The first glimmer of the Fabled Lands MMO

I was talking recently about the RTS game Plague that I worked on with Sam Kerbeck and Richard Fletcher at Domark (later Eidos). Around the same time, Jamie Thomson and I were trying to convince the Domark/Eidos management to start development on a multiplayer CRPG based on our Fabled Lands gamebooks.

This was around May/June of 1996. The Fabled Lands Otherworld Game, as we called it, was destined to mutate considerably over the next couple of years as the technology advanced by leaps and bounds. We changed to an all-new setting, the continent of Abraxas, which you can read about here. We massively expanded the scale of the game into a true MMO and we abandoned the top-down isometric view for true 3D. We began to use Propprian theory to develop the idea of a "referee AI".

It was all too ambitious for the Eidos senior management, who by then may have spotted that they didn't need to develop games to make money. Many internal teams were hived off into private companies like Black Cactus, the FL team was laid off, and the Fabled Lands MMO never happened. But, for no better reason than historical curiosity, here is the original pitch document that Jamie and I showed to Ian Livingstone in mid-1996.

Fabled Lands "Otherworld" Gaming

We say "role-playing" when we're talking about solo explore-and-level-up games, and "adventure gaming" when we really mean boring old crate-stacking and puzzles, which means that when it comes to real role-playing for the PC games market we don't have a term left. So let's call this "otherworlding": realtime multi-player role-playing, given a new lease of life by the medium of software to create a new kind of gaming experience.

The Fabled Lands Otherworld Game anticipates the gaming styles that will have become current two years from now, while not abandoning traditional gaming forms. I'll start by describing how the game would play in its solo form and then go on to cover future innovations.

The Solo Game

On the surface FL won’t look much different from a traditional CRPG. You choose a character from a gallery of races, classes and clothing styles and assign starting skills. (These are mix-&-match to allow multiple options, eg in favourite weapon.) Then you set out on your adventures, your adventuring persona represented by an animated sprite on isometric city streets and landscapes. Dotted around the world are many lost ruins, wizard's towers, haunted castles and other areas where you can gamble risk against reward. In the cities you can spend your treasure on new equipment and magic, resurrection deals, buy a townhouse or castle – or even ships to go trading and privateering across the sea.

Where it differs from ordinary CRPGs is in having a number of special partially-scripted adventures that a campaign "referee" (in the form of the game's AI) can bring in to liven things up whenever your character is having too easy a ride. These adventures are templates with slots to accommodate friends and enemies you've picked up in the course of your travels.

For example: you take a bounty hunter's job and go hunting bandits. You round up most of the horde but the leader, Black Nat Varley, escapes. Later, while implementing a random attempt on your life, the AI fills in the assassin's identity as being Black Nat. If Nat survives your second encounter, he'll eventually show up in another encounter and so on. (Adversaries who survive more than three encounters are classed as "dear foes" and have their own level increases tied to yours so as to always give you a good battle.)

And the referee AI will also take account of your character class, deity, etc, when introducing new missions and encounters. It can also randomly generate adventure locations as needed. This means that every campaign will be unique.

The Home Campaign

A bunch of friends arrange to get together and play a Fabled Lands Otherworld campaign on a regular basis. Say I'm the campaign manager; this means the campaign data is kept on my machine. Players come round once a week with their laptops, or maybe they dial in – or the campaign might be run on an office network a couple of evenings a week.

Within the game, players can get together for adventures or split up and go their separate ways. Some magical objects allow you to spy on the progress of other players, possibly with a view to ambushing them and grabbing their treasure. The magic level is high, permitting frequent teleportation and communication at a distance. Alliances and rivalries are equally possible. The game moves more swiftly than old style pnp RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. This allows players to move around the world quickly and have plenty of adventures every session. (The best way to explain this is as a combination of an RPG and an adventure boardgame like Eric Goldberg's Tales of the Arabian Nights.)

