That old serpent

We were just talking last month about how the fantasy adventure gamebook has evolved into (among other things) CRPGs, so no need to go into all that again. This is Inkle's latest gamebook app in the Sorcery series, and it's interesting that 80 Days seems to have steered them more towards the go-anywhere open world gameplay of Fabled Lands.

Good thing too, though I'll admit to a heartsink when I saw a piece of simulated text-on-paper flip up onto the screen - only because the rest of it looks so good, particularly Mike Schley's maps, that those old connections to gamebooks' past seem as out of place as wisdom teeth or a burst appendix. (I know, I know - text is inexpensive; I'm not faulting Inkle for using it, just saying that the rest of their banquet looks so appetizing that the paper napkins are bound to come as a slight disappointment.)

What particularly impresses me is that all this is built on the foundations of Inklewriter, a markup language, rather than the object-oriented database structure you'd use in a CRPG. But that's the bit of the iceberg you don't see. The important thing is that Sorcery 3 is here, it looks great, and if Games Workshop style goblin-bashing is what floats your boat, you're going to be spending the next few months in Analand. (Don't look at me; it's what Steve Jackson called it.)

Title fight

When Sylvester Stallone brought back his two most iconic characters a few years back, the movies in question were technically Rocky VI and Rambo IV, but they were released as Rocky Balboa and Rambo. The difference? Probably an extra 50% at box office.

Book publishers have long known that you don’t put numbers on the covers of a book series. This occasionally irritated me when, in younger days, I had to look inside to find which Elric or Ellery Queen book to read next. The publishers didn’t care because they already had me hooked; it was the non-fans they needed to attract. If somebody saw “James Bond book 5” on the cover and hadn’t read the first four, they wouldn’t bother to pick it up. If you number a series too conspicuously, the law of diminishing returns soon kicks in.

Some series can buck the trend. Toy Story and Star Wars movies don’t mind adding the weight of a Roman numeral to the poster. That’s because those series have already broken through to the real mainstream. If you’re going to see the next movie, it’s a dead cert you already saw the earlier ones.

This all came up recently in a discussion with the chaps at Megara Entertainment, who may be running a Kickstarter for a new Fabled Lands book later this year. Perhaps I should add a word of caution here before I overstimulate the hopes of FL aficionados. The problems I've already cited with Kickstarter haven't gone away. (Short version: even if you raise $50,000, after printing and shipping all those hardbacks you might have less than $5000 to pay for writing, art, editing and typesetting.) So we're still just at the discussion stage, figuring out how it could be made to work. Megara may decide to run a Kickstarter campaign for something else this year. Paul Gresty, who has volunteered to write the thing for nothing but love and praise, may yet come to his senses and focus on paid work instead. There are no guarantees in life.

If there are answers to the Kickstarter Paradox, they can only be found by a group of people proposing and debating different strategies, refining the best ideas, and all getting behind an agreed plan. I started this particular discussion off by saying that, given the twenty-year gap, we could hardly sail in with, “Here’s book 7” like nothing had happened. Most of the people we’ll be talking to would never have heard of Fabled Lands. And even for the fans – well, think of Sherlock Holmes. Does anybody want yet more formulaic adventures of the dear old bod? Even his creator was sick of those. When a new Holmes book comes out, what we look for is something interesting like Moriarty or A Slight Trick of the Mind. Nobody but a Baker Street Irregular is going to want Sherlock Holmes V – and they’d just swipe a copy without paying and then use it to cosh a tramp.

Anyway, here’s what the Megara team had to say. Joining in are Mikael Louys and Richard S Hetley, Megara’s CEOs in Europe and the USA respectively; Paul Gresty, the author of the new book whatever it ends up being called; and me and Jamie, as the ones to blame for all this FL stuff in the first place.

So: do we follow the lead of movie series like Bourne, Batman and Star Trek - and books like Tintin, Peter Wimsey, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc - in dropping the numeral?

Richard S Hetley: “That is an interesting possibility. Sure, the Way of the Tiger worked out very well, but ‘rebooting’ a series is often a peculiar thing psychologically. After all this time, why not act as though it were a standalone book? Part of the point is that they already are "standalone" in the sense that you can start from anywhere. So, ‘We acknowledge that it's been years and the initial plan of twelve books isn't getting completed. We are returning to the Fabled Lands for this one book. Sure, it connects with all those books, and it draws from the missing 7-12 domain, but we know things are different 25 years later and this book is its own thing.’”

