The Devil is a gentleman

Midsummer is a good time to talk about the Devil. I don't mean the Biblical fellow. (Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub... They're not even the same character, are they?) In English folk tales he has another persona, as Sybil Marshall reminds us:

"The medieval folk-concept of the Devil, as distinct from that preached by the Church, is of Rex Mundi - large, dark, and handsome, infinitely attractive, a jolly fellow full of pranks and merriment and still displaying some of the attributes of his counterparts in pagan times."

In older English legends, the Devil tends to be a ferocious adversary, often scaly or horned, whose main function is to make saints look cool. And making those early British saints look cool is quite a task.

When we meet the Devil in English folk tales, though, he usually comes clothed as a squire or, if he's feeling particularly wicked, maybe a monk or a parson. In this guise he has a little bit of faerie about him, and seems to borrow the aspect of Odin or Cernunnos rather than God's erstwhile favourite angel. He enjoys a challenge - building a bridge in a night, a riddling contest, or even a simple wrestling match. He is a trickster, sometimes so cunning that he outwits himself. If you are familiar with the TV show Once Upon A Time, this is pretty much the character of Rumpelstiltskin, only without the Hollywoodized origin story.

Saints are far too boring to appear in any decent folk tale, all preachy and chinbearded as they are, but many an English hero named Jack shows his mettle by outsmarting the Devil. Souls are sometimes wagered, and in the wager the Devil's greed will usually see him come off worse. I'm sure we're supposed to sympathize a little when, returning a farmer's wife, he gripes that...

“...I've been the Devil the whole of my life
But I never knew hell till I met your wife.”

I'm not just rambling, honest. There's a point to all this. If you cast your mind back to midwinter, at the end of the Legend scenario "Silent Night", I put in a throwaway line that had Mitch Edgeworth justifiably raising an eyebrow:

"At midnight on Christmas Day, the Devil comes to Crossgate Manor and offers to play a game of chess for a favour."

Clearly this was to be a story seed for the referee to extemporize a minor epilogue incident, perhaps with a single player, to contrast with the desperate danger and action of the preceding few hours and possibly to set up an ongoing relationship in the campaign. The Devil might enjoy having one mortal friend to play chess with just as much as Morpheus is fond of an occasional glass of wine with Hob Gadling.

Mitch did preface his comment by saying that he's not a role-player, which explains the confusion. Encountering the Devil over chess might very well develop into an interesting ongoing storyline, but setting up the idea in a scenario takes no more than one line. In real games, half a page of notes are ample for running a session of several hours, and scenarios like "Silent Night" are written up only to explain to somebody else how that adventure might be run. In our own game, the denouement came in the forest, not in Crossgate Manor, and the key to defeating Duruth and his knaves was completely unexpected and yet perfect. It arose out of nowhere, a story created from the participation of the group where the best parts have no individual origin. Which, in a nutshell, explains why I am a role-player.

The picture, by the way, is Pan, not the Devil. Image copyright Ian Greig and used here under Creative Commons Licence.

Interview with Mark Smith, creator of Orb

Of all the Fighting Fantasy inspired gamebook series of the 1980s, the most innovative was probably the Way of the Tiger. Mark Smith had created a vivid world steeped in intrigue and adventure, and he and co-author Jamie Thomson didn't rest on their laurels. Soon tiring of the traditional find-the-quest-item-in-the-dungeon structure, they began to introduce elements from the wargames and boardgames they loved so much. In one book you had to juggle competing political factions while managing a city. In another you had to muster an army and choose the tactics that woul carry it to victory. Here, to mark the reissue of Way of the Tiger book four in paperback, author David Walters describes what it was like to play through those classic books when they first appeared, and he asks Mark Smith to look back at what inspired him to create them:

*  *  *

When I read the Way of the Tiger series back in the ‘90s, I started with book four, Overlord. I do not recall why I chose that particular one, maybe it was the Kraken on the cover, or maybe the other books were in short supply that week in the bookstore, but the book remains my favourite of the series to this day.