The Open Campaign

Almost a Multi-User Dungeon, except with the AI referee throwing in plenty of plotlines to keep the adventure fizzing. The way this would work is with a company picking up the licence to run a commercial Fabled Lands campaign. Such companies might have a couple of hundred participants in one game, all paying-to-play with a percentage coming back to Domark. (Distributed processing through the network would prevent the game from being frustratingly slow.)

The character-to-character interface will mean that when two adventurers meet they cannot immediately start typing messages to each other. To start with they have to go through a menu of greetings and responses, which will be decided by factors such as class, race and deity. For example, an elf meets a human. They're given possible messages and responses that, if followed appropriately, allow both players to reach a point where direct messages can be typed in. However, a human meeting a goblin would not be able to do this (the two races being mutually hostile) unless one or both was accompanied by a dwarf or other "neutral" race. This effectively provides a kind of "Turing Test" interface when first meeting a character whereby you cannot know if you're talking to another human player or a computer-controlled character.

What happens if you can't turn up (on-line or in person) for a game? This is the bane of the old-style roleplayers life, because his character misses out on treasure and experience awards. The way Fabled Lands solves this is to get every player to choose a Downtime Mode for his character when logging off. If you opt for "Sanctuary" then your character is retired from the game world until the next time you play. He gets no awards but cannot be attacked while you're off-line. "Training" means your character is in the arena or library. He gets some experience for any campaign time that passes when you're absent, but there is a chance of other players stealing from or assassinating him. "Adventuring" makes your character available for dungeon expeditions or other endeavours, making him an AI-run NPC for the duration, but although this means you can get your share of treasure and experience you also run the risk of logging on next time to discover your character has been killed in action.

Game mechanics

By basing the game on our Fabled Lands world – which we have developed over several years for radio plays, gamebooks and role-playing adventures – we make sure to avoid the cobbled-together warmed-over fantasy typical of the usual CRPG output. Fabled Lands is as detailed and unique a setting as you will find in any fantasy novel.

Begin by choosing your race (human, trau, merfolk, mannikyn people or whatever), country of origin (the four continents and many islands of the Fabled Lands world all have their own character), deity (there are over a dozen with a complex interplay of antagonisms and associations), and a name for your adventuring alter-ego.

Next the player sets his expertise in the five abilities: Combat, Magic, Charisma, Wayfaring, and Agility. Each of these governs your potential scores in the skills which are sub-groups of that ability. (For example, Wayfaring devolves to Sailing, Riding, Scouting, Survival and Streetwise.) By focussing in one field you can make yourself a master, but at the expense of your other abilities.

Higher ability scores bring in hero-level skills and spells that the player had no idea were possible, maintaining the excitement of discovery that is at the heart of the real role-playing experience.

The display is isometric and characters move in real time. A whole gallery of animated figures can be custom-coloured in the way that tabletop gamers like to paint their own figurines. In combat you can preset your fighting mode (ie, how much is put into attack and defence) or key in manoeuvres on the fly. More experienced adventurers can perform more effective fighting manoeuvres with just one keystroke, or unleash more devastating spells.

Expansion disks would introduce new quests, encounter areas, and characters while extending the map and including additional storylines for the referee AI to use.

Whereas CRPGs up till now have copied the sillier and more tedious aspects of early DnD (one dungeon level full of orcs, another full of lizard men, and so on...and on), Fabled Lands will emulate and expand on the things that made role-playing popular to start with. This means building up a character history: exploring exotic worlds, encountering friends and deadly foes, discovering magical artefacts and the excitement of researching ever more powerful spells. At the highest levels players can occupy their own castles, hire armies, wage wars or create their own "pocket universes" using the mightiest magic.

It will be a journey to a whole other world.

Breaking the butterfly

Last week I was talking about Plague, the game I designed at Eidos in the mid-90s that morphed from sim-medieval London to "the game of war, Black Death and taxes" to the unabashed RTS that was Warrior Kings.