Jamie Thomson: “I just don't see the value of not calling it FL 7. It's a series of linked books, each playable on their own anyway. Mucking about with it at this stage will only confuse people. Is it Fabled Lands or not? Or some new spin off? There's no need to complicate a fairly simple idea. There's a bunch of fans out there who want more in the series. We just give them the next one. Then we find out whether there's enough of them to justify the work, but hopefully there will be. And if so, they'll want the next, and we could even keep doing that until they don't want to fund any more. I can't see where the gain is. It sounds like we'd be saying, 'This isn't book 7, although actually it is.’ Unless we did it as a stand alone title, but it referenced all parts of the world, and wasn't just set in the Feathered Lands. You'd just have fewer adventures, but spread around a bit. It wouldn't actually be book 7 then.”

Mikael Louys: “The fans want it to be a Fabled Lands book not a standalone. I've heard this often enough over the last few years.”

Richard: “There was a recent movie called Tron: Legacy. It was not called Tron II. They didn't even try to get people to watch the original Tron first. That's what I mean by ‘standalone’.”

Paul Gresty: “Looking over the FL reprints, they aren't really called 'Fabled Lands 1', 'Fabled Lands 2' etc. The pertinent number appears on each book's spine, but that's the only place it does appear. The cover of Book 2, for instance, says: Fabled Lands: Cities of Gold and Glory. So, for the Kickstarter, it's easy enough to drop the 7. By the very nature of the FL series, The Serpent King's Domain could easily be considered the first book you play anyway.”

Dave Morris: “That’s what I’m saying. The fans already know The Serpent King’s Domain is the seventh book in chronological order of publication. They also understand they can start in any book. But somebody who has never played Fabled Lands before but does have an interest in gamebooks and is willing to support a campaign on Kickstarter – I submit that could be a respectably large set of potential backers, for whom seeing it described as ‘book 7’ will only put them off.”

Paul: “I think it would be particularly tricky to reboot Fabled Lands, given how interconnected the books are – far more so than, say, Golden Dragon. The as-yet-unpublished Lone Wolf 29 apparently takes place twenty-five years after Lone Wolf 28. A quarter of a century has passed in real-life, and it has passed in the life of the book's protagonist as well. Could something similar be done with Fabled Lands? For the moment, I'm failing to see how. As I say, the books are too interconnected, and non-linear, to make that sort of thing easy.”

Dave: “I don't think anyone is advocating an FL reboot. And I like the sound of what Joe Dever is doing there, letting the 25-year hiatus be a feature not a bug, but we can’t really do it with Fabled Lands because we don’t have a central character in that way. Short of adding show tunes or pop-up maps, what can we do to make this, not a reboot, but more than just ‘here’s more monsters and treasure’?”

Jamie: "I think we just have to say it’s book 7! You know what will happen if we don’t: ‘Is this book 7 in the series?’ ‘Can I go straight from one of the earlier books to this one?’ ‘Why isn’t this the next in the series’. ‘What is this?’ ‘Can I take my old Fabled Lands character into this book?’ ‘Is this set in the same time period as the original series?’ ‘This sounds interesting, but I really just wanted the next in the series’ and so on, and so on.

It seems the debate will rage on and on. Should the book be trumpeted on Kickstarter as "Fabled Lands Book 7" or as "Fabled Lands: The Serpent King's Domain"? Or should it even be a single volume that wraps up the whole Fabled Lands series once and for all? A lot depends on whether we are willing and able to reach out to a new bunch of readers, and thus inject the series with a fresh lease of life, or whether the market for Fabled Lands books is going to stay restricted to those players who have stuck around for the last twenty years. What do you think?

A Dark Lord in full colour

Jamie Thomson and I created the character of teen lord of evil Dirk Lloyd over beers in my garden back in the late summer of 2007. It's easy to assume when you see a big success such as the books have grown into that it all comes about overnight. Not a bit of it. Jamie gave blood, sweat and tears to develop the concept into a very funny novel that (as you know) eventually won the Roald Dahl Prize. Five years and many drafts, that took. We would have given up if not for Fabled Lands LLP supremo Frank L Johnson, who rallied us for one final push and spent one Guy Fawkes' Night in Lewes pep-talking Jamie into writing the masterpiece of his career.