The opening was simply electrifying for me. For a start, I was the ruler of a city, which I had never experienced in a gamebook before. I was used to being a lone warrior on quests in gamebooks, and sometimes even winning a position of power at the end of such a book, but I had never been in a position of wielding that power from the start of a gamebook. In Overlord, the crown did not rest easy on my brow, for I had to get on with the difficult decisions of ruling a city split by competing interest groups on whom I had to rely for support, and a people divided by racial and religious schisms.

Then I got to pick my advisers from a choice of varied and interesting characters, including those who had once allied with my (tyrant) predecessor, yet who represented a large part of the city. Dangers were everywhere. It would be just as threatening to my rule to rely to much on new allies as it would be to trust potential enemies.

(Incidentally, if anyone has calculated all of the possible safe routes via the councillors you can select, please do comment below. The editor in chief of the series is very interested to confirm all the permutations!)

As well as political intrigue, I had to survive an assassination attempt, endure a siege and undertake a perilous quest that would lead me to the very den of the evil ninja of the Way of the Scorpion and beyond. Interestingly, I was not only powerful in my position as a ruler, but also as a deadly ninja. In this game book the reader was allowed to feel personally and politically powerful, yet still experience threatening situations and enemies.

It was only after this book that I went back to the beginning of the series and played through them all, enjoying the journey from a young unproven ninja setting out on an epic quest. For me, Overlord set a benchmark in innovation, in characterisation and sophistication that I had never seen before in a gamebook. I'd recommend you to give it a try, and hope you enjoy it as much as I did. But watch out – it may inspire you to become a writer as it did with me!

Questions about Overlord answered by Mark Smith, creator of the world of Orb and co-author of the Way of the Tiger series:

DW: Were you concerned about introducing rulership into an action series? Is that why the whole book was not about ruling the city and involved a quest element?

MS: We did worry that if there was no standard gamebook adventuring it would disappoint and yes that's why it's not all about governing.

DW: What were your inspirations for the characters who seek to become your advisers in Star Chamber?

MS: Some of the characters had been pre-developed while role-playing. The Demagogue was inspired by Athenian history.

DW: What possible game mechanics did you consider or reject regarding the city management element of the book?

MS: I gave little consideration to game mechanics beyond striving for simplicity.

DW: Apart from Avenger, which character in Overlord did you most enjoy writing about?

MS: I enjoyed all of the characters but especially Golspiel, Foxglove, Force Lady Gwyneth, Solstice and the Demagogue.

DW: Looking back at the book, is there anything you would do differently now about it?

MS: I would do more checking for game balance.

DW: Were you concerned about ending this book on something of a cliffhanger?

MS: The cliffhanger was deliberate. I was happy with all the books except that in Inferno you need to take Foxglove with you for it to be good.

How games best create stories

I wrote this originally in response to one of Porter Anderson's Ether For Authors columns on Publishing Perspectives, but as we occasionally discuss the confluence of stories and interactivity on this blog, it seems like it might bear repeating.

You can read the original piece ("Where is publishing's jetpack?") here. The points I want to address are, first, by Hugh Howey in The Future of Books:

"Donning an AR headset to read a picture book will be as common twenty years from now as putting on 3D glasses to watch a film can be today. But imagine this scenario: You put on a pair of AR glasses and grab a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. The glasses recognize the cover of the book, and it knows you’ve purchased the AR version of Gulliver. When you open the book, the story comes to life all around you. Not just on the pages of the book, but on the floor in front of you. There’s Gulliver being washed up on the beach. You might pull your knees up to keep your feet from getting wet. There are the Lilliputians staking Gulliver to the sand. Maybe one of them asks you to place a finger on a knot while they tie a bow."

I like and admire Howey, but that multimedia monster isn't the future of anything. You breed from the unhappy pairing of book and movie and you're only going to get a mule.

And secondly I'm responding here to this comment by by Patrick Soderlund in This is War (for a Game Industry's Soul):

"I hate to say this, but storytelling does not come naturally to Swedes. But we’re good at designing systems, and that’s what these games really are…Battlefield is a system designed for entertainment rather than for telling you a story."

Okay, let's start with that. “Storytelling does not come naturally to the Swedes..." Utter nonsense. You will find game developers in the UK saying that storytelling does not come naturally to the British. America likewise. The fact is, storytelling often doesn’t come naturally to the kind of person who gets interested in videogame development. Software engineers may not as a rule read widely, and may not grasp how broad and flexible is our remit when we talk of storytelling. That, fortunately, is changing.