I wish I had more than snippets from old documents to show you. Sam Kerbeck's 3D engine was amazing. He and lead artist Richard Fletcher worked 24-7 for weeks to build a demo that would make the execs at Eidos take notice. Unveiled at E3, that demo reportedly rattled Peter Molyneux enough to put Populous: The Beginning back by six months. The engine was whisked over to Eidos subsidiaries like Pumpkin to use for Warzone 2100, but development on Plague itself was dogged by the politics that comes of being located at a games publisher's head office. One day I'll write the novel, only nobody will believe it.

So this (below) is the second attempt at an intro for Plague. The idea of writing these was more to give the team a creative focus than to necessarily be the actual game intro, as by this stage development had entered a kind of reverse Zeno's Paradox whereby the projected shipping date seemed to be receding into the far future. Within another year I had seen that the only way to fix the whole thing was to junk Plague and start afresh with Warrior Kings. It worked for a little while, but - Oh, maybe I'll save that story for the novel too.

Plague Intro Movie

A glimmer in darkness. Words briefly appear on the screen: Sunset, on the Day of Judgement. The words fade.

There's the sound of screams and moans, of many people. Flames licking up out of the darkness around ruined towers. We're pulling back gradually as the flames die down and the screams recede away...

The fires fade and we continue pulling back. What seems to be the walls of an immense dark cavern reveals itself to be the socket of a skull. We continue pulling out. It's not a whole skull, the lower jaw's missing, and it's charred and blood spattered. We see a black clawed hand is holding it.

The hand crushes the skull. There comes a hideous gasp of triumph. Continuing still to pull back, we see (from low angle shot - he looks immense) a figure. Under his cowl, you can't quite make out his face - it could be black bone, or hard black beak like a raven's. He has black raven-wings and a scythe.

We stop tracking out with Death in three-quarter shot and pan across as he turns to survey a wasteland, shrouded in smoke or fog. Music: the "Dies Irae" from Symphonie Fantastique. The sun hangs on the horizon, strangely close. Death lets the last fragments of the skull fall.

DEATH: It is over. Mankind's day is done. The last mortal soul speeds on its way to Hell, and Death holds illimitable dominion over all.

Hold on the scene a moment. The music fades away.

There's a flare of white light from behind Death. A wind roars across the plain, dispersing the fog. We pan round as Death turns to see...

A figure all in white, delicate features, with jagged fractal wings like a marvellous butterfly. The wings may have caused the wind, but now they're relaxing slowly back into position as we see the figure. White light shines from behind him.

DEATH: I thought I had slain everything.

ANGEL: I am the last of my kind.

DEATH: You come too late. This is the end of Time. Eternity is drawing to a close.

ANGEL: Perhaps.

DEATH: There's nothing you can do for Man. He has been judged for his sins and sentenced to extinction.

ANGEL: Perhaps not.

DEATH: Who are you? Tell me what name to carve in the stone that shall press your corpse into the earth!

ANGEL: I am hope. While I live, Mankind has a future.

DEATH: While you live - ? I'll putrefy your body with a thousand pestilences, rack you with a thousand agonies... break you down to atoms and less than atoms and scatter the debris across the cosmic void.

While they've been talking we've tracked across towards the angel (the whole thing is one continuous shot all the way through with no cuts), who turns briefly to look into the sky. With the fog gone, a long swathe of dim stars is visible in the darkness. The angel reaches up and takes them from the sky - a sword made up of a million stars that flare with renewed light at his touch. As he turns back to face Death, his eyes and mouth glow with inner white light.

ANGEL (smiling): Want a bet..?

As they move together, the scene blurs and starts to fade, becoming a swirl of black and white that spirals around and around...

The game options are superimposed, set out on bars that mirror the Light vs Darkness theme (ie, hardship level, difficulty level, etc). The player selects his options...

The swirl, like a whirlpool, opens up to reveal the start of the game.

Plague outro 1: Dark Lord victory

The same desolate plain seen the start, now completely shrouded in a thick blanket of mist. Slowly a hump rises, like a black mushroom. Tracking in, we see it's a hunched figure in black robes: Death. Slowly he rises to his feet, the mist swirling around him in slow eddies as he moves, and the camera POV moves around likewise, ending close in and to one side of him.

DEATH: So that was Hope...

