Turn to panel 9

A while ago I mentioned the interactive comic that Russ and I thought of doing back in about 1987. And here are a few test strips we knocked up at the time, though now with the benefit of professional Blambot fonts laid in over my scrappy hand-lettering on the originals.

Would this have been feasible? A full gamebook adventure in a 64-page graphic novel, say? Looking at it now, it would have been a fair old bit of work. But hard work wasn't something either Russ or I would shirk from in those days.

One thing I'm glad to say is that my dialogue writing skills have improved a little bit since then! Anyway, nothing we were contemplating in '87 approaches the mind-bending complexity of Jason Shiga's brilliant branching graphic novel Meanwhile, which is well worth a look to see what happened when gamebooks grew up.

Gamebooks where you're NOT the hero

Recently I was looking at the manifesto of e-gamebook publisher Mifiction, who have an interesting new take on the whole idea of interactive stories. It’s similar to a direction Jamie and I were discussing a couple of years back, before we got distracted by videogames and comics respectively. Now we have some free time to return to that project, and I’d be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts.

First, a quick recap of where we used to be. Traditionally, as you know, gamebooks comprise interactive narratives built in sections that fit a branching structure. Each reader navigates his or her own preferred path through the narrative, typically by choosing from a list of options and turning to the corresponding number for that option:

Speak to the man - turn to 27
Call the militia to arrest him - turn to 120
Ignore him and continue on your way - turn to 206

Too wide a decision tree and you’ve got very short adventures. Too narrow a tree and the reader’s choices feel constrained. A good interactive novel should provide a different but still satisfying story if you go back and make significantly different choices. As a rule of thumb, Jamie and I always used to figure there should be a minimum of three distinct routes through the narrative, with multiple interweaving strands on each route.

Of course, I’m talking about the traditional “one story” kind of gamebook here. Lord Daark Muder has kidnapped your sister and you’re going to get her back, yada yada. What we were trying to do with Fabled Lands was a whole other thing – more like an open-structured role-playing campaign than a gamebook. In Fabled Lands, you really do get to “choose your own adventure”.

When we look at the future of prose fiction – a largely electronic future, perhaps – it seems that a lot of readers could potentially enjoy gamebooks. In fact let’s use the broader term interactive fiction here, not gamebooks, because it’s likely that what has stopped the medium from getting a wider readership has been those intricate game-based rules.

Most people are interested in characters and stories, and they are intrigued by the consequences of decisions. But most people have zero interest in rules, numbers, inventories, and other fiddly details. Personally as a writer, I’ve always been more interested in the “book” and less in the “game”. So I’m very keen to find ways to jettison dice altogether when adapting our material to e-readers. I’d certainly count it a failure if you are tapping on your iPhone screen to roll some virtual dice.

Okay, but that’s our old content. That was then. Now we’re starting to think about what we might work on next, an interactive novel that can and should be something completely new in the genre. To do that, we’d change the point of view and the narrative style and throw out the whole idea of game mechanics. Like so…

Point of View

As far as I’m aware, pretty much all interactive fiction has cast the reader as the protagonist:

Your suitors come to you with three caskets. By choosing a casket, you thereby designate the one you will marry. Will it be:

The lead casket? Turn to 77
The silver casket? Turn to 101
The gold casket? Turn to 290

So that specifically locates the reader in the narrative. A direct analogy is the first-person narrator in a conventional novel. Contrast with a narrative in which the reader has an authorial role:

Entering the village, Ketzel paused to consider two buildings dominating the main street. One was a squat low-roofed dwelling set on study black timbers. A man stood on the porch sweeping idly at the grey dust that had blown in off the plains. To the other side of the street: a tavern with three chimneys of extraordinary height. The glaring, red-whiskered man at the door was evidently the proprietor.

Before Ketzel could even begin to consider his next course, something happened that would force him to change all his plans.