Since then the Dirk Lloyd story has been continually optioned for TV and movies (fingers crossed) and we regularly return to the idea of a DL game. And now Dirk is bursting into new life in a vibrant comic strip that will run in The Phoenix, the UK's best kids' magazine, starting on March 7. With art by the ultradimensionally talented Dan Boultwood and story ideas by Jamie and me, what's holding you back?

Hot and cold about interactive literature

I was talking to James Wallis about Powell and Pressburger and how one of my favourite movies – my “hang out” movie, as Tarantino would have it – is A Canterbury Tale. I mentioned that the Pilgrim’s Way passed near my old school and how I’d always wanted to walk it. Possibly I was thinking of cross-country runs around Newland’s Corner with the sleet in my teeth , and the operative word was walk. Anyway, it made an impression on James. The following year he got engaged to the beautiful Cat Muir, asked me to be his best man, and suggested that I and Martin McKenna make ready with him to wenden on pilgrymage.

To my everlasting regret, I wasn’t able to tread the whole route from Winchester to Canterbury. Elixir Studios had just closed down and I was too busy looking for a job to clear two weeks for the simple pleasure of wayfaring with good friends. I should have done. You can’t bunk off halfway through a pilgrimage, not even if you’re an agnostic like me.

Anyway, you'll be glad to know there is a point. James decided that a good angle for charity fundraising would be to do the whole 146 miles without a map. Instead, he brought along a written description of the landmarks we should be steering by: a track beside a field, turn left at the second farm, etc.

Remind you of anything? It’s like Fabled Lands, where you find yourself in deep countryside with something like this to guide you:

The irony there is that Jamie Thomson and I didn’t originally intend the player to navigate using the text. Our first thought was that you’d move a counter around the map, with the usual allowance for terrain type. Regions would be marked with different encounter tables and each city and town would have a number that pointed to the text in the book.

Why did we change our minds? Because navigating by map would have required a little more work on the part of the player, and gamebook readers in the ‘90s weren’t as accustomed to that kind of thing as role-players. Yet when Jamie and I were working at Eidos, and we talked to Ian Livingstone about turning FL into a computer game, we enthusiastically returned to the idea of using the map as the main armature around which you’d build your character’s story. Here’s the first part of our pitch document:

A scrolling map of the world. Key figures (players and powerful NPCs) appear on this map, but you can only tell the profession of characters if they're in the same country as you are (ie, those characters will be differentiated into Warriors, Mages, etc; those in other countries are just shown as a generic character sprite).

That was 1996. Almost twenty years on, gamebook apps like Sorcery and 80 Days made the long-overdue step of having the top layer be the map – just simple common sense because, as James and Martin and I soon discovered on the North Downs Way, trying to find your way around the Home Counties from just a text description is sheer insanity. This is so much better:

But when you switch in the map layer, is that still a gamebook? Leaving aside the question of the “game” part (there is dice-rolling but little or no actual gameplay in almost all the gamebooks I’ve seen), the distinguishing feature of gamebooks is that they are like novels. So let’s go back to basics with what a novel is. You are presented with prose that functions as a kind of blueprint or program for what is going on in the story, and when you run that program in your mind, you construct an imaginary reality. The whole shebang may seem to be in the control of the author, but in fact you are lucidly dreaming your own version of the world with just occasional nudges from the text. (It’s actually the basic mechanism of human awareness too, incidentally, but let’s not get sidetracked.)

That lucid dreaming process is very different from watching a movie or playing a videogame. There the world you’re experiencing is already rendered for you. (And when I say that, you realize I’m not only talking about the graphics, right?) This is why it is easy to interact with any visual or even aural story, but in the case of prose we have to disengage the part of the brain that’s modelling the world around us in order to decide what choice to make. How can we make that easier? Well, there’s a world of difference between parsing this:

and this:

The square is empty. To the north is a river. You do not see a key here.

All this is not exactly new. Marshall McLuhan wrote about hot and cold media (he said “cool” but, y’know). A hot medium is doing the work for you. A firework display, for example, or a blockbuster action movie. A cold medium (comics, say, or novels) requires your conscious participation in the process. It’s a continuum, so the short example of text-adventure prose above is hotter than the novel-like one involving the Gargan twins.