He swings his scythe round. A single tatter of white robe hangs from the tip of the blade.

Death plucks off the tattered fabric, gazes at it a moment. In his hand it blackens and shrivels.

DEATH: ...but now he too is gone. In all the universe, there is no living thing left...

Death suddenly looks straight at the camera. It's a bit of a jolt, seeing into his eyes for the first time. More of a jolt is the implication that we're actually present in the scene.

DEATH: ...except for you.

But does he mean it as an acknowledgement of victory, or something more ominous?

As he starts towards us, suddenly, cut to black.

Plague outro 2: Bright Angel victory

Death and the Angel are locked in combat, but Hope has the upper hand. Death falls back, and behind him a swirl of nascent stars forms in the dark void. The mist is sucked away into them - and the plain too, leaving Death and Hope suspended in a cosmos which is starting to glow with new nebulae.

Death's scythe is pulled out of his grasp, sucked back into the swirl of stars, which now begins to resemble a galaxy - setting the scale as cosmically huge.

Death braces himself against the cosmic wind. His robes flutter and snap, but the Angel is unmoved. Remorselessly he reaches out to place his hand around Death's black mask-like face.

DEATH: You can't destroy me! I am Death...

We cut to the Angel's face. With the brilliant light behind his eyes and mouth, he hardly looks human at all.

ANGEL: Not any more.

Cut back and pull away fast as he closes his grip. Death's head seems to shatter, and as it does there is a blinding burst of light as the Universe begins again.

Cut to a man's face, waking startled from a dream. He's a BEGGAR, wearing rags and sleeping in the gutter of a medieval town. From the angle and colour of the sunlight we guess it's dawn.

The beggar gasps and mops his brow, relieved that it was all a dream. Then a shadow falls across him and he looks up, momentarily alarmed. We see him shield his eyes, squinting into the sun.

BEGGAR: Who are you..?

Cut to the beggar's POV, looking up at a STRANGER who is silhouetted against the rising sun so that we can hardly see his face because of the halo of light.

STRANGER: Do not be alarmed. I'm not here to hurt you.

BEGGAR: Stay away for your own sake. Do you not see I have the plague?

The stranger bends to help him up, and as he does we cut back to the beggar's face. Before he may indeed have been pockmarked, but now there are no sores on him.

STRANGER: The plague has gone. You do not have it.

The stranger steps back out of shot. The beggar gets up, feeling his face in growing amazement as he realises it's true, he's been cured.

He looks up for the stranger, then we see him look puzzled because the stranger has gone. He looks around.

Cut to see the stranger walking off down the narrow medieval street, trailing his fingers past beggars who are waking up to a new day. There's astonishment and delight as each realises that he too is free of the plague.

As the sun rises higher, there comes the sound of birdsong and the growing bustle of the town. The beggar watches till the stranger is out of sight, then notices something in front of him. He bends down and plucks it: a beautiful flower coloured like a butterfly's wing.

I do remember showing it to Ian Livingstone and he thought the intro script would be better if, after the Angel says, "Want a bet?" Death curls his (unseen) lip and purrs, "Oh really...?" I tend to think one punchline is enough, but that's the problem with being a writer. Everybody thinks they can do your job. There was also an Eidos game called Gangsters. The copy for the poster read: "Real power is never given..." with an image of a wild-eyed wiseguy with a tommy gun spitting lead. The Eidos brass added a line at the bottom of the poster: "...It's taken " - just in case you hadn't got the point. Two punchlines again, you see. May Death and the Angel of Life both save us from execs with too much time on their hands.

A journal of the Plague years

Jamie and I went to work at Eidos Interactive in late 1995. I don't even think it was Eidos yet - that was some kind of reverse takeover manoeuvre cooked up by Charles Cornwall to finagle ailing software house Domark into a big money-spinning confection. As he put it at the time, "It's a minnow swallowing several whales."