What Mr Soderlund is missing is that, when we talk of storytelling in games, that doesn’t mean a writer using the game as a stage from which to declare a pre-defined story. A game is a world: an environment populated by characters and objects with rules to govern the interactions between them. The most interesting possibilities for story in such a context are not the sequences I might write in advance for the player to watch. That’s just using the game environment as a kind of movie, albeit one you can walk around inside. The really interesting evolution of storytelling in an interactive framework is when the story emerges from what the player does. Like, if I place a limpet mine on a wall that I couldn’t otherwise scale and use that to rocket-jump over it, there I have a story to tell my friends. It’s a very simple story in that example, but it’s special because I made it happen. It wasn’t a story fragment left there for me to experience “from the stalls”. It was always supposed to be - paraphrasing Patrick Soderlund now - a system designed to enable stories to happen.

So here’s how game developers ought to be thinking about interactive stories. Once a fortnight, I run a face-to-face roleplaying game. My players are mostly writers themselves. I see myself as the moderator. I present them with the germ of incidents, non-player characters to interact with, the constraints such as legality and status. I don’t know in advance what the story will be. The story only happens when the actors – that is, my players – come on stage. Our stories are not polished the way a novel or movie ought to be, but they’re not intended to be a spectator sport. Nobody authors them. There's no talking of ourselves in third person. None of us stands back outside the narrative and tries to engineer where it's going. To allow these stories to occur, we let go of being authors and step into the world as participants.

Experienced from within, a genuinely emergent story is new and unique and thrilling. It isn’t “tell me a story” any more. More videogame developers like Soderlund should roleplay so they get to see why the rest of us are so excited by the possibilities here.

Having said all this in praise of what videogames can deliver, I have to add that prose is still the most powerful medium for telling stories. That’s been true since long before Homer first banged his stick on the ground and said, “Sing, goddess!” – and you bet you could hear a pin drop. Words are more powerful because they create a more personal conduit into the imagination of each reader or each listener. (And to think I say this as a writer of comic books and a designer of videogames.) That’s why, if a discerning fellow in the year 2034 really wants to appreciate Gulliver’s Travels, he’ll do without the sloshing surf sound FX and all that art installation gimcrackery and just go back to the words as Swift wrote them.

Saved from the pits

The cover design for the new paperback edition of Blood Sword could have gone horribly wrong. I took it upon myself, that's why. Luckily, to our rescue came Matt Hill of Gamebooks Unlimited, who generously served up a variety of designs and patiently absorbed my comments such as, "Maybe like this but a bit edgier and with extra coolness."

This version isn't quite final. Very nearly, though. And you can see how much better and more professional it's looking than if I'd done the design. The boomalicious art of Megara's Sébastien Brunet doesn't hurt either.

The first book should be out by August, with The Kingdom of Wyrd following before the autumn. Sadly the books don't come packaged with card figurines and a full-colour tactical board like John Berry has improvised here, but maybe when we get around to the hardbacks.

Red as blood

I've dropped a few hints about Blood Sword coming back. The rumors are of a deluxe, hardcover edition of the complete series with full-color artwork throughout - and I'm not going to deny those rumors here, no indeed.

A previous post discussed whether to keep Blood Sword's very complex rules or to go for something a little bit easier. The current thinking is to start off with a "classic edition" using the original text and rules complete with tactical maps. That's the version the diehard fans will want. I can always revise it as a rules-lite edition later.

Fabled Lands LLP will start by releasing the classic edition in paperback, with the first two books, The Battlepits of Krarth and The Kingdom of Wyrd, appearing this summer. Personally I think the full tactical rules are better suited for an app version than print. In an app the tactical stuff would work brilliantly and require no work by the reader; something a bit like Warhammer Quest. But as the apps would necessarily prune the text down (those books are like thumping great GoT novels) we're going to publish the print version so that you can have both.

The hardcore collectors among you will be asking when the hardback edition is coming. Well, it's all just speculative right now, but probably this time next year. It all depends on Megara Entertainment's Kickstarter campaign for the Way of the Tiger books. Given the success of that, maybe we should try the same with Blood Sword's hardback edition.. Or maybe the Kickstarter should be to get the app launched, as that's going to take a little bit more oomph than most gamebook engines have going for them at the moment.