A dust-storm? Turn to 82
A duel? Turn to 109
The reappearance of an old foe? Turn to 260

Narrative style

Interactive fiction has always been based around a single protagonist, for the simple reason that a second-person narrative leaves no alternative. The result is a pretty straitjacketed type of genre narrative. If the hero is Conan, a certain kind of adventure is likely. If Sam Spade, another. But it’s all genre; you’re never going to get Crime and Punishment, much less The Great Gatsby.

And, of course, the “you-are-the-hero” form requires the writer to abandon all his most powerful storytelling tricks. There’s no cross-cutting to increase tension, because you only have the one viewpoint. Likewise, no dramatic irony. You can surprise the reader, but it’s hard to use most of the tricks of suspense that rely on the reader knowing something the character doesn’t.

Look at a novel like War & Peace that interweaves the lives of many characters. There is a sense of a real living world inhabited by many different characters - all with their own histories, hopes, projects and fates. A bigger and more involving story is possible than you could ever get with: “…as you crest the hill you catch sight of the French army.”

Jettison the second-person view, and interactive fiction too can start to tell those kinds of stories.

Mechanics

Most interactive fiction in the past has been driven by dice-based game mechanics because the genre had its roots in fantasy role playing. However, the game aspect can be off-putting to many readers. As I said before, most people prefer their fiction without the accompaniment of dice, and prefer not to have to keep notes as they read.

The Virtual Reality series in the early 1990s showed that it is perfectly possible to construct an interactive novel without resorting to dice. In our next interactive novel, we’re going to dispense with rules-based gameplay altogether. The setting and story premise will be enthralling in its own right. The pleasure of exploring it via multiple narratives would only be lessened by intrusive game mechanics.

Durkesh pulls out the tube of blue concentrate. Does he have a +3 magic vial? If so, reduce its magic bonus by one on the adventure sheet and then turn to 44. If not, turn to 303.

But how about:

Andrew raises the pistol, which startles him with the noise of its bang. A cloud of pungent smoke fills the space between them. The troops fall back as their officer staggers, clutching at the blood welling from his white waistcoat. In the confusion, Andrew makes his escape into the woods, running until he hears no sound of pursuit. What does he encounter there: an angry hermit (turn to 175), a girl of some beauty (turn to 260), or an abandoned chapel (turn to 304)?

Summing up: we’re talking about an interactive novel in which the reader participates as author, not protagonist, to determine what befalls a cast of characters in a rich storyline. Would it work? Only one way to find out…

The dying of the light

One of the most imaginative and atmospheric works of fantasy fiction ever written is Oliver Johnson's Lightbringer Trilogy. Each book conforms to a disciplined unity of time, as the titles suggest: The Forging of the Shadows, The Nations of the Night, The Last Star at Dawn. Such evocative names! - don't they send a shiver down the spine? And even within such compressed time-frames, twelve hours per book, an epic story unfolds. In the whole genre of fantasy adventure there is nothing to equal it, except perhaps for Oliver's own The Knight of the Fields, which has yet to be published.

It helps that Oliver has a background in role-playing games, I think, because it's only when you've experienced an imaginary world from the inside that this level of authenticity is possible. Which is not to say that most RPG referees should launch into writing a fantasy trilogy - far from it. Oliver is almost unique in having both the gamer's grasp of detail and texture coupled with a poet's ability to imbue words with visceral, transformative force. When he describes a battle, you are right there.

You can read excerpts from all of the books on Amazon, and an interview here about how they came to be. For example, Oliver describes the thinking behind his extremely scary take on vampires:

"What is it like to know you’re going to live forever? Not very pleasant, probably - wouldn’t the spirit be sapped knowing that there was no pressure of time, no finite end? I remember a Borges story, ‘The Immortals’, which had this as its theme. The gods ended up wallowing in mud pools all day, barely bothering to move, so tired had they become of their eternal life. I’m not a great fan of the svelte, charming vamps we find in a lot of contemporary fantasy fiction. I wanted to explore beings for whom the pursuit of blood was a physiological necessity, like an addict’s craving for a drug."

And to whet your appetite further, here's the overview that Oliver gave us when he started his role-playing campaign set in the Lightbringer world:

Ten thousand years ago, the gods lived on the earth.