None of that made any difference to us developers. Jamie was hired to do level design on the Deathtrap Dungeon computer game, while Ian Livingstone asked me to design a SimCity-type management and building game set in medieval London, or something like London. The inspiration was Daniel Simpson's short claymation movie H, in which a mark in the form of the letter h appears on the hand of a medieval stonemason who is sculpting a gargoyle for a cathedral. The stonemason is branded a heretic - or something else beginning with h - and burned at the stake We decided to call the game Plague, happily having talked Ian out of calling it P.

After struggling with economic models and architectural plans for a few weeks, I saw Ian in the corridor brandishing a copy of Warcraft 2 that he'd brought back from the States. He knew Warcraft was a favourite game of mine. "Have you played this yet?"

"No."

He chucked me the box. "You better take a look. Plague's got to be like this."

"OK, but Plague is a SimCity game."

I might have sprouted antennae, the way he looked at me. "Nobody wants more sim games. We want excitement. We want realtime strategy."

This was news to me, since I'd been hired to design a sim game, but I loved Warcraft 1 so I wasn't about to argue. I duly started to pack RTS elements into the city-building game the team were working on. It was going to be nearly a year before I realized that what was needed was to throw Plague out and start afresh - which is how Warrior Kings came to be conceived. That got mixed up in the political and business fallout of extricating a team from Eidos and forming Black Cactus, so the Warrior Kings that got released was a bit of a mishmash. A story for another day, that. We were talking about Plague.

As the wargame elements started to get bolted onto the original design, I realized that the team were still thinking of it as a city-building game. Our lead artist was an architecture graduate, and he had a lot of sway in the company, so it wasn't politic to junk the SimCity stuff right away. To help steer everyone's vision onto the new page, I wrote a script for the game intro sequence and got Martin McKenna to storyboard it. This wasn't even the intro I intended to use (more on that next week) but it made the team aware that the game they were working on was going to be about rather more dramatic issues than where to put the fish market...

Opening titles cards appear in sequence:

“The High King is dead.”

“The rule of law and justice is dead.”

“The dragon wing of night o'erspreads the world…”

We see the funeral of the High King. He's carried by his knights and laid in a burial mound, which is then sealed. As the knights and mourners file away, a storm-cloud darkens the sky.

Unhindered by the old King's edicts, resentment festers among his former knights. Each believes himself the rightful inheritor of the crown. Honour withers and treachery takes root, spreading like a poisoned weed in embittered hearts.

Across the countryside, the peasants huddle in fear. Murder, acrid-smelling, wafts on the air. The knights scent it; they grow grim and battle-keen. Each dreaming of dominion, they marshal their forces and prepare for the carnage to come.

In the court, knights look at each with hooded eyes, distrustfully. Some glance towards the empty seat at the round table, behind which hangs the dragon's-head banner of the High King.

Shadows on a castle wall: an assassin stabs a man in the back.

Kindled by intrigue, old grudges ignite. The kingdom is plunged into civil war. Armies surge and clash. Ringing steel and the wailing of widows drowns out the voice of reason. While Death sharpens his scythe, men who were once closer than brothers slaughter each other like wild beasts.

Crops and homesteads burn, great castles are shattered and left to ruin. A hundred noble knights lie dead, swords buried in mud, armour rusting. The victors bay for yet more blood. No quarter is given. The vanquished are hung on gibbets, ripe fruit for ravens.

Scenes of erupting battle, fire, dying men, executions...

A shadow sits now upon the vacant throne: the shadow of terror. The High King's dream has become a nightmare.

Sunset, falling through a narrow window on the deserted hall of heroes, leaves a slash of blood-coloured light across the dusty throne. The dragon's-head banner is by now moth-eaten.

Such brutal passion soon is spent. The fury of battle at last is lulled to sullen silence. In the aftermath thrive pestilence and famine. The soil, blood-clogged, yields weeds instead of wheat. Grain rots in dank barns where rats breed in the darkness. Behind the fortified walls of their towns, the survivors cower in dread of the plague that now sweeps the land. The sick are nailed inside their houses and abandoned to die. Bodies thrown into carts are left to blacken and bloat, the living too few and too fearful to bury them.

