you can keep it and discard the old one if you wish. Whether or not you keep the new card, play then passes to the next player.

You can never retain more than two cards (listing a maximum of four characteristics) at any one time. You begin the game with a single card which represents a simple organism. You can increase this to two cards (representing a complex organism) when you take and retain a card from the Gene Pool. If you choose to become a complex organism (by retaining two cards) then you cannot return to being a simple organism except through a Global Change.

Cards are kept face up in front of you at all times. You do not have to show other players a card you have drawn from the Gene Pool unless you decide to keep it.

Rolling for a Global Change allows you to check to see if drastic environmental effects are happening to the whole planet. You roll the dice and consult the Global Change Table below. Global Changes affect all players regardless of habitat. Most are fairly extreme, doing no good to any player, but they can be useful for slowing up a player who is on the verge of winning.

SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Some characteristics have special effects, so keep a sharp eye on your card(s) to see if you have ones that help or hinder your survival. The game gradually shows you how organisms react to each other and their habitats in the battle to survive.

■ Sexual Reproduction This is incompatible with the characteristics Hermaphroditic and Parthenogenesis (both methods of reproduction which do not require a partner), and so if you have a card with either characteristic, you cannot keep Sexual Reproduction unless you discard the other card in the same turn. Sexual Reproduction counts as a disadvantage (-1) in all habitats. However, when you have this characteristic and opt to Mutate, you can draw two cards from the Gene Pool. (Remember you can only hold a maximum of two cards at a time.)

■ Sharp Claws counts as an advantage (+1) in all habitats, but only for a complex organism (2 cards).

■ Thick Hide counts as an advantage (+1) in all habitats. However you cannot hold this card at the same time as Climbing or Flight. If you already have Thick Hide, you cannot keep a card with Climbing or Flight unless you discard Thick Hide in the same turn.

■ Shell always counts as an advantage (+1), but does not go with Flight, Running, Climbing and Leaping, so if you have cards with any of these characteristics, you cannot keep Shell unless you discard the other card.

■ Intelligence is useless in isolation, but allows you to add 1 to any other advantage you possess when Migrating.

■ Symbiosis can be used when you are on the same space as another player who also has Symbiosis. You combine your advantages and disadvantages with those of the other player when rolling to Migrate. If this roll is successful, both players move to the next space.

■ Parasitic only works when you are one space behind another player. You can Migrate automatically to the other player's space without rolling the dice.

■ Parthenogenesis is an advantage (+1) in all habitats but only for a simple organism (one card).

GLOBAL CHANGE TABLE

1. Environmental catastrophe threatens extinction. Each player takes one card from the Gene Pool. If one of the colours on the card matches a colour you already have, discard your current card(s) and play on with the one you have just drawn. If none of the colours match, you become extinct and start again in OCEAN DEEPS with a new species.
2. Loss of ozone layer wipes out higher life-forms. Every player is reduced to a simple organism (one card). Players who previously had two cards miss a go, but can choose which of their two cards they will discard. Players with only one card play on.
3. Ice Age. All players with complex organisms (two cards) move backwards three spaces to avoid the spreading glaciation. For each of the following characteristics that you possess, move back one less space: Fur, Fat and Hibernation.
4. Solar activity promotes genetic changes. Every player puts a card back into the Gene Pool and replaces it with a new one drawn at random.
5. A fierce new predator develops. Any player who does not currently have a red- and/or green-coloured characteristic must move back four spaces.
6. Disease ravages whole populations. Any player who does not currently have a blue-coloured characteristic must move back a number of spaces determined by rolling the dice.

If you enjoy this simple boardgame about evolution, try the much more comprehensive and informative Cell to Singularity game.

All I want for Christmas

Seems a bit cheeky to ask, but I reckon Santa knows I've been nice. If I can have one wish, what would really make a big difference to the future of Fabled Lands Publishing as a whole would be to get more reviews on Amazon.

Reviews are what Amazon's search engine notices and flags up for other potential readers. The best book in the world with two or three reviews will languish in obscurity. But even real stinker with 50+ reviews (yeah, I'm looking at you, Dan Brown) is the rolling snowball that will get bigger and bigger until all you can see are little feet and heads poking out like the cover of Coils of Hate.

If everybody who regularly reads this blog could find the time to review a single gamebook on Amazon right now, that would bring gamebooks back into the spotlight overnight. If just one person in ten who's reading this went and wrote a quick review of, say, The Court of Hidden Faces then we'd break the 50+ barrier in time for Christmas.

I know a lot of people still enjoy gamebooks - and not just the folks who were there in the '80s and '90s, but a whole new generation too. But as long as the hobby stays in the shadows, publishers will continue to ignore it. A slew of reviews on Amazon would crash through their bubble of complacency like that Titantic-shaped starship on that episode of Doctor Who.

So if you ever got pleasure from one of my or Jamie's or Oliver's gamebooks - or anyone else's, come to that; I've included a few notable ones in the list below - and you can find a couple of minutes just to write one or two sentences as an Amazon review, you could make our Christmas wish come true. You don't even have to buy a copy. Here are a few suggestions - just pick one of these titles, or choose another favourite gamebook if you prefer. No turkeys in this lot, I guarantee it.

Tune in on Christmas Eve for the seasonal FL freebie. And in the meantime, rest you merry.