Reh, god of the Light and the Sun, Iss, God of Worms and Prince of Eternal Darkness: these two were the principles. They fought together at Shandering Plain. The Earth shook at the roar of the battle; the sky went black for a hundred years. And in the darkness, the gods departed. They now live in the stars and their power is exercised by their human servants upon the earth. The two gods wait for that moment when their subjects destroy the worship of the other. The victor will then return: Reh in his chariot of Fire, in a blaze of light. Or Iss under the blanket of eternal night.

Does that Eternal Darkness come soon? The earth grows old and, with it, the sun. The summer comes slower and later. The crops are sere and brown and die in the fields. The light of autumn even in the height of summer tints the woods and fields with a melancholy umber: there is no vigor, or sap. Each day the sun sets in violet doom. Iss prays it will never return.

But there are some worshippers of Reh who still believe the sun will be reborn. The man you once served, Baron Illgill, Lord of Thrull, was one of these. Yet he brought doom upon his people. He excavated the tomb of Marizian, the great law-giver, and took from it a powerful magic artifact of the gods, the Rod of Shadows. War followed with Iss; soon the Legions of the Worm advanced on Thrull. In hubris, Illgill marched his own legions out to meet them, when he could have withstood a siege for years within the city’s walls. Dark sorcery and the Undead legions who leapt from the soil at dusk defeated the Flame.

Thousands died. Their skulls are now built into a pyramid outside the gates of Thrull. The victor who set them there, Lord Faran Gaton Nekron, Undead Lord, High Priest of the Worm has ruled for six years. The Baron fled to the North and no one knows whether he or his few followers are still alive. Faran Gaton has decreed that the worshipers of Reh will be tolerated, for the moment, as long as they meekly accept their subject status. Once Iss comes, all will see the incontrovertible victory of the Darkness.

Unopposed, the legions of the Worm and the Undead spread over the world. From Tiregand their capital in Ossia they have conquered Thrulland, now they move into Surren. The Great Stepped Pyramids of Iss throughout the earth, once abandoned and overgrown with weeds, are being reoccupied by priests wearing the purple and brown. Where can the true servant of the light go..?

A couple of years ago, Oliver ran a GURPS campaign set in the world of the Lightbringer novels. As you might expect, it was a memorable experience drenched in vivid, brilliantly doom-laden Gothic ambience, as if Lord Byron had got together with the lead designer of ICO to write a set of role-playing scenarios. If there's any demand, and if I can get Oliver to dig it out, we might put it up here in episodic form.

We manufacture miracles!

Another cross-post from the SCAS blog. This one is probably just for completists, as it's a project that Leo Hartas and I have variously pitched as a TV show, movie and comic over the years. It got quite close as a TV show, actually, but close is no cigar - although recently it resurfaced as just possibly perfect as an iPad edutainment game for kids, and I'm beginning to think that may have been its destiny all along - we just had the idea six years too early!

Fangleworths is a factory run by robots. They build the kind of way-out gadgets that used to feature in articles about the way we'd live in the future. Except that future never arrived - instead of anti-gravity galoshes and teleport tubes, we got phones and... er, more phones. So Fangleworths is constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. (They do say write about what you know.)

The team line-up there is (left to right) Chug the foreman, Fidel the inventor, Boomer the boss, Rummage the dog, Nettie the real boss, and the big guy is Stacks from the storeroom.

We had serious interest from several TV production companies, but the second question (after "How much will they rip us off?") is "How much will they try to mess it up?" Here's a real example - hard to credit if you haven't actually worked in European TV, but if you have it will be horribly familiar, I'm sure. To set the scene, the producer was, as they often are, a pampered middle-aged ex-public schoolboy, voice set permanently to Loud Bray, who's convinced that his presence in the room is what everybody has been waiting for:

Producer: "My boys, do you know what they like? Doctor Who."
Dave (already worried): "Oh yes?"
Producer: "And do you know who Dr Who is?"
Dave: "The Doctor."
Producer: "Hmm?""
Dave: "The Doctor. That's what he's called. Doctor Who is just the name of the show."
Producer: "Well, Dr Who is Merlin! Yes! You see, he's a wizard, and he travels in time. And Merlin, he travels backwards in time."
Dave: "Merlin was said to age backwards rather than actually travel in time. But go on."
Producer: "And over the weekend it struck me. That's what this show needs! The Fangle robots should have a friend who's a time-travelling wizard, and each week he brings them magical gifts!"
(Around the table, eager young faces are nodding. But then, this guy does pay their wages.)
Dave: "Well, they're already robots. So really a time-travelling wizard would be what we'd call Double Mumbo Jumbo."
Producer: "What does that mean?"
Dave: "I'll get my coat."

We planned for the comic book to be created in Lightwave. Leo and our animation team actually had made all the 3D models for the TV show, not just the characters but the factory itself, so it made sense to approach the comic that way too. I love these characters and this is another project I plan to return to just as soon as they invent an 8th day of the week

Dragon Warriors II - part three

The third and final instalment of Tim Harford's design ideas for Dragon Warriors II. The concept of myth levels is something I'd long wanted to implement after seeing the scene in Robin of Sherwood that Tim mentioned before, where the Lionheart mightily throws Little John (surely a case of myth level 3 vs myth level 2), though the concept originally came to me when reading about how the heroes of Chinese myth could stick an arrow through a ghost. And if you've read the third Knightmare novel, which I co-wrote with Oliver Johnson, you'll recall that Hannibal freezes a troublesome kobold in a block of ice. If you're a mythic hero, you don't need magic weapons; you don't even need spells. You can just do this stuff.

Anyway, more of that at a later date. For now, back to Tim:

5 – Sorcery

Sorcery is a dangerous business. Some notable features:

• Every time a sorcerer casts a spell, he or she must reduce an attribute or quality by one point, permanently. Spell-casting is not done on a whim or for trivial matters.
• Sorcerers will tend to have accumulated a combination of arcane objects and magical servants, and it is with the aid of these that most sorcerers wield magical power.
• Sorcerers can acquire magical servants or items by casting a spell to summon and bind a demon or spirit. (The process is very similar both for magical items and for personal servants.) Success binds the spirit, which can then be compelled to expend its own attributes or qualities to cast spells.
• The risks of summoning are very high. In addition to the sacrifice mentioned above, sorcerers risk having part of their own spirit being captured and bound by the demon if they lose. Perhaps worse yet is the possibility that the demon will be able to prolong the contest into an unholy stalemate.

Basic Procedure

Finding a spirit
If a suitable spirit is not readily to hand, then one must be located. This is a quick contest of Sensitivity vs. the spirit’s Trickery. If the sorcerer fails, he must wait one minute for each point by which he lost the contest before he may try to find another spirit.

Location is important here. Certain spirits will have certain aptitudes. For example, it will be easier to find an sturdy devil to bind into armour near a great mountain, and a spirit with the gift of illusion magic will best be sought at the end of a rainbow. The referee should assign bonuses accordingly.

Binding a spirit
The rules for binding a spirit are closely analogous to the combat rules. Pride replaces Attack; Pride or Faith replaces Defence. Instead of Toughness, use Sensitivity. (Toughness and Sensitivity may seem to be opposites; but in spiritual combat the sensitive are far more subtle and resilient. The spiritually clumsy will quickly be subdued.)

How long does spiritual combat take?
Spiritual combat moves to a different rhythm than physical combat. In physical combat, each round represented about six seconds. In spiritual combat, the first round lasts six seconds, but each subsequent round lasts twice as long as the previous one. Pure spiritual combat can last for days or even years. It can only be carried out in parallel with physical combat if the contest is extremely uneven. Sorcerers would be ill advised to pick close fights, for the victor of such a combat may emerge, ancient and white-bearded, to find the world has moved on…

What if the sorcerer loses?
Sounds like curtains. The sorcerer becomes a servant, bound into the item in question.

Once a spirit is bound
A spirit will be bound into an item, it can then be compelled to cast all manner of spells.