Prophets preach that Doomsday is near, that God means to wipe Man from the world for his sins. To most this is welcome news. The suffering is too much. Better the endless sleep of death than to endure the relentless horrors of the world.

Scenes of hardship. Narrow empty streets in a town, with smoke drifting on the breeze. Flagellants wearing crowns of thorns shuffle along, crying out as they whip themselves. A few peasants trudge miserably past – a weeping funeral cortege carrying the bundled body of a child.

Then, one night when the high winds howl, a traveller comes to your court. In these times, strangers are feared as carriers of the plague but he walks past your guards unchallenged, as if in a dream. With your ministers you listen to his words, even though he comes from far away and his tongue is hard to understand. In your hearts you hear him, in your memories you recognize the ring of noble speech. There is wisdom in his strange words. And he reminds you of the secret that in these terrible days of turmoil and death had been forgotten:

The court. Lightning outside. Knock at the doors, which swing open and a stranger enters. He looks like the High King seen on his bier in the first scene. This whole bit seems dream-like. We’re closing in on the stranger's face and into his eyes, sparkling in the firelight, and we hear the stranger speak:

“The soul of the land is its King. It withers because its soul, the King, is dead. So there must be a new King. His reign will mark a new beginning. For good or evil? Time will tell. But power cannot be shared. Others also come to take the throne. Therefore grasp you now this sword. Conquer by might, rule with right. One land, one King.”

While the stranger speaks, the view pushes into his eyes, fades to black, and then shows the faces of those listening to him. We pan around the court, ending on the lord's face.

The stranger reaches the bit about others seeking the throne and his voice becomes more emphatic and resonant. Cut back to where he was standing to find he's no longer there. A gleaming sword hangs in the air. The lord rises, reaches to take it –

The lord wakes, sitting bolt upright. He is surrounded by his ministers and men, who had fallen drunkenly asleep at the benches. Now they stir and, seeing the resolve in the lord's eyes, are instantly alert. Perhaps they shared his dream? We see his hand close, remembering the phantom sword he was reaching for. Jaw set sternly, he repeats the final words of the dream:

“One land, one king...”

Black and wight

A little while back I mentioned a Kickstarter campaign by Megara Entertainment for a hardback edition of Crypt of the Vampire, which was my first-ever gamebook and also Leo Hartas's first illustration job. That was the mid-80s and Leo was still at university at the time - as indeed I might have been, researching fundamental particles and the theory of everything, if I hadn't frittered away the time I should have spent revising for Finals on roleplaying, girls, and punting. But that's a detail.

Anyway, after tweaking the campaign a few times, Megara gave it up as a bad job. I could have told them. In fact I did tell them. A Kickstarter for Heart of Ice might have soared to great heights, but Crypt of the Vampire was written for 9-12 year olds, and they're not the demographic that's going to shell out $50 for a hardback book.

The saddest casualty of the aborted Kickstarter campaign is that we won't get to see Leo's colour versions of his original artwork. When I first heard about that I thought it was a terrible idea. Why not colourize Citizen Kane while we're at it? But I should have trusted more in Leo's talent. As this sample shows, he can do a lot more than drop in some tints using Photoshop.

You can't buy any of Leo's original artwork via Kickstarter, but if you wanted a piece to hang on the wall then you can contact Leo directly via his website. He's got drawings from the Golden Dragon books and from Down Among the Dead Men, as well as a drawer full of fabulous fantasy maps from Fighting Fantasy. It's as great a treasure as any Smaug ever made a pillow of, believe me. And what a great birthday or Christmas present (is it too early to mention Christmas? sorry) for a fantasy fan.

STOP PRESS: Would you believe there has been some talk this week about Megara restarting that abortive Kickstarter campaign? I wasn't going to authorize licences for any more of my old gamebooks, but Leo seems keen and I'd hate to miss the chance to see his colour versions of all those old pics. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

Darkness and light

I make no secret of my admiration for the work of John Whitbourn, who I believe ranks as one of Britain's leading exponents of weird fantasy fiction. Of all his books, my favourites are the Binscombe Tales, in which the mysterious and possibly magical Mr Disvan (no, he's not Merlin; avowedly Saxon, see) leads our bemused and mildly Pooterish narrator through an entangling web of supernatural close encounters which are astonishing, quirky, terrifying and hilarious - often all at the same time.