While you're waiting, here are a couple of images from the fourth book in the series, Doomwalk - which can be yours right now if you have $175 handy. The map is by Geoff Wingate, who I tapped for these books after seeing the fine cartographic work he was doing for Paul Cockburn in Imagine. The drawing of the marketplace storyteller is by Russ - as if you needed telling. And if you want to see an overflowing treasure house of great Russ drawings, hie yourself over to his blog this minute, for he generously posts collections of his outstanding fantasy and SF work, both old and new. The interesting thing about this one is the Vulcan (or Romulan?) in the audience there at top right. (I don't think I ever noticed that before, and I've been looking at this picture for 27 years!) I can't wait to see what these classic images look like in glorious color.

From Fighting Fantasy to the Empty Quarter

There were supposed to be eight Virtual Reality books. Mark Smith had written most of the first draft of his third, called (if memory serves) The Masque of Death and inspired in part by a Fritz Leiber Jr short story, but it was proving complicated and Mark was getting a lot of feedback from the series editor, Ian Marsh. By the time I’d handed in Heart of Ice there was a yawning gap in the schedules and I had to write a book in a hurry to fill it.

Heart of Ice had been a lot of fun, but it wasn’t easy to write. By basing it on a Tekumel role-playing campaign I’d run with several groups of players over the years, I thought I’d save myself some work. Not a bit of it, as the world and the characters had to be created from scratch and that had knock-on effects on the story. So coming off that I really wanted a rest, and most definitely didn’t want to turn around another gamebook from scratch in eight weeks.

I had a vague outline hanging around from the late ‘80s, when Jamie Thomson and I had pitched a number of ideas to the Fighting Fantasy editors at Puffin Books. One, which had begun life as a storyline for a novel called, at various times, A Thief of Cairo or The Best Thief of Baghdad, and was then reworked as The Thief of Arantis, now got dusted off. I found it was a very scanty outline indeed. Oh well, I’ve always been a pantser. And in any case it was supposed to be loose and shapeless and picaresque. An Arabian Nights homage can’t look like Tolkien, you know.

So here’s what I had to start out with:

The Thief of Arantis

This gamebook takes as its setting the ports and coastal waters of Arantis, in Titan. Its flavour, however, is derived from the Thousand and One Nights. It deals with the protagonist's picaresque adventures as he or she rises from being a common sailor to the exalted rank of adviser to the Sultan.

Stopping off in one of the richer ports of Arantis, the protagonist hears talk of a marvellous egg bigger than a house. This egg, laid by the fabulous giant Roc, is prized for its qualities of good fortune and rejuvenation. A single piece chipped from the shell could be worth 10,000 gold pieces or more. Naturally, as with most tavern stories, the details are hard to pin down. Everyone knows of the Roc's egg, but no-one has much idea of where it might be found. Nonetheless, the protagonist is sure that it truly exists (he saw it on the cover of the book, after all) and sets out in search of the Roc's eyrie.

Along the way his ship is wrecked on an inaccessible stretch of shoreline. Luckily he alone survives and is brought before a wizard, who listens to his story with great sympathy. Moved by his plight, and taking his survival as sign of the favour of the gods, the wizard gives him some magic slippers that allow the wearer to levitate - once only. These should enable him to reach the Roc's eyrie.

Soon after arriving at the next city, however, the protagonist is mistaken for a notorious thief and is thrown into gaol, charged with having stolen a magnificent ruby from the Sultan's treasury. There he is befriended by a beggar who tells him a story about the legendary Roc. In return, the protagonist might choose to tell the beggar about his magic slippers. If he does, his trust is rewarded with treachery: he awakes the next day to find the beggar has escaped using the slippers, leaving behind only his mangy cat.

Unless he still has the slippers and uses them to levitate to freedom, the protagonist is still in the gaol a week later when the real thief is caught. This fellow, Azenomei, is thrown into the same cell, but the gaolers make no move to free the protagonist, assuming that even if he did not steal the ruby there must be some other crime he should pay for. That night the protagonist mentions his obsession with finding the Roc's nest. Much to his surprise, Azenomei agrees to help him on condition that they first go to the rescue of his sister, who has been carried off by a sinister Jinni to a citadel on the western edge of the Plain of Bronze.