• Specialised Bindings: to produce magic weapons, etc, and wands.
• Generalised Bindings: to bind a servant into an item so that it can be summoned, genie-like, for general purposes.

Duels of Wizardry

A wizard can also try the same trick on a human being (perhaps even another wizard, if he is particularly brave or foolish). Again, that human can be enslaved or bound into a weapon, and if the human in question has spell-casting ability it can be commandeered.

We’re playing with different ideas here…

One idea is that every spell cast costs the sorcerer one attribute or skill point permanently: this makes spell-casting a serious business indeed! But most spells are long-lasting (a year and a day), or permanent (enchanting wands, rings and books, or summoning familiars and faltyns), or very powerful. Since Faith and Pride are close substitutes in many instances, there is the nice side-effect that many sorcerers will choose to burn Faith first, and become truly Godless.
Really hard sorcerers can get instant special effects without burning attributes – these will be special abilities (perks of their Myth level), not spells.

We should also consider making sorcerous combat analogous to physical combat, using Pride in place of Attack, and Pride or Faith in place of Defence.

Rules for spell casting:

• Keep track of “Pride Points” / “Faith Points”
• Fight vs the opponent
  o May be a person
  o May be a spirit (bound into an item)
  o May be a faltyn (sandestin)

Bonuses / penalties depending on the effect (and whether it tampers with God’s law).

Different spirits have different powers (depending on the effect that you want to create; an item, how long, etc.)

Dragon Warriors II - part two

A further excerpt showing the direction that Tim Harford and I planned to take with the rules for DW II:

3 – Rolling Dice

In DW II there’s a single die rolling convention, and it’s “open-ended plus-minus”. Translated, that means roll two dice; one of them is added to the total and one subtracted from the total. (The basic total prior to applying the dice will usually be the character’s skill score with any modifiers.)

If one of the dice shows a six, add and re-roll. Keep doing this as long as sixes are rolled. If both of the dice show sixes, then something special happens. (Bear with me on this – probably something to do with humours.)

Active and Passive Contests of Skill
Most actions are resolved as contests of skill. If there are two characters/animate objects involved, both roll and add the relevant skill.

If there is only one character involved, either against the environment (climbing a cliff, for instance) or against some internal challenge (rolling to stay conscious when wounded), then only one roll is made.

4 – Combat

Combat turns last about 6 seconds, as in DW. Each turn, roll and add Reflexes. (For example, say you have Reflexes 10 and roll +3 and -1, that means your score is 12.)

Each combatant acts in order of the result; action can be delayed voluntarily if desired until later in the turn.

Roll to Hit
The attacker rolls and adds Attack. The defender rolls and adds Defence. If the attacker wins, he does damage equal to the margin of victory – this added to the victim’s total of wounds. Defender must roll vs Toughness to avoid ill effects (see below).

Ripostes
If the defender wins, he may elect to counter-attack, using his margin of victory as an Attack score. However, he will in turn be vulnerable to a counter-riposte from the attacker, and so on. Thus, each attack can descend into a frantic flurry of blows and counter-blows. This will not usually happen, however, since a defender with a narrow margin of victory will be ill-advised to launch a riposte.

Injury: Stun, Knock-Out, and Death
Keep a track of cumulative wounds. Each time an injury is suffered, roll Toughness vs (Wounds + 5). A failed roll means that the character is stunned and has Attack and Defence of 0, until this time next turn. A roll failed by more than five means that the character is knocked out.

A character whose cumulative wounds score is greater than his Toughness must roll Wounds vs Toughness every time a further wound is taken, or die.

Defensive Stances
The combat procedure described above assumes that both combatants are fighting normally – ie, giving some thought to defence but also attempting to make an attack of their own. Alternatively, a character may opt to be overtly defensive in combat in two ways. In both cases described below, he sacrifices his own attack.

Full Parry
This is the fully defensive stance. The defender adds his Attack score to his Defence score to work out his effective Defence for the turn. However, no riposte is possible.