I was reminded that it's time to award myself the treat of re-reading the Binscombe Tales while browsing the internet recently. First of all I came across this astute comment on the series by writing tutor and blogger John Yeoman:

"Some of the eeriest stories ever written, in my belief, are the little known Binscombe Tales by John Whitbourn. They're set in a homely English village that lives on the borderland between reality and a grim alternative world. Disembodied eyeballs float around the pub ceiling, men long dead drop in for a drink, and demons mumble in the rest room. The locals just sigh 'What can be done?' and order another beer. Their acceptance of horror as a universal constant gives the stories, ostensibly humorous, a hideous sub-text. But the horror works only because it is set against a backdrop of banal normality."

And that led to this podcast by Ms Julie D on the website Forgotten Classics. I was charmed by the Texan pronunciation "Bins-COOM" (over here in England we say "BINS-cum") and there are a lot of very thought-provoking observations about the juxaposition of eeriness with everyday life that makes the stories so effective.

Secret lore

I keep forgetting about this, but Mikael Louys of Megara Entertainment recently reminded me that a Players' Book has been released for my old Dragon Warriors roleplaying game.

This ties in with the Magnum Opus edition of a few years back and has new skills and three new adventuring professions, as well as rules about daily life in the world of Legend. Sounds great. Now, if only it were available on Createspace or Amazon I'd have a few Christmas gifts sorted early.

UPDATE (Sept 9): And lo! Because our regular correspondent Anonymous requested it, here's the book's cover artwork unobscured by the title having been put in the wrong place (duh).

The etiquette of roleplaying

Inigo Hartas, who is the son of my dear friend and long-time colleague Leo, is a roleplayer. My position as Inigo’s godfather is ironic, given that I’m not religious (if you don't count an atavistic reverence for Odin - or maybe I mean Alan Moore, if indeed they're not one and the same on the mythago level), but perhaps I can take credit for having helped inspire his favourite hobby at least.

I began roleplaying when I was a little older than Inigo is now. He often says things that are a lot smarter than I would have come out with at his age. The hobby wasn’t invented back then, that’s my excuse. We had to work it all out from first principles.

There are a few pointers I’ve learned over the years that are de rigueur for a good roleplaying campaign. I don’t think players like Inigo need me to tell them this stuff; they’re breathed it in as they played since their pre-teen years. But it’s the nature of experience to want to share itself around, so here goes.

Oh, first a couple of preambles. I don’t use the term games-master or dungeon-master. The role has too much control anyway, and that just makes it an excuse to boss players around with your sublimated ambitions as a frustrated novelist. Call them referees or umpires.

Also, when a referee foists a plot on the players and has them jump through all his or her story hoops, I call that a “thatched” game, after the way the late and unlamented British prime minister ran her Cabinet. If you want to write a novel, please go right ahead – it’s easier today than it has ever been. But don’t co-opt me to be one of your shoe-horned characters. I’m here to roleplay.

Okay, to the tips:

Focus 
Keep your mind on the game, stay in character, don’t suddenly start yakking on about how something that happened in the game reminds you of a trailer on YouTube. Honestly, you can natter any time, but to do it during the game is rude to the other players. Also, it wastes 90% of the power of what a roleplaying campaign can deliver. Imagine a play if the actors kept running to the front of the stage to tell you about their day. Commit to the experience, remain in character throughout, and you will go places no movie or novel or videogame will ever take you.

Don’t block
This is from improv, and it’s about keeping a smooth flow. If a player says, ‘I call my butler,’ the referee shouldn’t say, ‘You don’t have a butler.’ That’s jarring. If the player-character’s finances don’t stretch to manservants, now there’s a plot thread to develop. What happens when the butler asks to be paid? If the character can’t afford it, maybe the butler goes off disgruntled – and he’s armed with the secrets that have been discussed among the PCs while he poured their drinks. Thus the plot will thicken.