Assuming the protagonist agrees, they escape from gaol that very night and within a week they have reached an oasis in the Desert of Skulls. The protagonist is summoned to the tent of a nomad princess who turns out to be a hideous ghoul. Although he should be able to survive this encounter relatively unscathed, it forces him and Azenomei to flee into the desert without filling their water-bags. A few days later, weakened by thirst, they stumble on another oasis at twilight. A stranger they meet here tells the protagonist he has found the Oasis Beyond The Mirage, and reveals a vision where the protagonist's reflection in a pool seems to be accompanied by an evil, gold-eyed man. When they awake the next morning there is no sign of the oasis or the stranger, though they now have full water-bags.

After a few further adventures they reach the Jinni's citadel. It seems deserted. With pounding heart the protagonist begins to search for Azenomei's sister, but somehow he loses Azenomei in the maze of corridors. At last he finds a scented chamber where the girl reclines on a divan to which she is bound by a golden chain. He is about to free her when the Jinni appears. It is his former companion, the one who called himself Azenomei! This is the meaning of the vision at the oasis. The Jinni reveals that he truly believes the protagonist to be the notorious jewel thief that the Sultan's guards mistook him for. The same thief once stole a great gem ("as big as the egg of the Roc that perches in its eyrie atop the Isle of Palms") from the Jinni's own hoard, and that is why he has lured the protagonist here. The protagonist's protestations of innocence are ignored and he is forced to fight for his life. Various items must have been gathered to stand any chance against the Jinni, but in fact the protagonist is helped by the girl, who reveals a knowledge of combat sorcery. After the battle she tells him she is actually the Sultan's daughter. Her magic was taught to her by her old nurse. However, she was not taught any spell to unlock the enchanted shackles binding her. For this, she says, the protagonist must get a jewelled key from the eyrie of the Roc.

Fortunately the Jinni has mentioned where the Roc can be found: on the highest peak of the Isle of Palms, which lies in the Gulf of Shamuz. The protagonist travels there and must use his magic slippers to levitate up to the nest. If he has already made use of the slippers, it is possible to succeed if he has bothered to keep the beggar's mangy cat. This miraculous animal has the property that its tail grows longer whenever an outrageous lie is spoken in its hearing. If the protagonist has treated the cat well and has learned of this power, he can cause the tail to reach right up to the Roc's nest and can climb up to get the jewelled key...

The protagonist might not have met the Sultan's daughter, of course, in which case he can just take part of the egg as he originally intended. This will make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice. If he takes the jewelled key instead, though, then his reward is even greater. After freeing the girl and returning her to her father, he is rewarded with a Robe of Honour and becomes the Sultan's vizier. Throughout the city he is lauded as the most daring thief in the world, for he stole the jewelled key from the Roc's nest and the princess from the Jinni's palace. Thus, one who began by being mistaken for another ends by becoming the one he was mistaken for.

I felt it needed more of a route in, but not the enforced quest of most single-story gamebooks. The story needed to be set in motion by the kind of arbitrary twist of fate (aha!) that characterizes the Arabian Nights. After that, the protagonist is cast around the world like a pinball by happenstance, coincidence and enemy action until it all ends happily ever after.

What I didn’t account for – or didn’t have time to correct – was that the original outline was predicated on you playing a thief. But in Virtual Reality books, the whole point is that you get to customize the kind of character you want. You might be a thief, but equally you might be a merchant or a nomad or a holy man. In a sandbox environment like
Fabled Lands, it wouldn’t matter. You could bypass the thievish narrative, or come at it from another angle. In a single-story gamebook, the picaresque structure risked seeming unfocused.

When, last year, I came back to the book released as Twist of Fate (never liked that title - another area where time ran out on me) and got to rework it as Once Upon a Time in Arabia, the biggest change I made was to give it an entirely new prologue. The bad guy is now badder, his villainy toward you more egregious, and the stakes are higher right from the start. This goes somewhat against the fairytale dream-flow of the Arabian Nights – but it makes for a better gamebook, and on the question of foolish consistencies, I’m with Emerson.

Ulukai te ho!