Aggressive Parry
A less defensive stance – here, the defender bides his time and waits for the opportunity to counter-attack. Again, the defender sacrifices his own attack. His effective defence is equal to half his Attack (round down) plus his Defence score. He does not pass up the opportunity to make a riposte, but if the attacker makes a counter-riposte, then the bonus to defence does not carry.

Example of Combat
Sir Rolf and Squire Lennox are in battle.

Rolf has ATT: 14, DEF: 14, TOU: 13, REF: 10.
Lennox has ATT: 11, DEF: 10, TOU: 10, REF: 11.

Rolf rolls (-4) on Reflexes, total 6. Lennox rolls (-3), total 8. Both gentlemen clearly a little slow off the mark.

Lennox swings a blow at Rolf, rolls (-1), total 10. Rolf’s defence roll is (+1), total 15. Rolf wins by five and elects to riposte.

Rolf rolls (+6), added to his riposte attack of 5, total 11. Lennox rolls (-3), total seven. Rolf’s counter-attack wounds Lennox for four points.

Lennox needs to roll Toughess vs Wounds+5 or be stunned. He rolls Toughness (-1), total 9. He Wounds are 4, plus 5, total 9. It’s a draw, so he just keeps his wits about him in time to meet Rolf’s attack.

Rolf rolls (+2), total 16. Lennox rolls (+10!), total 21. Lennox, somewhat desperately, decides that he, too, will press his luck and riposte (with an effective attack of 5).

Lennox’s riposte is (-4), total 1. Rolf’s defence is (-1), total 13. Rolf wins by 12 and launches a counter-riposte.

Rolf’s counter-riposte is (-2), total 10. Lennox rolls (-3), total 7. Rolf has won by three and deals another three wound points to Lennox.

Now Lennox needs to roll Toughness vs Wounds+5 again, or be stunned (if he fails by five or more, he is knocked out). His total wounds are 7, and he rolls (-2); he has just missed fainting, but is stunned.

The combat round ends, and with a vicious grin, Rolf swings his mace at the dazed Lennox.

Rolf rolls (0), total 15. Lennox’s effective defence is 0. He rolls (+6), but still loses by 9 and takes another 9 wounds.

Now Lennox must roll against cumulative wounds of 16, +5 to avoid stun. He rolls (+8), with Toughness of 10, he is stunned again, but still on his feet. That said, he might be wise to go down at this point, since if he takes another wound and then fails a check on Toughness vs Wounds he’ll die of his injuries.

The die rolls in this combat were genuine. Notice that although Lennox was a bit unlucky, he hastened his own demise with a very unwise attempt at a riposte. It’s also interesting to see that Rolf struck Lennox twice in one round, and both times with a counter-attack. This is fairly typical when one reads accounts of real combat, although in most DW II combats ripostes would be less likely.

Missile Combat: Feet and Fathoms
Missile combat takes the same form as melee combat, with two main differences. First, in place of the Defence score is a difficulty rating, based on range plus other modifiers. For close-range weapons like rocks, axes, knives and javelins, the difficulty rating equals the range in feet. For long-range weapons like bows and crossbows, the difficulty rating equals the range in fathoms (ie divide the range in feet by six).

Weapons
We presume that warriors are versatile, and can use any weapon with equal facility. (Distinctions come later, with special abilities that work only for favoured weapons.)

However, different weapons have different properties, summarised in terms of bonuses to Attack and Damage. (Obviously, a bonus to attack also leads to a bonus to damage – but it’s preferable, since it also leads to a reduced chance of a riposte.)

We have a simple classification of melee weapons:

- Two-handed heavy weapons (axes, maces, polearms): +1 Attack, +3 Damage
- Two-handed swords: +2 Attack, +1 Damage
- Two-handed light spears: +1 Attack; can be thrown
- One-handed heavy weapons (axes, maces, morningstars): +2 Damage
- One-handed swords: +1 Attack
- Small weapons (knives etc.): No bonus to attack, but can be concealed and thrown
- Unarmed, or improvised weapons: No bonus to attack, -1 damage

(In the combat example above, these modifiers were omitted for the sake of simplicity.)