Don’t be authorial
Players need to think about the character from the inside. It should be, ‘I do this,’ not, ‘Geralt does this.’ For this reason I dislike the mental disadvantage rules you find in games like GURPS where being shy, for instance, or sadistic gives you extra points to spend on your character build. The rationale is that NPCs’ reaction rolls will be adversely affected by knowing you’re prone to get off on watching toenails being pulled out. Well, balderdash. First because no referee makes a habit of rolling NPC reactions, second because most of those authored traits will get forgotten in play because they were only taken for the points bonus, and third because all that character stuff should come across in the roleplaying anyway.

Maintain the atmosphere
This is for the referee. You are your players’ eyes and ears. Evoke the scene for them. This isn’t about purple description, it’s about clarity and verisimilitude. As a corollary, don’t lie to players about what they would know. ‘The axe chops you in half. Only kidding, you get to roll dodge,’ is not much funnier than telling a blind man that the kerb he’s stepping off is a ten foot drop. Don’t abuse the power you have as referee, instead help everyone to immerse themselves seamlessly in the events of the game.

Respect the rules
Like Hammurabi, I don’t want to be ruled by whims but by laws. The rules are the court of appeal that allow the players to know that the game world is fair and that they really have agency and aren’t just getting to sit in on the referee’s thatched storyline. You can have house rules, of course, but make sure everybody is aware of those before the game starts.In short, dear referee, don't be arbitrary. People came to play a game and participate in the creation of an emergent narrative, not to give your ego a stroking.

An example: I ran a Dark Ages scenario where the characters were up against a near-immortal time-travelling foe who had a thousand years’ greater experience and skill than they did. At one point, a lone player crept into the enemy base. Unknown to him, this immortal foe was there. The player-character came across him, facing the other way along a passageway. On his own, he stood no chance. But he rolled for stealth, the immortal rolled for perception and – against the odds, he tiptoed right up behind him and killed the guy before he could react. Was I tempted to thatch it, having devised this top bad guy only to see him cut down by one surprise attack? Sure, but I knew that we were now in unplanned territory, and that always makes for a more interesting game. Trust the dice and the rules to be the wings of inspiration.

Freedom is everything
A roleplaying game is not a scripted story. Regardless of what the referee may have planned, the players should feel at liberty to act however they feel their characters really would. That’s why we call it roleplaying, not boardgaming. ‘But what if they ignore my plot?’ you cry. ‘What if they split the party? What if they do something that ends my campaign?’ My reply: they can’t. Because it’s not your campaign, it’s theirs. If they become wanted fugitives, that’s the campaign now. If they split into factions that want to kill each other, go with that and see where it leads. This has happened in my own games and because of that we’ve had experiences (such as a Tsolyani civil war and a long plan to drive a character mad) that none of us could have foreseen. To roleplay well, you must delight in the unexpected. (Control freaks sent into a panic by this concept, please see above re the ease of publishing your own novel.)

For the best advice on roleplaying, I recommend Paul Mason’s articles in this Imazine freeware archive.And for all the truly transformative experiences I've had in four decades of roleplaying, I'd like to thank those I've played with - including, but not limited to: Paul Mason, Steve Foster, Oliver Johnson, Robert Dale, Jack Bramah, Mark Smith, Mike Polling, Sheldon Bacon, Frazer Payne, Les Binet, Pauline Ashall, Penny Newman, Gail Baker, David Bailey, Dermot Bolton, Mark Wigoder Daniels, Tim Harford, Paul Gilham, Aaron Fortune, Zelah Meyer, Andrew Mounstephen, Tim Savin, Simone Cooper, Nathan Cubitt, Nick Henfrey, Andy Murdin, John Whitbourn, Steve Wilshire, Patrick Brady, Mark Wilkinson, Paul Deacon, Roz Morris, and of course Jamie Thomson. It was because of all the years we've spent in imaginary realities that Fabled Lands exists at all.

Further reading:

Play Unsafe: How Improvisation Can Change The Way You Roleplay