I’m typing this in madcap haste because I only just heard about a Kickstarter for the greatest game of all time. And the campaign has only four days left to go. So think of this as the blog equivalent of your TV screen going crackly and dissolving to an emergency announcement. We interrupt your regular program...

Oh, which game am I talking about? Outcast, of course.

Outcast was released in 1999 to a whole lot of fanfare, courtesy of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra no less, and Atari’s (then Infogrames) CEO Bruno Bonnell on a high wire in a leotard. Which is not something you’d catch Bill Gates doing, though he can jump over a chair.

At first glance, Outcast fits neatly into the adventure genre, albeit with an unusual pitch of science fantasy imagination that owes more to Vance, Druillet and Moebius than to the usual Flash Gordon serials that inspired Star Wars - and everything else like it that's come since. Outcast wasn't just an original setting, though. It did so many things its own way that it really defies definition.

Our hero is Cutter Slade, a Navy SEAL who is roped into a dimension-hopping experiment that takes him to an alien world where he learns that he’s a legendary hero whose coming has been prophesied for years. Hitting the ground running, Cutter has to lead a revolution, rescue the girl, and save the planet Earth from destruction.

Sounds familiar? Not the way Outcast does it. (Trust me on this. If I know anything, I know a good interactive story.)

To begin with, most story-based videogames even today are mostly linear. Outcast is an open world that allows the player to explore the story in the same way that he or she explores the landscape – by roving freely between different territories, picking up information in no particular order, ignoring elements that don’t interest and concentrating on others that do. No two players’ experience of the Outcast storyline are exactly alike.

It also helps that Outcast has a witty, intelligent script that keeps our interest and makes us care about the characters. The musical score, composed by Lennie Moore, would do credit to a great Hollywood epic. The voice acting is superb and the sound effects highly evocative. As we walk through the market of Talanzaar we hear the babble of voices, the strains of pipe music and the trudge of alien feet on ochre sand and we can easily forget that there are only a few characters visible on screen at any one time. It feels like a teeming city.

Also, Outcast is far beyond the simplistic black-and-white conflicts you usually get in SF blockbusters. Cutter’s enemies don’t do things simply because they are evil. Characters have real, complex motivations. There's at least one twist that is thought-out and executed as brilliantly as the best moments in cinema. And what makes it all the more believable is that the bad guys aren’t orcs or occupying aliens, existing solely to do evil acts. They are an army drawn from the same population they terrorize.

But all those things merely show that Outcast can do great storytelling as well as any movie. The really important factors are the unique stylistic touches that go to make it more than just an interactive adventure movie. To play this game is to take a trip to an amazing new world.

Outcast is full of great locations. The landscapes are set against alien skies that were painted as dioramas by lead artist Franck Sauer. There are points during Outcast that you have to forget about the adventure for a moment and just stop and marvel at a breathtaking view.
The creatures who populate the alien world, the Talan, aren’t just humans with a few bobbles stuck on their head. They really are alien, different, interesting. Their unusual appearance is a clever way around the limitations of the graphics, of course. We don’t have the same expectations that an alien face will display detailed emotion, so we quickly get used to taking emotional cues from their gestures and tonal inflection instead. But that’s just the technical question. Most importantly, the quaintly comical Talan with their clumsy splay-footed gait and child-like innocence are endearing. We get to like them, and so saving their world ceases to be a cliché or a mere game objective. It becomes personal. It’s something we want to do.

Outcast is distinguished by hundreds of tiny details that reveal the care and artistry that have gone into its creation. The rusty streaks that stain the stonework of Fae Rhan’s palace, the unique and clearly non-Terran flora and fauna, the simple yet engrossing subplots, the breathtaking otherworldly vistas, the humour and the humanity. All contribute to a work of art that ranks among the greatest in history. Cutter Slade goes on an adventure. And we go with him.

Now, the original team are trying to raise the money to overhaul the old voxel-based graphics and give the game an up-to-date look. It deserves to find a whole new generation of players, and maybe – thanks to Kickstarter – it will.

UPDATE (March 2017) - The Kickstarter didn't reach its target, but Appeal are now working on Outcast: Second Contact for a UK publisher, so here's hoping Brexit doesn't scupper that.