Shields
Shields add two to defence (and two to the difficulty rating of missile attacks). This does carry through to a riposte, since a shield can enable an aggressive response to an attack.

Armour
Armour subtracts from damage and also from initiative rolls:

Leather or cloth armour: -1 from damage and initiative
Ring or scale armour: -2
Chain mail or plate: -3

Dragon Warriors II - part one

Here's the first part of Tim Harford's design outline for DW II, which he wrote following our long discussion (one of many) about where the rules needed to go. Another project I'd love to get back to one day!

Dragon Warriors II

1 - Design Principles

The idea behind Dragon Warriors II is to wipe out whatever is clunky and archaic about the original rules, and to add certain new elements to the rules – while keeping the connections with the original system visible.

The first against the wall
The first anachronisms to go from Dragon Warriors should be:
- The use of all kinds of different dice when six-sided dice would do;
- The use of character classes;
- Mechanistic rules for spell casting.

What needs to be added
DW II needs a more comprehensive skill system, although the number of skills will still be small. We also need a system for dealing with faith, which is central to Legend but not reflected in the rules.

Myth Levels and Special Abilities
There’s a question mark as to whether DW II should have “rank”. The desire to reflect the fact that some people are heroes and others are not, argues to keep “rank”. On the other hand, there’s little use for the concept in a skill-based system, which is what DW II is.

The compromise is this: high skills or attributes give access to special abilities; but the nature of the special ability depends on the Myth Level of the character. Only adventurer-types, that is “lead characters” such as player-characters and important NPCs, will have Myth Levels. Most people are Myth Level 0 no matter how highly trained in any given skill.

For instance: a character with Myth Level 1 reaching Defence: 15 can choose a plausible but impressive special ability such Leaping Dodge or Quick Draw. Myth Level 2 would give a choice of distinctly cinematic manoeuvres such as Arrow Cutting. Myth Level 3 offers The Elf King’s Parry, where the attacking weapon turns out to have been in the defender’s hand all the time, or The Ghost’s Walk, where the defender evades by stepping through the attacker – feats that are not just cinematic but clearly magical.

We explicitly want to avoid DW II becoming too much like a conventional level-based system. There are many other ways to distinguish between two characters of the same myth level, and so three Myth Levels (four, if you include Myth Level Zero) are enough.

Players would earn their first Myth Level quite easily, for winning their first important battle or pulling off an exceptional and story-worthy feat. Myth Level 2 is harder, the sign that the character is now a hard-bitten adventurer. Myth Level 3 is reserved for the characters who have achieved legendary status in the campaign.

The use of special abilities is an attempt to deal with several problems at once. Special abilities are a way of layering all kinds of special cases and exceptions over a basic set of rules that are (hopefully) clean and flexible. The very fact that special abilities break those rules are part of the fun.

Using special abilities in conjunction with Myth Levels also breaks the direct connection between being skilled and being a hero.

The highly magical special abilities also blur the distinction between the magical and the material – a distinction which should be blurred in Legend. Sorcerers achieve some of their effects by having mythical abilities associated with Pride; others are spells, and yet others are the result of alchemy or hellish bargains. It’s messy, but it’s messy within the same system that applies to warriors – heroes get their results in unusual ways.

2 – Character Creation

DW II has six attributes:

Strength
Reflexes
Intelligence
Charisma (formerly Looks)
Sensitivity (formerly Psychic Talent)
Toughness (new attribute)

There are also four humours – we’ll come to them later:

Melancholic
Choleric
Phlegmatic
Sanguine

There are eight skills (for now) in four pairs:

Attack & Defence
Faith & Pride
Trickery & Alertness
Persuasion & Perception

Usually, they oppose each other in contests of skill, but not always.

Let’s leave to one side how those skills and attributes are generated. Suffice it to say that we have in mind a 3-18 / 1-20 sort of scale, but because DW characters are heroes there is nothing to prevent both attributes and skills going off the scale. Special abilities kick in at skill 15.