The confounding factor here is interactivity. It’s very easy to interact with a hot medium. A ball flies at me; I swipe it away. But interactivity with a story is more of a conscious process. Do you want the princess to marry the prince or to spend her days singing MOR show tunes? Let me think… Yet as I spin the cogs to decide that, the entire world of the novel must grind to a halt, even begin to fray around the edges, as I’m not consciously sustaining it. So, the more you want the reader to interact – in fact, the more you want them to be a player – the less you must make them a reader.

Arguably the text in an app like Sorcery is crying out to be severely de-novelized, reduced from this:

to this:

or preferably replaced altogether with animated characters. It’s evolving into a game anyway, and in doing so is proving far more popular than a straight “book-like” interactive story app. So why retain features that gamebooks only had originally by reason of historical circumstance, because the only mobile devices in those days were paperbacks and because artwork was too expensive?

Or is there a valid reason for interactive stories to hang onto their gamebook roots and even to play up the novelistic elements? What do you think?

You never have to wait for breakfast

The Thomson-Smith series everybody talks about is The Way of the Tiger. Fair enough. Mixing Japanese martial arts with Dungeons and Dragons doesn't do it for me - and the ninjutsu and bushido stuff was never part of Mark Smith's original conception of the world of Orb either. But in the '80s it was all black pyjamas and nunchuks. Even Daredevil seemed to be wall-to-wall ninja back then. Way of the Tiger rode that wave, and you can't blame them.

Another '80s fixture was British comic 2000AD. Of course Judge Dredd wasn't my favourite. I preferred Nemesis the Warlock (which felt a bit Moorcockian), Ace Trucking Company (definite shades of Keith Laumer), and the resolutely downbeat Strontium Dog, whose demise (later retconned as "legend") surely inspired Avenger's apparently sticky and sudden end.

More of the spirit of Johnny Alpha was evident in the Falcon gamebooks. Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson wrote these books around the same time as Way of the Tiger, but that series has always overshadowed them. It's a shame. Falcon's time-travel concept allows for a diversity of setting and tone that WotT could never achieve. There's a dry humour as well as a dark bite to Falcon's adventures, and with multiple timelines as the theme sudden death is no longer quite such a metafictional minefield. Put it this way: Falcon could make a respectable movie or TV show, whereas in the case of WotT you could hardly help asking why an Occidental-looking guy kept using Japanese words and was trying to drop-kick that shoggoth with an orc on its back.

Well, no need to pick sides. You can have your kēki and eat it, because Fabled Lands Publishing is bringing back the Falcon series, starting this month with The Renegade Lord. It's 3033 AD, you're an agent of the Temporal Executive, and you have to stop the time traveller who is trying to change history before he, she, or it deletes the present. The wrinkle in the time stream is that the miscreant you're after seems to be one of your own superior officers.

We had this book ready for release at the end of last year, but we didn't know what to do about a cover. Then Jamie happened to get in touch with Peter Andrew Jones, the near-legendary artist responsible for some of the great gamebook covers of the '80s and '90s. Mr Jones kindly offered to remaster the cover for the new edition. So that's a point in favour of Facebook, in case you're still missing your hoverboard.

Just a matter of T.I.M.E.

Anybody want to hazard a guess at what's going on here? Hint: I said what, not WOTT. If you can't guess from all the clues, pop back tomorrow when all will be revealed.

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Actually, while you're waiting, here's a complete role-playing system for the world of Tekumel. And here's the character sheet template to go with it. And here's an entry-level scenario. And here's a set of adventures to continue that into a full campaign. And the city (with map) to set it all in.

Not sure what Tekumel is or why it's the richest and most meticulously detailed fantasy setting ever created? Then start off by reading Patrick Brady's quick-start introduction to the world. The world maps will help too.

That's nothing to do with tomorrow's news. It's just some freebies I thought the roleplayers among you might like.

A crate of souls and a ship's spine breaking

Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.

In case you hadn't heard,the complete Sunless Sea goes on sale from 09:30 PST on Friday. I'm telling you now because we have big gamebooky news coming up on the blog then - don't miss, or all of history might be irrevocably altered.